The Champions League has never lasted as long as the 2019-20 edition, with the final in Lisbon taking place 14 months after the first qualifying game kicked off on 25 June 2019.
With the Covid-19 shutdown disrupting the tournament as well as the league seasons that qualifying for it, the first stages of the 2020-21 Champions League actually started before the knockouts from the previous year’s tournament had finished. Northern Irish side Linfield played the first game of the latest edition of the competition on 8 August, beating San Marino’s Tre Fiori 2-0, the same day that Barcelona and Bayern Munich both qualified for the quarter-finals of the 2019-20 version.
This year’s format will be adjusted due to the condensed schedule but will nevertheless see a return to the two-legged knockout stage that was dispensed with in the Portuguese mini-tournament this summer, although qualifying matches have been reduced to one-legged affairs.
Group stage draw
The draw for the group stages of the Champions League, the point at which the competition proper begins, will not take place until the qualifying stages and play-offs have been completed.
It will take place in Athens, the new host for the 2021 final, on Thursday 1 October 2020, just under three weeks before the matches are due to get underway.
Seeds
* denotes team have not yet qualified
Each group will receive one team from each pot, meaning for example that Premier League champions Liverpool cannot be drawn alongside Bayern Munich, or Manchester City cannot be drawn with Barcelona.
Pot 1
- Bayern Munich
- Juventus
- Liverpool
- Porto
- PSG
- Real Madrid
- Sevilla
- Zenit St Petersburg
Pot 2
- Barcelona
- Atletico Madrid
- Manchester City
- Manchester United
- Borussia Dortmund
- Shakhtar Donetsk
- Chelsea
- *Benfica/Ajax (Benfica will be a Pot 2 team if they come through qualifying; if not, Ajax will be promoted from Pot 3)
Pot 3
- RB Leipzig
- Inter Milan
- Lazio
- *Dynamo Kyiv
- *Red Bull Salzburg
- *Olympiacos
- *Celtic
Pot 4
- Stade Rennes
- Istanbul Basaksehir
- *Atalanta
- *Lokomotiv Moscow
- *Borussia Monchengladbach
- *Club Brugge
Group stage schedule
- Matchday 1: 20-21 October
- Matchday 2: 27-28 October
- Matchday 3: 3-4 November
- Matchday 4: 24-25 November
- Matchday 5: 1-2 December
- Matchday 6: 8-9 December
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from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/2EwVjMg
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