And just like that, almost in a blink of an eye, we have completed one-third of the Champions League group stage as we begin October. The World Cup has made the 2022–23 European football season an especially arduous journey, and major teams that have stumbled in league competition now have voids to fill in the Champions League as well.
The group stage has always the potential to be a little bit of a roller coaster in the long run. For many teams, just making it to the knockout rounds is a big accomplishment, and odds for many of those teams have altered significantly thus far – for some, more than once.
The odds of winning the grand prize, though, haven’t changed significantly during the past few weeks. Before group play began, FiveThirtyEight’s Soccer Power Index assigned seven teams at least a 5 percent chance of winning the Champions League. All seven teams’ current odds are within three percentage points of where they were when group play began.
According to FiveThirtyEight’s Soccer Power Index and sports betting analysts, Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain are the odds-on favorites to win the UEFA Champions League title – punters can even take advantage of the Bet365 bonus code to pick the winner of the continental title. However, Bayern Munich, Liverpool, Real Madrid and Barcelona are also among the top contenders.
League form influencing Champions League performances
We frequently utilize European competitions to declare the strength of a specific league, but up to this point, a team’s performance within its own league has been much more indicative.
The current average points per game for each of Europe’s top four leagues – England’s Premier League, Spain’s LaLiga, Germany’s Bundesliga, and Italy’s Serie A – is between 1.50 and 1.63, but if you divide the teams up differently, you see a very obvious correlation.
Teams in the top four of these four leagues are currently averaging 11 wins, 1 draw, 2 losses, and 2.4 points per game in the UEFA Champions League, while teams in the fifth through eighth spots are averaging 4 wins, 1 draw, 7 losses, and 1.1 points per game, and teams in the bottom ten are averaging 2 wins, 1 draw, 5 losses, and 0.9 points per game.
Within each of these powerhouse leagues, we’ve seen some rather different form for Champions League teams.
In the Premier League, Manchester City and Tottenham Hotspur are performing well, while Chelsea and Liverpool are sixth and seventh, respectively. In the Bundesliga, Bayern is shaky but still third, followed by Dortmund in fifth, RB Leipzig in tenth, Eintracht Frankfurt in eleventh, and Bayer Leverkusen in a pitiful seventeenth place. Real Madrid and Barcelona are dominating LaLiga action, while Atletico and Sevilla are in seventh and sixteenth place, respectively. In Serie A, Napoli and Milan are doing well, while Inter is in sixth place and Juventus is in ninth.
Although recognizing that successful teams in one competition also succeed in another (and unsuccessful teams fail to do so) is not very difficult, it does kill some of our drives for stories. There is always an exception, and at the moment it is Sporting CP, which has looked brilliant in two Champions League matches but has shed eight points in six matches in the Primeira Liga.
Biggest surprises
Five teams have so far pulled off major upsets in the group stage and have experienced the largest overall increase in qualification odds over the first two matchdays: Club Brugge, which increased 47 percentage points, from 28 to 75 percent, Sporting CP, +37 percentage points, from 53 to 90 percent, Napoli, who rose from 37 to 71 percent, Benfica, +28 percentage points, from 64 to 92 percent, and Shakhtar Donetsk, who increased 24 percentage points, from 12 to 36 percent.
The door is currently open for clubs from other leagues if some of the top four European leagues’ teams are having difficulty. That Sporting and Benfica from Portugal have set themselves up to benefit from the situation and that Ajax and Salzburg, who have caused havoc in recent Champions League matches, are in a good position to do the same now is probably not a surprise.
However, Club Brugge has had the most unexpected growth to date. The team of Carl Hoefkens pushed late in 2021–22 to defeat Union St. Gilloise won their fifth Belgian league championship in six years, but that success hasn’t carried over to the European stage.
They have now participated in the Champions League group stage for five years in a row, but to this point they have only managed four victories, three third-place finishes (each of which was followed by an immediate round-of-32 Europa League elimination), and a fourth-place finish in last year’s PSG-Manchester City-RB Leipzig group of death.
The story this year has been entirely different. First, they defeated Bayer Leverkusen 1-0 in Belgium, before traveling to Portugal to face Porto. There, the style was turned on and everyone participated in a great performance that saw them beat the home team 3-0.
Even though Porto’s victory was significant and well-earned, their work is undoubtedly not done; back-to-back games against Atletico Madrid may easily bring them back to earth. For the first time since the 1990–1991 European Cup, they might go to the final 16 of Europe’s premier competition with one or two more victories.
The predictability of European football has been a problem in the past and is still a problem for the sport today. While the chances of winning the title haven’t changed much, the chances of advancing have. However, there are always entertaining tales to discover along the way, and Belgium’s top squad is now penning an exciting one.
