UEFA Champions League front-runners, form teams, wildcards and more
- Bill Connelly is a staff writer for ESPN.com.
After weeks of qualification and months of gnashing teeth over future format changes, the most important and high-quality continental club competition in the world, the UEFA Champions League, begins group-stage play on Tuesday.
Somehow, this behemoth of a tournament almost snuck up on us, coming in on the heels of a particularly important international break, so let’s set the table for everything you need to know before matches in Bern and Seville get the ball rolling on Tuesday.
Jump to: Likely champs | Best form teams | Worst form teams | Biggest wildcards | Hipster picks | Best groups | New stars to watch
Most likely champions
There will be countless twists and turns along the way, but we already have a good idea of who the best clubs in the world are. Based on any number of factors — last year’s performance, recent form, sheer roster quality — here are the three teams I think are most likely to end up lifting the trophy in May. No surprises to be found here.



Best recent run of form
The top six betting favorites — the three teams above, plus Bayern Munich, Liverpool and Manchester United — have all begun the season well, as one would expect. But here are four more teams that hit the ground running this August and carry both confidence and form into the Champions League battle.




Worst recent run of form

They brought back longtime success Massimiliano Allegri as manager, but have begun the domestic season with one point in three matches. And you can’t even say it’s just bad luck: their overall xG differential is -0.93 thus far.



Biggest wild cards
We know who the favorites are. Now let’s talk about three teams that have been a little more difficult to read. They have the money and squad to be contenders, but there are still question marks.



Favorite long shots
It’s not hard to find people complaining about the tournament’s overall predictability, but even if or when we get the results we expect, there are twists and turns along the way: Real Madrid nearly failing to advance in 2020-21, Lyon and RB Leipzig making the semis in 2019-20, etc.
Now’s the time to dream of chaos, so here are three teams that (a) have betting odds of +5000 or worse to reach the finals, per Caesars and (b) have just enough high-end talent to make a big run.



Salzburg lost Jesse Marsch to RBL, forward Patson Daka to Leicester City and midfielder Enock Mwepu to Brighton, but simply plugged Matthias Jaissle into the managerial role and 19-year old German forward Karim Adeyemi into the main scoring role, and everything has continued apace. They’ve won their first seven Austrian Bundesliga matches by a combined 19-4, and they’re going to attempt to run the legs off of Sevilla, Wolfsburg and Lille in Group G. They were a tough out last year (until the last 10 minutes of a given match, anyway), and they will be one this year as well.
Favorite groups
1. Group A (Manchester City, PSG, RB Leipzig, Club Brugge). PSG dropping Ligue 1 to Lille last year created one of the deathiest groups of death you’ll ever see, pitting the last two Champions League runners-up against each other and, in RBL, squeezing a 2020 semifinalist in there as well. RBL’s current iffy form could help to assure there aren’t any major surprises, but the group’s depth has created a fun scenario: according to FiveThirtyEight’s current odds, there’s a 5% chance Messi, Mbappe and Neymar are leading the club… to a Europa League title in May.
2. Group G (Sevilla, Wolfsburg, Lille, Salzburg). You will rarely see a more evenly matched group than this. Any of these four teams could win the group with just a couple of big results, and FiveThirtyEight only gives group favorite Sevilla a 66% chance of advancing to the knockout rounds.
3. Group C (Ajax, Borussia Dortmund, Sporting CP, Besiktas). Sporting has maybe the strongest identity in the entire field, Ajax and Borussia Dortmund have gloriously volatile upside and, as we’ll discuss below, Besiktas has one of the most incredible “Oh hey, THAT guy!” rosters you’ll ever see. Miralem Pjanic! Michy Batshuayi! Cyle Larin! A really strong and interesting team is going to get sent down to the Europa League knockouts from this group.
Your new fave players
The knockout rounds, plus marquee early match-ups like Man City vs. PSG and Bayern Munich vs. Barcelona, will give us plenty of opportunities to talk about the tournament’s best players — the Messis and Mbappes, the Robert Lewandowskis and Kevin De Bruynes. But one of the more enjoyable aspects of the group stage is feasting your eyes on two specific groups of players: the young guys on second-tier squads who will soon be commanding huge transfer fees from bigger clubs, and the veterans who have landed on those second-tier squads and found a way to keep playing in big, relevant matches.
Here are 10 such players, all from long-shot teams with betting odds of +7500 or worse to reach the finals.
1. Karim Adeyemi, RB Salzburg. He’s fun, young, fast and a feature player. And he’s already capable of doing things like this for his national team.
In just three months, his (admittedly crowdsourced) value at Transfermarkt doubled from $11 million to $22 million. With a big few matches, it might double again.
2. Pedro Goncalves, Sporting CP. Sporting’s winning recipe: defend like crazy and hope Pote does something brilliant. It won them a league title last year, with Goncalves scoring 23 goals and creating 51 chances from what was ostensibly a midfield role (!!). He’s already got three and nine, respectively, in four league matches this year.
3. Tete, Shakhtar Donetsk. Somehow still only 21, Tete scored on a brilliant setup from full-back Viktor Kornienko in Shakhtar’s upset of Real Madrid last year, and he’s one of the more exciting chaos agents in the field. He’ll take long-range shots and make risky/bold/silly passes, and just enough of them will pay off that you have to keep watching.
4. Alex Teixeira, Besiktas. A beneficiary/victim of the Chinese Super League’s brief spending splurge, Texeira nearly left for Liverpool in 2016, but spent his prime years at Jiangsu FC instead. He was brilliant there, averaging 12 goals and 44 chances created over five seasons, and he’s got 11 career Champions League goals to his name from his Shakhtar days. Now 31, he’s joined former Chelsea prospect Batshuayi in what is a surprisingly high-ceiling Besiktas attack.
5. Charles De Ketelaere, Club Brugge. A rare 6-foot-4 wide forward, the lanky 20-year-old is unique to watch and adept on both wings. He scored twice in last year’s Champions League, both in wins over Zenit, and he’s already got three goals and two assists in league play this season.
6. Viktor Tsyhankov, Dynamo Kyiv. Tsyhankov can play in both central and wide roles, and has scored at least 15 goals in all competitions for Dynamo for four straight seasons. And he’s only 23! The Ukrainian champs are picked to finish last in Group E, but they have just enough upside to make things messy for Bayern, Barcelona and/or Benfica.
7. Atiba Hutchinson, Besiktas. He’s still around and still clicking! Hutchinson made his national-team debut for Canada almost 19 years ago, and at age 38 he’s still regularly making 40+ midfield appearances for Besiktas. And now he’s back in the Champions League for the first time in four years.
8. Adama Traore, FC Sheriff. Not the mighty Wolves winger, but the slightly older Malian winger who landed in Tiraspol in February and has already made a massive impression, scoring four times with two assists while Sheriff was climbing through eight qualification matches to reach the group stage. He scored twice during their stunning 3-0 win over Dinamo Zagreb in mid-August, and if Sheriff pulls any points out of group play, he’ll probably be the reason why.
9. Artem Dzyuba, Zenit St. Petersburg. He’s 33, he’s scored nine career Champions League goals, plus eight more in the Europa League (not to mention 30 for his national team), and he might actually be improving? He scored 22 goals during Zenit’s domestic title run last season, his most since 2015-16.
10. Jordan Pefok, Young Boys. USA! USA! USA! USA!
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