And just like that, as September reaches only its midway point, we are one-third of the way through the Champions League group stage. The 2022-23 European soccer season is a particularly relentless ride, thanks to the World Cup, and big teams that have started slowly in league play now have holes to dig out of in the Champions League too.
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Let’s talk about the most noteworthy shifts and stories from the first two matchdays of Europe’s biggest club competition.
Inflection points
In terms of winning the big prize, not much has changed through two weeks. FiveThirtyEight’s Soccer Power Index gave seven teams at least a 5% chance of winning the Champions League before group play started, and all seven teams’ current odds are within 3 percentage points of where they started. But from an “It’s the journey, not the destination” perspective, the group stage can always be a bit of a roller coaster. Simply advancing to the knockout rounds is a huge deal for a number of teams, and lots of teams’ odds of doing so have changed pretty drastically — for a few, more than once — thus far.
Let’s take a look at each group’s major inflection-point matches so far. In terms of teams’ odds for advancement to the knockout rounds (per SPI), each of these produced a cumulative change of at least 20 percentage points for the two teams involved.
Group A
Napoli 4, Liverpool 1
– Napoli’s odds of advancing rose 25 percentage points; Liverpool’s sank 24
Liverpool 2, Ajax 1
– Liverpool up 14 percentage points, Ajax down 17
In the end, Napoli and Ajax have basically traded places. With their shocking domination of Liverpool and eventual win over Rangers — it took a red card and a couple of penalties before they could finally earn the advantage in Glasgow — Luciano Spalletti’s Napoli have established themselves atop the group. SPI now gives both Liverpool and Napoli a 71% chance of advancing, while Ajax, a team SPI has loved for quite a while, are still at 56% thanks in part to their impending two shots at Napoli.
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The Ajax that came to Anfield, however, would have odds far worse. Liverpool outshot Ajax by a 24-3 margin during their 2-1 win (xG: Liverpool 2.1, Ajax 0.3), and only a brilliant Mohammed Kudus goal, at the end of one of Ajax’s few brilliant possessions, kept them close. It was an incredibly passive match from the Dutch champs, and they will have to assert themselves far better against Napoli to have a chance.
We’ve seen some pretty varied form for Champions League teams within each of these powerful leagues. Manchester City and Tottenham Hotspur are doing well in the Premier League, but Chelsea and Liverpool are sixth and seventh. Bayern is wobbly but still third in the Bundesliga, while Dortmund is fifth, RB Leipzig and Eintracht Frankfurt are 10th and 11th and Bayer Leverkusen is a dismal 17th. Real Madrid and Barcelona are cruising through LaLiga play, while Atletico is seventh and Sevilla is 16th. Napoli and Milan are looking good in Serie A, while Inter is sixth and Juventus is eighth.
It’s not exactly rocket science to note that the teams doing well in one competition are doing well in another (and the ones that aren’t, aren’t), but it sure does kill some of our narrative urges. (There’s always an exception, however, and at the moment it’s Sporting CP, which has looked fantastic in two Champions League matches but has dropped eight points in six matches in Portugal.)
Biggest surprise thus far: Club Brugge
Here are the five teams that have seen the largest overall increase in odds of advancement over the first two matchdays:
Club Brugge: +47 percentage points (from 28% to 75%)
Sporting CP: +37 percentage points (from 53% to 90%)
Napoli: +34 percentage points (from 37% to 71%)
Benfica: +28 percentage points (from 64% to 92%)
Shakhtar Donetsk: +24 percentage points (from 12% to 36%)
If some of the teams from Europe’s big four are struggling, then the door is open for teams from other leagues at the moment. It probably isn’t a surprise that two Portuguese teams (Sporting and Benfica) have positioned themselves to take advantage or that Ajax and Salzburg, who have done damage in recent Champions League tournaments, are in position to do so again.
The most surprising surge to date has come from Club Brugge. Carl Hoefkens’ side surged late in 2021-22 to overtake surprising Union St. Gilloise for their fifth Belgian league title in six years, but that form hasn’t translated to European success. This is their fifth straight year in the Champions League group stage, but thus far they had mustered only four wins, three third-place finishes (each of which was followed by an immediate round-of-32 knockout in the Europa League) and a fourth-place finish in last year’s PSG-Manchester City-RB Leipzig horror group.
