Champions League Group Stage Draw: Another Rough Draw for Manchester City

Thursday in Monaco — of course Monaco — UEFA pulled the draw for the 2015-16 Champions League Group Stage. Yes, Manchester United is back after a one-year absence. Naturally Jose Mourinho gets another game against a former club, this time FC Porto. Once again again Arsenal and Bayern Munich will renew familiarities.

All-in-all, it’s a lot of good headlines. If you love soccer it’s fun thinking about how one field can fit the joint egos of Cristiano Ronaldo/Zlatan Ibrahimovic.

That said, the Champions League group stage format remains very forgiving. Six games affords the favorites, one if not more screw ups — take Manchester City going winless in its first four games, only to qualify for the knockout rounds with a pair of wins to close out the group last season. Looking back a year ago perhaps the only upset came in Basel advancing over Liverpool, but that wasn’t all that surprising since the Liverpool team that played in the Champions League didn’t have Luis Suarez, whose goals powered the Reds back into the competition.

Every now and then there’s a surprise — Juventus missing out on the knockouts two years ago — but it mostly plays to form.

Instead, much of the intrigue, if there is any for the Group lies with UEFA Coefficients — math + soccer = more fun than humanely possible.

You can read how UEFA’s system works here. It’s far from a perfect equation, as results from as far back as 2011-12 are weighted for both leagues and individual teams, using both the Champions League and second-tier Europa League. In short, qualifying for the Group Stage and knockout rounds gain teams and leagues a lot of points and all the wins throughout the competition end up adding up.

You might not have any relevant players from the squad remaining four seasons ago, but those results still matter.

This is why Manchester City — on the verge of a $100 million acquisition of Kevin De Bruyne from Wolfsburg and a second-place finish in the EPL — is lumped between Napoli and Basel. The numbers don’t account for City’s spending largesse and rapid improvements. In turn the club has to win games in Europe to avoid the “Group of Death,” where it landed once again, with games against Juventus, last year’s runner up, and Sevilla, the reigning Europa League champs. If City wants to creep up the UEFA club rankings, it’ll have to do it the hard way and beat strong opposition.

Spain’s perch atop the league rankings isn’t going to change, as its nearly 20 points clear. England (64.4) is third behind Germany (65.9), each having four Champions League spots. Italy is fourth (60.6). The Europa League muddles things a bit, but the four English teams still landed favorable Champions League Group Stage draws, save for City.

Meanwhile, it would be surprising if Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United don’t finish first or second in their groups.

UEFA wanted to put more emphasis on league champs, giving automatic spots in Pot 1 to the seven top-ranked league champions. This is a good idea in theory, but less so when you have a club like PSV Eindhoven winning the Dutch Eredivisie, only to offload many of its key players — including Memphis to Group B opponent Manchester United. (PSV moved into the top 8 since Barcelona won La Lig and the Champions League last season — the eighth Pot 1 seed goes to the previous season’s winner.)

Realistically, there isn’t a perfect way to seed the draw that makes everyone happy and equates current form and rosters into consideration. Whatever UEFA does or tweaks, we go into the competition with the same handful of teams — Barcelona, Real Madrid, PSG, Bayern, Chelsea — are the clearest favorites to win it all. The numbers don’t matter all too much when you’re fielding the best players in the world come the knockout stage in February.

Group A: Paris Saint-Germain, Real Madrid, Shakhtar Donetsk, Malmo

Group B: PSV Eindhoven, Manchester United, CSKA Moscow, Wolfsburg

Group C: Benfica, Atlético Madrid, Galatasaray, Astana

Group D: Juventus, Manchester City, Sevilla, Borussia Mönchengladbach

Group E: Barcelona, Bayer Leverkusen, Roma, Bate Borisov

Group F: Bayern Munich, Arsenal, Olympiakos, Dinamo Zagreb

Group G: Chelsea, Porto, Dynamo Kyiv, Maccabi Tel Aviv

Group H: Zenit St Petersburg, Valencia, Lyon, Gent

[Photos via Getty Images]