Five Cantonas

The Champions League draw is this afternoon, and it’s an interesting one. Because a few teams have come from nowhere to be genuinely top class in the past year or so (namely Napoli and Dortmund) there are some Pot 4 teams who wouldn’t look out of place in Pot 2 and, given the decline of the likes of Zenith St Petersburg and Arsenal, there’s crap in the upper pots too. This makes it almost impossible to predict the kind of draw we’re going to get.

The only restriction on our draw, given that the English clubs have such excellent coefficients (3 of the top 5 UEFA ranked clubs are English) is that we can’t pull City out of Pot 3. That means that we could end up with either of these wildly contrasting draws;

• Manchester United
• AC Milan
• Ajax
• Borussia Dortmun.

Or;

• Manchester United
• CSKA Moscow
• BATE Borisov
• Otelul Galati

Whilst the first draw looks terrifying, the best way to demonstrate the strength in depth of the draw is to look at what our second-worst outcome could be – it’s no less daunting than the first draw.

• Manchester United
• Lyon
• Zenith St Petersburg
• Napoli

You could spend hours arguing over whether Napoli or Borussia Dortmunt are the worse draw, but there won’t be a person in the land who thinks Otelul Galati make a fair alternative to the German or Italian clubs in Pot 4.

The third-worst outcome? That’s still pretty crappy all told.

• Manchester United
• Villareal
• Olympiakos
• Dinamo Zagreb

You really wouldn’t want to be facing Villareal, especially as matches between us and them tend to turn into complete snooze-fests (neither side has ever scored against the either) and Zagreb and Olympiakos away are  ugly trips.

If we take the second lowest ranked team from each pot, we still end up with a tricky looking draw; we’d get Benfica, Lille and Viktoria Plzen (who could be a well-drilled outfit for all we know, and a decent away trip as Plzen is the home of Pilsner).

As an amusing aside, the highest ranked team not in this years Champions League? Liverpool.