The halfway point of the Champions League league phase will soon be upon us, and with it comes an awful lot of mouth-watering ties. First among them might be a rerun of the 1981, 2018 and 2022 finals as a faltering Liverpool welcome Real Madrid to Anfield. Meanwhile holders Paris Saint-Germain facing off against Bayern Munich is not a bad option on the undercard either while there’s plenty of intrigue in how Tottenham might fare after their bruising defeat to Chelsea on Saturday. Let’s look ahead to those games, shall we?
But first, something completely different:
1. Can I do a Laura Harvey on this column?
You may by now be aware of the fascinating coaching gambit made by Laura Harvey earlier this year, revealed on a podcast last week. With time on her hands before the start of the season she found herself throwing tactical questions in the direction of ChatGPT, which suggested she might want to consider lining her side up in a back five. Now it’s very easy to scoff at this (and very right to do so). The few seconds artificial intelligence spends scouring the web to turn out MOR slop really shouldn’t be able to compare with the bespoke plans a coaching staff could create with time and attention.
Having said that… Seattle Reign did end the regular season in fifth. Would I take the 1.5 points per game of Champions League preview content? In week four, absolutely. AI is nothing if not a time saver and I’d quite like to go the movies this evening. Honestly I could just farm this off to ChatGPT, would you even notice the difference? That’s what I asked myself on Friday when Harvey’s quotes dropped, ahead of me the glinting promise of a weekend unimpeded by checking in on Barcelona.
NWSL coach Laura Harvey says she asked AI about soccer tactics, used response to try new formation
Sandra Herrera
This should all be simple enough. “What are the burning questions for next week’s Champions League fixtures?” Five answers it offers me. Five! We might have enough for a column and quarter here. Which teams under pressure can turn things around? How will injuries and rotation affects squads fighting just to get points? How will the heavyweights respond in their ‘must win’ games? I mean it’s alright but it’s giving a little bit too much of me responding to a question on Morning Footy that I really ought to have prepared for. Just throw out some generic football word soup and see if you can pad out the clock.
Let’s get a bit more specific here, please. ChatGPT offers, I am only to happy to oblige. Ok, now here we go. Liverpool vs. Atletico Madrid: Can the Reds maintain their usual high intensity when facing the top European teams in this new format? Athletic Club vs. Arsenal: does the Gunners relative lack of deep UCL experience in recent seasons… hey… wait….
These are matchday one games!
And look, credit where it’s due, the AI owns its mistakes. No one is perfect, least of all Skynet. It’ll go check the fixtures it says and then finally we can “craft the right burning questions” (subject’s emphasis). And credit to it, it gives it a go, refusing to be put off by how utterly catty I am in response. “Yeah, why don’t you try that?”
“I couldn’t identify any specific fixture for [this week] in the 2025-26 UEFA Champions League league phase that hasn’t already happened.”
I suppose we could keep labouring the issue but it’s all getting a bit Ange Postecoglou at Nottingham Forest, isn’t it? Looks like you folks are stuck with me for now.
2. Liverpool vs. Real Madrid: Have these two reversed their roles?
Some of the foundational myths of this iteration of Liverpool as a European force pit them against a team in the mould of Real Madrid. It does not have to be Madrid per se and these tales don’t always end in glory, but these sorts of opponents offered a clear contrast to what Liverpool became under Jurgen Klopp. Others would spend more money and assemble their Galacticos, but more often than not they were overwhelmed by the united front in red.
Six months down the line this may be that team once more. Old habits die hard, particularly in a dressing room marshalled by Virgil van Dijk. However at this stage of the season, even after Saturday’s 2-0 win over Aston Villa, Liverpool look a lot more like the teams that Klopp defined his club against. The pressing from the front that was once their defining quality has been scaled back after the arrivals of Alexander Isak and Hugo Ekitike, such that they are allowing 20% more passes per defensive action compared to Klopp’s final season.
His successor Arne Slot was bequeathed with well over half a billion dollars of high grade talent in the summer, but it really shouldn’t be much of a surprise that he has struggled to find a structure to mitigate the defensive weaknesses of full backs Milos Kerkez and Jeremie Frimpong, the latter sidelined with a hamstring injury, when he has so many forwards to fit in. Only by returning as near as possible to last season’s title winning formula did Slot find his way out of the domestic losing streak at the weekend. Even then they were lucky that Aston Villa didn’t have a little more guile to crack open what was a far more up and down of a game than a title contender might like.
Up against Slot on Tuesday night, a coach who seems intent on demanding that egos are sacrificed on the altar of team success. Xabi Alonso’s reluctance to indulge his big name attackers has not been without its risks: speculation over Rodrygo’s future has not eased with the Brazilian seemingly on the peripheries, while Vinicius Junior threw a firecracker into the Madrid media landscape with his furious reaction to being substituted in El Clasico (and the absence of any apology directly to his head coach afterwards). Still, when your record for the 2025-26 season reads played 14, won 13, you can be pretty confident that your collectivist approach is going to be popular among the powers that be.
But it need not be all doom and gloom as Madrid roll into town. The 15 time European champions may exemplify the pursuit of stardom over cohesion, but they are also the 15 European champions. You don’t need to be the best side in the world in November to win the biggest prizes in the spring. As Liverpool learned all too well under Klopp, sometimes the superstar team leave it late but click at just the right moment.
3. PSG vs. Bayern Munich: Are the visitors on the same level as holders?
Given that they have been at least quarterfinalists in every season, it is curious that Bayern Munich have rarely if ever felt like serious contenders to win the Champions League since they last lifted it by beating Paris Saint-Germain in the compressed 2020 championship. Their teams have felt a little in-substantive, blessed with plenty of dangerous attackers but ill-defined in midfield and light on elite defensive talent to protect their leads.
Has that changed this season? Bayern have blitzed the two lesser opponents that they ran into and were extremely impressive in dismantling Chelsea, against whom they conceded from one of the two high grade chances they have allowed throughout this competition. So far in the Champions League they have allowed only 1.4 expected goals (xG). To contextualize that, even Arsenal are at 1.46. In the Bundesliga too, Bayern are a lockdown defense, four goals and six xG conceded through nine games, all of them wins. Just look at their shots allowed chart below and how there is legitimately only one chance there that is better than one in three.
TruMedia
At the other end, it’s like every day is November 5 for Harry Kane. There’s fireworks everywhere. His 18 games this season have delivered 25 goals and three assists, establishing the England captain as a legitimate contender for the Ballon d’Or. Flanking him with Michael Olise and Luis Diaz is only going to buttress that case over the coming months. The latter might have had the feel of a curious way to spend $85 million — a 28-year-old winger who has never set the scoring charts alight — but when you’re Bayern Munich you can make a few missteps, which this may not prove to be, and still win the Bundesliga title.
That, however, is the problem with assessing this team’s standing among the European contenders. Bayern might be blitzing the Bundesliga but, well, have you seen most of the Bundesliga? Borussia Dortmund are performing credibly so far in the Champions League but there is only one other German side ranked in the top 20 by club ELO, a Bayer Leverkusen side who are falling like a stone. Eintracht Frankfurt will do well to cling on to a top 24 berth while conceding four-plus goals a game and in the Europa League VfB Stuttgart are hardly setting the continent alight.
Bayern, then, occupy a similar role to their opponents on Tuesday, just without the trust conferred on any reigning champion. It will be in games like this that they must prove that they belong alongside the elite.
4. Tottenham vs. Copenhagen: Is Thomas Frank a big club manager?
You’re all thinking the same not as pithy as you might like rejoinder: are Tottenham a big club? Those are lengthy, tedious weeds. They are ultimately a Europa League holder with a 60,000 seater stadium. Compared to Thomas Frank’s previous club, that is an almighty step up. That much was apparent in the aftermath of Saturday’s 1-0 defeat at home to Chelsea, an insipid display that shone the brightest of spotlights on Frank. It wasn’t just how his side played but how he and his players conversed with the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, the supporters booing him as he made his way past the South Stand while both Micky van de Ven and Djed Spence openly flouted his instructions to applaud the ground.
Tottenham’s defeat to Chelsea points to future issues Thomas Frank might create as Spurs aim for stability
James Benge
Frank moved to cool any talk of mutiny on Monday, saying at a press conference: “Micky and Djed came into my office yesterday unprompted and said, ‘We want to say sorry for the situation.’ They didn’t want it to look bad or disrespectful or all kinds of perceptions you can get in this strange media world. That was not their intention at all towards me or the club. They were just frustrated with the performance, the loss and the booing during the game.”
Would this be a talking point at Brentford? In all likelihood a moment of disobedience at what Frank famously termed “just a bus stop in Hounslow” would barely have made headlines. There is precious little at a team like Tottenham that doesn’t. As such it is incumbent on a manager to construct a narrative, to give a big fanbase a sense of what the future might be.
It is something Postecoglou implicitly understood, before a ball was even kicked there was an identity to Spurs that supporters wanted to see. That earned him enough credit with supporters that they were applauding their players off for a kamikaze high line in their 4-1 defeat to Chelsea. Two years later there was no such sympathy for Frank. His side might also be better off in the table than anyone could reasonably have expected, a fair way out over the skis in xG terms, but they have a stolid style that is anathema in their particular part of north London. That counts for just as much as a third place berth and unbeaten start to the league phase.
Games like Tuesday’s give him a chance to change the narrative, to show that his team can cut loose and attack even if for now the focus is on plugging the holes his predecessor left. If Spurs fans are going to get behind Frank, and if the man himself is going to prove himself ready to lead one of the biggest clubs in the land, he needs to be able to show what his tenure is building towards.
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