After a rather so-so round of 16, we’re finally into the business end of the 2023/24 UEFA Champions League season.
Eight teams remain, with the bulk of the pre-season favourites (bar Inter) finding a way through to the quarter-finals of the competition.
So who should be considered the best team left in the Champions League? We’ve taken a look…
Borussia Dortmund impressed in both legs of their round of 16 clash with PSV Eindhoven, sweeping their Dutch adversaries aside thanks to goals from Jadon Sancho and Marco Reus at Signal Iduna Park.
Despite that, performances in the Bundesliga don’t exactly suggest Dortmund should be considered frontrunners in the Champions League this season.
When you’re the fourth best team in Germany, chances are you’re not the best team the whole of Europe. That’s just basic math.
Atletico Madrid were not expected to knock Inter out of the competition.
And yet, that wily old Diego Simeone was able to pull the rabbit out of the hat, inspiring Atleti to a dramatic penalty shoot-out win over the runaway Serie A leaders.
While they could repeat those heroics heading into the latter stages of the competition, right now it feels like Atletico are a hard out for one of the favourites as opposed to being one of the favourites themselves.
Yes, we agree, it is strange that we live in a world where Barcelona aren’t automatically considered top contenders for the Champions League.
But post-Lionel Messi and in the midst of a financial crisis that would make stock brokers in Wall Street in 1929 quiver, that’s exactly the world that we live in.
This is the first year since 2020 that Barca have even made it this far in the competition, and now they have to take on PSG to make it one step further. Yikes.
Despite the addition of one of the best defenders (Kim Min-jae) and strikers (Harry Kane) during the summer transfer window, Bayern Munich somehow managed to become a worse football team this season.
That regression has led to Bayer Leverkusen running away with the Bundesliga title and the club confirming that Thomas Tuchel will leave the club (forcibly) at the end of the season – both obvious net-negatives for Bayern.
The one positive of this huge underperformance in the Bundesliga however, is that the club can fully focus on the Champions League in the final few months of the campaign. And while their tactical deficiencies are apparent, players like Kane, Leroy Sane and Jamal Musiala are capable of dragging Bayern kicking and screaming through to the latter stages of the competition.
Paris Saint-Germain haven’t been particularly great this season.
In fact, at times they’ve been downright bad.
However for now, PSG still have Kylian Mbappe – a player so good that any team he plays for have a chance of winning any competition they play in.
For the first time in 14 years, Arsenal have made it through to the last eight of the UEFA Champions League.
And while getting this far was a bit of a struggle – relying on a penalty shootout to see off Porto – the Gunners’ recent domestic form leads us to believe they are genuine contenders this season.
Bayern Munich await in the quarter-final, after which we’ll know a whole lot more about what this Arsenal team are made of.
Much like PSG, in Jude Bellingham Real Madrid have a player so good that they are contenders to win any competition they ever enter.
Unlike PSG, they also have other players who can contribute to winning the Champions League too.
The likes of Vinicius Junior and Rodrygo Goes are proven match-winners late in the competition, while the veteran midfield tandem of Luka Modric and Toni Kroos are still as good as anyone in the world.
The holders, the treble-winners, the obvious favourites to win the UEFA Champions League this year.
Despite accomplishing literally everything imaginable in 2022/23, Man City have shown no signs of slowing down in 2023/24.
They’re the most complete team in the competition by a considerable distance.
