UCL DRAW

Monaco, Aug 29: Paris Saint-Germain was handed a tough start to the defense of its Champions League title when the draw was made Thursday with no opponent from any of the lower-ranked nations.
PSG was drawn against Bayern Munich and Barcelona from the pot of top-ranked teams, while Tottenham came from the pot of third-seeded teams in a repeat of their tight Super Cup game two weeks ago.
And the French champion was paired with arguably the two toughest opponents from the lowest-ranked teams: Newcastle and Athletic Bilbao.
Bayer Leverkusen, Atalanta and Portuguese champion Sporting Lisbon complete the title holder’s slate of eight games in the 36-team league phase.
“It’s always difficult,” said PSG president Nasser Al-Khelaïfi, whose team stumbled to 15th place in the single-standings league last season before surging to its first Champions League title. “We forgot last season, we think about this season.”

Madrid and Liverpool again

Real Madrid also got a challenging draw, including a long-haul trip to play Kairat Almaty of Kazakhstan – 6,420 kilometers (4,000 miles) from the Spanish capital, which is the furthest east the Champions League has ever gone.
Record 15-time champion Madrid got two English opponents from the pot of highest-ranked teams.
Madrid will host Manchester City, which it beat in the knockout playoffs last season, and return to Liverpool after losing 2-0 at Anfield in the league phase last year.
Madrid also will face Juventus in a repeat of its 2017 final win, and two French opponents, Marseille and Monaco – where superstar forward Kylian Mbappe started his career.
Liverpool fans will welcome Trent Alexander-Arnold back to Anfield with Madrid which he joined in June, and have away trips to the vibrant stadiums of Inter Milan, Eintracht Frankfurt, Marseille and Galatasaray.
“That is, I am sure, a fixture that the whole world will be looking at,” Liverpool coach Arne Slot said about another Madrid challenge.

Rematches and reunions

Bayern Munich will have rematches of two recent finals – at home to Chelsea where the German champion lost the 2012 title game on home turf, and away to PSG, which it beat in the 2020 final. Bayern also will go to Cyprus to face Pafos.
Manchester City will travel north of the Arctic Circle to face Bodo/Glimt of Norway, and host former fan favorite Kevin De Bruyne with his new club Napoli.
Inter Milan, which lost two of the last three finals, will host the top two teams in the Premier League last season, Liverpool and Arsenal. Inter beat Arsenal at the San Siro last season.
Kairat also will host Club Brugge, Olympiakos and Pafos.
The team also must travel four time zones west to play at Arsenal and Sporting Lisbon.
Bodo/Glimt also will host Juventus, Tottenham and Monaco Qarabag in Azerbaijan is another long-haul trip east to Baku for Chelsea, Eintracht, Ajax and Copenhagen.

League format

This is the second season of the league phase format with 36 teams playing eight different opponents on a weighted schedule through January, and ranked in a single-standings table.
Four newcomers to the main stage of the Champions League are: Bodo/Glimt, Kairat Almaty, Russian-owned Pafos and Belgian champion Union Saint-Gilloise.
Games in Bodo and Almaty shape to be the longest-ever trips for visiting teams, and their home games in January among the coldest in competition history. Bodo plays on a heated artificial turf field.
The computerized draw gave each team two opponents drawn from each of the four seeding pots.
Teams are seeded based on their ranking over five seasons of results in UEFA competitions.
Retired great Zlatan Ibrahimovic former Ballon d’Or winner Kaka picked each team out of its draw pot and pushed a button to reveal the slate of opponents.
Games start on Sept. 16 and the final league phase matchday is Jan. 28. On that Wednesday evening, all 36 teams play in 18 games kicking off at the same time.
The top eight teams in the final standings advance to the round of 16 in March. Joining them will be winners of eight knockout playoffs, featuring teams ranked ninth to 24th, scheduled in February. The bottom 12 teams are eliminated.

Prize money

UEFA has allocated 2.47 billion euros ($2.88 billion) in prize money for the 36 teams.
The lowest-ranked team, Kairat, is guaranteed at least 20 million euros ($23 million) from UEFA. High-ranked teams Real Madrid and PSG will get at least 60 million euros ($69 million). Teams earn more for each win and draw, then for advancing through the knockout rounds.
The title winner should receive about 150 million euros ($175 million) in prize money. (AP)

Monaco, Aug 29: Good luck Manchester City, Tottenham, Juventus and Monaco – one of them will have to travel north of the Arctic Circle in mid-January to play a Champions League game.
All four were drawn Thursday as away opponents for Norwegian champion Bodo/Glimt, whose 8,000-capacity Aspmyra stadium is located farther north than soccer’s top club competition has ever been.
And Real Madrid’s team of superstars is going farther east than the Champions League has ever been, to play at Kairat Almaty in Kazakshtan near its border with China.
That is a flight of about 6,420 kilometers (4,000 miles) across three time zones from the Spanish capital.
Thursday’s draw only paired teams with their opponents but did not determine the dates of any of the games, so it’s still unclear which teams will be making those trips in the middle of winter.
The temperature in Almaty, a city that once bid to host the Winter Olympics, can drop to minus-20 C (minus-4 F) in January.
Visitors to Bodo/Glimt could expect to bask in the relative heat of minus-7 C (19 F) in January. That is what greeted Maccabi Tel Aviv seven months ago in a Europa League game. The Israeli visitors lost 3-1 on Bodo/Glimt’s heated artificial turf.

New challenges

Bodo/Glimt and Almaty are both newcomers to the Champions League, and their locations present extra challenges after the competition schedule was changed from last season to include games in January. Though the weather could prove challenging in other months, too.
The 40,000 people living in coastal Bodo can get heavy snow in April – as they did when 10 centimeters (four inches) fell overnight when Lazio visited in the Europa League quarterfinals.
“So Lazio was saying, How are we going to play this game?’” Bodo/Glimt chairman Inge Henning Andersen said Thursday ahead of the Champions League draw. “Just shuffle the snow away. The heat is on. We don’t need to adjust anything playing in Bodo.” If snow does force a game to be postponed, the teams should try again the following afternoon, the Bodo official said.
Tottenham already visited Bodo for last season’s Europa League semifinal, though that was in May.

Long-haul soccer

Regardless of the time of the year, there will be some extreme long-haul flights for some teams in this Champions League edition.
Madrid, the record 15-time champion of Europe, will be joined by Club Brugge, Olympiakos and Cypriot newcomer Pafos having to play Kairat in central Asia.
“It’s no problem, it’s football,” said Kairat general director Askar Yessimov, suggesting opponents should travel two days before the game.
Kairat’s players and fans, however, will make four of those return trips, not just one like their opponents. They had 11 hours flying time last week to face Celtic in Glasgow in the qualifying playoffs, Yessimov said.
The champion of Kazakhstan was drawn with away games at Inter Milan, Arsenal, Copenhagen and – furthest of all – Sporting Lisbon.
Almaty to Lisbon is about 7,000 kilometers (4,350 miles), which should set a record in Europe’s marquee competition.
Kazakhstani teams have played in European competitions only since 2002 when it became a member of UEFA, and Astana played in the 2015-16 Champions League. The former Soviet Union republic had first joined the Asian Football Confederation in 1994.
Azerbaijan also is represented in this Champions League, with Qarabag due to play home games in Baku. That is about 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) from London for Chelsea and slightly shorter flights for Eintracht Frankfurt, Ajax and Copenhagen.
Qarabag’s players and fans have long trips west to Liverpool, Lisbon – to play Benfica – Athletic Bilbao and Napoli.

Western Europe dominates

The travel demands reflect how the Champions League is now a very western European affair concentrated on the richest clubs in the richest leagues.
With no teams from Ukraine, Croatia or Serbia among the 36 clubs in the league phase this season, the only other from a former Iron Curtain country is Slavia Prague. No eastern European team advanced to the 24-team knockout phase last season. (AP)

Buenos Aires, Aug 29: Lionel Messi has given his strongest hint yet that he will bid farewell to international football at next year’s FIFA World Cup.
Argentina, already assured of a place at the 2026 finals in the United States, Mexico and Canada, will host Venezuela on September 4 at the Monumental Stadium in Buenos Aires before completing qualifying away to Ecuador on September 9.
“It (the Venezuela clash) is going to be a very, very special match for me because it’s the last qualifying match,” the 38-year-old forward told reporters after leading Inter Miami into the Leagues Cup final.
Messi said his family will be present for the Venezuela game and acknowledged it could be his last opportunity to appear in front of home fans, reports Xinhua.
“I don’t know if there will be friendlies or more matches [after Venezuela], but it is a very special match, so my wife, my children, my parents, my siblings will be there with me,” he added.
The Albiceleste captain has signaled before that Argentina’s title defense in 2026 would mark the end of his international career. The former Barcelona and Paris Saint-Germain star will be 40 when the next World Cup qualifiers begin in 2027.
South American football governing body CONMEBOL echoed his comments on Thursday, posting “the last dance is coming” alongside a picture of Messi in an Argentina shirt.
Messi, the winner of eight Ballon d’Or trophies, is Argentina’s all-time leading scorer and most-capped player. His crowning moment came in December 2022 when he led the team to its third World Cup triumph in Qatar. (IANS)

Riyadh, Aug 29: Ronaldo is still a name above all others when attention turns to the Saudi soccer league’s season-opening round.
Just like it was earlier this month when more than 30,000 fans turned out in Hong Kong to watch Al-Nassr defeat Al-Ittihad 2-1 in the first semifinal of the Saudi Super Cup on Aug. 19, he’s part of the league’s growth and marketing plans.
“The majority can only be described as Cristiano Ronaldo fans,” Chris KL Lau, a Hong Kong resident and fan, told The Associated Press. “The match had an electric buzz and each time Ronaldo had the ball there was excitement.” The Portuguese star was mobbed the following day when he visited the city’s official Cristiano Ronaldo museum. “Fans have travelled from across China, Saudi Arabia and the Asia-Pacific to see him,” Lau said.
After Ronaldo left Manchester United and joined the Saudi Pro League in December 2022, other big names followed to Riyadh, Jeddah and elsewhere, including Karim Benzema, Neymar and Riyad Mahrez. The Big Four’ – Al-Nassr, Ittihad as well as Al-Hilal and Al-Ahli – were taken over by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund in 2023 and have budgets as big as ambitions.
The league season kicked off Thursday with three games. Ronaldo’s Al Nassr opens Friday against Al Taawoun.
While the five-time Ballon d’Or winner is still the international face of the league, backers are working to expand the reach of the league. But the importance of Ronaldo’s presense was evident in the second game at Hong Kong Stadium between Al-Ahli and Al-Qadsiah, when organizers announced a crowd of 16,000. Some doubt that figure.
“Those who were at the game reckon only 5,000 to 6,000 fans were inside,” Lau said “Fans were happy to splash the cash for Ronaldo but were less inclined to do so for Al-Ahli and Al Qadsiah. This resulted in rows of empty seats.” (AP)