The Champions League returns today to a very different European soccer scene than it was before a three-month midseason break.
In the interim, Lionel Messi won his first World Cup title. Kylian Mbappé almost won his second, then got injured. Early-season favorites for the European title fell into slumps at home.
Meanwhile, one standout team before the World Cup, Napoli, has marched on and aims for its first quarterfinal place in the competition’s 68-year history.
Off the field, the Super League project that tried to effectively kill the Champions League met a serious legal setback, and English title holder Manchester City faces Premier League charges of financial wrongdoing that could one day stop the club entering future Champions Leagues.
It adds up to plenty of drama even before soccer’s most prized club competition resumes with a stellar game between Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich.
A rematch of the 2020 final won by Bayern pairs two powers that helped stop the Super League in 2021 by refusing to join it. What it was not expected to have at Parc des Princes were the goalscorer and goalkeeper with the best records from the group stage.
Mbappé, who scored seven goals across five different Champions League games in the fall, was set to miss most of February with a thigh injury. He made a surprise return to training on Sunday.
Bayern goalkeeper Manuel Neuer’s season is over because he broke a leg skiing on a vacation taken after Germany’s quick exit from the World Cup.
The other game pairs AC Milan and Tottenham, two of the seven round-of-16 teams that are currently outside the Champions League qualifying places in their domestic leagues. Chelsea is another and visits Borussia Dortmund on Wednesday, when Club Brugge hosts Benfica.
Four more first-leg games are scheduled Feb. 21-22.
MESSI QUEST
At age 35, Messi finally has a World Cup title for Argentina. Now back to the business of winning a fifth Champions League.
When Messi won his fourth title with Barcelona in 2015 Barack Obama was president, Britain was in the European Union and Jose Mourinho won a league title, at Chelsea.
Messi has not been to the final since and his first try with PSG ended in the round of 16 against Madrid. When he last faced Bayern it was an 8-2 rout over Barcelona in the single-leg quarterfinals of the pandemic-hit 2020 edition.
Both PSG and Bayern have misfired since the World Cup. PSG was unbeaten entering 2023 then lost three in the league and is out of the French Cup. Bayern still leads the Bundesliga after restarting with three straight draws.
DARK HORSES
Napoli and Benfica topped their groups in November — ahead of Liverpool and PSG, respectively — to be seeded in the draw and avoid teams like Madrid, Bayern and Man City. Napoli travels to Eintracht Frankfurt on Feb. 21, and Benfica plays Wednesday at Brugge.
Both are set up for domestic titles after strong returns from the World Cup break. Could an elusive Champions League title follow? Benfica has not been European champion since 1962, Napoli never got close.
However, Napoli mostly stayed out of January trading while Benfica sold Argentina midfielder Enzo Fernandez to Chelsea for a British record fee of about 120 million euros ($128 million).
Benfica should have enough to eliminate Brugge, which fired coach Carl Hoefkens in December after poor domestic results despite overachieving in the Champions League. Brugge hired Scott Parker, whose previous game had been a 9-0 loss at Liverpool in August with Bournemouth. GRAHAM DUNBAR, MDT/AP
