Despite the heatwave that has seemingly engulfed the whole of Italy, Arsenal secured a place in the Champions League along with Benfica, Lyon and the winners from Tuesday, Villarreal (seen above!) And the highly anticipated CL draw takes place later today, where the 32 qualified teams allocated into eight groups of four teams. As usual, each group will contain a top seed, plus one club each from the second, third and fourth pots.
Pot one: Manchester United, Barcelona, Chelsea, Bayern Munich, Arsenal, Real Madrid, Porto, Inter Milan
Pot two: Shakhtar Donetsk, Lyon, Villarreal, AC Milan, Valencia, Marseille, CSKA Moscow, Benfica
Pot three: Zenit St Petersburg, Manchester City, Olympiacos, Ajax, Bayer Leverkusen, Basle, Lille, BATE Borisov
Pot four: Borussia Dortmund, Dinamo Zagreb, Napoli, APOEL, Genk, Trabzonspor, Otelul Galati, Viktoria Plzen
Well, this banner displayed during Real Madrid’s friendly against Galatasaray last night is not going to go down well with the Catalans! It reads : “Mou, your finger shows us the way.” It’s undoubtedly in relation to Mourinho’s eye-poke at Barca assistant coach Tito Vilanova. Madrilenos happen to be one of the more stubbornly passionate fans (to be fair, they aren’t the only clubs with fans like these around!) so they’re more likely to back you up if you speak directly to them. Anyway, Real won 2-1 although the game was hardly impressive to begin with.
