Champions League draw LIVE: Liverpool, Manchester United, Man City and Chelsea learn group stage opponents
Follow the latest updates from the Champions League group stage draw
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Your support makes all the difference.Follow the latest updates live from the Champions League group stage draw as Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Chelsea all discovered who they will face in Europe this season.
Premier League champions Liverpool have been drawn alongside Ajax, Atalanta and Midtjylland in Champions League Group D. Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City, losers in the quarter-finals last season, were drawn in Group C with Porto, Olympiacos and Marseille.
Manchester United will play French champions and 2020 losing finalists Paris St Germain as well as RB Leipzig and Istanbul Basaksehir in Group H while Chelsea will meet Europa League winners Sevilla as well as Krasnodar and Rennes in Group E. Here’s how the pots will be drawn, with live updates of both the Champions League draw and the Uefa Best awards below:
UEFA CHAMPIONS LEAGUE DRAW
Group A: Bayern Munich
Group B:
Group C:
Group D:
Group E:
Group F:
Group G:
Group H:
UEFA CHAMPIONS LEAGUE DRAW
Up first, it’s pot one, where the eight teams will be spread out across the eight groups. Here’s a reminder of whose up:
Bayern Munich, Sevilla, Real Madrid, Liverpool, Juventus, Paris Saint-Germain, Zenit Saint Petersburg, Porto
UEFA CHAMPIONS LEAGUE DRAW
Giorgio Marchetti, Uefa’s deputy general secretary, is on hand as usual to stage the draw and set the perimeters for who can face who across the four pots - of course it’s not as simple as a free-for-all.
WOMEN’s UEFA GOALKEEPER OF THE YEAR
First up is the Men’s and Women’s Goalkeeper of the Year awards, which goes to Bayern Munich’s Manuel Neuer and Lyon’s Sarah Bouhaddi respectively.
UEFA CHAMPIONS LEAGUE DRAW
Drogba will remain for the draw, where he is joined by a former Chelsea teammate, Champions League winner and French international Florent Malouda, who will help decide which club will be in which group this season.
PRESIDENT’S AWARD
Didier Drogba, recalling the 2012 Champions League final in which he scored the equaliser against Bayern before winning the final in the penalty shootout: “I think it’s one of the best moments in my career, if not the best. I had a manager when I was in Le Mans who said you don’t need to play 9 minutes, you can play 10 minutes and make the difference. At first I was frustrated but I think because of this I made the difference in Munich.”
PRESIDENT’S AWARD
Uefa president Aleksandar Ceferin joins Chowdhury and Pinto on stage inside an eerily empty Swiss TV studio in Geneva, where they are soon joined by Didier Drogba as he collects the President’s Award from Ceferin himself.
The Ivory Coast legend is used to being honoured for the work he does on the field, but since retiring he has gone about improving the lives of those less fortunate in developing nations by helping to build schools and give children a chance where they may not normally be afforded one.
THE DRAW IS UNDERWAY
Presenters Reshmin Chowdhury and Pedro Pinto get the 2020/21 Champions League group stage draw underway!
UEFA WOMEN’S PLAYER OF THE YEAR
Will it be another golden year for bronze?
England and Manchester City’s Lucy Bronze is looking to defend her crown as Uefa Women’s Player of the Year, having taken the award last year following Lyon’s second consecutive Champions League triumph.
Of course, Lyon went and made it three in a row last season, before Bronze departed to return to the Women’s Super League with City, but she’s up against stiff opposition in Denmark’s Pernille Harder, the 2017/18 Player of the Year who helped fire Wolfsburg to the final, and Lyon teammate Wendie Renard.
CHAMPIONS LEAGUE DRAW
Only 15 minutes to wait until the draw ceremony gets underway in Geneva.
It feels like just yesterday that the 2019/20 campaign finished, and that’s largely because it’s been only 32 days since Bayern defeated PSG 1-0 to win their sixth European crown to pull level with Liverpool and sit behind only Real Madrid and AC Milan in the all-time list of winners.
However, this season’s campaign did not even wait for the 2019/20 one to complete before it got underway, with the preliminary round getting underway back on 8 August with five rounds already in the bag.
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