By the time it was all done, Manchester City could probably be forgiven for leaving the auditorium in Monaco with a stifling sense of deja vu. For City, it has become the norm. This is the fifth season they have appeared in the Champions League and in every year but one they have ended up with the closest there is to a Group of Death, with the serious potential for rigor mortis to set in.
They should be used to it by now but Manuel Pellegrini, just like Roberto Mancini before him, might also be entitled to cast an envious glance at the way everything has fallen for the other English clubs – Manchester United in particular – bearing in mind his own team must take on Juventus, last season’s runners-up, as well as the Europa League champions, Sevilla, and Borussia Mönchengladbach, who finished third in the Bundesliga.
Even in 2013, when the group draw was a fraction kinder than normal, City were lumbered with Bayern Munich. The season before that, it was Borussia Dortmund, Ajax and Real Madrid or, to put another way, the champions of Germany, Holland and Spain. Last season there was Bayern, Roma and CSKA Moscow. One of the City directors, starting to feel like a jinx, deliberately stayed away this year.
It made no difference and the latest draw is reminiscent of City’s first season in the competition, 2011-12, when they were also pitted against teams from Serie A, La Liga and the Bundesliga. Indeed, in all five seasons City have drawn German opposition.
A lot of it is due to the perplexing format employed by Uefa that means Benfica, PSV Eindhoven and Zenit St Petersburg are currently among the highest eight seeds whereas the next pot down includes City – first, second, first and second in the Premier League over the past four seasons - and even more incredibly Real Madrid, winners of la Decima 16 months ago. City have never done enough to warrant a higher grade but, however much it is dressed up, it is barely plausible that a team with Madrid’s traditions and history, featuring Cristiano Ronaldo, Gareth Bale et al, are not among the top group.
As such, City are always vulnerable to these kind of misfortunes, although it will not make them feel any better that United were also in the second pot and have been dealt a much kinder hand. Louis van Gaal’s team have been given a relatively gentle introduction back into the competition, in the form of PSV, CSKA Moscow and a Wolfsburg side who look like being significantly weakened by the impending transfer of Kevin De Bruyne. City, negotiating a transfer possibly in excess of £50m, could never have imagined it would be doing their neighbours such a favour.
On a more positive note, City did show last season they can negotiate a way through these tricky opening stages, and that if there was once a mental block it is no longer quite so debilitating. Sevilla have shown they are a fine knockout team but they were only fifth in La Liga last season while Mönchengladbach finished 13 points off the top in Germany and, despite their history in European competitions(including knocking City out of the 1979 Uefa Cup quarter-final), do not inspire anything like the same trepidation as Bayern, one of Arsenal’s opponents in Group F.
Arsène Wenger’s team are experts at qualifying for the knockout rounds but, behind City, they have the toughest draw of the four English clubs. Arsenal have gone out to Bayern in two of the past three seasons.
Their other opponents, Olympiakos and Dynamo Zagreb, both play in front of partisan crowds and Arsenal’s record against the Greek team since 2009 is mixed – three wins at home, three defeats away.
Otherwise it was a draw of reunions. There is a return for José Mourinho to Porto where, less pleasingly, he will come up against Iker Casillas, the goalkeeper he came to regard as a sworn enemy when he was managing Madrid.
Memphis Depay will go back to Eindhoven only a few months after helping them to the Dutch championship. Zlatan Ibrahimovic will head back to Sweden to face his hometown club, Malmo, and Paris Saint-Germain have also been drawn in Madrid’s group, meaning a return for Ángel di María to the Bernabéu. Luis Enrique, having taken Barcelona to the treble last season, will take the holders back to his old club, Roma.
Mourinho should relish going back to the club where he won the competition in 2004 and the fixture schedule has been kind for Chelsea. The London club face a couple of long trips to play their first ever games against Dynamo Kyiv, on 20 October, and Maccabi Tel Aviv, on 24 November, but those dates do not interfere with any matches against title rivals.
The bigger issue on that front is for United, who have a gruelling journey to play in Moscow on 21 October, the same week they will be preparing for the first Manchester derby of the season.
In that respect, all the English clubs will be grateful to have avoided Astana, making their debut in the competition as Kazakhstan’s representatives, and the possibility of a 7,000-mile round trip featuring six-and-a-half-hour flights each way.
For City, however, one imagines they would probably swap.
