The Champions League is back and one Supercomputer has predicted that a Premier League club will emerge victorious in the newly-revamped competition.
The format for European competitions has radically changed for this season with the group stage changed to a league phase with UEFA hoping for greater unpredictability and more clashes between the ‘big’ clubs.
The draw for the league phase has certainly thrown up some spicy fixtures, with Aston Villa and Liverpool kicking-off the action tonight against Young Boys and AC Milan.
Manchester City host Italian champions Inter Milan, in a repeat of the 2023 final, on Wednesday, while Arsenal travel to Europa League winners Atalanta on Thursday.
And yet, one Supercomputer has still tipped two teams that have dominated the UCL for the past few years to reach the final, which will be held in Munich on May 31, 2025.
In the new format, all 36 teams will play eight different opponents from September to January, with results determining their position in one big league table.
Clubs that finish in the top eight advance to the last-16 while those in ninth to 24th go into a play-off to determine who will join them, with the knockouts proceeding as normal.
And there’s good news for the five British sides in the competition, as Grosvenor Sport’s Supercomputer has predicted that they will all reach the knockout phase, with one going on to lift the trophy.
But it won’t happen as you might expect, as City are tipped to finish in the top eight alongside Aston Villa who are competing in the Champions League for the first time since 1982/83 when it was known as the European Cup.
Arsenal however are predicted to just miss out on a top-eight place and will go into the play-offs alongside Liverpool and Celtic but from here things get tricky as the knockout draw will of course not be made until the new year.
Predicted Champions League league phase table
- Monaco – 16
- Arsenal – 15
- Dortmund – 14
- PSV – 14
- Milan – 14
- Feyenoord – 14
- Leverkusen – 13
- Stuttgart – 13
- Girona – 11
- Liverpool – 10
- Juventus – 10
- Celtic – 9
- Sparta Praha – 9
- Benfica – 9
- RB Leipzig – 8
- PSG – 8
Supercomputer prediction courtesy of Grosvenor Sport
Regardless, the English sides have been tipped to advance from the play-offs but the Scottish champions Celtic will go no further thanks to a 4-3 aggregate defeat to PSV.
Villa’s journey then comes to an end in the last-16 after a 5-4 aggregate loss to RB Leipzig.
In this prediction Liverpool knock Arsenal out in the quarter-finals by a scoreline of 4-2 only to lose to the old enemy Real Madrid in the semi-finals.
Reigning champions Madrid will then take on 2023 winners City in the final – the fourth year in a row that the two sides will have met in the competition – after the Citizens beat PSG, Barcelona and Leipzig in the knockouts.
This could be Pep Guardiola’s last season at the Etihad and it seems he’ll be going out on a high, with the Supercomputer tipping City to beat Los Blancos 2-0 in Munich.
We’ll see how much of this comes to pass with the Champions League league phase kicking off on September 17.
How does the Supercomputer work?
Grosvenor Sport’s Supercomputer is a probability model, not determined by human predictions or bias. The Supercomputer estimates the outcome of each fixture based on a team’s current strength (based on factors such as league position and form) and betting market odds.
The predictions are the result of a model simulating every game in the competition and predicting the exact score it thinks every game will be. A level of randomness is added to the predictions to ensure that upsets happen rather than the best teams in the league winning every game. The outcome of the score predictions is the most common result between the relevant teams.
The model then simulates the remaining games in a season 1,000 times and constructs an average league table from the 1,000 simulations, to rule out anomalous results. This is in order to capture as many different outcomes as possible, and this includes teams like Aston Villa winning the Champions League in a small number of simulations.
The final score predictions are the result of these simulations then being compiled into what the Supercomputer predicts at present given all the information that is available to it, but there is a range of possibilities within these predictions.
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