Champions League stock watch: Barcelona, Real Madrid rising

We’re now done with three matchdays in the freshly expanded Champions League’s eight-match “league phase.” What do you think? We’ve certainly had some surprise results (Monaco over Barcelona in matchday 1, Lille over Real Madrid in matchday 2). We’ve had some big-name matchups that the previous format might not have given us this early (Manchester City-Inter Milan, Arsenal-PSG, Barcelona-Bayern). And unless you truly believe that Aston Villa are the best team in Europe, that Brest are in the top five and that Bayern Munich aren’t in the top 20, then the table itself certainly packs some early surprises and oddities.

If you enjoy true stakes, however, you might still be struggling to find your way in. Lille’s upset of Real Madrid, for instance, was huge for their own odds of advancing to the knockout rounds, but Real Madrid still have the third-highest odds of finishing in the top eight, which would give them a first-round bye in the knockouts. Borussia Dortmund still have the fourth-highest odds of finishing top-eight despite Tuesday’s late collapse at Real Madrid. Bayern have lost two straight but aren’t in any major danger of missing the knockouts.

The matches have been frequently interesting, the best players in the world have been slowly raising their game (see: Vinícius Júnior’s Tuesday hat trick or Erling Haaland’s karate-kick goal), and we’ve gotten to see thrilled home crowds celebrating wins at proud clubs such as Celtic, Lille and, of course, Aston Villa. If you’re struggling to figure out what the results have actually meant thus far, I can’t totally blame you. But I can help.

There are basically four tiers of Champions League contenders: The actual title favorites, the teams best positioned to make a run, the long shots likely to advance to the knockouts (but maybe not advance far) and the teams least likely to advance. Let’s walk through each tier and talk about whose stock rose and fell during matchday 3.

CHAMPIONS LEAGUE PROJECTIONS AFTER MATCHDAY 3

Note: Odds of top-eight or top-24 finishes come from Opta’s most recent supercomputer projections, while the title odds come from the most recent implied odds at ESPN BET.) The criteria for each tier are noted below.

Within each tier, who’s rising and who’s falling?

Tier 1: The favorites (2)

Criteria: Title chances of 10% or more

Stock up

Real Madrid: While both Manchester City (draw with Inter) and Real Madrid (loss to Lille) have dropped points in this competition, they remain the Tier 1 gold standards. And while City traded jabs with a spirited Sparta Prague for a little while on Wednesday before landing the knockout blow in a 5-0 win, Real Madrid actually took one on the chin from Borussia Dortmund before finding its best form.

Late in the 2022-23 season, Real Madrid, distracted by an upcoming Champions League semifinal game against Chelsea and having already just about handed the LaLiga crown to Barcelona for the season, lost 3-2 at the Bernabeu. Since then, they’ve played 39 home matches in all competitions and lost none of them. Their goal differential in the first half is a decent plus-21 (31-10); from the 75th minute on, it’s plus-23 (28-5).

In short, they’re gracious hosts — they know it’s a big moment for you, playing in such an immaculate stadium against the all-time European champions, and they allow you to land some blows early on. Then, when it’s winning time, they win. It feels like you can only beat them in that building if you score the go-ahead goal on the very last kick of the match.

Tuesday’s 5-2 win over Borussia Dortmund was exactly the sort of match that Stats Perform’s momentum charts were made for:

BVB looked genuinely awesome for large portions of the first 35 minutes and took a 2-0 lead thanks to two perfectly executed sequences. On one, a large string of good passes ended with Serhou Guirassy’s lovely assist to Donyell Malen, who thundered the ball into the net. Just four minutes later, Jamie Gittens made an utterly perfect run on a counterattack, appearing out of nowhere to slam in a Malen cross. It was all brilliantly done and yet, from that point forward, Real Madrid attempted 21 shots to BVB’s four and outscored their visitors 5-0.

To be sure, BVB players made mistakes and crumbled in the moment. Manager Nuri Sahin seemed to blink too early, taking out Gittens for another defender (Waldemar Anton) early in the second half and signing up for 35 minutes of pure defending, which was never going to work. Still, it’s hard to blame them too much when this is just how things go when a visitor has the audacity to take the lead in that stadium.

Real Madrid have long mastered the art of looking mediocre for as long as possible, then turning on the fireworks at just the right time. They have struggled to find fifth gear this season while figuring out how to work Kylian Mbappé into the attack. They found it on Tuesday evening.

Stock down

None

Tier 2: Absolute contenders (12)

Criteria: Title chances of between 1-10%

Stock up

Barcelona: The Flick Effect is real, apparently?

Back in November 2019, following a dire 5-1 defeat at Eintracht Frankfurt, Bayern Munich fired Niko Kovacs and replaced him with assistant Hansi Flick. Almost instantaneously, Bayern became the best team in Europe (or at least, the second best until Liverpool’s early-season momentum began to flag). They pummeled Borussia Dortmund 4-0 in his first league match, suffered a couple of unlucky 2-1 losses and then didn’t lose again after Dec. 7. They were in fourth place in the Bundesliga when he was hired, but they rolled to the title by 13 points and won their last seven matches of the season, including four in the COVID-delayed Champions League, by a combined 27-6.

That home-stretch run featured one particularly famous result: Their 8-2 win over Barcelona in the Champions League quarterfinals. Flick’s charges were too fast and too focused for Barca, scoring three goals in 11 minutes to charge to a 4-1 lead and cruising.

Wednesday’s Barca-Bayern match wasn’t quite that lopsided. This time, with Flick on the opposite sideline, his team charged to a 4-1 lead and stopped. But for Barca, it was their first win over Bayern since the first leg of the 2014-15 semifinals — Bayern had won their last six encounters by a combined 22-4 — and it was quite easily their most impressive Champions League performance since they beat Liverpool 3-0 in the first leg of the 2018-19 semifinals.

Barca got a first-minute goal from Raphinha, weathered a Bayern storm that eventually produced a tying goal from Harry Kane, then completely controlled the game’s final 70 minutes. Robert Lewandowski, another famous former Bayern employee, put the Blaugrana ahead in the 36th minute, then Raphinha basically scored the same goal twice on either side of halftime. For the final half-hour at the Olympic Stadium, it was a party.

This wasn’t systemic domination — Bayern controlled 60% of the possession, and Barca only attempted one more shot (12-11) while basically playing counter-attacking ball for the last 50-60 minutes — but catharsis is good.

If you’d been watching Barca of late, it was easy to suspect they might be capable of a performance like this. They had suffered a couple of frustrating away losses to Monaco in the Champions League and Osasuna in LaLiga play, but they had won six matches by at least three goals, and in their last three matches leading up to Wednesday, they had outscored opponents by a combined 13-1. They got a spiritual shot in the arm on Sunday, too, when midfielder Gavi made his first appearance since a November ACL injury. Gavi is a walking ball of energy, and Barcelona already had quite a bit of that to spare.

They are still in no way close to full strength — goalkeeper Marc-André ter Stegen and midfielder Marc Bernal are both out for the season, and it’s still going to be a little while before defenders Ronald Araújo and Andreas Christensen are healthy — but Barcelona are absolutely soaring with El Clásico — stream LIVE on Saturday, 3 p.m. ET, ESPN+ — on deck.

Aston Villa: The first team to reach nine points in this competition wasn’t Real Madrid, or Manchester United, or Bayern, or Liverpool or any other recent champion. It was the 1982 champion.

Following their win over Bayern in the previous matchday, Aston Villa didn’t light the world on fire against Bologna on Tuesday. But while Bologna created some decent opportunities, they couldn’t finish them. John McGinn and Jhon Durán, on a run of finishing form unlike almost anything we’ve seen — in just 404 minutes this season, he has scored seven goals from 26 shots worth 4.2 xG — scored in the second half to get the job done 2-0.

Villa have already all but clinched advancement to the knockout rounds, and they now have the fifth-best odds of a top-eight finish. What a brilliant start in Birmingham.

Stock down

Bayern Munich: In matchday 1, Bayern beat Dinamo Zagreb by a jarring 9-2 margin. Two matches later, Bayern are 23rd in the table … and Dinamo Zagreb are 22nd.

Bayern are back to playing Hansi Flick ball, for (usually) better or (sometimes) worse. We saw the good part of this last weekend when the German giants absolutely pummeled Stuttgart. We saw the bad part … against Flick’s Barcelona.

Atletico Madrid: Atleti have only lost two matches since last May, but they were both in this year’s Champions League, and they were by a combined 7-1. After a shockingly poor 4-0 loss to Benfica earlier in October, they were gifted an early Julián Álvarez goal at home against Lille and were in total control after 55 minutes, but gave up a long-range goal from Edon Zhegrova and a pair from Jonathan David to succumb 3-1.

Now, there’s some magic going on right now with the Ligue 1 teams not named Paris Saint-Germain (we’ll get to them), but this was still a terribly disappointing result even if the advanced stats — they attempted 11 shots worth 2.2 xG, while Lille managed just eight worth 1.4 — suggested this was at least slightly fluky. And there could be consequences: Their odds of a top-eight finish nearly disintegrated, and their odds of advancing at all plummeted from over 90% to under 70%. Another poor result, and they’ll be in genuine trouble.

PSG and Atalanta, aka this week’s Sports Are Dumb Award winners: Against PSV Eindhoven and Celtic respectively, the two teams combined to attempt 48 shots worth 4.9 xG while allowing 12 shot attempts worth 0.5 xG. But PSG and PSV tied 1-1, and Atalanta and Celtic tied 0-0.

Obviously the stakes of any one match are lower right now, but dropping points at home dropped the teams to 17th (Atalanta) and 19th (PSG) in the table and dropped their odds of finishing in the top eight by 9.0% and 8.3%, respectively. Not the end of the world, but not great either.

Tier 3: Spicy long shots (11)

Criteria: Title chance of 1% or lower but at least a 50% chance of advancing to knockout rounds

Stock up

VfB Stuttgart: Sebastian Hoeness’ squad has experienced about everything a decent team can over the last few weeks.

They played well against Real Madrid in their Champions League opener at the Bernabeu before — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — Real Madrid laid the hammer down late in a 3-1 win. They destroyed Borussia Dortmund 5-1 a few days later in Bundesliga play, then suffered three consecutive unlucky draws against Wolfsburg, Sparta Prague and Hoffenheim, generating a combined plus-2.6 xG differential in the three matches but winning none. Last week, in a big statement opportunity at Bayern Munich, they got steamrolled 4-0.

In those six matches, they played poorly only once, but won only once.

Did they let this frustration boil over and take them down against a Juventus team that was unbeaten in all competitions and had allowed just one goal in eight Serie A matches? Nope!

The Swabians instead dominated from start to finish. They attempted 22 shots to Juve’s seven, generated 2.4 xG to Juve’s 0.3 and, despite having a goal controversially overturned by VAR and missing a penalty, Stuttgart still found a way through. El Bilal Toure emphatically finished a beautiful sequence in second-half stoppage time.

A brilliant Stuttgart team move! 🤩

El Bilal Touré bags the stoppage time winner vs. Juve 🔥 pic.twitter.com/HOkbelNxu4

— CBS Sports Golazo ⚽️ (@CBSSportsGolazo) October 22, 2024

All in all, a very well-earned three points for the visitors and a result that just about confirmed that they’ll be advancing to the knockouts.

Ligue 1 (non-PSG edition): Monaco, Lille and Brest are having three very different years in Ligue 1 play — Monaco is tied at the top of the table with PSG, having begun the season unbeaten in all competitions. Lille battled through a September funk but have gone six straight games unbeaten and are up to fourth in the league. Brest only won one of their first five matches this season and have still battled up to only 11th in the league, as close to the relegation zone as a Europa League spot.

But while things are different domestically, the three teams do have one thing in common: They have nailed the first stages of the Champions League. They’ve combined for six wins, two draws and only one loss thus far. Lille have beaten Real Madrid and Atletico Madrid back-to-back. Brest beat two minnows but backed things up with a solid 1-1 draw against Bayer Leverkusen on Wednesday. And while Barcelona were probably the best-looking team this week, Monaco, the team that beat Barca in Matchday 1, might have been No. 2.

OK, no, Red Star Belgrade haven’t provided much resistance in Champions League play thus far, but Monaco’s 5-1 win on Tuesday was nearly note-perfect. That’s the way they’ve been for much of the season. Even while leading for much of the way, Monaco generated 70.2% possession against Red Star and outshot the Serbian champions by a 27-5 margin. The attacking trio of Breel Embolo, Takumi Minamino and Maghnes Akliouche combined for four goals and two assists from six chances created. Minamino is a pressing machine — he had eight defensive interventions on Tuesday — and Akliouche was relentless in ball progression, producing 21 combined progressive carries and passes (third most of any attackers this week. This team has massive confidence and a puncher’s chance (25.8%, almost identical to Bayern’s odds) at a top-eight finish.

Stock down

None

Tier 4: Here for a good time, not a long time (11)

Criteria: Under 50% chance of advancing to the knockout rounds

Stock up

None

Stock down

RB Leipzig: Welcome to the fourth tier, RBL.

What a strange start for Marco Rose’s team. They’re still 11th in the Opta rankings, and they’re tied with Bayern atop the Bundesliga with zero losses — and an early-season away win over Bayer Leverkusen — through seven matches. This is a quantifiably good team, but like Atletico, they haven’t really proven it in the Champions League. They collapsed late in a 2-1 loss to Atletico, then gave up two goals while a man up in a shocking 3-2 home loss to Juventus. And while a 1-0 home loss to Liverpool isn’t embarrassing, they were severely outplayed on Wednesday, allowing far more high-quality chances (17 shots worth 2.4 xG) than they created (13 worth just 0.8 xG)

Now, starting with Atletico, Juve and Liverpool is bad luck. They’ve had a tough draw, yes, but it only gets so much easier. You’ll probably need at least nine points to advance, and while trips to Celtic and Sturm Graz will give them opportunities to pick up six, those matches are still away from home, and they still have to play first-place Aston Villa (home), seventh-place Inter (away), and eighth-place Sporting CP (home). Their odds of advancing have slipped under 50% and below those of Sparta Prague and Dinamo Zagreb. Ouch.

Red Star Belgrade, Slovan Bratislava, RB Salzburg and Sturm Graz: One benefit to the expanded Champions League field is that certain lower-rung teams can find their footing, beat teams in similar weight classes, give their home fans some thrills and position themselves for knockout-round appearances. But it also means that some of those lower-run teams are going to have a very bad time.

These four teams have now lost 12 of 12 matches with a combined goal differential of minus-32 after losing by a combined 11-2 this week. There are six zero-point teams in all, but Young Boys played well in a loss to Inter on Wednesday, and RB Leipzig is better than its record (I think). We’re not even halfway through this league phase, but for these four teams in particular, odds of advancing are just about toast.

Players of the week

Vinicius Jr. and Kylian Mbappé, Real Madrid

Maybe you’ve heard of these guys? After spotting Borussia Dortmund a 2-0 lead, Real Madrid charged back as they are wont to do and the two biggest stars more than played their part, combining for three goals (all from Vini Jr.), one assist (Mbappé) from five chances created, 12 shots and six shots on target. Vinicius Jr. added 16 combined progressive carries and passes, too.

Watching Real Madrid is almost always a frustrating experience: We know what they can look like in fifth gear, but they don’t shift into it until they’re forced to. But damn, was that a sight to behold on Tuesday.

Raphinha, Barcelona

Good gracious, was he good against Bayern. He scored three goals on three shots — two were basically the exact same goal — and he was the face of Barca’s biggest Champions League statement wins in years.

Dmytro Riznyk, Shakhtar Donetsk

The 25-year-old goalkeeper did everything he possibly could to give Shakhtar a chance against Arsenal at the Emirates. He faced five shots on goal that were worth a combined 1.93 postshot xG, and he kept them all out of the net. That made it particularly cruel when Arsenal scored on a shot that deflected off of a Shakhtar defender, bounced off the post and went in off of Riznyk’s backside for an own goal.

Gabriel Martinelli’s shot deflects off the back of Shakhtar Donetsk’s goalkeeper to give Arsenal the lead 😳🎯 pic.twitter.com/ePK4ERK8kj

— CBS Sports Golazo ⚽️ (@CBSSportsGolazo) October 22, 2024

Again: Sports are just mean sometimes.

Christian Pulisic, AC Milan

It’s not every day that one of the best players in the history of the U.S. national teams scores an Olimpico in the Champions League.

🚨 CHRISTIAN PULISIC #UCL OLIMPICO!!! 🚨 pic.twitter.com/NSgfJMunLu

— CBS Sports Golazo ⚽️ (@CBSSportsGolazo) October 22, 2024

Breel Embolo, Monaco

Honestly, take your pick between Embolo, Minamino and Akliouche. They were all brilliant on Tuesday against Red Star Belgrade, but we’ll go with Embolo, who forever ranks high on the “When he looks good, he looks unbelievable” list.

Embolo hadn’t scored all season, but he had a goal and an assist, plus he had another excellent goal disallowed. Monaco’s attacking depth is phenomenal, and it’s helping to position them for a top-eight finish.

Antoni Milambo, Feyenoord

No one improved their odds of advancing more than Feyenoord this week thanks to their 3-1 upset win at Benfica, and the 19-year old’s brilliance was a major reason for it. After Ayase Ueda put the visitors ahead, Milambo’s brace put them up 2-0 and 3-1. He scored twice on three shot attempts and was a constant source of aggression, attempting six 1v1s, winning four of them and recording five ball recoveries as well. (Only nine players had more all week.)

Two years ago, he became Feyenoord’s youngest-ever debutant; now he’s scored in two straight Champions League matches, and won’t turn 20 until the spring. I would say his career is progressing nicely.

Jamie Gittens, Borussia Dortmund

He didn’t do a ton beyond this run, but this run was unbelievable.

Two goals in five minutes! 💥

Dortmund are taking it to the reigning champs 😳 pic.twitter.com/8fDeTglsvr

— CBS Sports Golazo ⚽️ (@CBSSportsGolazo) October 22, 2024

Individual brilliance gave BVB an early lead before individual mistakes took the lead away.

Auston Trusty, Celtic

Was Celtic a little bit lucky to keep the ball out of their net considering how many decent chances they allowed Atalanta? Sure.

Does that make it less impressive that Trusty made 26 defensive interventions (ball recoveries, tackles, interceptions, clearances, blocked shots, blocked crosses and aerials won in the defensive third), most of anyone in matchday 3? Absolutely not.

Savinho, Manchester City

Erling Haaland’s karate kick goal, lucky or not, was the highlight of City’s easy 5-0 win over Sparta Prague, but Savinho was the engine. He created five chances (tied for most of the week) with one assist, he had 23 progressive carries (fifth-most of the week), and he attempted eight 1v1s, winning four. This was everything City hoped for when they added him from sister club Girona (via sister club Troyes) this past summer. He’s dynamite.