We’re approaching the first-quarter pole of the European soccer season. The second round of Champions League matches is about to kick off. The women’s club season is underway as well. The season is a super-slow build, with each month more important than the one before it, and that makes October the most important month yet! Even with another international break messing with its rhythm!

From the Premier League to the Concacaf Nations League and everything in between, here are the most interesting and impactful matches — five for each category — of the coming month.

UEFA competitions

– Oct. 4: Barcelona at Porto (Champions League)
– Oct. 5: West Ham United at Freiburg (Europa League)
– Oct. 24: RB Salzburg at Inter Milan (Champions League)
– Oct. 25: AC Milan at PSG (Champions League)

Obviously, take your pick on Champions League days (can’t really call them “European nights” in the U.S. time zones). If you want to focus on Milan at Borussia Dortmund — aka Christian Pulisic and Yunus Musah vs. Gio Reyna — on Oct. 4, for instance, hell yeah, go for it.

But these five are most interesting to me when it comes to group-stage standings. Real Madrid and Barca would seize total control of Groups C and H, respectively, with wins in Naples and Porto, and after Salzburg’s win at Benfica established an interesting hierarchy in Group D, Salzburg-Inter could be for control of that group, too. And hey, Milan-PSG just feels like a big one.

Meanwhile, in UEFA’s best competition*, the Europa League, Freiburg-West Ham is a big matchup of teams from Europe’s Big Five leagues that would benefit pretty significantly from winning their group and scoring a bye into the round of 16.

* Why do I love the Europa League (and its cousin, the Conference League) so much? Because it offers semi-realistic opportunities for lots more clubs with pretty spectacular fanbases to win some matches and advance pretty far. On television, the atmospheres for matches like Freiburg-Olympiacos, Real Betis-Rangers, Sporting-Sturm Graz and Liverpool-LASK on the first matchday seemed as fun and lively as anything we had seen on the first Tuesday and Wednesday of the Champions League. Also, with so many matches going on at once, the format of “The Golazo Show” worked incredibly well.

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English Premier League

– Oct. 8: Manchester City at Arsenal
– Oct. 8: Liverpool at Liverpool beating Arsenal, Freiburg drawing with Bayern, Barcelona only scoring four goals in two games — right out of the gate.

October will give us a couple of big matchups between England’s big four, and it will give Eintracht Frankfurt the biggest week (okay, nine days) imaginable. On Oct. 10 and 18, Eintracht will play Sparta Prague in Champions League qualification; in between, they’ll play the defending German champs. Eintracht won seven Frauen-Bundesligas and four Champions Leagues as 1. FFC Frankfurt but haven’t done anything in Europe since 2016. Big opportunity here.

Oct. 10 and 18 will give us a couple of name-brand matchups, too. Manchester United will have to top mighty PSG to qualify for its first Champions League group stage, while 2023 Champions League runners-up Wolfsburg will have to beat the early first-place team in France (and a team that eliminated Arsenal last month), Paris FC.

Men’s international matches

– Oct. 12: Scotland at Spain (Euro qualification)
– Oct. 13: France at Netherlands (Euro qualification)
– Oct. 14: Kazakhstan at Denmark (Euro qualification)
– Oct. 15: Jamaica at Haiti (CONCACAF Nations League)
– Oct. 17: Italy at England (Euro qualification)

We’ll leave out the USMNT friendlies here — Germany on Oct. 14, Ghana on Oct. 17 — because you already know to watch those. Instead, let’s actually take a look at the competitions that are the primary focuses of International Break No. 2.

The biggest, of course, is Euro 2024 qualification. The top two from 10 groups will automatically qualify, and we’re just past the midway point there. There are some pretty interesting second-place battles in Group B (Netherlands and Greece tied with nine points), Group C (Italy, Ukraine and North Macedonia tied with seven) and Group E (Czech Republic tied with Moldova?Slovenia and Denmark at 13 points and Finland and Kazakhstan at 12.

Oct. 14 and 17 will be huge for Group H, but we’ve got some pretty big name-brand matchups as well — the Netherlands could really use a win over France, and Italy would be well-served beating England at Wembley Stadium like they famously did a couple of summers ago.