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Hello! It’s Matchday Mayhem in the Champions League and a club with five per cent of Real Madrid’s riches are the heroes of it.
Coming up:
🙌 Brest’s incredible rise
🔢 Europe’s 18-game rumble
🃏 Ted Lasso trading card buzz
😬 Missing the unmissable
French fairytale: Fishing-town team Brest go from amateur leagues to taking on Real Madrid
The closing night of the Champions League’s revamped group stage, now known as the league phase, this evening cuts a scene of pure gluttony. Eighteen simultaneous matches are an indulgence of action, money and largesse — with a little strand of fantasy mixed in.
If you’re trying to decide which game of the 18 to watch, I’d point you towards Brest vs Real Madrid — a club who require a roadmap for the Champions League against another who know it inside out. It’s a fixture that defies football’s natural order; the product of a minor miracle.
The setting this evening tells a story in itself, because the stadium in which Brest are playing their Champions League fixtures belongs to somebody else. Their own is too small and basic to comply with the regulations of European football’s governing body, UEFA. Instead, they will host Madrid in Guingamp, an hour’s drive away and no heaving metropolis either. It took protests from supporters to halt plans to play future knockout fixtures further afield, in Paris.
Brest is a small fishing town on the north-western tip of France (next stop, Canada!), with a football club to match its modesty. Comparisons with Real are hilarious: an annual turnover of £42million ($52m) versus £840m, one season in the Champions League (this one) compared to Real’s 55, and zero major trophies in contrast to the Spaniards’ 103.
But it is Brest’s history alone that says more than anything and there is no better way of putting it than this: when Madrid lifted the eighth of their 15 European Cup/Champions League titles in 2000, Brest were in one of France’s regional amateur leagues, competing with what were effectively village teams.
Truly, they have never known days like these.
Knockout stage guaranteed
BrestComparisonReal MadridSeasons in the European Cup/Champions League
Brest are not just here for the ride either. Whatever happens in Guingamp tonight, they are guaranteed a place in the knockout play-offs next month. Get the right result and they could advance into March’s round of 16 automatically. As it stands after seven of the eight rounds of league-phase play, they’re a point better off than today’s opposition — who are the defending European champions.
Their route to this point is distinctly marvellous. Manager Eric Roy was almost devoid of experience and a stab in the dark when he got the job in 2023. Their squad is as far from box office as it gets in the Champions League. Mark Carey from our data department highlighted giant striker Ludovic Ajorque and combative midfielder Mahdi Camara as faces to look out for, but the average football fan would struggle to pick them out of an ID parade.
The setup was enough to earn them third place in France’s Ligue 1 last season, the best domestic finish in their history. It’s been enough to guide them into Europe and give them a fighting chance of sticking around at that level.
UEFA will see the threat of elimination from European competition for the rest of this season hanging over giants Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain tonight as the firmest vindication of its new Champions League format but, in the list of positives, Brest is best.
Companion guide
U.S. broadcaster CBS has dubbed tonight ‘Matchday Mayhem’, a rare occasion when advertising hyperbole is justified. Nine of the 36 Champions League teams are already out, but there’s a hell of a lot still to play for. The Athletic got up close and personal with CBS here.
Before the dogs of war are unleashed, I wanted to bring you some essential reading. First up, it’s useful to understand just how much Europe’s top competition is paying out this season. For example, should Liverpool go all the way, they could pocket £135million. They’ve banked £35m so far. UEFA’s revised format is staggeringly lucrative (which was, of course, the whole point).
Our writers have also explained how they intend to follow a slew of simultaneous contests unlike any other competition. The games involving City and PSG are obvious picks, but Lille vs Feyenoord, Inter vs Monaco and Aston Villa vs Celtic stood out from Anantaajith Raghuraman’s study of the permutations.
The old man in me told The Daily Football Briefing podcast this morning that 18 matches in one night is fundamentally daft. But hands up: it sounds a lot of fun, too, and I don’t think we were so enthusiastic about the final round of group-stage fixtures last season. It’s also set up for a gambler somewhere to fall one result short of an epic accumulator returning a fortune.
Say it quietly, but I’m a bit of a convert.
📺 Selected games, all 3pm ET/8pm UK and Paramount+/TNT Sports: Aston Villa vs Celtic; Barcelona vs Atalanta; Bayern Munich vs Slovan Bratislava; Brest vs Real Madrid; Dinamo Zagreb vs Milan; Girona vs Arsenal; Inter vs Monaco; Manchester City vs Club Brugge; PSV vs Liverpool; Stuttgart vs Paris Saint-Germain.
📲 Our LIVE Champions League blog is up and running for all the latest
News round-up
🖱️ Most clicked in yesterday’s TAFC: the Seagull celebration.
Thousands for Ted: Once given away, only six Lasso rookie cards thought to remain
The ironic thing about trading cards is that some become insanely valuable because nobody wanted them in the first place. A tonne of Mickey Mantle 1952 baseball cards were dumped in the sea — rendering those not sent to Davy Jones’ locker so rare that one in mint condition sold for eight figures in 2022.
A similar thing happened with a Ted Lasso version, issued by NBC to promote its acquisition of TV rights for the 2013-14 Premier League season. The lion’s share were thrown away. It’s estimated that just six remain in circulation and if you’ve got your hands on one, it’ll net you a sum in the thousands because they’re highly sought after now.
The highlight of this piece about them: a chat with Bill Bergofin — an NBC employee at the time of issue — prompting him to rummage through the stack of cards in his closet. He found two of Ted Lasso, both pristine. Kerching!
And finally…
What is the definition of ‘on a plate’? How about this chance for Millwall’s Raees Bangura-Williams in their 1-0 Championship win at Portsmouth yesterday. It had an expected goals (xG) rating of 0.80 — which, to put it bluntly, is very close to unmissable. The net wasn’t wide enough to swallow him up either.
(Top photo: Fred Tanneau/AFP via Getty Images)
