It’s the best in Spain against German soccer royalty in the latest round of games in the Champions League.
A rematch of last season’s final between Real Madrid and Borussia Dortmund is the headliner on Tuesday, before Barcelona hosts Bayern Munich on Wednesday in the next chapter of what has been a fairly one-sided rivalry in Europe’s top club competition.
All four teams have been European champions inside the last 30 years and they’ve made mixed starts to this season’s revamped format.
Dortmund has won both of their opening matches — 3-0 at Club Brugge and 7-1 at home to Celtic — to be the early leader and top scorer of the league stage, which sees all 36 teams play eight matches: four at home and four away.
Just like last season when reaching the Champions League final against the odds before losing to Madrid, Dortmund has been far more impressive in Europe than in the Bundesliga. Indeed, after thrashing Celtic, Dortmund lost at Union Berlin four days later.
Madrid, meanwhile, is coming off a surprising 1-0 loss at Lille, the defending champions’ first defeat in the competition since the semifinals in the 2022-23 season.
In fact, the second round of matches threw up a few shockers, including Bayern losing 1-0 at Aston Villa to end its unbeaten run under new coach Vincent Kompany.
Now Bayern heads to Barcelona in search of a seventh straight win in their head-to-head, a streak that includes a humiliating 8-2 loss for Barca in the quarterfinals in 2020. Hansi Flick was in charge of Bayern that night and is now the coach of Barcelona.
If Manchester City beats Sparta Prague at home on Wednesday, the English champions will set the record for consecutive games undefeated in the history of the competition — even stretching back before 1992 into the European Cup era.
City is currently on 25 matches unbeaten, tied with Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United team from 2007-09.
The last loss for Pep Guardiola’s team in the Champions League was the 3-1 defeat against Real Madrid in the second leg of the semifinals in 2022, which cost City a place in the final that season.
Since then, City has won 17 matches and drawn eight, having won the competition in 2022-2023 and been eliminated on penalties by Madrid in 2023-24 after back-to-back draws in the quarterfinals.
Of the seven teams on a maximum six points, Brest is undoubtedly the most surprising.
This is the unheralded French team’s European debut — in any competition — after an unexpected third-place finish in Ligue 1 last season. It couldn’t be going any better.
A 2-1 win over Austrian champion Sturm Graz was followed by a 4-0 thrashing of another Austrian team, Salzburg, in the second round of games.
They will be the easiest opponents Brest is going to face. Now the hard work begins, with German champion Bayer Leverkusen next up on Wednesday.
Leverkusen won’t be heading to Brest, a pretty port city in Brittany, but Guingamp — about 114 kilometers (71 miles) away. That’s because Brest’s stadium doesn’t meet UEFA standards so its home games have been relocated.
With each team playing eight games in the new league system, opening with back-to-back losses isn’t the nightmare start it would have been in the old format when there were six matches per side in the group stage.
Still, AC Milan, Leipzig, Girona, Salzburg, Sturm Graz, Slovan Bratislava, Young Boys and Red Star Belgrade will be desperate to get at least one point on the board in the third round of fixtures.
Salzburg and Young Boys haven’t even scored a goal.
One of the eight pointless teams is sure to get off the mark, with tournament newcomer Girona hosting Slovan Bratislava on Tuesday.
Leipzig could easily be on zero points after three games, though, with Liverpool visiting on Wednesday — a match that has more intrigue since former Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp was signed as the head of global soccer at Red Bull, whose international network of clubs includes Leipzig.
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Steve Douglas is at https://twitter.com/sdouglas80
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AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer
