Liverpool – Atletico Madrid

The Madrid club will head home with no points.

Liverpool began the past season with clear ambitions to win the Champions League. Then, riding the euphoria from winning the English championship, the Merseyside club spent half a billion euros on the transfer market and looked to the future with optimism. The problem is that in the Liverpool camp no one accounted for the need to integrate new players into Arne Slot's well-tuned mechanisms. All this ended with the Reds, instead of pursuing plans to win the Champions League and maintain dominance in the Premier League, settling for a fight for fifth place in the English championship, to have the opportunity to play on Wednesday in the first group-stage match of the new Champions League draw. The performances in the elite continental tournament last season ended for the team after a clash with PSG in the playoffs, losing twice by the same score 0-2 to the eventual winners. Liverpool strengthened specifically in the off-season and entered the new football year with Spanish coach Andoni Iraola, who came to replace Arne Slot. Despite the fact that the Reds this time did not face any significant changes to the squad, the opening Premier League matches were extremely difficult for him. In matches with Newcastle and Nottingham Forest, Iraola's charges avoided defeats with the same final score 2-2. Ipswich Town managed to beat them in the last round of the championship, boosting morale before the match with Atlético Madrid. The Spanish club last season visited Anfield in the group stage of the Champions League and already by the sixth minute were 0-2 down. Then Diego Simeone's team managed to equalize, but at 90+2 minutes Virgil van Dijk's trump card came into play — 3-2. In that Champions League Atlético reached the semi-finals, where in a hard-fought contest they lost to Arsenal. The new season the Mattress Makers began without Antoine Griezmann; a few more players in secondary roles left the team. Now the team is unsettled by a scandal related to the Atlético leadership forbidding Julián Álvarez to move to Barcelona. The footballer and the team remain in limbo over this transfer. In the last round of La Liga this affected Atlético, who lost in Bilbao 0-3. Liverpool has every chance to win in the upcoming match.