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Sporting and Benfica return to the field in the Champions League, today and tomorrow, for two highly difficult games on which, fortunately, their objectives in the competition will depend little and where everything that comes will be won. I don’t say it for lack of ambition, maybe a little for calculation. But there is one thing that cannot be denied in today’s Sporting-Arsenal and tomorrow’s AS Monaco-Benfica, which is the importance of these two games at the moment for both teams. Sporting and Benfica may not even need to overcome these two challenges to get to where they want in the Champions League – and if this is more true for the lions than for the eagles, even in Alvalade it will always be possible to revisit goals on the rise… But what do they do? what others do today and tomorrow will be fundamental for creating the context in which they will live the next few weeks. And from this context, yes, it will largely depend on what each one’s season will be like until they measure up directly, on December 29th.
When the Champions League began, UEFA studies said that qualifying for the play-offs – to which teams placed between ninth and 24th in this phase qualify – would be achievable between six and seven points. However, the low percentage of draws, which if the dominant narrative were to celebrate the new format and not condemn it from the beginning would be seen as a positive point, forced these estimates to change. It’s normal: if a victory distributes three points, a draw only gives two (one for each team), so if there are more wins and fewer draws there are more points distributed and the needs for classification grow. It is now known that ten points must be needed to have a place in the play-offs. Maybe up to eleven, in an extreme scenario. Now Sporting already has those ten points, Benfica has six, but four games to get the four they are missing. Even if they lose to Monaco, the Red and Blacks will still be missing Bologna and FC Barcelona at home and Juventus away. Decisive will certainly be the reception to Bologna, in fifteen days, certainly without time for Vincenzo Italiano’s team to get out of the crisis they are in. In the case of the Lions, the specific pressure in the game against Arsenal, which despite being at home rivals the trip to Leipzig for the title of the most complicated challenge of the four still to be played, already puts it more in the perspective of an upward revision of the objectives . 16 points should be enough to get straight into the round of 16, avoiding the knockout stages. And two victories – which could even be in the final three rounds, which includes a trip to Bruges and the reception to Bologna – could allow for this unthinkable goal in the match.
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As of today, Sporting occupies one of the top 24 positions in 99.9 percent of the 10,000 simulations carried out by Football Meets Data and one of the top eight in 65 percent of cases (and you can see the paintings here). Benfica sees the Top8 as more difficult, having only reached there in six percent of the same 10 thousand simulations, but is in one of the first 24 positions in 76 percent of the scenarios. The Opta Sports supercomputer (whose results you can see here) ran more simulations, came up with 50,000, and gave the Lions the same 99.9 percent chance of finishing in the top 24 and a 72.9 percent chance of finishing in the top eight. As for Benfica, it gives them a 4.4 percent chance of finishing in the Top8 and the same 76 percent chance of doing so in the 24 that will continue in the competition. Does this mean that today and tomorrow’s games are a kind of respite from competitive pressure? No, not at all. Sporting and Benfica cannot afford to shed even one ounce of the pressure they put on their games, because everyone contributes to the more global context of the identity of the two teams. And it will be this context that will enter the field in the weeks to come, not only when the remainder of the Champions League is played but also when they return to the championship, which is and will always be the main objective of both. At Sporting-Arsenal and AS Monaco-Benfica, you play for much more than points. And, at least in the case of the Lions, it might not even be like that, if Ruben Amorim hadn’t exchanged stability at the head of the team in the meantime for the dream of Old Trafford.
The Lions host an Arsenal team that has already reinstated Calafiori and Ødegaard, coming off a 3-0 win at Nottingham Forest that suggests that Mikel Arteta’s team has recovered many of the qualities that make it a permanent candidate for the Premier League title. And they do it in the first game of real demand for the new coach, which the reception to Amarante FC did not count in this. Losing a game against a powerhouse from the richest League in the World would always have to be seen as normal, even more normal than winning, but after Sporting de Amorim beat Manchester City, if João Pereira’s team loses to Arsenal He will immediately be admitting to the fans and especially to the locker room that he took a step back. And, even if the connection between the two factors is not crystal clear in reality, it may be in terms of perceptions, which will greatly influence Sporting-Santa Clara on Saturday. In turn, the eagles travel to Monaco, where a team that is also more comfortable awaits them – it has the same ten points as Sporting and has already won at FC Barcelona’s Louis II, for example – and appears to have already overcome the bad phase at the start of November, when they suffered their only defeats this season. If it’s true that this is as good a game as any for Benfica to add the points they lack – apart from Bologna’s reception, I don’t see much difference in difficulty in the other three matches, and Adi Hutter’s team doesn’t seem worse to me than Thiago Motta’s Juventus, for example – is at the same time a fundamental game for Bruno Lage to confirm the paradigm shift that gave him seven consecutive victories in the League and an average of more than three goals per match since taking over. by Roger Schmidt.
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Weakening today and tomorrow may not be dramatic for our teams in terms of Champions League qualification, but it could leave any of them with doubts before the series of internal commitments that will culminate in Sporting-Benfica de Alvalade, in the week between Christmas and New Year. . This is mainly what will be at stake this week of the Champions League.
