The Champions League — where dreams come true, fantasies become reality and legends are born. Or something like that.
Unless you’re Dinamo Zagreb, Red Bull Salzburg, Celtic, Red Star Belgrade, Slovan Bratislava or Young Boys, in which case the Champions League is where fears prevail, nightmares become reality and careers get ruined.
OK, maybe not that bad, but fans of the above clubs can be forgiven for feeling apprehensive when UEFA’s anthem plays during Matchday Three tonight (Tuesday) and tomorrow.
These are teams who are used to dominating their domestic leagues, winning 60 per cent or 70 per cent of their league matches year after year (even as high as 84 per cent last season for Red Star) to claim title after title.
Taking the past seven domestic seasons, Dinamo, Salzburg, Celtic, Red Star, Slovan and Young Boys have won 38 league titles between them, out of a possible 42. Dinamo have taken every one of those Croatian championships with Red Star doing the same in Serbia, and the rest have won six of the available seven.
They are superior in their homelands almost to the point of boredom. And yet, from their combined opening two rounds of Champions League matches this season, the six teams have scored 12 goals between them and conceded a whopping 49. That’s a combined goal difference of -37 from 12 matches.
Transferring domestic bliss to European success is not easy, especially when your budget is a fraction of the spending power available at Manchester City, Real Madrid or Bayern Munich.
According to transfer website Transfermarkt, Slovan have spent a total of £2.6million ($3.4m) on new signings in the past three seasons and their squad has a total estimated value of £24m. The same source lists City as having spent £365m in the past three years (which, to be honest, feels quite frugal for them) and their squad value is estimated at being a smidgen over £1billion. So, City have spent roughly 139 times as much as Slovan since 2022, and their squad is worth 43 times as much.
When the teams faced each other three weeks ago on Matchday Two, Slovan’s odds for winning on home turf were 40/1. They may have a monopoly on the Slovakian title, but with a budget akin to a club in League One, Engish football’s third tier, they were predictably no match for City.
“We dreamt of, one day, the best team in the world, or one of the best, coming (here),” Slovan manager Vladimir Weiss told reporters before the match. The reality, however, was less romantic: City had 28 shots, scored four goals, hit the woodwork three times and registered an expected goals (xG) figure of 3.8. Slovan had 24 per cent possession and didn’t register a shot on target.
“Honestly, this was just as we expected,” Tomas, a Slovan fan who attended the game, tells The Athletic. “Slovan has not played in the Champions League for 32 years (having failed to get past its qualifying rounds on 11 occasions), so it is a big success to even be there.
“When we beat (Denmark’s champions) Midtjylland to qualify (having got through three previous ties in a campaign that began four days before last season had ended with the Euro 2024 final on July 14), it was one of the best results in the last few years and was like a European final for us.
“Then we were drawn against Manchester City, Bayern Munich, AC Milan and Atletico Madrid (among their eight league-phase games). These are matches we have not had for many, many years, so even though we will probably lose, it is still a big prize. The Celtic defeat (Slovan lost 5-1 in Glasgow on Matchday One) was not good, but even a club like Celtic has much more money than us.
“We have Dinamo (Zagreb) at home (on November 5), a match we can look to draw or win, but mostly I want the eight games to be a lesson for the players and the owners, and for us to make money from TV and full stadiums to spend on improving the team.”
There is a distinct “happy to be there” vibe from Slovan, but that does not apply to every Champions League ‘minnow’.
Salzburg, who will compete in the revamped Club World Cup in the United States next summer courtesy of their consistent Champions League group-phase qualification in recent years, are adjusting to life under a new manager in Jurgen Klopp’s long-time Liverpool assistant Pep Lijnders, and were probably thought of as a bit of a dark horse going into the league phase.
Instead, they were comfortably beaten 3-0 at Sparta Prague and then surprisingly trounced 4-0 at home to French newcomers Brest. They lie fourth in the early-season Austrian Bundesliga, six points off leaders Sturm Graz, but have two games in hand.
Pep Lijnders acknowledges Salzburg fans after defeat in Prague (Michal Cizek/AFP via Getty Images)
“I don’t want to make excuses, I take full responsibility,” Lijnders said in a press conference after the Brest defeat. “This group has enough quality that it should not happen like this. That worries me a little bit.
“We expected a completely different start in the Champions League, especially with the qualification (beating FC Twente, 5-4 on aggregate, and Dynamo Kyiv, 3-1). I’m sick of people calling us a young team. There are no excuses, we have enough quality to win football matches in the Champions League.”
Young Boys, whose Swiss Super League is of a similar standard to Austria’s Bundesliga, will also have expected better than to be propping up the 32-team Champions League table after two defeats (3-0 at home to Aston Villa, 5-0 at Barcelona).
Like Salzburg, the Bern club are enduring domestic woes, and sacked manager Patrick Rahmen, who had only been appointed in the summer, a week after the Barcelona thrashing. They are 10th in a 12-team domestic league. A visit from Inter Milan, Serie A champions and three-time European Cup/Champions League winners, awaits on Wednesday.
Dinamo also dispensed with their manager after suffering one of the heaviest defeats in Champions League history, losing 9-2 at Bayern last month. Sergej Jakirovic had led Dinamo to a Croatian league and cup double in 2023-24 but the Bayern thrashing was deemed unacceptable and he left two days later by mutual consent.
The harsh reality of Dinamo Zagreb’s European struggle is laid bare on Bayern Munich’s scoreboard(Sebastian Widmann/Getty Images)
A 2-2 home draw against Monaco on Matchday Two, under new boss Nenad Bjelica, suggested the right decision had been made. Next up? A visit to Lijnders and Salzburg on Wednesday.
And then you have Celtic. Unlike many of those sides mentioned above, the Scottish club are Champions League regulars and have taken some incredible scalps over the years, beating Barcelona, Juventus, Manchester United and AC Milan (and back in 1967 they won the competition). But every one of those victories has come at Celtic Park where, backed by one of the most vociferous atmospheres in European football, they can be a match for anyone.
Away from home, it’s a different story. This season’s competition has been Celtic in Europe in a microcosm, thrashing Slovan 5-1 at home and then being humiliated 7-1 by Borussia Dortmund in Germany, where they conceded five before half-time — the first time a British club had done so in a major European competition since 1997-98. It was their 31st defeat from 37 Champions League group/league-stage away games — and in those 37, they have conceded an almighty 100 goals.
Yet manager Brendan Rodgers was unrepentant in not changing the team’s approach for that Dortmund game, despite facing criticism familiar from his first spell at Celtic, when his side lost 7-0 to Barcelona at Camp Nou and 7-1 at Paris Saint-Germain, or 6-0 away to Atletico Madrid in his second spell last season.
“We play in a way that allows us to dominate domestically,” Rodgers said. “We know it’s going to be difficult at times for us to do that, but we still have to show our ability with the ball. Are we going to sit in and camp, and wait? No, we won’t do that.”
Celtic supporters who have paid thousands of pounds to travel across the continent to see their team win just two of 37 Champions League away matches (beating Spartak Moscow in 2012-13 and Belgium’s Anderlecht in 2017-18) may see things differently. While nobody could accuse Celtic fans of not making the most of their trips abroad, if anyone has attended all 37 games, they will have travelled more than 70,000 miles, which is almost three times around the world, to see two victories.
“I’ve not done that many, but I’ve never seen us win abroad,” Celtic season-ticket holder Alasdair tells The Athletic. “There is always a great atmosphere on the road and no one takes it for granted that we’re privileged to visit some great cities and stadiums, but it’s pretty demoralising.
Celtic fans enjoy their European trips – until the football starts (Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images)
“There’s maybe an unrealistic expectation at the club that we should be doing better, but given our resources compared to the Premier League and the big Spanish, German and Italian clubs, we’re on a different planet. We’ll find the new format only skews the imbalance further.”
We are working with an incredibly small sample size after two rounds but the early results in the expanded 36-team ‘league phase’ do suggest the scales are tipping further. We have seen scorelines of 9-2, 7-1, 5-0 and 5-1, plus four 4-0s. After 36 matches, this is proving to be one of the most goal-heavy editions of the Champions League, with 3.19 per game being close to the highest on record (3.24 in 2019-20).
So far, it has been the most one-sided Champions League season yet, with an average margin of victory of 2.57 goals, comfortably above the next highest of 2.37 from the 1993-94 season.
By expanding the competition, the quality will be diluted, while this bigger first stage could lend itself to teams playing more expansively, given the probable need for only 10 or so points from your eight matches to reach at least the play-off knockout round, where places in the last-16 will be up for grabs.
As the rich get richer and the financial imbalance across Europe increases, expect more of the same. And expect fans of relative Champions League minnows to dread rather than relish their continental adventures.
(Top photos: Getty Images)