The Champions League group phase draw will take place later on Thursday. Infostrada Sports’ head of analysis @simongleave has looked at which teams should be avoided and which teams might be favourable in your club’s draw, using the Euro Club Index.

I have previously written about the luck of the draw and how this affected both Manchester City and Chelsea in particular last season. Both clubs went out at the Champions League group stage after being drawn in much tougher groups than would have been the case under a fairer system than the one currently employed to rank the clubs. 

UEFA’s coefficients system is relatively easy to understand, awarding points based on matches played in UEFA competitions. It does a pretty good job with most clubs given its simplicity but it is slow to respond to changing circumstances. Clubs who are on the way up are often misclassified due to lack of results in European competition and clubs on the way down can also end up in the wrong draw pots. Such declines can be masked in a system which only takes UEFA matches into account as the sample size of fixtures is too small. This is exacerbated by the fact that the UEFA system takes no account of the relative strengths of teams playing each other, whether they are playing home or away and treats results from five years ago the same as those from more recent times. The coefficients are decided purely on the basis of win, draw or loss with extra bonuses for reaching different stages of the competition.

Manchester City and Borussia Dortmund both suffered from this system last year as did Dutch club Ajax. With City in draw pot 3 and Borussia Dortmund in pot 4 despite their domestic championships in England and Germany, there was a potential catastrophe in waiting. That befell Dutch champions Ajax who ended up in Group D  with the champions of Spain, England and Germany. It was the only group with four champions.

This year, things have improved only slightly with Borussia Dortmund’s classification in the third group of seeds after their final appearance last year. Many have criticised Manchester City’s European performances but the system used for drawing the groups makes it very difficult for them as they can potentially be drawn against two other clubs from Europe’s best 10 as they were last year. Their failure then becomes a self fulfilling prophecy which never gets better as they cannot improve their coefficient enough due to the toughness of their opposition.

Critics of this argument use Borussia Dortmund’s performance last season as an example but the fact is that one of Dortmund and City probably had to miss out last season from a group which also contained Real Madrid. Having progressed, Borussia Dortmund didn’t face opposition of a similar standard to Real or Manchester City until they drew the Madrid club again in the semi-finals. Clearly, knocking Real Madrid out was a great achievement but Borussia Dortmund were unable to emerge victorious in two successive rounds against theoretically better opposition, losing in the final against last season’s Bundesliga champions Bayern Munich.

So, what about this season? Well, now that we know the 32 teams in the draw pots on Thursday, it is possible to assess which have been misclassified by using the Euro Club Index. The most obvious are again Borussia Dortmund (ranked 5) and Manchester City (7) with both in pot 3 this time. However, 11 other clubs have also been misclassified into pots other than the ones that the Euro Club Index puts them into so here is a guide to teams that are better avoided and the ones that are most favourable in each of this year’s draw pots: 

Pot 1

Avoid: FC Barcelona (Euro Club Index number 1), Real Madrid (2), Bayern Munich (3), Manchester United (4)
Want: Benfica (14), Arsenal (10), FC Porto (8), Chelsea (6) 

Pot 2
Avoid: Atletico Madrid (9), Paris Saint-Germain (11), Juventus (12), Shakhtar Donetsk (16)
Want: Olympique Marseille (35), Schalke 04 (28), CSKA Moscow (21), AC Milan (17)

Pot 3
Avoid: Borussia Dortmund (5), Manchester City (7), Bayer Leverkusen (18), Zenit St. Petersburg  (19)  
Want: FC Basel (42), Galatasaray (32), Olympiacos (30),Ajax (23)

Pot 4
Avoid: Napoli (24), Viktoria Plzen (25), Real Sociedad (26), Anderlecht (49)
Want: Austria Vienna (117), FC Copenhagen (111), Celtic (78), Steaua Bucharest (53)