UEFA Champions League draw 2014: The biggest guns avoid each other

Strange times in Catalonia. On the European front, things have been relatively straightforward. A potentially tricky group containing Ajax, AC Milan and Celtic was negotiated with a minimum of fuss — one shock loss in Amsterdam aside — and their last-16 opponents Manchester City were spirited but never once looked capable of winning the tie.

If Barcelona are a team playing a touch below their capabilities, their opponents Atlético Madrid are playing at the very extremity of theirs. Built in the terrifying, captivating image of their coach Diego Simeone, though they lack the glamorous names and reputations of their opponents, they tackle hard, break quickly, pass intelligently, and defend like absolute lunatics. In Arda Turan and Diego Costa they have the attacking capacity to hurt any side, and though there’s no evidence to support this, surely the superior coolness of their shirt sponsor will give them an edge. “Qatar Foundation” vs. “Azerbaijan: Land of Fire”; that’s not even fair.

The word “could” is used loosely there, since, if this tie was played 10 times, Bayern would probably win eight or nine of them. They’re an obviously superior team to United in every single way imaginable. But if someone is going to beat them, they’re going to pull it off by packing the midfield, defending really well and countering quickly. This isn’t rocket science -- it’s the best way to beat most teams that prioritize dominating possession -- but a team isn’t going to try to play Bayern at their own game and beat them. Especially since their midfielders are the muscle cars to Barcelona’s Fiats.

United play the first leg of this tie at home, which is probably good for them and bad for neutrals. It’s good for them because they’ll have a reasonable chance of scoring first and putting a good result on the board heading into the second leg. It’s bad for neutrals because they have to watch 90 minutes of utterly pointless football at the Allianz Arena if United lose.

Real Madrid: Cristiano Ronaldo - One goal away from matching the record for most goals scored in the Champions League, Ronaldo is sure to be at his merciless best. The free-scoring winger will have more space than he was allowed in the previous year with more attention given to his in-form compatriots of the BBC.

Not only should that set of ties give way to some very competitive ties in the quarters, but the draw did everyone even more favors on Friday, keeping the true best of the best separated. Two ties are potential blowouts while two others should be hyper-competitive. The two strongest sides avoided each other, while the strong dark horses drew each other, meaning they should be fairly battle-tested when they inevitably face one of the giants. This really could not have gone any better.

Real Madrid and Bayern Munich appear set for an eventual collision course and it’s difficult to see how either of them is going to win the Champions League without going through each other, but the other two ties could produce adversaries that will be much more prepared to face them than they would have been in this round.

Arguably the greatest quarterfinal grouping in the history of the UEFA Champions League will be drawn on Friday, with the eight remaining teams separated out into four matchups. Unlike the last round of the draw, there are no longer any restrictions for who can be drawn together. Teams from the same country can meet each other in the quarterfinals, while teams that met in the group stage could have been put into rematches, had two teams from any group advanced, which didn’t happen in this competition.

The complete list of teams in Friday’s draw is as follows.

It is, perhaps, the strongest quarterfinal lineup since the European Cup transmuted into the Champions League in 1992. The first few seasons were still played under the quaint notion that only national champions should be eligible for the Champions League, and so quarterfinal places were filled by teams like Gothenburg, Hajduk Split, and Legia Warsaw; teams that in today’s bloated elite-fest would be considered group stage cannon fodder. Indeed, in 92/93 and 93/94 there weren’t even any proper quarterfinals: The last eight played in two groups of four.

Since the tournament expanded, however, the general pattern of the last eight tends to be six or seven of the traditional continental aristocrats, plus one or two surprise packages. Last season’s was Malaga, the season’s before APOEL. Villarreal and Schalke have also filled that role on a couple of occasions in recent years. These sides are not identified as outliers because they were poor sides; they weren’t. Malaga nearly embarrassed Dortmund last season, Villarreal and Schalke made it through to the semifinals in 05/06 and 10/11 respectively, and had Juan Roman Riquelme not taken one of the most miserable penalties of all time, the Yellow Submarine would have made it even further. But when set against the rest of the sides in the last eight, they were definitely the ones to hold out for.