4 big stories from the Champions League playoffs

The Champions League playoffs are over and the final spots in the group stage have been filled. With the group stage draw coming on Thursday, the attention of many fans is shifting ahead to the bright lights and big stage of the Champions League proper coming this fall. But this most recent round of matches had a lot of interesting stories to tell and lessons to teach, so what did we learn over the last few days?

After getting annihilated and utterly outclassed in a 3-0 loss to Porto on Tuesday, Roma needs to go back to the drawing board and figure out what comes next. They were poor in the first leg and far worse in the second leg, and now that they’re out of the Champions League there are serious questions to be asked as to just how good this team really is.

Often celebrated as a “smart” team in the transfer market, right now they look like anything but that. Their new signings haven’t played well and don’t make much sense when looked at in context of how they fit with the players they line up next to, and that’s translated to some shoddy play on the pitch. In their two playoff matches with Porto, Roma had three different center backs get red-carded, and their midfield has been a poorly structured mess that Porto overran with ease. Luciano Spalletti is a good manager, but he has his work cut out for him if he’s going to keep this team competitive at the level they want to be at in Serie A.

When Guardiola benched Manchester City’s long-time starting goalkeeper, it was news that made a lot of waves. Hart finally played on Wednesday, though -- and showed that maybe it wasn’t so strange or controversial a decision for Guardiola to make.

From first whistle to last, even with no pressure on City to perform well with a 5-0 aggregate lead coming into the match, Hart looked profoundly uncomfortable trying to play the way Guardiola wants his goalkeepers to play. He asks for more aggressive actions from his man in goal and more proactive passing with the ball at his feet, two things that Hart isn’t necessarily good at and did not look like he wanted to be doing when he was on the pitch against Steaua Bucharest. If he’s that shaky trying to play the way Guardiola wants him to, then it’s understandable that City moved on to Claudio Bravo in goal, who is good at doing those things.

Brendan Rodgers has Celtic back in the Champions League group stage, but only through a lot of luck. They got some tremendously fortunate draws during qualifying and yet only barely scraped by in each round, including only advancing over Israeli side Hapoel Be’er Sheva by one single aggregate goal to get out of the playoff round.

Since Rodgers took over, Celtic simply hasn’t been very good. Well, they weren’t particularly good before Rodgers took over either, but the ex-Liverpool boss has, at best, failed to improve his side despite being aggressive on the transfer market. They will almost certainly be a team that other fans hope to draw on Thursday, and if they go up against a giant like Bayern Munich or Barcelona things could get ugly. This isn’t the hard-fighting side that can claw out results that they were a few years ago.

A year ago, Croatian side Dinamo Zagreb shocked the world by beating Arsenal 2-1 in their first Champions League group stage match of the campaign. They followed that up by losing their next five, including a 5-0 loss to Bayern Munich and a 3-0 loss to Arsenal. They obviously overcame that disappointment to win their domestic league by a comfortable eight points, but that failure still stung — and is something they’d like to correct.

Now they have a chance to do just that, thanks to a brave and excellent performance against heavily favored Red Bull Salzburg. They stayed strong after going down early and mounted a late comeback to force extra time. Another goal early in extra time and more solid defending allowed them to knock Salzburg out, giving Dinamo a chance at redemption in the group stage this fall. They’ll have to do it without audacious young playmaker Marko Rog — who is expected to finish a transfer to Italian side Napoli this week — but Dinamo definitely showed on Wednesday that they have the right combination of talent and determination to put in a much more impressive Champions League showing this time around.

Viktoria Plzeň 2-2 Ludogorets (2-4 agg.)

Hapoel Be’er Sheva 2-0 Celtic (4-5 agg.)

Legia Warsaw 1-1 Dundalk (3-1 agg.)

AS Roma 0-3 FC Porto (1-4 agg.)

AS Monaco 1-0 Villarreal (3-1 agg.)

APOEL 1-1 København (1-2 agg.)

Red Bull Salzburg 1-2 Dinamo Zagreb (2-3 agg.)

Manchester City 1-0 Steaua Buchaest (6-0 agg.)

Rostov 4-1 Ajax (5-2 agg.)

Borussia Mönchengladbach 6-1 Young Boys (9-2 agg.)