Champions League draw 2016: Group stage rules and preview

One of the most looked-forward-to moments for football fans is here: the Champions League group stage draw. An event full of pomp and splendor, the Champions League draw can help define a season for many teams, as a particularly tough or easy draw can impact not just their chances of advancing to the knockout round, but also can create challenges during their league seasons because of the travel and extra matches involved.

But before we get to all that, we get a couple hours of balls being pulled from bowls, celebrities, music, analysis and chaos. It’s one of the best and most interesting days all year long in the sport, and it’s finally here.

As a selection of league winners and the defending Champions League winners, there’s no truly easy team to beat here, and plenty of incredibly talented teams that other clubs would want to avoid to improve their chances. There’s no clear “best team” in the group, but if there was any team a club from another pot would want to be paired with, it would probably be Benfica or CSKA Moscow -- Benfica took some pretty major losses without great replacements in the transfer market, and CSKA have never been able to turn their domination of Russia into European success.

Half of the teams in this pot are ones that most clubs will want to avoid -- Spain’s Atlético Madrid, Manchester City from England, and the two German teams as well, Borussia Dortmund and Bayer Leverkusen. All four are tough teams who have gone through fairly significant changes in the summer, but came out looking better than they did a year ago -- all four primed to take big steps forward this season.

In turn, two more teams in this pot that have made major changes that look much less certain: Napoli and Porto. Porto looked excellent in a romp over Roma in the playoff round, but their Italian opponents were an utter mess and Porto clearly looked a step or two below the level we’ve seen from them in the past. Napoli lost a Serie A-record scorer in Gonzalo Higuaín and are an unsteady mess off the field right now, which carried over in a bad way in their league opener. They need to get better fast to become a Champions League threat.

Tottenham Hotspur and Borussia Mönchengladbach are the standout threats in this pot, two highly talented clubs rated lower than their talent would indicate just because of a lack of experience at this level. Both teams can give the best clubs in Europe a stiff challenge while dominating most of the rest -- a potent combination in European competition.

In contrast, we have a pair of huge clubs that aren’t quite what they once were -- Olympique Lyon and Sporting Clube de Portugal. Two teams who once were powerful forces in their countries, the French and Portuguese sides are in awkward transition stages as clubs, and simply aren’t the threats they once were. They’re not pushovers by any means, but there’s no group draw permutation that has them come out as a favorite.

French outfit AS Monaco are the biggest threats here, with a talented team who have made a lot of noise in the Champions League over the past few years. Don’t overlook Dinamo Zagreb, though -- they showed in the playoffs that they have a lot of heart and fight in them. Combine that with their talented squad, and they’ll be a team who can easily wind up with a couple of big upsets.

At the other end of the spectrum is Celtic, who have been extremely poor in Champions League action this summer, only barely scraping their way through three qualifying rounds against opponents that a team of Celtic’s side should have absolutely blasted. Looking at their squad and how they’re playing, it’s hard to envision them doing any kind of well in the group stage.

The groups will be filled through the usual ceremony of selecting teams through a draw, pulling teams out one pot at a time to assign them to each group. No two teams from the same country can be drawn against one another to keep variety among the matchups, and by a ruling from the UEFA executive committee, teams from Russia and Ukraine cannot be drawn against each other -- meaning that Dinamo Kiev won’t be facing CSKA Moscow or FK Rostov.

Pot 1 is filled by the defending Champions League winners, Real Madrid, and the league winners in each of the seven top-ranked national associations in UEFA -- Spain, England, Germany, Italy, Portugal, France and Russia. The remaining three pots are sorted by the clubs’ respective UEFA coefficient rankings, which is determined by a combination of club and league performance in European competitions.

When: Thursday, 12 p.m. ET, 6 p.m. local

Where: Monaco

TV: FS1 (U.S. - English), Fox Deportes (U.S. - Spanish), BT Sport 2 (U.K.), EuroSport Spain, TV3, beIN Sports Spain (Spain), SRF zwei, EuroSport Deutschland (Germany), Sky Sport 1 HD Italia (Italy)

Online: Fox Sports Go (U.S.), BT Sport Live Streaming (U.K.), beIN Sports Connect (Spain), UEFA.com

Listings from LiveSoccerTV.