Andre Onana and Rasmus Hojlund have changed Manchester United since Champions League exit

Champions League football returns to the calendar this week but it will do so without Manchester United. A club synonymous with continental football will be watching on the television and spending these European weeks preparing for some crucial domestic games.

It’s by no means a classic round-of-16 draw and the truly entertaining ties are few and far between. United will watch City’s clash with FC Copenhagen with a sense of trepidation, given the difficulties they had against the Danes in the group stage.

Those six group games will stay in the memory, but for all the wrong reasons. The home game against FC Copenhagen was the only one that was won and that required Andre Onana to save a penalty with the final touch of the game.

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It felt like much of United's European campaign centred around Onana and Rasmus Hojlund. The penalty save from the former was outweighed by the mistakes he made in the other group games, while Hojlund's flashes of potential were pointless given the flurry of goals going in at the opposite end.

But with European football back on the agenda, it feels like Onana and Hojlund are now delivering at the right time for United. The £47million goalkeeper is starting to come up with some big saves and the Danish striker has added goals in the Premier League to his haul in the Champions League. Unfortunately, they've aligned too late to rescue this continental campaign.

When Galatasaray and FC Copenhagen followed Bayern Munich into Group A in the draw, it felt like United had a fairly routine passage into the knockout stage. That they managed to make a mess of it sums up their