Champions League draw: Lewandowski and Haaland set for quick return to former clubs

A Uefa Champions League divided into two distinct parts begins in 11 days time, with, for the first time ever, a World Cup sandwiched in the middle.

The challenge for those aspiring to win club football’s most watched competition, its most coveted trophy, will be to pace themselves through the unprecedented schedule.

The challenge for the World Cup, meanwhile, is to match the elite standards on display at the summit of the club game.

Less than three weeks before Qatar meet Ecuador in the opening of the group phase of the international showpiece in late November, fans worldwide will have been watching matches as glamorous as Bayern Munich against Barcelona, Paris Saint-Germain versus Juventus, or Chelsea taking on AC Milan, to name just three of the pairings that emerged in Thursday’s group-stage draw.

Liverpool hardly need an extra motive for reaching, and winning another Champions League final, having lost the last one narrowly, but nor are they a club that ever resists an invitation to feel nostalgic. The venue for the 2023 final stimulates that impulse.

Istanbul’s Ataturk Stadium was the site of the most extraordinary of comebacks in a final this century: trailing 3-0 at half time Liverpool went on to beat AC Milan on penalties.

Seventeen years on, Jurgen Klopp’s team, winners of the competition in 2019, are plunged into a group of other resonant venues. Naples’ San Paolo and Glasgow’s Ibrox generate the sorts of atmosphere that Anfield regards as uniquely rousing in an English context.

Ajax can also count on terrific support, although fans in Amsterdam fear that the summer departures of players from the spine of the side – goalkeeper, Andre Onana, defender Lisandro Martinez, midfielder Ryan Gravenberch and striker