The Champions League group stage draw promises to deliver highly predictable drama - The Warm-Up

FRIDAY'S BIG STORIES Group Stage Fun Times Ad The balls are out, the draw has been made, and Europe is ready for 96 games of highly intense group stage action. And if you, like the Warm-Up, are incapable of looking at any arrangement of football teams without suddenly being drowned in narrative, then it's an intoxicating time of the season. TransfersRonaldo dropped by Ten Hag in two-hour team meeting – Paper Round10 HOURS AGO Group A! Sure, Liverpool will probably have sorted themselves out by then, but what if they haven't? Would you like to take a wobbly defence and an absent midfield to the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona, to the Johan Cruyff Arena, to the Ally McCoist Thunderbowl? And even if last season's finalists are back to something like competence, the fight for second place should be a fun one.

Group C! The «C» stands for crikey. We can all agree that putting financial escape/con artists Barcelona in the same pot as Bayern Munich is very funny, for Lewandowski reasons and 8-2 reasons. But chucking Inter Milan in there as well elevates the whole affair: a proper and actual Group of Death, just like mother used to make.

Just like UEFA's elaborate network of coefficients and seedings is designed to avoid. Poor Barca. They pulled all those levers and sold all those shards of the club's future, all in a desperate bid to keep acting like a big club, and now they might get dumped out in the group stage anyway.

Your heart bleeds. And Group Tottenham! It's an odd wrinkle of the competition, but sometimes the best groups are the ones that feel — and we mean this absolutely as a compliment — just a little bit Europa League. Like a Europa League final four, that is: Eintracht Frankfurt, Tottenham Hotspur, Sporting,