Today, Moscow “Spartak”, whose fans are already hungry for the Champions League, is playing in Tiraspol with Moldavian champion “Sheriff”. This is not the League, but the first step towards it.
With this match of the second qualifying round of the most prestigious continental tournament, Russian clubs are launching a new European campaign. Strictly speaking, FC Moskva not only started it, but managed to finish it by beating the MTZ-RIPO Intertoto in the Cup, and then losing to the Berlin Hertha. However, this tournament, by the will of UEFA, is not included in a single European cup field: points accumulated and lost in it are not taken into account when calculating club odds. And it’s appropriate to recall just these coefficients today in order to assess the immediate prospects of Spartak and CSKA. CSKA, we recall, start in Europe in two weeks.
Suppose, “Spartak” in the sum of two matches will defeat the champion of Moldova (this, by the way, can also be a difficult task, given the serious tournament experience of one of the last owners of the Commonwealth Cup).
With their current rating (21.504), red and white cannot count on seeding in the next, third qualifying round. And this means that rivals “Spartacus” can easily get the third or fourth teams from leading European leagues or champions and vice-champions of leagues of a lower rank. Potential opponents include Liverpool, Arsenal, Valencia, Ajax, Lille, Benfica, Galatasaray, Hamburg, Shakhtar Donetsk.
CSKA (club coefficient - 42.504), on the contrary, will be included in the number of seeded clubs and, as a result, in the struggle for access to the group stage of the Champions League, it will get an opponent easier.
Most likely, it will be one of the winners of the second round, with the exception of having a high coefficient of “Steaua”, Kiev “Dynamo”, “Levski” and “Fenerbahce”. But a variant is possible, for example, with the Spanish “Osasuna”, which, with all the desire, can’t be attributed to convenient rivals.
By the way, another Spanish team - “Villarreal” - turned out to be a co-author of the first European Cup surprise of this season: the semi-finalist of the Champions League 2005/2006 could not qualify for the Maribor Intertoto Cup, losing at home with a score of 1: 2, and having managed in the second leg in Slovenia to achieve only a draw 1: 1 and three red cards in the end of the match.
The draw for the third qualifying round of the Champions League will take place at the end of this week, but we will give the composition of the pairs of the second, the matches of which are played on July 26 and August 2:
Ekranas (Lithuania) - Dynamo (Zagreb, Croatia)
Fenerbahçe (Turkey) - B-36 Torshavn (Faroe Islands)
Hearts (Scotland) - Broad Brieg (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Metalurgs (Liepaja, Latvia) - Dynamo (Kiev, Ukraine)
Cork City (Ireland) - Crvena Star (Serbia)
Levski (Bulgaria) - Sioni (Georgia)
Sheriff (Moldova) - Spartak (Moscow, Russia)
Debrecen (Hungary) - Workers (Macedonia)
Gorica (Slovenia) - Steaua (Romania)
Copenhagen (Denmark) - MuPa-47 (Finland)
Mlada Boleslav (Czech Republic) - Volerenga (Norway)
Djurgården (Sweden) - Ruzomberok (Slovakia)
Hafnarfjordur (Iceland) - Legia (Poland)
Zurich (Switzerland) - Salzburg (Austria)
Mikhail MELNIKOV