The Seville it was surely the luckiest of the five representatives of Spanish football in the Champions League and will be the main rival to beat in his Group F of the Champions League, in which should deal with French Lille, Austrian RB Salzburg and German Wolfsburg.
The Seville team will have three opponents who are not presented as inaccessible to the potential of their squad, but against those who cannot relax excessively if they do not want to see their classification in the round of 16 of the competition jeopardized because they are all good competitors.
In principle, LOSC would be the main rival for the first place, especially since the French team has been able to stop the all-powerful Paris Saint-Germain in France, taking away the league title last season and this summer the first trophy in contention, the Super Cup.
These performances give a good measure of the performance of the champion of the neighboring country, a set that does not have a great continental history and that he now aspires to take his successes in the national championship to the highest continental competition and to overcome at least the group stage, something that he has only achieved in one of his previous seven participations.
The Lille, now run by Jocelyn Gourvennec, who will have the difficult mission of matching the performance that Christophe Gaultier gave, maintains the base of the squad with the conquest of the league title, with a lot of youth and few reinforcements, one of them the Croatian goalkeeper Ivo Grbic, on loan from Atlético de Madrid.
Thus, in defense he mixes the youth of 21-year-old Dutch central Sven Botman and the experience of Portuguese José Fonte, while in midfield he has lost two important players such as Boubakary Soumaré and Renato Sanches. LOSC has brought in the young (20-year-old) Amadou Onana as a replacement, although at the moment the French André and the Portuguese Xeka are in charge, in charge of giving the Super Cup with his goal.
Above, the veteran Turkish striker Burak Yilmaz stands out, who lived a ‘second youth’ last year scoring 15 key goals for the league title, and who is well accompanied by two young men such as Canadian Jonathan David, Frenchman Jonathan Ikoné and the American Timothy Weah, son of the mythical George Weah.
SALZBURG REPEATS, WOLFSBURG RETURNS
Another obstacle that Sevilla cannot be relied upon is Red Bull Salzburg, a team already quite seasoned in European competitions and that they have participated in the last three editions of the Champions League, although they have not yet been able to pass the group stage.
The Austrian team has been gaining experience over the years, but he still seems far from the best of the Old Continent before those who try to wrinkle with a football of rapid transitions as he already demonstrated last year at the Wanda Metropolitano where he created problems for Atlético de Madrid, falling in the final bars.
Salzburg, the great dominator of their country’s championship in recent years and the one made known by Erling Haaland, qualified for the group stage of this Champions League after eliminating the Danish Brondby in the playoff. Led by Matthias Jaissle, replacement for Jesse March, promoted to the other RB, Leipzig, the Austrian champion continues to bet on young talent, like 19-year-old forward Karim Adeyemi. In their ranks there is an ex-Sevilla player like the central Wober.
Finally, Sevilla will have in their group Wolfsburg, a team that returns to the Champions League five years after having Zinédine Zidane’s Real Madrid on the ropes in the quarterfinals and whose greatest danger is competing in a level league like the Bundesliga.
In addition, the ‘wolves’, trained by former Dutch player Mark van Bommel, have started the season quite well in the domestic tournament and have positioned themselves leaders, being the only ones capable of winning the four matches played so far, showing that they will not be a easy rival.
The German team has above all a lot of danger from three quarters forward, where he has the Dutch striker Weghorst, who already showed good manners in the last European Championship, and the Germans Maximilia Philllip, Lukas Nmecha and Luca Waldschmidt. In the middle, the former Atlético de Madrid Guilavogui and a veteran like Maximilian Arnold, a survivor of the last adventure in the Champions League and who is completing his eleventh campaign at Wolfsburg, remain.