Ranking the field: Can anyone stop PSG, Barca?

16.09.2025, 22:06 espn.com

Welcome to Year 4 of the Champions League rankings, where I ... rank all the teams in the Champions League.

This year is notable for one specific reason: Manchester City are not No. 1. In fact, they're not even close to being No. 1. City have been the favorites to win the European Cup in six of the past seven seasons, and they were second favorites the only time they weren't No. 1.

Without City leading the way, it's way more open at the top than it has been in a long time. Five clubs can make reasonable cases that they should be the favorites to win it all -- and then there are also a bunch of others that could win it all, too.

- Ogden: UCL storylines to watch this season- O'Hanlon: Worst 2025 summer transfers, from Cunha to Isak- UCL draw reaction: Must-see games, easiest/toughest paths

So, who is No. 1 in our rankings? Who is No. 36? And where does everyone land in between? Let's get to the list.

The easternmost team to ever play in the Champions League got here with shootout victories in qualifying against Celtic and Slovan Bratislava. Per Transfermarkt, the entire squad maintains a transfer value of about €12.53 million. That's roughly the same as the average player on Benfica, who according to the betting odds, have about a 1-in-200 chance of winning this tournament.

Based on rough estimates, I'm pretty sure Qarabag would be favored to beat Kairat by around a full goal on a neutral field. That's roughly the same gap as between, say, Liverpool and Nottingham Forest.

Remember Mislav Orsic? Only a select few of you will, but he came on in the knockouts against Spain at Euro 2020, scored and assisted on a goal, and sent the game to extra time. He had a hat trick as Dinamo Zagreb eliminated Jose Mourinho's Tottenham from the 2021 Europa League, and he scored the winner in Zagreb's Champions League victory against Chelsea in 2022 in what ended up being Thomas Tuchel's last game in charge of the English club. Orsic scored the winning goal in the third-place match at the 2022 World Cup, with Southampton signing him a month later for €5.75 million.

Anyway, he's 32 and plays for Pafos now.

Jindrich Trpisovsky has been coaching Slavia Prague since 2017. That seems like forever in the current high-stakes, low-patience managerial environment -- and it gives me an opportunity to mention that Guy Roux managed Auxerre from 1964 to 2000. Yes, you read that right.

Playing their matches near the Arctic Circle, Bodo surely will have an outsize home-field advantage. Playing at home will essentially be equivalent to adding Lionel Messi to the team. Or will the Bodo effect add up to, say, Messi and Dwight McNeil? Messi and Cody Gakpo? Messi and Bukayo Saka?

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Over the past 22 seasons, Copenhagen have won the Danish league 13 times, and they've never finished lower than third. Over that stretch, their leading scorer has scored 20-plus goals just twice. Last season, they won the league, and their leading scorers were Mohamed Elyounoussi and Jordan Larsson -- with eight goals apiece.

They could have had a fun, sort of old-school creator-scorer pairing with Mehdi Taremi on loan from Inter Milan and Rémy Cabella on loan from Lille. Unfortunately, and surprisingly, Cabella didn't make the Champions League squad list.

The Belgians have one of the youngest teams in the tournament, and they made it to the round of 16 last season, but they lost three players to €20 million or more transfer fees over the summer -- holding midfielder Ardon Jashari to AC Milan, fullback Maxim De Cuyper to Brighton, winger Chemsdine Talbi to Sunderland -- and they've merely been pretty good instead of dominant to start the domestic season. It looks like a bit of a rebuilding year in Brugge.

They, too, lost a bunch of players (including their top two forwards, Franjo Ivanovic and Mohamed Amoura, plus midfielder Noah Sadiki) to larger teams over the summer, when USG made three of their five biggest transfers ever. But if there's anyone who knows how to lose a couple of stars and actually make the team better, it's the same people who own Brighton. Unlike Brugge, this team has been utterly dominant so far this season.

You might see the name "Ajax" here and think, "Oh, a fun dark horse!" Allow me to advise you to not do that. The Club Elo ratings are an opponent-, score-, and location-adjusted system that awards or docks a team points after every match it plays based on those factors. Ajax's Elo rating is the fifth worst of any team in the tournament -- above only Kairat, Qarabag, Pafos and Bodo/Glimt.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but can they ... replace Luuk de Jong? PSV were an Eredivisie superteam the past two years with De Jong starting up top. At age 35, he has continued his reverse-career progression and now plays for FC Porto. They're still top of the table in the Eredivisie; they just haven't been nearly as dominant as they've been in years past.

They can't be as good without goal scorer Viktor Gyökeres and manager Ruben Amorim for a full season ... right? Sporting have a ton of defensive talent, so the question is will their new center forward, 27-year-old Luis Suárez, who was last seen playing for Almeria in Spain's second division, have a similar late-career breakout to Gyökeres and suddenly be good enough to play at a Champions League level?

On pure talent, maybe they should be a little higher. Outside of Álvaro Carreras going to Real Madrid and Ángel Di María going back to Argentina, they haven't had as many major departures as they usually do each offseason. They were every bit as good as Sporting last season when they made the round of 16 in the Champions League.

As with Sporting, the biggest question is whether they'll be able to score enough goals.

They brought in 15 new players this offseason to a team that finished second in Ligue 1. In some ways, that made sense. They drastically outperformed their underlying numbers, plus they now had to contend with Champions League matches. But that's a lot of turnover, and the limited evidence we have suggests that Roberto De Zerbi is a brilliant tactician and an awful manager of human beings.

Overall, it just seems that there's a ton of downside with this group.

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This is a very solid team that doesn't have a ton of upside. In its 2-0 loss to Atlético Madrid over the weekend, Nicolas Pépé and Georges Mikautadze started up top. That's a fun pairing -- one post-hype Arsenal prospect, one Ligue 1 creative darling -- but they combined for one shot between them.

Folarin Balogun and Mika Biereth is a fun striker pairing that I believe will catch some opponents off guard because so few teams in this competition play that way. There's a bunch of talent elsewhere, too: winger Maghnes Akliouche, midfielder Lamine Camara and fullback Vanderson could be off to much bigger clubs next summer.

It's surprising that none of them was off to a bigger club this summer. Maybe a couple of guys will make the leap, and this group will mount a run to the round of 16 or even the quarters.

Monaco and Galatasaray are the two teams I'm most worried I'm underrating. Galatasaray have Victor Osimhen and Leroy Sané. These aren't two over-the-hill stars like we've seen gathered in Istanbul previously -- no, Osimhen is only 26 and Sane is 29. These are better players than those on any team we've already mentioned, or on any of the clubs we're about to mention.

It's a bummer that we never got to see the Hugo Ekitike and Omar Marmoush version of this team give it a go in the Champions League. But, well, the fact that this team had both of those players last season goes a long way toward explaining why they're in the competition this season. Frankfurt created the second-most expected goals of anyone in the Bundesliga last season, but were middle of the pack for expected goals conceded.

If they can keep the train moving without Marmoush and Ekitike, Dino Toppmoller is going to make a lot of money to coach someone else next summer.

It has been pretty much the worst start to the season imaginable for the post-Xabi Alonso era, but Leverkusen dominated Frankfurt last Friday despite playing a man down for a third of the match. There's still a ton of uncertainty here given all of the roster churn and the fact that they are already on their second coach of the season, so it seems right that they're ranked almost directly in the middle of the field.

Roughly, I'd say PSV down to Atalanta is one large tier of teams that will be disappointed if they don't make it out of the league phase, but whose progress beyond that is largely dependent on what kind of knockout round draw they get. Atalanta just missed a bye last season by finishing ninth in the league phase, and then they were upset by Club Brugge in the knockout phase playoffs.

Now they're without Gian Piero Gasperini on the sidelines, so I doubt they'll finish as high again this season, but they could make it a round further and it wouldn't be a shock.

If Serhou Guirassy remains one of the best strikers in the world, they'll be a tough out. But it continues to be shocking how low Dortmund's ceiling is every season. They have no real potential super-prospects, just a bunch of decent dudes in their mid-20s or later.

Janusz Michallik assesses Thomas Frank's impact at Tottenham after their 3-0 win vs. West Ham.

There's a chance Spurs deserve to be in that previous tier from PSV to Atalanta, as I'm still not really sure what to make of them. They played City well on the road but then got thrashed by Bournemouth at home. (It was only 1-0, but they got outshot 20-5.) That's sandwiched by two 3-0 wins against two of the worst teams in the league (West Ham and Burnley), where they scored nearly double the combined expected goals the