Does Real Madrid have to the Odds to Win the Champions League?

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The 2019-20 La Liga season is finally in the books, and Real Madrid was able to slip by Barcelona in the standings and win by five points. Barcelona had stumbled early in the season, before the COVID-19 shutdown, but had reasserted itself to take a slim lead in the league standings. The same offensive woes that had plagued Barcelona before the shutdown, though, returned a few weeks after La Liga play resumed. Basically, if Lionel Messi wasn’t scoring goals himself or directly setting up goals, Barcelona wasn’t scoring. Teams took advantage by locking down the Argentinian star, and Barcelona found itself tying too many matches down the stretch and taking a few bad losses to boot. The next quest in soccer is the completion of the 2019-20 UEFA Champions League, as a few teams have to finish up their Round of 16 ties, and then the quarterfinals will get underway. After the Round of 16, the rest of the tournament will take place in Portugal. Can Real Madrid follow up their La Liga championship with a Champions League title? Take a look at the UEFA Champions League odds for each of the remaining teams as well as the schedule and our thoughts on Real Madrid.

Soccer News: Can Real Madrid Win the Champions League? Updated Odds

Champions League Schedule

You might wonder why Real Madrid faces such long odds. After all, their play after the resumption of the La Liga season includes an emphatic win over Barcelona. However, Real Madrid faces daunting odds when it comes to simply making the quarterfinals. They still have a Round of 16 fixture with Manchester City. They enter as the away team, and they are down to Manchester City 2-1 after the first leg. That means that City enters not just with a lead in aggregate but also with two away goals — which would serve as the tiebreaker for advancement after totaling aggregate goals. So even a 1-0 Real Madrid win would not help them advance. The teams would each have two goals, but City would have the edge with two away goals as opposed to just one for Real Madrid. If Real Madrid won, 2-1, then the match would move to penalty kicks for qualification. Real Madrid has to score at least two goals and permit no more than one to City just to get to the penalty kicks. If they want to advance outright, they would need to win by two goals or more. I expect Manchester City to come out with an extremely conservative approach, and then if Real Madrid makes a mistake on the back end, City has the personnel and the scheme to make Real pay.

Real Madrid could be forgiven for some lax play in their La Liga finale, as they had already clinched the title, and they had some lax play indeed, going to a 2-2 draw against Leganes, a team that will now have to survive a playoff from the third-place team in Spain’s second division in order to avoid relegation for 2020-21. Before that, they had not played a team in the top six of the La Liga standings since June 21, when they went to Real Sociedad and picked up a win. City will bring competition that Real has not seen in weeks — so this is to say that I’m not all that sanguine on Real Madrid even making the quarters, let alone rolling to a Champions League win. City has plenty of frustration to work out after watching Liverpool clinch the English Premier League weeks ahead of the end of the campaign and finishing in second place. So which team will be hungrier? It sounds like City to me.