Champions League Predictions 2024-25: The Opta Projections

Who will win the UEFA Champions League title in 2024-25? We look at all the key questions with our Champions League predictions for the upcoming season via our trusty Opta supercomputer.

The UEFA Champions League is back, although Europe’s elite club competition will have a very different look for the 2024-25 season.

Not only has the tournament increased from 32 to 36 teams, but the format has changed significantly.

The previous four-team, eight-pool groups have been replaced by a league stage in which all clubs will play eight matches, rather than the previous six, and are ranked in one full table.

Finishing in the top eight ensures immediate qualification for the last 16, while the teams between ninth and 24th will contest the new Champions League play-off round for the right to join the leading sides in the prestigious knockout stage.

There is no more Europa League safety net either – the bottom 12 from the 36 and the eight teams who lose in the play-off round will all be immediately eliminated from continental football for this season.

Real Madrid enter the revamped competition as defending champions. The 15-time winners triumphed in two of the last three seasons and have now added Kylian Mbappé to their ranks, too.

The teams Madrid beat in those two finals – Liverpool and Borussia Dortmund – are also involved, as are 2022-23 European champions Manchester City, their Premier League title rivals Arsenal and continental heavyweights Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Inter Milan and Paris Saint-Germain.

There are four teams competing in Europe’s biggest competition for the first time: Bologna, Brest, Girona and Slovan Bratislava; meanwhile, Aston Villa will make a debut participation in the Champions League era, having previously been crowned champions of Europe when the tournament was known as the European Cup.

But who is going to come out on top in this season’s competition? The Opta Supercomputer continues to garner plenty of attention during the domestic league season and it also made some high-profile calls ahead of Euro 2024.

Now, once again, it has not been shy in putting its (robotic) neck on the line.

The supercomputer has simulated the 2024-25 competition 10,000 times and confirmed its pre-tournament percentages. So, without further ado, let’s run through its UEFA Champions League predictions.

UEFA Champions League 2024-25 Predictions

• Manchester City (25.3%) are named favourites to win this season’s Champions League by the Opta Supercomputer.
• It took a penalty shootout to knock out Pep Guardiola’s team in the quarter-finals last season and City won the competition in 2023. They have also claimed an unprecedented four straight Premier League titles.
• The most likely team to stop the English side are holders Real Madrid (18.2%), who eliminated Man City last season and have reached at least the semi-finals for four straight years.
• Italian champions Internazionale (10.9%), runners-up to Man City in 2023, are the only other team who have a chance greater than 10 per cent according to the supercomputer.
• If none of those top three sides prevail, the team to emerge triumphant is likely to come from a closely matched group of six other contenders: Arsenal, Barcelona, Bayer Leverkusen, Bayern Munich, Liverpool and Paris Saint-Germain.

Champions League Favourites

Despite a painful exit last year, Manchester City (25.3%) are the favourites to win this season’s Champions League with the Opta supercomputer.

There is a huge field of 36 teams participating in the league stage, but Guardiola’s side are still seen as near certainties to fill one of the top few spots in the new overall table. They finish first out of 36 in 21.9% of our simulations; in the top four places 55.5% of the time; and are automatic qualifiers for the knockout stage by finishing in the top eight at an enormous rate of 77.5%.

It’s not difficult to make the case for City as favourites. Excluding shootouts, they are unbeaten in their last 23 games in the Champions League, with 16 wins, and if they avoid defeat in their first two in 2024-25, they will equal the longest unbeaten streak by a team in tournament history, matching a 25-game run from rivals Man Utd that has stood unchallenged since it ended in May 2009.

Guardiola loves the competition too and, among managers to oversee 50 or more games in the Champions League, the Catalan has the highest win percentage (63.7%), with 109 victories from 171 games.

Once we get into the knockout stage, which Man City (95.2%) are almost assured to be part of, they are expected to thrive again. Even coming up against the best opposition on the continent, they are likely to keep racking up the wins, reaching at least the semi-finals (55.0%) in over half our UCL simulations. City get to the final at a rate of 39.9% and lift the trophy a huge 25.3% of the time.

Just like Real Madrid managed to do last season, if a team has realistic hopes of winning the Champions League, they are most likely going to need to find a way to eliminate Man City.

Real Madrid win the UCL yet again in 18.2% of our simulations. That is an impressive pre-tournament win percentage and, without a rival as powerful as Man City, it would often see Madrid come out on top.

Adding Mbappé to a Champions League-winning team is a formidable challenge for the other contenders to deal with. The former PSG striker was the joint-top scorer in the competition along with Harry Kane in 2023-24 and has already raced up to 48 career UCL goals at the age of 25, enough to ensure he features among the top 10 scorers in the tournament’s history.

There is a 48.9% chance of Madrid making it five straight seasons in the semi-finals, while they appear in the 2025 final at Allianz Arena at a healthy rate of 31.6%.

Their predicted points total in the league section is 16.7 and they are highly likely (74.0%) to automatically qualify in the top eight before becoming a team who rivals will be desperate to avoid in the latter stages.

Inter (10.9%) are the only other team who go into the tournament with a Champions League win percentage of greater than 10%.

Simone Inzaghi’s men were beaten by Atlético Madrid in last season’s first knockout round, but that was an incredibly tight tie settled by penalties. Inter did cruise to Serie A glory last season and had made the UCL final a year earlier, with many feeling they were unlucky to lose against Man City in Istanbul.

Inter have a huge 86.2% chance of progressing to the last 16 (doing so automatically as top-eight finishers 54.4% of the time) and they go all the way to the semi-finals in 36.7% of simulations and the final at a rate of 21.2%.

Man City and Real Madrid are clear frontrunners, but there is also a sizeable gap between Inter and the rest of the chasing pack, so this season’s predictions have seen the supercomputer show significant faith in the Italian champions.

Their league-stage clashes against Man City and Arsenal should therefore make compelling viewing.

Other Champions League Contenders

Six teams are very closely matched in the group behind, and all of them start the tournament with realistic hopes of embarking on a long run.

Arsenal, Barcelona, Bayer Leverkusen, Bayern Munich, Liverpool and PSG are the teams in question, with their chances of winning the competition all in a tight range between 4.1% and 6.3%.

Of that group, it’s Arsenal who narrowly fared best in our simulations, meaning they emerge as the fourth-most likely winners overall.

In a statistic that will not please the Premier League side, Arsenal are the team who have played the most matches (197) in the history of the European Cup/UEFA Champions League without ever winning the trophy.

But they are at least incredibly consistent, progressing from the group stage in each of their last 15 appearances. The Gunners again reach the last 16 in 76.5% of our simulations this time around.

They make it to the final 13.2% of the time and win the tournament at a rate of 6.3%, so Mikel Arteta’s side do enter the competition with a fighting chance.

Barcelona are also well fancied by our predictive model this season. In Robert Lewandowski, they have a striker on 94 career Champions League goals and, after appointing Hansi Flick, Barca are pairing one of the competition’s great strikers with a Champions League-winning coach.

Boosted by having the fourth-best schedule in the league stage according to Opta’s Fixture Difficulty ranking, Barcelona actually have a better chance than the likes of Inter and Arsenal to top the 36-team table outright at 8.9%, and are predicted to rack up 15.1 points.

It would be a big shock if Barca did not reach the last 16 (83.3%), from which point they will hope to make more of an impact in the knockout stage than they have been able to in previous seasons.

Bayern Munich have also been handed a good draw – the second-easiest according to our aforementioned analysis of each team’s fixture difficulty. They reach the last 16 at a strong rate of 80.3%, and only four teams are rated as more likely to progress.

But interestingly, at 4.1%, Vincent Kompany’s team are seen as less likely overall tournament winners than domestic rivals Bayer Leverkusen (5.4%), who ended Bayern’s 11-year run of Bundesliga dominance last season and now look like a force to be reckoned with on the continent.

Early matches for Xabi Alonso’s side against Inter, Liverpool, Atlético and Milan will be eagerly anticipated as they look to prove they can live up to that high billing.

Liverpool return to the competition after a year in the Europa League and are ranked the seventh-most likely winners at 4.2%.

The Reds have a 31.7% chance of finishing in the top eight to progress automatically and have a predicted points total of 13. Those figures might not look too impressive, but that is mainly due to a tough draw that is rated as the third-most difficult overall.

To outperform that tally and boost their hopes of a top-eight spot under new boss Arne Slot, Liverpool may need to get a positive result against Real Madrid, who they have a miserable recent record against – drawing one and losing seven of the previous eight meetings, including two very recent UCL finals.

On the plus side, Mohamed Salah has started the Premier League season in fine form and he typically thrives in Europe, too. His 41 Champions League goals for Liverpool is the highest tally any player has recorded for an English club.

PSG are yet to get over the line in the Champions League, and their cause in 2024-25 has not been helped by the departure of Mbappé and a brutal initial schedule that is rated the hardest of all by our model.

They will have to play Man City, Barcelona, Atlético Madrid and Arsenal inside their eight league-stage matches, so are rated as more likely to land in the play-off round between ninth and 24th (56.4%) than they are to finish in the top eight (27.6%). But if they can navigate their way through the early part of the tournament, the system believes they are a team that can still do some damage.

Best of the Rest

It would be a significant surprise to the Opta supercomputer if a team outside any of the top nine prevails in the Champions League, but the system has not completely discounted the hopes of a few other high-profile participants.

Atlético Madrid, Borussia Dortmund, RB Leipzig and Sporting CP all have a better than one-in-fifty chance of triumphing.

Europa League winners Atalanta and returning Juventus are not rated too far behind, with both those Italian teams seen as more likely than not to reach the last 16.

Among that group of six teams, Dortmund (13.9 predicted points), Atletico (13.0) and Atalanta (12.9) are most likely to impress in the initial league stage. They qualify automatically in the top eight at rates of 41.5%, 31.2% and 30.7% respectively.

Atlético have been busy in the transfer market and will hope to be in the mix once the latter stages come around. They have a 30.5% chance of reaching the quarter-finals, according to our predictive model, while Dortmund’s chance is even higher at 35.4%. However, the German side’s hope making the final again is just 5.7%.

No other teams in the competition are given a chance of above 1% to win the tournament, so the remaining 21 clubs can certainly be seen as outsiders.

Champions League Outsiders

Given the competitiveness and financial might of the Premier League, it might come as a surprise to some that Aston Villa are rated firmly in the middle of the pack, below the likes of Sporting, Monaco, PSV and Benfica.

There is just a 11.3% chance of Villa earning a top-eight finish to qualify automatically for the last 16 and they are more likely to finish between ninth and 24th to land in the play-off round (53.9%).

Villa have a predicted points total of just 10.4 from their eight matches, but there are some reasons for optimism. A Matchday 1 fixture against Young Boys gives them the chance to get off to what would be a much-needed strong start and, despite having to face Bayern and Juventus, Villa’s schedule is the fifth easiest.

The last English newcomers to the competition were Leicester City in 2016-17, and they won their first game against Club Brugge, who are also among Villa’s eight opponents this time. Capitalising on fixtures such as that will be crucial.

Having Emery will surely help Villa, too. Villa are the sixth different team he has managed in the Champions League, with only Madrid boss Carlo Ancelotti (8) having taken charge of more sides, and that’s before you consider Emery’s huge continental success in the second-tier Europa League.

Another team boosted by their Champions Leaue draw is Celtic. The Scottish champions’ fixtures are rated as the easiest across all 36 teams with an average opponent rating of 87.4. The unluckiest team on the spectrum, PSG, have their opponents rated five points higher at 92.4.

Celtic are appearing in the European Cup/Champions League for a 28th time, trailing only Man Utd (30 appearances) among British teams.

They have struggled of late, failing to progress from the groups in five straight appearances, while manager Brendan Rodgers has won just three of his 24 games in the tournament.

But the new format and kind draw could help Celtic, who have a predicted points total of 9.7 and a healthy 57.2% chance of finishing in the top 24 (7.3% in the top eight and 49.9% landing in the play-off round).

That means Celtic can enter the tournament with genuine excitement, though a fast start against the tournament’s weakest team, Slovan Bratislava, is essential.

Seven-time champions Milan, meanwhile, will have to upset the odds to make an impact this season, having crashed out of a tough group last season. Across our simulations, they made the last 16 just 44.7% of the time and came through as the 20th most likely winners.

Champions League Debutants

As for all the debutants, Girona are given the best chance of going on a decent run following their impressive La Liga campaign a year ago.

Girona are seen as more likely winners of the tournament than Milan, but that is more a reflection of the system not being favourable towards the Rossoneri.

Michel’s team are rated 16th overall and can realistically target reaching at least the last 16, which they do in 48.8% of our simulations. Across all 36 teams, they and Milan are the two teams seen as most likely to land between ninth and 24th to participate in the play-off round.

Bologna (52.8%) are also more likely than not to reach that play-off round, but Ligue 1 side Brest would be doing well to get that far. They finish in the bottom 12 at a rate of 63.1% and are predicted to get just eight points from as many games.

And unfortunately for the other newcomers, Slovan Bratislava, they were one of four teams who did not even win the tournament once from our 10,000 simulations. The other three were Crvena Zvezda, Shakhtar Donetsk and Young Boys, while three other teams – Brest, Sturm Graz and Salzburg – won the tournament at a rate of just 0.01%.

It could be a very tough few months for Slovan, who after their trip to Celtic have the daunting task of facing Man City in their first home game. They have a comparatively huge 28.2% chance of finishing 36th out of 36 – for context, the next-most likely team’s chance of finishing bottom is substantially lower (Shakhtar at 11.9%).

In 75.3% of our simulations, Slovan finished in the bottom six teams, and they made it through to the last 16 just 121 times out of 10,000, so this may be a good moment to reflect on the fact the Slovakian team have done incredibly well just to get this far, reaching the tournament proper for a first time in 12 attempts.

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