Mohamed Salah, Cristiano Ronaldo and Luka Modric up for award at Champions League draw

Sport360 staff 21:02 29/08/2018
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  • Manchester City, Manchester United, Tottenham and Liverpool will learn their Champions League group-stage opponents in Monaco on Thursday.

    The draw for the pool phase begins at 6pm at the Grimaldi Forum, with the ceremony also seeing the winners of the UEFA Player Awards being announced.

    Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah is on the shortlist for the men’s player of the year award, along with Cristiano Ronaldo and Luka Modric.

    Ronaldo – now with Juventus – and Modric were part of the Real Madrid side that beat Liverpool 3-1 in last season’s final in Kiev as Los Blancos won the competition for a third successive year.

    The 2018-19 final will be held at Atletico Madrid’s Wanda Metropolitano Stadium on June 1 next year.

    Scottish champions Celtic miss out on Thursday’s draw having been knocked out by AEK Athens in the third qualifying round earlier this month.

    There are four pots of eight teams, with one team from each pot forming a group, although teams from the same association cannot face each other.

    Premier League champions City, eliminated by Liverpool in the quarter-finals last term, are in pot one along with Real, Europa League winners Atletico, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Juventus, Paris St Germain and Lokomotiv Moscow.

    United and Spurs, who both exited at the last-16 stage in 2017-18, are in pot two, which also features Borussia Dortmund, Porto, Shakhtar Donetsk, Napoli and Roma, with one more team to join.

    Liverpool will be either in that pot or pot three – which includes Schalke, Lyon, Monaco, Ajax and CSKA Moscow – depending on the outcome of Wednesday night’s final matches of the qualifying play-off round.

    The first group matches take place on September 18 and 19.

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