After another morning of ball fondling in Nyon, here’s the eight ties that make up the first knock-out phase of this season’s Champions League.
The big story out of today’s draw was always going to be who the two English sides who finished as runners up in their groups, Manchester City and Arsenal, would play.
The options open to them (Real Madrid, Atletico Madrid, Barcelona and PSG, plus either Bayern Munich for Arsenal or Borussia Dortmund for City) were not too appealing and the end results were about as tough as Arsene Wenger and Manuel Pellegrini could have feared.
Arsenal will play Bayern Munich, the team who eliminated them last season.
City will face the might of Barcelona, a team very familiar to Pellegrini.
As for the other English teams, Manchester United will face an easy enough game against Olimpiakos while Chelsea will reunite with Didier Drogba and face Turkish side Galatasaray
Away from those sides, the big game is AC Milan v Atletico while Real Madrid will play Schalke.
Here’s the draw in full:
Man City v Barcelona
Olimpiakos v Manchester United
AC Milan v Atletico Madrid
Bayer Leverkusen v PSG
Galatasaray v Chelsea
Schalke v Real Madrid
Arsenal v Bayern Munich
Zenit St Petersburg v Borussia Dortmund
The Europa League draw is on at 12.00 and we’ll update this page with full details of that as we get them
As promised, here’s the last 32 draw for the Europa League. A very tricky one for Swansea’s against Rafa Benitez’s Napoli, while now AVB-less Spurs will play Ukranian side Dnipro
