On Friday, March 17, 2023, the UEFA Champions League quarterfinal draw was completed at the House of European Football in Nyon, Switzerland.
Italian Serie A clubs outperformed all other European clubs in terms of appearance at the 2022–2023 UEFA Champions League quarterfinal stage, with English clubs coming in second.
Internazionale Milan, Associazione Calcio Milan and Napoli represented Italian Serie A at the draw in Switzerland; Chelsea and Manchester City were teams of the English Premier League; Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, and Benfica were teams from the Spanish La Liga, Bundesliga, and Liga Portugal.
Graham Potter’s Chelsea has been paired with Champions League holders Real Madrid in the quarterfinals, which has been an interesting fixture in recent seasons.
Following the draw at UEFA headquarters in Nyon, where the defending champions are the only club to have competed in over 300 UEFA Champions League matches, Real Madrid will face Chelsea in the Champions League quarter-finals.
The imaginative team of editors at www.atspo.com can reveal a statistic: the competition’s two-time winner has been paired with the competition’s all-time champion in three consecutive seasons.
In the 2020–2021 season, the two clubs played against each other in the semifinal, with Chelsea qualifying to the next stage, and in the following season, 2021–2022, they again met at the quarterfinal stage, where Real Madrid got the qualification slot.
There has been an exciting feature in their competition meetings: either of the two teams has won the ultimate trophy after qualifying when they met in the semifinal and quarterfinal stages, respectively.
The other fixtures of the quarterfinal stage of the champions’ league are: Benfica will host Internazionale Milan; Guardiola faces a reunion with former club Bayern Munich for Manchester City; and in an all-Italian affair, Associazione Calcio Milan battle for the semifinal slot against Napoli.
In fact, of all the teams that have faced Real Madrid at least five times in European competition, Chelsea has the lowest percentage of losses (14%), having only lost one of their seven games against them.
