The Champions League is Real Madrid‘s favourite competition, but this season it is proving more difficult than expected. The Whites did not manage to qualify for the last sixteen and now they will have to play two extra games with all the risks that entails. The new sanctions system in European competition means that the Whites will travel to Manchester on a Yellow Alert.
For this match, Real Madrid has one of its star players back, Vinicius, who was not available against Brest due to suspension after receiving his cycle of yellow cards. In the Champions League, that cycle is three cards, which is how many the Brazilian picked up in the first seven games. With the sanction served, he will be able to play in the round of 32, but he will have to be careful if he does not want to harm his team, since in the new competition format, the first cycle of cautions is 3, but in the next one it is no longer like that. If Vinicius now sees only two cards, he would miss another game.
This would not be the only concern for Real Madrid in this regard. The Merengues are the team with the most players threatened with suspension for the first leg of the tie, although a couple of them, the Brazilian Militao and the German Antonio Rudiger, will not play it because they are injured. In addition to them, Jude Bellingham, Luka Modric, Brazilian Endrick, Frenchmen Eduardo Camavinga and Aurelien Tchouameni and coach Carlo Ancelotti himself are also on warning after picking up two yellow cards during the league phase.
Unlike the whites, their rivals have no such concerns as the team managed by Spaniard Pep Guardiola only has the Portuguese central defender Rubén Dias under threat, as the rest of the players who have been booked have only seen the card once.