Manchester City’s assistant manager, Mikel Arteta has predicted the club that will win the 2018/19 UEFA Champions League trophy.
He stated that Real Madrid are still favourite to win this season’s Champions League trophy despite losing their all-time highest goalscorer, Cristiano Ronaldo to Juventus in the summer.
Madrid won the Europe topflight football competition for the past three consecutive years with Ronaldo before the 33-year-old left the Santiago Bernabeu to join Juve in a 100-million-euro deal earlier in the summer.
“I am surprised when you have a team [Real Madrid] that’s won it three times in a row,” Arteta was quoted by Sportskeeda as saying at a news conference on Tuesday.
“But that means we’re doing things really well. People think we are candidates to compete against other teams in Europe.
“It has to be a motivation, not a pressure, that’s the way we take it and hopefully we can improve on what we did the last two seasons because we came up short.
“[The favourites] has to be Real Madrid, they have something special for this competition and they deal with every detail better than everyone else. The rest, we have to catch up and make that gap smaller.
“It’s a very open Champions League, that was the case last season and will be this season. The difference between the teams is not that big.
“They [Madrid] won the competition without Ronaldo as well, but of course he’s a massive weapon. It will be tough for everyone, I think.”
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