PSG-Liverpool and Madrid-Munich headline the Champions League quarterfinals

Paris Saint-Germain’s bid to become the first side since Real Madrid’s three-peat (2016-18) to retain the Champions League begins against a Liverpool team in crisis, while the competition’s most decorated clubs, Madrid and Bayern, meet in the pick of the last-eight ties as the quarterfinals kick off this week.

Liverpool’s return to the Parc des Princes on Wednesday will revive vivid memories for Arne Slot: the Dutch coach still calls last season’s round-of-16 second leg against PSG “the best game I’ve managed in my career,” even though his side exited on penalties. Twelve months on, the landscape has shifted dramatically. A record-breaking summer outlay of $570 million followed a stroll to the Premier League title, yet a 4-0 FA Cup humiliation at Manchester City on Saturday means Slot is battling to save his job. With the league already gone, the European Cup is Liverpool’s lone remaining trophy route; they have lost four of their last seven fixtures and arrive in France with form in free-fall.

PSG, by contrast, are soaring. Luis Enrique’s holders swept past Chelsea in the round of 16, winning 5-2 in London and 3-0 at home, and carry a four-match winning streak into the first leg. A repeat of last year’s dramatic shoot-out victory at Anfield would leave the French champions firmly on course for back-to-back titles.

Thursday night brings the competition’s heavyweight collision as Real Madrid host Bayern Munich at the Bernabéu. Between them the clubs have lifted the trophy 21 times, yet remarkably they have never faced each other in a final. They do meet in the knockout rounds with wearying familiarity—this is their sixth two-leg encounter in 14 seasons—and the head-to-head makes painful reading for the Germans: Madrid have prevailed in four of the five ties since 2011-12, including the 2024 semifinals.

Bayern, unbeaten in 13 games in all competitions, sense an opportunity. Harry Kane, who sat out Saturday’s Bundesliga win over Freiberg after tweaking an ankle on England duty, has been passed fit. Madrid, meanwhile, are smarting from a 2-1 league defeat at Mallorca that dented their domestic title hopes despite a comfortable aggregate dismissal of Manchester City in the previous Champions League round.

The draw has also thrown up a purely Spanish affair as Barcelona take on Atlético Madrid, completing a dizzying sequence of five Clásico-flavoured meetings in two months. Barcelona edged Saturday’s league encounter 2-1 at the Metropolitano, but Atlético advanced from February’s Copa del Rey round on aggregate. Their European history is split down the middle: each has eliminated the other once at this stage, Atlético in 2014 and 2016 on runs to the final, both times sealing progression in the second leg at home. The first leg at Camp Nou on Wednesday will set the tone for another knife-edge tie.

Sporting Lisbon versus Arsenal rounds out the quarterfinal bracket and carries a poignant subplot. Viktor Gyökeres, fresh from firing Sweden into the 2026 World Cup with a playoff hat-trick against Ukraine and the decisive goal versus Poland, returns to the José Alvalade where he plundered 97 goals in 102 games—54 last term alone. Since his $85 million move to north London the striker has 16 in 42 matches, numbers dwarfed by his Lisbon exploits but still sufficient to keep him as Mikel Arteta’s preferred No. 9. Sporting will seek to replicate their round-of-16 heroics when they overturned a first-leg deficit against Bodø/Glimt by winning the return 5-0.

First legs continue Thursday with Madrid v Bayern and, 24 hours earlier, PSG v Liverpool. The return fixtures are scheduled for April 7-8, by which time four sides will stand 180 minutes from Istanbul’s Atatürk Olympic Stadium and this season’s final.