Champions League overreactions – Liverpool, Chelsea last-16 hopes take a minor hit, Club Brugge the early surprise

And just like that, as September reaches only its midway point, we are one-third of the way through the Champions League group stage. The 2022-23 European soccer season is a particularly relentless ride, thanks to the World Cup, and big teams that have started slowly in league play now have holes to dig out of in the Champions League too.

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Let’s talk about the most noteworthy shifts and stories from the first two matchdays of Europe’s biggest club competition.

Inflection points

In terms of winning the big prize, not much has changed through two weeks. FiveThirtyEight’s Soccer Power Index gave seven teams at least a 5% chance of winning the Champions League before group play started, and all seven teams’ current odds are within 3 percentage points of where they started. But from an “It’s the journey, not the destination” perspective, the group stage can always be a bit of a roller coaster. Simply advancing to the knockout rounds is a huge deal for a number of teams, and lots of teams’ odds of doing so have changed pretty drastically — for a few, more than once — thus far.

Let’s take a look at each group’s major inflection-point matches so far. In terms of teams’ odds for advancement to the knockout rounds (per SPI), each of these produced a cumulative change of at least 20 percentage points for the two teams involved.

Group A

Napoli 4, Liverpool 1
– Napoli’s odds of advancing rose 25 percentage points; Liverpool’s sank 24

Liverpool 2, Ajax 1
– Liverpool up 14 percentage points, Ajax down 17

In the end, Napoli and Ajax have basically traded places. With their shocking domination of Liverpool and eventual win over Rangers — it took a red card and a couple of penalties before they could finally earn the advantage in Glasgow — Luciano Spalletti’s Napoli have established themselves atop the group. SPI now gives both Liverpool and Napoli a 71% chance of advancing, while Ajax, a team SPI has loved for…