Achraf and nostalgia meet Madrid in an accessible group stage

Achraf celebrates a goal against Benevento.CIRO DE LUCA / Reuters

The balls did not get the quote from Real Madrid, which will have an accessible Champions group stage.

Inter, the new destination of the white youth squad Achraf Hakimi, will a priori be his thorniest rival to try to finish first in the group and have a field advantage in the round of 16, a round that he has not exceeded two years ago.

The Ukrainian Shakhtar, with Brazilian roots, and the German Borussia Moenchengladbach, a club that appeals to the nostalgia of the Bernabéu, will be his other rivals.

The crossing with one of his sons is the most striking sign of the whites in this first continental station.

Achraf, 21, has been Madrid's biggest sell this summer on the transfer market.

After two years on loan at Dortmund, he went to Inter for 40 million plus five in variables.

Carvajal's competition on the right side discouraged him from returning and Antonio Conte recruited him for the

project

.

His good performance as a winger in a five-man defense made him shine in Germany, where he scored 12 goals and 13 assists.

At Inter, they have already scored a goal in their second match in Serie A. In addition to Achraf, Madrid must guard themselves well in defense of people like Lukaku, Lautaro, Álexis Sánchez and Perisic.

Former Barcelona player Arturo Vidal has also recently arrived in Milan.

Inter, with a long but not very recent past, has been away from the elite since they won the title in 2010 with Mourinho on the bench and precisely at the Bernabéu.

Since then, only the runner-up in the Europa League last August, after being defeated by Sevilla, somehow returned him to the European showcase.

Shakhtar, the striking Ukrainian project that does not stop looking at Brazil, is a Champions League classic of the last decade, always uncomfortable for the greats.

The Donetsk team, exiled 1,000 kilometers away in their matches due to the war in the country, has made a career and fortune in recent decades by signing young Brazilians who have later been sold at the price of gold.

So he did with Fred, Willian, Fernandinho or Douglas Costa.

Now he has a dozen South Americans.

One of that line, forward Júnior Moraes, scored 25 goals and 12 assists last year.

And Moenchengladbach is a Bundesliga classic, although in recent times far from being able to play Bayern or Dortmund tournaments.

His five domestic titles were raised in the seventies.

Its top scorer last season (14), Marcus Thuram, son of former Barcelona, ​​Juventus and Parma player Lilian Thuram, a few months ago became much more than a footballer by kneeling after a goal as a show of rejection for the murder in the United States of the African American George Floyd.

Beyond its current sporting arguments, the name of Moenchengladbach evokes the Madrid fans to the comebacks of the eighties at the Bernabéu, when they returned 5-1 in the first leg in the 1985 UEFA Champions League with a 4-0.

From those historic nights in Chamartín, Inter also came out sheared a couple of times.

Memories of a football that has already left as an impulse to return to a peak that Madrid has been very far behind in the last two years.

This first phase will be held on the dates: October 20/21 and 27/28, November 3-4 and 24/25, and December 1-2 and 8/9.