By Graham Dunbar -
The Associated Press
Real Madrid ended up paying the most expensive toll after UEFA's mistake in the draw for the knockout stages of the Champions League.
The Spanish team will have to face Paris Saint-Germain after the tournament organizers had to repeat the draw due to a mistake.
The Spanish team was initially paired with the Portuguese club Benfica, but now they
will have to battle Lionel Messi
, Kylian Mbappé and Neymar,
the offensive trident led by Argentine coach Mauricio Pochettino.
What makes it even more interesting is that the French team now has Sergio Ramos, former captain and central defender of Real Madrid.
PSG were to meet Manchester United in the original draw, which was declared void following a technical glitch that UEFA attributed to an external service provider.
The English team was initially framed with Villarreal, but the names of those clubs could not coincide because they had already met in the group stage.
Kylian Mbappe (right) celebrates with Lionel Messi after scoring a goal for PSG against Monaco in the French League on December 12, 2021. Christophe Ena / AP
Manchester United was wrongly included
among the rivals that Atlético de Madrid should not face.
That mistake caused the replay of the draw.
Ultimately, Atlético and United finished head-to-head in the second draw.
Only one of the original eight crosses was repeated in the second: the reigning champion Chelsea against Lille of France.
Bayern Munich will face off against Salzburg, an Austrian club that makes its debut in these instances, instead of Atlético.
And Liverpool, who were going to meet Salzburg, ended up paired with Inter Milan.
The rest were like this: Sporting Lisbon-Manchester City, Benfica-Ajax, and Villarreal-Juventus.
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The first leg matches will be played midweek between February 15 and 23.
The return will be between March 8 and 16.
The second draw ceremony began with an apology from Giorgio Marchetti, the UEFA tournament director.
Marchetti wanted to exempt the governing body of European football from guilt by pointing out that
the technical errors were made by an external provider
.
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With the new draw
the Champions were left without a duel between Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo
.
In any case, the most attractive game continues to have PSG, by far the best team in the group stage.
Madrid eliminated PSG in the same phase in 2018, in Mbappé and Neymar's first season in Paris.
The PSG-Madrid clashes will also have Mbappé facing a team everyone points to as his next destination when his contract expires at the end of the season.
On the other hand, Messi will collide with Madrid again.
As part of Barcelona, the Argentine star became the top scorer in the history of the Spanish classic, scoring 26 goals.
La Pulga
left Spain at the end of the summer when the Catalan club - hit by a financial crisis - was unable to renew his contract.
Apart from Ramos, injured during his first season in the French capital, PSG also has two other former Madrid players in its ranks: Costa Rican goalkeeper Keylor Navas and Argentine midfielder Angel di María.
A duel of dispatches will also be noticed.
PSG opposed the creation of the Superliga, the failed project launched in April by Madrid president Florentino Pérez.
Madrid had urged UEFA to keep the original match with Benfica.
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Emilio Butragueño, Real Madrid's director of institutional relations, described
what happened in the draw
as “
surprising, regrettable and very difficult to understand
”.
"We face this tie with all the enthusiasm, aware of what this competition means for the club and our fans and also aware of the difficulties, due to the rival and the category of players they have," he added about the crossing with PSG.