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The Champions League is back, and come Friday morning we will at last have a shape for how this is all going to work out. Between now and then is the small matter of rounding out the field for the last 16. For plenty of the big sides there is work to do with Paris Saint-Germain and Real Madrid holding onto one goal leads and Atletico Madrid licking their wounds after a 3-3 draw.

The biggest pressure is on the Serie A giants however. Last year’s finalists Inter returned from Bodo/Glimt having been utterly chastened in a 3-1 loss that has their Champions League hopes on the brink. Juventus’ might already have slipped off their after they were obliterated by Galatasaray, whose star forward is where we’ll kick all of this off.

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1. Is Osimhen a top five striker in the world?

Without wishing to state the obvious, the very best center forwards in the world tend to be the ones who score the most. You might get the odd Roberto Firmino type whose qualities lie in facilitation, but if you wear the No. 9 shirt (or one whose digits add up to nine), you’d best be putting the ball in the onion bag. Move to the very best of the very best, though, and you enter the class of players who can deliver all the goals you need but still, on those rare off days, bend a big contest to their will without scoring. A prime reference point for that might be Victor Osimhen’s obliterating of Juventus in a 5-2 win that will almost certainly have Galatasaray in the last 16 of the Champions League for the first time in 12 years.

What was funny about the devastation wrought by Osimhen on his former boss Luciano Spalletti was that it really didn’t show up on a cursory glance at the stats sheet. Three shots for 0.13 xG, 11 of 18 passes completed, no chances created. You’re telling me this is the guy you’re considering placing behind Erling Haaland and Kylian Mbappe in the pantheon of center forwards, maybe on a par with Ousmane Dembele and Harry Kane? 

Dig a little deeper though and you see something. Ten touches in the opposition box is usually the sort of number a Champions League striker registers when they’re on the positive end of a severe talent mismatch. The 0.41 expected assists is pretty sprightly too, though Opta does not have any assists logged for the Nigerian international. Check UEFA’s data and you will find two and it was those moments that typified the chaos Osimhen created both before and after Juventus went down to 10 men. 

His pressing was ferocious, his commitment in the duels relentless. Gabriel Sara’s opener would not have come about if Osimhen hadn’t sensed a heavy touch by Kenan Yildiz and hit him hard. Galatasaray’s fourth is the poacher’s instinct of a striker reinterpreted for when the other team has possession. Lurking on the blind side, waiting for the moment when Juventus think they can breath because the initial wave of pressure has crashed against them. They never see Osimhen coming.

Such elite off ball play tends to be one of the first things that goes when strikers enter the pantheon of the best on earth. So many reason that they need to save their energy for what they do best. You would figure the intensity would drop off even more when a player moves out of Europe’s top five leagues to the sort of environment he can dominate at 80% energy. And yet Osimhen averages an incredibly impressive 1.75 interceptions per 90 minutes in the Super Lig this season, four times what Mbappe, for instance, does for Real Madrid in league play. It translates on the European stage too. Only eight players win possession in the attacking third more frequently than Osimhen has in this season’s Champions League. All that is to say nothing for how he holds possession when he gets it, bringing others into play.

As for the thing that really matters for strikers, you know that Osimhen delivers on that front. Perhaps not quite with the consistency of last year but 15 goals in 23 games is not to be sniffed at, all the more so when six of them have come in the Champions League. There might not have been any in his last four games but there is no shame in struggling to find the net against Manchester City and Atletico Madrid, particularly when even after Galatasaray’s recent aggressive investment they are not a club that can go toe to toe with those sides on talent terms.

So Osimhen then is quite clearly one of Europe’s outstanding strikers, right? Well probably, when he’s fit. That has been the recurring problem for the 27-year-old, who missed the weekend’s defeat to Konyaspor with a knee injury. He is stated to be a doubt for the trip to Turin too, albeit he is expected to travel. Per Transfermarkt, this was the eighth separate injury he has suffered since leaving Napoli, initially on loan, at the start of last season. They say availability is the best ability. Whether that is or isn’t the case (it isn’t), it might be the only one a striker needs that Osimhen is missing.

2. Can Bodo/Glimt see out their upset on the road?

So, how much of Bodo/Glimt’s stunning 3-1 win over Inter was down to what is probably the most significant home field advantage in the Champions League this season. The artificial turf and freezing temperatures have been a pretty helpful swing factor against not just Inter but Manchester City, Lazio and Porto in the last 18 months. Since the start of the 2020-21 season, Bodo/Glimt have a European record at the Aspmyra Stadion that can stand up against all but the continent’s superteams: 19 wins, two draws and nine defeats. That’s a smidge under two points per game. Their opponents, twice Champions League finalists in that same time period, average exactly two.

And so Bodo/Glimt’s win was one we might have seen coming, but was it enough? Because as good as the Norwegian champions are at home, their road record is pretty abysmal: seven wins, 14 draws and 19 defeats. Most notably they seem to struggle when travelling for knockout games. There are isolated periods of success, winning against Celtic in Glasgow and getting the result they needed away to AZ in the 2021-22 Conference League. The following year the giants of Bohemians and Pyunik fell at home to Bodo/Glimt but not a lot else. Across their last 40 away European matches a goal difference of -20 is bad but it could have been so much worse, their non-penalty xG difference is -29.36. Historically they’re three-quarters of a goal per game worse than their opponents on the road and most of those opponents are not Inter.

So historically Bodo/Glimt have the look of a team that could very plausibly cede a two goal lead to a European juggernaut. But this isn’t 2021-22 Bodo/Glimt. Their money-spinning runs through the Europa League have not only allowed this club to recruit and retain Norwegian stars like Frederik Bjorkan and Kasper Hogh, but to bring back the likes of Patrick Berg and Jens Petter Hauge after moves to the big five leagues. As their manager Kjetil Knutsen explained, this is a team that have only improved from their many trips across the continent.

“I really believe in our identity and in the work we do over time,” he stated. “That [way] it becomes second nature, there’s loyalty, and a culture where we trust the quality we have within the team. We’ve also been extremely fortunate because we’ve been in the Europa [League] over a sustained period, facing stronger and stronger opposition. Both personally and as a [coaching] team, we’ve trusted the process.”

The current iteration shouldn’t be written off as just a side who do the business at home. Kjetil Knutsen’s men took five points on their travels in the league phase, the memorable win against Atletico Madrid following draws at Borussia Dortmund and Slavia Prague, the latter a fighting performance to overturn a two goal deficit in the final 12 minutes. Most worryingly of all for Inter, Bodo/Glimt are proving themselves to be a team who can execute in the particular scenario ahead of them. Four of their 17 goals in this season’s Champions League have come on the counter attack, a tally bettered only by Real Madrid and they average a breakout that ends in a shot once per game. If they can just convert that moment when it comes their way, they will set Inter an almighty task.

3. Will Mbappe break Ronaldo’s single season scoring record?

Even with the new Champions League format exposing players to as many as four extra games in the competition, it feels remarkable that before spring has sprung Kylian Mbappe finds himself so close to what once seemed an unbreakable Champions League record. The 17 goals that Cristiano Ronaldo hammered home in the 2013-14 competition included a healthy dose of group stage output against lesser opposition and some thundering beatdowns on the likes of Schalke, Bayern Munich and Atletico Madrid. Thereafter only Ronaldo got within one again and those who even sniffed it were the best striker in the world in the form of their lives (Robert Lewandowski in 2019-20 and Karim Benzema two years later).

Kylian Mbappe might be the first of those things, only time will tell if the latter is true. What he is not, for the moment at least, is at the head of an all-conquering attack like those led by Lewandowski, Benzema and Ronaldo. Even so he needs just four more goals to match the single season scoring record in this competition.

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You suspect a player averaging 5.7 shots and 0.73 non-penalty xG per 90 will back himself to add a few more against Benfica this week, who have given up nine shots to Mbappe in two games so far in the competition. What bodes best for him in this Champions League iteration is that he has had that very Ronaldo-ish quality of scoring in bunches: two against Monaco, three on Kairat, four against Olympiacos.

The only question is whether Madrid can go far enough in this competition to allow Mbappe to get up to and ahead of his predecessor. Much will depend on Friday’s draw, assuming Los Merengues are in it. If Madrid drop on Manchester City’s side then we are in crapshoot territory, two sides that have hardly inspired great faith in their Champions League chops duking it out once more in games that are reliably incomprehensible. The other option though is Sporting and while any team that has beaten PSG and won in Bilbao will deserve Madrid’s respect, they will also have plenty to fear from an in form Mbappe. Get this guy to the quarterfinals and he might already have delivered the greatest scoring season this competition has seen.