Liverpool have won six European Cups, and the squad starting this Champions League campaign contains almost nobody who was there for the most recent one. Mohamed Salah left at the end of 2025-26 after nine years and 48 goals in the competition. Arne Slot was sacked at the end of the 2025-26 season, replaced by Andoni Iraola. Anyone reading Liverpool vs Atletico Madrid odds is therefore pricing a team that has barely played together, and that is a different problem from pricing a bad one.
A Squad Assembled in two Windows
Florian Wirtz is 23. Milos Kerkez is 22, Giovanni Leoni 19, and Rio Ngumoha 18. Alexander Isak arrived from Newcastle at the start of last season for a British record fee before his 26th birthday. This summer’s new signings include 24-year-old Bradley Barcola, 21-year-old Jeremy Jacquet, and 23-year-old Victor Munoz.
Set against that, Virgil van Dijk is 35 and Alisson Becker 33, and they are the only two starters from the 2019 final still at the club.
That is a squad with a high ceiling and no shared memory. In a 38-game league, the second of those matters more than the first.
Why Europe can Suit a New Team Better Than the League
The league phase forgives a slow start in a way the Premier League does not. There are 36 clubs, each playing eight matches against eight different opponents, and 24 of them come out the other side, the top eight going straight to the round of 16 and the rest into a play-off round. A title challenge needs something nearer 85 points across 38 games, which rewards depth and consistency rather than eight decent nights.
Style pulls the same way. Iraola’s Bournemouth pressed high and attacked in straight lines, which needs an opponent willing to play out from the back and commit players forward. Premier League sides in the bottom half rarely oblige. They defend deep at Anfield, keep the game in a small space and make it a set-piece contest, and that is where a young team without settled patterns drops points.
Opponents from La Liga, the Bundesliga and Serie A more often build short and hold a higher line, which is the game a fast, direct side wants.
Iraola is New to This as Well
Iraola took Bournemouth from 12th to ninth to sixth in three seasons and into Europe for the first time in the club’s history, then left before that campaign began. He has never managed a Champions League match. As a player, he made more than 500 appearances for Athletic Bilbao and reached the 2012 Europa League final, so the competition is not unfamiliar, though the dugout version of it is.
The inexperience cuts both ways. A manager with no European template also has no habits to unlearn, and a two-legged tie gives him a fortnight to prepare for one named opponent. That is much closer to the way he worked on the south coast than a Saturday-Tuesday-Saturday league run is.
The Players the Campaign Turns On
Wirtz decides how good this gets. He won a domestic double at Bayer Leverkusen in 2023-24 and reached a Europa League final in the same season, so he has already played the long knockout games most of this squad has not. Isak and Ekitike give Iraola two different ways to attack the same space, one holding the line and one running beyond it.
Anyone working through Champions League odds should look at the full-backs next. Kerkez and Jeremie Frimpong are attackers by instinct, an asset in an open European tie and a liability against a low block. Then there is Van Dijk, who has won the competition and is the one voice in the back line that has been through a semi-final.
What Experience Still Buys
Knockout football is where inexperience shows: an away leg to manage, extra time, penalties. Atletico Madrid won 3-2 at Anfield after extra time in March 2020, which is a fair picture of what an older, settled side can do to a younger one over 210 minutes.
So the honest answer is that Europe is the easier of the two jobs, not an easy one. Even so, Liverpool won the 2005 final in a season they finished fifth in the Premier League, 37 points behind Chelsea. Domestic consistency and a European run have never needed the same team. Betting is for over-18s only.
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