The inaugural Champions League play-offs reached their enthralling conclusion this week, with Real Madrid, Paris Saint-Germain, Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund, Feyenoord, PSV, Benfica and Club Brugge all securing a place in the round of 16. They will be picked out of the hat in Friday's draw alongside Liverpool, Barcelona, Arsenal, Inter, Atletico Madrid, Bayer Leverkusen, Lille and Aston Villa, who all qualified automatically after finishing in the top eight of the league phase.
A grand total of 160 games have already been played in this season's competition, 35 more than across the entire previous format, and there are still another 29 to come before the 2024-25 European champions are crowned on May 31 at the Allianz Arena in Munich. It's been an exhausting journey to this point, but there's no denying that the play-offs brought back the sense of jeopardy that was lacking in the first stage.
Only one of the 16 matches ended up goalless as fans were treated to breathless end-to-end contests like Manchester City's 3-2 home defeat to Real Madrid and Benfica's 3-3 draw with Monaco. Most teams ditched a safety-first approach in favour of a gung-ho one, which made for quite the spectacle, and not all of the historically elite clubs managed to survive.
We now know the main contenders, the dark horses, and the complete failures who have a lot of soul-searching to do over the next few months. GOAL runs through all the winners and losers of the play-off phase below...