Champions League winners and losers: Chelsea not feeling blue in Europe
The three-month group stage slog is over and the UEFA Champions League will enter its winter hibernation having whittled the field down from 32 teams to 16, relegating eight third-placed teams to the Europa League and sending the last-placed eight home outright.
[ FC Yahoo: Arsenal beats Olympiakos to complete great group-stage escape ]
When the tournament enters its business end, returning with the knockout stages in the middle of February, it will all be on the line. But first, let's take a look back and pick out five winners and five losers of the group stage – in no particular order.
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WINNERS
Chelsea
Going into its final game at home against group leaders Porto on Wednesday, Chelsea needed a win to ensure that it would advance. Because a loss and a win by Dynamo Kiev over pointless Maccabi Tel Aviv could have sent Jose Mourinho's side home and made this dumpster fire of a Blues season even worse.
Their lead didn't come in the most elegant of ways, but Diego Costa's parried finish caromed off Marcano and into goal and then Willian doubled the score with a trademark strike from distance to make it 2-0. Almost as importantly, Chelsea played well, suggesting that it didn't just salvage its European campaign but also continued to turn things around. (A 1-0 loss to Bournemouth last Saturday was dispiriting, but the Blues also played better than they had in weeks.)
Cristiano Ronaldo
The three-time World Player of the Year, who has won the last two of those trophies consecutively, is supposed to be in decline. And he has indeed become a less mobile player. But his production hasn't suffered any for it.
To wit, Ronaldo scored two braces, a hat trick and whatever you call scoring four goals in a game to set a new record with 11 goals during the Champions League group stage. He scored more than half of his team's 19 goals in this phase, as Real Madrid cruised into the next round with the group-winner's seed.
PSV and Gent
Every year sees a few underdogs surprise the pack and reach the knockout rounds. But this season's Cinderella stories were particularly unlikely. PSV lost its two best players in Memphis and Georginio Wijnaldum to Manchester United and Newcastle United, respectively, but it made it through a group with Wolfsburg and United – oh, irony.
Gent, meanwhile, had the longest of shots of survival in a group with Zenit St. Petersburg, Valencia and Lyon. The Belgians have the third-lowest UEFA coefficient in the main tournament with just 13.44. By comparison, Real, Barcelona and Bayern Munich have 171.99, 164.99 and 154.88, respectively. Valencia's was 99.99, Zenit's 90.09 and Lyon had one of 72.98. But Gent advanced by a four-point margin anyway.
Manchester City
For once, Man City qualified fairly comfortably from the usual brutal draw. In spite of a come-from-ahead loss to Juventus in its opener, City beat Sevilla twice and Borussia Moenchengladbach twice – coming from behind in three of those wins – to improve on a weak 2-for-4 record of surviving the group stage.
Dynamo Kiev
Certainly, Kiev was only playing Maccabi in its final game on Wednesday, but it still had to win and hope that the Chelsea-Porto game would produce a victor as well. Otherwise, even a victory would have thrown up a three-way tie, which would have complicated things considerably.
Denys Harmash scored in the 16th minute to send Dynamo into the next round for the first time since its late-90s heyday.
LOSERS
Olympiakos
All the Greeks had to do to advance was hold off Arsenal at home, in their daunting stronghold. If they lost by one or fewer goals and avoided conceding three times, they were through. But in a flat performance, they let Olivier Giroud score a hat trick and allow Arsenal to complete a stunning turnaround to reach the last 16 for a 16th successive campaign.
Manchester United
The long and short of it is that Louis van Gaal's men dropped points all over the place. They spilled five against PSV, three against Wolfsburg and two against CSKA Moscow. On the final day, all they had to do was beat Wolfsburg or hope that PSV lost. But United lost and PSV won. And so that made it three times in five years that the Red Devils failed to survive the group stage. It feels like a long time ago now that United reached three Champions League finals in four years, but that run only ended in 2011.
Valencia
Not even a soft draw could get rookie manager Gary Neville's new club into the knockout rounds. And this will make life hard in Valencia, where crippling debt is imperiling owner Peter Lim's rehabilitation project. The extra revenue was badly needed. But a 2-0 home loss to Lyon and Gent's win over heretofore perfect Zenit knocked the Spaniards out.
FC Porto
Going into the final round of games, the Portuguese powerhouse sat atop Group G. And a draw with Chelsea would have done the trick to advance. But after going undefeated in its first four games, winning three, Porto lost its last two games and found itself leapfrogged by Chelsea and Dynamo on the last day. As such, it became the only team to collect 10 points and be knocked out.
That team that sold Chicharito
Bayer Leverkusen eagerly snapped up Mexico star striker Javier Hernandez when he became available again last summer. And he has provided an instant return on its investment.
Not only has he already scored seven times in the Bundesliga, but he also tallied four goals in the Champions League, making him one of the 10 most successful goal scorers in the tournament thus far. That Bayer came close to advancing at all was in large part Chicharito's doing.
So who was that team again that let him leave and then found itself short of reliable strikers? Oh yeah.
It was United.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.
