Who’s in Leicester City’s Europa League group and the Foxes chances

Get your passports, book your tickets because Leicester City is going around Europe once again! The UEFA Europa League draw is out. What does this mean?

Another new European campaign is upon us. The buzzing excitement is off the charts, but the Foxes’ mood might have been dropping as the draw set a vital roadblock in our way of steamrolling the group stages like last time.

What happened? Before we dive into that, you all should know that the 51st season of the competition is getting revamped. It would be having several changes in its structure. Having three separate UEFA club competitions, the traditional rules have been altered to make the formats more exciting. If you want to know the specifics click here.

Leicester City’s UEFA Europa League draw

The four drawing pots were decided on their UEFA coefficients. I dreaded a few teams that could come up against us as serious threats. Out of which Napoli (Italy) was at the prime spot for my cautious nature as not by any stretch of the imagination does it have the squad that is deemed worthy for a secondary competition.

On completely being taken aback, my nightmare came to fruition. The Foxes were put in Napoli’s group C. The other teams we drew up against us were Spartak Moscow (Russia) and Legia Warszawa (Poland). Now you can call it even-steven because all the sides in this competition are, for the most part, on a similar platform.

An exception to that would be Napoli. Here’s why- Napoli nearly missed out on Champions League football much like us, but in terms of quality Gli Azzurri holds some of the most exciting footballers on the continent. Even without the legendary Maradona, Napoli remains a force to be reckoned with.

The combined firepower of Dries Mertens, Victor Osimhen, and Lorenzo Insigne to Giovanni Di Lorenzo, Konstantinos Manolas, and Kalidou Koulibaly in defense of Alex Meret or David Ospina in goal makes this side proper title contenders.

Apart from that, the added pressure of finishing at the top of the group remains a non-immediate concern. Our back and forth against the sides of Moscow and Warsaw would be interesting as they both are having a rough patch domestically compared to the places they finished last season. Gathering points off them should not be too hard if we don’t get complacent.

Frankly, Leicester City is capable of scraping out points off some of the best sides, but with the history of the injuries that we have, we cannot be very confident of dominating the challenge at hand. The UEL draw is the last indication that we needed to foreshadow the urgent need for a last-minute credible right-winger for an almighty push.