Perfect Records Walk Into Spain

Five teams are still perfect in this Champions League. Only two of them play today — and both of them have to do it in Spain.

Paris Saint-Germain and Aston Villa sit first and second in the league-phase table, level on points and goal difference, separated only by goals scored. At noon Pacific, PSG walk into the Estadio de la Cerámica to face Villarreal, while Villa walk into the Spotify Camp Nou to face Barcelona. By mid-afternoon, at least one perfect record is expected to be gone — and it could easily be both.

PSG arrive as the competition's pace-setters, three wins from three with the attack doing the separating. But this is a thinner Paris side than the one that has been rolling through the league phase: Ousmane Dembélé, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, Marquinhos and Nuno Mendes are all out, and Villarreal at home is not the fixture anyone picks to protect a perfect record with a patched-up squad. The Yellow Submarine have lost twice in this competition, but they pushed Liverpool to a 4-3 finish on Matchday 3, and the Cerámica is not a ground that gives visiting favourites anything for free.

Villa's assignment is louder. Barcelona are the one side in today's pair with a genuine grievance: they lost the reverse of this table's top line 4-2 at PSG on Matchday 3, and they come in warm, having put six past Alavés on Saturday. Lamine Yamal needs one goal to break the under-20 scoring record he shares with Kylian Mbappé in this competition, and he will spend the evening running at a Villa defence that has conceded the fewest goals of any of the perfect five.

And then there is the man in the Villa dugout.

Unai Emery has been here before — literally, and in the worst way. In 2017 he was the Paris Saint-Germain manager who won a round-of-16 first leg 4-0 against Barcelona and then stood on the Camp Nou touchline while his team lost the second leg 6-1, going out 6-5 on aggregate in the comeback the sport now simply calls La Remontada. Nine years on, he returns to the same ground, with a different club, carrying a perfect record he would very much like to keep. The stadium does not hand those out.

That is what makes today's double so good. Perfection in November is fragile by design — the league phase is built to send the best teams into each other's grounds — but it rarely lines up this neatly: the top two, on the same day, at the same kickoff, both away, both in the same country, one of them coached by a man with history in the building.

Follow both games live: PSG at Villarreal in the Game Center and Aston Villa at Barcelona in the Game Center. The full Matchday 4 picture is in our Champions League Matchday 4 preview.

By tonight, the perfect five becomes a perfect four at best. Spain decides who survives.