AC Milan vs Liverpool LIVE: Champions League team news and line-ups tonight

“He’s a great goalkeeper. He has done incredibly well for three, four, five years.

“Since he came to Milan, he has always played wonderfully, and with the French national team he has replaced a great goalkeeper (Hugo Lloris). He is a very physical player – quick, technical.”

Alisson Becker, the Liverpool goalkeeper, took on media duties alongside his manager Arne Slot and spoke about what it feels like to be playing Champions League football again.

He said: “Imagine not doing something you really like doing for a year, and how much you’d be looking forward to doing it again.

“That’s the way we feel. Playing in the Champions League is one of the reasons I came to Europe from Brazil. We will do our best to try and win it.”

Uefa’s elite club-level competition now involves 36 teams, which means an extra two matches in a group stage which now does not finish until the end of January as opposed to mid-December.

“For us players as well, it is good that you are going to play against the best in Europe – and it is always a good idea to add some games to the calendar that is not busy… I am being ironic a little bit.

“Sometimes nobody asks the players what they think about adding more games so maybe our opinion does not matter.

“But everybody knows what we think about having more games. Everybody is tired of that but we have to bring those kind of things on side and stay focused on the big challenge we have here.”

AC Milan XI: Maignan, Calabria, Tomori, Fofana, T. Hernandez; Loftus-Cheek, Reijnders, Pavlovic; Pulisic, Morata, Rafael Leao

Liverpool XI: Alisson; Alexander-Arnold, Konate, Van Dijk, Tsimikas; Gravenberch, Mac Allister, Szoboszlai; Salah, Jota, Gakpo

As star players approach the new Champions League season this week, there are still many who don’t get the new format. Uefa even joked about it in its promotional video at the draw. The players are far from alone in this, with plenty of fans and even club executives having the same discussion.

It could be argued this is a real problem for the basic functioning of a competition, not to mention how it represents the needless complication of a sport that is historically popular due to its simplicity. There is still hope within Uefa that everyone will understand once the reality of the games and the table take shape in front of their eyes. That’s quite a rare justification but then, this whole change represents quite a leap. It also represents the start of an era where our understanding and expectations of how football works will be completely scrambled.

Instead of 32 competing sides being divided into eight groups of four, all 36 teams in this year’s Champions League will form a single league. Each entrant will play four games at home and four games away for a total of eight fixtures, two more than under the previous format. These eight encounters will be with eight different opponents.

The top eight sides in the league after the competition’s first phase will progress directly to the last-16. Teams placed ninth to 24th will have to negotiate a play-off round, while teams that finish 25th or lower will be eliminated from all European competition.

The 36 clubs will be seeded into four different pots based on their individual club coefficient at the start of the season. Each team will face two sides from each pot, one at home and one away. Pot 1 will include defending champions Real Madrid and the other strongest club sides by Uefa coefficient.

The Liverpool manager Arne Slot says there is no fear in his team over tonight’s trip to the San Siro. Speaking in his pre-match press conference he said: “I don’t think any manager is scared to play the other team, but we have a lot of respect for AC Milan.

“They have quality; we’re not scared but we respect all their players. They have shown they are in good form with a very good 4-0 win [against Venezia]. Scared is not the word we would use. We respect a lot.”

Slot also addressed the new Champions League format and picked out a couple of positives saying: “As someone who loves football, every night there is a nice fixture. For example, tomorrow everyone who loves football is looking forward to our game. It is positive for the person at home, [and] for the players.”

It used to be that Milan-Liverpool matches would crown Champions League seasons rather than kick them off, and it’s not the only thing about Tuesday’s meeting that has been upended. The two clubs have consistently been the names directly underneath Real Madrid in the competition’s list of honours since 1990, at which point the Spanish club had six European Cups, with Milan and Liverpool four apiece.

It’s now 15, seven, six. Despite that almost perpetual status as the next greatest clubs on the continent, AC Milan and Liverpool actually only met four times before Tuesday’s fixture at the San Siro. More fittingly, two of those have been Champions League finals, and it was after the last of those that the late Silvio Berlusconi triumphantly came out with the following:

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