John Stones and Kevin De Bruyne have come into the Manchester City starting line-up for tonight’s UEFA Champions League clash with Club Brugge.January signings Abdukodir Khusanov and Omar Marmoush

Manchester City avoided a catastrophic early exit from the Champions League and defeated Club Brugge to advance to the playoff round of the competition.

And so we come to the final week of the Champions League’s new league phase. Never before has European football known 36 teams jostling for position in its biggest competition and by tomorrow, it will be time to part with 12 of them once and for all.

The league phase of this year’s Champions League was concluded on Wednesday night. All the 18 games were played simultaneously around Europe. Here’s how the final group fixtures ended up: PSV 3-2 Liverpool Bayern Munich 3-1 Slovan Bratislava Dortmund 3-1 Shakhtar Donetsk Leverkusen 2-0 Sparta Prague Girona 1-2 Arsenal Barcelona 2-2 Atalanta Brest

The Champions League knockout phase is nearly here but 16 teams will need to go through the play-offs in order to reach the next round of the tournament. The new Champions League format, used for the first time this season,