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The 60-year wait for UEFA Champions League (UCL) football at Bologna is over after a fifth-placed finish in Serie A last season allowed them to qualify for the competition for the first time since their last Italian top-flight title win in 1964, after which they appeared in the preliminary round of the old European Cup. The Rossoblù are one of five sides to make their UCL debut this year, as the competition introduces its revamped league format to replace the group phase, with those matches running until January.
However, the departures over the summer of manager Thiago Motta and crucial players Riccardo Calafiori and Joshua Zirkzee seem to have affected the club, as Bologna are winless in their opening four Serie A games this season (D3, L1) and they haven’t now won in six successive matches in a sequence stretching back to May. Their morale may have improved slightly after coming from two goals down to salvage a 2-2 draw against newly promoted Como on Saturday.
In contrast to their opponents, Shakhtar Donetsk are regular participants in Europe’s most prestigious club competition as they prepare for an eighth consecutive appearance in the main phase and will now have featured in all but one of the last 15 seasons. This will though be their first match against Italian opponents since 2021/22, when they met Inter Milan, to whom they lost away 2-0, which forms part of an uninspiring record on the road in Italy (W2, D3, L10).
The reigning Ukrainian champions have actually won only one of their last ten games overall against Italian opposition, when beating Atalanta in the 2019/20 edition (D3, L6). Shakhtar warmed up in style for this clash with a 5-2 win over Karpaty Lviv at the weekend, which was their third victory in the opening five league matches of the campaign (L2), with three of those encounters featuring at least five match goals.
Players to watch: Santiago Castro opened his account for the season with Bologna at the weekend and will look to build on that against Shakhtar on what will be his 20th birthday, while his last two goalscoring appearances have also seen him record an assist. Artem Bondarenko, meanwhile, registered a hat-trick at the weekend, meaning that five of his last seven goals have now come before the break.
Hot stat: Just one of the last Shakhtar’s 23 games has ended in a draw (W18, L4).
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