Girona supporters should savor the Champions League experience, urges coach Michel

Girona manager Michel expressed his excitement on Thursday, urging club fans to savor their debut experience in European soccer. The Catalan side will be taking on formidable opponents such as Liverpool, Paris Saint-Germain, Arsenal, and AC Milan in the Champions League this season.

Fired up by their commanding 4-0 victory over Osasuna, their first win of the 2024-25 campaign, Michel commented on the draw for the new-look 36-team tournament that was held while they were playing on Thursday.

Girona, who were last year's surprise package of the LaLiga season going toe-to-toe with Real Madrid in the title battle and beating Barcelona twice before finishing third, were also drawn to face PSV Eindhoven, Feyenoord, Slovan Bratislava and Sturm Graz.

"I didn't have time to think about it but we are talking about top teams so I just want our fans to be well represented in this tournament and tell them they should go with their heads held high around Europe," Michel told DAZN on Thursday.

"The players have a lot of maturity and are facing it very naturally, focused on the present, which was the game that we had to play today.

"I found out that Liverpool were one of the teams in the group during the game and I was surprised, but I didn't think much more about it due to the circumstances."

Michel praised his players' resilience in recovering from a humbling 3-0 loss to Atletico Madrid on Sunday with a "perfect" game against Osasuna on Thursday.

"We were very well positioned and all the players did a spectacular job, a great game in every sense of the word," Michel said.

"I'm very happy with the team's performance and because there was something strange that I didn't like at all before. Often you only see the negative side, but today the team played a perfect game from the beginning."