UEFA Champions League REVIEW 8 Sep 2026: A bizarre handball gifts Aston Villa a Bruges win, Haaland doubles up despite no pre-season, and Ethan Mbappe sees the youngest-ever French red card

The strangest goal of the opening night belonged to Aston Villa, and it came from an incident nobody at Jan Breydel Stadium seemed happy about. Club Brugge levelled at 1-1 through Hugo Vetlesen before Emiliano Buendia restored Villa's lead — via, per Sky Sports's broadcast partner TNT Sports, a moment their own commentator called "quite frankly, a farcical situation": "On his Champions League debut as well for Tyrone Mings. The first goal Aston Villa have conceded in the Champions League and it comes from..." — the handball award that set up Brugge's leveller in the first place, with Villa defender Ezri Konsa arguing it should have brought a second yellow: "It killed the game. If it is a handball, deliberate, then he should get a second yellow, he's on a yellow already so why not send him off for that then?" Nicolas Jackson made it 3-1 before the break and Nicolo Tresoldi's second-half penalty for Brugge made the final score 3-2, with Sky Sports noting how thin the margins were on the run of play: "His side had just 35 per cent possession in Belgium yet produced 21 shots in total with nine on target." Unai Emery pointed to a second-half wobble as the moment Brugge threatened a comeback: "The second half, the mistake changed everything... they then focus 100% to stop us, they were better than us."

In Athens, AEK ended a long European exile: Razvan Marin's 21st-minute goal was enough for a 1-0 win over LASK that, per Crypto Briefing, was "ending an eight-year drought without a win in Europe's premier club competition" for the Greek side. In Madrid, Kylian Mbappe and Federico Valverde put Real Madrid two up inside 23 minutes of Jose Mourinho's Champions League bow against Inter Milan, before Carlos Augusto pulled one back late in a 2-1 Real Madrid win. Cristian Chivu declined to draw conclusions from his side's league form before kickoff: "It's still very early. It has been a fairly balanced start, although they lost their last match undeservedly because they played very well." Xabi Alonso, for his part, downplayed any pressure on Mbappe to deliver the trophy immediately: "He's not anxious, we all feel this is a project that's just starting."

The night's most eventful red card came in Lille, where Real Betis won 3-2 in a match that swung twice — Ayase Ueda's opener cancelled out by a Marc Bartra brace either side of an Alexsandro Ribeiro goal, before Troy Parrott made it 3-2 to the visitors — and turned further when Ethan Mbappe was sent off in the 56th minute. Get French Football News reports the scale of it: "Per Opta, Mbappe (19 years, 253 days) is the youngest player to be sent off in the Champions League for a French club." Manuel Pellegrini had framed the trip beforehand as a landmark for a club long absent from this stage: "It is something very important. First, for bringing joy to the Betis fans and taking another step forward in Europe." Meanwhile in Porto, Erling Haaland scored either side of half-time — the second in stoppage time — to seal a 2-0 win for Man City, doing so, he said, without the usual buildup: "The new season started and I didn't even have a pre-season. I normally have a bit of pre-season but this time, just nothing." Enzo Maresca had flagged the same concern beforehand: "I think it's correct that you see these kinds of players that they start to be tired." And in the night's oddest scoreline, Borussia Dortmund beat Villarreal 3-2 despite two of the five goals being their opponents' own — Renato Veiga turning the ball into his own net to open the scoring for Dortmund, and Serhou Guirassy's stoppage-time own goal cutting the gap back to one after his earlier goal and penalty had put the hosts 3-1 up.