Why isn’t John Stones playing for Manchester City in the Champions League?

The UCL quarter-finals continue on Wednesday with Manchester City hosting Real Madrid and Bayern Munich taking on Arsenal.

The big team news of Wednesday’s Champions League games was the absence of John Stones from the Manchester City team to face Real Madrid.

The Englishman was a key part of the City team that lifted the Champions League last year to complete a famous treble. He starts on the bench for today’s second leg at the Etihad Stadium as City come up against a fierce Madrid attack.

In recent years we’ve seen how the absence of a key player in a crucial game can spell disaster for teams’ Champions League dreams. Manchester City reached the UCL final for the first time in their history in 2021, where they came up against Premier League rivals Chelsea.

City were the stronger team in domestic competition but Pep Guardiola opted against playing either Rodri or Fernandinho as a defensive midfielder, fielding the more offensively-minded Ilkay Gundogan in the role. Without that extra layer of protection City were hit on the break by Chelsea’s Kai Havertz who scored the only goal of the game to deny City their first European title.

European soccer’s elite club competition is now into the quarter-finals, where eight genuine giants are battling it out for a place in the final four. The first games in those two-legged ties was played last week, with the all-important second legs taking place across Tuesday 16 and Wednesday 17 April.

The order of the Tuesday and Wednesday fixtures has flipped for this week’s UCL ties. Borussia Dortmund, Atlético Madrid, Barcelona and Paris Saint-Germain all played their first leg games on Wednesday, but have moved to Tuesday for the return fixtures.

On Tuesday Borussia Dortmund overturned a 2-1