In focus: #CLVolleyM Pool B

Let’s start our men’s CEV Champions League Volley 2024 pool previews with Pool B, one of the two with the full line-up of participants already known. Four well-known teams with solid past Champions League experience will lock horns in the Pool B battles.

This pool is the last one to get underway, with all four teams opening their campaigns on Thursday, November 23. With Poland’s Asseco Resovia Rzeszow hosting France’s Tours VB at the RCWS Podpromie at 18:00 local time and Italy’s Trentino Itas Trento entertaining Slovenia’s ACH Volley Ljubljana at the ilT quotidiano Arena at 20:30 local time, a hard-fought race, consisting of a total of 12 matches, split into the six legs of a double round-robin format, will get underway. It will last through January 17, 2024, when the pool winner will have advanced directly to the quarterfinals of Europe’s most prestigious club competition, while the pool runner-up and quite possibly the third-placed team will have booked their spots in the eighthfinal playoffs.

ACH Volley Ljubljana will once again represent Slovenia as the country’s national champion, engaging in its 18th Champions League season. The club has been a regular participant since 2006, skipping only the 2021-2022 season, with its best result coming in 2010, when it finished fourth. Last season the Orange Dragons finished third in Pool E on a 2-4 win-loss record and moved on to the CEV Cup competition. The club’s showcase contains one CEV Top Teams Cup trophy (2007), 13 MEVZA League crowns and 19 Slovenian national championship titles. In the 2023-2024 season of the national league, the team from Ljubljana is currently running second on 7-1 and 21 points. Slovenian international libero Jani Kovacic and North Macedonian scoring machine Nikola Gjorgiev are among ACH Volley’s leading players.

Poland’s Asseco Resovia Rzeszow returns to the Champions League for the first time since the 2016-2017 season, when it registered its seventh appearance in Europe’s top club competition. The team qualified for this season’s edition as PlusLiga 2023 bronze medallists. Resovia’s best Champions League result was the silver medal it earned in 2015. It was the second time the club reached Europe’s second place, after finishing runner-up in the 1973 European Champions Cup. The team from Rzeszow has never won any of the European Cups, but also reached the CEV Cup final in 2012. In Poland, Asseco has so far collected seven national titles. This season’s stellar line-up, including the likes of Fabian Drzyzga, Jakub Kochanowski, Karol Klos, Klemen Cebulj, Pawel Zatorski, Stephen Boyer, Torey DeFalco and Yacine Louati, is currently sixth in the PlusLiga on 3-2 and 8 points.

Tours VB is about to launch its 18th Champions League campaign. During the club’s best years, its team triumphed as continental champions in 2005, took Champions League silver in 2007 and bronze in 2004. Its rich collection of trophies also features the 2017 CEV Cup and nine French national titles, including the one in 2023 that qualified Tours for the upcoming Champions League edition. In the last edition, the team finished Pool C runners-up and advanced to the eighthfinals. This season, Dutch international Michael Parkinson and his teammates have already picked up their first trophy, the 2023-2024 France Super Cup. However, they are on a negative streak of four consecutive losses in the French league and currently stand 11th on 1-4 and just 3 points.

Reigning Italian champion Trentino Itas Trento is one of the most decorated clubs in the men’s volleyball world and certainly the big favorite to top the final Pool B standings. The team has won the Champions League title three times (2009, 2010 and 2011) and the FIVB Club World Championship crown five times, in addition to a number of other medals in both competitions, as well as the 2019 CEV Cup trophy. In its 12th Champions League appearance last season, Trentino topped Pool D undefeated, but was then dramatically eliminated in the quarterfinals by European champions Grupa Azoty Kedzierzyn-Kozle of Poland in a golden set, following two five-set battles. However, it claimed a Club World Championship silver and its fifth national title in Italy. This season’s squad around Serbian captain Marco Podrascanin includes a number of top-level international stars like Alessandro Michieletto, Daniele Lavia, Jan Kozamernik, Kamil Rychlicki or Riccardo Sbertoli. They are the last unbeaten team remaining in the 2023-2024 Italian SuperLega, leading the standings on 4-0 and 10 points.

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