Giants gamble

london: Real Madrid and Chelsea resume in the Champions League this week after the winter break with new coaches working in the competition for the first time.

Job losses are a strong theme in a season where patience has run thin in the board room and 11 of the 36 Champions League clubs changed coach.

Nine of the 11 were fired, the latest being Xabi Alonso one week ago when Madrid removed him after barely seven months and well set in seventh in the Champions League standings.

Madrid’s new coach Álvaro Arbeloa will take charge of just the third game of his career when hosting Monaco on Wednesday. The last time Madrid hired a novice coach mid-season, Zinedine Zidane’s appointment in January 2016 led to three straight Champions League titles.

Chelsea replaced their Club World Cup-winning coach Enzo Maresca with Liam Rosenior — who had led sister club Strasbourg to top the third-tier Conference League standings — and will host Pafos on Wednesday.

Monaco and Pafos have also changed coaches. Monaco fired Adi Hütter in October and went to another Champions League team, Union Saint-Gilloise, to lure its Belgian league-winning coach Sébastien Pocognoli.

Pafos’s coach in the first half of the season, Juan Carlos Carcedo, bought out his contract this month to return to Spartak Moscow. Pafos hired another Spaniard, Albert Celades, who was in Madrid’s Champions League-winning squad in 2002 and later played at New York Red Bulls.

Also firing their coach this season were Ajax, Atalanta — now fifth in the standings — Benfica, Club Brugge, Juventus and Bayer Leverkusen, which gave Erik Ten Hag just three games before the Champions League even began.

Inter-Arsenal

Stability reigns at Arsenal and Inter Milan, the Premier League and Serie A leaders who meet in the highest profile game of the week of first versus sixth in the standings.

Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal is the only team with six straight wins and now goes back to the scene of its only loss in last season’s league phase. Then, a Hakan Çalhanoglu penalty was decisive at San Siro. Inter matched Arsenal’s pace through four rounds in its first season coached by Cristian Chivu, then lost back-to-back