Messi and PSG are favorites for the title this season. They also showed great football last year, but allowed themselves to be tricked in the decisive moments. Manchester City is also good, but you cannot compare it to PSG in the front. A mutual confrontation would be nice, but we have not seen that in recent years. Real Madrid are an outsider, but often rise above themselves in the CL, resulting in a sensational win over Liverpool last season. And in that match they turned out to be very stable. Liverpool will not win the CL this season.
PSG and man City have both been great this season but its early to start tagging them favourites. The competition will resume after the world finals and we will see maybe they will keep same momentum. PSG has a big test against Bayern and it will be a handful of test for them, until then I am not making any predictions.
Again do not rule out Liverpool because of there bad first half of the season. Many clubs have won this competition playing poorly for the first half of the season. Chelsea's last champions league triumph is a case study
It is really hard to trust PSG to perform well in the Champions League. In the World Cup final, two of PSG's most prominent players will take part. I don’t know how fit they (Messi and Mbappé) are going to be to play for PSG after the World Cup final. And Neymar has already picked up an injury. I am still not sure that he is healthy 100% right now.
But on the other hand, Manchester City are playing excellently in the Champions League. They have a really competent squad as well. And the scoring machine, Haaland is also playing really well for them.
Currently, I am reluctant to trust Liverpool because of their poor performance in the Premier League. They will be under some mental pressure to prove themselves. And that might result in subpar performance for all of them.
I don’t have much hope for Bayern Munich because they have an injury-inflicted squad right now.