There are still two more rounds to reach the final, each team has the potential to fall in the round of 16, even though the draw results bring together the seeded and unseeded teams. I predict AC Milan, Leverkusen, Liverpool, Sporting, West Ham, Benfica, Brighton and Marseille will advance to the quarter finals. This is only a temporary assumption, because the opportunities for these teams may change in the future, they may improve or they may experience setbacks. Liverpool is the favorite team to win in this seasons, after that there are Leverkusen and AC Milan. However, the European League is full of surprises, fortunately Sevilla did not appear this season, they failed to qualify for the play offs because they finished in fourth place in group B of the Champion League.
your choice is very right and the most important thing is that the main candidates to reach the final round are only Liverpool and Leverkusen who are currently considered very strong in the european league this season and I will not ignore Milan even though this team is also very consistent but it seems very difficult if In the quarter finals, Milan had to compete against Leverkusen and Liverpool, which would be a big disaster for Milan and the opportunity to reach the final would be more difficult if they had competed against one of the two strongest teams in the quarter finals.
Liverpool and Leverkusen are the main candidates to win the title, meanwhile Milan, Atalanta, Roma, Villareal are teams that could also provide a surprise in the Europa League this season. We don't yet know which team will advance to the final, but considering the performance of each team in the domestic league, Liverpool and Leverkusen are two of the 16 best.
Personally, I tend to think Liverpool can advance to the final round of the Europa League this season, but other teams are simply not worth taking lightly. There will be 8 teams that will qualify for the quarter-finals and some of them are easy to predict. Leverkusen, Liverpool, Milan, Roma, Benfica, Atalanta, Villarreal and West Ham are my favorites for the quarter-finals, but of course there is no guarantee whether they will actually qualified.