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Soccer

 
 
 
Another victory for Liverpool sees the champions go third just like that. Man Utd slip up again and Spurs and Leicester lose. Citeh are starting to look invincible.
 
LFC wakes the heck up. Liverpool's third goal was goal of the season gorgeous.

Is it too late for the EPL title? Probably not. Man City is unlikely to have an absurd run to the end that matched their finish two seasons ago. Man United and Leicester dropped points to level things out under City.
 
How bad is Liverpool's funk? One of the best keepers in the world made several bad plays that led to two deciding goals. Man City beats Liverpool, coming close to putting Liverpool out of the race for the EPL title. Liverpool still has the Champions League, but really, I'm not hopeful. The injuries on the back line have just disturbed the club too much.
 
Watching a few games in the Champion's League round of 16, predictably the teams that are good beat the teams that are bad after dominating possession the entire game.

I didn't know much about Bayern until last year, but tuned in to see them perform against a weaker team. The commentary made for an interesting case study in how the weaker side can fail miserably against such a strong team. Lots of mistakes, while Bayern picked them apart. You almost feel bad for some of the players.
 
Liverpool facing off against Real Madrid in the never-ending odd season that is 20/21. Real Madrid sits third on their table and Liverpool FC, sits... well.. they beat Arsenal 3-0 over the weekend, so they have that.

LFC have struggled with a ridiculous number of injuries and even their World Class keeper Allison has been bit by the Fabian Bartez bug. Klopp sounds as if he has given up on the Champions League at this point, but honestly, they are just on form Robertson and Alexander-Arnold from knocking top European teams out. If past performance means anything, Liverpool is in trouble, but they can win with their talent. Also Real Madrid is suffering from injuries too. It is a shame Sergio Ramos can't have an anvil dropped on his head after his challenge in the Finals a few years ago. Though I'd be happy enough with an anvil dropping on him anywhere.

Thanks to how fractured sports programming is these days, unless you subscribe to the sub-par CBS... I mean Paramount+ (because companies can't come out with their own ideas), you need to try and find Univision and watch it in Spanish.
 
Liverpool fail 3-1, but a 2-0 win in Anfield gets them through... so no worries until they cede a goal. YNWA... You'll Never Win Again? *sigh*

Meanwhile, the US National Team is inexplicably ranked 20th in the world. The US, the team that failed to qualify for the last World Cup, haven't actually accomplished much since then and are now 20th. FIFA bases their rankings based on recent performance, regardless how utterly unimportant the games are. There are plenty of opportunities to justify that ranking, and climbing up with the summer ahead. I'm on a wait and see stance.
 
This has been a really odd season. The pandemic has made watching it harder, with the irony that the EPL made it easier for people to watch in England. I haven't watched many Liverpool games at all this season and am basically illiterate about the remainder of the EPL, other than Man City is way up in the table.
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
This has been a really odd season. The pandemic has made watching it harder, with the irony that the EPL made it easier for people to watch in England. I haven't watched many Liverpool games at all this season and am basically illiterate about the remainder of the EPL, other than Man City is way up in the table.
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I agree. I haven't really been able to follow it much at all, despite my team being there for the first time in years.

We are doing well for a newly promoted side, and have had a run of good results recently, including a 2-1 away win against Man City on Saturday, where we led 1-0 at half time, and played the entire second half with ten men.
 
The Special One has been sacked by Tottenham. No surprise there, Spurs have been underwhelming despite a cup final coming up but a complete capitulation in Europe was probably what did him in. Where to now I wonder.

An interesting development in European football is the proposed European “super league” put forward by 12 of the big clubs in Europe. Lots of backlash and rage going on surrounding this. Arsenal fans trust declare it “the death of Arsenal as a sporting institution” which is a hoot considering the position they have been in for quite a few seasons. I predict it will come to nothing.
 
Appears the future of European Football is on pause, as Chelsea say they are filing paperwork to officially request "backsies" on the European Super League (ESL). The ownership of Chelsea, an ungodly rich Russian, saw the tea leaves in the form of flaming torches approaching Stamford Bridge. Chelsea is the first team to withdraw from the not yet set in stone ESL, which was announced yesterday and has been condemned by everyone except the owners of the teams that proposed the ESL.

There is still no word on how Tottenham got a spot in the ESL. Since the turn of the Millennium, they have one piece of hardware, the League Cup (and that was 13 years ago). They finished in the top 3 in the EPL, three times, and haven't won it in that span (or roughly 40 years before the turn of the Millennium). I know, Liverpool aren't drowning in trophies, but they have two Champions League trophies and EPL title, and several smaller pieces of hardware. Stoke City has more FA Cup finals appearances (1) than Tottenham (0).
 
I read an article a few weeks ago that mentioned how most of the super clubs are owned by over-spending sociopaths whose teams are unsustainable and continuously lose money.

I think there is an argument to be made that something needs to be done about super clubs, but I don't think that's a new league for a bunch of teams that will eventually collapse financially.
 
Well the European Super League has crashed and burned already. We’re they even serious in the first place ?
 
rousseau said:
I read an article a few weeks ago that mentioned how most of the super clubs are owned by over-spending sociopaths whose teams are unsustainable and continuously lose money.
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Most of them suffer from different sins, though the they have made a mess of the transfer market with player values skyrocketing like the US housing market during the W Administration.

A team like Man City is overspending, and their owners have to hide the funding for it. Manchester United is owned by asshole Americans that have things overleveraged with debt. Not as bad as Gillette/Hicks but it isn't pretty. Liverpool is running under debt but not nearly as much. It gets a bit hard to tell at times with transfers. Liverpool sold Coutinho for something like eleventy trillion, and they actually showed a profit! La Liga is just a mess financially. I can't imagine La Liga would have survived the ESL.

But as I noted above, no one supported the announcement. I think the owners might have grossfully misread what the fan position would be. Had the fans been at their side, that'd given them a lot of capital to move forward. But the fans hated the concept, especially the fans of the teams involved.
 
The owners misread the reaction of their fans, their league, UEFA, FIFA and their players. Unless this was just a gigantic ruse to boost their negotiation position, they really screwed up. But at least they were open about their unmitigated avarice.

On another note, West Ham is still in the hunt for a Champions League place - unbelievable!!! Big game for them and Chelsea on Saturday. I just hope NBC does not put it on Peacock.
 
I'm surprised Glazer even tried to apologize. "You know, even if I was sorry, you wouldn't care anyway" probably would have been the most honest. The funny part of all of this, any negotiation power the top teams had with UEFA and FIFA... evaporated. They actually come out of this much weaker than they came into it. Even if this was a bluff, it cost them dearly. UEFA can say to them "What are you going to do, form your own league?" and laugh them out of the room.
Glazer said:
You made very clear your opposition to the European Super League, and we have listened. We got it wrong, and we want to show that we can put things right.

Although the wounds are raw and I understand that it will take time for the scars to heal, I am personally committed to rebuilding trust with our fans and learning from the message you delivered with such conviction.

We continue to believe that European football needs to become more sustainable throughout the pyramid for the long-term. However, we fully accept that the Super League was not the right way to go about it.

In seeking to create a more stable foundation for the game, we failed to show enough respect for its deep-rooted traditions - promotion, relegation, the pyramid - and for that we are sorry.

This is the world's greatest football club and we apologise unreservedly for the unrest caused during these past few days. It is important for us to put that right.
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They keep talking about this being about "sustainability". No one is buying that line. This would have made the game less sustainable, as the top teams would be taking a much larger chunk of pie, leaving much less for the even the first division teams. This was solely about monopolizing the money for the game in their tiny top tier league. More money for them. This was about business, not the sport.
 
It's a good indicator of what's gone wrong with European football. I've enjoyed following it for the past few years, but I've taken a bad smell away and it's hard to un-see the business side. I can watch the premier league all season and there are only a handful of genuinely good, hotly contested games. Half of the league just sits there in mediocrity never accomplishing anything, winning trophies or being demoted.

There's a balance to be struck because the current system favours players, as it should, but clubs really need to be on a more equal financial footing in some way. This is what we're seeing in the NHL, and it's become one of the most tightly contested leagues with fantastic playoffs. I know it's due to the salary cap, but it really does make the product better. One must wonder what would happen if relegation wasn't a thing - a Man Utd being demoted is a serious problem for the organization, and with tighter financial restrictions it becomes a very real possibility.
 
The way things have panned out over the past twenty off years is that most European leagues are dominated by two or three teams. Liverpool winning the league last season was probably an anomaly, similar to Leicester and Blackburn and Man City will get back to dominating the league. Similar in France, Spain, Germany, Belgium and Portugal. The Europa league is a better competition than the "champions" league in my opinion.
 
In a shocker, Jose Mourinho doesn't last two years (or 18 months) at Tottenham. The Special One's signing in Tottenham was more surprising and shocking than walking in on your grandparents having sex... with your pets. Or, at least that is how The Mirror put it. His classic style of overspending, talking too much, winning initially but then poisoning the locker room so badly that knife fights break out every other week... didn't seem like a good fit with Tottenham who historically don't spend a lot on the transfer market. Mourinho, who won't eat a burger that someone else hasn't spent 100x the asking price for, simply didn't have the philosophy of being a Tottenham manager. Tottenham needed to replace Pochettino after his sacking when he complained about not enough spending in order to continue keeping Tottenham fighting for Europe. Pochettino was definitely a much better fit for Tottenham, but EU regulations clearly state no manager can stay at one team for more than 5 years... or at least it seems to be a law.

Regardless, Mourinho didn't do poorly at Tottenham, they are in the League Cup final, the best trophy they ever seem to be able to get to a final for (yes, they were in the Champions League final once, but that was an accident), but it hasn't gone well either. Tottenham sit somewhere in the top 20 (probably top 17) of the EPL, but this experiment seemed doomed to failure like making a breakfast cereal out of meat and fish eggs.
 
Good grief, Manchester Utd v Liverpool called off due to protesting fans getting in to the stadium. I saw some footage and it’s baffling how they got in to the stadium since it was known ahead of time that a protest was planned for today. Fans are demanding that the current owners sell the club.
 
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