To quote Duke Ellington, things ain’t what they used to be over in Germany’s top soccer league. For starters, not a single player from last season’s Bundesliga was on the podium at the Ballon d’Ata awards. Okay, maybe that doesn’t seem so important, but also: no Champions League finalists after 2012-13 no Europa League finalists after 2008-09 dropped from second to fourth place in UEFA rankings since 2017-18 sliding Elo ratings may rank the league fourth by the end of 2019-20 mostly Bundesliga-based squad lost twice in 2018 World Cup group stage executives and players of flagship club seem out of touch with social issues These are…
Read more →
Clubs
Searching for Sergio
As Pep Guardiola has just informed us, this weekend Manchester City will play one more time without their talismanic striker Sergio Agüero. As an Independiente fan, I’ve followed Agüero’s career since he was a teenager playing alongside the likes of Gabriel Milito and Daniel Montenegro. He’s 30 years old now and has never been the most durable player, so the question for Manchester City is inevitably how to replace him. Even for a star of his quality, it’s a much harder task than you might expect. It’s easy to say that every player is unique. But Agüero is particularly different from his peers as a…
Read more →
How good is the Championship?
This week at the Dealmakers in Sports conference in New York, the English Football League’s chief executive, Shaun Harvey, was asked where Major League Soccer clubs would place in his country’s soccer pyramid. He replied that the clubs would probably sit somewhere in the lower half of the Championship or the top of League One, in the second and third tiers respectively. But he added that MLS teams might have a hard time making it through a 46-game season that ran through the winter and would probably be “seen off” by most clubs under his purview. I mostly agree with Harvey’s assessment. NYA uses…
Read more →