CL knockouts

[tee rex]

Also the earnest discussions of tactics on this thread are entertaining. It's like being at a student party and you're getting totally pissed for the first time in your life and it feels fantastic, while somebody is trying to explain the science behind the fermentation process.

[pebblethefish]

While I absolutely love the analogy Tee Rex, I can't help but wonder, if the first time you ever got drunk was at a student party, what on earth you did with the rest of your teenage years.

[tee rex]

Cydrax. Dandelion and Burdock. An occasional sip of the vicar's sherry. Wild times.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Watching Man City vs Spurs I saw two disjointed teams. Either of them are well capable of beating Ajax due to the quality of their individual players, but I don't see much in the way of a structure.

.........

[anton pulisov]

Obviously it is not Ireland levels of disjointedness, but most of the PL teams play fast paced reactionary football. Even the better PL teams.

[Sporting]

I would venture that Barcelona still try to keep some structure. It may not work too well but I think some kind of defensive plan is there, and the midfield is rarely overrun, The latter point may be the more important one; for all Messi's brilliance there's only a limited number of times he can do it by himself from midfield. Most times it's pressing and quick release of the ball from midfield which opens up opportunities,

[anton pulisov]

Ah right, I think you misread PL as CL there.

[Sporting]

I did.

[DPDPDPDP]

Ajax could make ~100 million on the Champions League. Plus god knows how much they will get for all the players. They are basically obliged to sell them. Take the silly money now and make a huge profit, or let them go for free in two years and make a loss. Frenkie de Jong is already going to Barcelona for 75 million. Which I thought was an absurdly high price at the time. Now, I am not so sure.

The Eredivisie could get even more predictable in the next seasons. But Ajax generally hasn't focused on splashing the cash with the prime aim being to win the Eredivisie. That has traditionally been PSV's thing. Ajax focus more on in investing the cash in a long term structural idea and remaining financially sound. Of course, Ajax being the biggest club in NL means that they will win the Eredivisie a lot. The long term development is what they were doing long before Johan Cruijff put Overmars and Van der Sar in charge of things. The success has always come in waves. You can't force players like Davids, Seedorf, de Ligt and Frenkie de Jong to magically appear every year. You won't get lucky and sign a Litmanen or a Tadic every season. Cruijff and friends started complaining during a low period. Now Overmars and Van der Sar will claim credit for happening to be in charge when things are going well. But I don't care anymore. The Ajax youth system is like a very well run civil service, where the ministers in charge come and go. They can play their politics, but in the end it doesn't matter. And now with Ten Hag, there is a manager who isn't obsessed with the 4-3-3 gospel, who is willing to challenge the Ajax scriptures and try something different.

Of course the interesting thing is that Ajax can't just go out and spend this year's prize money to buy the best players. Those players don't fit into the club's wage structure. Also, not being in the big TV money leagues means that it doesn't make sense for Ajax to splash the cash. The money would run out after a few seasons and they'd go bankrupt like Rangers and PSV. Or you try and splash the cash on cheaper players and end up with Nikos Machlas type players and essentially turn into Celtic.

Nope, they just have to bank the money and continue as is. Being in the Dutch league has turned out to be a blessing. It gives breathing space to develop something different. You don't have to compete in the annual fight for survival that the Premier League arms race has become. Watching Man City vs Spurs I saw two disjointed teams. Either of them are well capable of beating Ajax due to the quality of their individual players, but I don't see much in the way of a structure.

It was very frustrating to see how Celtic have never taken advantage of being in Scotland. Especially when Rangers went under, Celtic had the opportunity to do something different. But they were just happy to buy the SPL for a decade.

As much as I hate to defend Celtic (or Rangers), the crazy TV money in the bigger leagues (especially England)to ALL clubs massive dwarfs whatever money Celtic get, so I’m not sure what they could have done differently to help them be more successful in Europe.

[Satchmo Distel]

Can we try to bin the idea that turnover/revenue equals "wealth"?

It really, really, does not. And football is one of the very few industries in which anyone even attempts to argue that it does (one sometimes sees a version of it in support of tech companies such as Uber that generate serious revenue while losing money on every transaction)

Fair point. An article from earlier this season states that Spurs's spending since 2010 is only the 16th highest, lower than that of Arsenal who are usually viewed as a spendthrift club relative to their size.

https://talksport.com/football/41868...transfer-fees/

There is no totally objective method of ranking "big" so I was picking one criterion that seemed OK but would now be more cautious.

[Lang Spoon]

Celtic could have tried to invest properly in their academy, they could have stopped their bullshit of picking off the better young players at their rivals and then never playing them. They prob should have brought in a Director of football no matter the Jock Brown Dr Jo/fucking Kenny and Barnes debacles and developed a proper fitba "philosophy" through the whole club that meant more than Brendan waffle.

[Lang Spoon]

Celtic seemed more intent on hobbling the likes of Aberdeen when they had the league to themselves than building for the future.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Obviously it is not Ireland levels of disjointedness, but most of the PL teams play fast paced reactionary football. Even the better PL teams.

Of course it seems reactionary. That's because the other team is usually quite strong relatively speaking, even quite far down the league. They usually are going to attack you at some point. Consider a situation where you have two teams of roughly similar levels of players and coaching, both have a good plan for what to do with the ball, both have a well developed plan for what to do when they don't have the ball, and both have the ability to switch very quickly between the two plans. You're going to get a chaotic mess. Liverpool spurs matches are a bit like this. They're both trying to do pretty much exactly the same thing so it winds up looking almost completely random at times. but the level of organization on both sides is very high, you can tell this because the game doesn't end 4-0 to one side very often. Something that has been lost sight of somewhere along the line was that aside from a nightmare for laporte, Man City played really well for long periods of time, penned Spurs in and pummelled at them, and came within a hair of scoring five goals against a Spurs team who also played very well. Man City never stopped trying to do their thing and it nearly worked. It's kind of an odd criticism really, particularly given the emphasis that all of the top six clubs have put on appointing managers with a preferred, modern, highly organized system of play (even if Man utd did it entirely by accident). They're just at very different stages.

[anton pulisov]

I don't see a coherent team and vision like I see it at Ajax, Barca or Atletico.

I see very good players and some kind of tactical formation, yes, but not players who look like they'd be able to pass and move even if they were blindfolded. And that's because the Premier League has too much money. Every team has lots of expensive internationals, and every team can potentially take three points off you. You can't, as a manager, take a punt at developing something new, or blood a new generation of teenagers. You'd lose six games in a row and be out the door. So you play it safe. The Premier League isn't where the new stuff is happening.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

What do you think Man city are doing? Having just watched man utd play barcelona, it's difficult to express just how far behind man city Barcelona currently are in those dimensions you highlight. Also Atletico Madrid don't strike me as a team who have a very sophisticated plan for when they have the ball. It strikes me that they have a very well developed plan for when they have the ball, but that what they do when the have the ball is pretty much down to the players, who are generally pretty shrewd, if achingly slow. Lets see them try to do that at the speeds required of a premier league season. But that's not a likely scenario. The english team they most remind me of is burnley last season, but with access to a much better class of player. Watching burnley moving around as a defensive bloc last season really reminded me of a lancashire version of villarreal or atletico.

[Snake Plissken]

I’m going to take that as a compliment.

[anton pulisov]

Man City have spent 1.3 billion in the past decade and have come nowhere close to winning the Champions League.

Kevin de Bruijne's job there is to make assists. He could become even better and be a brilliant all round midfielder. But there's no necessity for career fluidity and development in a team filled with superstars who each have their task that they are paid millions to do. Necessity is the mother of invention, but the unlimited transfer funds take away the necessity. When you are the best, why change? It's an interesting paradox.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

I love the way the conversation flips on the result of one game that was ultimately decided by a VAR spotting that Sergio Aguero's toe was offside. A week ago this was the greatest team ever assembled in English club football, about to go past 95 points in a league season for the second year running and, to boot, win an unprecedented quadruple. Now Pep is a manager with rigid ideas sticking to a failing system, his defenders fell apart under pressure and they may end up cuddling the League Cup and weeping.

Football punditry, eh? Bloody hell.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

I’m going to take that as a compliment.

It's meant as one. Burnley were very well organized last year. They just don't have the access to the sort of player that being the third biggest club in a major league gives you, independent of how much money you have. (which no money can really compensate for) and they're not tied up in a bizarre and highly dubious way with the Jorge mendes empire.

[anton pulisov]

Man City are very, very good. As they should be, considering the quality of players they have and the resources at their disposal. The question is about the team part of the equation. Success in football, if it could be boiled down to a simple equation, is individual quality multiplied by teamwork. There's no doubt that Pep has improved the latter at Man City a bit when compared to somebody like Mancini. But the front half of the equation (individual quality) is so loaded at Man City that it's hard to make out the contribution of the teamwork. And then I also have a theory that a team with too much individual quality can actually be detrimental to teamwork. Due to the necessity of improving teamwork being taken away.

As for Pep. He's managed Barcelona when Xavi, Iniesta and Messi were all at their peak. Then he managed the richest team in Germany. Then he managed the richest team in the world. I have no idea if Pep is actually any good or not. He's never actually challenged himself. Mourinho gets a lot of shit, and rightly so, but Pep has never achieved something like winning the Champions League with Porto. And don't forget that Pep paid loadsamoney plus Eto'o to get Zlatan. Mourinho ended up with one of the most intelligent strikers in the world and enough money to go out and buy Wesley Sneijder. And we all know how that worked out for Inter.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Kevin de Bruijne's job there is to make assists. He could become even better and be a brilliant all round midfielder. But there's no necessity for career fluidity and development in a team filled with superstars who each have their task that they are paid millions to do. Necessity is the mother of invention, but the unlimited transfer funds take away the necessity. When you are the best, why change? It's an interesting paradox

he scores a goal every four games. He sets up a goal nearly every two games when he's fit. He does more in this respect than xavi and iniesta combined. What do you want him to do? You seem to be demanding greater team play and complaining about how it stifles individuality. You're basically having the row that johan cruyff had with the old ajax board with yourself!.

Runs and hides.

[Tony C]

I love the way the conversation flips on the result of one game that was ultimately decided by a VAR spotting that Sergio Aguero's toe was offside. A week ago this was the greatest team ever assembled in English club football, about to go past 95 points in a league season for the second year running and, to boot, win an unprecedented quadruple. Now Pep is a manager with rigid ideas sticking to a failing system, his defenders fell apart under pressure and they may end up cuddling the League Cup and weeping.

Football punditry, eh? Bloody hell.

Good post TAB. Ultimately we come to the question of what constitutes success or failure. If City do now fall away and only end up with the League Cup their fans will still have seen them play very attractive, high scoring football all season and been in serious contention for every competition they entered with the CL place assured anyway. No supporter will feel short changed (although maybe disappointed) if that transpired. Pep's broad reputation may be taking a hit for not having won the CL in either Germany or England but telling fans who were watching Jamie Pollock in midfield less than twenty years ago that the world is caving in because the quadruple has been lost isn't a runner.

[elguapo4]

But it's not the "watching Jamie Pollock" fans you have to convince,it's the owners and investors and you can guarantee that they won't be satisfied with "just " the treble.

[anton pulisov]

Would love to see Pep managing Man City twenty years ago. I genuinely mean that. I mean it when I say I have no idea how good a manager he is. He's essentially playing Championship Manager with unlimited funds enabled. I'd love to see him take on a real challenge. Louis van Gaal went back to Holland and won the Eredivisie with AZ, for example.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

Good post TAB.

Ahem. But thanks.