Jonathan Wilson's Blog, page 102
February 17, 2020
Manchester City's ban, the race for fifth and more – Football Weekly
Max Rushden, Barry Glendenning, Jonathan Wilson and Flo Lloyd-Hughes discuss Manchester City’s ban from Europe, José Mourinho’s stink eye, Arsenal’s positive goal difference and explaining Rory Delap compilations
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We take a look back at the weekend’s football, starting off by chatting with David Conn about the two-year Champions League ban handed to Manchester City by Uefa.
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February 16, 2020
Ramifications of City's two-year ban may be seismic – not least for Uefa
Friday’s statement could destroy the European game’s ruling body and change utterly how football is run
Perhaps all declarations of war seem slightly underwhelming in tone. Perhaps when the consequences are potentially so huge, there is no need for bombast. But, make no mistake, the drily legalistic statement Uefa released on Friday evening announcing Manchester City’s two-year ban from the Champions League for breaches of financial fair play legislation could destroy the confederation and change utterly how football is run. The crisis has been brewing for a while: it is here now.
It had seemed likely the Club World Cup would be the trigger, making clear the financial draw of the superclubs allowed them to operate without Uefa, Fifa offering the fig leaf that allowed them to accept vast sums from outside the game – just as this season’s Spanish Super Cup permitted four La Liga clubs to take large payments to help sportswash the Saudi state under the guise of spreading the game.
Related: Manchester City now look like a butterfly in danger of having its wings picked off | Barney Ronay
Continue reading...February 15, 2020
Diego Simeone’s Atlético Madrid tackle Liverpool in battle of opposites | Jonathan Wilson
Recent transfer activity suggests that the La Liga side may be moving towards a more expansive approach to the game
E lite football is more attacking now than at any time since the coming of systematisation in the mid-60s. Between 1994‑95 – when the Champions League first incorporated quarter-finals after the group stage – and 2007-08, there were only two seasons in which an average of more than three goals per game was scored in the knockout stages. Since then there has been only one season when that average has not been higher than 3.0, and in each of the past three it has been higher than 3.5.
As José Mourinho’s star has waned, there has been only one real exception to that trend: Atlético Madrid, who face Liverpool in the Champions League on Tuesday. Twice Champions League finalists in the last decade, the La Liga club play a form of football that has come to be known, after their manager, Diego “Cholo” Simeone, as cholismo, a word coined by the journalist Mario Torrejón in 2012 to contrast their muscular pragmatism with the “tiki‑taka” of Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona.
Related: Kieran Trippier out of Atlético's Champions League first leg against Liverpool
Related: Jürgen Klopp says Liverpool are not favourites to win Champions League
Continue reading...February 8, 2020
Lionel Messi and money are keeping rudderless Barcelona afloat | Jonathan Wilson
Sacking of Ernesto Valverde and Messi’s fallout with sporting director Eric Abidal are symptoms of long-term stagnation and disjointed structure at the Camp Nou
L ast Tuesday, as Lionel Messi lashed out at the club’s sporting director, Eric Abidal, the crisis at Barcelona became official. But this is a story about far more than clashing egos and mismanagement at the Camp Nou. It is a parable of modern football, of the problem with genius and the difficulty of identity.
Perhaps the strangest aspect of the saga – sparked by the Argentinian reacting with fury to what he saw as Abidal’s attempt to blame the players for the recent sacking of Ernesto Valverde – is that it has taken so long to reach this point, a reminder that in the modern era super-clubs can be run with staggering ineptitude and still win titles.
Related: Barcelona crisis grows as Athletic Bilbao knock them out of Copa del Rey
The biggest effect of Neymar's sale: gifting Liverpool the Coutinho windfall they used to become the world's best team
Related: The blame game: how Lionel Messi’s patience finally snapped at Barcelona
Continue reading...Nottingham Forest’s Sammy Ameobi piles pressure on struggling Leeds
It’s happening again. The same old story played out another time. It happened at Athletic, it happened at Marseille and it happened last season. This is what Marcelo Bielsa sides do. They start brilliantly, they ignite the enthusiasm and then they fade.
Leeds’ start to the season was so good they remain in the automatic promotion places but it’s hard to avoid the sense the mirror has cracked and the curse is on them.
Related: Football League roundup: Fulham and Brentford wins make it tight at the top
Related: Tom Lawrence completes fightback for upwardly mobile Derby against Swansea
Continue reading...February 1, 2020
Pioneering reds to the Reds: Why Jürgen Klopp’s pressing is a perfect fit for the age | Jonathan Wilson
The dominant style of football’s hyper-capitalistic age has its origins in the unlikeliest of places
A training field near Ostfildern, in the forest south-east of Stuttgart. It’s February 1983, and local sixth-tier side Viktoria Backnang are playing a friendly against Valeriy Lobanovskyi’s Dynamo Kyiv, who are wintering at Sportschule Ruit. For Viktoria’s young player-manager, Ralf Rangnick, it is a revelatory experience. When the ball goes out of play for a throw-in early on, Rangnick counts the Dynamo players, half-believing they had sneaked an extra man on to the pitch. They hadn’t, but such was the ferocity of their pressing that it felt as if they had. And so a seed was planted that has had a profound impact on football’s tactical development.
Dynamo kept coming to Ruit and Rangnick, who is now the head of sport and development at Red Bull, kept studying them. As his career developed he became part of a group of coaches fascinated by the possibilities of zonal marking and pressing, radical ideas in a Germany dominated by the belief that football was about individual battles, courage and vocal leadership.
Related: Klopp says lack of Liverpool transfers show how hard it is to improve his squad
Related: Jordan Henderson shows why he may be Liverpool’s most important player of all | Sachin Nakrani
Continue reading...January 25, 2020
The Club World Cup is not about football – it's about making the rich even richer | Jonathan Wilson
The tournament will begin in its new expanded format in summer 2021 and already it has forced the Africa Cup of Nations to be re-rescheduled
Tippi Hedren sits on a bench outside the school. Behind her, crows gradually settle on a climbing frame. She smokes, distracted. By the time she finally notices a crow pass above her, it is too late. The frame, the roofs behind, the telegraph pole, the fence are laden with crows and the attack on the children cannot be averted. This is the greatest scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and it is also modern football.
Every week, there comes a new detail, stat or report of an initiative. Individually they can be laughed off. What’s the Juventus chairman Andrea Agnelli banging on about this time? Who is Fifa’s Gianni Infantino abasing himself in front of now at Davos? Why has the Spanish Super Cup been rejigged with wildly variant appearance fees to try to put on a Clasico for the people of Jeddah? What’s the point of the Champions League group stage?
Related: Pep Guardiola wants League Cup to be scrapped to ease fixture congestion
Related: Super rich versus the rest: Champions League groups hampered by inequality | Jonathan Wilson
Continue reading...January 20, 2020
For Manchester United the gulf to Liverpool is cause for major concern | Jonathan Wilson
United have just been well beaten by a Liverpool side 30 points ahead of them. They are sleepwalking towards mediocrity
Liverpool are brilliant. They are top of the league by 16 points with a game in hand and will probably have the title wrapped up by the end of March. And yet at the same time, while acknowledging how preposterous it is to offer any criticism of a side that has taken 64 points from 22 games this season, there must be a sense that of late they’ve become a little bit sloppy.
In their past two league games, against Tottenham last week and then against Manchester United at Anfield on Sunday, they have come extremely close to drawing games they have dominated almost entirely. Giovani Lo Celso and Anthony Martial both missed extremely presentable chances to make it 1-1. In both games Liverpool ended up under pressure in the final 10 minutes – on Sunday at least until Mohamed Salah added a second on the break deep in injury time. Tottenham they had broadly held at arm’s length, in a performance of great control; United they had pummelled for roughly a third of each half. And yet in each two points could have slipped from their grasp.
Related: Unheard-of achievement beckons as Liverpool begin their victory parade | Barney Ronay
Continue reading...January 18, 2020
Ole Gunnar Solskjær is not the right manager for Manchester United | Jonathan Wilson
There has been little sign of improvement since Solskjær took over and he looks ill-equipped to turn things around
O n Friday 5 March 1909, Manchester United went to Burnley for an FA Cup quarter-final. The pitch was frozen, there was heavy snow and with 18 minutes remaining the referee, Herbert Bamlett, decided the match couldn’t go on. For United, the abandonment was fortunate: they had been 1-0 down but won the rearranged game 3-2 and went on, for the first time, to lift the FA Cup.
Bamlett, having refereed the 1914 FA Cup final, turned his hand to management, taking charge of Oldham, Wigan Borough and Middlesbrough, guiding the latter to the verge of promotion when, in April 1927, he was named manager of United.
Related: Manchester United make Harry Maguire new full-time captain
Continue reading...January 17, 2020
Will Klopp’s team become the GLOAT (Greatest Liverpool Of All Time)? | Jonathan Wilson
Statistically, this is likely to be Liverpool’s greatest league season, which for a club with 18 championships is no small achievement. The only season that could conceivably beat this one came last year, when they did not win the title – a reminder that statistics must always be considered in context. Greatness lies not only in numbers.
And in a world in which Juventus can dispense with their manager after five successive league titles, and Barcelona sack theirs after two straight titles while top of the table, in which 95+ points has come to seem standard for a Premier League champion, it’s as well to be aware that domination of a domestic league does not mean quite the same thing that it did in the past.
Related: Unassuming icon Trent Alexander-Arnold leads Liverpool’s league quest | Eni Aluko
Related: Alan Kennedy: this fantastic Liverpool team reminds me so much of my own
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