Jonathan Wilson's Blog, page 24

Chelsea’s pervasive chaos threatens to destabilize another season | Jonathan Wilson

Worrying pre-season results and ill-conceived recruitment leave manager Enzo Maresca with a series of headaches before the new campaign

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Pre-season is always about the performance and never about the results. And even then there has to be an awareness of what managers are looking for from each individual game: clubs can be at different stages of their physical development, or managers may be working on a specific ploy. They are means to an end. Nobody should ever read too much into pre-season. And yet, all that said, it’s impossible not to look at Chelsea’s pre-season games without a slight twinge of concern.


Enzo Maresca’s record as Chelsea manager at this stage reads: played six, won one. That win came against the Mexican champions Club América who, four games in to the new Mexican season, sit in ninth place. Chelsea have also played the champions of England, Spain, Scotland and Italy in their warm-up matches, plus Wrexham, who were promoted from League Two last season. That’s a challenging run of games. Against Manchester City they were 2-0 down inside five minutes, the result of a soft penalty and a wayward backpass. The 4-2 defeat perhaps wasn’t reflective of the pattern of the game. Mitigation can be found.

But it’s not just results. There’s also a pervading sense of chaos. After the initial splurge following the Clearlake takeover, the £1bn spent on 28 senior players, this was supposed to be when the consolidation began. They had signed young players, we were told, so that there would be less need for upheaval as the project progressed. Players would grow into stature at the club. And then this summer a further nine players arrived at a cost of £160m, with two more already in the pipeline for next season.

This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Have a question for Jonathan? Email soccerwithjw@theguardian.com, and he’ll answer the best in a future edition

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Was FA’s appointment of Lee Carsley down to political cunning or lack of options? | Jonathan Wilson

It is not unreasonable to ask why the FA did not have a candidate ready as soon as Gareth Southgate bid farewell

Take a moment. This is not a concept that can easily be taken on board. Deep breaths. But what if – bear with this; it will sound ridiculous – what if the Football Association is attempting to be machiavellian and is doing it well?

Yes, this is the FA who dished out handbags to try to persuade Fifa executive committee members to vote for its World Cup bid when Russia was offering paintings from the state archive and Qatar was doing deals for a couple of dozen fighter jets.

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Sunderland’s anti-riot stance shows how football clubs and cities are proudly united | Jonathan Wilson

The game is now how many places express their existence and identity, so that it is in effect another theatre of conflict

Friday 2 August was opening night for Sheepfolds Stables, a £4m entertainment venue on the north bank of the Wear that replaces the scrapyards and derelict land that used to lie between the Stadium of Light and the river with bars, restaurants and event spaces. People who were there spoke of an enjoyable evening of live music and drinking in the sunshine.

A footbridge is being built to link Sheepfolds and the stadium with Keel Square, which lies a couple of hundred yards upriver of the traditional city centre. There is a conscious effort to refocus Sunderland on the axis running from the 2,000-capacity Empire Theatre and its associated arts spaces through the office development on the site of the old Vaux Brewery to the football venue. After years of stagnation, there is finally a sense of progress.

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Manchester City devour another trophy but there is no sign of United’s doughnut | Jonathan Wilson

Community Shield told us little about the champions but Erik ten Hag may have solved his side’s midfield problem

Unfurl the bunting! Prepare the open-topped bus! Paint the city blue! Or perhaps not. This time it was City who won the second Manchester derby at Wembley inside 80 days and, while the Community Shield hardly competes with May’s FA Cup final, it does means that a potential quintuple is on. For a team as successful as Manchester City, every new goal is worth highlighting.

City didn’t seem overjoyed at the final whistle, United didn’t seem devastated. Why would they? Having lost in each of the last three Community Shields, City more than anybody know how little bearing the curtain-raiser has on the show to come. Only one of the past 13 Community Shield winners have gone on to win the title; were City to do so this season they would become only the ninth side to claim both the Community Shield and Premier League in the same season. “It is what it is,” as a resolutely sober Rúben Dias sagely confirmed. “Another trophy.”

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Uefa’s craven failure to stand up for the game’s values has left clubs on the brink

In a mailbag edition of his newsletter, Jonathan Wilson answers your questions on the multi-club model, how Kylian Mbappé will fit at Real Madrid, and VAR

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What are your thoughts on the multi-club model? It seems a shame that community clubs become branches of the European elite. On the other hand, you have Bordeaux going bust, where the only real option to save the club seemed to be to fall under the ownership of Liverpool’s FSG . – Declan

It’s scandalous and should never have been allowed to get this far. Why should great clubs who have a proud history and identity – in Bordeaux’s case for well over a century, in which they’ve won six French league titles – become nurseries for bigger clubs? I don’t know what Bordeaux fans think, but certainly in the UK, I think a lot of fans would rather their club went bust and started again lower down the pyramid than lose their independence and their identity. I’m a Sunderland fan and would far rather we were playing in the sixth tier as ourselves than effectively as Manchester United’s fourth team. One of the great lies about fandom is that it’s about winning; far more important is being – and representing – who you are.

This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Have a question for Jonathan? Email soccerwithjw@theguardian.com, and he’ll answer the best in a future edition

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Scott Parker suffers the yo-yo curse of British manager at next stop Burnley | Jonathan Wilson

After chastening experiences at Fulham, Bournemouth and Club Brugge it is hard to judge him at another mezzanine club

The pattern is familiar. The promising young manager gets his chance with a Championship club. He leads them to promotion. He talks a good game of pressing and position, shape and transition, passing and control. And then the financial reality of the Premier League strikes. The manager is reluctant to adapt his philosophy, perhaps doesn’t know how to; that is his style, the way he will make it to the top.

They perhaps achieve a couple of notable results. Maybe, people think, this young manager is the real deal. But they play against an elite side and lose. The cumulative effect of playing against high-class opponents every week takes its toll. The players who swaggered through the Championship become error-prone and, in the Premier League, those mistakes are punished. Confidence dwindles. Form deteriorates. Results go against them. There is a cycle of decline.

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Who replaces Southgate and early pre-season predictions – Football Weekly podcast

Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Lars Sivertsen and Jonathan Wilson as Football Weekly returns from it’s summer break

Rate, review, share on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud, Acast and Stitcher, and join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter and email.

On the podcast today; with Gareth Southgate announcing he is resigning as England manager, the panel debate who is best suited to replace him.

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A century ago, Andrade and Uruguay made the Paris Olympics a global first | Jonathan Wilson

The face of 1924 Games was a footballer, the Black Pearl, who danced the tango and left jazz singers and novelists swooning

In June 1924, L’Auto, the French sportspaper that had launched the Tour de France, ran a large portrait on its front page. This was the Olympic Games of the Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi and his five gold medals; of Harold Abraham and Eric Liddell, whose story would be told in Chariots of Fire; of Johnny Weissmuller, who would later play Tarzan, winning three swimming golds; of WB Yeats’s brother, Jack, winning Ireland’s first ever medal, in the painting that formed part of the culture programme of that era; but the face of the 1924 Paris Games was the Uruguay centre-half José Andrade.

This was remarkable for two reasons. First because this was the first football tournament to feature countries from Europe and the Americas, a combination that made it the most popular and profitable sport at the Games. And second because Andrade was black. The 1924 Olympics was the Games in which DeHart Hubbard became the first African-American to win gold, in the long jump, but it also gave football its first black superstar, its first global superstar.

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Men’s Olympic soccer remains stuck in the game’s second tier

The advent of the World Cup has turned the competition into a development vehicle

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The Poststadion still stands, about 10 minutes’ walk north-west of Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof. It’s set up for American football these days and this summer it was the centre of Berlin Pride. But in 1936, it was there that Adolf Hitler, for the only time in his life, attended a football match.

Hitler, like a lot of dictators, was suspicious of football. It was too unpredictable, the crowds that followed it too large and anarchic. But Germany had been impressive in beating Luxembourg 9-0, and nobody thought much of Norway, so Hitler, along with several other senior Nazis including Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels and Rudolf Hess went to the quarter-final.

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England must not lose Gareth Southgate’s successes in the urge for revolution | Jonathan Wilson

But the three big problems in the team will be hard for anyone to solve without the kind of ball-playing English Rodri the country still isn’t producing

What went wrong? What vital lessons can be learned? How can we make sure England don’t fail again? The postmortems after tournaments are always wearying. So many people have a panacea, an idea of the one detail that will guarantee success. If only we had a deep-lying metronome like Rodri! We’ll never win anything until we control midfield! Unleash this unprecedented generation! Cast caution to the winds! Let the players play! Release the handbrake! Be more like Italy! Be more like France! Be more like Spain!

Gareth Southgate’s greatest strength was his capacity to shut out the noise. A lot of it seems to derive from a basic misunderstanding of football. Being more attacking is a fine sentiment, and perhaps it is true that England could have taken a few more risks with their passing, but the reason England lost against Spain was that after Kyle Walker’s 75th-minute throw-in back to John Stones, which led to Jordan Pickford belting it out for a goal-kick, they didn’t touch the ball in the Spain half for 13 minutes, during which time they conceded. The issue was not what they did with the ball; it was getting the ball back.

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