Standing there at Mestalla, it no longer felt impossible for them to compete to be champions for the first time since the late Jaume Ortí wore an orange wigRodrigo Moreno sprinted towards the near post, slotted the ball past Marc-André ter Stegen and ducked behind the goal at the north end of Mestalla, team-mates racing to join the celebrations. In front of him, Valencia’s fans went wild; behind him a ballboy in a grey bib was busy reaching into a plastic carrier bag. David Vassilev is 14, he plays for Valencia’s Infantil A and in the middle of all the noise and excitement, the gathering crowd, players piling on, he had a job to do. He pulled out a big...
It is still early in the season but even a draw in the derby was not much use; Madrid and Atlético had to win. Only Barcelona didFC Barcelona pulled out of Butarque on an angular blue and orange bus that looked like it had been borrowed from a school trip in the 90s a bit before seven on Saturday evening and headed 30 kilometres north up the M40 to the airport at Barajas, their work done. Half of it, anyway. Nearby, just about visible from the terminal, stood the Wanda Metropolitano, where the rest of it was done for them. Not long after Barça had set off, and a couple of hours after Alavés had passed on their way north...
The calm and popular manager has put Lionel Messi centre stage while turning Neymar’s departure into an opportunity to recalibrate the team’s setupAt the start of the season Gerard Piqué admitted that for the first time he felt “inferior”. Barcelona had just lost the Super Cup: Real Madrid had scored five, Barcelona just one – and that was a penalty. Neymar had gone, 11 days after Piqué announced he was staying and 16 days since the vice-president said he was “200% sure” he wouldn’t leave. Coutinho hadn’t come yet and wouldn’t come at all. And nor had Marco Verratti, Héctor Bellerín, or even Ángel Di María. Iñigo Martínez was done then undone and in Nice, where “the walls shook”, Jean...
The preening Portuguese beat the more humble Lionel Messi to yet another Fifa award last week but does he ever notice that football is a team game?Last Monday the Best Fifa Football Awards were held in London – leading one to ask when can one expect the Worst Fifa Football Awards, featuring YouTube videos of missed sitters and theatrical simulation. All the legends were there: Diego Maradona, Ronaldo (the Brazilian one), Phillip Schofield. It was the “biggest night on planet football”, as the Sky presenter said, full of “excitement, glamour and gossip”, making it sound as though it were an overblown gathering of prima donnas on the red, sorry green, carpet. Which, on reflection, is an unerringly precise summary of the...
Like Frank de Boer and Frank Rijkaard, Koeman is the latest in a line of managers to stumble outside the Ajax and Barcelona models in which they were schooledLong before he was sacked, a criticism of Ronald Koeman at Everton was that he seemed to regard the club as a stepping stone. “He called us Everton, he never called us ‘us’,” as the former Everton captain Kevin Ratcliffe put it on Monday. Koeman’s ultimate ambition, as he has made clear since he took his first steps in management with Vitesse in 2000, is to manage Barcelona.That seems ridiculous as he slinks away from Goodison Park after an unprecedented summer spree with Everton in the relegation zone. Perhaps now there have...