Pep Guardiola’s free-flowing team are starting to run away with the Premier League and are doing it in a way that cannot help but soak up new admirersThe devil always gets the best tunes. Watching Paris Saint-Germain overwhelm Celtic in the Champions League on Wednesday the most striking thing about PSG was not the sense of powerful gears still in reserve, or even the basic beauty of their attacking play, the way the ball skittered about between Neymar and promising loanee-trialist Kylian Mbappé like a bead of water in a pan of hot fat. The most remarkable thing was how difficult it was, suddenly, to properly dislike them.Difficult but not impossible. It is important to emphasise this. PSG’s on-field brilliance...
The striker granted just 15 minutes of Italy’s play-off defeat against Sweden continued the scintillating club form that made his omission so controversialIt was a weekend for gallows humour in Italy. “Goals from [Ciro] Immobile and [Lorenzo] Insigne yesterday,” tweeted the wags from Chiamarsi Bomber on Sunday. “So we qualified, right?”In truth, it will take a lot more than a week for a nation to digest its World Cup play-off defeat to Sweden. Gian Piero Ventura was fired as manager of the Azzurri last week, and the Football Federation president Carlo Tavecchio resigned on Monday amid reports that his support base had crumbled. Related: European roundup: Juventus stumble in Serie A title race with loss to Sampdoria Related: All players...
Max Kruse’s hat-trick brought relief at the Weserstadion, but questions over the club’s long-term – and even medium-term – plan remain“It doesn’t matter who scores the goals,” said Max Kruse on Thursday, and it sounded like he believed it. Yet even if it doesn’t quite mean everything, it means a lot. That much was evident after he retired to the bench a few minutes from the end from Werder Bremen’s emphatic 4-0 win over Hannover on Sunday, their first of the season, having hit a hat-trick – his first goals of the season. Kruse goofed around, whooping and pulling faces at the television cameras. The supporters’ relief was palpable. Not just at the result, but at their star forward taking...
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...