Only a few seasons ago Italy’s top league was regarded as a defensive, Juventus-dominated turn-off but now it is game onThere was a time when Italians might have been insulted by the suggestion of theirs being the third-best football league in Europe. Serie A was always il campionato più bello del mondo – the most beautiful championship in the world. How else to describe a competition that produced 12 European Cup finalists between 1983 and 1998, a place where you could watch Diego Maradona take on Franco Baresi, or Zinedine Zidane battle Ronaldo for the Ballon d’Or?Nobody is blind, though, to the power shift since. Between TV deals and billionaire owners, Premier League clubs became able to offer wages the...
Barcelona’s nuanced identification with Catalonia is part of what gives the club an explicitly socio-political dimension. And that meant this was always going to be more than a match … even if in the end it was less than oneAt every Camp Nou game for almost six years now, chants for Catalan independence have gone up when the clock reaches 17 minutes and 14 seconds, commemorating the year the city fell to Felipe V, but not this time – not on the day they were perhaps closer to independence than ever before. This time, Europe’s largest stadium was silent. No fans could be heard, only footballers. Occasionally, the referee’s whistle rang out or somebody clapped yet there were no chants,...
Gian Piero Gasperini’s in-game tweaks are one reason his Atalanta side keep recovering from losing positions – and they did it again to draw with JuventusIt should have been all over. Within 25 minutes of Serie A’s Sunday night fixture, Juventus were two goals to the good. What opponent could overcome such a disastrous start against the champs: winners of six consecutive Serie A titles, as well as six consecutive games to begin this season? Who would even dare to fight back against the Old Lady of Turin?Only the Goddess of Bergamo. Atalanta share their name with Greek mythology’s virgin huntress, and over the past 12 months they have embodied her combative spirit just as well. Related: European roundup: Neymar...
The passion from both sets of fans remains undimmed, but the question is whether the teams will get away with underachieving again this seasonEven by the standards of local tussles and their particular intensity, it wasn’t much of a spectacle. Pundit Lothar Matthäus told the Sky audience that Saturday’s 107th top-flight Nordderby between Hamburg and Werder Bremen “didn’t deserve a sold-out stadium” – nearly 55,000 were there – but what did anybody expect? These two grand old clubs have been on the train leaving Worried, headed for Desperate, for a while and after this fractious encounter, neither look like taking a diversion soon.For HSV, who had a muted celebration of the club’s 130th birthday on Friday, it was tougher to...
The sacked manager has many fine attributes but could never live up to his predecessor and Wednesday’s defeat by PSG was the final strawWhen Bayern Munich came to London in March to face Arsenal, following one 5-1 victory and just about to register another, everything seemed rosy in the kingdom of FC Hollywood. Sure, their football in the Bundesliga had hardly been edge-of-the-seat stuff, but Carlo Ancelotti spoke confidently, almost bullishly, of his team before the game in the press room at the Emirates Stadium.He talked of his side approaching their physical best and of their “real energy”. It felt like his plan to take them back to Champions League glory – the reason that he was appointed to replace...