The French champions resemble a luxury store, full of high-end goods no one can afford and lacking togetherness and spiritParis Saint-Germain can make you sad. In the recent defeat by Bayern Munich we saw none of the class this team should display given their players. On one hand it was a disappointment; on the other it wasn’t a surprise because PSG’s early exit from the Champions League happens all the time.Only in 2020 have the club reached the final. In that unique season, two German and two French clubs contested the semi‑finals, largely because the English and Spanish clubs had not played for a few weeks and were not in the rhythm of the competition, nor in training. This year,...
Victory over Madrid in the clásico leaves Barça 12 points clear. It will have been a different kind of success this seasonFranck Kessié hasn’t always been in the right place at the right time but on Sunday night at 10.53pm he was exactly where he needed to be, and when. One morning, soon after arriving at Milan, the Ivorian pulled into Milanello and parked in the space reserved for the big boss. Stopped by security, told he couldn’t go there because that was the president’s spot, he replied: “I am the president.” It fit somehow and the title stuck. That day he became The President; now, five years on, he became President, King, Emperor, anything he likes. Above all, he...
Maurizio Sarri said he wanted to win the Rome derby more than a Conference League tie. And win the derby they didLazio let the side down on Thursday when they became the only Italian club to be eliminated from Europe all season. Serie A sent six teams through to continental quarter-finals for the first time this century, but the Biancocelesti’s defeat to AZ Alkmaar cost the league a clean sweep. Maurizio Sarri pointed to a congested calendar, saying his team was “probably not structurally ready for these competitions”.Was it that, or did their priorities simply lie elsewhere? In the same breath, Sarri had acknowledged “there’s less energy around the club when it comes to a competition like the Conference League”....
The Bundesliga fluctuations in Munich this season are so frequent and so wild that it cannot help but invite scrutinyJulian Nagelsmann might have imagined this stage of the season in many different guises when he resumed work after the World Cup. He almost certainly did not envisage this. His team will begin April with more games to shape the remainder of their campaign than they normally would at this stage, a legacy of the aforementioned break for the tournament in Qatar, but they will also make their way onto that road in an unfamiliar position of second place. Bayern Munich did not lose everything in Leverkusen, but any misapprehension under which they might have laboured under that this is a...
La Liga’s giants were briefly on the same page but the case against Barça has injected a level of paranoia into this title raceThe battle for the glorious past will be fought in the inglorious present. And it will be fought with heavily edited Twitter videos. Early last week Real Madrid TV released what can only be described as an attack video, aimed at the former La Liga referee José María Enriquez Negreira. If this seems a little extreme, it is worth noting this was in fact a follow-up, sequel to Real Madrid TV’s previous attack video aimed at referee Carlos Clos Gómez, now head of La Liga VAR.There have been grander, starrier, more knife-edge meetings between Barcelona and Real...