Juventus, Inter, Lazio, Milan and Atalanta are queuing up for a crack at the Scudetto after a summer of change in ItalyThe post-Scudetto cleanup in Naples took more than a month, local authorities reporting they had gathered up enough banners and blue and white ribbons to cover the length of 400 football pitches. Those were just the ones hung on public property. In bars, restaurants and the windows of homes all over the city, Napoli’s first Serie A title in 33 years will continue to be celebrated as long as there are people to remember it.Now, though, they must defend their crown. Easier said than done: Italy has had a different champion in each of the past four seasons. A...
Substitute gives Manchester City something they lacked and starts the move that led to Rodri’s winner against InterIt felt fitting, in the end, that Phil Foden should have a decisive hand. On a taught, sweaty, occasionally indigestible night at the Ataturk Olympic Stadium Manchester City finally turned the whole world a shade of sky blue, reaching the end point, the final high, of this extraordinary 15-year football-industrial project.City are champions of Europe. If this always seemed inevitable in the abstract, it still feels like moment of double-take, of pure sporting vertigo. A team playing in the same clothes as the one that seemed for so long the embodiment of gallows humour, familiar underachievement, a roll of the eyes in human...
Some tactical tweaks are not overthinking – they’re just thinking, and the Manchester City manager’s decisions paid offNot all tactical tweaks are the result of overthinking. Pep Guardiola did not simply pick the obvious starting XI. He did not pick the starting lineup that had propelled City through the Premier League run-in. He is criticised readily enough when he makes changes and City don’t win; this was an occasion when the change paid off. Guardiola made the necessary adjustment, and was rewarded with his third Champions League.Until mid-February City, by their own remarkable standards, had not had a particularly great season. There were questions – entirely reasonable questions for all the subsequent sneering – about what Erling Haaland did to...
The result was seen as a formality when city officials moved Napoli’s kick-off time but it gave the visitors a point to proveYou would think the prefect of a city as superstitious as Naples might have worried a little more about tempting fate. To place a loaf of bread upside down on the dinner table is to invite bad luck on yourself in southern Italy, yet Claudio Palomba had no qualms requesting that the footballing calendar be flipped on its head so the home team could win Serie A at a more convenient time.Napoli were originally scheduled to host Salernitana on Saturday. Seventeen points clear at the top of the table, with seven games left to play, they knew a...
Edin Dzeko’s header proved decisive as the Serie A leaders started 2023 by seeing their lead at the top cut to five pointsThe mid-season World Cup interruption felt that little bit longer to many Italian football fans, left without a team to cheer for, so Serie A’s organisers opted for total immersion on its return. If you thought four games in an afternoon was a lot during Qatar’s group stage then how about 10, scheduled in pairs to kick off every two hours throughout a regular workday?Typically, the Italian top flight would return from its winter break on the Christian feast day of Epiphany, 6 January, a national holiday, but that falls on a Friday this year. Playing then would...