On course for their fourth manager in under five months, Las Palmas had drifted to the foot of La Liga before a lifeline emerged against Espanyol …The new manager of Unión Deportiva de Las Palmas is on holiday and won’t be back until the new year. He wasn’t on the bench at the Estadio Gran Canaria on Sunday and won’t be on the bench at the Coliseum on Wednesday either, while the man who will be there in Getafe knows he’ll be gone by the end of the game: he won’t make it to Christmas – which wouldn’t be that unusual except he only started work at the end of November – and the man replacing him won’t make it...
Atlético Madrid, despite a number of issues this season, remain unbeaten in the league and still feel like one of the runners who will compete for the titleQuique Setién says he has told Atlético Madrid’s manager Diego Simeone exactly what he thinks of him but Simeone hasn’t told him back. He can guess, though: it doesn’t take a genius. “He might not like what I do, but he has the decency not to say so,” admits the chess-playing, beach football international, former manager of Equatorial Guinea (for one night only) and defender of an aesthetic footballing faith who briefly made Las Palmas the best thing in the league and is now at Real Betis, if maybe not for much longer....
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...