With Cristiano Ronaldo 33 on Monday and Lionel Messi the wrong side of 30, who are Europe’s bright prospects shaping up to be inheritors of the Ballon d’Or duopoly’s crown?“A very good question,” mused Cristiano Ronaldo as he basked in the glory of his second successive Ballon d’Or and fifth overall back in December. “I see some with great potential: Asensio, Mbappé, Neymar, Dembélé, Hazard, Rashford … and some others. In the next generation there are at least 10 players with very, very great potential.”It’s more than a decade since Milan’s Kaká became the last player outside of the Ronaldo-Lionel Messi duopoly to walk away with football’s highest individual honour. But with the Real Madrid forward celebrating his 33rd birthday...
The preening Portuguese beat the more humble Lionel Messi to yet another Fifa award last week but does he ever notice that football is a team game?Last Monday the Best Fifa Football Awards were held in London – leading one to ask when can one expect the Worst Fifa Football Awards, featuring YouTube videos of missed sitters and theatrical simulation. All the legends were there: Diego Maradona, Ronaldo (the Brazilian one), Phillip Schofield. It was the “biggest night on planet football”, as the Sky presenter said, full of “excitement, glamour and gossip”, making it sound as though it were an overblown gathering of prima donnas on the red, sorry green, carpet. Which, on reflection, is an unerringly precise summary of the...
The prospect of the Argentinian and all that is built around him leaving Barcelona would create such a frenzy it is difficult to imagine it being possibleWe all have our favourite Victorian engineering folly. Mine is the SS Great Eastern, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s super-ship powered by a hundred furnaces, a vessel so vast it could carry 10,000 passengers, so vast it became a symbol of grandiose, stovepipe-hatted ambition, and so vast that it turned out it couldn’t actually sail anywhere.Completed in November 1857, the Great Eastern stayed moored at Millwall on the Thames for two months, unable to move because of its own mind-boggling size. Several times a launch was attempted and then abandoned. Eventually the Great Eastern left its dock...
There is another clásico this weekend, another head-to-head between Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. But it is now possible to wonder how many more of these we’re going to getTowards the end of his life Mozart wrote a piece of music called Ein musikalischer Spaß, or “a musical joke”, intended as a satire on bad composers. As you might expect it contained a hilarious discord in the horns section, some off-key sonata and – LOL – a polytonal finale.No doubt back in the 1780s this was all very weeping-laughing-emoji-face. Listening to it now, A Musical Joke just sounds predictably ace, brill, fun, yeah, really good. It turns up on the kind of CDs you buy at petrol stations called The...
The 4-0 hammering by PSG has raised questions about a team that has been called a mess tactically and physically, with no youth system or leadership“We tried to score to get back into the tie but they got the third goal and then the fourth,” the Barcelona manager, Luis Enrique, said at the end of his darkest night. His words were telling but not even entirely true.It was not that Paris Saint-Germain had scored a goal; it was that they had scored a third and then a fourth, and anyway it was not as if the visitors had been caught chasing the game, a quick counter or some fluke goal cruelly ending it. When Ángel Di María curled in the...