The European Leagues & Competitions Thread V2

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De Roon: ‘The coach doesn’t let us go back or wide, only forward. It’s intense’

https://theathletic.com/1907710/2020/07/05/marten-de-roon-atalanta-serie-a-freescoring/

Marten de Roon never thought he would miss the Teesside weather until now. “Honestly, playing the game at the moment it would probably be a bit better in the UK,” he says. The former Middlesbrough midfielder, whose self-deprecating posts on social media make him a must-follow, has just finished a morning training session in Zingonia. Atalanta are working-out as early as they can before the summer sun starts to burn at peak temperatures, and it’s just as well too. Sessions here can be brutal. Atalanta don’t slow down even when match day approaches.

“For the manager, you can train quite intense the day before,” De Roon tells The Athletic. “You don’t go very low in your intensity. I think that’s a big difference.” Part of what has made Atalanta one of the most enthralling teams to watch in Europe over the last few years is undoubtedly their ability to come back from behind as if it were no sweat. Two-nil down to title-chasing Lazio last week, the team turned it around in the second half and made a 3-2 win look comfortable. In all, they have claimed a jaw-dropping 22 points from losing positions this season. This lot never seem down and out. When Atalanta come to play, the games are infinite.

The addition of Jens Bangsbo to Gian Piero Gasperini’s staff in October 2018 has enabled the team to go harder for longer.

The Danish strength and conditioning coach, who served under Carlo Ancelotti and Marcello Lippi at Juventus around the time Gasperini started his own coaching career with the Old Lady’s youth teams, has powered Atalanta up with weights, squats and lots and lots of running. “What you see with a lot of different teams is that they’re very good probably for the first 60-70 minutes and then the last 20 minutes they suffer,” De Roon says. “For 70 minutes we’re maybe on the same level as them. But the last 20 minutes we can keep the same (intensity).” As such, it perhaps shouldn’t come as a great surprise to learn that the largest share of Atalanta’s goals (22 per cent) this season have arrived in the final quarter of an hour.

“A lot of people say the training is hard but it’s always full of games, full of competing,” De Roon adds. “And then when you see the results and you also feel during the games stronger than your opponent, especially in the final minutes, you have such a good feeling and that gives you more and more energy to go more.”

When De Roon returned to Bergamo after a season with Middlesbrough — the €13.5 million Atalanta paid was a club record at the time — the surroundings were the same but the vibe completely different. The team he left were relegation battlers who went into every season with survival as the aim. The one he rejoined in 2016 were audacious and dared to dream.

Atalanta had just finished fourth, back when fourth wasn’t enough to earn Champions League qualification. For context the club’s highest top-flight finish up until then was fifth back in 1948 and, as is the way of modern football, the vultures were already circling the team’s break-out stars. Inter had already picked off Roberto Gagliardini in the January. Milan swooped for Franck Kessie. It left Atalanta needing to reconstruct their midfield, which led them to bring back De Roon. The change in mentality under Gasperini could not have been more pronounced from the Atalanta he knew under his predecessor, the old-school Edy Reja.

“When you went away from home in my first spell it was like, ‘Don’t lose. A draw is OK’. Gasperini changed the mindset to winning. It doesn’t matter who we are playing against, you have to try to win. If it’s Juventus away, Napoli away, of course it will be harder to win those games than if you play against the teams down the bottom but the mindset has to be that you can always win, that you always want to win.” And Atalanta have won against all the top sides in Gasperini’s four years at the Gewiss Stadium.

The restart has brought that to the fore again with Thursday night’s victory over Coppa Italia winners Napoli — a club-record seventh straight in the top flight. It came hot on the heels of Atalanta inflicting a first league defeat on Lazio since September when they even overcame a De Roon own goal. “The manager wants the maximum in every training session,” he says, “the maximum quality. There are not a lot of sessions where it’s freedom and fun. Of course we have fun but it doesn’t come for free.”

De Roon needed “two or three months” to adapt not just to the workload and intensity of training but an entirely new way of interpreting the midfield role under Gasperini. Although signed to play the exact same position he’d performed for the club in the past, De Roon effectively had to start over and re-learn what it means to be a middle man. “It was new. It was strange,” the 29-year-old explains. “I thought I knew it all but with him it was too different.”

What follows is a great insight into how Atalanta operate.

“We play a lot of times with two midfield players,” De Roon says. “Over the last few years, that’s been me and Remo Freuler. Normally as a midfielder you’re used to playing in the centre of the field, so if the ball is on the left you come across from the middle to help out. But in Gasperini’s concept the two midfielders (in a 3-4-2-1/3-4-3) stay quite wide to leave a lot of space for the forwards.

“I’ll give you an example. Papu Gomez and Josip Ilicic start wide on the left or the right and come inside to find space in the middle. When they do that, the wing-backs in our system push up. They start to go in front. So in that moment the opponent’s left defender probably follows Ilicic inside and our right defender goes into the space that is open.” When De Roon says “our right defender” he is thinking of the centre-back on that side, Rafael Toloi, every bit as much as wing-backs Hans Hateboer and Timothy Castagne. “As a midfielder, you stay quite wide. If you lose the ball, you’re in a good position, so I think that’s a big difference.”

Thursday’s goals against Napoli offer a perfect illustration. Look at De Roon’s positioning here, as Gomez releases Castagne to cross for Mario Pasalic’s opener. See how he’s in an area of the pitch where he can cover for his wing-back or for Toloi as the Brazilian joins in the attack.

Atalanta’s second goal originates from yet another piece of build-up down the right flank, with Toloi, Pasalic and Castagne combining to outnumber Napoli on that side.

A series of quick one-twos ends with centre-back Toloi racking up his sixth league assist of the campaign as he helps the ball along for a late, blind-side run from Robin Gosens, who is out-of-shot in the below grab. The left wing-back is now in double figures for goals in all competitions this season.

De Roon’s positional sense enables Atalanta to play with the handbrake off and takes reference points away from their opponents. His comfort in that zone has also allowed Gasperini to be more aggressive when chasing games. As we saw in August when Atalanta came back from 2-0 down to win another game 3-2 — this time against SPAL — Gasperini will not hesitate to replace a centre-back with an attacking midfielder if his team are behind. Losing 2-1 at the Paolo Mazza, he makes an audacious double change five minutes short of the hour mark, swapping veteran defender Andrea Masiello for the highly technical Ukrainian playmaker Ruslan Malinovskiy, not to mention the equally bold switch of Freuler for lethal sub Luis Muriel.

The cool thing here is De Roon drops into Atalanta’s back three. Yet Gasperini does not want him to act as a centre-back. As you can see from the action in Ferrara, he is using De Roon’s instincts to ratchet up the pressure on SPAL even more.

The position he adopts is nominally that of a defender but his vocation is to remain as intrepid as he was before the tactical change which, in conjunction with the introductions of Muriel and Malinovskiy, really turns the screw on the home side.

Observe here how he sets Hateboer up to cross for Duvan Zapata.

“He wants me to play as a midfielder,” De Roon explains. “I’m the lowest midfielder. Gasperini always says, ‘I want my midfielders and attackers to have the ball and now I have a midfielder who plays as a defender but like a midfielder with the ball’. ‘I like it’, he says. ‘I like it because I have an advantage that instead of one of my defenders going forward or playing passes, I have a midfielder there who can change positions with the other midfielder a little bit easier’.

“For him, it’s like an extra midfielder who is used to playing (the ball and the positional game) a bit more forward than a defender. He doesn’t see it as, ‘Now you play as a defender’.”

When I suggest Gasperini’s total football is as Dutch as De Roon, he counters: “Tactically, he is Italian because Italian coaches are stronger or very strong in this regard as they grew up with all the tactical stuff. He is a little bit Dutch in the total football because he expects defenders to attack and midfielders to attack and attackers to defend. What for me is really different with the Dutch mentality though is that, in Holland, we play a lot of possession. We want to keep the ball.

“Now, of course, he loves possession (Atalanta average 58 per cent of the ball, the third-highest figure in Serie A) but he hates possession for possession’s sake. He hates it. He wants to go forward. His first mindset is to go forward. He hates a ball wide, he hates a ball back. Honestly in training, where you can make mistakes, he wants you to play forward, always. He doesn’t want you to play back, even if you make a mistake, because if you go backwards the other team has an opportunity to press us, to go forward and everything. They’re the ones who have to go backwards. We have to go forward. So I think that’s a big difference with the Dutch mentality where possession is sometimes the main thing you know. But that’s not Gasperini’s mentality. He wants to go. He wants to score goals. That’s why we score so many.”

Atalanta’s attacking threat makes them an absurd outlier in terms of their expected goals (xG) per 90 minutes, with a league-leading 2.15.

The other reason is Atalanta’s delightful trident (and wicked change-up from the bench in Muriel, Malinovskiy and Pasalic). “Papu and Ilicic are both players who can beat a man. They’re our creators,” De Roon says. “You know, in moments of difficulty they can beat two or three guys or have an amazing play and score or give an assist (Gomez, known to all as Papu, has 15 of the latter in Serie A this season). The pair of them draw the attention of the defenders. That’s why others have spaces.

“Zapata is often one-against-one because defenders don’t want to have Ilicic or Papu one-against-one. They double or triple up on them which means he’s often on his own and with his physical ability and everything he scores a lot.”

The Colombian’s hat-trick goal in the 7-2 win over Lecce — one of three games in which Atalanta have put seven past a Serie A team this season — is a case in point. Notice how a swarm of defenders suddenly converge on the slaloming Ilicic.

Then Papu.

Then Ilicic again, before he hooks the ball over to a wide-open Zapata for a tap-in.

No team has scored more goals at this stage of a Serie A season since Fiorentina in the late 1950s and, if Atalanta keep this up, they are projected to end the campaign with 107 in the league. The unprecedented numbers and scintillating play have sparked a provocative debate in Italy about whether or not they should consider the league season something of a disappointment because they are not in the title race.

Some pundits wonder if a more measured approach would have got Atalanta closer to Juventus and Lazio. But De Roon doesn’t agree and believes we should never lose sight of just how much this club are punching above their weight. “The way we play has got us where we are,” he says. “We talk a lot about it. Also, we are not all bought for €30 million or €40 million. We are learning. There are a lot of young players who, three years ago, were playing in Holland and elsewhere and now they are competing with the best.

“It’s easy to say, ‘If they play like this they can play for the Scudetto’. We can beat anyone. But we’re also a team that if it is not happening we cannot go back to a very stable system or a boring kind of playing style and then try to win one-zero. It’s in our veins now to try to attack, to play our style. It’s difficult to compare with teams like Juve and Inter, who pay €80 million, €100 million or €120 million for players, when our wage bill is €36 million and 13th in the league. Our goal from the beginning of the season was to try to end up again in the Champions League and even that is not easy with teams like Milan and Roma, who have a bigger budget and everything.”

Atalanta’s payroll is around 30 per cent of what those two clubs pay their players. They are also the only Italian side to have already booked their place in next month’s Champions League quarter-finals. It’s a remarkable achievement when you recall they had zero points after the first three games of the group stage. Reflecting on how the team got to grips with the competition, De Roon says: “The first thing is the pace. It’s not like you can say, ‘OK, let’s slow down for five or 10 minutes’, because then they punish you. That’s the difference between playing your own competition (Serie A) and playing Champions League. Of course, you have to be concentrated for 90 minutes and everything in Serie A but sometimes if you’re 1-0 or 2-0 up, you can let the tempo down a little bit. Do that for five or 10 minutes in the Champions League and you’re behind or they pull level. Nobody can switch off for 30 seconds.”

Nobody, in the competition’s present format, had qualified from the position Atalanta found themselves in either. “(Manchester) City at home (a 1-1 draw) gave us a little bit of confidence,” De Roon recalls. “The two draws between Shakhtar (Donetsk) and Dinamo (Zagreb) gave us hope too. That was very important. The only thing we could do was win twice and even then we were still dependent on City (winning their final group game in Zagreb), otherwise we were out. We said to each other, ‘Let’s go for it. We’re growing in the Champions League. We’re adapting’. We couldn’t go out with zero points. It was Atalanta’s first time in the Champions League. Now we’re in the final stages. It’s something unbelievable. The impact that it had on the city also, the people here.”

As one of the worst-hit places in the world during the pandemic — Bergamo suffered more than 6,000 deaths — De Roon and his team-mates are striving to do as much as they can to give their city a lift. Now that qualification for next season’s Champions League is close to being wrapped up, Gasperini has set the team the target of breaking the club record points total Atalanta set in his first season (72). Attention will then shift to the eight-team Champions League tournament in Lisbon.

The question is: Can they win it now the format has been temporarily changed from two legs to one-off ties?

“Errrrr… I cannot say nothing,” De Roon says. “There are stronger teams than us with more quality but for us it’s an advantage that it’s one game. I would say if you draw Bayern Munich and have to play two games against them, it’s going to be very difficult. But when it’s one game, well, if you have a good day and the other team has a bad day, you have a chance to win. It’s quarter-final, semi-final, final. So it’s three games against the best teams in the world. But you know what we always say to each other? ‘We go there, we go play and we will see how it goes’.

“Anything can happen.”

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Cadiz, the club and city where the rules are different, finally return to La Liga

https://theathletic.com/1921020/2020/07/14/cervera-la-liga-cadiz-promotion/

The scenes were startling on Saturday evening as 2,000 yellow-clad fans noisily gathered in the narrow streets around Cadiz’s Ramon de Carranza stadium to welcome the team bus ahead of their Segunda Division game against Fuenlabrada.

Showing a clear disregard for a call from city mayor and big Cadiz fan Jose Maria Gonzalez “not to play with COVID-19”, some supporters could not stay away, knowing that even a point would clinch their club’s promotion back to Spain’s top flight for the first time in 15 years.

An unexpected 1-0 loss to play-offs chasing Fuenlabrada put the celebrations on ice though, and fans who had gone to bars and houses in the city to watch the game melted back into the heat of the night. But 24 hours later, the party could properly begin after third-placed Real Zaragoza’s own 4-2 defeat against relegation candidates Real Oviedo confirmed Cadiz’s promotion with two games to spare.

Elsewhere in Spain, there was concern at the lack of social distancing, but general joy at the return of one of La Liga’s most colourful clubs to La Liga.

Although formed in 1910, Cadiz’s biggest contribution to football over the decades was the summer Carranza Trophy tournament, where many of the biggest Spanish and South American clubs would come for some relaxing pre-season fun, before more serious commercial considerations of recent years sent them on tours to the US and Far East. Cadiz’s own most successful era came in the late 1980s and early 90s, when El Salvador international Jorge Alberto “Magico” Gonzalez was widely admired for his on-pitch skills and off-pitch antics.

Relegation from the top flight in 2006 was a much more serious affair for Cadiz, especially when followed two years later by a further fall to the third-tier Segunda B.

Six seasons in semi-pro “hell” almost saw the club go out of business. The 2014 arrival of current president Manuel Vizcaino coincided with an upturn in fortunes, though they were still in Segunda B when Real Madrid visited in December 2015 for a Copa del Rey tie. That evening saw Cadiz supporters’ reputation as the wittiest in Spain reconfirmed. Chants of “(Rafa) Benitez, look at Twitter” rang around the stadium as news circulated online that Real were about to be thrown out of the competition for fielding ineligible winger Denis Cheryshev that night.

Vizcaino’s rebuilding of Cadiz has not been without its own controversies, with a legal battle for control of the club with former Granada president Quique Pina still to be resolved.

In 2018, ex-Granada sporting director Juan Carlos Cordero was replaced by Oscar Arias, who brought with him the recruitment skills and processes learned working under (Cadiz-born) Monchi at Andalusian neighbours Sevilla. However, the key appointment of recent years was coach Alvaro Cervera, who, within two months of his arrival in April 2016, had delivered promotion back to the Segunda.

Cervera has ended a 15-year top-flight exile for Cadiz (Photo by Irina R.H. / AFP7 / Europa Press Sports via Getty Images)

 

Cervera was born in Equatorial Guinea in west Africa, grew up on Tenerife in the Canary Islands, then moved to the Spanish mainland, where he came through as a forward with Racing Santander. He also played in the top flight for Valencia and Mallorca, and won four Spain caps in the early 1990s.

His coaching career has been mostly in the second and third tiers at clubs such as Castellon, Alicante, Real Union and Recreativo de Huelva. His only top-flight experience to date among almost 500 games as a manager was with former club Santander, where he was hired midway through the 2011-12 season with the team in a desperate situation amid an institutional crisis. Unable to save them from relegation, with the team picking up just three points, all from draws, in his 13 games, Cervera landed in hospital at one point for what was reported as stress. There was also controversy when he accused his own players of not trying hard enough after a loss to relegation rivals Zaragoza.

He was sacked from his next job in the Segunda with Tenerife after almost three years, before Cadiz decided to take him on when they needed help getting out of the third tier. His excellent work there has now finally gained him another chance to succeed at Primera level at age 54.

Well used to succeeding against the odds, Cervera has been nicknamed “El Simeone del Cadiz”, after Atletico Madrid coach Diego Simeone, and has described his team’s gameplan as “rob and run” — winning the ball high up the pitch, and going straight for the opposition goal. “You thought you had the game under control, then the final score shows you they did,” said Las Palmas and former West Bromwich Albion coach Pepe Mel, after his better footballing side lost 2-0 at the Carranza in October.

Cadiz’s steady progress through recent years has been achieved without spending much money — they have made a profit each summer while down in Segunda.

Last summer they paid out just €700,000 in total, while selling homegrown striker Manu Vallejo to top-flight Valencia (where he has barely played) for €5.5 million. Their €9 million wage bill places them 10th among the 22 clubs in the second tier.

Many of the team’s key players have also taken their own roundabout routes to this point. Their 41-year-old captain and goalkeeper Alberto Cifuentes has never played in La Liga and joined from Polish club Piast Gliwice in 2015, when Cadiz were still in Segunda B. Their current players with the most top-flight experience are former Sevilla, Getafe and Las Palmas centre-back Juan Cala, 30, and ex-Atletico Madrid, Schalke and Watford midfielder Jose Manuel Jurado, 34.

Maybe the most talented squad member is Alex Fernandez, the 27-year-old brother of Real Madrid’s Nacho. Twelve goals from midfield make the former Real Madrid youth teamer and one-time Reading loanee Cadiz’s top scorer this season.

“We are a team of grafters,” Fernandez told Radio Marca from the team’s promotion party on Sunday evening. “We love working, and that has been the key.”

Former Barcelona B striker Anthony “Choco” Lozano has nine goals while on loan from Manchester City-owned Segunda rivals Girona, who decided they would not need the Honduras international to get promoted this season but are still not certain of even making the play-offs.

With the practical game plan required to get out of the Segunda refined over four years of mostly gradual progress, 2019-20 did seem to be going perfectly on the pitch. Cervera’s team won 10 of their first 12 league games, and have spent the entire campaign in the two automatic promotion spots.

The biggest threat to them going up was mid-March’s shutdown due to the pandemic opening up the possibility of the season being called off with no promotion or relegation. There were also fears within the squad, voiced by defender Fali, who at first refused to return to training and said he might even retire from the professional game if resuming the season posed a risk to his health. However, he and all his team-mates did fall into line, along with everyone else in Spanish football.

Recent months brought further sad news, with Cadiz’s most famous non-local fan, Michael Robinson, passing away in April after a long battle with cancer. City mayor Gonzalez has even suggested that the Carranza be renamed after the former Liverpool striker and respected Spanish football pundit and journalist, who connected so well with the club and the city. “Cadiz has a spirit,” Blackpool-raised Robinson told Jot Down magazine in 2011. “It is the only western city where capitalism is not the law. To be rich is even a disadvantage. The rules of life are different.”

Cadiz’s rise through recent years could also be described as a rebellion against the usual rules, while current social norms were put aside again on Sunday evening when supporters spilled onto the streets of the Mediterranean port city to celebrate promotion together.

Club president Vizcaino has already promised the 10,000 club members who have attended every Segunda home game this season that their season ticket will be renewed for free for 2020-21 (assuming the COVID-19 situation in Spain improves to the point where supporters are allowed into stadiums again).

The club have also recently renewed Cervera’s contract up until 2024, while during Sunday night’s celebrations Vizcaino announced Spain international former Sevilla, Manchester City and Valencia striker Alvaro Negredo, soon to turn 35, would join them for next season.

It would not be Cadiz if there were not still some challenges to overcome — these still include an appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport over a FIFA transfer ban imposed for re-signing centre-back Mamadou M’Baye from Watford (another club with Quique Pina links) last summer.

That is a reminder there is still plenty of work to be done at Cadiz, on and off the pitch.

But for now the celebrations are likely to last long beyond the end of this season, and well into the next one.

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Honigstein: How to fix the broken Bundesliga

https://theathletic.com/1919044/2020/07/13/honigstein-broken-bundesliga-bayern-munich/

West Germany coach Sepp Herberger once famously summed up football’s core appeal. “People go to the stadium because they don’t know how the game will turn out,” the 1954 World Cup winner said.

For decades, this has essentially rung true. In 2020 though, things are doubly different. People can’t go to the stadiums but they do know how the game will turn out: it ends with Bayern Munich winning. Always.

The Bavarians secured an eighth consecutive title in 2019-20, their 29th championship in 51 years. Their 4-2 win over Bayer Leverkusen then delivered a 20th DFB Pokal win, their 11th this century.

Bayern deserve praise for their voracious appetite and mostly excellent use of their considerable resources. But as 11 Freunde contributor and Steilcast pod regular Christoph Biermann put it so succinctly, their dominance is a sure-tell sign of “a broken league”.

How did it come to this?

With an annual income of £670 million in 2018-19, Bayern have become simply too big to fail, or, if you want, the competition are just too meek to take advantage. Even appointing the wrong manager in Niko Kovac and playing 16 months of largely dysfunctional football wasn’t sufficiently bad enough to miss out on domestic silverware.

The Bundesliga behemoth’s sporting hegemony is a direct result of their relative financial might. They made £233 million more than their nearest rivals Borussia Dortmund (£437 million turnover) last season, £429 million more than third-placed RB Leipzig (£241 million) and £480 million more than Borussia Monchengladbach (£190 million) who finished in fourth in 2019-20. Augsburg, last season’s lowest-placed survivors in 15th spot, are a whopping £578 million worse off.

The imbalance is clear to see but ways out of this lopsided state of affairs are much harder to find. Possible solutions fall into two categories — you can either attempt to level down, curtailing Bayern’s advantage, or level up, by generating more money for the teams below. Neither are anything like straightforward.

So how do you plug the gap?

One way, without addressing the thorny issue of money itself, would be to render the bigger mismatches meaningless and shift the focus on to games between sides that are more evenly matched. You could do so by introducing play-offs. Michael Reschke, now technical director at Schalke, mooted the idea a couple of years ago as a means of adding more excitement to the title race.

A best-of-five series between Bayern and Dortmund in late May would certainly be entertaining but it would also dramatically diminish the appeal of the regular season and pose the big logistical problem of fitting in the extra games, unless the number of teams in the league was reduced.

Play-offs also wouldn’t change the basic fact that Bayern are huge favourites to win the league against sides with two-thirds or a third of their income, at best. The change to the structure of the competition would be drastic; the real benefit in terms competitiveness doubtful.

What about salary caps or a luxury tax?

Salary caps would require a change of European law and near-global adoption in order not to put Bundesliga clubs at a unique disadvantage. But even if those hurdles could be overcome, there’s a good chance that wealthy clubs would no doubt still find “creative” ways of paying top money to their best players, via sponsorships from related companies or a very generous bonus structure, to name but the legal methods.

A luxury tax? You could tax Bayern, say, on any wages beyond £180 million and redistribute the money to the other teams. To go by this year’s figures, that would result in £120 million of extra income for the rest of the league. Dortmund would be taxed £4.5 million themselves.

Redistributing income directly from the top earners to the needier would be a very popular move — taking money from the rich to give it to the poor always is — but just like a salary cap, it would require a European-wide adoption to pass the tests of legality and fairness. Bayern can’t be the only club in the Champions League to lose a sixth of their income in that way. It wouldn’t be in the league’s interest, either.

Why would penalising Bayern financially hinder the Bundesliga as a whole?

“Munich’s monopolisation of trophies does have a chilling effect on the Bundesliga’s international TV rights and will also be detrimental on national TV rights in the medium term,” industry expert Kay Dammholz, of Sass Media, explains but hobbling Bayern financially would still do more harm than good to the league as a whole. In order to understand why that’s the case, it’s necessary to look at the reasons why people abroad watch German football.

 

Robert Lewandowski and Bayern Munich celebrate at a town hall reception last week (Photo: A Beier/Getty Images for FC Bayern)

An unpublished study by the league into the appeal of foreign competitions to global audiences found that the number one reason to tune in were “clubs and superstars” — in other words, recognisable brands. “Quality of football”, as measured by the teams’ performances in European competition, comes second, and an “exciting championship” is third. Much to the Bundesliga’s frustration, “match ambience” (fans, stadiums) sits only in fourth.

If you consider that their domestic market is largely saturated — attendance is, under normal conditions, high and TV rights are stable — then any substantial growth will have to come from internationalisation. Taking the top club (and Dortmund) down a peg is, therefore, the last thing the league wants to do.

“We don’t win by making Bayern smaller,” a Bundesliga official tells The Athletic. “They, along with Dortmund, are the main drivers of international engagement. There are other interesting stories — like the first-ever Berlin derby between Hertha and Union in the top flight — and we do well in certain markets such as the US and Japan because we have many of their players but it still comes down to the big clubs, how they do well in the Champions League.” Increased domestic competitiveness would certainly be good for the “product” but it must not come at the cost of hurting the top sides.

Recent history is very instructive in that regard. In the noughties, Bayern’s dominance had not yet reached today’s totalitarian level. Surprises were still possible. In the seven years between 2002 and 2009, the Bundesliga had six different champions in Bayern, Dortmund, Werder Bremen, VfB Stuttgart and VfL Wolfsburg.

Unfortunately, nobody outside Germany paid much attention, as the “cheap and cheerful” (The Guardian) league was considered poor in sporting terms and bereft of stars with international visibility. International TV rights brought in only £9-£18 million annually, a measly fraction of the £230 million the Premier League was raking in from foreign channels at the time.

Today, there’s far less mobility at the top but more people than ever are watching because they recognise Bayern and Dortmund as sides of international stature or want to watch their native players. The Bundesliga’s annual income from international TV rights is currently worth £224 million, roughly a fifth of the Premier League’s. Growth has come on the back of Bayern’s reemergence as a European superpower and Dortmund’s ascent to the number two position, not despite it. “What we need are more Bayerns and Dortmunds: clubs good enough to compete in Europe and attract global audiences,” the league official says.

So the Bundesliga needs more outside investment, then?

German fans don’t think along those lines. They would love their clubs to be as wealthy and powerful as Bayern, of course, but they’re not prepared to accept the external investment that could make that happen rather quickly. The Bundesliga’s fabled “50+1” rule — a stipulation that the majority of a club’s voting shares must remain with the supporters — acts as an effective bar to takeovers by individuals or companies. Growth must be organic, with clubs generating their own income.

Borussia Monchengladbach’s comeback as a force in German football shows that it can be done but the speed of progress is glacial by international comparison and the pitfalls are plentiful. Two or three wrong coaching appointments coupled with a few misguided big transfers and you’re back to square one — or worse. Just ask VfB Stuttgart, Werder Bremen or Hamburger SV.

There are exceptions. Wolfsburg and Bayer Leverkusen are owned by corporations for historic reasons, Hoffenheim have a benefactor in billionaire Dietmar Hopp, RB Leipzig are controlled by Red Bull and Hertha BSC will see a £335 million investment by financier Lars Windhorst in return for 66 per cent of the club’s subsidiary company that encompasses the senior football team.

But the overwhelming majority of fans of traditional powerhouses such as Hamburg(now in Bundesliga 2), Stuttgart, Schalke or Bremen still abhor the idea of selling to an oligarch or local sugar daddy, even if it meant overnight elite status, a la Manchester City. They want to stick with the democratic control structures. Keeping it their club is much more important to them than silverware.

“When a club is sold, it loses part of its soul and identity,” says Jan-Henrik Gruszecki, a fan-activist who is working on a number of reform proposals with supporters’ group Unsere Kurve. “It’s like having a really good friend you’ve stuck with through good and bad times suddenly winning the lottery and becoming a completely different person, and no longer interested in you.”

But how else can clubs make more money if an oligarch isn’t going to come along and help?

As long as those purist sentiments persist, so will the dynamic that sees Bayern and Dortmund grow further apart from the field. One of the unintended side effects of the 50+1 rule is that it forces clubs to maximise commercial income. In order not to sell themselves, they must flog everything else, by way of merchandising or sponsorship. But not everybody can.

“The exponential growth of commercial income for the elite teams has been the real differentiator in recent years, more so than TV money,” says Yannick Ramcke, founder of the well-respected Off The Field Business blog and business development manager at onefootball.com. Bayern, for example, made £175 million from sponsorship and marketing activities last season, close to three times the money they received from the Bundesliga’s national television rights, £60 million.

Due to the relatively low value of domestic rights (£1 billion per year, 20 per cent of which is passed on to Bundesliga 2), Champions League money acts to distort the competitive balance even further. Bayern received £73 million from UEFA last year, despite exiting at the last-16 stage. The Bundesliga could lobby UEFA to pay out revenue more evenly among participating leagues but due to the top teams’ position of power, it’s a no-starter. Europe’s elite are forever pressuring the federation into maximising income for them, dangling the sword of a super league without UEFA’s involvement over their heads.

So no more money from UEFA. What about addressing the imbalance in domestic TV revenue?

This would seem a more promising avenue. Unlike the Premier League, the Bundesliga does not publish the exact breakdown of payouts to clubs, which is in itself rather indicative of some pretty damning inequity. Kicker magazine and others are forced to calculate the numbers themselves every year, taking into account a complex system that weighs historic achievements. For this season, the domestic breakdown works out at £60 million for Bayern and £23 million for 18th-placed Paderborn. Broadcast rebates and loss of income from COVID-19 excluded, this is a ratio of 1:2.5.

Once you add the money received from international TV rights, however, things get totally out of kilter. Instead of distributing the £224 million evenly among its 18 members, the Bundesliga’s weighted system favours the biggest sides to an extent that feels unconscionable. Bayern received £40 million from the foreign rights pot, Dortmund £28 million, but Paderborn only £2.7 million. The net effect is that the overall ratio stretches to 1:4.

“It used to be 1:2.3, 10 years ago,” Mainz board member Jan Lehmann told Sponsors magazine. “Clubs like ours don’t demand radical change but a return to the proven way things worked in the past.”

An even distribution of international money would provide just around £12.5 million for each club and see Bayern and Dortmund lose out on £28 million and £16 million respectively: not enough to seriously hamper their chances in Europe. There’s no good reason not do that, even if the overall dynamic won’t be too much affected.

What’s the nuclear option?

If the Bundesliga is to hold on to its traditional club structures and increase competitiveness without clipping Bayern’s and Dortmund’s wings too much, there’s only one drastic option as long as TV revenue is static: the number of clubs in the Bundesliga has to be smaller.

Reducing the league to, say 14 teams, would pit more evenly-matched teams against each other in more meaningful games. Sticking with £100 million for the team finishing in first place would increase the average sum for other sides from the current £52 million to £70 million — a huge jump of 34 per cent that would help with domestic, as well as international competitiveness.

That’s if German broadcasters are prepared to pay out the same money without the four worst teams being a part of the league any longer. In the season just gone, that would have meant doing without Paderborn, Fortuna Dusseldorf, Werder Bremen and Mainz.

Ramcke believes the value of rights wouldn’t be overly affected in a negative sense. “The biggest sides are the by far the most important drivers of revenue, whereas the production of the smaller sides’ live games is more a burden to broadcasters than an asset,” he says, adding that the Champions League has shown that scarcity and relevance, combined with much higher quality games, can offset the reduction of games available for rights holders.

Four fewer home matches would mean less income from gate receipts, to be sure. But those losses, up to £3.5 million per game per team, are mostly offset by the increase in TV revenue. In addition, freeing up eight kick-off slots in the calendar could be used to move more rounds of the Champions League to a more lucrative weekend schedule, help Bundesliga teams grow their brands during off-season trips abroad, see the introduction of two-legged DFB Pokal fixtures or even that of a league cup that would generate additional income for Bundesliga 2 and third-division sides.

Europe’s biggest country reducing the number of teams in its top league does appear counter-intuitive and will be guaranteed to face stiff resistance from sides worrying about relegation and their chances of promotion from Bundesliga 2. Gruszecki disagrees with the notion, unsurprisingly. “We shouldn’t think about reducing the league but work towards making an 18-team league more competitive.”

But increasing the concentration of wealth in the upper-middle really is the most logical way of countering the concentration of wealth at the top without allowing for billionaire takeovers or harming the chances of German clubs to be competitive in Europe, which is so vital for the league’s international standing.

If Bayern aren’t to win the next nine leagues in a row, the only chance is to strengthen the sides best-placed to thwart them.

(Top photo: Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images)

[communicate 2,703]

9 hours ago, Vesper said:

Honigstein: How to fix the broken Bundesliga

https://theathletic.com/1919044/2020/07/13/honigstein-broken-bundesliga-bayern-munich/

West Germany coach Sepp Herberger once famously summed up football’s core appeal. “People go to the stadium because they don’t know how the game will turn out,” the 1954 World Cup winner said.

For decades, this has essentially rung true. In 2020 though, things are doubly different. People can’t go to the stadiums but they do know how the game will turn out: it ends with Bayern Munich winning. Always.

The Bavarians secured an eighth consecutive title in 2019-20, their 29th championship in 51 years. Their 4-2 win over Bayer Leverkusen then delivered a 20th DFB Pokal win, their 11th this century.

Bayern deserve praise for their voracious appetite and mostly excellent use of their considerable resources. But as 11 Freunde contributor and Steilcast pod regular Christoph Biermann put it so succinctly, their dominance is a sure-tell sign of “a broken league”.

How did it come to this?

With an annual income of £670 million in 2018-19, Bayern have become simply too big to fail, or, if you want, the competition are just too meek to take advantage. Even appointing the wrong manager in Niko Kovac and playing 16 months of largely dysfunctional football wasn’t sufficiently bad enough to miss out on domestic silverware.

The Bundesliga behemoth’s sporting hegemony is a direct result of their relative financial might. They made £233 million more than their nearest rivals Borussia Dortmund (£437 million turnover) last season, £429 million more than third-placed RB Leipzig (£241 million) and £480 million more than Borussia Monchengladbach (£190 million) who finished in fourth in 2019-20. Augsburg, last season’s lowest-placed survivors in 15th spot, are a whopping £578 million worse off.

The imbalance is clear to see but ways out of this lopsided state of affairs are much harder to find. Possible solutions fall into two categories — you can either attempt to level down, curtailing Bayern’s advantage, or level up, by generating more money for the teams below. Neither are anything like straightforward.

So how do you plug the gap?

One way, without addressing the thorny issue of money itself, would be to render the bigger mismatches meaningless and shift the focus on to games between sides that are more evenly matched. You could do so by introducing play-offs. Michael Reschke, now technical director at Schalke, mooted the idea a couple of years ago as a means of adding more excitement to the title race.

A best-of-five series between Bayern and Dortmund in late May would certainly be entertaining but it would also dramatically diminish the appeal of the regular season and pose the big logistical problem of fitting in the extra games, unless the number of teams in the league was reduced.

Play-offs also wouldn’t change the basic fact that Bayern are huge favourites to win the league against sides with two-thirds or a third of their income, at best. The change to the structure of the competition would be drastic; the real benefit in terms competitiveness doubtful.

What about salary caps or a luxury tax?

Salary caps would require a change of European law and near-global adoption in order not to put Bundesliga clubs at a unique disadvantage. But even if those hurdles could be overcome, there’s a good chance that wealthy clubs would no doubt still find “creative” ways of paying top money to their best players, via sponsorships from related companies or a very generous bonus structure, to name but the legal methods.

A luxury tax? You could tax Bayern, say, on any wages beyond £180 million and redistribute the money to the other teams. To go by this year’s figures, that would result in £120 million of extra income for the rest of the league. Dortmund would be taxed £4.5 million themselves.

Redistributing income directly from the top earners to the needier would be a very popular move — taking money from the rich to give it to the poor always is — but just like a salary cap, it would require a European-wide adoption to pass the tests of legality and fairness. Bayern can’t be the only club in the Champions League to lose a sixth of their income in that way. It wouldn’t be in the league’s interest, either.

Why would penalising Bayern financially hinder the Bundesliga as a whole?

“Munich’s monopolisation of trophies does have a chilling effect on the Bundesliga’s international TV rights and will also be detrimental on national TV rights in the medium term,” industry expert Kay Dammholz, of Sass Media, explains but hobbling Bayern financially would still do more harm than good to the league as a whole. In order to understand why that’s the case, it’s necessary to look at the reasons why people abroad watch German football.

 

Robert Lewandowski and Bayern Munich celebrate at a town hall reception last week (Photo: A Beier/Getty Images for FC Bayern)

An unpublished study by the league into the appeal of foreign competitions to global audiences found that the number one reason to tune in were “clubs and superstars” — in other words, recognisable brands. “Quality of football”, as measured by the teams’ performances in European competition, comes second, and an “exciting championship” is third. Much to the Bundesliga’s frustration, “match ambience” (fans, stadiums) sits only in fourth.

If you consider that their domestic market is largely saturated — attendance is, under normal conditions, high and TV rights are stable — then any substantial growth will have to come from internationalisation. Taking the top club (and Dortmund) down a peg is, therefore, the last thing the league wants to do.

“We don’t win by making Bayern smaller,” a Bundesliga official tells The Athletic. “They, along with Dortmund, are the main drivers of international engagement. There are other interesting stories — like the first-ever Berlin derby between Hertha and Union in the top flight — and we do well in certain markets such as the US and Japan because we have many of their players but it still comes down to the big clubs, how they do well in the Champions League.” Increased domestic competitiveness would certainly be good for the “product” but it must not come at the cost of hurting the top sides.

Recent history is very instructive in that regard. In the noughties, Bayern’s dominance had not yet reached today’s totalitarian level. Surprises were still possible. In the seven years between 2002 and 2009, the Bundesliga had six different champions in Bayern, Dortmund, Werder Bremen, VfB Stuttgart and VfL Wolfsburg.

Unfortunately, nobody outside Germany paid much attention, as the “cheap and cheerful” (The Guardian) league was considered poor in sporting terms and bereft of stars with international visibility. International TV rights brought in only £9-£18 million annually, a measly fraction of the £230 million the Premier League was raking in from foreign channels at the time.

Today, there’s far less mobility at the top but more people than ever are watching because they recognise Bayern and Dortmund as sides of international stature or want to watch their native players. The Bundesliga’s annual income from international TV rights is currently worth £224 million, roughly a fifth of the Premier League’s. Growth has come on the back of Bayern’s reemergence as a European superpower and Dortmund’s ascent to the number two position, not despite it. “What we need are more Bayerns and Dortmunds: clubs good enough to compete in Europe and attract global audiences,” the league official says.

So the Bundesliga needs more outside investment, then?

German fans don’t think along those lines. They would love their clubs to be as wealthy and powerful as Bayern, of course, but they’re not prepared to accept the external investment that could make that happen rather quickly. The Bundesliga’s fabled “50+1” rule — a stipulation that the majority of a club’s voting shares must remain with the supporters — acts as an effective bar to takeovers by individuals or companies. Growth must be organic, with clubs generating their own income.

Borussia Monchengladbach’s comeback as a force in German football shows that it can be done but the speed of progress is glacial by international comparison and the pitfalls are plentiful. Two or three wrong coaching appointments coupled with a few misguided big transfers and you’re back to square one — or worse. Just ask VfB Stuttgart, Werder Bremen or Hamburger SV.

There are exceptions. Wolfsburg and Bayer Leverkusen are owned by corporations for historic reasons, Hoffenheim have a benefactor in billionaire Dietmar Hopp, RB Leipzig are controlled by Red Bull and Hertha BSC will see a £335 million investment by financier Lars Windhorst in return for 66 per cent of the club’s subsidiary company that encompasses the senior football team.

But the overwhelming majority of fans of traditional powerhouses such as Hamburg(now in Bundesliga 2), Stuttgart, Schalke or Bremen still abhor the idea of selling to an oligarch or local sugar daddy, even if it meant overnight elite status, a la Manchester City. They want to stick with the democratic control structures. Keeping it their club is much more important to them than silverware.

“When a club is sold, it loses part of its soul and identity,” says Jan-Henrik Gruszecki, a fan-activist who is working on a number of reform proposals with supporters’ group Unsere Kurve. “It’s like having a really good friend you’ve stuck with through good and bad times suddenly winning the lottery and becoming a completely different person, and no longer interested in you.”

But how else can clubs make more money if an oligarch isn’t going to come along and help?

As long as those purist sentiments persist, so will the dynamic that sees Bayern and Dortmund grow further apart from the field. One of the unintended side effects of the 50+1 rule is that it forces clubs to maximise commercial income. In order not to sell themselves, they must flog everything else, by way of merchandising or sponsorship. But not everybody can.

“The exponential growth of commercial income for the elite teams has been the real differentiator in recent years, more so than TV money,” says Yannick Ramcke, founder of the well-respected Off The Field Business blog and business development manager at onefootball.com. Bayern, for example, made £175 million from sponsorship and marketing activities last season, close to three times the money they received from the Bundesliga’s national television rights, £60 million.

Due to the relatively low value of domestic rights (£1 billion per year, 20 per cent of which is passed on to Bundesliga 2), Champions League money acts to distort the competitive balance even further. Bayern received £73 million from UEFA last year, despite exiting at the last-16 stage. The Bundesliga could lobby UEFA to pay out revenue more evenly among participating leagues but due to the top teams’ position of power, it’s a no-starter. Europe’s elite are forever pressuring the federation into maximising income for them, dangling the sword of a super league without UEFA’s involvement over their heads.

So no more money from UEFA. What about addressing the imbalance in domestic TV revenue?

This would seem a more promising avenue. Unlike the Premier League, the Bundesliga does not publish the exact breakdown of payouts to clubs, which is in itself rather indicative of some pretty damning inequity. Kicker magazine and others are forced to calculate the numbers themselves every year, taking into account a complex system that weighs historic achievements. For this season, the domestic breakdown works out at £60 million for Bayern and £23 million for 18th-placed Paderborn. Broadcast rebates and loss of income from COVID-19 excluded, this is a ratio of 1:2.5.

Once you add the money received from international TV rights, however, things get totally out of kilter. Instead of distributing the £224 million evenly among its 18 members, the Bundesliga’s weighted system favours the biggest sides to an extent that feels unconscionable. Bayern received £40 million from the foreign rights pot, Dortmund £28 million, but Paderborn only £2.7 million. The net effect is that the overall ratio stretches to 1:4.

“It used to be 1:2.3, 10 years ago,” Mainz board member Jan Lehmann told Sponsors magazine. “Clubs like ours don’t demand radical change but a return to the proven way things worked in the past.”

An even distribution of international money would provide just around £12.5 million for each club and see Bayern and Dortmund lose out on £28 million and £16 million respectively: not enough to seriously hamper their chances in Europe. There’s no good reason not do that, even if the overall dynamic won’t be too much affected.

What’s the nuclear option?

If the Bundesliga is to hold on to its traditional club structures and increase competitiveness without clipping Bayern’s and Dortmund’s wings too much, there’s only one drastic option as long as TV revenue is static: the number of clubs in the Bundesliga has to be smaller.

Reducing the league to, say 14 teams, would pit more evenly-matched teams against each other in more meaningful games. Sticking with £100 million for the team finishing in first place would increase the average sum for other sides from the current £52 million to £70 million — a huge jump of 34 per cent that would help with domestic, as well as international competitiveness.

That’s if German broadcasters are prepared to pay out the same money without the four worst teams being a part of the league any longer. In the season just gone, that would have meant doing without Paderborn, Fortuna Dusseldorf, Werder Bremen and Mainz.

Ramcke believes the value of rights wouldn’t be overly affected in a negative sense. “The biggest sides are the by far the most important drivers of revenue, whereas the production of the smaller sides’ live games is more a burden to broadcasters than an asset,” he says, adding that the Champions League has shown that scarcity and relevance, combined with much higher quality games, can offset the reduction of games available for rights holders.

Four fewer home matches would mean less income from gate receipts, to be sure. But those losses, up to £3.5 million per game per team, are mostly offset by the increase in TV revenue. In addition, freeing up eight kick-off slots in the calendar could be used to move more rounds of the Champions League to a more lucrative weekend schedule, help Bundesliga teams grow their brands during off-season trips abroad, see the introduction of two-legged DFB Pokal fixtures or even that of a league cup that would generate additional income for Bundesliga 2 and third-division sides.

Europe’s biggest country reducing the number of teams in its top league does appear counter-intuitive and will be guaranteed to face stiff resistance from sides worrying about relegation and their chances of promotion from Bundesliga 2. Gruszecki disagrees with the notion, unsurprisingly. “We shouldn’t think about reducing the league but work towards making an 18-team league more competitive.”

But increasing the concentration of wealth in the upper-middle really is the most logical way of countering the concentration of wealth at the top without allowing for billionaire takeovers or harming the chances of German clubs to be competitive in Europe, which is so vital for the league’s international standing.

If Bayern aren’t to win the next nine leagues in a row, the only chance is to strengthen the sides best-placed to thwart them.

(Top photo: Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images)

Team in Germany need to stop playing open football. That is a start. 

[NikkiCFC 7,566]

More horrible transfers incoming...

[Fulham Broadway 16,386]

5 minutes ago, NikkiCFC said:

More horrible transfers incoming...

Mental. Goldman Sachs shouldnt be allowed to trade - greedy cunts helped create the 2010 crash. Then made money from it

[Fulham Broadway 16,386]

Fans celebrating their biggest European win: Liverpool Fans: “That night in Istanbul” Man United Fans: “That night in Barcelona” Chelsea Fans: “That night in Munich” Man City Fans: “That day in Court”

[Vesper 27,283]

Atletico Madrid vs Real Sociedad Live Stream

http://hdstreams.club/hd/ch13.php

https://www.totalsportek.com/atletico-madrid/

[Vesper 27,283]

Serie A | Roma vs Internazionale

 

http://www.sportnews.to/sports/2020/serie-a-roma-vs-internazionale-s4/

https://www.totalsportek.com/as-roma/

 

[Vesper 27,283]

scouting those CB's of Inter

plus Mancini on Roma

[Vesper 27,283]

nil 1

Inter

great header by de Vrij

he looks sharp

[NikkiCFC 7,566]

If Juve lose tomorrow against Lazio it would be just three points with 4 games to go.

[LAM09 6,535]

If Juve lose tomorrow against Lazio it would be just three points with 4 games to go.

Lazio can't seem to buy a win to save their lives. A draw would be a huge surprise.

 

[Alabama 1,992]

Inter with another bottle job...

[Vesper 27,283]

1 hour ago, NikkiCFC said:

If Juve lose tomorrow against Lazio it would be just three points with 4 games to go.

none of Juve's games left are complete walkovers either

[Vesper 27,283]

shameful that Inter are down 2 1 and shitting away another title chance

[Jase 43,479]

6 minutes ago, Vesper said:

shameful that Inter are down 2 1 and shitting away another title chance

Looking forward to Conte's excuses...

[Vesper 27,283]

oki, I admit it, Skriniar looks aorta poor atm

nothing like 2 years ago, which is madness as he is 25yo and should be at the perfect or near perfect balance of age and experience (I rate prime as 23-30 for the majority of players)