The European Leagues & Competitions Thread V2

Vesper · July 12, 2020

Youssef En-Nesyri

Vesper · July 12, 2020

25 minutes ago, Rapkun said:

I watch a lot of french football and having seen him quite a lot at OM, he was average. Hardworking but nothing special. I don't know if his move to Sevilla had a big impact on him or if he just stagnated at Monaco/Marseille but it's certainly surprising to see him doing so well in La Liga.

he tied his all time high scoring year tonight

16

but the first one, at Marseille, was in 53 games

this is in only 38 games, all comps

Vesper · July 12, 2020

killer1257 · July 12, 2020

I hope Madrid wins it so we get some more of the Hazard money we need.
Yes, I feel ashamed of what I just said lol. I so fucking hate Real. But Madrid winning the league would make an additional signing possible

Gesendet von meinem VOG-L29 mit Tapatalk

1chelsea · July 13, 2020

I dont where to post this...you can make additional legit money by signing up with your google or Facebook account and then doing some basic stuffs every hour and every day...
https://GramFree.world/?r=3799478

Have you seen anyone who have earn from it or have you earn from it yourself?

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

Alabama · July 13, 2020

2 hours ago, 1chelsea said:

Have you seen anyone who have earn from it or have you earn from it yourself?

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

Have seen others earn from it but am getting closer to earning myself and others started a bit ahead of me...

Vesper · July 13, 2020

Villarreal v Real Sociedad

https://www.totalsportek.com/villarreal/

http://4kstreams.net/embed/soccer2.php

Vesper · July 14, 2020

How much power does Messi really hold at Barcelona?

https://theathletic.com/1911358/2020/07/09/lionel-messi-barcelona-power-president-setien/

It’s autumn 2009 and Barcelona coach Pep Guardiola is sitting in the front seat of the team bus, alongside long-time friend and collaborator Manel Estiarte, when his phone buzzes.

A text. It reads, “Well, I see I’m no longer important for the team, so…”

The message was from Lionel Messi, who sat stewing further back down the bus. The team’s big summer signing, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, had scored in each of his first five La Liga games. Messi had also been among the goals, and the two had even assisted each other already. But the younger, quieter man was feeling under threat, so reached for the only way he could bring himself to make that known.

Guardiola quickly rectified the mistake, and Ibrahimovic lasted only one season at the Nou Camp. Messi was given an even more central role in the team, which went on to have such great success.

Many things have changed at Barcelona since then, and the brilliant Argentinian has also matured and taken on more responsibility on and off the pitch. One thing has remained constant however as presidents, directors, coaches and players have come and gone. There is still one person at the club who it is all-important to keep happy.

In February, Messi took out his phone again to send another message, although this time he was at home in his house in the Catalan capital’s very comfortable Castelldefels district.

The provocation had come from Barcelona’s sporting director Eric Abidal, a former team-mate, who had suggested in an interview with Catalan daily Sport that the team’s players were to blame for the firing of coach Ernesto Valverde the previous month.

“To be brutally honest, I don’t like doing these things,” Messi responded, in an Instagram post he composed himself. “But I think that every person has to take responsibility for their own duties and the decisions they take. That includes the players, in what goes on out on the pitch — but we are the first ones to recognise when we haven’t played well. Those in charge of the ‘technical area’ also need to assume their responsibilities and above all, the decisions that they make. Lastly, I think that when someone mentions players, they should give names because if they don’t, they are tarring everyone with the same brush and fuelling gossip — a lot of which is not true.”

Messi followed up this post with an interview in Mundo Deportivo in which he explained why Abidal claiming to have been able to “smell” problems between Valverde and senior players had struck such a nerve.

“I don’t know what went through his head to say that, but I believe I responded as I felt attacked. I felt he was attacking the players,” Messi said. “And too many things have been said about the dressing room, that it controls everything, that it hires and fires coaches, signs players — and above all about me. As if I have too much power and I take decisions. And it annoys me that a person of the club would say that, the technical secretary… that he puts the players in the frame for the firing of who was our boss, it seems crazy to me. The technical secretary takes these decisions and must take responsibility for them. He takes the decisions. That is why I came out to clarify it, I knew that I could not let it go, that the sporting director would attack me in that way.”

When asked whether such frustration might affect his long-term future at Barcelona, Messi gave the same answer he always gives to these questions — that he wants to spend his whole career at the Nou Camp, but also wants the club’s hierarchy to demonstrate that they share his desires.

“At many moments I had the chance to leave the club, there were many clubs interested and even ready to pay the release clause,” Messi said. “But I never really thought of leaving, and not now either. I will repeat again. If the club wants me, there will be no problem.”

The problem though is that it can be very difficult for those who have to work with Messi to know exactly what he wants.

He himself even struggles to clearly explain it, beyond saying he wants to play in a team that wins everything, especially the Champions League, as often as possible.

The Athletic understands Messi’s anger over Abidal’s comments was very real and had been building for a long time.

Barcelona’s performances and results this season have not helped with his mood, but the real issue is a huge sense of frustration over the idea he is responsible for everything that happens at the club and therefore is to blame personally when things go wrong.

That was why the most important message in both the Instagram post and subsequent interview was that each individual at the club must take responsibility for their own decisions, their own mistakes. They definitely should not shift the blame onto Messi, who feels that he is an easy target, because of his profile and personality.

Each recent season, and this one especially, has brought lots of Catalan press stories, usually fuelled by leaks from somewhere within the club, which holds Messi responsible for the team’s issues. If Antoine Griezmann has not settled yet and is not performing to his level, it is because Messi won’t pass him the ball. If Barcelona’s finances are creaking, it’s because Messi and his father Jorge are constantly asking for more money. The final straw was the feeling Abidal had suggested Valverde’s sacking had been his fault too.

Such stories gain traction as it has become widely accepted by many inside and outside the club that Messi is so powerful he can just pick up his phone and make big things happen at Barcelona. A lesson learned from the Ibrahimovic experience a decade ago was that the Argentinian may be a shy and introverted character, but he needs to feel he is the No 1, and keeping him happy has to be the primary consideration for everyone who works at the club.

However, it is also clear that if Messi really was in charge, things would have gone very differently at Barcelona over the last few years.

None of the more than 30 players signed at a cost of over €800 million since 2014 have been his friends or former team-mates. Press stories have linked Barcelona with Argentina national-team colleagues such as Sergio Aguero or Ever Banega, but they have not arrived. He did call for Neymar to be re-signed last summer, but instead club president Josep Maria Bartomeu’s personal wish to sign Griezmann from Atletico Madrid was fulfilled.

When big signings such as Philippe Coutinho or Ousmane Dembele do not work out, Messi feels people blame him, even though he was not involved in their arrivals. While speaking to those around the club, The Athletic was told that in the past Messi has been actually surprised to see a new team-mate introduced at training, having not even been aware their signing was concluded the previous day.

For sure, Barcelona’s top brass try to make decisions they think he will agree with.

The board knew signing another superstar attacker in Neymar in the summer of 2013 was going to be tricky to manage, so it was also decided to hire Gerardo Martino, like Messi a Rosario native and former Newell’s Old Boy player, as coach. Messi and his father have always denied they were directly involved in the appointment, and The Athletic believes that to be true. Then-club president Sandro Rosell made a big show of how he had personally travelled to South America and used his personal contacts and charisma to persuade Martino to join. But the Messis were certainly asked for their opinion before the decision was finalised, and were generally happy with the idea — until it quickly became clear that Martino was out of his depth, and Barcelona ended the 2013-14 season without a major trophy.

Subsequent coaching appointments — Luis Enrique, Valverde and Quique Setien — were not in any way linked to Messi, nor did he voice any particular opinion on their suitability before they arrived. His relationship with them has not always been perfect – there was a big row especially with Enrique in January 2015 – but they always found a way to work together.

Back in the day, Messi would ask Guardiola not to talk so much about tactics, just to put the best players out on the field and let them win the game. That remains his basic, rudimentary idea of football — and explains why he wanted to get Neymar back, as together they won the team’s most recent Champions League.

Modern coaches generally have more in-depth ideas about setting up their team, but they also know they need Messi to feel comfortable to get the best out of him. Most recently, that has meant keeping Luis Suarez on the pitch even when not 100 per cent fit, both before and after the striker’s knee operation in January. It also means Setien finding a place for Arturo Vidal, who does not really fit with the coach’s favoured possession-based style but has good chemistry with his fellow South Americans on and off the pitch.

Picking the team remains the coach’s responsibility, however. Messi himself just wants to focus on what he is good at — scoring goals and playing games. He wants other people at the club to also do their own jobs and to do them well. That is why he was so angry over being blamed for Valverde’s sacking. Nobody asked him before the decision was made, and Abidal as sporting director and Bartomeu as president have the authority there. So they should be big enough to accept responsibility for their own decisions. Not try to hide behind the shield of the views of the “dressing room” or “senior players”, which Messi generally takes to be a euphemism for him personally.

Most recently, the slew of media stories about Messi’s apparent snubbing of Setien and assistant Eder Sarabia during the 2-2 draw at Celta Vigo 12 days ago has also been a source of frustration.

It came at a very tense moment in a key game, with Barcelona’s chances of retaining the title clearly slipping away. Messi was using the second half drinks break to focus on what he needed to do, thinking about where the space would be on the pitch and what he needed to do to ensure Barcelona could win the game and get three crucial points. It was not that he was ignoring his coaches, just that amid the general mayhem on the sideline he did not even notice what was going on, or think for a moment that maybe the cameras were on him. Setien has also decided not to take offence — playing down the incident’s importance to reporters afterwards, and even claiming he and Messi were similar characters in some ways. “I was not the easiest to deal with either when I was a player,” said the former Racing Santander and Atletico Madrid midfielder.

Off the pitch, it is not the case that Messi only communicates via text message and cannot talk face to face with his theoretical superiors. Setien says “they talk as much as they have to”. Bartomeu says they have regular amicable conversations around the training ground. That is believable, although neither man wants to do anything to provoke a direct confrontation.

Messi sees himself as a pretty normal guy, maybe a bit shy, but not someone with ideas above his station. He is a player, he wants to play as well as he can. He does not want to make big, important decisions around picking the team, deciding transfers, hiring or firing coaches, choosing who gets to be club president. He wants to go to work — whether that’s just training or playing games — and then head home and spend quality time with his family. So he gets very annoyed with a public image of him as this passive-aggressive ogre imposing his will on everyone at the Nou Camp just with a cold stare. Especially when both the club and the team are in such a mess.

He’d really like to be able to just ignore all the noise and hassle outside of the 90 minutes of games, or when he is enjoying himself at training. That is more difficult now since he replaced Andres Iniesta as club captain two summers ago, and he has accepted the need to speak more in public, especially to do more interviews with the Catalan press. These tend to be tightly controlled by Barcelona’s communications department, but he does his best to explain his own thoughts and feelings. Messi also knows that many others at the club — in the dressing room and boardroom — are regularly leaking things to friendly local reporters, and often the stories which result do not reflect positively on him. He sees some people complaining he is not a real leader and captain like his fellow countryman and former national coach Diego Maradona was. While others say he is trying to have too much power and decide everything himself. They can’t both be right. And it just adds to his frustration.

It is clear that if Messi really wanted to wield his power, his achievements as a player, and the general weakness of the club’s directors and coaches currently mean nobody could even try to stand in his way.

A source with long experience of the situation told The Athletic: “If Leo wanted to, he could easily come out tomorrow and say, ‘We need a new president and new coach’. He has the red button in his hand every day. But he never presses it.”

When he feels he needs to, he can take to Instagram to make a statement, as he did again in March (below) to make clear it was the players, not the board, who had decided to take pay cuts to ensure the lower-profile workers at the club would be paid salaries during the COVID crisis. But he has never openly called for anybody to be sacked, nor has he gone to knock on the president’s door to make any demands.

Nobody doubts that those who really do make the decisions at Barcelona still try very hard to keep Messi happy while balancing that with the other interests which are at play. Those who publicly cross the team’s best player generally find it was a bad idea.

When director Javier Faus questioned, in late 2013, the need for the club to keep giving Messi a new contract “every six months”, he was quickly sidelined and did not last much longer on the board. Pere Gratacos’ long service in the La Masia academy did not stop him being removed from all public club duties for saying in January 2017 that “Messi would not be as good without Iniesta or Neymar”. In neither case did Messi have to raise his voice, either in public or in private, but others at the club deemed it easier to avoid any more conflict.

Abidal remains as sporting director for now but his authority has already been weakened irreparably, whether that was Messi’s intention with his Instagram post or not.

“I’m not going to give details, but Leo Messi has said many times he will end his working and football life at the club,” Bartomeu said on Movistar TV after Sunday’s 4-1 win at Villarreal kept alive their slim chances of retaining the Spanish title. “There is no doubt that Messi will continue at the club.”

That was in response to radio show El Larguero claiming earlier last weekend that Messi had “put the brakes on” talks between his father and the club over renewing his current contract and was considering leaving when that deal expires next summer. The Athletic believes the reality of the situation is not so dramatic, that negotiations are still ongoing, and that it is all part of the usual process. Jorge Messi has been in Argentina all through the COVID lockdown, and no serious progress was expected in the short term anyway.

Barcelona’s very weak current finances are a big problem for those at the club looking to get the now 33-year-old to agree to another long-term contract. Money has always been important to the Messis, as Leo’s nine salary improvements in the last 15 years make clear. There has never been a shortage of clubs who would have been happy to meet his economic demands — Chelsea, Bayern Munich, Paris Saint-Germain and Manchester City are among those to have seriously looked at trying to persuade him to leave, while there have even been meetings through the years between his father and emissaries of Real Madrid president Florentino Perez.

The biggest “crisis” of Messi’s time at the club came in 2013-14, and was directly related to Neymar’s arrival the summer before. The Messis had been assured the younger player’s salary was much lower than what Leo earned, but the extent of all the ‘extras’ and ‘bonuses’ being paid to Neymar and his father, who was also his agent, soon became clear. A bumper new contract at Real Madrid for Cristiano Ronaldo around that time also made it clear Messi’s status as the world football’s highest earner was under threat.

The situation grew so serious that Messi told Tito Vilanova, while visiting the then seriously ill former Barcelona coach in April 2014, that “I’m going, and it’s not a question of money”, without revealing to which club, according to his biographer Sebastian Fest. That came during the most frustrating season of his club career so far — the team won zero major trophies under Martino, he appeared in court to face tax fraud charges and missed two months of the season through injury. In the end, though, he could not bring himself to leave, and a new deal was agreed the following summer.

There are parallels with the current campaign, given the mix of on- and off-field factors which have led him to feel less than comfortable.

Although Messi was actually in a positive mood when La Liga returned post-lockdown in mid-June, believing that the break had been a benefit and that Barcelona could end the season well. They were top of the table then, but the optimism did not last. They have already dropped six points in eight games, and know they probably won’t catch Real Madrid from here as their rivals are one point clear with a game in hand. There is also not a huge amount of confidence around either that they can up their level in time to really compete for the Champions League next month.

Another failure in Europe would hit much harder than missing out on the La Liga title — which Messi has won in 10 of his 15 completed seasons as a senior player. Domestic success is no longer enough to really satisfy, they have to win the Champions League, and doing so three times since he really established himself as a staple of the first team is not enough. Especially as Ronaldo won four in five years from 2014 with Real Madrid. The nature of Barcelona’s European exits in recent years —such as at Anfield last season, after winning that semi-final’s first leg 3-0 — have also been very difficult to take.

“I’ve said many times before that my idea is (to spend my whole career at Barcelona), and while the club and the fans keep wanting this, there will never be any problem from my side,” Messi told Mundo Deportivo in February. “Many times I have also said that I would like to be here, and for us all to be doing well, the club, that the fans are happy with the team, that there is a winning project, and that we are fighting for all the trophies, as we always have at this club. That is my idea, to stay at this club. I want to win another Champions League, I want to keep winning La Ligas, and I always aspire to that.”

Some Catalan press reports have claimed Messi favours a new president and coach coming in, and would, for example, be happy for Xavi to return to the club from managing Al-Sadd in Qatar as part of a general shake-up. The Athletic believes he is not in particularly regular contact with Xavi though, nor does he share his former team-mate’s tendency to get deeply involved in future planning.

As the best player in the world, he takes responsibility to do everything he can on the pitch, but he does not have solutions for all Barcelona’s problems, nor does he like the idea people want him to provide them. He accepts that the club’s members — the socios — decide who is president and that the board then appoints the coach. He does not like the idea of being used by any candidates or campaigns to improve their own chances of winning a presidential election due to take place next year. He has never had a meeting with any candidate or got involved in electioneering. It is just not something that interests him, or that he sees as his place.

Again, he is just a footballer, maybe the best one ever, but nothing more.

Whoever is Barcelona president also knows that what Messi really wants to do is to win with that club, not anywhere else.

If previously his main reason to stay at the Nou Camp was the incredibly talented squad he was surrounded by, over the years his family being settled and happy in the Catalan capital has become more and more important. Those who know him find it difficult to imagine him being happy in Manchester, Paris or Munich. A romantic return to Argentina, to finish his career at boyhood club Newell’s Old Boys, has often been talked about, and he still speaks with the accent not just of his country but his home city.

However, the place has changed a lot over the years. Only last January there was a fatal shooting at the City Center Rosario hotel complex where Messi married wife Antonella in 2017, linked to drugs gangs which have made life in the city increasingly dangerous. It would just not be possible for the global superstar to return to the La Bajada barrio he left as a boy over two decades ago.

In press interviews, Messi has also spoken a lot about how tying the knot has changed his perspective, and how his life experiences have helped him grow as a person. He is no longer the sulky kid who would retreat into himself and not respond for days when he felt slighted in some way. He also feels more comfortable taking on a leadership role in his professional life but in his own way. He wants so badly to be part of a winning Barcelona team, and feel the acclaim as they lift the European Cup again. He does not like being made to feel it is his fault when this does not happen.

Messi is a different person now to the kid who sent Guardiola a text from the back of the bus.

Although he remains the best player in the world, his powers are not as unlimited as many people make out. But he still has a phone in his hand and wants the ball at his feet.

Vesper · July 14, 2020

The ‘ghost’: 4 top-flight clubs, 3 continents over 9 months. Zero matches played

https://theathletic.com/1903793/2020/07/08/bernio-verhagen-viborg-court-mo-sinouh-transfers/

When someone makes a film about the bizarre, head-spinning tale of Bernio Verhagen’s time in football, there is a good chance that it will begin quietly, at the desk of a journalist.

It will build up to the more obviously cinematic beats: the alleged identity fraud, Verhagen’s escape from the police, the web of lies that would be the envy of an entire spy network. It will eventually lurch into the violence that lends a more sober tone to the entire affair. But those dominoes will only start toppling over later. The story must start small, with an act of curiosity that sets the scene for all that follows.

Sam van Raalte is the lead editor at Vice Sports in the Netherlands. He hosts a podcast and writes features. He covers fan culture and martial arts, but there is one subject that is particularly close to his heart: weird, wacky football transfers.

“I love stories from the absolute bottom of the market,” he says with a laugh. “Players who aren’t good enough for the top leagues but go to these obscure parts of the world just to call themselves professionals.”

One day in June 2019, Van Raalte was scrolling through Transfermarkt, a website that tracks the movements and values of footballers around the world. He was looking for Dutch players in foreign countries, with an eye on potential interviews. Most of the listings were fairly beige, but one stood out. It was for a winger who had moved to FC Dinamo-Auto, a tiny club in Moldova.

It looked promising. When Van Raalte saw that Dinamo-Auto are based in Transnistria — a breakaway territory that is not recognised by the international community — and that the player had returned to the Netherlands before making a single appearance, he resolved to look into it. “He was this amateur player who went to this obscure part of the world and didn’t play,” says Van Raalte. “I just wanted to know what happened there.”

The player was Verhagen, a 25-year-old who was born in Surinam but grew up in Tilburg, near the Belgian border. His only previous experience at a professional club had come a decade earlier when he spent a year in the academy system of Eredivisie outfit Willem II. He was a complete nobody, but that just made the idea of his Moldovan adventure all the more alluring.

Van Raalte sent him a message, inviting him onto his podcast to share his experiences. A few days later, Verhagen strode into the Vice offices in Amsterdam.

“In walked this calm guy with a Balenciaga sweater and golden earrings,” recalls Van Raalte. “We sat down and spoke for about 45 minutes. He had the funniest anecdotes. In hindsight, I could say that he came prepared. He told me about being shocked at all the holes on the highway from the airport in Moldova. He told me his team-mates had never seen a black guy in the shower and were very impressed by the size of his penis. All kinds of stories. Funny, cultural things.

“He told me the first training sessions [for Dinamo-Auto] didn’t go well because it was too cold, and then there was an issue with his agent. I thought, OK, this guy probably just wasn’t good enough and they ended his contract. It felt like a small, innocent story.”

The podcast came out on July 5. It went down well; Van Raalte was pleased. Then two emails came in. The first was from someone who had played amateur football with Verhagen. He said he was surprised Verhagen had managed to get a move abroad — even to an insignificant team — because he really wasn’t very talented. The second was more serious. It suggested Verhagen was not to be trusted.

Van Raalte called Verhagen, who asked for the names of these “haters”. When Van Raalte refused to oblige, Verhagen hung up. It was an odd exchange that made Van Raalte question the tone of their previous conversation. He decided he would keep tabs on Verhagen’s career, even if, deep down, he suspected he would simply disappear back into the hinterlands of the Dutch game.

“I didn’t see anything further happening,” says Van Raalte. “But then things escalated very quickly.”

On July 26, Cape Town City FC, a first-division team in South Africa, announced a new signing. They published a photo — since deleted from the club’s social media accounts and website — which showed owner John Comitis shaking hands with a man wearing a black hoodie and an inscrutable half-smile.

The man was Verhagen. His stay at the club lasted less than a month. He never played a match.

On August 22, Audax Italiano, a first-division team in Chile, announced a new signing. “The player arrives as a result of the international connections that Audax Italiano has,” the club’s president, Lorenzo Antillo, told the press. “The idea is that he will be with us until December. He is a forward who plays on the outside.”

The forward was Verhagen. His stay at the club lasted 61 days. He never played a match.

On November 5, Viborg FF (VFF), a first-division team in Denmark, announced a new signing. He was presented with the No 28 jersey and talked up by the club’s sporting director, Jesper Fredberg. “He has some cutting-edge skills that we think are exciting,” Fredberg told Danish football website Bold.dk. “He was recommended by people close to the club, so we think it makes good sense to bring him in. It is up to us to get him to perform and to tap into the potential that we have seen in him.”

The owner of the cutting-edge skills and the potential was Verhagen. His stay at the club lasted 19 days. He never played a match.

By this stage, it should be clear why Verhagen came to be known in the Netherlands as a “spookvoetballer” — a ghost footballer. In the space of nine months, he joined four top-flight clubs in three continents, managing a grand total of zero appearances. From Moldova to South Africa, then to Chile and Denmark: it is quite the itinerary. Quite the head-scratcher, too, given that his last actual game, before all this globe-trotting started, came the colours of Den Dungen, who play in the eighth tier of the Dutch pyramid.

Inexplicable transfers take place all the time in football, but when four of them involve the same person and go through in such rapid succession, things start to smell fishy. Why did all these clubs take a chance on a player with no reputation? Why didn’t he actually play for any of them?

The answers to these questions are knotty. Revelations and accusations relating to the case have tumbled out slowly over a period of months, thanks to dogged investigative work by Van Raalte and colleagues in the Danish press. There are still grey areas now, but it is instructive that one agent who crossed paths with Verhagen along the way compares the events to Catch Me If You Can, the Leonardo Di Caprio film about a globe-trotting forger and conman.

VFF claim they were victims of “a large scam… a serious crime involving fraud, document fraud and identity theft”, and took the case to the Danish police late last year. The other three clubs have been less forthright, but the suggestion is that they were fooled too. All will be watching with interest when he stands trial on charges of fraud and forgery in Viborg next month. All, it is safe to assume, rue the day they allowed Verhagen into their orbits.

When Verhagen joined VFF, Van Raalte got back in touch with him. He had been puzzled by the Cape Town and Audax Italiano moves, but this was a bit closer to home. “I texted him to ask who the agent who was arranging all these deals was,” he says. “I wanted to know the process behind all these contracts.”

Verhagen did not seem happy to hear from him. His reply was terse: “I want you to stop bothering me with your bullshit.”

Van Raalte ploughed on. He contacted Den Dungen, whose head scout told him that Verhagen had only played a handful of games and “didn’t really stand out”. That chimed with two sets of quotes given to Bold.dk. “He was fast, but that was it,” said Ben Hoek, Den Dungen’s head coach. Andreas Baes, a former player for Naestved — a second-tier club in Denmark — said he remembered Verhagen arriving for a trial match, only to be sent away after being so poor in the warm-up. “I was shocked at how bad he was,” said Baes.

On November 24, Van Raalte released the second of what would end up being five podcasts on the story. Verhagen texted him, threatening to sue. If he was on the defensive, that was probably understandable: by that stage, the first in a series of explosive claims about his modus operandi had been published in the written press.

Danish newspaper BT reported that Verhagen’s move to Cape Town City had been initiated by Mo Sinouh, a director at Stellar Group – a prominent sports agency whose clients include Gareth Bale and Saul Niguez. Sinouh contacted Vasili Barbis, a South African agent, on WhatsApp. He told him that he had a player who had a lucrative transfer to China lined up at the end of the year, but needed to find a team in the interim. It looked like a chance to build a relationship with a big hitter in global football, so Barbis took it to Comitis, Cape Town City’s owner.

“We didn’t know much about him initially,” Julian Bailey, a spokesperson for Cape Town City, later explained on Van Raalte’s podcast, De Wereld van Vice Sports. “We saw some footage and the chairman really liked what he saw. He came to train with us for a while and we ended up signing him.”

There was, as BT reported, just one problem: “Mo Sinouh” turned out not to be Mo Sinouh, just an opportunist who had pinched a photo of him from the internet. By the time Barbis became aware of the fact — the real Mo Sinouh called him after being confused by a comment from a mutual contact — it was too late. The publicity photo was online and Verhagen was in Cape Town, working on his fitness with the club’s coaches.

Verhagen has said he too thought he was dealing with the real Sinouh. But Barbis believes “Mo Sinouh” was Verhagen himself — “100 per cent,” he told Vice – and felt that the whole thing was carefully calculated. “He never had the intention of playing football. I think what he tried to do was bullshit a club for a certain period of time, then move onto the next. Good riddance.”

The next club was Audax Italiano. According to documents published by BT, “Mo Sinouh” was called into action again, in a bid to woo Chilean agent Gaston Gonzalez Pezola. On this occasion, the con started with a fake letter, purportedly sent by Ajax, hinting at a future bid for one of Pezola’s clients. It then referred the matter to the fake Sinouh, who leveraged the goodwill to swing a trial for one of his own players. Verhagen flew to the town of La Florida. “He came for a test, but since we hadn’t used our quota of foreign players, we signed him up,” explained Antillo, the club president.

The pattern of behaviour outlined in these reports clearly rung a bell at VFF. Club officials were already harbouring suspicions about Verhagen due to a string of controversies in his private life (about which more soon), but this was the final straw. A day after BT’s story hit the newsstands, they released a statement in which they detailed, at some length, their concerns about the sequence of events that had brought the Dutchman into their world.

Their story ticked all of the same boxes: “Mo Sinouh”, a big-money move to China, a short-term deal with no strings attached. VFF admitted they had been seduced by “the great prospect of professional collaboration with one of the most reputable agencies” and had agreed to sign Verhagen “to strengthen the relationship”. When they had questioned his backstory in early November — he had made a terrible first impression in training — they claim the timely arrival of a memo from the Chinese club, printed on an official letterhead and stamped, had convinced them to hang fire on getting rid of him.

Now, though, they were convinced they had been duped. “Viborg FF has not been hit financially, as neither a salary nor agent fees have been paid,” read the statement. “But the club has been greatly affected on the level of professional pride.”

It seems unlikely the feeling was not echoed in Moldova, South Africa and Chile. After the case blew up, FC Dinamo-Auto head coach Igor Dobrovolsky told Reuters that he had never heard of Verhagen. The news item about Verhagen’s arrival disappeared from the club’s website soon thereafter. The Athletic emailed FC Dinamo-Auto for comment but received no response.

Cape Town City denied Verhagen was ever formally added to the payroll. “He was never registered,” Comitis, the club owner, told Reuters. “He was going to, but we discovered that something was not right, so we pulled out of giving him an official contract.” The Athletic emailed Cape Town City and Barbis but received no response.

“I have got involved in something I didn’t ask for,” Antillo, the president of Audax Italiano, told Vice. A member of the club’s media team told The Athletic that they would issue no further comment. Gaston Gonzalez Pezola did not reply to messages sent on WhatsApp.

Viborg, refreshingly, opted for pure transparency, despite the inevitable embarrassment. “We hope that with this information we have shown sufficient openness about a completely extraordinary case,” read their statement. “We take our responsibility in this matter and hope that with this openness we ensure that other clubs and colleagues never get into a similar situation.”

Two days after that press release, VFF terminated Verhagen’s contract. After collaboration with the real Stellar Group, the club handed a slew of documents over to the Danish police. On June 10 this year, Verhagen was charged with fraud and forgery, relating his dealings with the club. He is due in court on August 18. It is understood he denies the allegations and he has said he too thought he was dealing with the real Mo Sinouh.

If there is a grain of comfort to be taken from the current situation, it is that nobody else has been tricked about Verhagen since last November. For one simple reason: he has been in prison since then.

It is here the story takes a darker turn. Stories of fake footballers usually induce a smile. Carlos Kaiser, Ali Dia, Alessandro Zarrelli… these were puffy underdog tales in which no-one really got hurt. But the Verhagen case is different. He is, in the eyes of many people who know him and now in the eyes of the Danish legal system, a dangerous man.

From the moment he landed in Viborg in October, rumours about his private life were rife. Most centred on his relationship with Nayaret Muci, a young Chilean woman who travelled to Denmark with him when he left Audax Italiano.

On November 3, La Tercera, a newspaper in Chile, published an interview with Verhagen. Before their video call with the Dutchman, La Tercera’s journalists had seen concerning posts on Muci’s Instagram page, in which she claimed Verhagen was holding her captive in Denmark, and had assaulted and spat at her. When they got hold of Verhagen, Muci was in the hotel room and helped to translate. She told them it was hard to live “with a person who doesn’t let you out of the hotel” and that “he was violent with me”, but said things had blown over.

On November 26 — hours after Verhagen’s contract was terminated by VFF — there was an altercation between the couple at Viborg’s main train station. Video footage showed Verhagen dragging Muci through a news kiosk. He was subsequently arrested.

The next day, after a four-hour hearing, Verhagen was remanded in custody. Even in court, he was committed to his footballing dreams. “I have already spoken to another Danish club,” he replied when the prosecutor, Katrine Melgaard, asked him about his job situation. As for “Mo Sinouh”, Verhagen claimed he too had been duped. “We have been fooled by him,” he said.

A dizzying number of accusations were levelled at Verhagen within the space of a couple of weeks. Danish paper Politiken claimed he stole money and jewellery from a former girlfriend. Van Raalte spoke to multiple acquaintances of Verhagen’s — including one of his relatives — who claimed to have been swindled by him. One woman told BT: “He is insanely manipulative. I have never met a person who can lie so violently.”

In mid-December, the authorities got first-hand experience of his slipperiness. During a handover to correctional officers after another hearing – his custody was extended – Verhagen managed to escape and flee. He tried to put the police off his scent by posting on Instagram that he was heading to Sweden. After a frantic 12-hour search, he was found hiding in the basement of a residential building in Holstebro, a town just west of Viborg.

On February 19, Verhagen was charged with 10 offences. They included issuing threats to two people in Denmark (the mother of his child and her father), rape, assault, robbery, the recording of a sexual encounter without consent, and escaping the police.

On June 24, Verhagen pleaded guilty to escaping the police. He pleaded not guilty to the remaining nine charges. Muci gave evidence via video link from the Danish embassy in Chile. Judge Jacob Svenning Jonsson found Verhagen guilty of nine of the 10 counts but said there was insufficient evidence to convict him for rape.

Verhagen was sentenced to 15 months in prison. The time already spent in custody counts towards the sentence.

Melgaard, the prosecutor, produced a snappy line in her closing remarks. “Bernio Verhagen is lying,” she said, “and he’s good at it.”

Whoever the fake agent is, they were sloppy. There were claims about former clubs, easily disproved by Danish journalists. There was the letter from “Ajax” to the Chilean agent, which was riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. It was signed by a “Mark Overmars”, but Ajax’s real sporting director — as any Arsenal or Barcelona fan could tell you — spells his first name “Marc”.

Barbis told Vice that he received documents, supposedly from China, that came from an email address ending ‘.ch’ — the country domain for Switzerland. Whoever is doing this, “is either the smartest guy I’ve ever known, or the dumbest,” Barbis said.

It certainly seems fair to say that the forger was dedicated to his task. Witness the two-month gap between the date on which VFF claim they were first contacted by “Mo Sinouh” and the day Verhagen actually signed for the club, during which there was “almost daily communication”. The fake Sinouh put the groundwork in.

Verhagen, if Viborg FF’s account is to be believed, knew how to work an angle. And for all of the repellent nastiness that rose to the surface, he was also capable of turning on the charm when the situation demanded it.

“He came across as this guy who didn’t take himself very seriously, who was sort of… floating through life,” says Van Raalte, remembering the day when Verhagen came in to record a podcast. “And he was really funny. It makes you lower your guard. But he is a highly manipulative guy.”

Nor do Verhagen’s dreams of being a professional footballer appear to have begun in 2019. A former girlfriend told Bold.dk he used to pose in FC Copenhagen tracksuits in a bid to convince her he played for the club. She said he then repeated that ploy with clothing bearing the logo of another Danish team, FC Midtjylland, and posted the pictures on social media. An old Instagram post, since deleted, shows him holding the yellow-and-black jersey of a third team, Hobro IK. On the back, printed above the number 23, is Verhagen’s name.

In that interview with Bold.dk, the former girlfriend also claimed Verhagen went to the length of creating his own football club. He called it FC Ostjylland. “He even made the logo with the deer,” the woman said. “I saw him do it on my computer.”

There is a picture on Verhagen’s Instagram page — dormant since that madcap dash from the police last December — that shows him in a white Nike strip bearing that crest. It was uploaded on February 13, 2018. It is one of only 14 posts that remain. The most recent of them dates back to August last year and shows Verhagen modelling Cape Town City’s home and away kits for the 2019-20 season. It looks like an official photoshoot.

The bio line on the page reads, “Professional football player / jugador de futbol profesional”, but that appears never to have been true, for all he wanted it to be so. No, the real essence of Bernio Verhagen is better captured by a quote on his old Facebook profile. It was pinned just above a line that listed his employer as FC Copenhagen.

“If the plan doesn’t work, change the plan,” the quote read. “But never the goal.”

(Top image: Danish Police released the photo when he escaped)

Vesper · July 16, 2020

Meet Roberto De Zerbi – master of beating the press Guardiola tunes in to watch

https://theathletic.com/1927757/2020/07/15/roberto-de-zerbi-sassuolo-pep-guardiola-how-to-beat-the-press/

During one of the autumn international breaks last season, Pep Guardiola flew to Trento in northern Italy and appeared on a panel with Carlo Ancelotti and, one of his great influences, Arrigo Sacchi. They wanted to know whether his opinion of Italian football had changed since he left Brescia as a player all those years ago. Is the game in Serie A evolving, or is the style of football the same as always?

“You see Sassuolo at the moment,” the Manchester City manager said, “and they give me the impression that it’s actually very expansive.”

As Guardiola uttered those words, I happened to be in Sassuolo for an interview with Kevin-Prince Boateng and, while I expected he would have one or two positive things to say about the set-up, I was still taken aback by the glowing reference he gave the team’s new coach, Roberto De Zerbi.

Boateng had only been working with him a couple of months but came across as the most excited he’d ever been as a footballer. He put De Zerbi above the other top coaches he’s worked under over the course of his career, which is saying something as Boateng has played for Jurgen Klopp and Massimiliano Allegri. His move to Barcelona that January, a real head-scratcher for most fans, came about in part because of the manner in which De Zerbi used him and the principles his teams play with, which undoubtedly share a couple of similarities with those adopted in Catalonia.

As I waited for Boateng to arrive — I turned up way too early — the small talk I engaged in with staff was just as positive. They thought Sassuolo were on to something, again.

Down the years, this small club have established a considerable reputation for discovering the next big thing in Italian coaching. At the very least they know how to spot talent in the dugout. Allegri passed through here, as did Stefano Pioli and Eusebio Di Francesco, who got them promoted and then into Europe. None of them, though, were able to generate the same level of hype at this stage of their careers as De Zerbi, who has attracted a cult of devoted tactics bloggers and YouTube videographers ever since he started coaching Foggia in Italy’s third division — even attracting the attention of our friends at Tifo.

Some pundits have turned their noses up and sneered at his rise to prominence, asking: What has he ever achieved? Why all the fuss? Foggia lost the play-off final to Rino Gattuso’s Pisa. Palermo sacked him after seven straight defeats. De Zerbi didn’t win a game at Benevento until the 10th time of asking.

To look at his record in those crude terms is unfair, though. De Zerbi brought joy to Foggia. You probably have to go back to the days of Zemanlandia to find as entertaining a team at the Zaccheria. Palermo were entering a death spiral under the most trigger-happy owner the game has ever seen, while Benevento turned to De Zerbi to save face. They were on course to go down in history as the worst team ever to play in Serie A when he replaced Marco Baroni. At the start of December 2017, Benevento had no points. Nothing. Nada. Niente. Then their goalkeeper, the legend that is Alberto Brignoli, scored and finally got them up and running against Gattuso’s Milan. Flash forward to Sandro and Bacary Sagna arriving in January and De Zerbi very nearly pulled off a miracle.

His ideas more than his results continued to capture the imagination, and the curiosity around what he might be able to do in a more stable environment was piqued when Sassuolo offered him the chance to stay in the top flight last season. It feels like a perfect match.

Don’t get me wrong, De Zerbi still has his sceptics. After a fast start to his first year at the Mapei Stadium — five wins in his first seven matches — expectations rocketed and Sassuolo couldn’t match them. The team raised their game against the top sides, upsetting Inter and running Juventus close, but largely flattered to deceive. They went from contending for a place in the Europa League to almost getting sucked into a relegation battle. It was bittersweet, not that it stopped De Zerbi from entering Roma’s thoughts as a replacement for caretaker coach Claudio Ranieri.

One of the many reasons behind his appeal, beyond the style of Sassuolo’s play, is his proven track record of improving players whatever their age.

We’ve already mentioned how Boateng suddenly found himself doing keepy-uppies at the Nou Camp, but Stefano Sensi (Inter) and Merih Demiral (Juventus) also earned big moves on the back of working with De Zerbi. The 41-year-old’s doubters have dwindled over the course of this season. Sassuolo have caught fire since the re-start, winning four straight games. They are also unbeaten in six and have helped tonight’s opponents Juventus move closer to a ninth consecutive title by taking four points off Lazio and Inter.

As grateful as Maurizio Sarri must be for the favours Sassuolo have done his misfiring team since the return to play, he also knows that if the Old Lady isn’t careful in Reggio Emilia she may come a cropper too. Until Atalanta’s escapades at the weekend, Sassuolo were the only team to stop Juventus at the Allianz Stadium this season, and given the state of grace they find themselves in at the moment it wouldn’t come as too great a surprise if a repeat is on the cards.

Sassuolo have the league’s fifth-best attack. Hamed Traore and Manuel Locatelli are two of the finest midfield prospects in the division. Each member of De Zerbi’s three-pronged forward line is in double figures. Francesco Caputo is, once again, the most prolific Italian player in Serie A. Jeremie Boga stands out as the best dribbler and, as De Zerbi frequently reminds us, Domenico Berardi is one of a select group of players born in 1994 or later to have scored at least 50 goals in any of the top five European leagues.

Sassuolo merit consideration as the best team to watch after Atalanta, with much of their entertainment value deriving from the courage of their innovative coach. De Zerbi is renowned for playing out from the back, no matter the opponent, no matter the pressure. This is why Guardiola’s a big fan and occasionally catches Sassuolo games in what limited spare time he has available to him. De Zerbi’s detractors claim there is narcissism in the sophisticated schemes he draws up to beat the press and play through opponents. They write them off as vanity projects designed to show everyone how clever he is. Naturally, De Zerbi rejects that and justifies his insistence on passing it out from the back on the deep-rooted conviction that it’s actually advantageous to his team and the development of his players.

De Zerbi used to be an attacking midfielder. For him, the game was fun when the ball was in his possession, not when his other team had it. As he sees it, if you like playing football why wait for a second ball, a flick-on or a ricochet when you can already start from the back? That way, you’re in control and if you lure an opponent on to you, there’s space in behind for you to attack.

It’s another sign of Italian football’s evolution. In the past, teams in Serie A gambled on absorbing pressure, regaining possession deep and then countering into the same space, often with a quick combination or by hoofing it into an area for a striker to chase after. They controlled the space, not the ball. De Zerbi does the opposite, attracting adversaries high up the pitch with deep possession and then turning their press against them to devastating effect. The more intense it is, the more vertical Sassuolo go.

Take the reverse fixture against Juventus as an example.

As Sassuolo pass from right to left, drawing Juventus on to them, Locatelli is going to drift out of the box to a position in front of his full-back Georgios Kyriakopoulos, where he’ll be open to continue the team’s progression up the pitch.

In the end, the Greek plays the ball up to Caputo, who comes short, bringing three Juventus players with him, and has the option to lay it off to either Locatelli or Filip Duricic.

He chooses the Serb, who shifts it inside to Traore…

And Sassuolo all of a sudden have Juventus on their heels and a five v four.

Another variation on this theme — and there are countless examples — came against Roma. De Zerbi’s goalkeeping coach proposed this particular pattern of play, with Sassuolo’s full-backs high and wide and the team’s tandem in midfield, Pedro Obiang and Locatelli, stationed on the edge of the penalty area.

Goalkeeper Andrea Consigli entices Roma to press centre-back Gianmarco Ferrari, who pauses and then goes back across goal to his partner Filippo Romagna.

A swarm of white shirts descend on the youngster but he’s comfortable under the pressure and finds Obiang, whose attempt to release Jeremy Toljan unfortunately misses the mark.

More successful was this clever move on Cagliari’s visit to the Mapei Stadium in December. The Sardinians were initially reluctant to press Sassuolo, so De Zerbi’s players went backwards to go forwards.

Using their teenage goalkeeper Stefano Turati, the Neroverdi encouraged Cagliari out of their shell. A quick triangle from Turati to Locatelli to centre-back Marlon inveigles the visitors into thinking Sassuolo are planning to develop the play on the left.

Six players flock towards the ball only for Francesco Magnanelli to switch it to the other side, where Toljan plays a neat one-two with Berardi, springing a four v four which ends with the German pulling the ball back for Duricic to score.

Beautiful to watch, but there is an aim as well as an aesthetic. The strategy is holistic in that it goes beyond setting Sassuolo up to hurt teams and score goals. Playing out from the back should improve a player’s technique, it encourages them to take responsibility, and when a move like this comes off it boosts self-esteem. As you can imagine, confidence at Sassuolo at the moment is through the roof.

They are nine points better off than they were at this stage of last season. Only Napoli and Juventus have a higher pass completion rate, and if you want an idea of the creativity running through this team a stunning 93 per cent of their 59 goals have come from open play.

De Zerbi’s contract was up in June and for a while it looked as though he’d be off, amid speculation Fiorentina were considering him as a successor to Beppe Iachini. Some of the players expected him to move on. Instead, De Zerbi has agreed to stay for another year and the hope is the team’s stars will stick around too. “Our strategy is to build not destroy,” chief executive Giovanni Carnevali told DAZN.

It’s a welcome piece of news.

Some feared Sassuolo’s fairytale was nearing the end. The team faded after Di Francesco left for Roma and the core of his team — Simone Zaza, Matteo Politano, Lorenzo Pellegrini and Francesco Acerbi — departed. More recently, the deaths of the club’s patron Giorgio Squinzi and his wife left the future looking uncertain. But Sassuolo now appear stronger than ever and have a state-of-the-art training ground to go with their avant-garde coach.

It’s amazing to think seven years have passed since De Zerbi travelled to Munich to observe Guardiola as he trained Bayern. Now, some of the leading coaches in Europe believe they have something to learn from him.

Vesper · July 16, 2020

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.”

Vesper · July 16, 2020

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.

Vesper · July 16, 2020

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 · July 16, 2020

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 · July 16, 2020

More horrible transfers incoming...

Fulham Broadway · July 16, 2020

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 · July 18, 2020

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 · July 19, 2020

Atletico Madrid vs Real Sociedad Live Stream

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

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