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The European Leagues & Competitions Thread V2


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1 hour ago, OneMoSalah said:

What about the games against Everton, Krasnador, United, Seville, Southampton, West Brom, Liverpool this season? Still mistakes, still inconsistencies, still things to be worked on. 

Wouldn’t say we have completely resolved everything we struggled with last season, we have made good steps in the right direction yes with set pieces and more solid at times but to think we still don’t have weaknesses or are a complete team is naive. I mean Everton just showed us a valuable lesson at the weekend imo and I would not be surprised if Atletico and other teams follow suit against us. We still haven’t won any of our big games domestically this season also.

Also regardless of what people think about Atletico right now or think about Diego Simeone wouldn’t write them off yet, in terms of knockout football they are more than capable. Its not as if we arent favourites if thats what people think I meant, its just that the idea I am getting from posts on here is that we are basically through to the next round already because its only Atletico. Which couldn’t be further from the truth. Its a good opportunity to see where we are at. Particularly as they are a better side that what we have played in the CL already arguably. 

Games against Southampton, West Brom, the first fixture against Seville, United and Liverpool dont count. 

The team lineup was only shaping up then and the switch to 433 happened midway through the first Krasnodar fixture, which we won.

Bringing up the second Krasnodar is also unwarranted, because we played with a 3rd string squad for the match.

The only poor performance is against Everton., and that game is completely different from the rest of the examples you mentioned 

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16 minutes ago, Jason said:

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my winners

Shitty

Bayern

Bindippers

Juve

PSG (almost flip a coin level with a deeply troubled Barca)

Dortmund (Håland will be back by then)

Real

flip a coin (us v AM) <<< no way to spin it, other than MAYBE Barca, this one was the only team I feared drawing, smdh, we have horrid luck lately with draws

 

add in AC Milan and Spuds to those 10  teams (10 because I said flip a coin between us and AM and then almost flip a coin with PSG and Barca) and you have (literally) the 12 best teams in the world atm IMHO (as Inter are playing like dogshit)

 

potential upsets

Real going out to Atlanta (IF Atalanta are on their game and have sorted the Papu Gómez nightmare, if not, Real will destroy them)

Dortmund getting picked off by a disciplined Sevilla team

Barca (if you count it as an upset) beating PSG

 

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logo football observatory

Best performing U21 players in 30 European leagues

 

Data is more than ever a must when it comes to scouting. The CIES Football Observatory has developed a unique methodology to assess the performance of players on an objective basis. Using the data from InStat, issue number 317 of the Weekly Post presents the 10 best performing footballers born in the 2000s for each of the six areas of the game covered in our approach. Only players fielded for at least 450 domestic league minutes up until December 7th are included in the rankings.

Nathan Collins (Stoke City) stands out when it comes to rigour (duels). He should soon receive his first call for the Irish senior national team. At the top for recovery, Mohamed Camara (RB Salzburg) is following on the footsteps of other top footballers trained in the academies ran according to the precepts of the French maestro Jean-Marc Guillou. Born in 2002, Ryan Gravenberch (Ajax) heads the distribution table, while Khvicha Kvaratskhelia (Rubin Kazan) has the top score for take on.

Dominik Szoboszlai (RB Salzburg) and the 2002-born striker Noni Madueke (PSV Eindhoven) are at the top for chance creation and, respectively, shooting. The 60th edition of the CIES Football Observatory Monthly Report details the basic principles of the statistical approach developed and presents the top 10 overall rankings in the different areas of the game taken into account for each of the 35 leagues examined.

4510437ea458eb5929cb0d74c43bbe71.png1a201715742614e513cf8faa044cb716.png38d85721ca3ebb0af6c146553d705466.pngbf5570067579e259fae1b31152489a53.pnge6035e2dfb13a97e84c6604b0e0dec0d.png22c81a3300e1cc0ea1b2a9456d611a6e.png

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Leon Goretzka exclusive: ‘I was able to swim against the current’

https://theathletic.com/2257523/2020/12/13/leon-goretzka-bayern-munich/

Leon Goretzka exclusive interview on his remarkable 2020 – The Athletic

On February 17, Leon Goretzka got into his car, drove 13 miles north of Munich and went to hell.

Dachau, the blueprint for the concentration camps built by the Nazis to incarcerate political enemies and prisoners of war and to enable the industrialised killing of European Jews, is an eerie memorial site now. Goretzka had been there before, as a young boy during a family trip to Bavaria’s capital.

“I was 12, maybe 13, your classic know-it-all teenager too cool for school,” he recalls. “You think that you’ve seen it all before, in history books and TV documentaries. I remember looking at some photos and then walking through the courtyard and recognising those very same places. It suddenly felt very real, and it was overwhelming. I broke down and cried, right there and then. Now that I live in Munich, I wanted to go again.”

Dachau has had previous Bayern representatives go through its infamous “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work sets you free”) adorned gate, albeit in very different circumstances. Kurt Landauer, the Bayern president who led the club to their first German championship in 1932, was imprisoned there after the “Kristallnacht” pogrom in 1938 on account of being Jewish but was released after 33 days when someone realised he had been decorated as a soldier in the first world war. He subsequently fled to Switzerland and became president once more after 1945. His four siblings were all killed. Sixteen other Bayern members were inmates at Dachau as well, including Alfred Strauss, a lawyer, who was executed in May 1933.

After decades of silence, the German champions have belatedly recognised Landauer’s suffering and his legacy with a series of measures including the erection of a statue at their Saebener Strasse training ground and the naming of the square outside the Allianz Arena stadium. The club’s ultras regularly commemorate victims of Nazism in choreographies. In 2009, a delegation led by executive chairman Karl-Heinz Rummenigge went to Dachau on Kurt Landauer’s 125th birthday. But Goretzka was the first Bayern footballer to visit the memorial on a day off and post photos of the site. Why?

“My parents have made an effort to raise me that way, being aware of things that are going on or have happened in the past,” the 25-year-old says. “You can learn about the Holocaust in class, on social media, or by watching films. But nothing brings home the scale of these crimes like visiting a concentration camp.

“Being there makes you realise how recent this was, just a lifetime ago. There are still people alive today who have survived. I know how much it affected me. It should be mandatory for all school classes in Germany to go.”

Goretzka was born in Bochum in Germany’s post-industrial heartlands. Like many Ruhrpott natives, he has Polish ancestors on his father’s side, immigrants who worked in the coal mines and steel factories. In this proudly working-class mish-mash of cultures, “nationality is a question of being Schalke, Dortmund or Bochum,” he once said, making a stand against xenophobia in the stadium and in general. “Growing up, I never came across racism, I thought we had moved on as a society. But I was wrong. We can no longer talk about nipping it in the bud because it’s come back. We just have to fight harder as a consequence.”

The replies under his post about visiting Dachau were widely positive but the odd troll and Nazi sympathiser felt obliged to disseminate their hate as well. Goretzka says he would never recommend using social media, let alone as a vehicle for such sensitive topics, because of all the horrible abuse that can come with it. “Fritz Walter (1954 World Cup winner) once said that internationals are foreign ministers in shorts. I like that,” he says. “As players, we should use the attention we get to raise awareness for such topics.

“But you have to be built that way to do it on social media. Others might get more hurt than me. You can teach yourself how to deal with it, though. I always tell myself, ‘On what basis do these people talk about me? Do they know what’s really going on?’ If they don’t, why should I give one cent about their comments?”

Goretzka says he’s learned to develop a thick skin following the mass opprobrium that greeted the announcement of his impending end-of-contract move to Bayern from Schalke 04 in January 2018. “There was all this talk about me being greedy and ungrateful and so on, things that couldn’t have been further from the truth. Maybe as a fan, I would have felt the same way, having read newspapers making the same incendiary points for months on end. I can understand those reactions and deal with them accordingly, as long as it doesn’t go too far.”

By the time the season was finished, Goretzka had won many of his fiercest critics around again with a series of fine performances. He was given a warm send-off in Gelsenkirchen after five years in royal blue.

Goretzka could have also gone to Liverpool then as interest in the skilled box-to-box player had been strong on Merseyside. “They were a consideration, of course,” he says. “They’re a great club, and their development since Kloppo came has been amazing. We’re all a little proud of him winning the title. But I took a long time making my decision, and I was 100 per cent sure that Bayern was the right move for me.”

It’s turned out pretty well. There were signs that Goretzka would become more of a factor in the Joshua Kimmich-Thiago dominated midfield during last winter but the man long hailed as “the next Michael Ballack” truly came into his own at the end of last season, when Bayern won 21 games in a row to win a treble. Thiago’s departure and Kimmich’s injury have now bestowed extra levels of responsibility on him. “There’s a bit of a hole right now but it’s a challenge you need to meet,” he says, “I’m aware that I have to deliver.”

That he has. Both Bayern’s and Germany’s starting XIs are now inconceivable without his name on the teamsheet, which is quite a turnaround after a couple of years on the periphery. Despite everything, 2020 has been his year, hasn’t it? “I can understand why it looks like that to you,” he says. “But there had been spells before where I felt very settled and as if I had arrived, but unfortunately there were some setbacks, due to injuries. Things have gone well, despite all of the crazy and negative things that have happened. In a sporting sense, I was able to swim against the current.”

Maybe it’s not a coincidence. Goretzka used the enforced nine-week break owing to coronavirus in spring to bulk up, gaining a few kilos in muscle to come back quite literally stronger. “Nobody knew what was happening and we had a lot of time to think. I asked myself: what can I do to develop further as a human being? It was an opportunity to take stock, listen to the voice inside of you and redefine your goals.

“The extra muscle is only the most visible part of that. Not playing gave me a chance to do work on the body in a way you can’t do under normal circumstances, as you’d need two or three days to recover.”

Leon Goretzka, Bayern Munich

The internet is full of memes contrasting his bulked-up frame with slimmer days at Schalke but he says that’s misleading. “I had spells when I was a bit heavier there as well, and I felt good about that, but the problem was that small injuries took away the focus on the big picture. You’re too busy putting out fires, there wasn’t time to attempt reaching the next level. Luckily, I was able to do that. It makes sense to recharge your batteries during breaks but I’m a firm believer that you get more power from working harder. And that’s the result right now.”

Goretzka’s muscularity was one of the factors in Bayern becoming a pressing machine, “the most difficult to play against in Europe,” as he puts it proudly. Chasing down opponents has always been part of his game, “but Hansi Flick’s biggest achievement has been to make everyone else feel the same way.”

“Players with great individual quality harangue the opposition relentlessly,” he adds, “that only works if everyone buys into it. And doing something that works well is fun as well.”

Goretzka also made a decision to put his extra time towards helping those affected by the pandemic. Together with Kimmich, he set up We Kick Corona to provide funds for charities and social institutions hit hard by the lack of donations during lockdown. The two Bayern players personally donated €500,000 each and phoned up dozens of contacts to collect north of €5.5 million that has so far been distributed among 570 recipients. “It was very important to us to explain that 100 per cent of all the money would go to those who need it and that we would choose each of the projects ourselves. People’s livelihoods were at stake and still are. It’s been very moving to see the feedback from those who were helped on the ground.”

Unfortunately, he will have his work cut out over the next few months. At a time when Germany’s COVID-19 case numbers are rising with unprecedented pace and Nazi insignia has appeared at lockdown protests, Goretzka’s impact off the pitch remains as vital as the one on it.

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2 hours ago, Blues Forever said:

Time to snatch several ligue 1 players lol.

20 best non PSG targets


DMF/CMF Eduardo Camavinga   
CMF    Houssem Aouar    
CF    Moussa Dembélé    
Winger/AMF    Jonathan Ikoné   
DMF/CB    Boubacar Kamara   
CF    Jonathan David   
CMF/DMF    Bruno Guimarães   
AMF/Winger    Rayan Cherki    
CB    Benoît Badiashile   

CMF    Jeff Reine-Adélaïde   
DMF    Boubakary Soumaré 
CB    Duje Caleta-Car
RB    Zeki Celik   
Winger    Jérémy Doku    
RB    Youcef Atal    
AMF    Lucas Paquetá    
CB/RB    Mohamed Simakan 
CB    Strahinja Pavlovic 
CB    Sven Botman    
GK    Predrag Rajkovic  

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22 hours ago, Blue Armour said:

Games against Southampton, West Brom, the first fixture against Seville, United and Liverpool dont count. 

The team lineup was only shaping up then and the switch to 433 happened midway through the first Krasnodar fixture, which we won.

Bringing up the second Krasnodar is also unwarranted, because we played with a 3rd string squad for the match.

The only poor performance is against Everton., and that game is completely different from the rest of the examples you mentioned 

The change of shape helped a bit but still seen enough to know this team isn’t complete. Even more so after Everton and the game tonight.

Even then regardless those games were poor performances. 
 

23 hours ago, Jason said:

West Brom and Southampton were before we switched to 4-3-3. Same goes with the Liverpool game and that came in the 2nd game and we went down to 10 men. Sevilla and Man United came immediately after Lampard started to switch things for the better; we were found wanting offensively but we were defensively sound. And which Krasnodar game?

If you are gonna point out the games where we had imperfections, then you should probably point the games where we did well as well. Only fair, no? Inconsistency is still to be expected from us when we are still a work in progress but compared to last season, our consistency is less bad this time around, if that makes sense. Had we faced Atletico last season, I wouldn't have fancied our chances at all. But this time? I do. We aren't perfect yet but we are also in a better place right now (maybe things will change come February but that is another debate). 

Sure, we haven't won any of the big domestic games yet this season but at the same time, we have also lost only once and that was after we went down to 10 men. Similarly, Atletico have failed to beat Villarreal (4th), Real Madrid (3rd) in La Liga this season. They also got smashed 4-0 by Bayern and then failed to beat a Bayern B side. The only big side they have beaten this season is Barcelona but that is a hopeless Barcelona side that have lost to the likes of Getafe and Cadiz.

And who is writing Atletico off already? If anything, people already wrote us off immediately after the draw was made if you have seen the posts. If anything, there are people who are just feeling bullish about our chances. Atletico won't be easy to get past, that is true but the way people have been talking about them, you would think they are the European champions and/or have been dominating Europe for years. If you go look at their results and performances in recent seasons in Europe, they aren't actually all that impressive. There have been some good ones but there have also been bad ones. Again, they won't be easy to beat but they aren't unbeatable either. If we are in good form and have no major injury issues especially come then, we have a good chance of beating them over two legs.

(On a side note, can't believe I'm the one who is trying or the one who is being optimistic on here!)

Yes the second one. I know it was a dead rubber, for sure but you going to say that team couldnt have played better? That those players arent good enough to beat them?

Irrelevant mentioning Bayern, they are European Champions, we are not at that level. Villarreal and Real (struggling just now) maybe not the greatest opposition but still over 2 games in knockout competition, Atletico are very dangerous imo. Particularly more so after watching the Everton and Wolves games (on top of some of the earlier games this season) we have just lost and not only just lost but probably quite deservedly so. I have no doubts Atletico are better sides than both quite comfortably and will definite play in a similar manner also.

Also if our game plan is still gonna be giving it to Chilwell or James and letting them cross it Atletico will eat that up all day, if theres one thing they know how to do well it is defend from crosses. 

I didnt say they were unbeatable, I said dangerous and they will be wanting to play a team like us rather than some of the others they could have got because we are still a work in progress, with faults and not completely settled.

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Former Chelsea striker returns to training and aims to face old club again

https://www.chelsea-news.co/2020/12/former-chelsea-striker-returns-training-aims-face-old-club/

EpcASe2W8AApYvr.jpg

When Chelsea were drawn against Atletico Madrid in the last 16 of the Champions League this week, many Chelsea fans automatically thought about a reunion with a former player.

Diego Costa spent three good seasons at Chelsea, and Blues fans have a real affection for the striker who became a cult hero.

Things didn’t end well though and the Spanish international fell out with Antonio Conte and headed back to La Liga to re-join Atletico Madrid.

Costa has been nursing a rare blood clot injury in his leg, but Marca are reporting that he aims to return now in time to face his former club in Europe.

Further to this, his club have tweeted a picture of Costa in training today simply saying ‘back.’ An image that will send chills down Chelsea spines.

It will be an emotional return for both parties though, Costa had a good time in London and scored many good and important goals.

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Dortmund's fall without Håland continues

b7fcc1adba615847138f7bdca3cee262.png

https://yfl.koralast.com/player/html/pCn3sk97Y8wOH?popup=yes&autoplay=1

This game will be remembered for the just-turned-16yo  Youssoufa Moukoko's first topflight goal

Union Berlin are amazing at set piece goals, especially corner kicks

bd54cac4a2cb7059ac25d5d8eb3352df.png

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