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  • Is it Finally Cavan Sullivan Time? – Philadelphia Sports Nation

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    Despite the Philadelphia Union’s winter rebuild, one fact remained the same. Most eyes on the Union will be on Cavan Sullivan. With his brother, Quinn, recovering from injury and the roster opening up space in front of him on the depth chart, is 2026 finally the time we see Cavan Sullivan?

    Eyes Have Been on Sullivan

    Cavan Sullivan made his debut with the Union’s top-flight MLS team in historic fashion. Sullivan was just 14 years old when he saw his first MLS minutes. Consequently, he holds the record for the youngest player to appear in a North American professional sports league. However, Sullivan’s appearances became few and far between.

    Since his debut in 2024, Sullivan has mustered 14 appearances and 223 minutes of playing time. In that time, he has yet to record a goal or assist. Sullivan’s time has mostly been spent with Union II and the United States Youth National Team. In the 2025 U-17 World Cup, Cavan Sullivan would play a pivotal role in leading the United States squad to the top of their group. Unfortunately, the squad fell in the round of 32 on penalties.

    Most notably, of course, Sullivan would agree to a groundbreaking deal with European giants Manchester City in 2024. The agreement will have the Union transfer him to City when he turns 18 for a fee of around $5 million. It proves Sullivan’s promise and ability that a top-tier European club would make a commitment to a then-14-year-old.

    Will Sullivan see a Bump in Playing time for 2026?

    Unfortunately, one of the factors that led to Cavan Sullivan’s lack of opportunity was his position on the depth chart. However, the Union, despite capturing the Supporters Shield in 2025, have competely overhauled the roster. Additionally, Cavan’s brother, Quinn, tore his ACL down the stretch of 2025. Cavan and Quinn find themselves sharing similar playstyles. Both can be attacking midfielders anywhere on the field, but become lethal when they can stretch the field down the wings.

    Although Quinn is sharing that his ACL recovery is going great, he won’t be expected back until a few months into the season. Cavan may also benefit greatly from the roster overhaul. Inserting Sullivan into a midfield that already had a feel of playing with each other could have backfired. Now, the likes of Daniel Gazdag, Tai Baribo, and Mikael Uhre are all gone. The Union, needing to rediscover its attacking identity, seems like the perfect time to factor Sullivan into the everyday lineup.

    Now, Cavan Sullivan is still just 16 years old. Believing he will, or should, be starting every single game for the Union is just not feasible. However, there is a real chance Sullivan will be given the chance to create in 2026. No longer being a substitute, appearing after the 85th minute mark. Factor in the Union’s schedule, once again getting crowded, as they return to the CONCACAF Champions Cup, Sullivan could be in a prime position to be a top choice off the bench and even get a start from time to time.

    Union Fans are Ready for Cavan

    At the end of the day, the Philadelphia Union’s bread and butter is youth development. The likes of Mark McKenzie, Brenden and Paxten Aaronson, and Jack McGlynn have all come and gone. The aforementioned players had their shot to perform in front of the Union faithful before their transfers. Cavan Sullivan has not yet.

    In 2026, it may be the time Union fans finally get a full display of how talented Cavan Sullivan is and why Manchester City scooped him up when he was just 14 years old. Only time will tell, as the Union kick off 2026 in just over 2 weeks in the CONCACAF Champions Cup.

    Featured Image: Wes Shepherd/PHLSportsNation

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  • Mikel Arteta’s time at Man City and the training drill that transformed Raheem Sterling

    Mikel Arteta’s time at Man City and the training drill that transformed Raheem Sterling

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    It is the training drill that helped transform Raheem Sterling from a zippy winger who narrowly reached double figures each season into a back-post assassin who was among the most lethal goalscoring wingers in Europe.

    The change happened in the 2017-18 season, Pep Guardiola’s second in charge of Manchester City, the club Sterling returns to face this Sunday as an Arsenal player.

    It is Sterling’s current manager, Mikel Arteta, Guardiola’s assistant from 2016 until 2019 when he left for the Emirates, who played a key role in extracting that staggering efficiency in front of goal.

    Guardiola had assistants more senior than Arteta, who was in his first coaching role, so he had the bandwidth to focus on specialisms and learn from as many departments as he could.

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    He kept finding himself gravitating to analysis, with his inquisitiveness leading down many a rabbit hole. His thirst to understand specific moments in the game on a granular level helped focus the work of Arteta and the analyst team but it also saw their research become part of the first-team decision-making process.

    There were several projects they worked on which produced dramatic improvements: goalkeeper penalty tactics, the diagonal full-back-to-winger pass that Ben White and Bukayo Saka have perfected, and quantifying what made a penalty-box predator.

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    How Arsenal used White to unlock the attacking abilities of Saka and Odegaard

    Arteta started looking at wingers around the world, searching for the sweet spot with the use of data. He and the analyst team broke it down into which area these wingers scored most often from, how many touches they took and how quickly a shot had to be taken.

    The higher the level, the less time and space players have to shoot. There were also zones identified where most goals are assisted and scored.

    From that, a drill was deduced in the academy which Arteta modified and introduced into the first-team environment for Sterling to work on.


    Arteta modified a training drill at City to help improve Sterling as a winger (Julian Finney/Getty Images)

    Guardiola’s fitness coach Lorenzo Buenaventura is credited with ensuring City train the way they play by making sessions game-realistic. Again, the club’s research informed their thinking as they found fast breaks required far longer sprints than would usually be associated with counter-attack training, so Buenaventura implemented a 60-yard sprint at the start of the exercise.

    Sterling then had to shoot inside a marked square under pressure from defenders but the sprint meant that, by the time they got there, they had a lack of oxygen in the brain, which makes decision-making more difficult.

    Arteta carried a stopwatch during the drill and if the shot was not taken in the allotted time, he called it dead and they would start over. The emphasis was on the need to act decisively, not to overcomplicate, which is what those privy to Sterling’s evolution at City believe was the key lesson he learned.

    With little time to train due to the relentless schedule, these sessions after training were important in hammering home the message. Video work helped, too, with clips of wingers such as Arjen Robben and Franck Ribery, whom Guardiola worked with at Bayern Munich, used in combination with the 16 cameras at the training ground to show exactly what they were looking for.


    Clips of Ribery and Robben, who were at Bayern with Guardiola, helped explain what they wanted from Sterling (JOHANNES EISELE/AFP via Getty Images)

    Sterling arrived in 2015 as a 20-year-old who had electrified Anfield with his dribbling as part of the Brendan Rodgers team that came agonisingly close to winning the Premier League in 2013-14. Manuel Pellegrini was the manager but when Guardiola arrived a year later there had to be a change to his game or he would not fit into his system.

    As the change to Jack Grealish’s game since moving from Aston Villa in 2021 has shown, Guardiola asks his wide players to be more subservient to the team structure than some other managers.

    One of the principles Guardiola introduced at City was the need to always look for the free man in possession. To do that, a player had to understand when he was in a clear one-v-one situation. If that was the case, they were encouraged to be aggressive and take on their man, but if they were doubled up on, logic dictated a team-mate must be free elsewhere.

    Sterling got 10 goals and 15 assists in all competitions in 2016-17. It was a healthy return for a young player. He had got 11 and nine in 2014-15, and 11 and eight in 2015-16.

    But it was not elite level and neither was Leroy Sane’s total of nine goals and five assists in his debut season after joining from Schalke. Once Arteta started working with the forwards more in that second season, it unlocked numbers that had hitherto been out of reach for players who thrilled but often flattered to deceive.

    Success reinforces the habits, though, and that is why Sterling was so receptive to diluting some of his natural game in pursuit of being the difference-maker.

    It almost became comical how many of his goals were scored from the same location. But this was not coincidence, it was design by Guardiola.

    The most potent assist zone was identified as the byline area inside the penalty box. City worked tirelessly on finding their wingers in that position, and if one was there then the other should be on the opposite side ready for the cutback or to tap home the square ball across goal.

    In 2017-18, Sterling got 23 goals and 14 assists. His shot conversion rate almost doubled from 10.9 per cent to 20.7 per cent as City won the league with 100 points — a total no other team has reached.

    The next season, he got 25 goals and 14 assists, with Arteta’s final season at City (he left for Arsenal in December 2019) seeing Sterling record his highest goals tally of 31.

    Sterling record with Arteta

    His numbers dipped slightly the next two seasons, albeit still scoring in double figures, before moving to Chelsea. His struggles there are no surprise when you consider the stability and structure of Guardiola’s football.

    It had been the perfect platform, whereas Chelsea have adopted so many different identities and such an aggressive recruitment strategy that continuity and consistency were hard to find.

    After being bombed out of the Chelsea squad this summer, with manager Enzo Maresca backtracking on previous comments about his importance, Sterling still had tens of millions he could have collected.

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    GO DEEPER

    Sterling and Chelsea: Broken trust, briefing wars and a bleak future

    When Arsenal’s sporting director Edu Gaspar presented the opportunity to reunite Arteta with his former winger, understandably, he had questions. Sterling is 29 now and has achieved almost everything there is to achieve.

    “The first call I had with him, I knew in the first 10 seconds we have to bring him,” said Arteta earlier this month.

    “That was my only question mark: what stage is he at in his career? After 10 seconds I knew already, before the next questions, that we needed him here.

    “He looks great. He’s got a lot of energy, a smile on his face and he’s at it. He wants to prove a point and when someone’s got that in his belly, you sense it straight away. Obviously, I don’t need to know anything else about his quality and what he can bring to the team.”

    The timing of Sterling’s arrival could not have been better. He had two weeks during the international break with only a handful of senior players to refresh his muscle memory on Arteta’s methods and the principles that took his game to a different level.

    It has been five years since they last worked together, in which time both have evolved. Sterling has leant into fatherhood and his religion, while Arteta is a different beast to the coach he worked with one-on-one, having seen how he commands an entire squad. They will hope that shared maturity can make a difference on Sunday against City.

    Sterling has performed well individually against his former club, scoring in both of Chelsea’s meetings against them last season. He has proven he knows how to hurt them and gave Kyle Walker a very difficult evening in the 4-4 draw last November.

    Arteta has found a way to access Sterling’s untapped reserves before. He will be hoping he can do it again.

    (Top photo: Arteta and Sterling at City in 2019; Marc Atkins/Getty Images)

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    The New York Times

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  • Manchester City, the Premier League and the season everything might change

    Manchester City, the Premier League and the season everything might change

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    Welcome to the season when everything might change, or nothing might change, for the most popular football league on the planet. In the coming months, the hearing against Manchester City for their 115 alleged breaches of Premier League regulations will begin and a verdict is expected before the end of the campaign.

    On Tuesday, in a season-opening interview with journalists, the Premier League’s chief executive, Richard Masters, insisted the competition organisers “actually have a pretty good working, operating relationship” with Manchester City. Yet that is a polite veil over an increasingly peculiar and toxic landscape for English football in which City, who have won four Premier League titles in a row, were “surprised” to find themselves accused by the Premier League of having cheated their way to the summit.

    This summer, during numerous conversations with owners and executives who work or have worked within the Premier League, many speaking anonymously to protect relationships, the divergence of opinions and expectations has been revealing. The matter has been discussed informally between ownership groups within the Premier League and it is the subject of gossip in matchday boardrooms. Naturally, they speculate.

    Some are so worn down by the decade-long pursuit of City that they fear Manchester City’s case may result in a financial settlement rather than a sporting penalty. Then some rival executives consider this outcome to be impossible and utterly outrageous, and say it would cast the death knell for financial sustainability not only within the English game but across European football.

    As one Premier League club executive says: “The collective view I’ve heard is that an appropriate sanction would have to be a points deduction so substantial — we are talking here between 70 and 80 points — that it guarantees City a season in the Championship.”

    Another of the sport’s leading figures suggests the punishment ought to be more creative, that many points could be deducted from City in each of the next three seasons, meaning the club’s chance of Champions League qualification would be severely restricted. Another compares the City case to that of the English rugby union side Saracens who, when Premiership champions in 2019, were deducted 35 points, hit with a £5.36million ($6.9m at current rates) fine and relegated to the second division owing to non-compliance with the league’s salary-cap rules.

    A coach who came up against City has simply made his mind up about their guilt and argues they have not achieved their success with the same level of discipline as their rivals, but suspects it is too late now to truly remedy the matter. At the same time, there are fears that a failure to convict and punish City poses major questions about the Premier League’s ability to run itself, particularly with the prospect of an independent regulator still looming next year. Numerous club executives say their incentives to follow the rules would be greatly diminished if the Premier League proves toothless on City.

    At this point, we should remember that Manchester City are contesting the charges. Upon learning of their alleged breaches in February 2023, City said they were “surprised” by the development. They also said they have a “comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence in support of its position” and added that they “looked forward to the matter being put to rest once and for all”. The alleged breaches are extensive and serious, relating to a period between 2009 and 2018 in which City won three Premier League titles and emerged as one of Europe’s strongest teams, as well as hiring Pep Guardiola, the most in-demand coach in world football, to lead the club from 2016.

    City stand accused of failing to provide accurate financial information, “in particular with respect to its revenue (including sponsorship revenue)”; failing to disclose managerial payments during the Italian coach Roberto Mancini’s time at the club between 2009 and 2013; and breaching Premier League rules on profit and sustainability (PSR) between 2015 and 2018. The Premier League also argued City did not comply with UEFA — European football’s governing body — regulations around financial fair play in 2013-14 and between 2014-15 and 2017-18. The Premier League also claimed City did not cooperate fully with investigations in “the utmost good faith”.

    City have been down this road before. They were banned from European competitions for two years by UEFA for alleged breaches of financial regulations in February 2020. Yet the sanction was overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in July of the same year when the court ruled “most of the alleged breaches were either not established or time-barred (outside of the organisation’s five-year statute of limitations)”. City were fined €10million (£8.6m; $11m) for not cooperating with the investigation.

    In English football, nobody is prepared to put their name to quotes about the City case. That is not the same for La Liga president Javier Tebas, who has been a longstanding critic of the impact of clubs linked to nation-states. City always insist they are not owned by the state of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), but Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan is the deputy prime minister of the UAE and the minister of presidential affairs. He is the majority shareholder in City via Newton Investment and Development, a company he wholly owns and which is registered in Abu Dhabi.

    Tebas tells The Athletic: “It is difficult for me to say what is proportionate in England because I don’t know so well the English rules and law. But I can refer to what happened at UEFA… then what happened at CAS — in a resolution I would describe as a joke — is they took the sanction away. It was a very controversial decision to take away that sanction. Now, let’s see, I won’t dare to predict, but I am aware that there is a lot of concern among many clubs in the Premier League about what happens with City. What happens with Man City is a before and after moment for the Premier League itself.”


    Javier Tebas is one of European football’s most powerful voices (Oscar J. Barroso/Europa Press via Getty Images)

    The important thing to remember here is that the view of Tebas, or the many clubs in the Premier League to which he refers, will not be a factor in the final verdict. The Premier League has accused City of 115 alleged breaches, but the matter is now referred to a three-person independent commission for assessment. They are not known to the public but have been chosen by Murray Rosen KC, the barrister who is the head of the Premier League’s independent judicial panel.

    A seasoned Premier League executive explains: “It is not the clubs that are prosecuting Manchester City. Unlike the American system, the clubs do not sit around in judgment of each other. They don’t decide whether to approve a new owner or not, like some American leagues. If you’ve got a case to answer, you’re going to have your day in front of an independent commission.”

    While clubs will not have an input on the independent commission, The Athletic has previously reported how, in the years leading up to City being charged, rival clubs at both ownership and chief executive level would seek to impress onto the Premier League the need for progress on that matter. Sometimes it would be informal phone conversations, while legal letters and requests for information would also be sent. Very occasionally, clubs would seek an update within shareholders’ meetings, but for the most part, this became a topic executives pretended did not exist when sat together around the boardroom table.

    Whenever they did ask for updates, clubs would be told by the Premier League that the case remained under investigation and nothing further could be said. Journalists have received the same answer. From a governance perspective, therefore, City’s rivals are powerless on this matter, reduced merely to lobbying around the edges. The pressure came more often from the top of the Premier League table, where bigger clubs argued to the Premier League hierarchy that they would have won more trophies if City had acted differently.

    Yet over time, that anger has filtered across the division. When City sought to appeal against their UEFA ban from the Champions League at CAS, nine Premier League clubs wrote to express their objection to City’s sanction being suspended while they appealed. Some clubs then placed in the top half of the table opportunistically spied a place in European competition if City were out of the picture.

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    Man City charges: What do rival clubs make of the Premier League’s accusations?

    Others across the Premier League do appear to genuinely believe the sport will be healthier if a firm deterrent is in place for financial regulations, while some clubs believe it is implausible, not least in terms of the optics for the Premier League, that City could evade punishment after Nottingham Forest and Everton received points deductions for financial breaches during the previous season.

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    Man City charges explained: The accusations, possible punishments and what happens next

    “There is no happy alternative to enforcing the rules, which everyone has agreed at the beginning of each season,” Masters told Sky Sports News this week. “They have looked each other in the eye and shaken each other’s hand and said ‘We will abide by these rules’. So the Premier League has to enforce rules.”

    There is also the question as to whether any political attempts have been made to exert pressure on the Premier League. Last year, the UK government admitted its embassy in Abu Dhabi and the Foreign Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) in London have discussed the charges levelled at Manchester City by the Premier League, but refused to disclose the correspondence. In response to a Freedom of Information request made by The Athletic, the government said it would risk the UK’s relationship with the UAE to do so. Manchester City did not comment when told about the existence of the correspondence and the Premier League declined to say whether it has received any correspondence from the UK government in relation to the matter.

    The Athletic has previously detailed extensive official correspondence demonstrating a desire to impress the interests of the UK government on the Premier League, which has always denied it has been influenced in any way. There is no evidence to say the UAE government has made representations. Asked this week if the Premier League has ever felt pressure from foreign governments, Masters said: “Never, of any flavour or description. It just doesn’t happen.”

    For the independent commission, there are reams of material to sort through. This all began when emails and documents emerged from Football Leaks and were published by German newspaper Der Spiegel in 2018. Those prosecuting City would claim the documents appeared to show City bypassing financial rules within football by disguising state investment as sponsorship revenues. City have always refused to comment on any of the German newspaper’s revelations because they say the leaks were “criminally obtained”.

    During the hearing, both sides will be able to request the presence of any participants from the club or Premier League during the period in question. This may even extend to the Premier League calling upon Sheikh Mansour himself, but nobody can be compelled to attend the hearing. It would be a surprise if Mansour, as the deputy prime minister of the UAE, was to put himself in that position.

    The same may be true of City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak. He is also the CEO of the $300billion Abu Dhabi Mubadala wealth fund — which owns some of City’s sponsors — as well as the chairman of the Abu Dhabi Executive Affairs Authority, which is described as a specialised government agency mandated to provide strategic policy advice to the Crown Prince Sheikh Mohamed. As such, several sources close to the Premier League suggested it would be unlikely that any figure directly linked to the state in the UAE would place their reputation on the line at a Premier League commission.


    Sheikh Mansour (left) attended the Champions League final in June 2023 (Michael Regan – UEFA/UEFA via Getty Images)

    The more likely scenario is that figures who have worked solely for City would attend the autumn hearing. Both sides have started preparing for cross-examination of witnesses, as to be expected with such an important hearing drawing near. One witness who had already been spoken to by City’s lawyers described the process as “hardcore”, “aggressive”, and “no-holds-barred”.

    When it comes to making a decision, executives spoken to by The Athletic expect the commission to consider the offences in two parts. It will focus on the material alleged breaches, which could bring the most substantive penalties if City are found guilty, but then also the matter of alleged non-cooperation. Every person spoken to by The Athletic for this article said they expect City will face punishment for failing to cooperate, having previously received a fine for this from UEFA. The question is whether the commission judges non-cooperation to be worthy of a sporting penalty or merely a slap on the wrist.

    These executives point out the contradiction in City’s public statement, where they said they welcomed the chance to present their irrefutable evidence but, at the same time, the Premier League charges include allegations that the club obstructed the investigation. City, for example, headed to court to question the league’s jurisdiction to investigate it and then once more, this time with the Premier League, to prevent any details from becoming public.

    Lord Justice Stephen Males, a High Court judge who heard the latter case, wrote in his 2021 judgment: “This is an investigation which commenced in December 2018. It is surprising, and a matter of legitimate public concern, that so little progress has been made after two-and-a-half years — during which, it may be noted, the club has twice been crowned as Premier League champions.” Twice has now become five.

    This is where the suggestion of a settlement between the Premier League and City appears to become less likely. “There’s been plenty of opportunity for settlements in the past, which hasn’t happened,” says one executive familiar with the case. “Either party can at any time effectively take it out of the court and have a conversation without prejudice to say we’ll have a settlement. But the further you go, the less likely that is.

    “But the scale of this is so large that it’s really difficult to have a negotiated settlement. What are you going to settle on? A fine? A small number of points? Look at Forest and Everton. You can’t do that. This is of a scale both in terms of time, depth and severity of charges that is completely off the scale of the others.”

    The desire for a settlement would need to come from City, too, and the biggest clue towards their approach came within one of City’s most infamous leaked emails when a leading City lawyer wrote that Al Mubarak, the club chairman, had said that “he would rather spend 30million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue them for the next 10 years” than agree to any financial settlement or penalty from UEFA amid the previous case.


    Pep Guardiola, pictured here with Khaldoon Al Mubarak, is hoping to lead Manchester City to an unprecedented fifth straight Premier League title (Simon Stacpoole/Offside via Getty Images)

    One Premier League executive says there is a feeling within the league’s HQ that City have simply “taken the p***” since receiving their first letter from the Premier League on the matter in 2018. This person argues that if City accepted some fault from the outset, they may have taken a substantially smaller punishment than the one which could now be imposed. “They wouldn’t have been relegated, but they have now dug themselves into the massive hole. And it’s either a massive leap that gets them out scot-free or a massive sanction. It is a Hail Mary.”

    The implications of the City case reach far and wide. The Premier League is a phenomenal global success that now drives more in international television revenue than it does from its domestic deal. In the United States, the Premier League’s $450million-per-season deal with NBC dwarfs that of La Liga’s $175m package with ESPN, or Bundesliga’s $30m deal with ESPN. During an interview earlier this summer, The Athletic asked Jon Miller, NBC’s President, Acquisitions and Partnerships, whether the investigations not only into City but also Everton, Nottingham Forest and Chelsea in any way impacted the value of the Premier League.

    Miller said: “It doesn’t question the value at all. What it says to me is that the people who are leading the Premier League very much are hands-on and they’re going to enforce their rules. It’s important that the league has got their hands around this and they’re not afraid to impose discipline where they think it’s needed.

    “I actually applaud them for the stance they’re taking, even if it might move a team into a relegation zone or out of a Champions League or Europa League place. I would rather make sure the league is run on a fair basis, that everybody plays by the same rules.”

    The challenge for the Premier League now is not only with regards to their own case against City but also that City have launched their own legal action against the Premier League, seeking to obliterate the rules, strengthened in 2021, that insist sponsorship deals must be independently assessed to be of fair market value within the competition. The aim was to prevent clubs from being able to receive funds through artificially inflated sponsorship deals linked to a club’s ownership or inflated deals between teams in a multi-club ownership group.

    The Times reported in June that City claimed they were the victims of “discrimination” within a 165-page legal document, stating that a “tyranny of the majority” of teams across the league had ganged up on them to implement rules aimed at preventing their success. A verdict on this matter is expected within the next month and, should City have success, it may also undermine a central plank of the Premier League’s broader case against the club because allegedly inflated sponsorship deals linked to Abu Dhabi are among the alleged breaches.

    The Premier League and City have indicated they intend to appeal against the decision if it goes against them in relation to these associated party transactions, according to people close to both parties.

    An experienced football arbitrator sees it like this: “What’s really going on here is that (City) have invoked the dispute resolution proceedings in the covenant with the Premier League. In invoking the dispute resolution proceedings, it gets them into a room with the Premier League on their terms before the November hearing, which is the substantive hearing to determine whether they’re in breach of the 115 charges.

    “So it’s a mechanism by which their KCs can eyeball Premier League KCs and effectively say to the Premier League, ‘We are prepared to take you down if you go forward with what you’re planning to do, then we’re going to have a damages claim against you of hundreds of millions, which you can’t afford. We’ll tie you up in litigation for the next five or 10 years and we will take you down’.

    “It’s an aggressive litigation tactic and they’ve done it for a reason. Their owners will have needed to sign off on this. It’s not lawyers — the lawyers are merely only ever a conduit. They’re an agent for their client and so it is fascinating — I think they’re trying to provoke a rupture in the English game.”

    City, it should be said, are not alone in having concerns about the policing of associated party transactions. When the Premier League voted to toughen up the regulations in February, six clubs voted against the move and two abstained, meaning the vote could be passed via the narrowest of margins with a two-third majority secured by 12 votes in favour.

    City’s rivals, whether rationally or otherwise, fear that legal success for City would only be the start of attempts to destabilise the competitive balance of the English game. “They worry that it will lead to City and Newcastle (owned by the Saudi Public Investment Fund) dumping a billion every summer; that’s the fear, that it blows the house down on financial sustainability across the whole of Europe,” says one European football executive.

    As the Premier League pursues City and City sue the Premier League, another subplot emerged this week. The Times reported that some of City’s rivals are considering compensation claims for loss of earnings — whether by not winning titles or failing to qualify for European competition — as a result of City’s dominance over the past decade. A source familiar with the hierarchy of multiple Premier League clubs argued it is unrealistic to expect legal success in this area because even teams with lower wage bills and inferior players can sometimes achieve more than may be expected. “It’s not like it is match-fixing where they have paid the referee or something. It’s too remotely related to the outcome of the match,” they said.

    Clubs will largely be left hoping that the Premier League’s independent commission serves up satisfactory justice. The Premier League handbook allows for any kind of punishment, ranging from reprimands to fines, points deductions or even expulsion from the Premier League.

    City are already facing uncertainty ahead of next summer, when manager Guardiola’s contract is due to expire. He is said to be torn over his future at this stage, regardless of the charges. He has often spoken in support of his club’s defence.

    In May 2022, Guardiola said: “Why did I defend the club and the people? It’s because I work with them. When they are accused of something I ask them: ‘Tell me about that.’ They explain and I believe them. I said to them: ‘If you lie to me, the day after I am not here. I will be out and I will not be your friend any more. I put my faith in you because I believe you 100 per cent from day one and I defend the club because of that.’

    Tebas, La Liga’s president, concludes: “The path the Premier League is taking now is important, after many years in which we have not seen proceedings against their own clubs for financial fair play issues. The path they are trying to take is very important for all of European football.

    “The Premier League’s economic sustainability is very important so that there is no inflation in salaries in the rest of Europe due to inflationary policies with money from outside of football (via state money). The result of Manchester City is important. I insist, there is a lot of concern within the Premier League teams. Without knowing the ins and outs of the charges, I do know something, which is that many clubs expect a sanction to be imposed.”

    Additional reporting: Jacob Whitehead

    (Top photo: Getty; Sebastian Frej/MB Media, Naomi Baker, Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA; design: Dan Goldfarb)

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    The New York Times

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  • ‘Bleak’, ‘Gutting’, ‘Disastrous’: What was your Premier League club’s worst transfer window and why?

    ‘Bleak’, ‘Gutting’, ‘Disastrous’: What was your Premier League club’s worst transfer window and why?

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    When transfer windows go right, they can set a manager and a team up for a successful season or kick off a new era.

    When they go wrong, however, they can go very wrong.

    From the early departures of managers after a disappointing summer to relegations or even financial turmoil, a disappointing transfer window can prove disastrous for clubs.

    Having already brought you our selection of the best transfer windows for each club last week, now it’s time to look at those that didn’t quite work out so well.

    Get the latest transfer news on The Athletic¬

    Worst window: Summer 2015

    If there was a window to sum up the frustrations with Arsenal’s passivity in the market it was summer 2015, when their only signing was a 33-year-old goalkeeper.

    Though that goalkeeper was Petr Cech — who later kept 16 clean sheets to win the Golden Glove — the 2015-16 campaign was one of opportunity. Arsenal’s traditional rivals faltered and they finished second, 10 points behind Leicester City and there has always been a thought of ‘what if’ had they invested in even one outfield player that summer.

    A close runner-up is the summer window of 2011. Cesc Fabregas, Samir Nasri and Gael Clichy — all entering their mid-20s — left despite being vital parts of Arsene Wenger’s side. Arsenal then signed Gervinho and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, and although their deadline-day dash brought Mikel Arteta and Per Mertesacker, it was a scattergun end to a gutting summer.

    Art de Roché


    Should Arsenal have gone stronger in summer 2015? (Ian Kington/AFP via Getty Images)

    Worst window: Summer 2015

    The summer of 2015 was when everything went wrong. The season started — and basically ended — in Bournemouth on the opening day, where new signing Rudy Gestede scored the only goal to give Villa three points and the only sense of optimism in an altogether horrendous campaign, finishing rank bottom with 17 points.

    That opening-day win served as a false dawn, with Micah Richards captain and one of 12 new signings that joined. Gestede came and went, the three Jordans — Ayew, Veretout and Amavi — became annoyingly good once they left Villa, as did a young Adama Traore.

    Scott Sinclair was already on the slide and Joleon Lescott’s time at Villa would be known for his apparent accidental tweeting of a new car immediately after relegation was sealed. Idrissa Gueye was the only solid buy. A bleak summer.

    Jacob Tanswell

    Worst window: Summer 2022

    Bournemouth’s hit rate since their first promotion to the Premier League in 2015 has been good, based on recruiting unearthed gems and, recently, young talent from abroad.

    Still, Scott Parker’s brief top-flight stay in 2022 was littered with in-fighting and squabbles over recruitment, exacerbated by the ownership flux, with incoming owner Bill Foley waiting to be rubber-stamped.

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    It meant Parker had what he viewed as little support in the market, claiming his side were “under-equipped”. Goalkeeper Neto and midfielder Joe Rothwell signed for free, while resources stretched to sign Marcus Tavernier and Marcos Senesi — two good players who are flourishing under Andoni Iraola, but not who Parker wanted.

    Jacob Tanswell

    Worst window: Summer 2022

    Fans thought the 2020 window had been a disaster after Brentford lost the Championship play-off final to their west London rivals Fulham and then sold Ollie Watkins and Said Benrahma. But Ivan Toney and Vitaly Janelt arrived and Brentford finished the season by winning the play-offs so it looks far better in hindsight.

    The reverse logic could be applied to 2022. Keane Lewis-Potter, Aaron Hickey and Mikkel Damsgaard were signed for around £45million ($58.1m at today’s conversion rates) combined but injuries and dips in form mean they have not shown their best. Thomas Strakosha arrived as competition for David Raya but left after two years having made more appearances for Albania (12) than Brentford during that time (six). Ben Mee joined for free but Christian Eriksen turned down a contract to join Manchester United.

    It may be too soon to definitively call this their worst window in history but it certainly stands out as being below par by Brentford’s lofty standards over the last decade.

    Jay Harris

    Worst window: January 2018

    Brighton’s business has not always been as good as it has been in the majority of recent windows.

    The outcomes were sketchy when they were still finding their feet as a Premier League club after promotion in 2017.

    In January 2018, they splashed out around £14million on Jurgen Locadia, a club-record outlay at that time. The forward proved a big disappointment, playing only 46 games and scoring six goals. Brighton make big annual profits now, but they were still incurring substantial losses back then, so it was a costly mistake.


    Jurgen Locadia was a club-record signing at the time (Steve Bardens/Getty Images)

    The same was true of Alireza Jahanbakhsh in the summer of 2018 for £17million from AZ Alkmaar, but fans still fondly recall the Iran winger’s overhead kick against Chelsea. Also, his arrival was accompanied by Yves Bissouma and Jason Steele.

    Andy Naylor

    Chelsea

    Worst window: Summer 2017

    The disastrous summer of 2017 still sparks shudders in Chelsea supporters.

    Fresh from winning the Premier League title, Antonio Conte felt he had earned a big voice in Chelsea’s recruitment. He submitted a list of high-profile targets that included Romelu Lukaku, Virgil van Dijk, Alex Sandro, Radja Nainggolan and Kyle Walker.

    Chelsea tried to bring Lukaku back from Everton but were outflanked by Jose Mourinho and Manchester United, before pivoting to Alvaro Morata of Real Madrid. Conte also had to settle for Davide Zappacosta (Torino), Tiemoue Bakayoko (Monaco) and Danny Drinkwater (Leicester City), with the latter pair becoming liabilities long before they were released as free agents.


    Danny Drinkwater was among Chelsea’s 2017 signings (Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images)

    The sale of Nemanja Matic to United for £40million aged well but deprived Conte of vital midfield experience. The club also took a loss on sending Juan Cuadrado back to Serie A and sold Nathan Ake to Bournemouth for £20million — much less than his peak transfer value.

    Liam Twomey

    Worst window: Summer 2017

    A memorable window for all the wrong reasons with Palace’s new manager Frank de Boer sacked 10 days after it closed, just four games into the Premier League season — all of which his team lost, all without scoring.

    Mamadou Sakho joined from Liverpool for £26million after an excellent loan spell in the second half of 2016-17 but was unable to reach those same levels again. Jairo Riedewald arrived from Ajax for £8m, and although he proved to be an excellent mentor for the club’s younger players, his contribution on the pitch was limited. He did, however, spend seven seasons at Palace covering various positions and made 106 appearances in all competitions.

    Midfielder Ruben Loftus-Cheek impressed to such an extent on a season’s loan from Chelsea that he made the England squad for the following summer’s World Cup, but Timothy Fosu-Mensah struggled at right-back after being loaned from Manchester United.

    The squad had been insufficiently strengthened in this window but De Boer’s replacement Roy Hodgson was still able to guide them to an 11th-place finish.

    Matt Woosnam

    Everton

    Worst window: Summer 2017

    There is an obvious answer here for anyone who follows Everton; one that shines a light on the glaring dysfunction of the Farhad Moshiri years.

    Let’s go back to the summer of 2017 and the arrival of not one, not two… not even three… but four No 10s in the form of Wayne Rooney, Gylfi Sigurdsson, Davy Klaassen and Nikola Vlasic.

    Mad, right? Well, that’s what happens when so many different people are feeding into the recruitment process — owners, board members, managers and other staff — and each one gets a pick. The bizarre splurge left Ronald Koeman’s side lacking balance — particularly out wide — and also led to financial problems later on.

    A case study on how not to do your recruitment.

    Patrick Boyland


    Davy Klaassen failed to impress (Alex Livesey/Getty Images)

    Fulham

    Worst window: Summer 2012

    There have been some bad windows at Craven Cottage in recent years.

    The summer of 2015 did bring Tim Ream, Tom Cairney and Ryan Fredericks, but it also brought nine other new players, the most notable of which was Jamie O’Hara. January 2014, meanwhile, saw a record fee spent on a striker, Kostas Mitroglou, who would play only 151 minutes (three appearances, zero goals) in the club’s unsuccessful fight against relegation.

    But the winner here is the one at the start of the 2012-13 season.

    It set in motion a tricky decade, as Fulham sold Clint Dempsey and Mousa Dembele, their crown jewels at that time, to Tottenham Hotspur and their only signing that paid off was Dimitar Berbatov. The Bulgarian striker was a popular addition, but on his own couldn’t stem the tide.

    This window marked the start of a downward spiral which would end in relegation the following season, and then four years in the Championship.

    Peter Rutzler

    Worst window: Summer 2020

    Both of Ipswich’s summer windows pre-relegation featured costly mistakes: in 2001, destabilising a unified squad, and in 2018, replacing Championship players on the cheap with those of predominantly League One quality.

    But for the sheer volume of underwhelming signings, the 2020 summer transfer window takes it.

    After ending the previous season 11th in League One — the club’s lowest finish since 1953 — just three permanent signings were made. David Cornell, Oliver Hawkins and Stephen Ward on free transfers in a feeble attempt to escape the third tier.

    Only Ward became a regular and striker Hawkins managed just a single goal. All three left the club after one season.

    Ali Rampling

    Leicester City

    Worst window: Summer 2021

    After just missing out on Champions League qualification in the previous two seasons, Leicester were looking to push to the next level as 2021-22 approached.

    The business they did that summer may not have set the wheels in motion for a decline which brought relegation less than two years later, but it certainly was a factor. A total of £55million went on Patson Daka, Jannik Vestergaard and Boubakary Soumare, while Ryan Bertrand joined on a free.

    Besides a few promising moments, striker Daka has not had the impact expected, and midfielder Soumare has also been a disappointment. Denmark international centre-back Vestergaard looked at first to be a disaster of a signing until his performances in the Championship last season earned him a new contract. Champions League winner and former England international Bertrand’s spell at Leicester was a mishap, due mostly to injuries, and he retired this summer aged 34.

    The reality for clubs of Leicester’s stature is they must be prudent in recruitment and reinvest after selling a major asset. They cannot afford to get it wrong.

    In summer 2021, when they didn’t sell a major asset, that’s exactly what happened.

    Rob Tanner

    Worst window: Summer 2010

    Rewind 14 years to the 2010-11 pre-season, and Liverpool were in a mess. Rafael Benitez’s reign had just ended, debts were piling up under the hated ownership of Tom Hicks and George Gillett, and fan protests were gathering pace.

    Liverpool appointed Roy Hodgson as manager at the start of July and, with money tight, what followed proved to be a dreadful transfer window.

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    The hype that surrounded signing Joe Cole on a free transfer from Chelsea proved misplaced, as the England midfielder flopped badly. Milan Jovanovic was another free-agent arrival that summer who ended up costing Liverpool a fortune in wages.

    The names Christian Poulsen (£4.5million from Juventus) and Paul Konchesky (a reported £3.5m from Fulham) still send a shiver down a Kopite’s spine as they struggled badly and looked completely out of their depth.

    Raul Meireles (£11.5million from Porto) was the only one of the new arrivals to give the club any kind of return on their investment.

    It was all too much for star midfielder Javier Mascherano as he pushed through a move to Barcelona before the deadline. You could hardly blame him.

    James Pearce


    Paul Konchesky was one of Liverpool’s stranger signings (Alex Livesey/Getty Images)

    Worst window: Summer 2012

    City famously built on their 2011-12 Premier League title by bringing in Javi Garcia, Jack Rodwell, Matija Nastasic, Scott Sinclair and Maicon.

    In fairness to them, this was the same summer they also tried to sign both Robin van Persie from Arsenal, losing out to Manchester United, and Eden Hazard of Lille, who chose new European champions Chelsea instead.

    City were clearly trying to put the hammer down and cement their place at the top of English football (not to mention the fact that a few months later they were pushing hard to bring in Pep Guardiola from Barcelona as manager, not long after Roberto Mancini’s finest hour).

    They obviously felt the signings they did make in that window, including two young English players seen as having bags of potential, would be able to take the club forward, but none of the moves worked out and summer 2012 has gone down in history as a missed opportunity.

    Sam Lee


    Jack Rodwell’s move to City did not work out (Paul Thomas/Getty Images)

    Manchester United

    Worst window: Summer 2013

    It’s the obvious answer. Sir Alex Ferguson and David Gill, the chief executive, had both departed at the end of the 2012-13 title-winning season. David Moyes had arrived from Everton as the new manager. Thiago Alcantara, Leighton Baines and Ander Herrera (who they did sign a year later) were pursued but eventually fumbled before Marouane Fellaini arrived on deadline day… for £4million more than the £23m release clause which ran out a month earlier.

    A special mention to the summer(ish) window of 2020-21.

    Disrupted by Covid-19 and a mere 35-day gap between completing one season and beginning another, United pushed and pushed and pushed for Borussia Dortmund’s Jadon Sancho, but to no avail. Instead, Edinson Cavani, Donny van de Beek, Alex Telles and Facundo Pellistri arrived in an assorted grab-bag.

    Ole Gunnar Solskjaer did well in the season that followed, with United runners-up in the Premier League and Europa League, League Cup semi-finalists and reaching the last eight of the FA Cup, but the club missed a crucial opportunity to back their manager while rivals were in a mild state of flux.

    Carl Anka

    Worst window: Summer 1997

    John Barnes. Stuart Pearce. Ian Rush. How is that a bad window? Because this was 1997, not 1990. Barnes was 33, Pearce was 35 and Rush was 35.

    Far worse windows (summer and winter windows were introduced in 2002) were to come in terms of talent, but this was the tipping point for the next two decades: the Kevin Keegan bubble had burst, replaced by Kenny Dalglish’s stultifying pragmatism. Jon Dahl Tomasson and Shay Given also arrived, but out went David Ginola and Les Ferdinand, and Alan Shearer had a long-term injury.

    The boom was over, contraction taking hold, a club being deflated like a soiled airbed after a festival.


    John Barnes joined Newcastle at the wrong end of the 1990s (Clive Brunskill /Allsport via Getty Images)

    Pearce was fine, and Barnes played in all but one of Newcastle’s Champions League matches, including the 3-2 win against Barcelona. Barnes was also Newcastle’s top scorer in the league, but with just six goals — the Entertainers had been thoroughly dismantled.

    The Champions League run ended at the group stage and Newcastle finished 13th in the Premier League. Joylessness loomed. The sad cherry on top? Signing Paul Dalglish. Nice work if you can get it, which you can if your dad’s the manager.

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    Andrew Hankinson

    Worst window: January 2020

    Before Cooper, there was Sabri Lamouchi. The old line about being able to cope with the despair but it’s the hope you can’t stand, was perfectly encapsulated for Forest fans by the 2019-20 season.

    Under Lamouchi, Forest enjoyed a brilliant first half of that season. There were a few dips here and there but, by the end of January, they were not just ensconced in the unfamiliar surrounds of the play-off places, but knocking on the door of the automatics too. The first XI was good, but the thing that might have pushed them over the line was a few quality additions that January.

    It would be unfair to blame the players who did arrive for the eventual collapse that would see them miss out on the play-offs in that Covid-interrupted season. But it did feel fitting that one of them, the striker Nuno da Costa, scored an own goal in the 4-1 home defeat to Stoke on the final day, which drove a stake through the already pretty dead heart of Forest’s promotion hopes.

    Nick Miller

    Worst window: January 2018

    Six words from January 2018 that are enough to bring back nightmares: Southampton sign Guido Carrillo for £19million.

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    A few years on from the dreamy days of beating Inter Milan in the Europa League and Southampton’s infamous black box seemed to be faltering. Locked in a relegation battle under Mauricio Pellegrino — remember him? (Sorry for the reminder, these were desperate times.)

    Needless to say, striker Carrillo, the only arrival in that window despite the sale of Virgil van Dijk, was not the answer. He scored zero goals at a cost of £1.9million per appearance.

    Nancy Froston

    Tottenham

    Worst window: Summer 2013

    Supporters had to deal with the pain of waving goodbye to Gareth Bale in 2013 and, to make matters worse, Tottenham wasted the £85million they received from Real Madrid. Roberto Soldado scored 24 times for Valencia in La Liga during the 2012-13 season, which is more than he managed (16) across 76 appearances for Spurs in all competitions.

    Erik Lamela is a cult hero but never truly fulfilled his potential following a £30million move from Roma. Paulinho lasted two years before he moved to China after barely making an impact. Nacer Chadli was a useful option from the bench but Etienne Capoue and Vlad Chiriches struggled.

    Apart from Lamela, the only other signing who qualified as a success was Christian Eriksen. He spent seven distinguished years with Spurs and was part of the team that came close to winning the Champions League in 2019.

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    Jay Harris

    Worst window: Summer 2022

    In the summer of 2022, West Ham spent £165million on Gianluca Scamacca, Lucas Paqueta, Emerson Palmieri, Thilo Kehrer, Maxwel Cornet, Flynn Downes, Alphonse Areola and Nayef Aguerd — the most they had spent in a window.

    But integrating eight players into the team proved difficult for manager David Moyes, which led to West Ham losing five of their first seven league games.

    Scamacca and Kehrer have since joined Atalanta and Monaco respectively, Cornet has been an underwhelming signing, while West Ham are open to offers for Aguerd and Downes could rejoin Southampton having returned from his season-long loan. Only Paqueta, Palmieri and Areola have improved the side.

    Roshane Thomas

    Worst window: Summer 2011

    It may seem difficult to beat the summer of 2022, when Wolves spent a combined £80million on Matheus Nunes, Goncalo Guedes and Nathan Collins. But at least that side avoided relegation.

    Eleven years earlier came a window just as poor but with worse consequences as Wolves broke up the limited but spirited squad Mick McCarthy had built and signed the higher-profile duo of Roger Johnson and Jamie O’Hara.

    It was supposed to take the club to the next level — but the next level was down. Two relegations in two seasons were the result of disturbing the dressing-room dynamic.

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    Steve Madeley

    (Top photos: Getty Images)

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  • Fight for the Champions League’s future threatens an age of uncertainty in Europe

    Fight for the Champions League’s future threatens an age of uncertainty in Europe

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    A love story. Florentino Perez called it a love story. Speaking to reporters on his way out of Wembley Stadium after Saturday’s Champions League final, the Real Madrid president sounded like a man in thrall to the mystique, the allure and the romance of a relationship that has spanned seven decades and so many special times.

    “It’s a magnificent night, because this competition is the one we like the most,” Perez said after Madrid, 2-0 winners over Borussia Dortmund, were crowned European champions for the 15th time. “It was created by Santiago Bernabeu (the club’s president from 1943 to 1978) along with L’Equipe newspaper, and it made us important in the world. Some (clubs) leave and others come, but this competition is very much ours.”

    There is a beautiful story there: the all-conquering Madrid team that won the first five European Cups from 1956-60, inspired by Paco Gento, Alfredo Di Stefano and Ferenc Puskas; a sixth title in 1966, and then an unthinkable 32-year wait before three more around the turn of the century, won by a team illuminated by the homegrown Raul Gonzalez and embellished by the arrivals of Luis Figo and Zinedine Zidane before the Perez-driven galacticos project lost its way; their re-emergence over the past decade with a side initially built around Cristiano Ronaldo and other A-list talents, but now extensively rebuilt around the young talent of Vinicius Junior, Rodrigo, Jude Bellingham and, coming soon, a bona fide galactico in Kylian Mbappe.

    No club have contributed more to the game’s growth in the European Cup era. Equally, no club have grown more with the game. It is, on one level, a beautiful relationship, particularly when they are led by coaches such as Carlo Ancelotti and Zidane, whose personal history with the competition dates back to their illustrious playing careers.


    Perez wants to overhaul a tournament Madrid have dominated (Angel Martinez/Real Madrid via Getty Images)

    But it is a strange kind of love story when Perez appears intent on killing the Champions League as we know it.

    He has the European football landscape he dreamed of — a vast and enormously lucrative competition, so elitist that it now attracts talk of fairytales if the second-biggest club in Germany make it to the final — but it is still not enough. Nothing will ever be enough.

    One way or another, European football is approaching a tipping point.

    It has felt that way for several years now, as if the unprecedented financial advantages enjoyed by the biggest, richest, most powerful clubs in the biggest, richest, most powerful leagues just aren’t enough anymore.

    Perez wants the European Cup to be replaced by a Super League. Why? “We are doing this to save football at this critical moment,” he told Spanish television show El Chiringuito around the time of the failed Super League launch in the spring of 2021. “If we continue with the Champions League, there is less and less interest, and then it’s over. The new format which starts in 2024 is absurd. In 2024, we are all dead.”

    And now here we are in 2024. Perez is still pushing the Super League project, emboldened and encouraged by the outcome of the latest court case in Spain, and continuing to wage war on UEFA, the game’s governing body on this continent, which he has accused of running a “monopoly” on European football.

    UEFA, for its part, has responded to the constant demands for more matches by introducing a new Champions League format from next season: the so-called “Swiss model”, where 36 teams will play eight games each, not in a group format but in a notional 36-team “league” from which 24 of them progress to the knockout phase. This is what Perez has described as “absurd”. And he might well be right.

    It sounds… bloated, convoluted, unwieldy, all the things that European competition should not be. It looks like a forlorn, misguided attempt to go with the flow when what the game really needed was for UEFA to do the impossible by stemming and reversing the tide.

    It is designed to placate the demands of the biggest, richest, most powerful clubs.

    Some of us would say UEFA has acceded far too much over the past two decades in particular, creating a financial model that has created a chronic competitive imbalance between leagues and within leagues. Perez and others have already concluded next season’s reforms don’t go anything like far enough.

    Sitting at Wembley on Saturday evening, soaking up the atmosphere created by their supporters, it felt like something of a throwback to see Dortmund in the final again. If it felt that way the previous time they got there, in 2013, when Jurgen Klopp characterised them as a “workers’ club” against a commercial juggernaut in fellow German side Bayern Munich, it certainly felt that way when they played Real Madrid in this season’s showpiece.

    It was similar when Inter Milan reached the final against Manchester City last season. Inter have won the European Cup as many times (three) as Manchester United and indeed they have won it more recently, but they too seem to have been left behind in the modern era. The latter stages of the Champions League felt like their natural habitat in the 2000s. By 2023, reaching the semi-finals, never mind the final, seemed extraordinary.

    And that is Dortmund and Inter — never mind other former giants such as Benfica, Porto and Ajax (to say nothing of Celtic, Red Star Belgrade and the rest). The 21st-century financial landscape has put these clubs far beyond most of their domestic rivals but unable to compete financially with even mid-ranking Premier League clubs, let alone the Champions League elite.

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    The European game is at such a strange point in its history.

    The football itself is frequently enthralling, highly technical and played at an astonishing speed, but the structure of the sport’s European model feels increasingly broken: by greed, by entitlement, by the biggest clubs demanding an ever greater share of revenue and ever more protection against underperformance. Attempts to preserve wild-card places for underperforming big clubs have so far been resisted, but that is clearly the direction of travel.


    Dortmund reaching the final feels almost like a fairytale in the modern game (Alex Pantling/Getty Images)

    UEFA’s solution, as always, is to give the elite more of what they want — but not enough to please most of them. The solution proposed by Perez and others is for the most powerful clubs to wrestle power from UEFA and to be allowed to do as they please.

    “To fix a problem, you have to first recognise that you have a problem,” Perez said in 2021, before making clear his belief that European football’s issue was not dubious ownership models, nor the spread of multi-club networks, a bulging fixture calendar or a chronic financial and competitive imbalance across the continent. The only problem he was interested in was the one that could be solved by “top-level games year-round, with the best players competing”.

    But Perez doesn’t necessarily mean “top-level games” between the best teams of the day. He wants the most marketable matches.

    If he feels short-changed by a Champions League campaign in which Madrid faced Napoli, Braga, Union Berlin, RB Leipzig, City, Bayern and Dortmund, you suspect he would be happier to have played Juventus and Liverpool (who didn’t qualify), Manchester United (who were knocked out in the group stage) and Barcelona (beaten in the quarter-finals).

    Provided his team still ended up winning, of course.

    Two great contradictions arise from the past decade of European competition.

    The first, much discussed elsewhere and not greatly relevant to this article, is that this period of Madrid domination, unprecedented in the Champions League era, has felt strange as far as the quality of their performances is concerned.

    It is undoubtedly strange that they have come to dominate an era while rarely dominating their matches against top-class opponents. It must leave Pep Guardiola wondering how on earth, beyond the small margins of knockout football, his City side have just one European Cup to show for their sustained excellence over the past seven seasons.

    The second contradiction — perhaps linked to the first, perhaps not — is that, in an era when the biggest clubs have enjoyed access to revenue streams that were previously beyond their wildest dreams, several of them have lost their way due to serious mismanagement.

    Barcelona, Madrid’s fiercest rivals, have flirted with financial calamity and have reached the Champions League semi-finals just once in the past eight seasons; Manchester United have reached just two quarter-finals in the past 13 seasons under the Glazer family’s miserable, directionless ownership; Juventus reached the final in 2015 and 2017 while in the midst of winning nine consecutive Serie A titles, but they have fallen away from the top tier of European football as ownership and management issues escalated.

    It is almost as if some of these ownership regimes became so fixated on driving up revenue streams and reimagining European football’s future that they lost sight of their own club’s present.

    That is not an accusation that could be levelled at the Perez regime.

    Obsessed as he might be by his Super League dream and his power struggle with UEFA, he has overseen Madrid’s evolution into a club that plays the transfer market shrewdly, always looking for the next big talents in world football (Vinicius Jr, Rodrigo, Bellingham, incoming Brazilian teenager Endrick) and always respecting experience and knowledge while recognising when it is right to let a fading A-list talent grow old at another club’s expense.

    Barcelona and Manchester United, from a broadly similar financial position, have spent enormous sums of money in a wildly erratic manner and allowed dysfunction to take hold. By contrast, Madrid have established a clear vision, made good appointments and built a winning environment.

    They have also without question ridden their luck at times in the Champions League. That needs to be emphasised: both the luck they have had in some of their winning campaigns (not least the last two) and the assurance Ancelotti and his players have shown in being able to ride it. In some of the individual success stories — Ancelotti, Nacho, Dani Carvajal, Toni Kroos, Vinicius Jr, Bellingham — there is so much to like.

    The most uplifting stories of the past few seasons in European football, though, have come away from the Champions League’s spotlight, with Europa League final successes for Villarreal, Eintracht Frankfurt, Sevilla and Atalanta, as well as the success of the initially derided third-tier Conference League, which Roma, West Ham United and Olympiacos have won in its first three years.

    The joy in those celebrations, particularly after Olympiacos beat Fiorentina in the Conference League final last week, was truly something to behold.

    It has shown there is still life and ambition among those clubs who have been conditioned to accept their place in the game’s 21st-century order and be grateful for whatever crumbs might fall from the top table.

    Former Juventus chairman Andrea Agnelli once infamously asked whether Atalanta truly merited a place in the Champions League while on their way to a third consecutive third-placed finish in Serie A. When it comes to outperforming expectations and resources over recent seasons, few clubs in Europe have been more deserving.

    Surely that is the lesson for European football to draw from the past decade: that, in 2024, there still has to be such a thing as upward mobility, that a club like Olympiacos can win a European trophy, that clubs like Atalanta, Bologna and Aston Villa can still reach the Champions League, that a club like Bayer Leverkusen can break Bayern’s monopoly of the Bundesliga. In an era when hope has been crushed — when Bayern have been able to sleepwalk their way to some of their 11 consecutive Bundesliga titles, often sacking coaches as they go — Leverkusen’s success under Xabi Alonso has been particularly inspiring.


    Olympiacos fans celebrated their own European triumph in huge numbers (Giorgos Arapekos/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

    But such love stories rarely seem to endure these days. It seems inevitable that, before long, Leverkusen will fall prey to those clubs higher up the food chain, seeing their best players whisked away, just as Klopp’s Dortmund team did, just like the Monaco team of 2016-17 or the Ajax of 2018-19 did. Maybe their manager, too.

    And at the very top of that food chain are Madrid, the sport’s apex predator, now champions of Europe for a 15th time, somehow re-establishing their dominance in an era when they felt threatened like never before.

    Leaving the stadium after Saturday’s final, it was hard to escape the feeling that European football, having allowed its problems to pile up over a long period of time, is entering a period of uncertainty and seismic change.

    This convoluted “Swiss format” will be the most inescapable change in next season’s Champions League, but, whether it has the desired effect or not, you can imagine the Super League mob clinging to its success or failure as irrefutable evidence of the need for radical reform.

    The game needs proper leadership. It needs someone to stand up and fight for tradition, for jeopardy, for the romance that runs through the history of European competition.

    Hearing his heartening words on his way out of Wembley, you might have imagined that person would be the 77-year-old president of Real Madrid, the man who talks fondly and reverently about the European Cup and his club’s enormous contribution to it.

    But no, Florentino Perez has a different perspective on that relationship these days. As love stories go, it’s increasingly complicated.

    go-deeper

    GO DEEPER

    Real Madrid’s Champions League party: Speeches, cigars, Carvajal’s dad on horseback

    (Top photo: Visionhaus/Getty Images)

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    The New York Times

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  • Manchester United shocks Manchester City in English FA Cup final as its teenage scorers make history at Wembley

    Manchester United shocks Manchester City in English FA Cup final as its teenage scorers make history at Wembley

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    (CNN) — Manchester United won the FA Cup on Saturday, defying the odds to defeat overwhelming favorite Manchester City 2-1 and deny its crosstown rival back-to-back league and cup doubles.

    A week is a long time in soccer. On Sunday, Manchester City sealed a historic fourth consecutive Premier League title and was ready to cap a glittering season with another trophy at Wembley.

    Pre-match there was a sense of inevitability about the result – United had lost six of its last seven matches against City and four of its last five finals, while City was enjoying another dominant season.

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    Issy Ronald and CNN

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  • Is the Philadelphia Union Ready for Cavan Sullivan? – Philadelphia Sports Nation

    Is the Philadelphia Union Ready for Cavan Sullivan? – Philadelphia Sports Nation

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    14-year-old prodigy Cavan Sullivan officially signed a 4-year deal with the Philadelphia Union.
    However, given the current state of the team, is the Union ready for the phenom?

    Usually, the questions are reversed. A 14-year-old kid should be the one in question about making his pro debut. However, the Philadelphia Union is currently in a nosedive identity crisis.

    At the moment, it needs to be asked if the Union is ready to provide growth to its once-in-a-lifetime talent.

    Sullivan is the Real Deal

    While the Aaronsons, Brenden, and Paxton set the standard for Union homegrown stars, Cavan Sullivan is on another level. At 14 years old, Sullivan was primed to be headed to European giants Manchester City. It was a shocking turn of events when Sullivan decided to stay home with his brother.

    All that it took was the largest homegrown deal ever given in the history of the sport in this country. Sullivan is the real deal and has proven it in his rise through the Union’s academy system. After leading the Union Academy to multiple trophies, Sullivan will look to add to the Union’s thin trophy case before he heads off to stardom overseas.

    The Union Are a Hot Mess

    The Union’s current state is not pretty. For the first time in 12 years, it has suffered three consecutive home losses. The cushion the club had built early in the season has not only dissipated, but the Union now finds itself far off the top of the table.

    However, the most concerning part of the poor form is the fact the team’s former stars have regressed ahead of schedule. Jacob Glesnes has been a shell of his former self, while Jack Elliot and Damion Lowe have not been up to par in picking up the slack. Andre Blake has been unable to play most of the games due to injury.  Simultaneously, Jose Martinez has been well below his standards. All of the regression on the defensive side of the ball has anchored the Union in 2024. While the offense has been putting together some of the best strings of attack fans have seen, it hasn’t mattered, as opposing teams can score at will against the club.

    Consequentially, regression is not the only culprit. While the Union has slid backward, the rest of the league has sprung forward. Union’s management refusal to invest substantial money into the club at its peak is starting to be the club’s downfall. The Union, as always, is missing that superstar who can take over the game by himself.

    Cavan Sullivan could be that player. However, by the time he makes his way into the first team, it may be too late.

    Sullivan is Ready, Is the Union?

    The biggest concern about Sullivan right now is if the first team is the right spot for him. As of right now, the answer may be no. Given the comments from players, coaches, and fans, there is a lot of tension in all phases of the club. It cannot be best for Sullivan to just get thrown into the fire.

    However, once the dust starts to settle and the Union has a clear path forward, whether that path be a rebuild or continue pushing this core for a trophy, then Sullivan should start to break in. The timeline on the Union’s current path is unknown. If the summer transfer window comes and the Union is still tail spinning, perhaps the transfer of Julian Carranza will mark the start of a rebuild for the Union.

    Nonetheless, the Union doesn’t have forever to figure it out. Once Sullivan turns 18, he is off to Manchester. While Sullivan will likely start slowly breaking into the first team this year, he has to be a focal point by no later than the start of next season. Not only do the coaches need to do right by Sullivan, but ownership needs to invest in him to spur his growth further.

    The Union cannot mess up with Cavan Sullivan. While it is nearly impossible to do with his talent, the entire world is now watching. If the Union can successfully grow Cavan into the next phase of his game and push him to superstardom, the phone stays open for future talent. Other teams will look deeper into the Union’s academy for investing. On the other side, if the Union messes this up, not only will teams think twice before investing in the Union’s academy, but younger players will think twice as well.

    At the end of the day, the Union has to sort out their form at the top level before Cavan Sullivan sniffs an MLS game.
    Cavan Sullivan might not be able to save the current state of the Union, but he absolutely could be the face of the new era of the Philadelphia Union.

    PHOTO: Wes Shepherd/PHLSportsNation

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    Ryan Hall

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  • Premier League salary cap mailbag: Why? Who wins and loses? How would it work?

    Premier League salary cap mailbag: Why? Who wins and loses? How would it work?

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    Premier League clubs this week opted to push on with plans for a hard spending limit — a de facto salary cap tied to the income of the lowest earning side in the top flight.

    OK, we hear you say, but what on earth does it all really mean?

    Who better to answer your questions than Matt Slater, who broke the original story? If you prefer, you can listen to Matt for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and the usual listening places on The Athletic FC Podcast.

    Let’s dive in…

    What are the real motivations for such a rule? — Adam M 

    Do I detect a note of suspicion, Adam?

    For some, such as Crystal Palace chairman Steve Parish, who has been talking about this idea longer than most, there are sincere concerns about the competitive balance of the league.

    They worry that the revenues of the ‘Big Six’ — which already feels like a ‘Big Seven’ and might be a ‘Big Eight’ before long — are growing faster than the revenues of the Premier League’s middle and lower classes, and that is before you factor in the increased sums they will receive from playing more Champions League games and occasional appearances in the FIFA’s revamped Club World Cup. Financial fair play regimes that tie your ability to spend to your own revenues play into the big clubs’ advantage, which compounds with each passing year.

    So, “anchoring” is an attempt to slow the big clubs down. It’s a backstop to the squad cost rule that UEFA has already introduced and the Premier League is moving towards. The two are meant to be complementary, with anchoring being the backstop — a hard cap that even the richest/most successful/most ambitious club cannot go beyond.

    Follow the Champions League on The Athletic…

    What is the role of the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA)?  — Peyton B 

    Is there any chance the PFA will agree to a hard spending limit of 5x? And, if yes, what concessions would they require from the owners? — Dave D

    The PFA calls itself the players’ trade union and it is, officially, the world’s oldest players’ union. But it has spent most of its history acting more like a lobby group, with a large charitable arm and growing education and healthcare sections. Unlike the North American players’ unions, it has not engaged in big disputes about profit-sharing with the clubs, the players’ employers, and it has not signed formal collective bargaining agreements with them.

    Instead, there is almost a gentleman’s agreement between the leagues, on behalf of the clubs, and the PFA that the former will fund the union’s work in looking after former professionals who need new hips, providing counselling for those who need it, funding grants for second careers and backing research into conditions such as dementia.

    The PFA, unsurprisingly, hates the idea of salary caps. Would you like it if a third party said your employer was not allowed to pay you over a certain level, even if that employer wanted to and could afford it?


    Erling Haaland with the 2022-23 PFA Player of the Year award (PFA)

    This is why European football’s governing body UEFA and everyone else have always had to step carefully when introducing cost controls. To avoid breaking European Union and national laws on restraint of trade, governing bodies have neeed to prove that what they are doing is justified by a legitimate aim — the sustainability of a culturally significant industry — and the proposed measure is fair, proportionate and transparent. In other words, they cannot push it too far.

    So, rules that tie a club’s ability to spend to its ability to earn have, until now, been OK with lawmakers, as there is a clear link to sustainability. But linking a club’s ability to spend to someone else’s earnings? Hmmm. Debatable.

    And it is almost certainly a debate the PFA will enter. As things stand, it is aware of the Premier League’s anchoring proposal and some preliminary conversations have taken place, but it is adamant that a proper consultation on the matter, at the relevant body, has not started.

    The body in question is the ‘Professional Football Negotiating and Consultative Committee’, which is comprised of members from the PFA, the English Football League, the English Football Association and the Premier League. It is where all matters relating to employment in the game are discussed. If its members cannot agree, the dispute goes to independent arbitration. And there has been a lot of that in football of late.

    Which clubs will benefit the most and the least from this? The clubs that objected to this seem very different, so it’s hard to tell — Andrew R

    Good question!

    Crystal Palace chairman Parish clearly believes it will help his team continue to compete in the Premier League. Anything, even something as loose as the proposed 5x anchoring cap, will help Palace put out a competitive team every week in the Premier League.

    And every other team in Palace’s tax bracket seems to agree. For them, letting Manchester City and the rest spend 70 per cent of their ever-growing total revenues on their squads will destroy what is left of the jeopardy when City meets a team from the league’s lower half.

    But the other big potential beneficiaries of anchoring are those clubs directly competing with Manchester City right now, and worried about the rising threat of Newcastle United. They want to tie their rivals to a more transparent cost-control mechanism. So, this would explain the support from Arsenal, Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur.

    Manchester United would ordinarily be in that gang but their new increasingly de-facto owner INEOS is concerned about anchoring slowing down its ability to perform the radical surgery United’s squad requires. So, their opposition is more tactical than strategic.

    Manchester United


    Sir Jim Ratcliffe, part-owner of Manchester United (right), with Sir Dave Brailsford (Robin Jones/Getty Images)

    Aston Villa’s opposition to the idea is interesting as it reveals just how ambitious their billionaire owners Wes Edens and Nassef Sawiris are for the club. In the past, Villa would have been in favour of something that constrains the league’s elite. Now, they see themselves as potential aristocrats.

    And Chelsea, well, they abstained probably because they realised a vote against the idea was not going to stop it from proceeding to the next stage in the consultation and legal process, so there was no point voting against it. But, equally, they could hardly back a rule that they are probably the only club to be in immediate danger of breaching. So, they did neither and abstained.

    Will the players not just go to a league without a cap? — Darragh N

    All of them, Darragh? And where? Which league pays average salaries anywhere near as high as the Premier League?

    I understand the concern, and it will be voiced as a reason not to do this by those who hate the idea. I just do not think it is very likely.

    According to the most recent data from UEFA, 10 of the top 20 wage bills in European football are in the Premier League. No other league has more than three representatives.

    The two biggest wage bills in Europe, and therefore global football, are at Barcelona and Paris Saint-Germain, but they can only field 11 players at a time, and both are trying to trim their wage bills, with Barca badly needing to stop their slide towards bankruptcy and PSG moving towards a more sustainable model.

    go-deeper

    GO DEEPER

    Who is the best-paid player at every Premier League club?

    Nothing lasts forever, of course, but there is no evidence of any short- or medium-term threat to the Premier League’s status as the richest domestic league in global football.

    Could the Saudi Pro League be the threat? It might, one day, but I would argue there is just as much chance of the SPL going the same way as the Chinese Super League in a decade as there is of it becoming a genuine challenger to the Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga and other major leagues.

    If I were in charge of the Premier League, I would be more worried about Major League Soccer but, as we know, North American sports owners love cost controls, so I cannot imagine them getting into an arms race for players with the Premier League, particularly as half of those owners are likely to own Premier League teams, too.

    go-deeper

    GO DEEPER

    It’s a controversial topic, but does taking a Premier League game to the U.S. make sense?

    How punitive are these rules on the richer clubs? A circa £500m limit on spending is hardly forcing teams to scratch around the bargain bin — Tom N

    I think you have answered your own question, Tom. And the answer is… not very! Not yet, anyway.

    We have estimated each club’s squad cost calculation for the 2022-23 season. The numbers that go into that calculation are the wages for your first-team squad players and coaching staff, your annual amortisation bill (the cost of your transfers spread across the length of their contracts) and any agents’ payments you make.

    Premier League

    Now, some of those numbers are publicly available but we have had to make educated guesses on the biggest one, the wage bill, as clubs only publish their total wage bills — for all their staff — and not what they pay their players. However, most clubs spend about 70 per cent of their total wage bill on their players, so that is the amount that we have used.

    The result is that only Chelsea spent more than five times what the Premier League’s bottom club, Southampton, received from the league in central payments. The Saints’ share of the league’s broadcast and sponsorship cash was £103.6million, which would have set a 5x cap at £518million. Chelsea’s estimated squad cost that season was £539million.

    So, no, you’re right, if the only club to possibly breach the proposed anchor was Chelsea, after their wild shopping spree, this would not appear to be particularly restrictive.

    Curious how it will work, timing-wise. Will they confirm the amounts available to spend the next season, once the season is over? — Courtney A

    You are not the only one to be curious about the details of this, Courtney, and you ask a good question.

    Whether the Premier League bases the cap on the multiple of the previous season’s bottom club’s central income or an estimate of the new season’s bottom club’s number is not clear yet. But I do not see how they can set the cap retrospectively. Clubs must know where they stand, so the cap will have to be set in advance.

    I wonder if the cap should be linked to rolling three-year domestic TV rights deals.

    The actual calculation is not that difficult, as most of the numbers are easy to predict. Every club receives a basic award of about £90million, with each place in the table worth a £3.1million merit payment, so the bottom club gets 1 x £3.1million and the top club 20 x £3.1m.

    The only real variable is the facility fee, as that is the payment clubs receive each time they appear on live television in the UK, and it is not often the case that the team that finishes 20th is the least-picked team.

    The facility fee is just over £1million a game and every team is guaranteed a minimum number of televised games. The range for facility fees in 2022-23 was £25.3million (Manchester City) to Bournemouth (£10.2m).

    So, there is some variability in the exact amount your bottom club will earn but not much. The facility fees make up 25 per cent of amount clubs make from the domestic deal, which is about half of the total income. As previously mentioned, Southampton received £103.6million last season and that seems like a good benchmark for a bottom-placed team in the current broadcast rights cycle.

    How will this new rule tie in with UEFA’s rules? Could you have a situation where a team spends more than £500million and wins the Premier League fairly but is not allowed to play in Europe? — Ben H

    This proposal will work in tandem with UEFA’s squad cost rules and the Premier League’s version of the same concept. Think of anchoring as a backstop or a relatively distant line in the sand that nobody can cross.

    Your second question is an intriguing hypothetical but does not seem very likely to me.

    Even if we ignore the numbers and just pretend that there is a way for a club to emerge from the pack and win the league, while breaching UEFA’s 70 per cent threshold, do not forget that winning the league will bring a big TV merit payment, increased commercial income and the promise of at least £45million of Champions League prize money.

    So, they might bust the 70 per cent limit in the year they win the Premier League, but they are unlikely to do so the following season. We have a very recent example of such a club: Leicester City. They made a record profit the year after they won the Premier League.

    Finally, even if your champion still, somehow, manages to breach UEFA’s threshold, the European governing body does not like banning champions from its competitions. It has a long track record of dishing out fines, which they collect by withholding some of the prize money, and squad restrictions.

    This approach is actually baked into the new squad cost rules, as UEFA has published a penalty schedule that links the size of the fine to the scale of the breach.

     (Top photo: Michael Regan/Getty Images)

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    The New York Times

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  • Fear and gloating on the Premier League title trail: watching three contenders in three nights

    Fear and gloating on the Premier League title trail: watching three contenders in three nights

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    One of the closest, most enthralling Premier League title races in many years is careering towards a climax.

    Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester City played out crucial games on consecutive nights this week — and The Athletic went to all three to survey and convey the emotions of three very different clubs and fanbases.

    An Arsenal fan briefly comes up for air between substantial munches of a doner kebab: “The internet is gonna be a f****** joke tonight.”

    Welcome to The Emirates. They are a different breed here; still rabid football fans all the way to their inner core, but perhaps with slightly different priorities on a matchday.

    The number of selfies being taken in front of the giant Arsenal lettering opposite the Hornsey Road roundabout, for example, is well above average for your typical football ground.

    One man films a staged video of his friend slowly walking towards the camera outside the ground, club-shop bag in hand, shades on. They both watch the video back to make sure it looks good, then they wrap their freshly purchased red and white scarves around their necks. Job done.

    There are still all the normal football pre-match sights and sounds. Alcohol, meat, cigarette smoke, anticipation.

    “We’ve still got an hour to drink,” one fan informs his mate. “An hour?” he replies. “You’ll be wearing one of them mate,” he cackles as he points to a passerby wearing a protective cast boot.

    It does, though, feel pretty normal around the ground. Should it? Arsenal are top of the Premier League with five games left. They haven’t won a title for 20 years.

    This place should be brimming with feverish expectation. And yet, the dead-behind-the-eyes robotic football machine that is Manchester City dictates that whatever Arsenal do tonight is irrelevant, in Premier League parlance.

    At least, that’s how some Gunners fans see it.


    Arsenal fans prepare for their team’s match with Chelsea as best they can (Zac Goodwin/PA Images via Getty Images)

    “The Villa defeat was obviously gutting but otherwise we’ve been basically perfect since the turn of the year,” season ticket holder Jamie says, referring to Arsenal’s otherwise outstanding record of 12 wins and one draw (0-0 at the Etihad) in 2024.

    “We’ve only been behind in one game since last year and that was the Villa game. It’s ridiculous, really, how perfect you have to be to beat City. I know we had that run around Christmas (four points from their last five matches of 2023) but yeah, I’m proud of us, we’re pushing them closer than last year.

    “I just feel the pressure is off now. If City win every game from now on, they deserve it and we’ll be back next year, we’re growing, on an upward curve. I’m not sure you can say the same for City, (Kevin) De Bruyne is probably less influential and (Erling) Haaland isn’t scoring as many. And Liverpool will obviously change a lot this summer. We’re all good.”

    It’s a philosophical attitude, one that seems to reflect a club comfortable in its own skin.

    There isn’t much skin on show as 60,000 people amble into the stadium. People wear hats, scarves and parka jackets. It’s 6°C on April 23.

    The cranky sound of AC/DC song Hells Bells fills the enormous red bowl inside. With its talk of high temperatures, it feels like a piss-take.

    After a plod-along run of two defeats, one draw and a laboured win over Wolves in their previous four, the question in the air is if Arsenal still have the minerals for this title fight.

    The answer comes within 30 seconds. Red swarm over blue like it’s the 1997 General Election all over again, Kai Havertz is sent through on goal (although is marginally offside) and the next few minutes are a blur of aggressive tackles, jinky movement and nimble passes.

    The crowd is immediately fully engaged and Arsenal are immediately in front.


    Leoandro Trossard celebrates scoring Arsenal’s first of the evening (Charlotte Wilson/Offside via Getty Images)

    By way of retort, Chelsea, with their 58 per cent possession and higher xG in the first half, play with a freedom that spells danger — Nicolas Jackson and Conor Gallagher flashing balls across goal that elicit nervous, leaning-back, pursed-lipped oooohs in the home stands, then spontaneous applause en masse by way of encouragement. Arsenal are a more united bunch these days.

    Greater teams — with the emphasis on team — would prey on Arsenal’s fragility, but not Chelsea.

    The freedom they are playing with also extends to their defenders, who run in odd directions and blame team-mates for their own mistakes.

    Mauricio Pochettino, for the time being, is a picture of calm amid the storm of an unceasing first half. Mikel Arteta buzzes around his technical area like a wasp who has accidentally sniffed some chilli powder.

    At half-time, Rollin’ by Limp Bizkit is inexplicably played in full. It feels like the early 2000s again, a sentiment Arsenal take literally as they regale their glory days by demolishing Chelsea over the next 25 minutes.

    The loudest cheer is for the third goal, orgasmic groans at Martin Odegaard’s wand-ish through ball, then euphoria as Havertz finishes it off.

    As the goals fly in, the giddiness elevates. All four sides of the ground are on their feet and the noise is overpowering at times. As a stadium, an entity, a feeling, this place is unrecognisable from three years ago. There is a tangible feeling of unity and delirium.

    “Who put the ball in the Chelsea net? Half the fucking team did,” they sing. Technically only three of them have scored, which is 27 per cent of the team, but you get the sentiment.

    The ultimate indignity arrives in the final minutes as they shout ‘ole’ at a rare sequence of Chelsea passes.

    “You have to react and face the moment,” Arteta says of Arsenal’s return to form. “And the moment is beautiful. We’ve been working for it for nine months.”


    Arsenal’s players are restrained, but the fans are not (David Price/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)

    On the pitch at full time, the celebrations are fairly restrained. Outside the ground, this is not the case.

    People aren’t just walking away chatting about the match; they’re singing, hugging and dancing. There is an incessant buzz of unfiltered, intoxicating joy.

    The scenes are so rhapsodic they bring to mind the end of the film adaptation of Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, set amid Arsenal’s 1989 last-minute league title win at Anfield, when fans poured onto the streets back home.

    “I feel like I’m walking out of a festival and we’ve just watched the headliner,” one fan says to his friends. Everyone is high on Arsenal.

    A group of three lads are dropping the c-word (champions), while another is shouting about goal difference.

    At the Tollington pub, the chant on repeat is not about the title, it’s about Chelsea getting battered. Whatever happens in the next three and a half weeks, this night will not be forgotten anytime soon.

    With Liverpool stumbling through Jurgen Klopp’s Last Dance, they shouldn’t mind that Everton are their next opponents.

    It might be a local derby, where form is supposed to ‘go out the window’, but this fixture has been massively skewed towards the Reds since the turn of the century.

    They have beaten Everton 28 times since 2000; the Toffees have won just five.

    “You wouldn’t get chips like that at Anfield,” a father tells his lad as he passes him one outside the Blue Dragon just a few feet from Goodison Park, with the chips in question being proper chips, and the insinuation being Everton are the proper club. Or the people’s club, as they say in this part of Liverpool.

    If Everton are a proper club, then lord knows what a disjointed one looks like in 2023-24. It has been a season of upheaval and strife and the visit of their neighbours is not necessarily being relished.

    Klopp stands impassively as he surveys the opening minutes of his final Merseyside derby, his feet encased by fluorescent orange trainers.


    Jurgen Klopp assesses the scene ahead of his last Merseyside derby (Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images)

    Perhaps he’s just taking it all in, his last visit to the grand/creaking/traditional/outdated (delete as applicable) old stadium, arguably unique in English football (there are other ancient grounds, but not of this size). Or perhaps he just knows what’s coming.

    Liverpool are submissive and compliant to the point of BDSM as they fail to cope with an Everton side who look like they’ve been locked up in darkness for the last week, caged and made to listen to the Z-Cars theme tune on repeat.

    As with Arsenal, the tone is set within the opening minutes, but on Liverpool’s part this means meek surrender. The wobbly wheels are in motion. They win 25 per cent of all duels in the opening half an hour, a ridiculous statistic.

    If The Emirates is an arena, a colosseum, Goodison is 38,000 people shouting into an empty tin can. It’s being sat in a wheelie bin while burly blokes beat the outside of it with baseball bats.

    There is an unceasing air of frantic desperation in their pleading yells for their team to tackle, to pass, to shoot, to block. No Premier League fanbase gets off on an agricultural sliding tackle more than at Goodison. Nowhere else is more spittle rasped for the tenacious blocking of a powerfully struck opposition shot.

    When the merited opener arrives via Jarrad Branthwaite’s left foot, Liverpool’s fans begin to fear the worst.

    Everton are willing to hoof the the ball out of play to clear a corner when they have all 11 players behind the ball… in the first half. Liverpool are not.

    The rabid home team are seemingly prepared to do and sacrifice anything to win this football match. Liverpool are not.

    “Games likes these, the bare minimum is fight,” Virgil van Dijk says later. “We were lacking that at so many moments.”

    Liverpool are creating chances, but they are losing all the key moments; missing chances (or shooting straight at Jordan Pickford), conceding chances and losing tackles and loose balls.


    Jarrad Branthwaite’s shot squirms under Alisson (Daniel Chesterton/Offside via Getty Images)

    The game is being played almost exclusively in Everton’s half. “We’re going to see record possession statistics for Liverpool in this half,” one home fan says.

    But his fears are not realised. Dominic Calvert-Lewin heads home a second, the roof comes off. One man sat in the home seats does not move, remaining seated and wearing a wry smile, if not a red shirt.

    Hope is lost in the away end. Defiance is not in their repertoire tonight, they are too despondent for that.

    They are told their “support is f***ing s***” and can only retort with muted sarcastic applause from a few hundred of them.

    Nerdy statistical models would have Liverpool winning this 19 times out of 20. But the Opta supercomputer does not allow for Sean Dyche wearing a tracksuit.

    “F**k off to Norway, the city is ours,” rings around Goodison (a dig at what they see as Liverpool’s tourist-heavy fanbase). As the whistle blows on an iconic Everton performance, the line “and if you know your history” from It’s a Grand Old Team must be one of the most thunderous noises heard in English football this season.

    Fourteen years of no home victories over Liverpool, the fact that survival is all but secured, that Liverpool’s title bid has been seriously dented, and Klopp’s farewell party severely sullied, plus the points deductions, the fury, the injustice, it all pours into that noise.

    “You lost the league, at Goodison Park,” is the refrain being sung over and over, more so outside the ground as people literally jump into each other’s arms outside the Winslow.

    Liverpool’s fans have long since scarpered, the away end emptying within a couple of minutes at full-time.

    The post-match quotes are telling. Calvert-Lewin says Everton were happy to let Liverpool have the ball because “we never feared they were gonna really hurt us”.

    Van Dijk criticises his team mates. Klopp apologies to his supporters and says that historically City and Arsenal don’t drop the number of points they’ll need to for Liverpool to stand a chance now. His words don’t say the title dream is over, but his face does.


    Klopp and Van Dijk after Liverpool’s potentially costly defeat at Everton (Peter Byrne/PA Images via Getty Images)

    “We were rubbish,” Neil Atkinson of The Anfield Wrap sums up succinctly.

    “I’d rather have lost 4-2, but we didn’t have that card to play, there wasn’t a point where we thought they could make it a mad game. They didn’t have that gear. All I saw coming was the fact we had to score first.”

    The Athletic’s naivety around whether this was still a “friendly derby” for Liverpool, at least in comparison to the rivalry with Manchester United, is very quickly dismissed.

    “It’s absolutely horrendous losing to Everton,” Neil clarifies. “I’m always hugely perturbed when we lose to them. It doesn’t happen very often.

    “Klopp looks tired. You wonder now if he felt (when announcing he was leaving) his race was run… maybe we can see this manifesting itself more now than we could at the time he announced it.

    “If he’d looked this way in November, people would have understood it more. He now looks really rather grey.”

    And all the while they sing in the pubs around Goodison: “You lost the league, at Goodison Park, you lost the league, at Goodison Park.”

    Yep, they probably did.

    There are two football teams playing at the Amex but the focus is directed at just one. Manchester City are in town.

    “Fancy bus, innit?” a Brighton fan says to her friend as they walk past City’s coach which has five 10ft-high trophies emblazoned across its side. They both have their picture taken by it.

    “I like (Jack) Grealish for England but not City,” another Brighton fan says.

    Brighton are concentrating on City… and so are City. For them, Arsenal and Liverpool’s results are irrelevant if, as everyone expects, they enter ‘closer’ mode and win all their remaining fixtures.


    Guardiola stepped off the Man City team bus knowing a win at Brighton was essential (Clive Rose/Getty Images)

    “I didn’t watch either game this week,” City season ticket holder of 30 years, Mike Hammond, says, but not from a position of irrelevance. “It’s just no good for your mental health, I can’t be doing with it,” he adds.

    Mike is, as he puts it, a legacy fan. From Maine Road, to League One, to the Etihad and the Champions League trophy. Hell of a journey.

    But while Arsenal have a party and Liverpool stretch their emotions thin like butter scraped over too much toast, how are City’s fans feeling about the possibility of another Premier League title?

    “You get a mix,” Mike says. “Some are presumptuous, they’ll say; ‘Yep, been here before, we’re at our best now and it should be straightforward’. Most are pretty realistic and, yeah, to be honest, most think we’ll do it.

    “I thought Arsenal might not drop any points but that Villa result has made a big difference. We’ll have to win every game to win the title, but we’ve done that before.

    “I’m not massively confident, tonight won’t be easy. We’ve struggled a bit with Brighton, they’ve got a good system that we struggle with sometimes.”

    Brighton’s fans don’t share Mike’s lack of confidence in a City win.

    “What are you doing missing this? We could have been 3-0 down by now,” a woman jokes as someone walks in late to sit next to her with two minutes on the clock. No, that comes in the 34th minute.

    City had been well below their best when edging past Chelsea in their FA Cup semi-final last weekend, days after being knocked out of the Champions League by Real Madrid.

    Like Arsenal, they had appeared to look tired and lethargic. Like Arsenal (and unlike Liverpool) they come correct at the Amex from the opening whistle.

    Their passing is sharp, their pressing is on point and full of energy, their movement is balletic.


    De Bruyne and Foden celebrate as City demolish Brighton (Sebastian Frej/MB Media/Getty Images)

    They are fortunate when Phil Foden falls over and is awarded a free kick by Jarred Gillett — and luckier still when said free kick deflects into the net — but otherwise this is an utterly dominant victory against meek opponents.

    In their previous 44 matches this season in all competitions, the lowest amount of possession Brighton had kept in a game was 45 per cent. Tonight they have 35 per cent of the ball.

    “That’s so easy, they’re taking the piss,” a Seagulls fan screams as Julian Alvarez scores City’s fourth in the second half. They are.

    The celebrations at full time are fairly restrained. This kind of victory is bread and butter for City, especially in April. It’s job done. Five to go.

    As a fan who regularly attends away games as well as home, Mike is one of a select few thousand who are in the inner sanctum of watching this title race unfold in the flesh.

    “It is a privilege,” he says. “And the away games are great, always a good atmosphere, most people really look forward to the away days.

    “It’s not ‘pinch yourself’ like it was in the first few years of Pep, the manner in which he did it, the football he’s introduced, he’s something else that guy. The best you’ve ever seen.

    “Obviously we’re going for the fourth in a row. We’ve done three, it’s not the end of the world if it doesn’t happen this year, but the team know how to do it and this is kind of where we come good.”

    Just like at The Emirates and Goodison Park, there is a song on repeat at the Amex as the evening draws to a close.

    “Champions again, ole ole, champions again, ole ole.”

    In some ways it has been an extraordinary week, what with Liverpool’s first defeat at Everton for 14 years probably ending their title hopes and Arsenal’s biggest victory over Chelsea for, well, ever.

    In some ways it has also played out to type – Arsenal loving life, Liverpool on the emotional rollercoaster and City utterly serene.

    (Top photo: Zac Goodwin/PA Images via Getty Images)

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    The New York Times

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  • This is still a three-horse title race – the 10 reasons why Man City might drop points

    This is still a three-horse title race – the 10 reasons why Man City might drop points

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    It seems unlikely that north London denizen TS Eliot was an Arsenal fan, but his poetry suggests otherwise.

    “April is the cruellest month,” begins The Waste Land. “I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,” laments The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. “This is the way the challenge ends; not with a bang but a whimper,” was probably the first draft of The Hollow Men.

    Sunday was a disappointing day not just for Arsenal and Liverpool fans, but neutrals who wanted to see the three-way title battle continue. Liverpool’s 1-0 loss against Crystal Palace and Arsenal’s 2-0 defeat to Villa leaves Manchester City two points clear at the top of the league and, as frontrunners, Pep Guardiola’s side are near infallible.

    “I have known it all already, known it all,” moans Eliot. But cheer up, Tommy. There is hope yet.

    Here are 10 entirely realistic reasons why City could still drop points.

    This is a serious article, so let’s start seriously. Can a team do the treble twice in a row? With injuries mounting, games tripling, emotions deepening — can City rouse themselves once more?

    There is a reason why a treble — or a double, for that matter — is so rare. Playing in multiple competitions does have an impact. When the margins are so tight, fatigue levels, tactical planning and mental freshness are even more crucial.

    When cup competitions are straight knockout, league matches against lower-ranked opponents are naturally the games which can slip out of focus. City host Real Madrid in the Champions League quarter-finals on Wednesday, play Chelsea in the FA Cup three days later, before travelling to Brighton five days on.

    Guardiola has already said City are in “big, big trouble” with fatigue and injuries. So that is surely cause for hope for Liverpool and Arsenal?


    Manchester City might need a bigger trophy room (Jan Kruger/Getty Images)

    The Spurs

    Won two, lost five. Has Guardiola ever had a record that bad? Taking on Lionel Messi in the crossbar challenge? Credit card roulette at Manchester’s finest restaurants? Family games of Uno?

    City have always struggled at Spurs. Their Premier League record in north London is poorer than any other fixture. Yes, they may have beaten them in the FA Cup this January — but that record does not include their Champions League quarter-final defeat in 2019.

    Every manager’s mind has a dark room where they store their worst defeats. Guardiola’s contains a Beavertown brewery and a retractable NFL field.

    Tottenham may have been overwhelmed by Newcastle, but both their meetings with City this season have been close. They still have the Champions League to chase, and they will not back down.


    Guardiola tends to be dumbfounded by league trips to the Tottenham Hotspur stadium (Michael Regan/Getty Images)

    Is 30 goals in 37 matches really a down season? Since when did that make you, as Roy Keane suggested, a League Two player? Anyway.

    If Haaland fails to score for the rest of the season, perhaps then there is a conversation to be had. For now, City’s rivals simply have to hope the wheels come off.

    Pep overcomplicates it

    “I always overthink,” said Guardiola in 2022. “I always create new tactics and ideas, and tomorrow you will see a new one. I overthink a lot, that’s why I have very good results. I love it.”

    “If it works I am brave, if it doesn’t work then I’m overthinking,” he added one year later. So go on — be brave.

    When you already play four centre-backs, why stop there?

    Play a back four of Nathan Ake, Manuel Akanji, Ruben Dias, and Josko Gvardiol. John Stones is virtually a central midfielder already. Plonk Kyle Walker (yes, he can count as a centre-back) on the right wing.

    The rest of them? Recall Taylor Harwood-Bellis from Southampton and put him up front in the Andy Carroll role. At 6ft 5in (196cm), Finley Burns must be decent in nets. Luke Mbete can return from Den Bosch and use his left foot from the left wing. Max Alleyne, at 18, has been on the bench this season. Fancy joining Stones in the double pivot? There is already chatter about 16-year-old Stephen Mfuni’s technical quality. Stick him in at No 10.

    Guardiola believes in total football. They’ll be fine. When you’ve won it all, the only way left to win is to… win better.

    Forest’s newest investment finally comes good

    Imagine the scenario: Nottingham Forest are battling for Premier League survival and keeping City at bay. In the 71st minute, Phil Foden finally puts them ahead. With 88 minutes gone, Chris Wood bundles Forest back into it. Bedlam.

    But before the cheers die away, the whistle blows. VAR review. Suspected foul in the box. The referee walks to the monitor. The City Ground has seen this story before. But then he spots something in the crowd — and walks away.

    Amid the depths of celebration, supporters stop for one moment. What made the referee change his mind? They search for an answer — and find it.

    Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Mark Clattenburg.

    This superhero has no cape, but Forest’s referee consultant has the regulations to his front and justice at his back. Gotham City is safe from PGMOL. The Premier League table is level once more.


    This is Clattenburg’s time (Mike Egerton/PA Images via Getty Images)

    Rodri’s break turns into a gap year

    Rodri has said he needs a break, but remember this is a player who lives the lifestyle of a university student. He lived in student accommodation. He has a degree in business administration. He drove a second-hand Opel Corsa. He is one step away from selling you £2 entry to Tuesday club nights at Pryzm.

    “Spending time with young people the same as you,” he told Manchester City’s website when asked why he considered university the best time of his life. “Studying and going out sometimes. It was good… a great time.”

    But in recent months, with the intensity of the campaign — he has played 3,498 minutes for City across all competitions this season — some of this purity must have fallen away.

    “I do need a rest,” he told reporters after City’s 3-3 draw with Real Madrid, with the dazed air of anyone who has attended a 9am lecture on a hangover.

    One week is a brief break, sure. But why not take three months? Why not find yourself? You’re only in your twenties once. British Airways offers student discounts on flights. There’s a world out there to discover.


    Rodri is knackered and needs a gap year (Oscar J. Barroso/Europa Press via Getty Images)

    “Jarrod, maaaaate, how’s it going cuz?”

    “Gaffer? Gaffer? Gaffer? Moyesy?”

    “Kalvin… how’s the new digs? Passport renewed?”

    Declan Rice’s phone bill has never been higher.

    City host West Ham on the final day. By the time it kicks off, there is little more Rice can do, except take care of his own business. The real work, therefore, starts before. West Ham have nothing to play for — it is time for that to change. Every negotiating card is on the table.

    He’s sold his car to Lucas Paqueta. He is willing to withdraw from the England squad in favour of Phillips. David Sullivan has been promised his first-born son. West Ham win.

    Roberto De Zerbi’s job interview to remember

    This season has slightly fizzled out for Brighton & Hove Albion, who are 10th in the league and winless in four. Roberto De Zerbi, still, has been one of the most impressive managers of the past 18 months. Arguably, only Guardiola exceeds De Zerbi in pure madcap, tactical improvisation.

    In the summer, the big jobs are open. Liverpool, Bayern Munich, Barcelona.

    The Athletic might have reported on Saturday that Brighton are increasingly confident of De Zerbi staying, but that comes amid a backdrop of talks over a new contract being put on the back burner and the coach has been publicly non-committal about his future.

    Showing rather than telling is the first rule of job interviews — and De Zerbi has the opportunity to show his tactical acumen by outwitting Guardiola.

    City initially deal with Brighton’s pioneering use of an overlapping sweeper and a pressing pattern based on the Fibonacci sequence, but are flummoxed by the inspired introduction of Jason Steele as an inverted trequartista.


    There is no outwitting De Zerbi (Mike Morese/MI News/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

    Gary O’Neil’s luck turns

    Gary O’Neil seems an unlikely contender to be on MTV’s Welcome To My Crib, but let’s imagine for a moment that he opens up the doors to his Wolverhampton mansion.

    The doormat is a four-leaf clover. As you enter, seven lucky cats wave their hellos. Rabbits’ feet hang from the kitchen beams. Mirrors are banned, O’Neil tells you, demonstrating how he brushes his teeth in the reflection from the bathroom window.

    There is an almost overwhelming smell of incense.

    No team has been unluckier than Wolves this season. O’Neil has tried reason, he has tried rationalisation. He’s tried avoiding ladders. All that’s left is faith… and Nathan Fraser.

    Foden hits the bar. Jeremy Doku trips over his laces. A wild swipe from Max Kilman deflects in off Hwang Hee-chan’s bum. Molineux erupts.

    City’s 115 charges reach a sudden conclusion

    The metaphorical gavel falls. White smoke emanates from the ceiling of Premier League HQ. This day was thought to be months down the line — but a decision has been made.

    City face 115 charges of breaching the Premier League’s financial rules across nine different seasons. If they are found guilty of at least some of them, points deductions are a realistic outcome.

    Of course, City will say this is impossible, the most ridiculous suggestion on this list. After all, they vehemently deny the charges and are working hard to prove their innocence.

    go-deeper

    GO DEEPER

    The Briefing: Arsenal and Liverpool must show title race isn’t over, it’s only two points

    (Top photos: Getty Images)

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    The New York Times

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  • The Premier League title race: Every fixture analysed

    The Premier League title race: Every fixture analysed

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    The Premier League remains a European outlier this season.

    Everywhere you look around the continent, title races have become virtual processions. Paris Saint-Germain are 10 points clear in France’s Ligue 1, Bayer Leverkusen are 16 ahead and one win away from winning the German Bundesliga title, while PSV Eindhoven have a nine-point cushion at the top of the Dutch Eredivisie.

    Elsewhere, Real Madrid lead by eight points in Spain’s La Liga and Inter Milan are 11 ahead of city rivals AC Milan with a game in hand in Italy’s Serie A.

    In England’s top division, however, things are a whole lot tighter. With seven games remaining, just a point separates table-topping Arsenal from third-placed Manchester City, with Liverpool sandwiched between on goal difference. Since the Premier League was launched in 1992, there has not been a season like it.

    So, after Liverpool dropped points at Manchester United on Sunday, who looks most likely to get their hands on the Premier League trophy on May 19 as things stand?

    According to data provider Opta, City have regained the edge as the most likely champions, a triumph that would represent an unprecedented fourth straight Premier League title for Pep Guardiola’s men. Arsenal’s chances were boosted the most by the weekend’s results, rising by nearly eight per cent. Despite Mikel Arteta’s side being in first place, they are currently third-favourites — although the differences between the three teams are paper thin.

    Using Opta’s own Power Rankings, we can also assess how difficult each team’s remaining fixtures are.

    According to that calculator, City have the ‘easiest’ run-in of the three would-be champions, with their only remaining ‘difficult’ game coming away against Tottenham Hotspur, who are currently fourth — with that fixture still yet to be rescheduled as City continue to fight on three fronts domestically and in Europe.

    But how do these run-ins break down, game by game? We asked three of The Athletic’s club experts to assess their side’s remaining matches for potential pitfalls.

    Arsenal

    Sunday, April 14: Aston Villa (H)

    Opponents’ league position: Fifth
    Last five results vs opponents (oldest first): WWWWL
    Minimum possible days rest pre-match: Three

    With Arsenal hosting Bayern Munich in the Champions League quarter-finals tomorrow (Tuesday), this is when their squad could be tested. Arteta has trusted his squad in recent games, rotating his starting line-up notably against Luton in midweek before travelling to Brighton on Saturday. With Villa in European action themselves on Thursday, the strength-in-depth of the sides could be vital. Arteta has faced Unai Emery’s Villa twice, winning once and losing once. Both were fairly tight affairs, so ensuring as many factors are in his favour this time is key.

    Saturday, April 20: Wolves (A)

    Opponents’ league position: 11th
    Last five results vs opponents: WWWWW
    Minimum possible days rest pre-match: Two

    Arsenal tend to fare well against Wolves, having beaten them in five successive meetings — but it is worth noting that this game comes on a Saturday night after Arsenal have travelled to Munich on the Wednesday for a second leg against Bayern that may require extra time and perhaps penalties. Gary O’Neil has overseen a real improvement in his debut season as Wolves coach, so this may be a match where Arsenal’s mental approach is as important as ever. They have shown intent against sides they ‘should’ be beating lately and have been rewarded. Staying in the moment and executing should be the name of the game.

    Tuesday, April 23: Chelsea (H)

    Opponents’ league position: Ninth
    Last five results vs opponents: LWWWD
    Minimum possible days rest pre-match: Two

    Postponed because of Chelsea’s progress to the FA Cup semi-finals, this match falling days before the north London derby could be crucial. Chelsea are inconsistent and should not pose Arsenal a real threat, but tend to play to the level of their opposition, which could be dangerous. This game feels like a major one for Arsenal’s momentum with it coming in midweek. It could give them a confidence boost at just the right time, or prove to be an unwanted pit-stop. As above, Chelsea may be coming off extra time at Wembley in their semi against Manchester City three days earlier.

    Sunday, April 28: Tottenham Hotspur (A)

    Opponents’ league position: Fourth
    Last five results vs opponents: WLWWD
    Minimum possible days rest pre-match: Four

    Second-half-of-the-season trips to neighbours and arch-rivals Spurs used to have a foreboding feeling for Arsenal, but last season’s 2-0 win at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium should reassure the players before this meeting. Spurs will come into the game not just wanting to dash Arsenal’s title hopes, but to boost their own Champions League qualification chances, too. How Arsenal deal with the intensity of this latest north London derby will be vital, but they have shown they can ‘live’ within these types of games well.


    Arteta celebrates Arsenal’s win at Spurs last season with Bukayo Saka (Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images)

    Saturday, May 4: Bournemouth (H)

    Opponents’ league position: 12th
    Last five results vs opponents: DWWWW
    Minimum possible days rest pre-match: Two (if Arsenal are in the Champions League semi-finals)

    Similar to Wolves, this could be a game where Arsenal’s mental state dictates what happens. Last year’s dramatic 3-2 win over Bournemouth created special memories, but gifting goals to teams cannot be a returning trend this year. David Raya becoming more confident in goal should help in that regard, but the outfield players need to be fully focused on the task at hand, too.

    Saturday, May 11: Manchester United (A)

    Opponents’ league position: Sixth
    Last five results vs opponents: LWLWW
    Minimum possible days rest pre-match: Two (if Arsenal are in the Champions League semi-finals)

    Arsenal have not played at Old Trafford since early last season, when they played well but lost 3-1. It is too early to say whether an element of wanting to make amends will play a part there next month. Without an away win against United since November 2020, however, this could be a match where their pressing intensity makes the difference. Despite an entertaining draw with Liverpool, Manchester United struggled to show any real control in the game. They could not pass through midfield and struggled to track runners. If these themes remain against Arsenal, Arteta’s side should punish them more. The threat that individuals like Bruno Fernandes, Kobbie Mainoo and Marcus Rashford have will always need to be kept in mind, however. This game may be moved to another day on the May 11-12 weekend for live TV broadcast.

    Sunday, May 19: Everton (H)

    Opponents’ league position: 15th
    Last five results vs opponents: LWLWW
    Minimum possible days rest pre-match: Seven

    Arsenal will hope Everton’s fate is already sealed when they travel to the Emirates on this the final day of the Premier League season, whether it be safety secured or relegation confirmed. Their last two home results against them are 5-1, on the last day of the 2021-22 campaign, and 4-0, as they often make use of the extra space of the Emirates Stadium pitch compared to the tightness Everton are used to at Goodison Park. Arsenal have also won on the final day of the league season for the past 11 years, with a 2-2 draw against Fulham in 2011 the last time they dropped points.

    Art de Roche

    Liverpool

    Sunday, April 14: Crystal Palace (H)

    Opponents’ league position: 14th
    Last five results vs opponents (oldest first): WWDDW
    Minimum possible days rest pre-match: Two

    Palace are rarely the easiest opposition for Liverpool at Anfield, given their quality on the counter-attack. They have lost some of that prowess, particularly Wilfried Zaha, who scored their goal in the 1-1 draw there at the start of last season. A first leg against Atalanta in the Europa League quarter-finals on the previous Thursday might see Jurgen Klopp rotate, but crucially there will be no further travel involved with the two games at home as players hope to stay as fresh as possible.

    Sunday, April 21: Fulham (A)

    Opponents’ league position: 13th
    Last five results vs opponents: DWWWD
    Minimum possible days rest pre-match: Two

    Marco Silva’s side have fared well against Liverpool this season with last-ditch heroics needed in the 4-3 victory for the home side at Anfield alongside a tightly fought two-leg Carabao Cup semi-final. Liverpool have not won in their last three visits to Craven Cottage (three draws) and there is no indication this will be any easier, with the possibility of extra time against Atalanta in Italy three days before. Liverpool’s last victory there came on the 2018-19 run-in, with a late James Milner penalty saving the blushes of Alisson and Virgil van Dijk over Fulham’s equaliser.

    Wednesday, April 24: Everton (A)

    Opponents’ league position: 15th
    Last five results vs opponents: WWDWW
    Minimum possible days rest pre-match: Two

    Rearranged to this midweek date after being postponed because of Liverpool’s involvement in the FA Cup quarter-finals, a meeting with your city rivals under the lights is as big as it gets. Sean Dyche’s side will be determined to dent the neighbours’ title hopes and are also likely to still need points in their latest fight against relegation. Five of the past six league derbies at Goodison Park have been draws — and those may be two points Liverpool cannot afford to drop if the theme continues.

    Saturday, April 27: West Ham (A)

    Opponents’ league position: Seventh
    Last five results vs opponents: WWWWW
    Minimum possible days rest pre-match: Two

    Liverpool’s record against West Ham should give them confidence. They have won five in a row, although their most recent defeat was 3-2 away in November 2021. It is tricky to know what to make of David Moyes’ side — they can look good one week and terrible the next – but the Scot’s record against Liverpool throughout his career should give Klopp reasons to be cheerful.

    Saturday, May 4: Tottenham (H)

    Opponents’ league position: Fourth
    Last five results vs opponents: DDWWL
    Minimum possible days rest pre-match: Two (if Liverpool are in the Europa League semi-finals)

    This fixture has served up some classics at Anfield in recent seasons and we should be in for another one here. In 2021-22, a 1-1 draw in their fourth-last league match represented the last points Liverpool dropped that season as they ultimately fell one point short of Manchester City’s total in the title race. Tottenham’s counter-attacking style has caused problems in the past, especially through Son Heung-min. Under Ange Postecoglou this season, their system has changed, but their threat in transitional moments will remain dangerous. Tottenham will also have the motivation of trying to qualify for next season’s Champions League.

    Saturday, May 11: Aston Villa (A)

    Opponents’ league position: Fifth
    Last five results vs opponents: WWWDW
    Minimum possible days rest pre-match: Two (if Liverpool are in the Europa League semi-finals)

    Had this fixture come earlier in the season, such as when Arsenal and Manchester City both visited Villa Park in December, it may have felt even more daunting. Villa’s impressive home record from back then has been dented in recent months, but this will not be a straightforward game. Liverpool exploited Villa’s risky offside line to win 3-0 at Anfield in September and if Darwin Nunez can continue his recent scintillating form, they will hope he causes havoc again. This match may be moved to another date on the May 11-12 weekend for live TV coverage.

    Sunday, May 19: Wolverhampton Wanderers (H)

    Opponents’ league position: 11th
    Last five results vs opponents: DWLWW
    Minimum possible days rest pre-match: Seven

    It always seems to be Wolves on the final day, doesn’t it? Backed by the Anfield crowd against a side who will likely have nothing to play for looks to be the ideal match if the title is on the line. Gary O’Neil’s side are not to be overlooked, though, as they have produced a handful of shock results this season and caused Liverpool plenty of problems in September’s reverse fixture before two late goals saw them lose 3-1. They opened the scoring at Anfield on the final day of the 2021-22 Premier League and were not behind in the match until Mohamed Salah’s 84th-minute goal, also suffering a 3-1 defeat.

    Andy Jones


    Mohamed Salah scores against Wolves in 2022 (Alex Livesey/Getty Images)

    Manchester City

    Saturday, April 13: Luton (H)

    Opponents’ league position: 18th
    Last five results vs opponents (oldest first): WDWWW
    Minimum possible days rest pre-match: Three

    This game is the filling of a Champions League quarter-final versus Real Madrid sandwich, so Pep Guardiola is most likely going to rotate his team for this one, adding more jeopardy than initially meets the eye for a title-chasing side’s home match against one of the bottom three. City will be massive favourites and Luton will not be holding out much hope, but the rotated team we’re anticipating will have to do the business as Guardiola tries to juggle the demands of the three competitions, with an FA Cup semi-final against Chelsea coming up a week later, too.


    Could Erling Haaland be rested against Luton? (Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)

    Thursday, April 25: Brighton (A)

    Opponents’ league position: 10th
    Last five results vs opponents: WWWDW
    Minimum possible days rest pre-match: Four

    After commitments in the Champions League followed by their FA Cup semi-final, this fixture — postponed from FA Cup quarter-finals weekend — is rearranged to one of the few available days in City’s crammed calendar. Given Brighton’s recent struggles, this might not be quite as difficult as it once looked, although there is always a clash of styles in terms of Roberto De Zerbi’s man-to-man press, which makes things complicated.

    Sunday, April 28: Nottingham Forest (A)

    Opponents’ league position: 17th
    Last five results vs opponents: WLWDW
    Minimum possible days rest pre-match: Two

    With the Brighton trip just three days earlier and a possible Champions League semi-final first leg three days later (this will be moved to the Saturday if City reach the Champions League semi-finals and play on the Tuesday), this adds a lot of extra spice. A trip to the City Ground is always going to be tough, with Forest in the relegation argument, and it will be a match that Liverpool and Arsenal fans, whose teams will already have played their games this weekend, watch with some degree of hope — especially given that this fixture last season ended in a 1-1 draw. City should have been 5-0 up by the time Forest equalised with their first shot on target in the 84th minute, though.

    Saturday, May 4: Wolves (H)

    Opponents’ league position: 11th
    Last five results vs opponents: WWWWL
    Minimum possible days rest pre-match: Two (if City are in the Champions League semi-finals)

    There are potential Champions League semi-final ties on either side of this one. There is also less margin for error against Wolves, who beat City in September, compared to Luton, so Guardiola will have to be especially careful with any rotation. It is normally something City manage well, but they have had some hairy games at this time of year before when they try to spin plates.

    Saturday, May 11: Fulham (A)

    Opponents’ league position: 13th
    Last five results vs opponents: WWWWW
    Minimum possible days rest pre-match: Two (if City reach the Champions League semi-finals)

    After a potential Champions League semi-final second leg against Arsenal or Bayern in the midweek, this match could be especially tricky, although City do have a great record against Fulham. They dug in for an important 2-1 victory at Craven Cottage late last season, and that kind of performance might be required again given the demands of everything else up until that point. This match may be played on another date on the May 11-12 weekend for live TV coverage.

    Sunday, May 19: West Ham (H)

    Opponents’ league position: Seventh
    Last five results vs opponents: WDWWW
    Minimum possible days rest pre-match: Two (if outstanding games, see below, are rearranged for the previous midweek)

    What we can say almost for sure in all of this is that if City need to get over the line in this final fixture against West Ham, they will do it. They made hard work of it at home against Villa in the corresponding fixture two years ago but if City battle through all of the above — and probably a rearranged game against Spurs in the midweek — and need three points (or, somehow, a draw) to settle things, you would imagine they will be up to it.

    Date to be confirmed: Tottenham (A)

    Opponents’ league position: Fourth
    Last five results vs opponents: LWLDW
    Minimum possible days rest pre-match: TBC

    It is a good job City beat Tottenham in the FA Cup in January — the first time they had not lost and so much as scored a goal at the Londoners’ new ground in six attempts since it opened in April 2019 — as it gives them some confidence that weird hoodoo is over. City played very well on the night too, completely shutting Spurs down.

    This game is yet to be rescheduled given City’s continued fight in two cup competitions, keeping them on for an unprecedented “double treble”. Whenever the authorities manage to fit this fixture in, you would have to say it is the most difficult one City will face in their remaining Premier League games. Even a draw at Tottenham could be enough to derail the title challenge, depending on how things pan out for their two title rivals.

    Sam Lee

    Players nearing 10 yellow cards

    The three clubs will need to be wary of the second deadline for yellow-card accumulation: any player who earns 10 bookings before the completion of their club’s 32nd league match of the season must serve a two-game suspension. The players in danger of a ban are Kai Havertz of Arsenal, Liverpool duo Darwin Nunez and Wataru Endo and Rodri of City, although all are on eight cautions so would need to be sent off for a second yellow in next weekend’s matches to be banned.

    Additional reporting: Thom Harris and Mark Carey

    (Top photos: Getty Images)

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  • The Briefing: Will Haaland’s form cost Man City? Cole Palmer: MVP? Xabi Alonso’s power move

    The Briefing: Will Haaland’s form cost Man City? Cole Palmer: MVP? Xabi Alonso’s power move

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    Welcome to The Briefing, where every Monday during this season The Athletic will discuss three of the biggest questions to arise from the weekend’s football.

    This was the round when Newcastle snatched victory from the clamped-shut jaws of defeat against West Ham, Liverpool went top of the league after an early scare against Brighton, Manchester United went 1-0 up in the 96th minute and still didn’t win and Sheffield United threw away another two-goal lead.

    Off the back of all that and more, we will ask if Erling Haaland is playing poorly at the worst moment for him and his club, if Cole Palmer is the Premier League’s most valuable player and whether Xabi Alonso turning down Liverpool and Bayern Munich to stay at Bayer Leverkusen is the real power move…

    Is Haaland’s bad form at the worst possible time for City?

    There were 84 minutes on the clock of Manchester City 0-0 Arsenal when the ball fell to Erling Haaland at the far post. For a split second, the hopes of the neutral were raised: we’d sat through an hour and a half of turgid rot by then, but at least we might be rewarded with a goal — any goal — for our heroism.

    But Haaland scuffed it. Actually, he barely even scuffed it: he just about missed the thing completely. And the really weird bit, if you watch it closely: it looked like he was trying to square the ball to Ruben Dias, a centre-half, rather than attempting to ram the thing home himself.

    This merciless goalscoring machine, presented with a chance four yards out, tried to pass it to a defender…

    In some respects, it summed up the game neatly. Not just an all-timer of a snoozefest made all the more acute by Liverpool’s more entertaining 2-1 win over Brighton earlier in the day and the 29 goals scored across the eight fixtures on Saturday, but a match devoid of anything approaching quality finishing, just three shots on target combined from the two attacks.

    You could also say Haaland’s blank was a triumph for Arsenal’s central defenders William Saliba and (especially) Gabriel Magalhaes, who kept the big Norwegian quiet for the second time this season; across those two Premier League games, Haaland didn’t manage a single shot on target.

    But perhaps there’s something broader at play. Haaland hasn’t seemed quite right since returning at the end of January from two months out with a foot injury.

    In that time, he’s scored four goals in eight Premier League games — for a normal striker, a healthy return, but for Haaland, it’s well off the pace. He has six goals in other competitions, but they were the five he got in that freak FA Cup win over Luton Town and one in the closing stages of a Champions League stroll against FC Copenhagen. Again, writing off any goal at this level is harsh at best, but it’s also valid and speaks to a concern about his form at a crucial part of the season.

    The deflating thing for the rest of the Premier League about City having Haaland is that, on the occasions when they’re not quite on their game, he can be there to stick a chance away and hoover up those points they might have otherwise missed. Last season, he scored home and away against Arsenal, bursting the balloon of their nascent title challenge ruthlessly. Not this season, though.


    (Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)

    Haaland was similarly ineffective against Liverpool just before the March international break. He scored against Manchester United a week earlier but only after missing a clutch of chances and his celebration was more informed by relief than joy.

    To clarify, this is not to say Haaland is bad now. Nothing like it. Clearly, he’s still if not the best centre-forward in the world, then one of them. There’s every chance he could go on a tear for the rest of the season, score twice a game and lead City to a fourth straight title and successive trebles.

    But at the moment, he doesn’t look himself — and it’s happening at the worst possible time for City.

    Is Palmer the Premier League’s MVP?

    Now is around the time when people start to seriously think about which individual player has been the best in the Premier League this season.

    There are plenty of candidates. Declan Rice and Martin Odegaard at Arsenal. Mohamed Salah and Virgil van Dijk for Liverpool. Rodri and Phil Foden for Manchester City. Ollie Watkins, James Maddison, Lucas Paqueta, Ross Barkley, Bruno Guimaraes… it’s all subjective, everyone will have their choices, none less valid than the rest.

    Who’s the most valuable player in the division, though? That’s a slightly different thing: “best” is self-explanatory, but “most valuable” is more about a player’s importance to their team. Which player would leave the biggest hole if they were removed from their side?

    The answer to that has to be Cole Palmer.

    There are a few ways to measure his importance to Chelsea. Goals and assists are the most basic: he has 13 of the former and eight of the latter, which you don’t need us to tell you are the highest numbers at the club.

    The caveat is that six of his 13 goals have been penalties, but they still need to be scored, and Palmer has been flawless from the spot so far.


    (Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images)

    Another very crude way of looking at it is if you removed his goals from Chelsea’s results. This is flawed, because it assumes that whoever replaced him in this thought experiment contributed absolutely nothing, but take his goals away and they would have 10 fewer points. That would have them on 30 from 30 games: near to relegation form in any other season.

    But beyond these simple statistics, Palmer’s value is that he has given Chelsea something to get excited about in an otherwise chronically bleak season. Even with the penalty against Burnley on Saturday: an audacious, floating Panenka when a more standard penalty would have been fine. It might look like needless showboating, but when there’s been nothing else to stir the passions, that sort of thing becomes important.

    go-deeper

    GO DEEPER

    Panenkas, shootouts and action bias: the best place to aim a penalty

    “We got too comfortable,” Palmer said after the 2-2 home draw with second-bottom Burnley, who had 10 men for 50 of the 90 minutes. “Same story, we kill ourselves every week. It’s got to improve from us as players. We need consistency.”

    Palmer used “we” and “us” there, but he would have been within his rights to separate himself from the rest of the Chelsea team.

    He’s doing his job, and then some. How many other Chelsea players can say anything like that?

    Is staying at Leverkusen the real power move for Alonso?

    We already know what an extraordinary achievement winning the Bundesliga this season will be for Bayer Leverkusen, but here’s another thing to emphasise it: even after their 2-0 home defeat against Borussia Dortmund on Saturday, champions Bayern can reach 81 points, 10 more than they achieved last season in taking their 11th straight title, yet are still likely to finish second by a double-digit margin.

    After the announcement that Xabi Alonso would be staying at Leverkusen beyond this season, his putative suitors have tried as best they can to style it out — he was only ever an option, they are conducting a thorough process, no approaches have been made et cetera — but even if they knew what was coming, the news will have caused consternation at Liverpool, Bayern and whoever else fancied a change this summer.


    (Hesham Elsherif/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

    Alonso’s decision has been mocked by some as ‘wimping out’; taking the easy option of sticking where he is rather than showing ambition. Does effectively turning down Liverpool and Bayern show he doesn’t have the ‘cojones’, that he isn’t confident in his abilities, as has been suggested?

    Well, in short: no. Quite the opposite, in fact.

    Alonso’s stock will, in all likelihood, never be higher than now, amid the afterglow of this minor miracle Leverkusen are performing. He will probably never again have the choice between two giants, both of whom he has an emotional history with.

    But what he’s doing is the true power move: a coach with the self-awareness to say that he needs at least another season of experience after less than two of them in the senior game but with the confidence to think that his reputation will stay high enough in the future to attract a big job the next time one comes up.

    Alonso is doing things on his terms, in his own time. He hasn’t ignored the attention of Liverpool and Bayern because he’s scared of a top job. He’s done so because he isn’t scared that this will be his only chance at one.

    Coming up…

    • Easter. A time when English football has for years come together and absolutely rinsed its players for our viewing pleasure as if they had limitless energy: to whit, today (Monday), there is a full round of EFL fixtures in all three divisions (apart from one game each in Leagues One and Two tomorrow), just like there was on Friday. Things to keep an eye on: the Championship’s extraordinary automatic promotion tussle, with three clubs separated by two points, but we’re also getting to the point where things can be decided. Rotherham United could be relegated from the second tier, likewise Carlisle United from the third.
    • Then there’s a complete round of midweek Premier League games. The Tuesday slate of five isn’t mega-interesting: although it will be interesting to see how West Ham United bounce back from the weekend collapse at St James’ Park when they welcome Tottenham Hotspur, while Nottingham Forest need a win at home against Fulham, Newcastle United host Everton, it’s Bournemouth vs Crystal Palace and Wolves go to Burnley.
    • Wednesday’s group of three has a tiny bit more pep to in its step: the standout is City vs Aston Villa, but there’s also Arsenal against Luton and Brentford vs Brighton & Hove Albion.
    • Then on Thursday, the round is completed by leaders Liverpool hosting last-placed Sheffield United and a theoretical big one, but not really because they’re both a bit rubbish this season: Chelsea vs Manchester United.
    • Finally, in off-pitch fun, Everton should find out the verdict for their second PSR breach of the season, which we can all agree is exactly the sort of thing we got into football for.

    (Top photos: Getty Images)

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  • Dissecting Haaland vs Van Dijk: When the league’s best striker took on its best defender

    Dissecting Haaland vs Van Dijk: When the league’s best striker took on its best defender

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    The best striker in the Premier League versus the best defender in the Premier League in a one-on-one showdown with millions of people watching across the world?

    Liverpool vs Manchester City had far bigger things at stake on Sunday (it finished 1-1 for those of you who live on Mars) but those few seconds when Erling Haaland took on Virgil van Dijk were explosive and exciting. 

    Two masters of their art had almost 3,500 square metres of hallowed Anfield turf to themselves. 

    Haaland thundered towards goal, dancing around the ball with protracted step-overs and feints, desperate to tempt a challenge from the game’s most unflappable centre-half. But the Dutchman resisted, back-tracking towards his own goal, and though he ultimately could not stop Haaland from slipping away and taking on the shot, it was an effort comfortably collected by his goalkeeper.

    Fantastic defending, or a slice of luck? The Athletic breaks it down, with the help of former Premier League strikers and centre-backs.

    The Premier League title race on The Athletic…

    So, the ball breaks, and you’re staring down a single defender, with the freedom of the pitch to work with. What is going through your head?

    “Well, you’re weighing up who you’re up against”, the Premier League’s all-time top goalscorer Alan Shearer tells The Athletic. “If, for argument’s sake, you’re up against a guy who you know is not as quick, then the obvious thing you’re going to do is knock it and run it.”

    “But he knows he isn’t going to do that to Virgil, because the Liverpool defender is one of the few people who can keep up with Haaland — even running backwards.”

    The solution is to unsettle Van Dijk, to throw him off balance with a series of twisting dummies and drives. During a five-second stampede, the Norwegian throws in three body feints, two changes of direction and one devastating burst of pace to finally break away from his defender’s grasp.

    Haaland’s first move is to dart onto his right foot; this is across the defender’s body and away from where Van Dijk is trying to show him, but onto his weaker foot.

    Note Van Dijk’s body shape — side-on and crouched low, able to shift his body weight if required. That stance, according to former Ivory Coast centre-back Sol Bamba, is crucial to the battle.

    “Usually, if I was coaching a young defender, I would not tell them to turn their back to the ball so much. But Van Dijk never loses sight of where Haaland is — he is low on his knees and side-on, which means he is prepared to spring in any direction to follow his run.”

    Seconds later, and Haaland has changed tack once again.

    “What he’s trying to do is go left, go right, go left, go right, and then try to get Virgil off balance to gain control of the duel. But the defender doesn’t dive in, he stands up the whole way,” says Shearer.

    It is a move for which Van Dijk has become renowned during his imperious spell at the heart of Liverpool’s defence, famously warding Tottenham’s Moussa Sissoko onto his left foot during a similar break back in 2019.

    Statistically, that shows through with the ‘true’ tackles metric, which combines tackles won and lost, as well as fouls committed while attempting a tackle, to measure how often a player looks to “stick a foot in”. Over the last five seasons, Van Dijk averages just 2.2 tackle attempts per game, but crucially, his success rate is up at a very high 61 per cent.

    “He never dives in and that’s an art”, says Bamba. “It is so easy to be tempted to go in for the tackle, but if you dive in, someone like Haaland is just going to push the ball past you and beat you.”

    “If it was me, I probably would have committed,” Bamba continues, “Neil Warnock used to say to us, ‘If the ball passes, the striker doesn’t!’.”

    “But it takes real discipline to back off like that. Van Dijk is clever, plays with his head and reads the game really well.”

    The relentless Haaland continues to twist and turn even as the spaces continue to be shut down.

    Having already turned Van Dijk around twice, the striker plants his right foot as if he is about to drag the ball over with his left, but instead ducks to the opposite side and continues onto his stronger foot.

    Here we can see the subtle move in three frames, as Haaland nudges the ball underneath Van Dijk’s trailing boot and powers towards the penalty area.

    The resulting shot, however, is weak, and Shearer puts that down to the defensive pressure.

    “Because he hadn’t had much joy in going left and right, Haaland is thinking, ‘Right, I’m going to run out of time in a minute, so I have to get my shot away pretty quickly’.”

    “In reality, he would have preferred to be another three or four yards closer, so that’s part of Van Dijk doing his job and making the forward’s mind up to take the shot where he has done”

    Having kept close to Haaland all the way through, the defender even manages to lean into the striker just as he is lining up his shot.

    Off balance, forced wide, and with his angles narrowed down, patient defensive play and constant attention to the ball have minimised the probability of the world’s most lethal striker getting a clean shot away, an effort valued at 0.10 expected goals by Opta, essentially suggesting an average player would have a 10 per cent chance of scoring. Not a bad result from an intimidating one-v-one.

    “He makes it so uncomfortable for him,” says Bamba, “He is so close to him for 40 metres, and forces him into a difficult shot.”

    “I would’ve fancied it in my heyday, yeah!” chuckled Shearer, asked if he would have enjoyed such a showdown in a massive game such as this. You can’t begrudge the confidence from a man with 260 Premier League goals.

    But there aren’t many players in world football who can reliably beat Van Dijk in a one-v-one, as his latest titanic tussle showed.

    “He would have believed in himself in that situation, Haaland, but it just didn’t happen”, said Shearer, “and that was more through really, really good defending than it was poor attacking play.”

    Let’s hope we get a re-run again soon.

    (Top photo: Premier League)

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  • Playing out from the back: Why teams do it and is it worth the risk?

    Playing out from the back: Why teams do it and is it worth the risk?

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    Picture the scene: a team has been awarded a goal kick. The goalkeeper throws the ball to one of two central defenders standing nearby in the six-yard box. One of them puts it down to restart and plays it laterally to the ‘keeper, who receives the pass and rests their studs on the ball as opposition players close in…

    That’s just one variation of a way of restarting play that has become extremely common in the last five years, and one that tends to split opinion like it does centre-halves.

    To some it’s a tactically and statistically proven method of starting a high-value sequence of play. To others it’s needlessly risky, a fad that may work for Pep Guardiola in the rarified air of the top end of the Premier League but which invariably fails as you get lower down the leagues.

    Who’s right? Who’s wrong? How did we get here? And what happens next?

    Here — to help answer those questions — is The Athletic’s complete guide to playing out from the back.

    How did we get to this point in football’s evolution?

    Tactical innovations can come from various sources.

    They can arise because of law changes. They can be inspired by individual players interpreting roles in different ways. They can come from revolutionary managers with new ideas. They can emerge because of improvements in the conditions football is played in. And they can grow because football has evolved from being pure recreation to being both big business and a form of entertainment. The history of playing out from the back takes into account all five of these concepts.

    First, law changes have been important. The most important change was the introduction of the back-pass law in 1992, which meant goalkeepers could no longer handle balls deliberately played back to them by defenders. It’s bizarre to watch matches from the pre-1992 era today; it’s almost like a different sport.

    One of the first red cards for a goalkeeper in the Premier League era came when Sheffield United’s Simon Tracey panicked after receiving a back pass at White Hart Lane and ended up running the ball out of play on the touchline, before hauling down the Tottenham player trying to take a quick throw-in.

    This change meant goalkeepers were, for essentially the first time, forced to practice kicking a moving ball. Their improved confidence in possession meant passing the ball out, rather than hammering it downfield, was more viable.

    There was also a key law change in 2019, which meant that goal kicks no longer had to be played outside the box before another player could touch the ball. Opposition players still have to start outside the box, but goal kicks can now be taken short to a team-mate inside the penalty box, essentially giving goalkeepers and defenders a few seconds’ head-start over their opponents. This has enabled them to play out under (slightly) less pressure.

    GO DEEPER

    How the humble goal kick became one of the most important passes in football

    Second, pitch conditions have improved dramatically over the last couple of decades. Go back to an average mid-1990s Premier League pitch, especially in winter, and you would be mad to attempt to pass the ball across your own box. There was a danger the ball would simply get stuck in the mud — or, at least, not run properly to its recipient.


    Stamford Bridge, 2003 (Matthew Ashton/EMPICS via Getty Images)

    These days, players can broadly trust the turf and therefore trust their technique to pass the ball properly.

    Third, the revolutionary goalkeepers tend to be those who push the boundaries in terms of what they’re capable of in possession. Essentially the goalkeeper has become an 11th outfielder. After the back-pass law change, Peter Schmeichel insisted on being involved in ‘outfield’ drills with the rest of the Manchester United players. A future United goalkeeper, Edwin van der Sar, was often credited with being the first ‘modern’ footballing goalkeeper in his days with Ajax. In recent times, the likes of Claudio Bravo and Andre Onana have been recruited by major clubs on the basis of their ability in possession, but have often looked under-equipped in terms of actual shot-stopping.

    Fourth, in terms of managers who have proved particularly influential in terms of playing out from the back, in the Premier League era — and the post-back pass era — things probably start with Mike Walker, manager of Norwich in 1992-93. Walker was, unusually for a manager, a former goalkeeper and recognised the need for ‘keepers to completely adjust their way of playing. In Bryan Gunn, he had a goalkeeper who was particularly adept at using his feet, and Norwich’s free-flowing style worked very well in the new era of football. They were top for a considerable period during the first Premier League season, eventually finishing third.

    Arsene Wenger is often credited with transforming Arsenal’s style of play, although arguably the initial revolution came from his predecessor Bruce Rioch, who put a big emphasis on Arsenal playing the ball out from defence and through midfield, rather than playing it long straight away as they had usually done under George Graham. Goalkeeper David Seaman was another who proved calm in possession and was unusual at this point for being able to use both feet effectively.

    Brendan Rodgers’ Swansea were hugely courageous in possession upon their promotion to the Premier League in 2011, with goalkeeper Michel Vorm recruited for his footballing skills as much as his shot-stopping ability, while the arrival of Guardiola in 2016 was another key moment. He immediately ditched Joe Hart, considered too old-school to adjust, but his first goalkeeper, Claudio Bravo, took an absurd number of risks on the ball, while also looking uncomfortable at the basics of goalkeeping.


    Claudio Bravo was brave in possession but ultimately took too many risks (Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images)

    In recent times, Roberto De Zerbi has also proved something of a game-changer, often asking his goalkeeper to stand still with their studs on top of the ball, almost baiting the opposition to move up and close down, creating more space in midfield for Brighton and Hove Albion to pass into.

    Fifth, supporters are paying serious money for tickets these days, and expect to be presented with something that is aesthetically pleasing. Tastes vary, of course, and too much playing out under pressure can rile some supporters even more than hoofing the ball long. But, as a general rule, modern supporters don’t want route one football.

    They want something more precise and considered. What was once the preserve of Barcelona is now, broadly speaking, the norm for most Premier League clubs — goalkeepers playing short passes to players in and around the edge of the penalty area.

    And, of course, that filters down to every level. Everyone wants to play like the footballers you see on television, but we don’t all have the technical skills to pull off one-twos in our own penalty box, and for the risk-and-reward situation to be in our favour. At almost every level now, you see maddening goals conceded by overplaying in deep positions.

    Sometimes, just thumping the ball long makes most sense. But in 2024, that approach is barely tolerated.

    Michael Cox

    go-deeper

    GO DEEPER

    Premier League goalkeepers keep passing straight to the opposition – what’s going on?

    How do you teach (and convince) players to do it?

    “That rule change has influenced tactics more than any coach or manager could. And, as the stats will prove, it led to a big spike in teams playing short from goal kicks. It’s almost a little bit embarrassing if you don’t. It’s a real message that you don’t want the ball – and I think that exposes teams.”

    An experienced coach at a Premier League club is talking about the 2019 goal kick law, which gave teams a “free” pass, essentially.

    Speaking on condition of anonymity so that he can talk openly about his own experiences, the coach recalls a presentation that he put together for a group of players a few years ago (prior to the law change) showing multiple examples of what he describes as “really good teams” punting the ball forward from goal kicks.

    Manchester United, at a time when David de Gea was in goal and Romelu Lukaku was up front, were one of those teams.

    “And I said, ‘In that moment, no matter who you are, you could have the best striker and goalkeeper in the world, and the best midfielder in the world, that is a 50-50 ball. If we’re saying we really want to dominate the ball, we cannot kick it long and just hope for a 50-50. That’s not valuing possession.’

    “So if you’re asking me why we’re doing it, it’s because we want the ball.”


    David de Gea was more comfortable hitting the ball long (Michael Regan/Getty Images)

    Risk and reward is the phrase you will hear a lot on this subject — and for some coaches (and a lot of fans) the risk is too great. Lose the ball in the first phase of build-up and the consequences can be calamitous. Beat the press, however, and the pitch totally opens up.

    That is easier said than done. Playing out from the back requires bravery on the ball and a high level of technical ability too.

    Or does it?

    “I saw some pretty average players… the execution of what we’re asking a player to do here is very simple,” the Premier League coach adds. “We’re talking about a 10-yard pass, or we’re talking about control and a 15- to 20-yard pass, maybe a one-touch pass. But we’re not talking about something the player can’t do. We’re talking about, does he have the decision-making capacity to make the right choice at that moment?

    “Decision making — I think that’s where the good coaching does come in, to really be clear and make it simple and effective for them, and make them believe it.”

    Graham Potter’s time in charge at Brighton provides a good case study. His appointment in 2019 is worth revisiting, not least because he took over a group of players who had previously been coached to play a totally different way under Chris Hughton.

    Speaking at the 2020 OptaPro Analytics Forum, Tom Worville, who was working as a football writer for The Athletic at the time, pointed to a graph showing how Brighton had taken 75.8 percent of goal kicks short under Potter compared to 6.4 percent under Hughton. Even allowing for the fact that it was the same season that the new goal-kick rule was introduced, the shift was huge.

    “I know Brighton were used to it (playing out from the back) in a certain era under Gus (Poyet),” says Dale Stephens, who played for Brighton under Hughton and Potter. “But we’d not seen it for a few years, so it’s almost like re-educating the players and the crowd.”

    Potter was an excellent teacher in that respect. A hands-on coach, he married practical work with the theory and, perhaps more than anything, had total conviction in his beliefs. Naturally, that rubbed off on his players.


    Potter was keen for his Brighton side to play out from the back (Bryn Lennon/Getty Images)

    “He convinced the lads from when he first came in,” Stephens says. “We had a great start and that just builds confidence with the evidence of what you can see on the pitch that it’s working. So the message from the manager and the confidence from him repeating that message day in and day out… because it’s not just something that you can do ad hoc.

    “I’ve been in teams that try to do it (play out from the back) because it’s ‘the thing to do’. That never works. There has got to be an idea and a process as to why you’re doing it, and why you’re going to try to do this to get into a better attacking position.”

    That idea, or process, will usually involve trying to move up the pitch by creating — and exploiting — a numerical advantage.

    Some managers have choreographed moves to play out — passages of play that are rehearsed over and again on the training ground.

    Others work more on principles around finding “the free man”, including rotation — the use of inverted full-backs is an example — and third-man movements.

    Much, however, depends on the opposition press. At times, the onus is on the team in possession to provoke pressure, whether that be through a bounce pass (a straight one-two), the use of the sole of the foot as bait, or dribbling towards an opponent to commit them.

    go-deeper

    GO DEEPER

    How the sole of the foot sparked a tactical revolution in football

    Last season there was a fascinating interview on Sky Sports when Jamie Redknapp, the television pundit and former England international, showed Lewis Dunk a superb passage of Brighton build-up play after a game.

    Smiling as he watched the footage, Dunk told Redknapp that he hadn’t made the pass that he was supposed to do in that scenario — a comment that said a lot about De Zerbi’s meticulous approach on the training ground and the extent to which principles, or phases of play, become ingrained.

    “Graham didn’t necessarily have patterns in terms of, ‘This is the pattern we’re going to try this weekend,’” Stephens explains. “(Instead), he almost gives you alternative solutions. So it is off their (the opposition) pressure: how many players are coming to press your centre-backs? Are they coming right to the box? Are they not pressing? Are they really aggressive on the full-backs?

    “Brighton (under De Zerbi) will let the centre-half take the goal kick, pass to the goalkeeper and he will roll his sole on top of the ball, and when he’s doing that he’s looking to see who is coming to press him.

    “So it’s not necessarily manufactured patterns. It’s multiple solutions for wherever the press comes from, and what’s happening behind that first line of pressure.”

    That could easily end up being a much longer pass from the player whose role has changed more than any other over the last 30 years or so.

    “The goalkeeper is in charge of everything now,” Stephens says. “I think we’ve seen it at Brighton with Jason Steele. He’s pumped the ball 60 to 70 yards and they’ve created the attacking transition that way because they’ve (the opponent) gone real high pressure and he’s just gone over the top of them.”


    Ederson almost getting caught in possession on his goal line against Liverpool in 2022 (Martin Rickett/PA Images via Getty Images)

    Guardiola, whose influence on this whole way of playing is impossible to overstate, has often talked about the importance of players moving up the pitch together in build up.

    The Manchester City manager is “a big fan of short passes”, overloading spaces, in particular in central areas, and players staying connected, rather than big distances opening up between them or between the lines — a strategy that also makes it easier to regain possession.

    An EFL coach, who has been wedded to playing out from the back across several divisions and different clubs, touches on that theme when he discusses how “our trigger to move is when the opposition releases to the ball carrier” and why it is important not to “miss” players during the build up.

    “So if I switch from right to left (in one pass) against a structured press, that team will be able to shuffle by the time the ball travels that distance,” the coach, who asked to remain anonymous, says. “But obviously the more ball speed you have, and the shorter the passes, the harder it is for that team to have a specific trigger.

    “So you’re constantly getting people to jump and as they jump — provided you’re passing at the right speed — their jump will be too late because I’ve never seen a player that can run faster than a ball can move. And then you’ll find that spare man, that left-back, without them having the structure to be able to slide and press.”

    Potter, Stephens says, was “huge on playing in tight spaces”.

    The idea behind that was to draw as many opposition players towards the ball as possible and leave room in behind to exploit, opening up what Stephens describes as “a four-v-four in half a pitch, which is a lot of space, especially if you’ve got dynamic, quick players in wide areas”.

    A goal that Swansea scored against Manchester City in an FA Cup quarter-final in 2019, during Potter’s time in charge at the Championship club, provides a good example of both his philosophy and what another coach describes as the “attract to take advantage” premise.

    This goal that Pascal Gross scored for Brighton under Potter at Old Trafford in 2022 talks to the same point — a great example of the philosophy working as it is designed to.

    Stuart James

    Mitigating risk and the importance of convincing fans

    There are examples of a very different kind, where the ball gets turned over close to goal, a team concedes and supporters despair.

    So, tactically, how do coaches mitigate risk when playing out from the back and what can they do to prepare players for all the external factors — crowd reaction in particular — that impact on the team’s ability to execute what they’ve practised?

    The EFL coach who spoke earlier offers an interesting response to those two questions.

    “This is the hardest thing — replicating the chaos of match-day on the training pitch. And the chaos of match-day includes fan noise and fan pressure, the weight of expectation — you have to manage all of that,” he explains.

    “But, for me, it’s just practice, repetition and recruitment. Recruitment is key, and if you’ve got a clear ideology of how you want to play the game, then it is absolutely vital that you recruit to that ideology.

    “As for the risk mitigation, initially that comes from having the ‘plus one’ (a free man), so we’ve still got the numerical advantage — I think that’s really important.

    “We try to stay compact centrally as much as we can, and the movement wide to disrupt and stretch the opposition always comes on the ball side. So once we manipulate one side of the pitch, we can be stretched that side but, as best we can, the opposite side is in a structured position inside the pitch, ready for transitions.

    “Also, we’ve worked really hard on counter-pressing, just avoiding disappointment, no negative body language, just a fast reaction to swarm the ball. It’s the acceptance of it going wrong, because that instant fast reaction can almost make it right straight away.”

    All of which makes you wonder how footballers feel about playing this way.

    On the face of it, being encouraged to pass to a team-mate and retain possession should be a lot more enjoyable than chasing second balls off a 70-yard hit-and-hope punt.

    That said, with so little margin for error in the first phase of build-up in particular, and a collective groan often the soundtrack to any misplaced pass in that area of the pitch (let alone the prospect of your team then conceding), it must also be stressful trying to play out at times.

    “I loved it,” Stephens, the former Brighton midfielder, says. “I just felt we had more control over what we were trying to do rather than percentage balls.


    Dale Stephens experienced a tactical revolution in his time at Brighton (Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)

    “But it wasn’t really necessarily just possession that we wanted. It was more: can you attack quickly from small spaces to big spaces? And that was Graham’s consistent message.

    “Even from throw-ins he’d try to get bodies around the throw-in, so that the opposition would go man for man, and the space would be on the other side of the pitch, and from there you can attack big space.

    “It opened my eyes. I was 30 years old and had been playing since I was 17 but I’d never really done it. I was learning so much from Graham and the way he saw football.”

    Football is always evolving, though, and a lot has changed since Potter took over at Brighton. The Premier League coach who spoke earlier says that, generally, clubs are much bolder and more aggressive in how they press now — and the quality of the opponent is almost unimportant.

    He cites Manchester City as an example and says there was a time when opponents thought, ‘Drop off. Don’t go near City in the build up, they’re too good, they’re going to kill you, they’ll rip you apart.’

    “But now you look at a lot of teams and they’ll go and press City when Ederson has got the ball,” he adds.

    In fact, in a scenario that would have been unthinkable years ago, teams are now quite happy to press high and leave themselves man-for-man (three-versus-three) on the halfway line.

    The coach smiles. “And this is where the game is going and why this is such an interesting topic, because the whole benefit of playing out was that it was all about generating the free man. And that was generated pretty easily because you obviously had your goalkeeper plus one other player, and your front three would pin back four players.

    “Basically, you know you have got seven players versus their six, plus your goalkeeper, so eight-v-six. That eight just need to get the ball… in my head, build-up is getting the ball over the halfway line successfully. If you’ve done that, you’re out of the build-up phase.

    “Let’s say their six were pressing your seven — forget the ‘keeper for now; now it’s their seven pressing your seven, so the only free man is the goalkeeper.”

    Interestingly, what shines through more than anything when talking to coaches on this subject is that the people they worry least about buying into the merits of playing out from the back are the players.

    “I think players who have come through the academy system from the 2010 era onwards all understand it,” adds the Premier League coach. “The hardest bit, I think, is convincing the fans. If they’re not on board, the whole thing can quickly fall apart.”

    Stuart James


    Onana was bought by Manchester United for his on-ball qualities (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)

    Quantifying how it works in the Premier League and beyond

    Build-up play is booming these days. That’s as true in London and Liverpool as it is in Las Palmas or Los Angeles. The trend is especially striking in the English Championship, not long ago a bastion of the old long-ball game, now a proving ground for an international talent pool, technically gifted academy graduates and a new generation of coaches schooled in Pep-ish positional play.

    But is this fad for futzing around at the back really a good idea? As with most football tactics, that depends on who’s doing it, how and why.

    One interesting thing about the Premier League’s playing-out craze is that it’s not restricted to the elite. Over the last six years, the top five teams on the league table have stayed fairly steady in their number of build-ups per game (where a build-up is defined as a possession that includes at least three passes ending in a team’s own third). Meanwhile, the bottom half of the table, once all too happy to hit and hope, are building out about 50 per cent more often than in 2018-19, daring to dream of more watchable football.

    But the steepest increase has come from the upper-middle class, teams five through 10 on the table, who are doing twice as many build-ups per game as they did just six years ago. This season, for the first time, the second tier has actually overtaken the first, averaging more build-ups per game than the top five clubs.

    What’s going on here? One part of the answer is that, when it comes to playing out of the back, it takes two to tango. Opponents often feel safer falling back into a compact mid-block while Manchester City or Liverpool walk the ball up to midfield, bypassing the build-up phase. When Manchester United or Chelsea start passing the ball around the back, though, they’re more likely to draw pressure.

    De Zerbi’s Brighton fall right in the sweet spot for maximum build-up play: they want to be pressed high and opponents are happy to oblige them, since both sides figure the reward of playing the game in Brighton’s half will outweigh their risk. Although Manchester City have more overall possession, Brighton do more build-ups than any team in the Premier League.

    But not all build-ups share the same purpose. For Brighton, who want to break from small spaces into big ones, passing around their own half is an attacking tactic. All that press-baiting sole-on-the-ball stuff? The point is to find a short pass into the space behind the first presser, then lay the ball off to a nearby “third man” who’s facing forward so that Brighton can move briskly through the lines.

    City, on the other hand, don’t mind taking it slow. Even when they build out of the back, City tend to do it with side-to-side circulation designed to push the defensive lines back rather than pry them apart. This serves a defensive purpose, since passing the ball through pressure in your own half is dangerous, but also an attacking one, as it allows City to move all of their players into the other team’s end and keep the game trapped there.

    We can see the stylistic difference by mapping where teams take their touches during build-up possessions. In the graphic below, Brighton’s bright red press-baiting blob in the middle of their own half means they take a lot more build-up touches there than the rest of the league, while City’s red wedge at the other end suggests that even on possessions that start with a few passes in their own third, the goal is to set up a good rest-defence structure and play patiently in the attacking half.

    You can see hints of other build-up styles here, too.

    Although Liverpool don’t play out of the back that much, when they do they split the difference between City and Brighton, spreading the ball safely across the width of their half before looking to attack quickly with long passes.

    With Oleksandr Zinchenko or Takehiro Tomiyasu tucked inside, Arsenal rarely use their left flank in the build-up. They build through the middle but take their time when the ball reaches the wings, where their possessions lean slightly toward Martin Odegaard and Bukayo Saka on the right.

    Some talented teams such as Aston Villa, Newcastle and Chelsea are willing to court danger by playing in areas out wide of their own box, where any opponent who wants to press them will have to open large spaces between the lines. Other, perhaps less talented teams such as Brentford and Wolves get stuck out there on the flanks and rarely make it to the final third at all.

    Burnley are an especially interesting case. Last season their build-up dominance made them look like the Manchester City of the Championship. But instead of moderating the team’s style when they reached the Premier League, Vincent Kompany has stuck to his principles, resulting in the rare relegation candidate that keep trying to pass their way out of the back even when the results are disastrous.

    Which brings us back to the most important part of a good build-up: the players.

    It may not look that hard to make a few practised movements and string together some short passes, but doing it at the speed the Premier League demands, against increasingly sophisticated pressing schemes, takes technical and decision-making abilities that can’t be easily coached. A manager may influence the frequency and style of a team’s build-up play but outcomes still depend largely on the players.

    The chart below compares the number of passes a team makes in its own third per game against the average expected goal difference in the next 30 seconds after each pass. Brighton do the most passing at the back, of course, but all those dicey combinations in front of their box are nearly as likely to lead to conceding a goal in the near future as to scoring one. It’s the same story for Tottenham, who are playing out of the back a lot more under Ange Postecoglou but also committing more costly mistakes.

    In general, the teams that see the best results from their build-ups either have a lot of talent or don’t take a lot of risks. That’s old news. The question the current craze for playing out of the back poses is whether teams have been taking enough risk. Just how much can skill in possession be taught in order to nudge a squad’s probabilities in the right direction? Can improvements in the build-up phase outpace innovation in the press?

    Nobody really knows how far football tactics can stretch one way before they’re pulled back in another, but the answers are just a short goalkeeper pass away.

    John Muller

    (Photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)

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    The New York Times

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  • Why Manchester City are being sued by Superdry

    Why Manchester City are being sued by Superdry

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    Manchester City’s players wore modified training gear for their pre-match warm-up on Sunday following a High Court trademark infringement claim from fashion brand Superdry.

    It emerged last week that City are being sued for damages over the use of the words Super Dry — a type of beer sold by one of their main sponsors, Asahi — on their training kit.

    Some immediate implications have become apparent: up until Wednesday, January 3, the day Superdry’s claim was first reported by Law360, City’s players have worn bibs, sweatshirts and coats that bear the words ‘Asahi Super “Dry”’ in training and before matches.

    Since the middle of last week, however, and including for the warm-up before their FA Cup match with Huddersfield Town on Sunday, the players’ clothing has been changed to ‘Asahi 0.0%’.


    City wore training tops without the ‘Super “Dry”’ branding at the weekend (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)

    But with Superdry, the UK-based clothing brand, also seeking an injunction and financial damages, and even the option to ‘destroy’ City’s ‘Super “Dry”’-branded training gear, there will be more developments to come.

    Here, The Athletic explains what we know so far and what could come next.

    What does Superdry want and why?

    Superdry alleged City “benefit unfairly” from “riding on the coattails of… well-known Superdry registrations” and argues its own brand could be “tarnished” by poor quality clothing items sold by City.

    It also claims there is potential for its brand to be affected by “negative perceptions or preconceptions of Manchester City Football Club in the minds of e.g. supporters of rival football clubs” and says the club’s use of Super “Dry” branding could do “damage to the reputation of Superdry”.

    Superdry submitted that “the appearance of the (training) kit is liable to deceive a substantial number of members of the UK public into believing that the (training) kit is clothing designed or sold by (Superdry)”.

    As a result, the brand is seeking financial reparations from City. It is “presently unable to quantify the exact financial value of this claim”, according to the court documents, but intends those damages to “include… any unfair profits made by the infringer by reason of the infringement”.

    The value of City’s training kit sponsorship with Asahi was not made available publicly, although it was reported the club’s previous partner, OKX, paid $20million (£18.5m) for the 2022-23 season and therefore speculated that the new agreement would fall in a similar bracket.


    City’s players wearing the Super “Dry” training gear at the end of December (Alex Livesey/Getty Images)

    Superdry claims City have “profited very substantially” from the sponsorship deal related to the branding on the training kit and that they have “engaged in… infringing activities knowingly and/or with reasonable grounds for knowing that Superdry was a well-known clothing brand” that had not given its permission.

    In November 2023, Asahi won an award from marketing agency The Drum for a campaign which set out, according to an article on The Drum’s website, to “elevate the status of the training kit and instil it with the same level of pride and symbolism as the first kit and away kit”.

    Following acceptance of the award, Asahi said the campaign — which featured Kevin De Bruyne and John Stones, among others — was City’s most-engaged-with piece of sponsorship content of the season up until that point, achieving 19.87million views and 428,000 interactions across social media.

    Superdry also asked the court to stop City from using or selling any items emblazoned with the phrase ‘Super “Dry”’ and for the club to transfer to the company all such items, or to “destroy or modify” them.

    What else is in the court documents?

    In documents submitted on December 15 — and seen by The Athletic — Superdry sets out to highlight its popularity as a brand, highlighting its 98 UK stores, several well-followed social media pages and awards won, as well as listing celebrities such as David Beckham, Neymar Jr and Kylie Jenner to have worn its clothing.

    It also cited collaborations with rock bands Metallica, the Sex Pistols, Iron Maiden and Motley Crue.

    City players Julian Alvarez, Jack Grealish, Erling Haaland, Kyle Walker and Oscar Bobb are also shown wearing training gear emblazoned with Asahi’s ‘Super “Dry”’ branding, specifically ‘Super “Dry” Asahi 0.0%’.

    Superdry argues some of the photos demonstrate that not all of that wording will always be visible due to “various factors such as the viewing angle and the physical posture of the wearer”. One of the photos does show Haaland inadvertently covering much of the “Asahi” logo on his training shirt.

    The brand also provides examples of its own clothing where the words ‘Super’ and ‘Dry’ are stacked on top of each other, as was the case on City’s Asahi clothing.

    City already appear to have made changes to their training gear. Last Wednesday, the club posted a picture of women’s team striker Khadija Shaw in training wearing a half-zip bearing the words “Asahi 0.0%”. On Thursday, there were further images of the male players wearing clothing with the same branding.

    The last time the ‘Super “Dry”’-branded items were publicly visible was during the Premier League match against Sheffield United on December 30.

    City have not commented and it is not clear when they were made aware of the claim against them.

    What are the implications for City?

    City announced in July that beer brand Asahi Super “Dry” would feature on both the men’s and women’s training gear throughout 2023-24.

    In a statement at the time, they said: “Since the start of the partnership, the Asahi Super Dry brand has been integrated across a number of different areas, including the rebrand of the Asahi Super Dry Tunnel Club and wider installation of cutting-edge technology throughout the Etihad Stadium to provide City fans with the unique Japanese super dry taste.”

    This claim relates only to training apparel rather than City’s tunnel club hospitality offering.

    Although the Super “Dry” brand itself belongs to Asahi — and is trademarked in relation to beer advertising rather than clothing — City find themselves in the middle of the claim because they own and were selling the product bearing the disputed wording.

    There is no set date for any further court hearings and it is unknown when there will be a resolution.

    Superdry, Asahi and Manchester City all declined to comment.

    go-deeper

    GO DEEPER

    Blingy, binky and beside the point: How football mouth guards became fashion statements

    (Top photos: Getty Images)

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  • Champions League draw analysis: City thrilled, Barca-Napoli dream tie and predictions

    Champions League draw analysis: City thrilled, Barca-Napoli dream tie and predictions

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    The draw for the last 16 of the Champions League was made in UEFA’s Nyon headquarters this morning and Europe’s big guns will have largely liked the outcome.

    England’s two remaining representatives, Arsenal and Manchester City, were handed kind draws in Porto and Copenhagen, while Real Madrid were paired with RB Leipzig.

    Of the more established big guns, Barcelona face arguably the toughest task, having been paired with last season’s Italian champions Napoli.

    Here, our experts cast their eye over the draw and what could happen next.

    Which game are you most excited about?

    Oliver Kay: Napoli vs Barcelona. Both clubs are experiencing hangovers from last season’s title success, but what better than a tie like that to get them going? In terms of individual talent, tactical intrigue and the atmosphere expected in Naples in particular, this tie sticks out. Second choice: Paris Saint-Germain vs Real Sociedad.

    James Horncastle: Maurizio Sarri will be disappointed. The Lazio manager wanted the chance to coach at the Camp Nou. Nevertheless, Lazio vs Bayern Munich sees him face Thomas Tuchel, pitting a couple of cantankerous ex-Chelsea coaches against each other in the ‘Miroslav Klose-ico’. Inter Milan vs Atletico Madrid is also Simone Inzaghi vs ex-Interista Diego Simeone and looks delicately poised, particularly because last year’s finalists face one of the better vintages of Simeone’s Atleti.

    Laia Cervello Herrero: Barcelona vs Napoli. It could be an interesting match, especially given how Xavi’s team are faring. They are unpredictable and that makes the match more attractive. It will also be the first time in three years that we will see Barca in the knockout stage of the Champions League.


    Victor Osimhen and Giacomo Raspadori pose a threat to Barcelona (Francesco Pecoraro/Getty Images)

    Liam Tharme: PSG vs Real Sociedad. Two teams that will go toe-to-toe, playing out and pressing. Don’t expect this to be a typically cagey knockout game. PSG just about squeezed through their group — even if Group F was the hardest of the lot — and will need a statement performance. They have looked vulnerable when pressed high and La Real will certainly do that.

    Sebastian Stafford-Bloor: Peter Bosz against Borussia Dortmund. Now flying at PSV Eindhoven, Bosz lasted half a season at the Westfalenstadion in 2017 and the way his Dortmund side fell apart still impacts how he’s viewed. Bosz is a punchline to some and he will be thrilled to take his brilliant PSV side (16 wins from 16 in the Eredivisie) to Germany. Fascinating — and that’s without even considering the questions surrounding Edin Terzic’s future.

    go-deeper

    Key dates

    Round of 16: February 13/14/20/21 and March 5/6/12/13
    Quarter-finals: April 9/10 and 16/17
    Semi-finals: April 30/May 1 and May 7/8
    Final (Wembley): June 1

    Who will be happiest with the draw?

    Oliver Kay: Manchester City. No disrespect to Copenhagen, but that is the opponent all the group winners wanted. The Danish team were a real surprise package in the group stage, but they will find City a rather tougher proposition than their neighbours.

    go-deeper

    James Horncastle: City, as usual. I look forward to Stefan Ortega, Micah Hamilton, Oscar Bobb and Mahamadou Susoho helping the treble winners reach the quarter-finals. Serie A leads this season’s UEFA co-efficient sweepstakes and, alongside Ligue 1, still has a full contingent of teams across UEFA’s three competitions. The draws look tough for Italy’s representatives but in the Champions League, Barcelona are not what they used to be and Inter got the ‘right’ team from Madrid, too.

    Laia Cervello Herrero: City, without a doubt. They’ve been drawn with the lowest-ranked opponents and they still have the tag of reigning Champions League winners. They can already see themselves in the quarter-finals.

    Liam Tharme: Presumably City, even if they did draw in Copenhagen in the group stages last season. They have missed the big hitters and get the bonus of a chance to eliminate the team that went through in place of their city rivals — not that they needed to justify which of the Manchester teams is faring better.


    Manchester City were held in Copenhagen last year (Dan Mullan/Getty Images)

    Sebastian Stafford-Bloor: Bayern Munich. Tuchel will probably have two or three new players to weave into his first team at the end of the transfer window and this tie, against Sarri’s underwhelming Lazio, should offer a chance to grow into the latter stages of the tournament. Bayern’s worst-case scenario would have been a fast-paced, vertical opponent, and Lazio certainly aren’t that.

    Which ‘giant’ could be in the most trouble?

    Oliver Kay: Barcelona, although I would still put them as slight favourites to overcome Napoli. It’s a funny season. None of the heavyweights are performing particularly well, so it’s possible to imagine any one of Barcelona, Bayern or Real Madrid coming unstuck — plus PSG, whom I’m not going to categorise as giants.

    James Horncastle: The underwhelming Barcelona. Will Xavi still be in charge come February? Robert Lewandowski seems a shadow of himself. Of course, a lot can change in two months. But a Spalletti-less Napoli still has enough skill to win the ‘Maradona derby’.

    go-deeper

    Laia Cervello Herrero: Real Sociedad have shown a great level in La Liga and the Champions League and they have a chance against PSG, who are not having the best season.

    Liam Tharme: PSG, for all the reasons I mentioned above. Luis Enrique was brought in as a project coach — which is reflected in their summer signings, more youth and less galactico-y — but PSG have gone out in the last 16 in the past two seasons (though to bigger European clubs, in Bayern Munich and Manchester City). If they lose to Real Sociedad, it will probably be down to tactics.


    Luis Enrique is under pressure at PSG (Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images)

    Sebastian Stafford-Bloor: The draw didn’t create too much jeopardy, but it’s probably Barcelona. Napoli are not what they were under Spalletti, but Xavi’s Barca have so little life in them — and so few goals. You can imagine them losing in Naples.

    Your predicted quarter-finalists

    Oliver Kay: Arsenal, Barcelona, PSG, Atletico, Dortmund, Bayern, City and Real Madrid.

    James Horncastle: Arsenal, Napoli, Real Sociedad, Inter, Dortmund, Bayern, City and Real Madrid.

    Laia Cervello Herrero: Arsenal, Barcelona, PSG, Atletico, Dortmund, Bayern, Manchester City and Real Madrid.

    Liam Tharme: Arsenal, Napoli, Real Sociedad, Inter, Dortmund, Bayern, City and Real Madrid.

    Sebastian Stafford-Bloor: Arsenal, Napoli, PSG, Inter, PSV, Bayern, City and Real Madrid.

    What would be your dream final from these teams?

    Oliver Kay: I’m not going to say an all-English final (too parochial) and I’m not going to say one English club and not the other. From a neutral perspective, in terms of what the clubs stand for, I like the idea of Real Sociedad vs Borussia Dortmund, but that’s not going to happen, is it?

    James Horncastle: Copenhagen against Real Sociedad. You asked for a dream final and this is the wildest fever dream. Jokes aside, I would like to see an outsider make it to Wembley on the 20th anniversary of Porto’s victory in Gelsenkirchen.

    Laia Cervello Herrero: Barcelona vs Manchester City. Although it is unlikely and it would be painful for the Catalans, I would like to see a final between Pep Guardiola and Barca.

    Liam Tharme: I would love to see Inter get to the final again, so wouldn’t be against a repeat of last season’s final, or perhaps against Arsenal, for another clash of styles.

    Sebastian Stafford-Bloor: City against Real Madrid. They bring out the best in each other; something always happens to make those games a spectacle. Adding Jude Bellingham seems unlikely to make it any less so, but the broader sub-plots are just so compelling. The contrasting historical and evolutionary dynamics have really made this into an absorbing rivalry between a symbol of the game’s past and a vision of its future.


    Jude Bellingham will be targeting Champions League glory (Angel Martinez/Getty Images)

    How will Arsenal view the draw?

    Arsenal will feel slightly at ease by drawing Porto for the round of 16, but should not be lulled into a false sense of security.

    They have missed most of the big names in the draw, including PSG, Inter and Napoli, but Porto are doing well in Liga Portugal. They have an identical record to Sporting Lisbon, with both clubs two points off league leaders Benfica and a game in hand against each other tonight (Monday). Last season, Arsenal drew Sporting in the Europa League round of 16, which was seen as a favourable draw, but the Portuguese side advanced via a penalty shootout.

    Even so, Arsenal have looked exceptional in this year’s Champions League and should be strong enough to progress. They had the best goal difference (+12) of any team in this year’s group stage and have looked more free-flowing in Europe than the Premier League.

    Mikel Arteta has not rotated his side as much as he did in the Europa League last term. A consistent team, mixed with the fact that European defences do not defend as deep or tightly as English ones, has allowed his attacking players to flourish on Champions League nights. These encounters should lift Arsenal’s confidence before they kick on into the business end of the season.

    And there is an intriguing sub-plot, as well: a reunion for Fabio Vieira with his boyhood club, the midfielder having signed from Porto in the summer of 2022.

    Art de Roche


    Fabio Vieira will return to his old club Porto (Glynn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images)

    How will Manchester City view the draw?

    It will be a great trip to a lovely city for the fans (albeit a bit pricey) and City should win.

    They only played each other last season and the game at Parken was a goalless shocker, but only after City had back-up left-back Sergio Gomez sent off in the first half.

    City have got their problems but we have seen time and time again, not just with this club but many others (often Real Madrid), that issues in December often count for very little by the time the last 16 rolls around in February.

    And even if City are still struggling with silly mistakes (which is basically what is costing them) there should still be a big enough margin for error given how strong they are compared to Copenhagen.

    Inter and PSG could have caused a bigger headache and, while you can never say never in football, City can be very pleased with this draw.

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    Sam Lee

    How will Real Madrid view the draw?

    They avoided Kylian Mbappe’s PSG, Inter and Lazio, but Real Madrid won’t consider Leipzig comfortable opponents. Far from it.

    Last season, Leipzig beat Madrid 3-2 in the Champions League group stage — a defeat that will not have been forgotten. And even though Leipzig have seen important players move on since, including Josko Gvardiol, Dominik Szoboszlai and Christopher Nkunku, they are doing well this season; third in the Bundesliga behind Bayer Leverkusen and Bayern Munich, comfortable runners-up behind Manchester City in Group G.

    That is why Carlo Ancelotti’s Real should not be overconfident — although, as always in European matches, they start as favourites. Even more so when bearing in mind that the second leg is at the Santiago Bernabeu, where the atmosphere always helps.

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    Guillermo Rai

    How will Barcelona view the draw?

    With Barcelona seven points behind Real Madrid in La Liga and with Girona still to play Alaves this evening, the Champions League is a huge deal.

    Falling short on domestic expectations means Xavi has to deliver in Europe — and returning some self-esteem to a club that last played in the knockout stages in 2021 would greatly help overcome the trauma of recent European failures.

    The draw could have been better, but it could have been way worse — especially with PSG in the mix.

    Barca and Napoli have met twice in knockout ties over the past four years. In February 2022, Xavi helped Barca past the Italians in the Europa League intermediate stage in his first season in charge. In 2020, Barca beat them over two legs in the Champions League last 16.

    This term, Napoli have struggled to match their dominating form of last season. Barca are struggling under Xavi, too, but this match-up will at least mean they can have realistic hopes of reaching the quarter-finals — which would also provide a huge financial relief.

    Pol Ballus

    (Top photo: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images)

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  • What our writers think of Haaland's reaction to Simon Hooper

    What our writers think of Haaland's reaction to Simon Hooper

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    It’s the photo that has defined the weekend’s Premier League action — and caused debate across the world.

    Erling Haaland reacted wildly to referee Simon Hooper’s decision not to play an advantage in the final moments of Manchester City’s 3-3 draw with Tottenham Hotspur on Sunday. Haaland was fouled in the City half but Hooper initially appeared to indicate an advantage as Haaland released the ball, only to pull play back with Jack Grealish clear through on goal.

    Haaland — and other City players — remonstrated with Hooper on the pitch. The striker also reposted a clip of the incident on Twitter commenting “Wtf”.

    City have also now been charged by the Football Association for how their players surrounded Hooper, with the FA alleging that “the club failed to ensure their players do not behave in a way that is improper.”

    There has been a lot of debate about refereeing in England over the last few weeks, especially after Mikel Arteta’s reaction to Anthony Gordon’s goal being allowed at Newcastle in the middle of last month.

    Here, The Athletic’s experts give their thoughts on the photo — and Haaland’s reaction.

    It’s a horrible picture. I understand the frustration, but when it boils over like that — yelling in a referee’s face, shouting “F*** off” — it is unacceptable and inexcusable. We can all explain the frustration easily enough, because it was clear Simon Hooper should have played the advantage, but you cannot possibly excuse a referee being hounded in that way.

    Nor can the FA allow it to go unpunished. Like when Manchester United’s players hounded Andy D’Urso in 2000, like when Gianluigi Buffon screamed at Michael Oliver in 2018, like when Jurgen Klopp yelled in the face of fourth official John Brooks this year, the game needs to send out a strong message that this kind of behaviour cannot be tolerated.

    It was one of those decisions that would drive you mad. But players have to learn that if they confront the referee like Haaland did — and like Kyle Walker, Bernardo Silva and most of the other Manchester City players didn’t — they will be punished.

    And, quite apart from missing a game through suspension, I would love to see abusive players and managers being required to referee a grassroots game as part of their sanction. It might teach them it’s not as easy as they think.

    Oliver Kay


    (Neal Simpson/EMPICS via Getty Images)

    Once upon a time, I did some Sunday league refereeing.

    The general sense I had, particularly at frantic moments in games, was that you could forgive many things during the first three to five seconds of instinctive exasperation, particularly when you as a referee know you’ve made a mistake.

    But beyond that, players and coaches should be able to retrieve a sense of perspective. So the initial frustration — albeit imperfect in a freeze frame — is not a massive issue to me.

    go-deeper

    The melodramatic unleashing of Haaland’s golden locks, his frenzied stomp off the pitch and subsequent “Wtf” tweet (viewed more than 50 million times), piling pressure on an official, probably requires, at the least, a reminder of his responsibilities.

    For what it’s worth, I’m not convinced Grealish necessarily had the pace to run through and score, with a couple of defenders also sprinting back, and a more likely cause of City not winning the game on Sunday was sloppy defending and Haaland’s unusually erratic finishing.

    Adam Crafton

    The still image looks bad, as did the Klopp vs Brooks one.

    I have a degree of sympathy as when playing you’re caught up in the moment, it’s harder to control your emotions and it is a shocker of a decision that’s potentially denied them a victory. We’re all guilty of doing it.

    Yet equally, no one could argue that players surrounding refs is a good thing. It looks like petulant children in a school playground.

    One thing rugby union has right that football doesn’t is the respect shown to referees.

    Tom Burrows

    To think that, throughout the centuries, women have been told we are the over-emotional ones…

    I’m just kidding — but clearly, the photo does not look good. Maybe it is just unlucky timing. After all, any number of players or managers could be guilty of it — this is not just an Erling Haaland problem. But it says something about the relationship between the football world and referees at the moment.

    Referees are taking abuse at levels never seen before and we’re losing too many from the game for it to be sustainable. At the same time, faith in them from fans and players has never been lower when the risks and rewards based on the outcome of single decisions have never been higher.

    Please send answers on how to rebuild the bridge of trust and respect between referees and footballers on a postcard addressed to Mr H Webb, PGMOL headquarters.

    @tifofootball_ Referees now have their own TV show #Referees #VAR #PremierLeague #Football #Soccer ♬ original sound – Tifo Football

    Nancy Froston


    Haaland and his City team-mates surround Hooper (Stu Forster/Getty Images)

    You can’t kill the emotion of the game and the intensity of it. There is a correct way to express yourself. But the emotional reaction is normal in that photograph, and you shouldn’t be punished for that. That is also a bit why comparisons with rugby union don’t always work, as football is far more fluid and less stop-start.

    That said, continued negative reactions on the pitch and after the game (for example, Haaland’s histrionics here or the Arsenal statement after Arteta’s reaction to refereeing decisions), are where you probably need punishments.

    In the City-Spurs game, it is clearly a refereeing mistake. Hooper knows that. It is a bad mistake, but he doesn’t need to be attacked for it. It’s not like other mistakes were not made during the game, such as missing an open goal…

    The idea of a dissent sin bin, in principle, is a good thing, but there’s scope to misuse it. I recently played in a game with sin bins in Sunday league where someone was just giving chat to a referee constantly, and unnecessarily. The sin bin worked. When he came back on the field, he’d cooled off and didn’t say anything to the referee. The referee had an excellent game, which was easier to manage.

    Step over the line and you should be punished. Fundamentally, that does not happen enough in football. Dissent enforcement has been too lax for too long.

    go-deeper

    Peter Rutzler

    It’s an appalling reaction and there’s no place for it, just as there was no place for Klopp’s tantrum at the fourth official. This stuff matters, it accumulates and it oozes down the pyramid, a steady stream of trickle-down toxicity that ends with grown men screaming at teenage referees in the park on the weekend because their kid’s under-nines team didn’t get a penalty.

    The referee has made a mistake, and it’s a big one, but it’s worth remembering that he’s run more than 10km at this point, he doesn’t get paid hundreds of thousands of pounds a week and, as far as I can recall, he’s made the same number of glaring errors that afternoon as Haaland.

    But what struck me most was that we’ve just had two weeks of moaning about VARs and crying out for a return to the days when referees just refereed and we all got on with it. Well, this was a referee refereeing and people are still losing their minds and howling about conspiracies.

    Maybe the problem isn’t the referees…

    Iain Macintosh

    How did Pep Guardiola react to the incident?

    City manager Pep Guardiola defended Haaland but refused to criticise Hooper for the decision.

    “Sometimes I lose my mind about the referees, but here no. Always people can make mistakes,” he said.

    “It surprised me for the fact that he went to whistle when Erling went down, but after he stood back up and made the pass, the referee made the gesture to play on. But then when the ball goes to Jack, then came the whistle.”

    Asked about Haaland, Guardiola said: “It’s normal.

    “He’s a little bit disappointed. Even the referee — if he played for Manchester City today, he would be disappointed for that action, that’s for sure.

    “But I would say we didn’t draw because of that.”

    (Top photo: Darren Staples/AFP via Getty Images)

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    The New York Times

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  • Every Premier League club’s stadium plans – from new stands to ground moves

    Every Premier League club’s stadium plans – from new stands to ground moves

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    As the Premier League gets bigger and bigger, so – it seems – do the stadiums that play host to it.

    The vast majority of clubs in the top flight have either drawn up plans to expand their grounds to service the overwhelming demand or are poised to open gleaming new stands – or, in some cases, open new stadiums altogether.

    Here, our experts guide you through what each club has done to their home ground and what could come next, plus how we rated each stadium in our rankings published last month.

    Arsenal: Emirates Stadium

    Current capacity: 60,704

    What The Athletic said: “The Emirates has its critics, but it now delivers the atmosphere, facilities, accessibility and product any sports fan would expect from the Premier League.”

    The Athletic ranking: 4th

    When was the last redevelopment work done? Arsenal have not redeveloped Emirates Stadium in regards to size since moving from Highbury in 2006.

    The most recent work done was the revamped artwork around the outside of the stadium in January 2023. The decision to redecorate was made a year earlier and was brought to life by consulting with fans before artists and specialists, such as Reuben Dangoor, Jeremy Deller and David Rudnick, were commissioned to make the artwork.

    Eight panels were created in total to display the club’s international, local and historic impact across men’s, women’s and academy football.

    What comes next? As things stand, no redevelopment work is planned. Alongside the new stadium artwork rolled out earlier this year, Arsenal unveiled a statue of former manager Arsene Wenger outside the Emirates.

    The Frenchman, who managed the club for 22 years and won three league titles, visited the stadium ahead of the new season to see the work.

    The Emirates has the fifth largest capacity in the Premier League, with three of the four larger stadiums (Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, London Stadium and Anfield) either built or redeveloped after that date.

    Current capacity: 42,530

    What The Athletic said: “A packed-out Villa Park is a special place to be. When it gets going, there is no place quite like it.”

    The Athletic ranking: 7th

    When was the last redevelopment work done? Villa Park last underwent major redevelopment in the 2000-01 campaign, building a bigger Trinity Road Stand, which was built from scratch. There has been an appetite for further expansion since, with the club now closer to the desired redevelopment than they have been in over two decades.

    What comes next? So this is the tricky part. The intention is to increase the capacity by 8,000, expanding Villa Park to 50,000 by 2027, the season before Euro 2028, for which it is a host stadium. This involves knocking down the North Stand completely before wrapping it into the connecting Trinity Road Stand.


    Villa Park could be expanded for Euro 2028 (Michael Regan/Getty Images)

    However, progress has been slow and new, revised plans are expected to be released before the end of the year. Inflation has taken hold since initial plans were drawn up and other problems, such as the lack of transport and on-site parking around Villa Park, require further feasibility studies, as do changes to the proposed work outside of Villa Park, such as a ‘Box Park’-type area named ‘Villa Live’.

    A stadium rebuild is likely to need an agreement with Birmingham City Council and Mayor Andy Street over talks about the redevelopment of the local train station, Witton. It will cost the council around £30million and is critical in easing the footfall around the stadium and meeting UEFA guidelines of having between 60-80 per cent of supporters attending the European Championship arriving on public transport.

    There has been no agreement yet and, under time constraints at risk of not adhering to UEFA guidelines, there is a pressing need for plans to be finalised. But there are question marks as to whether the council will spend the money on the station when its budget is already stretched. 

    Jacob Tanswell

    Current capacity: 11,307

    What The Athletic said: “There’s little discernible character. The support is welcoming, but everything feels a bit temporary.”

    The Athletic ranking: 20th

    When was the last redevelopment work done? Despite cosmetic touches to the stadium since Bill Foley’s arrival as owner, Bournemouth’s previous redevelopment was done in 2013, two years before the club were promoted to the Premier League for the first time, with the Ted MacDougall Stand being unveiled by the man himself. Incredibly, Real Madrid took part in an exhibition match to mark the occasion.

    What comes next? With Foley keen to increase revenue streams and drive the commercial value of the club, Bournemouth are assessing whether to redevelop the Vitality Stadium or build a new ground. Presently, they are looking at plans, using data, ticketing information and feasibility studies, to scope the right side for a stadium which would increase the capacity. Previously, Foley has outlined his desire for a 20,000-seater stadium.

    The immediate priority is building a new training ground at Canford Magna, moving away from the temporary training pavilion adjacent to Vitality Stadium. A 3G pitch has been installed and once the complex is in operation, players will move there, with the pavilion to be used for office staff, possibly freeing up space inside the stadium for hospitality renovation. In that period, Bournemouth could look to press ahead with plans on what next to do with the current stadium.

    Jacob Tanswell

    Brentford: Gtech Community Stadium

    Current capacity: 17,250

    What The Athletic said: “It is one of the smallest grounds in the top two divisions, but none of that detracts from its charm.”

    The Athletic ranking: 8th

    When was the last redevelopment work done? Brentford only moved from Griffin Park to their new ground in September 2020. There have been a few minor cosmetic changes, with a new poster installed on the side, but the biggest work has been to install safe standing.

    Barriers were installed on 1,700 seats in the West Stand and were tested at matches during the Women’s European Championship last year before being fully rolled out for the 2022-23 season.

    What comes next? The Gtech Community Stadium is built on a tight triangular piece of land, which is sandwiched between multiple railway lines and blocks of flats. Even if Brentford wanted to increase the capacity in the future, the tight restrictions make it impossible. For now, they are more than happy in their shiny new home, which chief executive Jon Varney calls “small but perfectly formed”.

    Jay Harris


    The Gtech Community Stadium is tightly hemmed in (Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)

    Brighton & Hove Albion: Amex Stadium

    Current capacity: 31,876

    What The Athletic said: “Neat, well-equipped and fit for purpose, it symbolises the spirit of the club and its supporters.”

    The Athletic ranking: 16th

    When was the last redevelopment work done? A tunnel club opened at the start of the season, joining similar facilities at Manchester City and Tottenham.

    For a total cost of just under £30,000 for a minimum of three years, members see the players in the tunnel through one-way glass in a fine dining restaurant before watching matches in luxury heated seats above the tunnel in the three-tier west stand.

    What comes next? There are no plans for further major works inside the Amex, which opened in 2011. The capacity increased from 22,500 to close to the current figure a year later, with the addition of the upper tier to the two-tier east stand.

    A major facelift is in the pipeline on the walkway surrounding the stadium, with plans submitted to Brighton & Hove Council for a covered fan zone, which will be available on non-match days for sports screenings, music gigs and other leisure events. The project is expected to open next season.

    Meanwhile, Brighton are pressing ahead with plans to build a second stadium in the city, designed specifically for women’s football.

    Andy Naylor

    Burnley: Turf Moor

    Current capacity: 21,744

    What The Athletic said: “Burnley is a proper football town and it feels like it. But while all places get cold, it can feel particularly chilly.”

    The Athletic ranking: 17th

    When was the last redevelopment work done? The last addition to the stadium was the two corner stands, either side of the Jimmy McIlroy Stand, built to improve disability facilities and stadium accessibility. They were opened in 2019.

    Since ALK Capital’s arrival, improving the experience at Turf Moor has been a key priority. They have added LED electronic signs inside and around the ground and revamped and upgraded the club’s hospitality areas around the ground.

    What comes next? There appear to be no imminent plans for any radical changes at Turf Moor. The ground’s position, so close to a road and neighbouring Burnley Cricket Club’s ground, makes any extension a challenge and is arguably not required anyway.

    The ownership group remains committed to continuing to make minor improvements and upgrades to the stadium as and when required, as what they inherited needed modernising.

    The club did recently commit to implementing safe standing in an area of the ground, as they aim to find ways to improve Turf Moor’s atmosphere. Those plans are still in the early stages.

    Andy Jones

    Chelsea: Stamford Bridge

    Current capacity: 40,173

    What The Athletic said: “As each year goes by, the ground shows more signs of age, but there is no other place Chelsea fans would rather be.”

    The Athletic ranking: 9th

    When was the last redevelopment work done? The last significant change made was the building of a new West Stand, which opened in 2001. It seats 13,500 and is also where VIP boxes, function halls and suites are housed.

    Since Chelsea were bought by the Todd Boehly-Clearlake consortium in 2022, some minor changes, mainly decorative, have been made to try to improve the fan experience.

    What comes next? This is a question still to be answered. The Athletic cover the current situation in a lot more depth here and it is certainly complex.

    Chelsea’s ground now ranks as only the 10th biggest club venue in England. From the moment the takeover was completed, figuring out whether to rebuild or move elsewhere has been a priority.

    They spent in the region of £70m-£80m to purchase 1.2 acres of land next to Stamford Bridge from Sir Oswald Stoll Mansions, but have yet to commit to building a new ground on site.

    Redeveloping Stamford Bridge will mean playing at another venue for up to five years while work is carried out. Building somewhere else is an option and going to where the former Earls Court Exhibition Centre used to be is being considered.

    But last week, the company in charge of overseeing the redevelopment of the 40-acre site – Earls Court Development Company – denied that a new ground was part of their plans.

    Simon Johnson

    Crystal Palace: Selhurst Park

    Current capacity: 25,486

    What The Athletic said: “The ground’s soul is among the best in the country. There is a community warmth that can be hard to find at other London clubs.”

    The Athletic ranking: 18th

    When was the last redevelopment work done? Selhurst Park has not undergone major work for decades. Minor improvements have been undertaken since promotion to the Premier League in 2013 and the Main Stand had an internal refit, but there have been no substantial changes since the Holmesdale Road End was converted from terracing in 1994, while a TV gantry required upon promotion has significantly obstructed the view from the back of the Arthur Wait stand, a point not lost on visiting fans.

    What comes next? The start of building work on a new 13,500-capacity Main Stand stand and improving other areas of the ground that celebrates its 100th anniversary next year has moved significantly closer after the relocation of nearby residents was completed.

    The expectation is that work will commence at the end of the season and potentially open in time for the start of the 2026-27 season, but costs have already ballooned to around £150million. It is expected to be funded through a capital call of the club’s shareholders.

    Matt Woosnam


    The original vision of a redeveloped Selhurst Park (Crystal Palace FC)

    Everton: Goodison Park

    Current capacity: 39,414

    What The Athletic said: “The Old Lady may be a pensioner, but it is a venerable old dear, bursting with history.”

    The Athletic ranking: 14th

    When was the last redevelopment work done? Improvements are made to Goodison on a fairly regular basis, although the last stand to undergo a major redevelopment was the Park End in 1994. The main focus for Everton has been developing the new site at Bramley-Moore Dock.

    What comes next? Everton maintain that the new stadium project is both on time and on budget, with work scheduled to be completed by the end of 2024.

    A move-in date for the stadium – which has been selected as one of the host venues for Euro 2028 – has yet to be finalised, but the club is liaising with supporters on various options, including a potential opening at the start of the 2025-26 season.

    Fans are still waiting to hear how the remainder of the project, which is expected to cost around £760million including ancillary works, will be funded, although Miami-based 777 Partners has committed to ensuring its completion as part of their takeover agreement with Farhad Moshiri. Last week’s Premier League points deduction for breaking profit and sustainability rules is not expected to affect the stadium plans.

    Patrick Boyland

    Fulham: Craven Cottage

    Current capacity: 24,500

    What The Athletic said: “The walk to Craven Cottage sets it apart. There is no football stadium like it.”

    The Athletic ranking: 15th

    When was the last redevelopment work done? The last major work undertaken at Craven Cottage was in the early 2000s when the ground was transformed into an all-seater arena in the aftermath of their top-flight promotion in 2001. Since then, there have been cosmetic changes around the ground, with small capacity increases. The most recent saw the dressing rooms expanded inside the Cottage in 2022 to accommodate the extra substitutes required in the Premier League.

    What comes next? The redevelopment of the Riverside Stand has been years in the making. It was first mooted before Mohamed Al Fayed sold the club in 2013, but it has now been realised under Shahid Khan. The aim is to bring year-round revenue streams into Fulham through a four-star hotel, a members club, a health club and restaurants, bars and other amenities.

    Work began in 2019 and it was originally expected to open in 2021. However, due to a range of issues, including the Covid-19 pandemic and the complexity of building on the river itself, the full re-opening has been pushed back three times. As it stands, the project is in the fit-out stage, with only 4,968 spectator seats available. Hospitality areas will open next year, with additional seating ahead of the 2024-25 season. The hotel and private members club may not open until 2025.

    Once completed, the new stand will increase Craven Cottage’s capacity to 29,600. It has proven expensive for Khan, with costs over £130million. It is hoped the facilities will ensure Fulham can be run sustainably at the highest level, as well as providing a new walkway along the River Thames. In the long term, Fulham also intend to build a pier on the river. However, this remains in the pre-planning stages.

    Peter Rutzler


    Fulham’s Riverside Stand (Alex Davidson/Getty Images)

    Current capacity: 54,074

    What The Athletic said: “You’ll Never Walk Alone before kick-off is one of football’s special experiences. Anfield can take you on a wild ride you may not want to end.”

    The Athletic ranking: 5th

    When was the last redevelopment work done? The last major development at Anfield was the redevelopment of the Main Stand, which was completed in 2016. The £100million project added a further 8,500 seats to Anfield, increasing the capacity to 54,000.

    What comes next? Liverpool are in the process of completing the £80million redevelopment of the Anfield Road stand, which has been hit by delays since work began in September 2021 and will not be fully open until 2024.

    The new stand will add 7,000 seats to Anfield and increase the capacity to 61,000. Initial plans were to have the stand ready for the start of the 2023-24 season, but the club announced in July that only the lower tier would be open for the first home game of the season against Bournemouth as work continued on the upper tier.

    The aim was to have the upper tier open following the September international break. However, Buckingham Group, who were chosen to oversee the construction, entered administration in early September. Work on the stand stopped for a period. It caused Liverpool to delay the timeframe again from October 2023 to an unspecified date in 2024.

    With tickets already sold for the upper tier, the club had to ask fans with tickets elsewhere in the ground to return them to the club if they were not planning on attending.

    The process to find a new contractor was extensive, with Preston-based Rayner Rowen installed and the site is now fully functional again. The next steps are ongoing as work towards completion continues, although the stand is not set to be fully open until well into 2024, according to multiple people contacted by The Athletic. It is a significant financial blow, with Liverpool missing out on extra revenue of approximately £750,000 per match with capacity down 11,000.

    Andy Jones

    Luton Town: Kenilworth Road

    Current capacity: 11,050

    What The Athletic said: “You won’t hear an atmosphere like it. The walk into the away end through neighbouring terraced housing really is fun, too.”

    The Athletic ranking: 19th

    When was the last redevelopment work done? Luton Town spent around £10million to upgrade Kenilworth Road ahead of the 2023-23 season to bring it up to Premier League standards and requirements. The upgrades increased the stadium’s capacity from 10,356 – which would have made it the lowest-ever capacity in the Premier League.

    The main body of renovations centred on renewing the Bobbers Stand, which houses a television gantry as well as seats for fans. The first Premier League home game against Burnley had to be postponed as works were completed.

    What comes next? Power Court Stadium. Luton are saying goodbye to their home since 1905 and are hoping to commence works on a new site in the city centre next to Luton railway station, which will have an initial capacity of 19,500. A second phase of development could see 4,000 seats added.

    “The next phase now is an engagement with Luton Council and key stakeholders, such as the Environment Agency and Historic England, as we take them all through our detailed design process,” chief operating officer Michael Moran said in May 2023. “We are also engaging with contractors as we finalise certain construction features, but our target for completion is 2026, regardless of the club’s league position.”

    Manchester City: Etihad Stadium

    Current capacity: 53,400

    What The Athletic said: “It is akin to visiting a football theme park, but it may never have that final piece of intangible soul that Maine Road had.”

    The Athletic ranking: 11th

    When was the last redevelopment work done? City unveiled their new-look South Stand in a game against Chelsea in August 2015, an occasion also remembered for Eliaquim Mangala’s fine debut. The expansion added 6,250 seats to a new third tier, another 1,500 seats around the pitch and extra hospitality areas.

    What comes next? An even more ambitious expansion that will add 5,000 seats to the North Stand is now full steam ahead. According to the club’s website, the plans include a “larger, single upper tier above the existing lower tier”, which will increase the Etihad’s capacity to over 60,000.

    There will also be a covered fan area with capacity for 3,000 people as well as a new club shop, museum, office spaces and a 400-bed hotel. The hotel, which is scheduled to open in 2026, will also serve the new 23,500-capacity Co-op Live music arena, which opens close to the stadium in May.

    Building on the north stand is scheduled for completion in August 2025.

    Sam Lee


    Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium is set to expand (Michael Regan/Getty Images)

    Current capacity: 74,031

    What The Athletic said: “Parts look out of date and the roof is leaking, but the scale of the place is mighty and it comes with a special atmosphere.”

    The Athletic ranking: 3rd

    When was the last redevelopment work done? United have invested millions of pounds in small improvements in recent years, mainly on hospitality areas, disabled facilities and adding safe-standing areas. A paint job was completed in 2022 and quickly gave it a much smarter appearance. At Erik ten Hag’s request, the club built a new lounge for the club’s manager and his players to use before matches at Old Trafford from the beginning of this season, replacing a hospitality area in the Sir Bobby Charlton stand.

    What comes next? United announced in April last year that they had appointed architects Populous and management firm Legends International as master planners and consultants for a revamp of Old Trafford. Several different options were assessed, including increasing Old Trafford’s capacity, building a completely new stadium next to the current one, and development centred around a new main stand.

    These were presented at a fans’ advisory board meeting. Major redevelopment work, however, has remained at a standstill during United’s strategic review, which started last November. Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the British billionaire and owner of petrochemicals company INEOS, is set to purchase a 25 per cent stake in United from the Glazer family.

    The Athletic detailed how Ratcliffe is prepared to commit $300million (£245m) of his personal wealth for infrastructure upgrades at Manchester United.

    Dan Sheldon

    Current capacity: 52,257

    What The Athletic said: “It’s slap-bang in the middle of the city, looming over it, setting the mood and drawing people towards it.”

    The Athletic ranking: 2nd

    When was the last redevelopment work done? Aside from changes to corporate boxes, the last proper redevelopment was in 2005. Shearer’s Bar was added to the Gallowgate End, which was itself upgraded as part of an expansion throughout the 1990s, raising capacity to present levels. The Milburn Stand and Leazes End were expanded after the Gallowgate, while corporate boxes were moved from the East Stand elsewhere.

    What comes next? The next phase of redevelopment will not alter the stadium itself, rather the area on Strawberry Place behind the Gallowgate. Mike Ashley sold the lease on that land, but the current owners bought it back and a fan zone, featuring bars, restaurants and big screens, is being built and is due to open within months.


    An artist’s impression of Newcastle’s fan zone (Courtesy of Newcastle United)

    Planning permission has been granted for three years on that site but, beyond, Newcastle are exploring how to raise the capacity to 60,000-65,000. That would likely involve expansion of the Gallowgate End and East Stand, but road and Metro infrastructure, as well as listed buildings on Leazes Terrace behind the latter, make increasing capacity difficult and expensive. It will cost tens of millions and is very much a long-term aspiration rather than a confirmed plan.

    However, the owners insist they want to remain at Newcastle’s historic St James’ home rather than move to a ground outside the heart of the city centre.

    Nottingham Forest: City Ground

    Current capacity: 30,404

    What The Athletic said: “It’s in a beautiful spot at the heart of Nottingham and the home atmosphere has been rejuvenated in recent seasons.”

    The Athletic ranking: 12th

    When was the last redevelopment work done? The club undertook a cosmetic revamp of many areas of the City Ground over the summer.

    That included a refurbishment of the dressing rooms and tunnel area and the construction of an entirely new media suite, in the area where Brian Clough’s office used to be.

    What comes next? In the short term, there is a desire among the Forest hierarchy to get the capacity further above the 30,000 mark and there are early plans to use shipping containers to add roughly 500 extra seats.

    The idea is inspired by one of the venues used during the Qatar World Cup, Stadium 974, which was built entirely out of shipping containers.

    There are also plans in place to further improve the fan experience around the stadium.

    In the longer term, Forest announced plans in February 2019 to knock down the Peter Taylor Stand and rebuild it with Champions League-standard facilities, which would take the capacity up to 35,000.

    The club hope that the appointment of Tom Cartledge, a lifelong Forest fan, as chairman will help accelerate the progress of those plans. Cartledge is chief executive of Handley House Group, which includes Benoy, the firm of architects who designed the proposed development.

    Paul Taylor

    Current capacity: 32,050

    What The Athletic said: “There can be few more intimidating atmospheres in English football. The noise lingers and swells as if stuck under the roof.”

    The Athletic ranking: 13th

    When was the last redevelopment work done? A general brush-up took place last summer, including a new lick of paint to smarten up the back of the South Stand. But the last tangible upgrade came in 2009 when the gap between the South Stand and the Bramall Lane Stand (where away fans are situated) was finally filled in via a new corner stand that included a hotel.

    What comes next? There has been previous talk by the current owners of improving the Kop stand by removing the pillars that currently restrict the view from hundreds of seats. But United’s struggle to compete financially with the rest of the Premier League, even with the riches that accompany promotion, suggests these plans will be firmly on the back-burner until a change of ownership.

    Richard Sutcliffe

    Tottenham Hotspur: Tottenham Hotspur Stadium

    Current capacity: 62,850

    What The Athletic said: “Sit inside the stadium and you soon realise its draw: an experience comparable to any live sport stadium across the world.”

    The Athletic ranking: 1st

    When was the last redevelopment work done? There have been no major development works since the stadium opened four years ago. There have been ongoing small improvements and the player’s lounge was refurbished at a not-inconsiderable cost in the summer of 2019.

    What comes next? Spurs are always looking to improve the stadium, but it’s so young and remains the best in class in the Premier League, so there are no big plans in place for redevelopment work.

    Charlie Eccleshare


    The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium has become a regular NFL venue (Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)

    Current capacity: 62,500

    What The Athletic said: “It has the feel of a big, international venue, but the pitch feels distant and so does everyone else in the stadium.”

    The Athletic ranking: 10th

    When was the last redevelopment work done? Ahead of the 2022-23 season, capacity at the London Stadium increased from 60,000 to 62,500 following redevelopment work in the West Stand. In April 2019, the club installed a claret carpet to surround the outside of the playing field.

    What comes next? As it stands, there are no plans for redevelopment work at the London Stadium.

    Roshane Thomas

    Current capacity: 31,750

    What The Athletic said: “A perfect balance of modern facilities and an authentic atmosphere to rival anywhere in the country.”

    The Athletic ranking: 6th

    When was the last redevelopment work done? The modern two-tier Stan Cullis Stand (still known locally as the North Bank) was opened in 2012, taking Molineux to its current capacity. That was the first significant rebuild since 1993, when the Jack Harris Stand (now the Sir Jack Hayward Stand) was opened, replacing the final section of old Molineux terracing.


    How Wolves’ redeveloped stadium could look (Courtesy of Wolverhampton Wanderers)

    What comes next? Wolves have an idea of what comes next, but there is currently no clear picture of when. In 2019, Wolves owners Fosun announced their intention to increase capacity to 50,000 by replacing the Steve Bull and Sir Jack Hayward Stands in the image of the Stand Cullis Stand and filling in the ground’s open corners.

    But Covid-19 and other factors meant the plans were put on hold, where they remain. Wolves have researched a range of options, but there remains no clear timescale.

    Steve Madeley

    (Top photos: Clive Brunskill/Naomi Baker/Catherine Ivill/Getty Images; design: Samuel Richardson)

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    The New York Times

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  • Erling Haaland is rapidly closing in on an international record that has stood since 1934

    Erling Haaland is rapidly closing in on an international record that has stood since 1934

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    Erling Haaland is just six away from Norway’s goalscoring record, so it is surely inevitable that he will soon be his nation’s most prolific striker ever.

    On one hand, that will have happened remarkably quickly – Haaland only scored his first goals for Norway in 2020. On the other, this has been an incredibly long time coming.

    GO DEEPER

    What is Haaland really like?

    Of the 213 FIFA-affiliated nations, Norway’s is the longest-standing outright individual goalscoring record in the world. It was set by Jorgen Juve, a fascinating figure who ended his international career in 1937 and later became a renowned sports journalist in his home country.

    Juve scored a relatively modest 33 goals in 45 matches for Norway, including five hat-tricks, although his tally is made remarkable by the fact he played as a centre-forward in less than half of those games. He was otherwise positioned in defence, from where he captained his nation to the bronze medal at the 1936 Olympics. That explains why his final international goal came three years before his final cap, in June 1934. Therefore, it is likely that by the time Haaland scores six more goals, it will be around 90 years since Juve reached the 33-goal mark.

    There is technically one other record that stands for longer, also in Scandinavia.

    Poul “Tist” Nielsen scored 52 goals in 38 games for Denmark between 1910 and 1925, although his record was equalled by Jon Dahl Tomasson — now manager of Blackburn Rovers in the English Championship — in 2010. Tomasson elected to retire from international football after that year’s World Cup in South Africa rather than seeking to make the record his own. Nielsen’s name therefore remains in the record books, although he now holds Denmark’s record only jointly.

    This graph demonstrates the extent to which these records are outliers.

    Only six countries’ goalscoring records have stood for more than 50 years, including Libya, Sudan and Guinea. Therefore, if we only include nations to have qualified for the World Cup, it is only Denmark, Norway and Hungary whose records have lasted more than half a century.

    Hungary’s record is perhaps the most impressive, considering Ferenc Puskas scored 84 goals in just 85 games, and his international career was brought to a premature end at the age of 29 because of the Hungarian Revolution. He later represented Spain at the 1962 World Cup, having gone half a decade without playing international football.


    Ferenc Puskas (right) playing for Hungary against England at Wembley in 1953 (Barratts/PA Images via Getty Images)

    The most striking thing about the graph is how many goalscoring records have been set recently.

    Sixty-four of the 211 nations’ record goalscorers have appeared for them in 2023, and in terms of time since they were set, the median goalscoring mark has stood for just seven years, which includes the likes of the Republic of Ireland’s Robbie Keane and Paraguay’s Roque Santa Cruz. Increased longevity due to superior fitness levels in the modern game is clearly a major factor, as is the number of relatively new nations on the FIFA list.

    Perhaps the most surprising international goalscoring record is that of Italy.

    Giga Riva’s relatively insubstantial haul of 35 goals has been the mark to beat since World Cup 1974. Not only has it not been matched or eclipsed, but no one has ever got particularly near it — Roberto Baggio and Alessandro Del Piero both reached 27 and that’s as close as anyone has come.

    For context, four Englishmen have reached 35 goals in that period — Gary Lineker, Michael Owen, Wayne Rooney and Harry Kane. Four Spaniards too — Raul Gonzalez, Fernando Torres, David Villa and David Silva, while Alvaro Morata (on 34) should get there shortly.

    Furthermore, no current Italians seem set to challenge it — Ciro Immobile (with 17) has less than half that tally, turns 34 years old in February, and has been omitted from recent squads. Nobody in Luciano Spalletti’s current squad has scored more than eight international goals.

    Italy’s shortcoming clearly isn’t about a complete lack of prolific strikers — the likes of Christian Vieri, Pippo Inzaghi and Luca Toni all scored heavily at club level. Sometimes it’s been the opposite, with various strikers competing for a starting place, meaning none of them got to dominate the national side for a decade. That said, around a decade ago, there was simply a dearth of prolific Italian strikers to choose from. Antonio Conte used Eder and Graziano Pelle up front at the 2016 European Championship.

    There are also tactical considerations. Not only have Italy traditionally been the most defensive of the major European nations, but their attacking play has generally been based around using a second striker. Baggio, Del Piero and Francesco Totti have all been the golden boy at various — overlapping — stages, with Italy’s No 9 often selected primarily to bring the best out of Italy’s No 10.

    What of Norway? They, similarly, were traditionally a defensive-minded side, favouring counter-attacks and long balls. At their peak under Egil Olsen in the mid-1990s, they often used a striker out of position on the wing, where he would challenge for long, diagonal balls.


    Norway’s Jostein Flo, a giant striker often utilised on the right flank, at the 1994 World Cup (Chris Cole/Allsport)

    But perhaps the more pertinent thing about Norway is that, historically, they generally haven’t been very competitive.

    They’ve only ever qualified for four major tournaments — in 1938, 1994, 1998 and 2000 — and have won a combined three matches in those appearances. They’re also similar to Italy in that, at times, they’ve boasted various high-level strikers whose careers roughly overlapped — John Carew, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Tore Andre Flo, Steffen Iversen — and at other points have suffered a complete lack of good centre-forwards.

    At this point in time, Norway appear to have the most prolific striker in Europe, and it’s not unreasonable to consider where Haaland might end up in the all-time international goalscoring charts worldwide, never mind just in relation to his compatriots.

    Haaland is currently averaging nearly a goal a game for his country, which will inevitably be difficult for the 23-year-old to sustain over his career. But it’s worth pointing out how impressive that is, even at this early stage. Again, excluding countries who have never qualified for a World Cup, only the aforementioned quartet of Juve, Riva, Puskas and Nielsen, plus Japan’s Kunishige Kamamoto, hold their nation’s international goalscoring records and also boast a rate of 0.75 goals per game or more.

    Even Cristiano Ronaldo, the most prolific international goalscorer of all time with 127 for Portugal, boasts ‘only’ 0.63 goals per game, a lower rate than the likes of Romelu Lukaku (Belgium), Kane and Aleksandar Mitrovic (Serbia), which owes to his early days as a winger rather than a central striker.


    Kane and Ronaldo, two national-team record scorers still operating in 2023 (Burak Akbulut/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

    Considering how many hat-tricks Haaland scores for Manchester City, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that he could score six goals during this international break to move level with Juve, particularly given Norway’s first fixture is a home friendly against the Faroe Islands today (Thursday), before a European Championship qualifier against Scotland in Glasgow on Sunday. That said, the Faroes’ defence is less leaky than you might expect — only twice in their last 22 outings have they conceded more than three times in a game.

    The wider question is whether we will ever see Haaland at a major tournament.

    Despite the presence of him and Arsenal captain Martin Odegaard, Norway have failed to qualify from their Euro 2024 qualification group directly, with Spain and Scotland already securing the top two spots.

    They are, at least, likely to qualify for the play-offs, and therefore will have two must-win games in March to secure their first major tournament appearance since 2000 — the summer when Haaland was born. But there’s been little in recent performances to think Norway will breeze through those play-offs.

    Juve’s individual record will soon be surpassed, but captaining his side to a bronze medal at the Olympics may stand as his nation’s greatest achievement for much longer.

    go-deeper

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    Erling Haaland is phenomenal – so why hasn’t he made Manchester City better?

    (Top photo: Sebastian Widmann – UEFA/UEFA via Getty Images)

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    The New York Times

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  • The Briefing: Palmer gives Guardiola cause for regret, Salah is still irreplaceable

    The Briefing: Palmer gives Guardiola cause for regret, Salah is still irreplaceable

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    Welcome to The Briefing, where every Monday during this season, The Athletic will discuss three of the biggest questions to arise from the weekend’s football.

    This was the weekend when injuries began to bite Tottenham Hotspur and Newcastle United, when Manchester United just about escaped a home game against Luton Town with all three points, and when Everton got another win to move them further clear of trouble.

    Here, we will ask whether Manchester City should have made an exception to their sales policy with one player, if Liverpool should reject any approach for Mohamed Salah in January, and what exactly Roberto De Zerbi’s comments about referees were meant to achieve…

    Will Manchester City regret selling Cole Palmer to Chelsea?

    You’d struggle to argue that Premier League leaders and treble holders Manchester City made a mistake in selling Raheem Sterling to Chelsea.

    Their policy of being perfectly happy to sell a player who wants to leave as long as a reasonable offer comes in hasn’t exactly held them back in the past few years. Sterling was being phased out of the City team in his final season, so a departure made sense for everyone involved.

    That he was the beating heart of Chelsea’s multiple comebacks in Sunday’s madcap 4-4 draw with City probably still won’t make Pep Guardiola or anyone at the club think they made a mistake: he served City well, but they replaced him and if you never sold a player because you thought he might have a good game against you… well, you would never sell a player.

    However, you wonder whether they will come to regret, on a certain level, selling Cole Palmer. Sterling was with City for seven seasons, scored 131 goals and won four Premier League titles. There is no sense of ‘what might have been’ there: he served his purpose and then some.

    Palmer is different. The 21-year-old hadn’t yet become a regular starter for City when he, according to Guardiola, decided he wasn’t going to get much game time so made the move to Chelsea. He was all potential, an immensely talented prospect who clearly had the style and technical ability to fit in a few different positions. Guardiola wanted him to stay, presumably because he knew just how good he was.

    Guardiola knew before Sunday’s game and he certainly knew it afterwards. It wasn’t just Palmer’s superbly struck penalty (who believes his claim that he doesn’t practise them, by the way?), but the way he played for the whole game. It was enough to make you think that, despite all of Chelsea’s lavish spending, it might just be a kid they bought on deadline day, almost as an afterthought, that they could end up building their team around.

    Sterling was exceptional, too, as he has been for most of the season, and there has been much understandable consternation about his omission from Gareth Southgate’s England squad. But if you were to bet on whether it will be Palmer or Sterling in that squad for the European Championship next summer, the smart money might be on the youngster, who has just earned his first senior call-up to the England squad ahead of qualifiers against Malta and North Macedonia.

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    Palmer, Lewis called up to England squad

    Why would Liverpool even consider selling Salah in January?

    It’s easy to forget how quickly this Liverpool team has changed.

    Of the regular front six that won the Champions League in 2019 and the Premier League a year later, only one remains. Fabinho, Jordan Henderson and Roberto Firmino left last summer, Sadio Mane a year earlier, and Georginio Wijnaldum the year before that.

    This is, as Jurgen Klopp proclaimed, Liverpool 2.0, the reinvention of a team in style (sort of) and personnel. They have recruited new forwards well and done as good a job as anyone realistically could in replacing an entire midfield in one summer.

    go-deeper

    And yet the one who remains is their best and most potent player.

    Salah’s two goals in Liverpool’s 3-0 win over Brentford represent his ninth and 10th of the season in the league, with another couple (in limited playing time) in the Europa League. You can chuck in four assists, too.

    He’s responsible for 37 per cent of Liverpool’s Premier League goals this season, a percentage that isn’t outrageous or massively unusual for a side’s best striker (Erling Haaland has 41 per cent of Manchester City’s), but next on the list for Liverpool is Darwin Nunez (who has one since September, though is crucial in providing assists to his Egyptian team-mate) and Diogo Jota, both with four.

    This is a roundabout way of saying he’s still Liverpool’s most important player and to reiterate they must not sell him, however much money is offered to them in January by Al Ittihad or whichever Saudi Arabian team wants that league’s ultimate prize.

    Apologies for bringing transfers into this while it’s still November, but there are only another 48 gossiping days before the window opens and the wheels are beginning to turn.

    There is a school of thought that, not unreasonably, says Liverpool would be foolish to turn down an offer of £100million ($122m) for a 31-year-old with 18 months left on his contract. It would be a sensible business decision and would allow them to get ahead of the game in finding a replacement.

    But without him, Liverpool might be touch and go for the Champions League places, never mind having a chance of a convincing title bid.

    Apart from that, Salah is one of the greatest players Liverpool will ever have: clubs shouldn’t necessarily make decisions like this based on sentiment, but they almost owe it to their fans to ensure he plays for them as long as possible.

    What good do De Zerbi’s complaints about referees do?

    “I am honest and clear. I don’t like 80 per cent of English referees. It’s not a new thing. I don’t like them.

    “The behaviour. I don’t like their behaviour on the pitch.”

    It’s going to be interesting in a couple of years if De Zerbi does succeed Guardiola at Manchester City, as some believe he will.

    At the moment, he’s with Brighton & Hove Albion, a team that most neutrals broadly quite like and where he receives almost universal praise for his exciting and progressive football. At a club that, to put it lightly, are not quite so universally popular and who play many, many more high-profile games, we might see the first example of a manager actually exploding on the touchline.

    His comments after Brighton’s 1-1 draw with Sheffield United were extraordinary, particularly when he acknowledged that the big officiating call of the game was correct. “If I see the new rules, it’s a red card, clear,” he said about Mahmoud Dahoud being sent off for a foul on Ben Osborn. “But I was a player and the dynamic of the situation wasn’t a red card.” It was a bit of a pity he didn’t expand on what sort of “dynamic” would constitute a red in his mind, if not a player missing the ball by a yard and planting his studs into an opponent’s calf.


    De Zerbi speaks to John Brooks after the match (Steve Bardens/Getty Images)

    We rarely get through a weekend now without at least one manager going off the deep end about the officials but most of the time, they’re at least complaining about decisions they don’t think are correct.

    What’s the thinking here? Does he think referees don’t get enough criticism? They simply get too easy a ride for the decisions they make, so he thought he would throw in ‘I dunno, I just don’t like their vibe’ into the mix?

    What’s he trying to achieve here? Clubs and managers will say they just want to improve the standard of refereeing when they criticise, but how is this sort of thing constructive? Presumably, De Zerbi is referring to the perception that some referees ‘peacock’ and try to make the games all about them. But even if this is true, who cares?

    go-deeper

    It’s the sort of thing you’d expect fans and neutral observers to get annoyed about, but managers? Quite apart from the fact they probably should have other things to be worried about, managers must understand their words carry much more weight than fans, broadcasters or journalists. One remark like this adds further weight to an already intolerable load placed on officials.

    Managers whining about refereeing decisions is irritating and we could probably do without it, but it’s at least understandable if the decision is either wrong or debatable. When you admit the referee got things right but still concoct some excuse to have a go… it’s just not understandable.

    Coming up

    • It’s international week, baby. But don’t worry, all you strident domestic followers: there are still a few club games to keep you happy before the nations start getting involved. The FA Cup first-round replays, for example, when tiny Isthmian League outfit Horsham have another go at League One Barnsley before, even more implausibly, Cray Valley Paper Mills face Charlton Athletic.
    • There’s also the Women’s Champions League, a little light on English teams but still with a few humdingers: Emma Hayes’ quest to win the big one in what will be (for the moment) her final season at Chelsea begins with a trip to Real Madrid, while holders Barcelona start their defence against Benfica and previous perennial champs Lyon face Slavia Prague.
    • Then it’s the internationals: England, who have already qualified for Euro 2024, face Malta on Friday night at Wembley and then travel to North Macedonia on Monday. Scotland can also take it easy having already sealed their place, but Wales will go through if they beat both Armenia and Turkey.
    • Netherlands vs Ireland next Saturday is one worth keeping an eye on if you like weird stuff/the vagaries of UEFA’s qualifying rules because it will help Irish hopes if they lose (even if it would still take a few more things to break their way).
    • Elsewhere, Italy will need to beat both Ukraine and old foes North Macedonia to avoid another rather embarrassing failure; it’s still all to play for in Group E where Albania, Czech Republic, Poland and Moldova are all in contention for the two automatic spots; it’s technically also all up for grabs in Group G, but realistically Serbia and Hungary are probably going through; while in Group J there is the delicious if slightly unlikely prospect of Luxembourg qualifying, but they’ll need to beat both Lichtenstein and Bosnia & Herzegovina and hope Slovakia lose both their games… but it could still happen…

    Your Monday reading list

    (Top photos: Getty Images)

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