do these fucks never learn

His position is also under threat from new signing Gabriel Paulista.

Mikel Arteta, heavyweight

In 2022, a typical England player at a club competing in the Champions League could expect to have played only 14 matches games between the start and the season and the end of October.

"We've cried out for a long time for a mid-winter break, maybe this will give us a great chance of winning a World Cup," added Neville, who won 59 England caps between 1996 and 2007.

The word "maybe" seems to be working quite hard in that sentence.

Vincent Kompany 9

Kompany was a colossus in a losing cause at the Nou Camp last time.

Sergio Busquets 7

At just 26, Busquets already has more than 70 caps for his native Spain and Fernandinho will need to fill the void left by the suspended Yaya Toure.

Manchester-City-vs-Barcelona-two-teams-compare-ahead-Champions-League-16-clash.html

Kompany is one of those rare big men who have become so big that they're pretty much honorary Englishmen in the eyes of most football hacks. He's more blood-on-the-shirt for England and St George now than actual English defenders like Gary Cahill.

The only other one I can think of off the top of my head is Peter Schmeichel.

very much so

patrice vieira was only rechristened patrick in 1997

Vieira was too French and Arsenal were too un-English throughout the majority of his time there for him to count.

“At Liverpool [when Carragher played in the Champions League] we had great technical players at the time, but we were more powerful than the other teams. We had the physical intensity of the Premier League, we took that into the Champions League. Now you look at it and PSG looked more powerful than Chelsea over the two games which is probably a bigger worry more than the football.”

http://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/mar/12/champions-league-jamie-carragher-chelsea-liverpool-europa-league-arsenal-manchester-city

“I think it has deteriorated,” he added. “I think it has the last few years. With the new TV deal, the clubs get a lot of money. But I think that maybe because they have so much money that when you’re buying players in it doesn’t mean enough to bring a player in because you have that much money. You can bring a player in but if it doesn’t quite work out you still have the money to bring another in.

Yep, that will explain the underperformance vs PSG and Monaco.

Sky Sports Jeff Stelling Thinks Arsenal Can Beat Monaco & Go Through In The CL.

(Published on 13 Mar 2015)

Sure. Arsenal win 1-0. Monaco field an illegible player just cos'. Arsenal go through.

It worked for Celtic... twice.

Here is the first footballer from these shores for a long time who could credibly be regarded as being among the top three or four players in the world and with the potential of becoming the very best.

The Welshman can become the world's best footballer but his style is being cramped by the Portuguese at the Bernabeu

Time to drop Ronaldo and let a Welshman breathe.

I'm assuming that's Martin Samuel or someone banging the drum for Bale going to Chelsea?

Jason Burt arguing that ronaldo should sling his hook back to utd, and messi should hurry up and get old so that Bale can be the star he rightfully should be I think.

At least until Harry Kane fully matures.

theres surely an argument for the epl currently being one of the worst leagues ever constituted in terms of aggregate level of quality for investment

the only real claim to fame it had was the success of the big four nee top four circa 2007-2011 or so, its achievement in the europa league has always been pitiful and gives lie to the notion that there is any depth beneath the headline teams and now the top teams are all shit too

the russian league post 2005 or so has been notably poor relative to investment but they have the huge disincentive of being in russia that raises recruitment costs

Chelsea are clearly the best team in England and they're really not that good. As for the rest....

Lewis Varey ‏@LewisVarey 10m10 minutes ago

@Guymowbray It's still the best league. Might not necessarily have the worlds very best teams. But still the best league
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AJ️ ‏@YanitedAdam 22m22 minutes ago

Regardless of our shambles in Europe this campaign, we're still the best league in the world. In terms of overall entertainment, definitely.

Morley White ‏@morleywhites 31m31 minutes ago

Premier league is still the best league in world.

Bounce In A minute ‏@Liam_CFC 47m47 minutes ago

The Premier League is still the best league in the world #FACT Other European teams want to win more than the English clubs

Jord Solomon ‏@Jordysol19 50m50 minutes ago Redditch, England

Premier League still the best league in Europe, every other league has two good teams that just dominate every year, we have at least 5

do other countries even reify 'best league' like this? fairly sure italians in the 1990s would have talked about how most of the world's best teams and players were there, but that isn't quite the same

99% of consumers don't consume 'the league as such, they watch their team plus a few choice games between big teams

the league they are referring to isn't the very small proportion of it that they consume but the brand, the ambience, the echo chamber of commercially and socially mediated boosterism

the content value of the epl needs to be shored up with a transcendent fiction that what they are seeing is as good as it is priced to be; that epl teams are doing badly doesn't show that they are shit, it shows that european competitions are shit because epl teams aren't even trying to win them

Apparently, in the Premier League, unlike any of the other major leagues, "any team can beat any other team".

.. according to some tit on Talksport.

Other European teams want to win more than the English clubs

lol see english clubs could win if they were, you know, trying

Love all this 'every game is so competitive in the epl' shit as well. Didn't Barca lose at home to Malaga or Granada just the other week?

nakh otm btw

even when these people might allow that it isn't blitw they seem so sure in the assumption that it's the most entertaining.

First published Tuesday 10 February 2015 in Sport

BURNLEY are now bigger economically than Ajax, according to Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore.

The Premier League announced a new £5.136bn television deal with Sky and BT this afternoon and Scudamore says the top flight of English football is stronger than ever.

Burnley have the least financial resources of any club in the Premier League but Scudamore says that even now they have more revenue than Dutch giants Ajax, the four-time European champions.

He said: "I read a stat the other day that Burnley are bigger economically than Ajax.

“Of course this will make our clubs even more competitive than their European counterparts.”

Yes, that's a given. Clutching @ straws tho.(xp)

(xp) Anyone remember the the Atlantic League.

More from Talksport: top teams in La Liga play maybe 8 difficult games a season, for the rest they could send out the tealady; EPL is more intense than any other league; domestic cup competitions are taken more seriously (lol delusional).

Surely it's just the safety of insular familiarity. Nobody talking this shit has ever watched a la liga game not involving barca or real, or a German match that isn't bayern v dortmund, but they've watched highlights of every west brom game this season and they like the look of that berahino, and they know that pulis is the man to make sure he knuckles down and gives 110%.

You could apply the same principle to almost any part of life that is as central as football is for many people. Sure la boqueria probably has more fancy-dan hams but I know where everything is in sainsburys, and their taste the difference ham is nice enough for me, so all in all I'd say sainsburys is the best marketplace for my food shop.

Not sure that analogy quite works, just wanted to say fancy-dan hams

Talksport: the trouble is the EPL is too strong, for instance, you can't have a strong league AND a strong national side at the same time... what??!?? By the way, these are mostly callers, so obv. cretins, but not much quibbling and quite a lot of agreement from the Talksport, er, experts.

there's a little of that, but most of them aren't saying it's the best because it is the most convenient/familiar/safe/recogniseable, they are saying it is just the best, and if objective metrics give lie to that then they will find vague, imaginary, unfalsifiable ones where it can be the best

football is of no importance but it is useful as a little thought experiment in how english exceptionalism works, how people rationalize england to be the best country in europe or the world when it is no longer the wealthiest or most powerful

really what they are asking is which football league comes closest to reaching the platonic ideal of epl-ness?

and no matter which way they look at it, the epl is the most epl-like footall league in the world; it has more steven gerrards than any other league in the world, and when he dies it will have more jordan hendersons than any league in the world

GLENN-HODDLE-Fernandinho-not-better-player-Ryan-Mason-did-cost-35m.html

The hyperbole suggested the Premier League game is falling behind the rest of Europe in terms of quality.

I hear the argument that the Premier League is over hyped….but let’s just have a reality check here.

Chelsea and Arsenal were eliminated on the basis of the antiquated away goals rule. Manchester City lost to an outstanding Barcelona team who continue to be inspired by the astonishing Messi.

Put Messi into the City team and they would have won the tie.

Indeed perhaps one of the main reasons four (the maximum thus the best allowance) English teams have all gone out of the Champions League before the quarter-finals is they may have been drained by the demands of the Premier League, which is certainly more competitive from top to bottom than any other league in the world.

Over the course of a 38 game season Chelsea are better than PSG, Arsenal are better than Monaco and, yes, when Messi plays, Barca are better than City.

After all how many BIG games do Monaco, PSG or Barcelona face in a season?

I'm not sure that success in a knockout competition like the Champions League is a particularly accurate barometer of quality - this Chelsea team is vastly superior to the one that actually won the thing in 2012. Likewise I didn't believe that the PL was The Best League In The World even when English clubs were routinely appearing in the final.

That said, most of the current English clubs just aren't that good, with the exception of Chelsea all of them have extremely obvious flaws and weaknesses and several of the players and a couple of the managers aren't streetwise enough to perform against elite-level European opposition. I don't know any fans who care about being The Best League In The World, that hype exists to justify exporting it to Asia and Africa and to an extent to the US. It may genuinely be more unpredictable on a week-by-week basis, but that's a bi-product of the randomness of inferior football.

I'm not sure that success in a knockout competition like the Champions League is a particularly accurate barometer of quality

― Matt DC, Sunday, 22 March 2015 16:22 (1 minute ago)

this is nonsense though because the aggregrate results of a half a dozen english teams across two competitions over several seasons erases the arbitrariness of individual results, not that psg beating chelsea is arbitrary at all because they are a better team

Aggregate yes, individual success not necessarily.

Barcelona's second and third-best forwards are Suarez and Neymar. City's are Dzeko and Wilfried Bony. There isn't a single football fan in the world who would make that trade.

this Chelsea team is vastly superior to the one that actually won the thing in 2012

― Matt DC, Sunday, 22 March 2015 16:22 (7 minutes ago)

they are a bit better, certainly not vastly, but the only way either of them could beat the very best teams is via a deep block counterattacking strategy, and on those terms the earlier one was better, they still had the core of his first side which had a resilience to it that they currently lack

They have as many points now, with nine games to go, as they managed in the whole of the 2011-12 season, even allowing for mismanagement and the differing quality of the EPL that's quite a gulf. But that's quibbling as at least five of the teams currently remaining in the CL are superior to this year's Chelsea.

ac milan won the champions league in 2007 and were 36 points behind inter in serie a, madrid were third and nine points off valencia when they won in 2002

in all three cases they were old squads who didn't have the squad depth or endurance for the league, it's this lack of the sort of tactically canny elite 28-32 yr old players that is most glaring about the current epl sides, lampard/drogba/cole vs serial champions league failures like kompany/hart/touré

https://scontent-ams.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xfp1/v/t1.0-9/11068027_10153189730835982_2196145673726719040_n.png?oh=6039131f3b9fc286a1aa40eb461bc171&oe=55BA9125

good stuff spain guys

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Martin Corbett: Embarrassing this game you wouldn't catch Burnley rolling over and getting slapped 7-0.