Archive for the ‘The Story So Far’ Category

The Lead

The Champions League final is upon us! And indeed, it has all the potential to be a defining classic, with the added narrative juice provided by two German teams showcasing their European Cup swagger at Wembley stadium. To the credit of many of the English papers this morning, most of the big dailies-perhaps out of consideration of the fact their audiences now reach well beyond Blighty-have acknowledged there will be a final tomorrow. The Guardian has even tasked renowned German football expert Barney Ronay with running a live blog.

Generally, match previews are a horrible waste of time, so I’m not going to bother you with the stakes. You know what they are. For Bayern, a coveted treble and a wonderful end to their insanely dominant year, an ominous welcome mat for Pep Guardiola courtesy of Jupp Heynckes. For Borussia Dortmund, consolation for their league form this year maybe, but an enormous statement on behalf of Juergen Klopp’s exciting, youthful brand of soccer.

You see how useless this sort of thing is?

Mostly because tomorrow will generally be a toss-up. A single game result often comes down to luck, particularly against sides as well-matched as these (although Dortmund is the obvious underdog). Which is fine, and should provide solace (eventually) to the losing side. That’s football, bloody hell. The achievement may not be so much in winning the damn thing as navigating to the final.

That’s because it’s far better to measure a team by their process than by their results. And by results here I don’t mean winning more games than you lose, but trophies. Which is why Manchester City chief executive Ferrano Soriano’s remarks should leave leading candidates for the managerial job like Manuel Pellegrini cold:

“I think that next season is going to be much better. I am convinced about that,” Soriano said. “It doesn’t mean we are going to win one or two titles but in the grand scheme of things, if we look at the next five years and I could plan now, I would say I want to win five trophies in the next five years.

“That may mean we win no trophy one year and two in another but on average I want one title a year. That includes the Champions League, the Premier League or the FA Cup. Is it a realistic aim? I think it is, yes, but I am talking about five years.

“If next year we don’t win but progress our football and get to the semi-finals of the Champions League, finish second in the Premier League and lose the FA Cup final again that will be fine.

“What we are asking the new manager to do is build a squad but also a football concept and a way of working that will last for the next 10 years. The manager has a shorter span [than that]. We are asking the manager to win this season, next season and every Sunday.”

In here are two demands that don’t always coincide with one another. “Have a football ‘concept’ that will define the club for the next decade, but make sure you start winning trophies immediately, now GO!” Good clubs with a good system, good tactics, and a good overall process will win more trophies over the long run. But process should not be measured strictly by trophies won, particularly in knock-out competitions often more defined by random variation (unless you’re Rafa Benitez apparently).

If Pellegrini’s City finish within three points of the top of the table for the next few years, or make the semifinals and lose in all competitions, does that make his team a failure? Are managers supposed to be so good they completely transcend the nature of fortune in football? If so, even a brilliant City side is going to have a bad time if they attempt to define expectations strictly in short term silverware.

The Lead

The crowds have dispersed, the sun has risen, and the endless European domestic football festival is at an end. All that’s left is for the remaining all-night crowd still hopped up on goofballs to shuffle into the House of Panckakes that is the European Cup final this weekend.

But don’t forget the little guy wading through a sea of newsy detritus in his flourescent bib and litter spike, stabbing at whatever scrap remains and hoisting it up for all to see before disposing into the news cycle garbage bag. Like, for example, the lowly football writer who must now track every last banal transfer rumour to ping around the eletronic ether, just after he collects snap shots of everyone’s vacation destination.

Some of these developments will be hard news in a matter of time: hey there Mourinho, Juan Mata of Chelsea Football Club thinks you’re a pretty special guy. Others crumpled up rumours look and feel like actual news, but are not. Like PSG purportedly matching Man United’s wage bill in the hopes of dragging Wayne Rooney to Gaul where he belongs. Is it irresponsible to wildly speculate on Ronaldo moving to Chelsea? Not if you work for the right paper! Not to worry Madristas, chances are Gareth Bale will arrive to replace him should CR7 leave.

There is some bona fide news amid all of this. Well, news in its embryonic pre-confirmation form:

Uefa to offer Champions League place to Europa League winners gu.com/p/3g3z7/tw via @guardian

— Guardian sport (@guardian_sport) May 23, 2013

This is not an insignificant item; our man in Parks and Rec might consider breaking the rules and sticking it in his pocket for sake keeping instead of tossing it. Rolled in with that news is word of more stringent punishments for racist abuse, too.

And that’s mostly it. The festival’s over. But there’s word of a really great acoustic show at a bar in town tonight. If you get some time to rest up today before going over you should check it out; you might like their act. It’s a little raw at the moment and they definitely have niche sound, but their lyrical progression has been steady over the years. Now there’s word they might have an amazing new bassist in a little while. They’re called MLS. I’ll probably see you there, I just have to pick up a bit more trash first.

The Lead

Andy Carroll is a good striker. I repeat: Andy Carroll is a good striker. He’s still scoring at a good rate, his career-average goals per game is 0.33, he’s would be a valuable addition to any decent, mid-level football club. He could even be an asset at a bigger team with the right coaching in the right system.

The one enormous blemish on his career, oddly, is that £35 million transfer fee Liverpool FC paid Newcastle United on the 31st of January, 2011. This fee, which was double transfermarkt’s estimated top end value at £17.5, had all the hallmarks of a last-minute, inflated deal. Liverpool wanted to buy, Newcastle were reluctant to sell, a deadline was fast approaching, LFC needed to replace Fernando Torres.

Now Carroll may have had a strong hand in this, but likely this was an arrangement strictly between clubs. By the standards of the loss of value, it was a terrible deal for Liverpool, and in some ways just as bad for Carroll, who, despite the evidence he’s still a very good player, must wear the “flop” albatross for the rest of his career.

Particularly as he now has another ignoble number stapled to his career: £20 million. That’s the total decline in value on Carroll’s transfer fee in the past two and a half years, as Liverpool are reportedly working to sell Carroll to his loanee club West Ham for 15 million.

It’s hard to believe football people would be dull enough to spend that kind of money on appearances alone, and to some extent the situation isn’t as simple as it seems. Liverpool’s former director of football Damian Comolli defended the Carroll deal this way:

“The way we looked at it, we were selling two players – Fernando Torres and Ryan Babel – and we were bringing two in – Suarez and Carroll – and we were making a profit and the wage bill was coming down considerably as well. It was a four-player deal.

“Chelsea kept bidding higher and higher for Torres. The difference between their first and final bid is double.

“They [FSG] asked me what the risks were and I said if things don’t go well you’ll lose something on Andy, but it is difficult to measure whether you will make money if things go well because Liverpool aren’t a selling club and he could be here for the next 10 years.”

So at least in relative terms, the deal came off well. And in picking up Suarez for substantially less money, a player whose personality issues haven’t affected his ability to score, LFC’s gamble worked at least in part.

But it’s hard to believe that, despite humming and hawing about hidden “key performance indicators” that made Carroll worth that pile of cash, Liverpool wasn’t fooled by something as simple as means regression. That the season-and-a-half of goals Carroll enjoyed at Newcastle before his move may have been boosted a bit by luck, that it was from a relatively small sample, 2/3rds of which came while Newcastle was playing out of the Championship, an ostensibly easier league in which to score goals.

That misread wasn’t Carroll’s fault, and yet the 24 year-old will pay for it the rest of his career.

The Lead

I think it’s safe to say that Jose Mourinho, whose departure “by mutual consent” was announced by Florentino Perez yesterday in a press conference on Real Madrid TV, was not universally liked in his time there. Graham Hunter’s particularly nasty epitaph is currently the lead at ESPNFC, in which he buries the Portuguese manager with quite a bit more sand than dirt:

Sendings off, insults, bullying journalists. Refusing to even go up to accept his loser’s medal from King Juan Carlos on Friday. Refusal to fulfill his club duties and communicate to the media on a regular basis. The coward’s finger poked in Tito Vilanova’s eye. The crowd booing and jeering him.

Set against one Copa del Rey and even what was a memorable, admirable league title in 2012, the balance is excessively negative.

Well, yes. Jose Mourinho can be quite the jerk. But it’s not as if this unfortunate personality trait was some sort of poison pill when Mourinho was first given a heap of money to join Madrid. Mourinho was a jerk at Inter where he lifted the European Cup, and he was a jerk at Chelsea where he won two back-to-back league titles, the club’s first in fifty years. Real Madrid knew this, and yet hired him anyway. Why? Because he’s a jerk who wins things. And when he doesn’t win things, he gets consistently close to winning things in a way that, in sporting terms, is fairly unheard of. Like three Champions League semifinals in a row.

Hunter’s other points are well-taken but maybe overstated. The charge that his approach exhausts players isn’t borne by Chelsea, who went on to ably win another league title under Carlo Ancelotti within a mere two years of Mou’s departure. And while it’s true that Mourinho didn’t get on well with his individual charges like Iker Casillas and now Pepe, the players must bear at least some of the responsibility for undermining a manager they didn’t like, in a club with a pro-player culture backed by a pro-player domestic tabloid media.

Oh, and yes, those italics up there are mine. Mourinho bullied journalists. Notoriously so. And here is where I believe Mourinho did fail, and where he might learn something from Borussia Dortmund’s coach Juergen Klopp, whose magnificent interview in the Guardian will stand for a long time as a wonderful testament to one man’s love of the game. When asked to explain why Mario Goetze wanted to leave such a tight-knit club, Klopp responded with this gem:

“It’s absolutely normal that people go different ways. At 18 I wanted to see the whole world. But I am only in Mainz and Dortmund since then and … [Klopp laughs] it’s not the middle of the world. It’s OK that they want to go to different places. But they get there and, shit, it’s not the same. Look, you work for the Guardian, and sometimes you see your colleagues and think: ‘Oh no, the same old thing every day.’ Maybe you want to go to the Sun? More money, less work. More photographs, [fewer] words.”

An analogy crafted for journalists. Empathy. Klopp reveals he’s has regular phone chats with Mourinho, and if the manager wants some advice from Kloppo he’d do worse than to pick up on his approach to the media. While the Ferguson method when dealing with journalists worked well for him (they fawned over him even as he told them to eff off or banned them from asking questions), Mourinho doesn’t have Ferguson’s gift of words or aura of invulnerability.

In any case, a softer touch with the assembled press might do wonders in preventing players from approaching them to peddle their every little grievance. A little love mixed in with the respect and fear among his players might give them second thoughts when things don’t go their way. Just an idea, of course.

The Lead

It’s a holiday Monday today where I happen to live my friends, so posting will be just a tad lighter than usual (leave me alone slavedrivers!). So that means no podcast today. However there will be a few goodies for you including the final entry of this season in our beloved Diary of Love/Hate.

News. News news news. Well hey, some bad stuff happened in Italy. Start there. Or good things if you’re a Milan supporter or you hate justice.

Elsewhere, England believe they can be as good as Germany by dressing the part apparently. Sharpish!

Hey MLS fans! Toronto FC lost again, but remember, DC United is worse. Okay? Happy? No hate comments? Good.

Finally PSG have told Real Madrid to seriously do one over Carlo Ancelotti. The nerve.

Is that enough for you? Alright children, enjoy the day.

The Lead

I’ve been sifting through posts from last August for some measure of prescience for this Premier League season and it seems the more things change, the more things change the same. One of my first 2012-13 posts involved rumours that Rooney wanted a transfer away from Manchester United. Although there is a delicious irony in the CA’s in-house Mancs questioning their manager’s approach: “questions must be asked of Alex Ferguson.” Not any more they don’t.

Still, there was no major development upsetting all expectation. Many smart, reasonable people predicted Manchester United to reclaim their Premier League honours, and here we are. We knew Gareth Bale was a good player. We knew Roberto Di Matteo might have a tough time justifying his European Cup win with a stable Premier League performance. We knew even as early as August that Brendan Rodgers’ Liverpool “project” might not be the dead cert some believed it would be. We knew that Mancini would go if he didn’t build on his title win (although the scorched earth approach to the backroom staff has been nothing short of stunning). I guess if I was to spend some real quality time thinking about it though, I wouldn’t have guessed Paolo Di Canio would be at Sunderland. That was messed up.

Anyway, perhaps not a classic season as far as last year’s incredible finish is concerned, but a fitting epitaph to the Old World Order. Sir Alex is gone. The FA Youth Cup winning class of ’92 is dispersed. Wayne Rooney’s career trajectory hangs in the balance. Newcastle’s reserve keeper Steve Harper is retiring. Gus Poyet is Premier League. Maybe next year the British Petroleum League won’t be as popular. Maybe the Bundesliga will. Good enough reason to start speaking Deutsch. Time will tell. Except if this season was any indication, sometimes it doesn’t tell us much of anything.

On Monday, because it’s a holiday and I have nothing better to do, I’ll do a Premier League by the numbers recap for you, a homage to my amazing former colleague Kristian Jack whose boots I continually fail to fill. For now, enjoy the final Exhibition Sunday.