World Football Postulant

Wesley Sneijder is on the brink of making a miraculous comeback to Real Madrid’s lineup.
Photo from Goal.com

One day after it was reported that Dutch international winger Wesley Sneijder had resumed training with the first team, Real Madrid has said their star is set to return.  When he does enter a match, Sneijder will complete a miraculous comeback that saw initial injury estimates of a six month layoff turn into six weeks of downtime.

We go back to the Emirates in preseason, when an errant Abu Diaby tackle in the Emirates Cup had Sneijder laid out on the pitch.  Just a month after staring in the Euros, the promise of the Dutch international’s ascendency into football superstardom seemed buckled under a wrecked knee.

Reports after the match were gloomy.  Berdt Schuster said that the winger was in a lot of pain and crying.  Ramon Calderon impetuously speculated Sneijder would be out three months.  There was the general feeling that Sneijder had torn ligaments and would be out until late in the season.  Within days, Real Madrid had bought Rafeal van der Vaart from Hamburg (something they would have done, regardless).

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I just finished posting my Week 3 review article to American Soccer Reader. Here is a direct link.  I name Player of the Week, Manager of the Week, XI of the Week, talk briefly about how the teams lay giong into the international match break, and rank the tops one through twenty.

Now, I am going to spend some time updating ASR for all the big Premiership news.  There are three main pieces which stick out (off the top of my head):  Dubai, Robinho, Berbatov.  I’m sure I’ll find other news, too.

Many may not look at Real Madrid visiting Deportivo de la Coruña as a marque match-up, but when you predict the two-time defending champions to drop to third place, any opening match is big one.  That’s why I will be looking intently at their match-up, though there are a couple of other more evenly matched fixtures which should draw attention.

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While Real Madrid has been making transfer headlines all summer, few have noticed that they have done little to improve their team.  In fact, it seems they have taken some steps backwards.  Now I agree Rafael van der Vaart is a great signing, but they’ve lost Wesley Sneijder to injury, have yet to get Fabio Cannavaro back, have an aging core, and are on the verge of losing Robinho.  Beyond that, you can ask if Casillas can play better than he did last year, or is it even reasonable to predict such performance?

Madrid is coming back to the pack.  The question is how much other teams have done to catch-up.  Barcelona has also been in the news all summer, but they made as many meaningful changes than Madrid.  Van der Vaart is going to play immediately and regularly for Real.  Is Alexander Hleb really going to unseat anybody in Barcelona’s lineup?  Doubtful.  Daniel Alves does, however, give them another dimension on the right, and he has a track record in La Liga.  Barça’s main issue is getting the talent they have playing to its potential.  As you can see to the right, I do believe that Pep Guardiola can so it.  At a minimum, he will instill a pride in performance - in the shirt the players are wearing - that will help resolve some of the inconsistencies we saw last season.

With apologies to Villareal, the other major title contender is Atletico Madrid.  They have made major improvements in goal prevention, bringing in Paulo Assuncao and Tomas Ujfalusi.  I love these signings and think Atletico can have on of the better defenses in La Liga.  Their strength and depth in midfield can help control matches against the slightly more talented teams, and the addition of Andre Sinnema Pongol should mitigate the effects of any regression by Diego Forlan.  If only one of them can help carry the load with Kun Aguero, this can be a historical season for the Atleti.

After the top five, I see a huge drop, and although my method ended up with Getafe in sixth and back in Europe, any team between sixth and fifteenth could end up qualifying for the UEFA Cup.  I don’t see much difference between Getafe and, say, Racing, who I’m picking at eleventh.  The things which will distinguish these clubs come May are those which I can not predict.

At the other end of the table, La Liga might have the most uninspiring set of promoted teams of all the league’s I’ve previewed.  This is the first of the six league’s I’ve looked at where I wonder how any of the three will stay up.  But, as I looked at some of the lower-table teams from last year, I did find one candidate that could make a promoted side’s season a success.  Osasuna, who finished seventeenth last season, took some positive steps forward and, as is often the case in these stories, were not as bad as they showed last season.  Recreativo, however, I wonder about.  I don’t see much to recommend them, and the regressions I see put them in a place where they should be worried.  They finished higher than they should have last season, the kind of fortunate you can not bet on from year-to-year.

One team everybody will be looking at after this summer’s European Chmapionships is Valencia.  The Davids (Villa and Silva) will continue to make the team dangerous, but as was the case last season, they will still have problems keeping the ball out of their own net.  Until they prove they can do that from game-to-game, they will continue to be a dangerous but inconsistent team, capable of winning shootouts while getting into too many.

In the end, I see this as the season Barcelona regains the crown.  I think they have done enough to mitigate their inconsistencies at the back to become the team that is most ready to take advantage of Real Madrid’s turn to mortality.  Guardiola will be hailed as a savior, and Joan Laporta may be vindicated.  Meanwhile, if these results come true, we may be left wondering who will replace Bernd Schuster and Ramon Calderon at the Santiago Bernabeu.

One of the more exciting days of the European club football season is the day the Champions League group stage is drawn.

The 32 teams that have qualified for the group stage are drawn into eight, four-team groups.  Before that happens, all teams are broken into four pots, labeled A through D, where they are grouped according to a team’s strength (as determined by a formula called a coefficient).  Each of the eight groups can have no more than one team from each pot, no more than one team from a country.  The eight groups end up pretty even.

The draw is fun because you end up with a series of matches which, in addition to being high profile based on the quality of the teams involved, are rare.  In the days before the draw, you start considering the possibilities and potential story lines:  Chelsea and Fiorentina in a group, forcing Adrian Mutu to play the club he owes £14 million; Marseille being slotted with Arsenal months after having sold them Samir Nasri, and potentially getting Bayern Munich in the group, so they would have to face Franck Ribery; Barcelona being slotted with a Zenit St. Petersburg team whose star, Andrei Arshavin, so badly wanted to play at Camp Nou; FC Porto being grouped with Inter Milan and facing Jose Mourinho.

Here’s how the eight groups ended up being drawn, with the clubs listed in order of the group they were drawn from:  A to D.  Continue Reading »

Contracts may not mean much in the footballing world, but the signing of them can send messages. When David Villa signed his contract with Valencia today, a deal with runs through 2014, the message was clear. Villa will not be moving before September 1.

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One of the trickle-down effects of Robinho’s potential move to Chelsea will be the renewed availability of Shawn Wright-Phillips. Wright-Phillips was thought to be gone from Stamford Bridge this summer as Luiz Felipe Scolari thinned out the bloated squad he’d inherited. Ultimately, Scolari decided to keep Wright-Phillips as an understudy to Joe Cole. But when Robinho comes aboard Wright-Phillips will lose a rung on the depth chart, becoming an extraneous third option at right wing. So as Chelsea continue negotiating with Real Madrid for their Brazilian target, Peter Kenyon is sure to have a subordinate calling around the Premiership looking for a new home for Wright-Phillips.

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A series of interesting notes from Saturday’s papers, but nothing to dissuade me from the notion that Robinho will be in London early this week and will be confirmed a Blue shortly there after.  There are, however, plenty of reports that would undermine that conclusion.

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In the last day Robinho has gone public with his wish to move away from Real Madrid, explicitly citing Chelsea as his desired destination.  Real Madrid, on the club’s web site, announced their intention to honor the request, taking a swipe at Manchester United in by saying they would never hold a player against his wishes.  And though it would seem the story has little to do with Cristiano Ronaldo, the loss of Robinho will undoubtedly have an effect on Madrid’s continued desire to lure the Portuguese star.  But first, Robinho.

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With the prerequisite Round 1 surprises, the Bundesliga started last weekend. Those few surprises help keep my pick results modest. Still a decent start (not as bad as Ligue 1), with most of the losses coming in matches that featured two teams I did not get to see in the preseason. Continue Reading »