A Beautiful Thread for the Beautiful Game

So, what do you guys think is wrong on the Man.U? It really isn't doing too well, and I dunno if they can do better this season.

It doesn't look like Manchester United are much of a team now. I know this is a cliché, but they're a group of extremely talented individuals, not a team. Relating everything to the teams I follow, I'd suggest the problem might be that there's been too much turnover in the seasons since Ferguson. Too many players in, and too many out. It takes a while for a player to settle, and to get that you need to play a consistent style. If your style and line-up are all over the place you're not going to help your new players settle in.

I think there are also too many players who aren't getting the sort of time and opportunity (even after a mistake or two) that they'd deserve, based on raw talent. Even Ferguson wasn't perfect about this - look at Kagawa, for instance - but with Moyes and his successors it's only gone downhill. You can't say that Mkhitaryan should only be breaking through now. You can't say that Di Maria had no more to give. Hell, even Zaha could have made it as a first-team regular at Manchester United. You can't play long-term with this stuff if you're switching managers all the time, or bringing in new superstars for dozens of millions of euros several times per transfer window. You leave no room to bring youth prospects through, or even really know what your bench and reserves can do.

I think this is an area where almost every Premier League club has done better than Manchester United since Ferguson left. Mkhitaryan, Schweinsteiger, Kagawa, and Di Maria wouldn't be frozen out of an Arsenal or a Manchester City. They'd play at least enough to show what they can do and afford everyone else in those positions a rest, and to improve and learn the way the team works. They wouldn't get thrown in, then benched after a mistake or two, then left out for a long while, and finally sold.

Russian MPs accusing FIFA 17 of LGBT propaganda.

Looks like WC 2018 is on the right way. It's going to be such a purr-teeh.

Also, for Quag: apparently it seems that Anthony Lopes, who got hit by firecrackers on saturday during a game in Metz, won't suffer any lasting eardrum trauma - he got hit by a case of "traumatic deafness".

edited 5th Dec '16 8:11:22 AM by Julep

So, you wanted intel about fraud coming from clubs instead of individuals? There you go.

In this story, the "guiltiest" party seems to be Cyprus' Apollon Limassol followed by Belgium's Mouscron, but it looks like Chelsea was nice enough to let its prestige be used to artificially boost the market value of a player (after all, if Chelsea is after him, he must be good?) - and it seems that a close friend of Abramovich is very influent in both Limassol and Mouscron.

Unrelated: Guardian writer Gregg Bakowski caught for "excessive snarking" while discussing hypothetical transfers.

edited 5th Dec '16 9:26:33 AM by Julep

Garth Crooks' "Team of the Week" selections for BBC Sport are often the stuff of cult fandom that people usually set aside for something like Birdemic, like the bizarre time early last season when he rolled out a weirdly mushroom cloud-shaped 3-1-1-5 / 3-1-3-3 formation◊, immediately followed up a week later with an inverse of that same formation which for some reason deployed Kevin De Bruyne as a holding midfielder and Alexis Sanchez as a left wingback.◊

This week's lineup published earlier today would seem fairly reasonable while making the most of the now-"fashionable" 3-4-3 formation◊ ...except Crooks' main reason for including David Luiz is credit for a goal assist that Luiz didn't actually make.

EDIT: The other day, you insisted on explicit evidence of clubs deliberately avoiding paying business taxes on their revenue. This is not that.

Where does anything here even infer Chelsea had direct involvement (even directly benefitting from a player's "boosted market value", as you put it)? All I'm gathering from this is yet another story about separate individuals playing their own shady game.

edited 5th Dec '16 10:14:45 AM by SeanMurrayI

TAS denied lenience to Blatter, so his punishment holds on.

It's fraud, not tax evasion. Also it's day 4, out of three weeks that are announced. Artifically boosting the market value of a product is fraudulent, even if you do it for a friend and not for yourself. That is like "just being the getaway driver in a robbery", even if you do not take a share and you did so while respecting the road rules, you still aided a criminal enterprise.

"Just being the getaway driver in a robbery" would still be direct involvement in a robbery, and I'm specifically asking where this article shows shows such involvement from Chelsea.

The article you've linked makes clear that the reports of a Chelsea transfer were made "using information from the Romanian media, leaked from Hagi’s entourage," while Chelsea themselves never gave any public acknowledgement. Why couldn't it be plausible then that Chelsea weren't aware of this and Hagi was just a liar out for his own self-interests? ...Because Abramovich once called Hagi a "friend"?!? Are people somehow expected to always be fully aware of what their "friends" are getting up to they're not around? Could "friends" be completely incapable of using a another's name and/or reputation for their personal gain without that party even being aware of it?

Hell, it's not like false transfer stories from far-off media sources are completely unheard of, either, and they're not always dismissed by the parties made "relevant" in such reports.

Nothing in this article goes so far as to outright accuse Chelsea of actually playing a meaningful role in this, so I don't see why anyone should immediately jump to that conclusion from just this piece.

In other news, The "New" New York Cosmos are looking likely to cease all operations and effectively disintegrate the latest iteration of NASL (the United States football pyramid's "second tier")

edited 5th Dec '16 1:34:15 PM by SeanMurrayI

Chelsea never denied that the player signed a contract with them, despite it being false. It's how Limassol managed to pay a ludicrous sum to buy him - of which a very large part (bigger than usual) went in the pocket of some shady people hidden behind a fake company.

Chelsea's name is why this transfer didn't get investigated, because whenever a PL top team starts to look into a young prospect, his price immediately skyrockets. Considering that among the Limassol big names is a man who helped Abramovich buy Chelsea, and that the news made it into mainstream medias, it is very unlikely that A/Chelsea was chosen at random by Limassol on the fake resumee of the player and B/that Chelsea ignored the announcement that they bought a player in the press.

Although it's possible Chelsea was used retroactively to cover for the transfer, since the chronology is a bit messy. It does not change the fact that they probably knew about it and didn't bother post anything that could have exposed the fraud. Even though the name and public image were used, and it did cost exactly nothing to debunk the fake news.

Nowadays, debunking such an info takes one tweet. You don't even have to reach every single news source. Neither La gazzetta nor L'Equipe are fringe news sources, by the way. They are the most prominent sports newspapers in their respective countries, we are not talking about some random blog. If something is written there, the big teams know it (and in the Independent too, so no excuse for language bartier). It was not a rumor about being interested either - which I understand teams don't bother debunking constantly - it was a straight, official transfer. It made it into Football Manager.

So while Chelsea's involvement, unlike Limassol's, looks circumstantial, it requires a succession of unlikely events for the fraud to happen without their knowledge and consent.

edited 5th Dec '16 3:46:44 PM by Julep

This is exactly what I'm reading in that article:

Lack of a denial, for one, is not a particularly strong determination of suspicion or guilt, but why are you touting such a radically sharper slant when your solitary source is so broad and general that the author doesn't say anything nearly as definitively about Chelsea's knowledge or involvement?

Alternatively, a player's agents/handlers could "leak" complete nonsense to a sports press churning that "transfer rumor mill", connecting their own clients to top European clubs in an effort to create what they call in the media business "buzz". This is a significant part of why a lot of transfer rumors are garbage... much like what this player's handlers were telling Romanian media, except they somehow were able to take advantage of such lies like never before.

Nowhere in your article alleges Chelsea even had shown any interest in the player in question, except the statements from the player's handlers... and the whole point of the article was that they haven't been telling the truth, so how could anyone just take their word at face value?

This is sounding exactly like the kind of stuff conspiracy theorists say before linking Fidel Castro to Lee Harvey Oswald and the U.S. Government to Osama bin Laden...

There we have it: The base hypotheses for a flimsy conspiracy theory founded on pure assumption and conjecture in a mess of irrelevant detail.

Honest questions: Why does a wealthy European soccer club go to these bizarre lengths to help a player's handlers deliberately "inflate" his market value when they could have more easily accomplished this by just paying for the player at a high price in full sincerity? Why couldn't Chelsea, in particular, have just made him an official part of their massive "loan army", like so many other young players they got? What do the player's handlers actually need the cooperation of a big club for if they're not actually buying a player and they could just as well create the exact same stupid ruse without their help at all?

Appeal to Authority, and they all publish their own share of inaccurate transfer rumors and speculation, despite their own sources.

No, they were news stories of "a straight, official transfer" that were clearly as untrue as any other bit of inaccurate transfer news because, obviously, no such transfer took place. All of this misinformation was said to have been spread by the player's closest handlers in Romania.

edited 5th Dec '16 7:51:02 PM by SeanMurrayI

As much as I'm inclined to suspect Chelsea, I've got to side with Sean here. Agents and players, and especially the press, report transfers as done deals (or just about) all the time. The rule of thumb is, if the club itself hasn't confirmed it it's not true. Even if the manager is asked and doesn't deny it doesn't mean it's real at all. Absent any comment from the club, it's safer to expect that it's not real.

Just about done deals? Yes. Actually done deals though? How many other examples do you have of transfers that were announced and never denied to the point of making it, for example, into the corresponding FM game?

And now, a bunch of completely legal transactions (that is not ironic: it is legal, or at least most of them are) that show how healthy (this is ironic) this world is.

• Hugo Lloris gets a 8k€ bonus when he plays and Tottenham wins. It's 4k€ when he plays and Tottenham gets a draw. It is also 4000€ when he plays and Tottenham loses (insert sarcastic reference to the Champion's League).
• Atletico Madrid gets 250k€ every five goals scored by Sergio Aguero while playing for City.
• Atletico Madrid also should have paid Chelsea €3M for Thibaut Courtois to be allowed to play the 2014 CL semifinals, since he was on loan from there. But it did not happen - not out of the goodness of Chelsea's heart, but because the UEFA considered the clause to be illegal.
• Neymar got $50k for signing 600 Panini images. If you consider a rhythm of 1 image every second, it's 10 minutes of "work", and $83 for every signature.
• Fabio Capello asked to be paid $75k in summer 2013 to be in three charity games organized by Lionel Messi. Coincidence, those games also got investigated by the Spanish justice for possible links with a money laundering operation linked to drug trafficking.
• Roberto Firmino has a €98M liberatory clause in his contract...except for Arsenal FC. For Arsenal FC, there is no liberatory clause.
• Rafael Van der Vaart can use the shoes he wants to play for Betis, except if there is red on them. Red is forbidden (that one was more worthy of a smile than a facepalm, to be fair).

edited 6th Dec '16 4:48:16 AM by Julep

I'd feel very strongly about shoe color if I was running a club. Shoes are, essentially, a part of the team uniform, and I don't see what's so silly about demanding players either avoid wearing certain colors or only wear a specific set of colors to match the rest of the team kit.

I've understood even stricter precedent for this sort of thing in the NBA since I was ten-years-old. The morning after Michael Jordan spontaneously began wearing #23 again, after coming out of retirement, the Chicago Bulls were hit with two fines: One for not reporting the number change, and a smaller fine for Jordan wearing white Nike sneakers when Bulls are supposed to wear black sneakers with their red away game uniforms.

Some "leaks", though. The Thibaut Courtois bit and UEFA's ruling on it was already reported over 2-and-a-half years ago before those semi-final games took place.

I also did some more digging into that Christian Manea non-transfer "leak" and found every bit of the same story originally published back in February.

edited 6th Dec '16 6:43:46 AM by SeanMurrayI

Basel 0 - 1 Arsenal at about 10 minutes. Goal by Lucas, after wonderful build-up play from most of the Arsenal team. Of course, Arsenal must win this and PSG must lose or draw against Ludogorets for Arsenal to win the group, and chances are even a win won't be enough. Still, good to be ahead early.

Ospina
Gabriel Holding Koscielny Gibbs
Xhaka Ramsey
Lucas Özil Iwobi
Alexis

The inclusion of Holding, Lucas, and Iwobi shows that Wenger saw this game as an opportunity to rotate, but he still wanted to include some of the core players to avoid the sort of disaster we saw against Southampton.

UPDATE: The first goal came after almost complete domination from Arsenal. After the goal, though, Arsenal's passes, especially from midfield to defenders, became too slow and short, allowing Basel's high pressing players to get the ball or at least put the player on it under pressure. They even managed to score, but it was rightly ruled offside.

Some minutes of nerves, and Arsenal recovered to start moving the ball from player to player with one or two touches each, all over the pitch, completely penetrating Basel's lines and tiring them out. A bit after 15 minutes, Gibbs was very deep with the ball again, and again he found Lucas, who had an almost completely empty net in front of him, just as he did the first time. He didn't miss: Basel 0 - 2 Arsenal, and we're still not at 20 minutes.

edited 6th Dec '16 12:06:58 PM by BestOf

Besiktas are losing 3-0 against Dynamo Kyiv (who are already eliminated) and are down to 10 men (blame the referee Craig Thompson for unfairly calling a penalty and giving the red card), so, Benfica and Napoli are pretty much qualified, regardless of the result (unless Besiktas somehow pulls off a miracle).

edited 6th Dec '16 12:29:05 PM by Quag15

The second half in Basel started very similarly to the first. About 10 minutes gone, and Arsenal have scored another two. The first was from Lucas, who completed his hat trick, and the second was Iwobi's first ever Champions League goal. That's Basel 0 - 4 Arsenal so far.

UPDATE: Basel 0 - 4 Arsenal, still, but in the other game, after Ludogorets won the first half 1-0 and stayed in the lead until 61 minutes, Cavani equalised. PSG need to win to climb back above Arsenal, mind. Apparently, at 69 minutes, Ludogorets got another goal. That game is played in Paris, so PSG are losing 1-2 at home at the moment, in a game they must win if they are to win the group.

I still think PSG are very likely to do it, but I'm at least happy that Ludogorets are making this interesting, and Arsenal are putting in the effort they needed to in order to. It would have been really disappointing to have Ludogorets play like that against PSG, only for Arsenal to bottle it once again.

UPDATE AGAIN: 1-4 now. Holding gave the ball away in a way he'll be really embarrassed about when he sees it later, and Doumbia had a fairly easy scoring opportunity there. Holding is a youngster, making his Champions League debut, so I suppose it's understandable. Still, disappointing.

edited 6th Dec '16 1:22:37 PM by BestOf

Scenarios like that are a "You Are the Ref" nightmare that really show how "impossible" an official's job can be at times.

The initial shoulder-to-shoulder collision by the attacking player looks fair enough to me. The subsequent tumble from the defender that trips up the attacker in the penalty area is more likely unintentional... But if that didn't happen, there would seem to be some chance of a goalscoring opportunity... I think I will take the ref's side on this one and say he had a sufficient reason to make the call he did, but I'll add that it's still an unfortunate mess that nobody ever deserves to have any part of.

I'm with you in that it looks like a fair challenge from the attacker, but I wouldn't give a foul (including penalty and a red) because it's not the defender's fault he can't stay up under that clash. He loses the shoulder-to-shoulder, has no balance, comes down, and it's blind luck that he happens to take the attacker down. I'd say no foul in that one.

In the Champions League, 2 minutes added to Basel - Arsenal, still at 1-4. Quite incredibly, Ludogorets are still ahead against PSG, 1-2. Not only are Basel out (even from the Europa League) despite being drawn in a group with Ludogorets, but the Bulgarians even went to Paris and won. Who expected that?

FULL TIME in both games.

Basel 1 - 4 Arsenal

PSG 2 - 2 Ludogorets.

Di Maria did score in the end, but it's not enough. PSG are second, and Arsenal win their group for a change.

edited 6th Dec '16 1:39:31 PM by BestOf

Agreed.

Well, Besiktas lost 6-0 and ended with 9 men on the pitch (Aboubakar got a second yellow due to a frustrating kicking of the ball into the stands).

Benfica lost 1-2 against Napoli. Goals by Callejon, Mertens and Raul Jimenez. Napoli tops the group, Benfica is 2nd, Besiktas will go to the Europa League.

In group D, Rostov drew with PSV Eindhoven 0-0. Rostov go to the Europa League, PSV are out of the European comps.

I don't deny any of that assessment, and the outcome that came out of this certainly isn't what anybody should like to see happen. All I'm saying is that the ref's decision may not feel "right" on moral principle, but he acted on fair, objective "reason," and I'll stand up for that.

We all agree that the defender's loss of balance which led to the unfortunate tumble that also brought down the attacker is not his fault. However, we're also maintaining that the attacker fairly challenged for the ball, which consequentially would have created an well deserved opportunity for the attacker to make a a scoring play.

While the shoulder-to-shoulder challenge is clearly the cause of the defender's tumble, the attacker can't be any more at fault than the defender for the resulting entanglement if his part in this is deemed fair play.

As the attacker had fairly gained an advantage to go through on goal, that he was tripped up unintentionally by an opposing player should matter little as this is still an impediment that denies the attacker of the opportunity he had created. And that is why a referee blows foul.

That the ref also had to call a penalty and show a card on top of other mitigating circumstances is admittedly harsh, but he was doing his part to uphold the letter of the law. If a ref could spare some sympathy for the hapless defender, he could at least do without the red card in acknowledgement of the complete lack of intent, if not call for a free kick at the edge of the box.

edited 6th Dec '16 4:36:20 PM by SeanMurrayI

I'm shocked that PSG didn't win, to be honest. Finishing second in the UCL group stage is never a good thing. In 2014, the eight teams who made it into the quarterfinals were the group winners.

Alright, I get your point. This might be a bit "this is how it is but it shouldn't be" territory, and highly speculative, but in any case I think usually in those circumstances you favour the defender. That's how it usually goes, or at least so it seems to me.

For instance, if a defender gets the ball kicked to their arm, which is in a "natural position" (to use the language that seems to be the standard in refereeing decisions), there's rarely anything given against the defender. Even if it was a very good-locking cross or an actual shot (potentially on goal), if the defender's arm if very close to their body and the ball just comes really quickly at them, it's nothing. When it is given as a handball and potentially a red card and/or penalty, it's usually controversial.

So in that situation, the attacking player clearly lost whatever they were going to gain from the defender being in the way, and assuming they didn't intend to kick the ball at the defender and the defender also was just maybe landing from a jump or just trying to keep balance or even pull their arm away, neither player is at fault and nothing's given. That's the attacker's loss, but punishing the other team with a penalty or red card would be unreasonable harsh for a complete accident.

I understand that this is not something that gets refereed consistently, and to be honest I don't think it ever will be, so I suppose the most we can say, other than bemoan a defender's rotten luck, is that ideally, an accident would never be punished. If it happens, it happens - punishments are there to deter foul play and to give the fouled side an advantage to make up for whatever they lost, and accidents are not foul play.

This can't be compared to a handball/ball-hand scenario. If anything, this should be looked at like other forms of impeding contact/collisions between players, and the only instances of that which I can think of that favor a defender are when an attacking player is adjudged to be deliberately seeking contact in order to draw a foul call (especially in and around the penalty area). In most any other situations, general wisdom follows that if a defender isn't deemed to be playing or gaining control of the ball, then any other manner of obstructing an attacking player—deliberate, incidental, accidental, or cynical—can warrant a free kick.

That's not to say that a foul call is always deserved for physical obstruction but that it can be given.

Besides the fair viewpoints that have been put here by you two, there's a matter on my mind: why the red card for Besiktas player (Beck is his name, iirc)? Excessive judgement? Misreading of the situation? Interpretation (or misinterpretation) of a 'last man standing' situation?

edited 7th Dec '16 6:52:30 AM by Quag15