Bayern edges Real and Barca in depth department
Three: the teams to beat are still Bayern Munich, Real Madrid and Barcelona. For going on five years now, the world soccer hierarchy has looked like this: Barcelona, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich … and then everybody else. it’s time to ask: Who exactly is the best of the rest?
So, the question remains: Have Bayern Munich,Paris Saint-Germain: Calling PSG the fourth-best team in the world is easy — you know they won’t disappoint you for months. Talentwise, the Parisians are there with any team in the world. In attack, Zlatan Ibrahimovic is supported by Edinson Cavani and summer acquisition Ángel Di María. That trio is supported by midfield playmakers Javier Pastore and Marco Verratti. Meanwhile, the spine consists of the Brazilian center-back tandem of Thiago Silva and David Luiz They’re a stacked, well-rounded team, full of stars who complement each other. Are they better than Manchester City? There’s no way to answer that. But I’m certainly not going to be the one to tell Zlatan he isn’t.
Barcelona, Real Madrid entered into a league of their own?
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Two different coaches in two different leagues think this is the case.
There is obviously a separation between the great clubs and the good clubs in European competitions this days. However, the questions must now be asked if we're seeing a gap forming now between Europe's elite clubs and their peers.
The question first came to my attention over the weekend when Jose Mourinho was discussinghow he believes Bayern Munich,Barcelona, and Real Madrid have established themselves most powerful of all the big European clubs.POWERED BY
"Does anyone want [Lionel] Messi? Can you bring him? I don't think so. They are big clubs with big history, economically strong and stable, income amazing. I think they sell when they want to sell. When you see a player leave one of these big clubs you have to think it's because they want him to go. That's my feeling. [I'm] speaking about the ones who make the world stop. Big transfers. When does Messi leave Barcelona? When he finishes his career."
While everyone knows about the off the field powers that these clubs have become, the results on the field have shown in recent years, too. All three clubs have made it to the Champions League Semifinals in each of the previous four tournaments, and each of them have won one of the last three Finals. The Silverware followed. They have won twenty trophies between them in the last three seasons alone.
Mourinho is not the only one that feels this way. Wolfsburg manager Dieter Hecking revealed as much this week when talking about the potential transfer of Kevin De Bruyne to Manchester City.
"You never know what will happen. We consider every offer. Kevin will only be allowed to leave the club should we receive an extraordinary offer.""Despite all my appreciation for Manchester City, it would be completely different for me if Real Madrid, Bayern or Barcelona were going for him. I'd understand everything then."
The truth, of course, is somewhere in the middle. It’s obvious that City are an incredibly talented, deep, well-built team. Their major offseason additions of Raheem Sterling and Kevin De Bruyne have slotted in seamlessly.
Everything about the current version of Arsenal screams “This is a very, very good team.” They dominate possession, inundate opponents with an endless barrage of shots, and give up comparatively few chances on the other end. Mesut Özil, Alexis Sánchez, and a healthy Theo Walcott make up a terrifying attacking group — a perfect mix of speed, technique, and creative ability.Yet, despite that, they’re still the same old Arsenal. The team needs depth and defensive midfield help, but the only summer arrival was a goalkeeper. Arsenal can be great, but we have a decade of evidence suggesting they won’t beIn related news: The defensive side of the ball remains resolute as ever, but Atletico’s attack has yet to come together. Simeone’s history in Madrid suggests it eventually will,able to do so consistently.
The other Premier League sides indeed have one or two key attributes that Jose Mourinho called key to retaining top players or signing them, missing.
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The other Premier League sides indeed have one or two key attributes that Jose Mourinho called key to retaining top players or signing them, missing.
The Premier League has none of the world's best players, says Rio Ferdinand... that's why our clubs fail in the Champions League
Which brings us to the next question: Setting aside Chelsea,1why, exactly, are Bayern, Barcelona, and Madrid so much better than the Premier League’s top teams?
Money Matters
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Let’s take a trip back to 10 years ago: Facebook was this exciting new thing only for college kids, and probably not at your school yet. Twitter was still something birds and women in Jane Austen novels did. And Liverpool was winning the Champions League.
The 2004-05 season started a half-decade run of utter domination for England. In addition to Liverpool, Manchester United also won, and both Arsenal and Chelsea reached the finals. For a three-year stretch from 2006-07 through 2008-09, nine of the 12 possible semifinalists were from the Premier League.
Then a funny thing happened: Three of those four teams stopped spending money. In the summer of 2009, Manchester United sold Cristiano Ronaldo to Real Madrid and bought the immortal Antonio Valencia from Wigan. Of the reinforcements that followed the next year — Bebe, Chris Smalling, and Javier Hernandez — none cost more than £8 million. When the lean couple of years ended, it was with the big-ticket acquisitions of Phil Jones, Ashley Young, and David De Gea (who, to be fair, is awesome). For Liverpool, Xabi Alonso, Fernando Torres, and Javier Mascherano went out the door, and while those funds paved the way for Luis Suárez and Jordan Henderson, who have both been instrumental to Liverpool’s recovery, they also led to the arrivals of Stuart Downing, Andy Carroll, and Alberto Aquilani, all since departed. The same was true of Arsenal: It started with the losses of Emmanuel Adebayor and Kolo Touré in the summer of 2009 and quickly progressed to Cesc Fàbregas, Samir Nasri, and Gäel Clichy in 2011 and Robin van Persie in 2012.
In essence, the summers of 2009 and 2010 marked the beginning of a rebuilding process for three of the four major English powers. Meanwhile, Madrid and Barcelona were simply reloading, often doing so by acquiring the players that England’s best were selling off. And not only were Liverpool, United, and Arsenal selling players to the two Spanish giants, they were also failing to compete with them for all the young international superstars on the market. This is the same period when players like Karim Benzema, Ángel Di María, Mesut Özil, and Alexis Sánchez were moving from smaller clubs to the Spanish powerhouses.
You’ll notice that this shift of power doesn’t involve Bayern Munich, who were quietly coming out of their own rebuilding period. During that time, Thomas Müller and David Alaba broke through into the first team to join stars who were already there like Bastian Schweinsteiger and Franck Ribéry. They also added Mario Gomez and Arjen Robben as the final pieces in their return to power, but it was not really until Pep Guardiola took over the squad in 2013 that the German giants began to battle with the other top teams in the same elite player pool.
Talent Usually Flows Upstream
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In general, good players on OK teams get bought by competitors further up the ladder. Sometimes it’s the player wanting to move, sometimes it’s the team needing to sell, and often it’s a combination of the two.
Now that Bayern Munich is on top, they have cemented that place by acquiring two of Borussia Dortmund’s stars over the last two seasons in Robert Lewandowski2 and Mario Götze. Dortmund, in turn, has done the same thing to teams further down the totem pole. Most notably, they bought Marco Reus from Borussia Mönchengladbach to replace Götze. As coach Jurgen Klopp said at the time:
We are incredibly disappointed but we cannot ignore the fact that this was done according to his contract. We don’t like [Bayern paying Götze’s buy-out clause] but we did the same this season with Marco Reus and Borussia Mönchengladbach weren’t happy either.
The same is true at Barcelona and Real Madrid. Barcelona’s lineup is full of the Jordi Albas and Ivan Rakitics of the world — players from the likes of Valencia and Sevilla who excelled at “lesser” clubs and earned their call-up to the big stage. Even superstar David Villa went through that process, dominating at Valencia before becoming a part of the Barcelona machine. The same goes for Real Madrid, which bought Malaga’s Isco and Real Sociedad’s Asier Illarramendi in 2013 to be really expensive backups.
This hierarchy in England got hit by a Manchester City–shaped asteroid at just the wrong time. Right around when the three English powers entered rebuilding mode, City was purchased by owners with infinite amounts of money to spend. So while Arsenal and Liverpool were selling, Chelsea and Manchester City were the ones buying. With Chelsea, it made perfect sense — and even though the Fernando Torres mega-transfer famously didn’t work, the mechanism of good team selling great player to great team is one that is perfectly normal.
However, City were not a great team yet, but in trying to become one they started buying Arsenal’s players. Some pieces like Samir Nasri and Gäel Clichy have more or less worked for the club, but others like Adebayor and Touré did not. Instead of refueling its richer rivals, Arsenal’s players went to a team that, at the time, they were more or less direct competitors with.
Today, the best teams in the world combine two methods of player procurement: They have a steady stream of talent that flows up from the rest of their domestic league, and they buttress that with big-ticket superstars from around the world. When Manchester United, Liverpool, and Arsenal all stopped spending at around the same time, the balance in England shifted. Manchester City, the team spending all the money, was doing so not to reinforce its already strong team but to create one. Along with the lack of spending on superstars across the country, the result was a number of very good Premier League teams, but no great ones.
Will an English Team Ever Join the Big Three?
Everything is cyclical and eventually the hegemony of the big three will degrade. Right now, it’s clear that Arsenal and United are both spending again, but in the intervening years, two important things have changed. The first is financial fair play. The rules are long and involved, but the end result is basically that teams can’t consistently spend more than they bring in. The second is that the Premier League, with all its millions, is much more financially stable than it used to be. To see the effects those two factors are having, look no further than the last two summer transfer windows.
Two years ago, Gareth Bale broke the world transfer record when he moved from Tottenham Hotspur to Real Madrid. Spurs apparently turned down an even bigger offer from Manchester United in order to ship him abroad, where he wouldn’t improve a competitor. In the same summer, Arsenal tried to bid for Liverpool’s Suárez, and Liverpool effectively laughed in their faces. Obviously, the two superstars now ply their trades at Real Madrid and Barcelona, respectively, but would that have been the case five or 10 years ago? Or would both Suárez and Bale have simply moved up the Premier League hierarchy?3 Ironically, both of those transfers ultimately helped Arsenal get better, since both transfers led Barcelona and Real Madrid to sell Sánchez and Özil to the Gunners. That’s good for Arsenal in comparison to their Premier League opponents, but not good for the strength of the Premier League as it compares to La Liga.
Manchester United now seem happy to throw around lots of money, but they’re still unable to convince the tip-top tier of players to come. Instead, they’re left with buying players the giants no longer want (Di María), getting fleeced by teams looking to offload expensive mistakes like Radamel Falcao, or overpaying for good-but-not-great players like Juan Mata and Marouane Fellaini. United have so much money to throw at the problem that it almost has to get solved eventually, but as evidenced by last season’s fall to seventh, there’s still a good amount of work to do.
Then there’s Liverpool, which dropped even further than United over the past five years. Thanks in large part to Suárez, they’ve climbed back to competing for the Champions League, but who knows if they’ll be able to find or willing to buy the superstar to replace Suárez. And while Raheem Sterling may be that guy, the fact that the two sides are embroiled in heated contract negotiations just speaks to Liverpool’s cost consciousness.
Manchester City have and are willing to spend money, but they’re especially restricted by FFP. Manager Manuel Pellegrini feels that his team lacks a superstar to pair with Sergio Agüero, but it’s unclear if City will be able to pay the eye-watering sums those superstars cost while not running afoul of FFP.
In sum, here’s the situation in England: Some teams want to spend and can’t because of the rules. Some teams want to spend and can, but they can’t convince the best players to take their money. Others might not want to spend enough, even if they can. And then there’s Chelsea — financially stable, willing to spend, and in compliance with FFP.
It isn’t an accident that the team in England most likely to compete with the superpowers is the one that has spent consistently over the last decade. That’s not to say that the rest of the league’s top clubs won’t occasionally be able to make a run in a knockout tournament like the Champions League. But in order to re-create the same level of excellence we saw a decade ago — or the one we’re currently seeing with Bayern, Madrid, and Barcelona — United, Arsenal, City, and Liverpool still have a ton of work to do.
Juventus: Coming into the season, Juventus were in pole position for the race for fourth. Last season, they reached the Champions League final by beating one of the big three, Real Madrid, in the semis. But much like Atletico, the previous surprise European runner-up, this Juventus team is not as good as last year’s vintage. Carlos Tevez, Andrea Pirlo, and Arturo Vidal are gone. Claudio Marchisio and the newly arrived Sami Khedira have been fighting off injuries,
This could potential be your five attacking players that Juve opens the season with: Paulo Dybala, Mario Mandzukic, Marko Pjaca, Gonzalo Higuain and Gabigol. That’s arguably the best group of forwards we’ve seen at Juventus in a good amount of time. And, outside of Mandzukic and Higuain, all of them are either 22 years old or younger.
Juventus: Coming into the season, Juventus were in pole position for the race for fourth. Last season, they reached the Champions League final by beating one of the big three, Real Madrid, in the semis. But much like Atletico, the previous surprise European runner-up, this Juventus team is not as good as last year’s vintage. Carlos Tevez, Andrea Pirlo, and Arturo Vidal are gone. Claudio Marchisio and the newly arrived Sami Khedira have been fighting off injuries,
This could potential be your five attacking players that Juve opens the season with: Paulo Dybala, Mario Mandzukic, Marko Pjaca, Gonzalo Higuain and Gabigol. That’s arguably the best group of forwards we’ve seen at Juventus in a good amount of time. And, outside of Mandzukic and Higuain, all of them are either 22 years old or younger.
Manchester United: Louis van Gaal has implemented a midfield press that’s a true defensive force. Still, it’s way too early to say they’re better than a couple of other teams in their league, let alone contenders for fourth in the world.
ReplyDeleteAtletico Madrid: If you looked at all of their results over the past few seasons, Atletico Madrid would have as good an argument as anybody for fourth in the world. Two seasons ago, they were in the Champions League final. But this team isn’t as good.
Juventus: Coming into the season, Juventus were in pole position for the race for fourth.
Borussia Dortmund: The core of this team has been near the top of the Bundesliga for years.
It’s a shame they aren’t in the Champions League, which would allow them to play other major, non-Bayern teams and give us a better sense of just how good they are. In the Bundesliga, they’re clearly not as good as Bayern Munich but clearly better than everybody else. They’re second-best in just about every category imaginable: goals, expected goals, and expected goals conceded.
We might never be able to finger how good Dortmund actually are this season, but the collection of talent they have, combined with one of the most well-respected young managers in the game.
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