I planned on a hoax today, some interesting bit of news that would ruffle the madridistas or enflame the cules, an April 1st broma to wind them up, an April Fool’s Day prank to break up the monotony around here, but in the end I decided against it. I’ll explain why.

Picture another headline above. Flash. Lionel Messi’s mother has announced her imminent divorce from her husband deciding it would be best that no one come between herself and her true love Diego Armando Maradona. You’d believe it right? Maybe if it were Cesc Fabregas’s hottie of a mom. Maybe. What about this one? Florentino Perez has pulled out of the Real Madrid race citing continued health problems for his embattled wife, leaving the door open for Spanish torch singer and Real Madrid socio Julio Iglesias everybody! What if I had added the nice bit about Jose Mourinho having been contacted and would bring new bromance partner Zlatan Ibrahimovich. Would that make the rumor more palatable?

I know it seems far fetched. Mourinho and Zlatan to Real Madrid just smack of sensationalism,  but everything else seems appropriate, no? That’s what it looks like to me when I wake up mornings and survey the landscape; the impending transfer window that is supposed to close twice a year but never really does; the preparations for and the ramifications of never seems to slow for a minute.

Here are some examples from just today: Jose Mourinho is in talks with Florentino Perez for the Real Madrid job and it’s obvious because he’s learning Spanish. Again. Does anyone remember that he was hired years ago by FC Barcelona as Sir Bobby Robson’s interpreter. Did he forget his Castilian while learning the Queen’s English? Zlatan though wants Barca instead. Couples sadly drift apart nowadays. In other news, Cesc Fabregas was seen wearing a white jacket (better than the ensemble he was wearing for the spit-shoot incident at Hull City I might add). This automagically means that the young Catalan prodigy is now singing Hala Madrid in Wenger’s ear? Not to be outdone, Joan Laporta and his Catalan press are happy to announce that Cesc is still Catalan! Get out the blaugrana carpet for the kid, he would make a great addition to the Camp Nou midfield and give them an extra member for their new Lollipop Guild from the Land of Oz run by the other mighty-mites Xavi Hernandez and Andres Iniesta.

You get the picture: Samuel Eto’o to Liverpool, Douglas Maicon to Madrid, and Alan Shearer to Newcastle, all of those seem unlikely right? Hmm. Shearer to Newcastle. It'll never happen. They couldn't be that dumb. Could they?

No, nothing I could make up today on April Fool's Day here in the United States, or as it's known in the Spanish speaking world as the Day of the Saintly Innocents although much later in the year I gather, or in France as the Day of April Fish for some reason, would be any more shocking than what we all get to read about daily in our daily sports pages.

Here at La Liga Weekly we don't do many recaps, we don't do match analysis or at least we don't do it the way that most blogs do it as a sort of minute by minute expression of something you should have watched anyway. No, this here blog is different. Not better, I hope not worse, but just a little different.

So, I was watching the Spain v Turkey match, I figured I'd better watch it if I wanted to be ready for this week's show, and I wanted to see if Del Bosque's side were any better than Aragones's side that won the Euros. No, I hadn't watched the previous matches since one old Spaniard succeeded the other.

First of all, it is not an easy thing to finish a hotly contested league title race in Spain or in its football colony England, then fight it out all Summer for a more competitive than usual European Championship and then start it all over again domestically the following year. These guys are tired, it's late in the season, and Spain are missing some of their more creative players in the midfield. Gone was Andres Iniesta who plays alongside Xavi for club and country and offers another point of attack, another fantasista in the midfield that the other players can play little triangles off of. His understudy, Cesc Fabregas of Arsenal, is just now returning from a knee injury he suffered against Liverpool in the league late last year.

With central midfield lacking that extra spark, Spain changed tactics and decided to attack the Turkish flanks. Villareal's Santi Cazorla started the game on the left but was subbed out late in the game by Valencia's Juan Mata who got his first cap for Spain. David Silva was a late substitute on the right but none of the newcomers had a marked impact on the game; they were pacy and involved all match but they offered an unfamiliar skill-set than what the FC Barcelona midfield engine of Xavi and Iniesta usually bring in for Spain. Spain were more direct but Torres in fact looked like he was at half speed, like he was saving himself for the English title race and Villa did not have one of his better games lacking the service he usually gets from the midfield. In my opinion they were lacking an identity and an obvious plan B.

All in all it was a win. Del Bosque would surely have come in for some sharp criticism had Spain thrown away the easy three points at the Santiago Bernabeu with a difficult away match set for Wednesday at Istanbul, and you know that the Raul-birds would have been squawking even more incessantly than they already have about his omission from the squad. They still have talent, but they will need to work very hard to get back to the level they were playing at after the Euros.

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Click on the links for the interviews.

• Andy Brassell


• Andy Mitten


• Jonathan Wilson 1, 2


• David Goldblatt


• Marcela Mora y Araujo


• Tim Vickery 1, 2


• John Foot


• Guillem Balague

For those of you ill advised to actually look at the English Premier League, I sympathise really I do, I've spent the last few hours listening to every BBC radio podcast imaginable simply so you wouldn't have to. Ignore the fact they the people they consider as pundits rarely contribute anything newsworthy, and never seem to actually have "give a toss" about what's happening on the Continent, the programs are actually entertaining. Informative? Not really. They cater to the same sort of myopics that were sitting behind me during the Real Madrid v Liverpool second leg Champions League match recently. After Fernando Torres scored the goal, the one that should have been disallowed, one turned to the other and said, "That Torres, 'e's great innie, where'd 'e come from eh? Barcelona?" And they were Scousers. What they give is entertainment. Pure, unadulterated, lunatic entertainment.

But yesterday I listened to one particular podcast and the topic in question was the Carlos Tevez affair at West Ham. This wasn't just shits and giggles, this was something else entirely. Let me explain. A few years ago Tevez's talismanic presence helped the Hammers stay up in a tight race against relegation and doomed the Blades. The subsequent lawsuit awarded 15 million pounds to Sheffield United affirming that Tevez's influence effected the tight relegation battle that year and also upheld the regulations that ruled Tevez had been an ineligible player throughout his time at West Ham. His contract was not owned by West Ham United at all but by Anglo-Iranian businessman Kia Joorabchian. By rights Tevez shouldn't have even been playing in the Premier League at all because of regulations blocking third party ownership. The presenter asked the caller if he believed this would effectively end this practice where someone other than a club in question owned the rights to a player. The caller dimly agreed and the presenter chuckled affably along. By the way, this myopic denseness is precisely why I believe the so called "Premiership dominance" will end sooner rather than later.

While it seems by that conversation that third party ownership is almost unheard of in England, if you trace the players back to their country of origin it is a very common practice. Clubs in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile amongst others have been forced to sell shares in the only assets they have left: the players. Keen on the enormous transfer fees that top players make, investors have been more than willing to help an indebted club like Boca Juniors, River Plate or Corinthians of Sao Paolo for a share of the profits when European clubs come calling. In response FIFA has come down against third-party ownership, so have UEFA and the individual FA's, but the suppliers, the trafficers of football players, the pushers if you will, will find a loophole. A Brazilian investment group ironically named Traffic already did. They bought a small club named Desportivo Brasil and loaned out their players out to larger clubs like Palmeiras and Botafogo. The trend I believe will continue until FIFA intervenes, but by that time investors will move on buying stakes in larger clubs or building up the smaller clubs, etc.

In my opinion, there's very little to be done by not allowing it. The Tevez affair is proof enough. Now Fulham want in on the legal action, so does Neil Warnock who managed his hometown Blades, and both want compensation for lost revenue and wages. Leeds United is suing Sheffield United for transfer fees owed and both Preston North End and West Bromwich Albion have similar claims. Even Wigan Athletic are monitoring a situation that has set a dangerous legal precedent that could have just as easily been avoided.

This week on Forza Futbol Mando is joined by Kevin and Gene. Together they review the latest from Serie A and La Liga.

Let me get this straight, before anyone begins to trash me here, I come to praise Juan Roman Riquelme not to bury him. This is a guy whose career I've been following since his first time through with Boca Juniors, a club I admire and follow intently, a club that has certainly held a place in the heart for Argentine National Team coach Diego Armando Maradona as well. Well, this past week the fit hit the shan again for our boy Riquelme. For the second time since the last World Cup, he has quit the albiceleste in a tantrum that has put him at odds with teammates, the Argentine public and even God himself; well at least the short, legendary Argentinean #10 variety.

The timeline is kind of hazy, apparently Don Diego has been assembling his squad step by step, bringing in his boys slowly, judging the effectiveness of Aguero, the fitness of Messi or the dedication of a Tevez. He made low-key Mascherano his captain, dropped out of form Cambiasso, and has made it well known that players like Veron and Riquelme were in his plans. All along though, like Basile and Pekerman before him, Maradona has had do deal with the whispers of the anti-Riquelme camp. “He doesn't track back, he has no pace, he's a left-over from a different time, a luxury player”; all of the same criticisms that have been bubbling under the surface for years and in a sense the focal point for this Argentinean generations' lack of success on the world stage.

With that in mind, and knowing that Riquelme had been left out of a recent friendly against France, Diego was asked by reporters if he still featured Roman in his plans. Sure, he responded, but he wanted a certain level of commitment from all of his players. He wanted players who gave their all for the shirt.

Now, that doesn't seem like an inflammatory enough public statement to set off the Boca primadonna to me, but there had to be some other context, a reference to some private spat that had been seething in the background, that led Riquelme to not only quit, but hit the revered Diego on the way out, "We don't think the same way. We don't share the same codes of ethics. While he is the coach of the national team, we can't work together."

I drew this in and all along I kept thinking about his past scrapes. First with management in Barcelona, then with Manuel Pellegrini at Villareal. It was pattern of behavior, two separate standards for some players and Riquelme, a petulance that had been rewarded at club level by Boca Juniors, by Basile and Pekerman internationally, but was unacceptable at a big-time European club like FC Barcelona.

His talent is still drawing admirers; from Newcastle United and Benfica this week alone. Hell, I admire the guy as a player, there is nothing to me more important in the game than a player that sees the field in its entirety, the ebb and flow of a group of players, and his passing is a sheer joy to watch, but when he under-performs and doesn't get his way, Riquelme can be a cancer that spreads through the entirety of a club. Is it any wonder that Villareal played better without Roman? Can Argentina afford to again hand the keys to their Ferrari to this temperamental and flawed genius? As much as it pains me to say, but modern clubs cannot have one axis from which everything runs, one point of attack and an easy target to defend.

I have to say though, that it's getting to be a habit for me that the players I admire, like Bobo Vieri, or Antonio Cassano, and even Francesco Totti, are just wack-jobs. Maybe that says something about me.

About a month ago, the newspapers both in Spain and in Europe were raving about FC Barcelona and the manner in which Pep Guardiola’s club had played up till that point. Despite a loss at Numancia, followed by a draw in the next game, the club went on an historic run taking all but two points from 16 straight matches, scoring 48 goals in the process and pointing the spotlight deservedly on their trident of attackers Messi, Henry and Eto'o. They were on pace to shatter the 107 goal record that Real Madrid set in 1989-90 and entered the break with 41 points opening a double digit lead on Sevilla and beating Real Madrid decisively in the clasico. Not many thought they could continue their form, but Real Madrid's Michel Salgado knew better. He saw the way the blaugrana celebrated their win at the Nou Camp. It was as if they had just won the league and obviously he was offended. "After this match last year I said we'd win the league, and I'll say it again this year", he added,"There is still a lot left to be played."

We all laughed of course, that's just Michel, but now no one is laughing, especially in Joan Laporta's office at the Camp Nou when he reads the latest copy of Marca that delineates exactly why his club's fortunes have fallen. In short the voice-box of Real Madrid blames a combination of self-inflicted pressure, poor goalkeeping and other defensive lapses or weaknesses, an accumulation of minutes leading to bad form from key figures at the club, a general over-confidence as an after effect of their early season form, and frankly the fact that despite a deceptive run of matches this is still fundamentally the same club that collapsed at the tail end of last season. I agree with some of it, but here's my list of what I think is wrong.

1)Defensive liability: I'm not one of these people who thinks that Victor Valdez is a poor keeper. He is often compared unfavourably with his great rival Iker Casillas, Spain's number 1 and arguably the best keeper in the world, and while he clearly isn't on par Valdez is a better than average shot-stopper who like many young keepers has trouble organizing his defenders and dealing with set pieces. Is he Gigi Buffon? No, but he's not Manuel Almunia; a Spanish keeper who does deserve criticism. His main deficiency is that has little in front of him. In the center he has Puyol and Marquez who are both on the wrong end of 30, and often injured joining the slightly younger Gaby Milito who is out for the year as well. Their cover in the last few matches has been provided by Caceres and Pique who are both barely into their 20's and of little help in a leadership role either. On either side of them they have Eric Abidal, who is out with a leg injury and have used either Puyol or Silvinho in the role, neither of which have the pace to play the wing anymore. On the other side is Alves who is, in my less than humble opinion, the best fullback in the world, brilliant on the attack like most Brazilian fullbacks are, but with the same general weakness that his compatriots have: he's not one to track back all that well.
2)Undersized midfield: Iniesta, Xavi and Messi are brilliant players individually and also collectively, they disrupt play and they hold onto the ball well, but they have a weakness that both Espanyol and Lyon exploited, they're just little. They can be hacked and driven off the ball by larger, less skilled players. Guardiola has introduced Keita and Busquets to the mix to help out Toure Yaya as guardians to the lollipop league, but they have been less than stellar in the past month or so.
3)Everything counts of course: Guardiola is still very inexperienced as a manager and had yet to lead a club out of this difficult a slump. This is not a deep squad compared to Manchester United, Inter Milan, or even Liverpool and they've played an unbelievable amount of fixtures to date. They're tired. Most of them even played the full allotment of games at Euro 2008, so they're even more tired than most. They were bound to have a dip in form.