The matches begin on October 23. These are some great groups and I can't wait until the games kick off. Out of all eight groups I only see two (Groups G and H) that don't look as strong as the other six. Some match ups I'm looking forward to have to be Sevilla - Sampdoria, Olympiakos - Galatasaray, AC Milan - Wolfsburg and Hamburg - Aston Villa.
Group A
Schalke
Paris Saint Germain
Manchester City
Racing Santander
FC Twente

Group B
Benfica
Olympiakos
Galatasaray
Hertha Berlin
Metalist Kharkiv

Group C
Sevilla
Stuttgart
Sampdoria
Partizan Belgrade
Standard Liege

Group D Tottenham
Spartak Moscow
Udinese
Dinamo Zagreb
NEC Nijmegen

Group E
AC Milan
Heerenveen
Braga
Portsmouth
Wolfsburg

Group F
Hamburg
Ajax
Slavia Prague
Aston Villa
MSK Zilina

Group G
Valencia Club
Brugge
Rosenborg
FC Copenhagen
Saint-Etienne

Group H
CSKA Moscow
Deportivo La Coruna
Feyenoord
Nancy
Lech Poznan

The biggest story to come to England in the last few weeks has been the return of the “Messiah” Kevin Keegan as manager of Newcastle United just weeks after the firing of Sam Allardyce. Big Sam grew increasingly under fire at the Toon for what many supporters in the Northeast called a Neanderthaloid brand of football, especially after being compared to the high-flying sides Keegan himself led 12 years ago, and he was unwilling or unable to change his approach. Although he employed dietitians, and psychologists, used scientific training methods and ran a tight ship defensively, Sam was a squarish man, who preferred a squarish style, and couldn’t adapt to the culture of the club, or the expectations of the Toon Army.

What does this have to do with Serie A or La Liga? Well, if anyone followed the dour side that Fabio Capello ran out to the Santiago Bernabeu last year, no one was surprised that he was fired despite his winning the Primera Liga title. His replacement, Berndt Schuster, whose plucky, serviceable Getafe side was amongst the defensive leaders in La Liga last year, was inexplicably hired by the Meringues to deliver a more attractive, attacking philosophy. The press, the socios, and even club leadership are now more than a bit disappointed that rather than Joga Bonito, the club are winning with that same plucky, defensive style Schuster used to good effect at Getafe. Imagine that.

At Valencia, Quique Sanchez-Flores also drew a great deal of criticism for his boring brand of football, and his successor Ronald Koeman continues his misguided legacy, but it’s nothing new; there’s been an ongoing problem there at the Mestalla since before the time of Hector Cuper. In Italy, land of Catenaccio, there are still a few sides that play in the classic style of Il Grande Inter coach Helenio Herrera. While his old club Inter do tend to grind out wins without excelling, city neighbors Milan have also played tentatively, lacking offensive punch due primarily to injury and an uncharacteristic lack of quality in attack. Just look at the fate of one of the most successful managers in recent history: Jose Mourinho. He was essentially fired, because he wouldn’t bend to the pressure of entertaining the masses. His Liverpool rival, Rafa Benitez, is coming under similar fire. Finally, even with a “Golden Generation” of English talent, Steve McClaren was not able to qualify the English national team for Euro 2008 because he unable or unwilling to take the reigns off his squad against the minnows of European Football.

There’s a disconnect here. The clubs and the supporters groups are calling for one brand of football, football as spectacle, and the managers are teaching another brand entirely. They make excuses, that the modern game can’t be played openly anymore, that a team needs to be strong at the back and wait for an opponent’s mistake on the counter. They feel the pressure of results, the economic realities of relegation, so they play not to lose, handicapping their chances before a fan has even sat down for the match. You can guess which side I fall on.

Whether it’s by choice, or by necessity, it is rarely in a club’s best interest to grind out a 1-0 victory. A slight lead in a match allows a slim hope of belief in the opponent, the small mistakes get magnified, and all it takes is a faulty decision, under the duress and fatigue late in the game, to allow an opponent a late equalizer or worse yet a decisive goal. Worse than his oft criticized rotational policy, it is in this manner that Benitez’s negative tendencies that have hurt Liverpool most. They play a match close in the first half and wait to attack on the counter in the second, and have suffered disappointing results against inferior clubs, whereas a similar club with a similar talent pool like Arsenal, that play to their own strengths and exploit weaknesses in their opponent, are within a hair’s breath of a much more talented Manchester United side at the top of the table.

Close your eyes and think about which sides play beautiful, attacking football. Roma play 6 midfielders essentially, but they are bombs away from essentially all parts of the field. They are unpredictable, mercurial and when on their game, no side in Serie A can match the waves of offensive talent that they can throw at you. Barcelona, under Frank Ryjkaard, have some of the best attacking talent in La Liga. They have unprecedented skill on the ball, the dribbling skills of Messi, the powerful shot of Eto’o, the silky smooth runs of Henry and no one is more deadly on set pieces than Ronaldinho. In England, there is a reason why Arsenal and Manchester United have dominated the Premiership over its existence. It’s not just because they have more money and buy the best talent. The primary reason is that they play with confidence that their skill players can play better than your skill players and they will punish you for it. Other sides that play beautifully? Werder Bremen, Lyon, Sevilla, and Spurs are all taking the bait.

Do these clubs necessarily have more talent, and thus can afford to take more risks? Certainly if you’re comparing them to a recently promoted side like Derby, Almeria or Genoa, but a club like Valencia with top door quality should not be playing a mixture of 4-3-3 and 4-5-1 with the wingers tracking back. Neither should Liverpool, or Real Madrid, or especially one of the richest clubs in the world: Chelsea.

Is there a ground-shift happening as we speak? I hope so. With some managers playing two defensive midfielders and a man up front against non-league sides and drawing 0-0, I look at the re-appointment of Kevin Keegan as Newcastle United manager as a return to what Ruud Gullit called “Sexy Football”. Frankly, it’s about time.

 

Barcelona Adventure

Covering La Liga from far away as we've been doing for the past 6 months like we have on forza futbol, we tend to see things antiseptically, second hand or translated and repackaged to fit another culture or another way of seeing things, whether it's to reach the ex-pat Spaniard, the curious Brit or the nonsensical American like myself. Sure, I speak the language and I can read the websites that As or Marca provides as a service, but it has never seemed to fit together, it has never seemed to make sense, until you come here like I did and you cover the league first hand, you read the ragsheets, you talk to the people on the street, and you sit in the seats and see the competition for yourself.

What have I learned? The place is old, it has a history that goes back generations in football terms, but there are Roman ruins here, there are events hardwired to people's genes here that we have no clue about, even if we speak the language, so I'm going to even try to make sense of the place in one sitting or in one two week holiday, but I do know more about it's football.

1. Football is king. Sure, they have something called futsala which is what Ronaldinho played I guess in those Nike commercials, and another weird invention that looks like water-polo but without the water, or even the swimming, the NBA and basketball in general is popular, and Formula 1 is always on, but football is front and center.
2. Spanish television, real over the air television, is stranger than I had thought, as there are hours upon hours of telebasura (or literally garbage tv), and while one could get spoiled by the one hour football pregame shows on free over-the-air tv like the one laSexta had, some games are changed and rescheduled or not run at all (like the Real Madrid game from last week) on a moments' notice, so fans needs or wants are secondary. Oh, and the announcers talk over the action just as much as the English broadcasters do on Gol TV, so it really wouldn't be that much of a difference. I even heard Ray Hudson's voice on that Madrid pregame show, weird huh?
   
3. Spanish newspapers. To get any real sense as to what is really happening in La Liga you have to play the, "let's buy all the papers in Madrid(As and Marca) and Barcelona(Sport and Mundo Deportivo) and try to find the truth somewhere in between. When 8-10 pages are given in Madrid to Real Madrid and the other teams are given anywhere from half a page to a full page of coverage, then bias is inherant in the system. It's the same for Barcelona in the Catalan press as well, but it is nice to get a better look at the players, their tendencies, what formations clubs have been playing, and all number of useless statistical data to wet the appetite. Yes, the sports dailies have their uses as well.
   
4. FC Barcelona. Barcelona is a city of monuments, the AgBar Tower which looks like a blaugrana cucumber in the night sky, the Sagrada Familia
   which is probably the strangest looking psychedelic Church in the world, but I can see why Barca is one of the biggest clubs in the world just by looking at their own monument to their city. Yes, they're planning on a new facade for the exterior (shown here) and a brand new coat of paint for the interior, but the club while very modern is all about its links to the past and making its members or socios feel part of the process of running the football club. For a measly 16 euros, I got the chance to tour the visiting training rooms, the media center and even the President's box, I took a picture with cardboard cutouts of Leo Messi and Ronaldinho, I saw the FC Barcelona Megastore and I even took a picture at field level with Mes Que un Club in the background. I came, I saw and I was looking for Walt Disney's hand in prepackaging the Barca experience. I must say that it did seem just a little phony to me, but it could just be me, the deluded, cynical American who is conditioned to it.
5. Espanyol were another story. The gritty club of overachievers that almost beat mighty Sevilla are actually situated on some nice property. Their stadium situated in the Montjuic area, a park and conventions area just south of their more popular cousins, is actually in a nice part of town, or at least as nice for different reasons as Barca, but the stadium while it was renovated for the Barcelona Olympics looks much worse for wear. The Espanyol supporters I talked to pretty much agreed that they were counting the days until their new stadium was built. I don't know though, maybe it's different on match days at Barca, but I got a better vibe at Espanyol. As one of the supporters told me, "It's easy to be a Barcelona fan, their stadium is beautiful, they win, you expect them to, but here at Espanyol you suffer, sometimes waiting for that goal that might keep you from being relegated on the last day of the season." And I told him, yeah but when you get one goal away from winning the UEFA Cup it seems all the sweeter no? He said he'd rather have won than had any moral victories.

I guess there's a story in there somewhere, that the League is as vibrant at ground level as we see on television, and that maybe you need to get out of your comfort zone and travel, see the sights for yourself and not just be spoon fed team or a league.

Here's Forza Futbol's Best Eleven as mentioned on our week 12 podcast or Year End Review of La Liga!


Hannah my 11:

Top 11 of the Season 4-3-3~


F: Fredi Kanoute 
F: Ruud Van Nistelrooy F: Tamudo


MF: Leonel Messi
 MF: Ivan De La Pena
 MF: Jesus Navas


FB: Milito FB: Alves 
CB: Puyol CB: Javi Navarro


GK: Palop

Sub - F: David Villa


Mando's Top 11-

Top 11 of the Season 4-4-2~*

F: Fredi Kanoute

F:
Ruud Van Nistelrooy

MF:
Leonel Messi

MF:
Ivan De La Pena

MF:
Juan Arango

MF:
Ronaldinho

FB:
Dani Alves

FB: Goleo

CB:
Mophead

CB: Javi Navarro

GK:
Palop



Elisa's Best 11***

Top 11 of the Season 4-4-2~*

In goal-
GK Casillas(MAD)

In defense-
LB Miguel Torres (MAD)
CB Ayala (VAL)
CB Gabi Milito (ZAR)
RB Alves (SEV)

In the midfield-
M Ibagaza (MAL)
M Ivan De La Peña (ESP)
M Lionel Messi (BAR)
M Jesus Navas (SEV)

In attack-
F Van Nistelrooy (MAD)
F Diego Milito (ZAR)

Subs/Honorable Mentions- Palop (SEV), Pires (VIL), Tamudo (ESP), David Silva (VAL), Zambrotta (BAR), Kanoute (SEV), Cazorla (REC), David Villa (VAL)

Do you agree? What is your Best 11?  Let us know!  We want to hear from you!

Forza Futbol podcast week 12 is now available for your listening pleasure!

Special Edition - Vamos La Liga - our Yearend Review of the Spanish League

We review the Highs and Lows on a Team by Team basis.

At last! We roll out the red carpet and dish out our Best and Worst Awards!

Team of the Season - Best and Worst
Player of the season - Best and Worst
Best and Worst Signing or Transfer
Coach of the year - Best and Worst
Best and Worst Game
Best Goal
Best and Worst Rumor
Best and Worst Italian player playing abroad
Best and Worst Hair
Best and Worst Kit
Who's Hot and Who's Not
Top 11 of the Season

We also briefly highlight some Copa America games.

You can listen to Forza Futbol on myspace, itunes, or podbean.com. Check out our Facebook page or Oleole.com page.

Email us your comments at forza.futbol@yahoo.com

 

 

In this episode we discuss- 

La Liga Round 37 - the title race is on -Real Zaragoza v Real Madrid, Barcelona v Espanyol, Mallorca v Sevilla, best of the rest, and as the relegation battle turns...

Internationals round up (España v Liechenstein, Lithuania v Italia and England v Estonia)

Serie A and La Liga- transfer rumors, news and gossip aka silly season gone wild!

You can listen to us on myspace, subscribe to Itunes or download the podcast on Podbean.com.

Be our friend on myspace, check out our forzafutbol page on oleole.com, or our facebook page!

Send us your feedback and comments at forza.futbol@yahoo.com.  Comment on itunes and tell your friends about our weekly podcast!

 

Gracias y ciao*