LIga šampiona 19/20

December 16, 2019

Gatuzo rutinira Mesija i onda ispada od neke Valensije, mmw :fantom:

December 16, 2019

ja zaboravio na zreb. bar nismo dobili barcelonu ili psg kao uvek. mada bih vise bio sretan sa leipzigom. bayern ce nas rutinski dobiti.

leipzig moze da izbaci tottenham imo i vreme je da se konacno poklope kockice pepu i da osvoji ls sa cityjem.

December 16, 2019

1 hour ago, copkillah said:

Da je u pitanju Atletiko Madrid od pre dve godine pa i nekako... Ovako, ipak malo manje zanimljivo.

Ne znam, mislim da je Atletico nezgodnog profila za Liverpool, uz sve ovosezonske blamove. Najzad, i Rafa je ispao od Benfice 2005-06. odmah u osmini finala, tako će i Klopp od Simeonea.

59 minutes ago, MiddleClass said:

jao kako ce Zidan razmontirati onu celavu prevaru.

Isco, Modrić, Bale, Benzema i Hazard, biće solidno trpanje Pepare koji ostaje bez Artete za taj okršaj.

December 16, 2019

Sad krece prava kradja.

December 16, 2019

Samo gledaj druze Zico.

December 16, 2019

26 minutes ago, Zico said:

Sad krece prava kradja.

aj napiši kako će da se krade, par po par

December 16, 2019

Barsa, opet, prosla odlicno (prosle sezone OL, pre 2 sezone Arsenal, ), opet rani duel ekipa koje bi mogle do polutke (Real-Citi) i opet zreb dodeljuje mogucnost da "autsajderi" prodju dalje u duelu Atalanta-Valensija (prosle sezone Roma-Porto, pre toga Roma-Shahtar, Sevijla-Lester, Benfika-Zenit...)

December 16, 2019

Prognoza: PSG, Real, Valencia (iako se nadam), Liverpool, Bayern, Juventus, Tottenham, Barcelona.

December 16, 2019

Мрђо, иде Аталанта даље :fantom:

December 17, 2019

Draw for CL, don't celebrate yet...

“Welcome to the house of European football”, the man wearing the UEFA blazer said with a smile, looking out to the audience and seeing so many familiar faces staring back. He extended a welcome to the wide-eyed delegates from RB Leipzig and Atalanta, whose presence told everyone that, yes, there is still a space for dreams in the Champions League.

Out came the pairings for the first knockout round: Borussia Dortmund vs Paris Saint-Germain; Real Madrid vs Manchester City, Atalanta vs Valencia; Atletico Madrid vs Liverpool. On it went, eight ties in total. Two clubs from north-west England will face clubs from Madrid. Two clubs from London will face clubs from Germany. Two clubs from Italy will face clubs from Spain. And, as if the symmetry was all becoming too much, two French clubs will face opponents from Germany and Italy.

This is what the Champions League has become. As recently as two years ago, the presence of Besiktas, Basel, Porto and Shakhtar Donetsk alongside most of the usual suspects meant there were as many as nine different leagues represented in the last 16. Now that number is down to five.

A lot of people will welcome that. A lot of people groan when they see clubs from Turkey, Switzerland, Portugal or Ukraine making up the numbers in the Champions League knockout stage. They anticipate one-sided ties and they are usually right. They do not stop to think that this competitive imbalance — the legacy of financial models that are so heavily weighted towards the biggest clubs in the biggest leagues and, on a localised level, towards the biggest clubs in the smaller leagues — is the greatest threat to the future of club football as we know it.

Andrea Agnelli, the Juventus president, loves those people. They are the ones who will facilitate his vision of a closed-shop Champions League, where the biggest clubs from England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain are guaranteed to be there year after year — even if they are run as abysmally as the modern Arsenal, Manchester United or AC Milan – and where Ajax, Celtic, Red Star Belgrade and so many other great, historic European clubs are left to fade further into the background.

Every change made to the European football landscape over the past two decades, from the constant tweaks to the Champions League format to the introduction of Financial Fair Play regulations, has widened the divide between the richest, most powerful clubs and the rest. It has led us to a situation where Ajax’s semi-final appearance was the first by a club from beyond the “Big Five” leagues since 2005 and where even Liverpool’s resurgence, as “only” the seventh richest club in world football, has at times had the feel of a throwback.

Inevitably, Ajax’s reward last summer was to have their star players, Matthis de Ligt and Frenkie de Jong, lured away by Juventus and Barcelona respectively. Sure enough, having had to battle through two qualifying rounds this season while the fourth-best teams from England, Germany, Italy and Spain proceeded straight to the group stage, Ajax were edged out by Valencia and Chelsea last week. They drop down to the Europa League. Unlike so many of the elite, they are a club with a clear vision to back up their ambitions, but, over the medium term, they simply cannot compete with the rich, powerful elite from the Premier League and La Liga.

The latest changes, introduced in time for last season, saw the top four European leagues guaranteed 16 of the 32 places in the Champions League group stage, with no awkward play-off rounds to navigate, and further amends to the way revenue is distributed. Next up? Agnelli and his friends among the self-interested elite want to introduce a league format, whereby, from the 2024-25 season onwards, participating clubs will be guaranteed at least ten matches before a knockout round and where, ideally, his Juventus can count on money-spinning matches against Real Madrid, Manchester United and Bayern Munich every season rather than having to lower themselves to playing the likes of Olympiakos, Young Boys or Dinamo Zagreb. Perish the thought.

There is always a tendency in English football circles to focus on how such changes, bringing further fixture congestion, might impact on the English game. Among the authorities and media alike, there is hand-wringing about the threats to the Premier League (finally reduced from 20 clubs to 18, as per the original blueprint 27 years ago?), FA Cup (no more replays?) and League Cup (no more two-legged semi-finals), as if these are the most important issues for the game’s future.

What matters infinitely more, surely, is that the chasm-like divides that have built up across European football over the past two decades, both between leagues and within leagues, do not become even greater than they already are.

The Champions League draw threw up some hugely appetising ties: Real Madrid v City stands out, as do Atletico v Liverpool and Napoli v Barcelona. But it cannot possibly be good for the future of European football if the strongest teams from Portugal, Holland, Scotland, Serbia, Greece, Russia and elsewhere are rarely anywhere to be seen at this stage of the Champions League.

Agnelli and his ilk will shrug their shoulders and say that it is an elite competition where the format favours the strongest teams. Of course, but the financial model has also dramatically distorted the playing field over the longer term. Even for as well-run as Ajax, who were European champions in 1995, five times Eredivisie champions and four-times runners-up this decade, their surge to the Champions League semi-finals last season was their first time beyond the group stage since 2006.

(Photo: Harold Cunningham – UEFA via Getty Images)

Celtic have not made it beyond the Champions League group stage since 2013. In 2017-18 they were in the same group as PSG and Bayern and conceded 17 goals in their four games against them. All the micro-analysis of their mistakes in those matches ignored a far more important point on a macro level. The money they make from European competition is not nearly enough to compete with the elite… yet it has been enough (Rangers’ threatened resurgence notwithstanding) to make them utterly dominant in Scotland.

As detailed this week by Swiss Ramble, the football finance blogger, Bayern Munich have already earned €81.5 million (about £69 million) from this season’s Champions League, even before the knockout stage begins (Barcelona, Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea and Real Madrid have earned slightly less). Among the clubs eliminated at the group stage, earnings range from Benfica’s £50.9 million to Slavia Prague’s €18.2m. Slavia’s revenue sounds small by comparison, but it will dwarf Viktoria Plzen’s income from the Europa League. One season in the Champions League has the potential to transform a club’s finances and, by doing so, destabilise an entire league. That is what has happened in leagues across Europe over the past decade.

Early in his UEFA presidency, Aleksander Ceferin warned that “the wealthiest clubs are only getting richer and the gap between them and the rest is getting bigger”. But how do you even begin to work out how to reverse that trend when the wealthiest clubs, led by men such as Agnelli, are so fixated on exploiting their privileged position?

So much of the European Cup’s history has been cyclical — Real Madrid’s dominance in the early years, followed by spells in the ascendancy for clubs from Portugal, Italy, Holland, Germany and England. Steaua Bucharest, FC Porto, PSV Eindhoven and Red Star won it in the space of six seasons between 1986 and 1991.

In part, that reflected the weakness of the champions-only format, which, although purer, left only a small number of credible contenders each year. The Champions League era has increased the quality in the competition, but the imbalance is now so great that any team threatening to break into the elite (Monaco in 2016, Ajax last season) is inevitably ravaged by the predators higher up the food chain. Individual clubs can rise and fall, but we can predict the general picture of European football for the next decade or two with a degree of certainty.

There are economic factors that have made the growth of certain leagues and club brands inevitable in the digital age. But greed, self-entitlement and bullying — threatening to take their all-powerful brands elsewhere every three years, when the time comes to redraft their competition regulations or the broadcast revenue distribution — has turned that organic growth into something inexorable. Every time you hope that Ceferin, or previously Michel Platini, will propose something to reverse the tide, the big clubs flex their muscles and the balance tips even more.

Quite apart from the broadcasters and the sponsors, every study will say that this is what the public wants: more matches between the mega-rich clubs from the mega-rich leagues. Of course it is. When the trend from the past two decades has been for so much of the best talent to end up at those clubs, it is natural that Barcelona, Real, Bayern, Juventus and the Premier League elite command so much attention. Even when we watch an emerging team such as Red Bull Salzburg, for example, we do so partly out of fascination with their players, wondering how long it will be before they are off to the big leagues. (Answer: Takumi Minamino is on his way to Liverpool next month, while Manchester United and RB Leipzig are among those scrapping over Erling Haaland. Not long at all, then.)

There is so little scope for dreams in European football these days, so little possibility for a team to build up and become a major force. Manchester City and PSG have not exactly done it the old-fashioned way. Salzburg and Leipzig are two of the great success stories of recent years, so far ahead of some bigger, richer clubs when it comes to recruiting and developing young players, but even their growth has been built on the largesse of the energy drink manufacturer that insists on using both clubs as an advertising vehicle. Aspiration isn’t what it used to be.

In many ways, it feels like the long-threatened European “Super League” is already upon us, ushered in by stealth, by making so many subtle tweaks, one broadcast cycle at a time, that ultimately the shift has been seismic. This season’s knockout stage, dominated by the five biggest leagues, feels like the shape of things to come, but still the greedy elite want more: more guaranteed games against each other, bigger broadcast contracts, bigger commercial deals, less uncertainty in their financial projections, even — if some get their way — the creation of “wild card” places in case one or two of the more marketable clubs that might not qualify via the conventional route. Shudder.

The flip-side is that, on paper, the matches look great. Dortmund v PSG. Napoli v Barcelona. Real v Manchester City. Eight ties with the promise of high quality, drama and unpredictability. What’s not to like? And maybe, as fans and certainly as reporters, we should all just enjoy them, as we certainly will when the ties come around in February.

Something has been lost, though, and the make-up of this season’s Champions League knockout phase is a cause for regret more than excitement. It should never have come to this, where the European football landscape is dominated, to such an extent, by a handful of leagues. The rich, all-powerful have got what they wanted. But still they want more. They will always want more.“Welcome to the house of European football”, the man wearing the UEFA blazer said with a smile, looking out to the audience and seeing so many familiar faces staring back. He extended a welcome to the wide-eyed delegates from RB Leipzig and Atalanta, whose presence told everyone that, yes, there is still a space for dreams in the Champions League.