I believe Brentford are a win away from matching. They beat Arsenal and drew with AV and CP. They play surprising Brighton and Hove tomorrow.
Its all good. No one knows who they are as of now. They used moneyballish strategy to build a small football club into an EPL club. Im glad they arent the only small club breaking through. :thumbup:
Looks like the only way to watch the Barca match over a regular channel is on both UniMas and TUDN in Spanish. CBS Sports Network isnt carrying it. Bad move CBS.
I have gotten so used to this. And sometimes hearing a language where I only understand one in every five words is better than some of the commentary you get on US broadcasts.
ETA: pretty sure you mean the Bayern match 
nm …
.
Oh, hey, I read about that a couple of years ago. I had been thinking that Moneyball was played out, but their strategy of taking players who had been picked up by the big teams but then discarded and giving them a try seemed to make really good sense.
Man U are nothing if not consistent.
American Jordan Pefok with the winner.
God Barcelona are awful. Frenkie deJong is the only one on that team that would have a chance at starting at Bayern and then probably only Pedri and Coutinho get any time at all. I guess Dest and Alba probably get minutes here and there.
How did you know?
He said, trying to distract from Barça’s dismal performance… 
Damn, I see hard years ahead…
I actually briefly felt sorry for them, but man, sometimes they just looked lethargic.
I’m a bit of the opinion that Xavi + Iniesta + Busquets was sort of the football equivalent of the resource curse. Barca learned to love on the ball skill an value it above everything else, and so are lacking in the more athletic modern game.
Basically lighting half a billion on fire in the transfer market over the past 5 years doesn’t help.
Very rough run of games for Jesse Marsch at the beginning of his RBL career. I wonder how much latitude he’ll get.
I feel like they went through a lot of significant change…on the other hand, that happens to plenty of teams. I hope they can pull it together.
The Mainz result is really the only bad result when taking into account the opposition, and they lost their 3 best players, but if you look at the record, 2-0-4, you image the execs getting nervous.
Yes, absolutely.
Meanwhile, Brugge played a really good match against PSG, tie seems fair.
I think Brugge might have even deserved the win. Messi showed some class 3 or 4 times in the match but clearly is still finding his feet. It’ll be interesting to see if/how that happens. Outside of him, PSG didn’t look great in general. Kept possession but always looked in danger of turning it over.
Barca manager Ronald Koeman (yes, I still pine for his Southampton days) advised the club’s fans in a press conference today to “have patience” and make this season’s expectations realistic ones.
I wonder how much input or direction the club’s board had in that statement. It’s a really interesting one in that it’s directed to one of the world’s most entitled fan bases.
In this article, Goal is reporting that he read the statement without club input, and that they’re still preparing to fire him.
This whole thing is stupid to me - of course it’s going to take time to fix this, and the idea that he’s going to be able to resume their dominant ways immediately is just nonsense. And hey, they still did better against Bayern this year than last year’s meltdown.
I mean, their roster is of a team whose goal is finishing in the top 4, not winning the league or making a CL run. Pep or Klopp or Nagelsmann don’t turn them into a contender. Koeman probably isn’t doing himself any favors, but he was never in a position to succeed. If they had sold Messi for $100M to Man City last year, kept Suarez, bought Kounde and Jadon Sancho, then you could lay more blame on him.
Now, they do need patience and they’re going to be in the wilderness for at least 3-4 years (or longer), unless Haaland wants to play for them for some reason. But yeah, the fans are totally spoiled and there’s going to be a lot of gnashing of the teeth.