“Five games into the new-look Champions League and the 36-team table is finally starting to take shape. Sort of. Strong favourites to progress have emerged, with Arne Slot’s Liverpool sat top of the pile after an impressive 2-0 victory over Real Madrid made it five wins from five. Inter are yet to concede a goal, while Barcelona and Arsenal— with convincing results this week — have increased their chances of qualifying for the knockout stages, via the play-offs or otherwise, to at least 90 per cent. …”
NY Times/The Athletic
Champions League projections: All the talking points after matchday five
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“The numbers alone are frightening. Viktor Gyokeres has made 25 appearances for club and country so far in 2024-25. He has scored 33 goals. He was top scorer in the Portuguese top flight for Sporting CP last season with 29 goals (eight more than anyone else). He has already scored 16 in the league this season (again, eight more than anyone else) and only failed to score in six of those 25 games in all competitions. He scored nine for Sweden in the recent Nations League group stages. He has scored 67 goals in 69 matches for Sporting since joining from 
“… Hello! 
“There was absolute silence at Valencia’s Mestalla stadium at 1.59pm on Saturday, as a crowd of 43,975 remembered the victims of the horrific flooding that struck the region last month. An incredibly emotional pre-game ceremony began with people from the areas most affected by the flooding bringing a huge Senyera, the Valencian regional flag, donated by 
“
“Before every training session, the Sudan men’s football team line up together and link arms. The captain calls them to attention for a moment of silence, which is broken by another shout before they clap three times in unison. It doesn’t matter where they are; it’s when they put everything else to one side and focus solely on football. They can’t play matches at home because, since April 2023, the north-east African country has been gripped by a bitter civil war between the government-led national army and the rebel Rapid Support Forces (RSF). As many as 150,000 people have been killed, 
“Modern football coverage has never been so focused on individuals, at a time when the game itself has never been so systemic. The reaction to 
“At a time of significant uncertainty around 
“It was the elephant in the room that Arne Slot went out of his way to address. Up until the last international break, 
“From the local businessmen propping up boyhood clubs to the Gulf states chasing reflected glories, an eclectic mix has taken over English football’s top 20 clubs. Owners of 
“Kylian Mbappe is France’s star forward and one of the most recognisable players in world football. The Real Madrid player was France’s captain at Euro 2024 and has 48 goals for Les Bleus — but for the second consecutive international break he has been left out of the squad by manager Didier Deschamps. It has not been a straightforward few months for Mbappe. He has struggled for form at the Bernabeu since joining after his contract expired at Paris Saint-Germain — though he remains in a legal battle with them over unpaid wages — and in October reports linked him to an alleged rape in Sweden. …”
“
“At a 
“The history of soccer in the United States is littered with failed leagues, all attempting to do the same thing: Americanize the world’s game. For nearly a century, proponents of the sport in the U.S. altered the long-standing rules of the game to make it more high-scoring, more action-packed, less… foreign. Some of those rule changes and innovations — the use of substitutes, for example, or the backpass law — were truly groundbreaking and 
“Gedling Town Football Club was a 
“Has the Premier League title race been whittled down to two teams after just 11 games of the season? Leaders Liverpool had the dream weekend after victory over Aston Villa coupled with defeat for Manchester City against Brighton – and 
“Different season, same 
“Even before Galatasaray signed Victor Osimhen on loan from 
“The FA Cup – the oldest football tournament in the world – begins its 144th edition on Friday the 2nd of November 2024. The number of teams entered has increased from 732 to 745, and the growth of the 9th tier is the reason for the increase. The lowest-placed team to make it to the 1st Round this year is Hednesford Town (of south Staffordshire), who are in the 8th tier, in the Northern Premier League D1-West, and who are currently drawing an impressive 1,265 per-game (in home league matches). …”
“Today should have been Thomas Tuchel’s inauguration day. The man who 
“Fairytales continued in the 
“Welcome to The Briefing, where every Monday this season The Athletic will discuss three of the biggest questions to arise from the weekend’s 
“All of a sudden, 
“It was a very good weekend for Liverpool, and a pretty good weekend for the Premier League. It’s one round of games, and blips and quirks do happen. But that three of the top four on Saturday morning could lose felt not only invigorating – maybe this isn’t a league entirely predetermined by how much money you have – but also, perhaps, part of a pattern. And that pattern is of football that is a bit patchy, a bit scratchy, a bit lacking the sort of fluidity and quality we’ve become used to, which is perhaps not so good. Moisés Caicedo’s equaliser aside, Chelsea’s draw at Manchester United in 
Girona’s Miguel Gutiérrez, one of many players with a connection to Valencia who featured in La Liga, dedicates his goal to victims of flooding.
The 17-year-old became the youngest scorer in the clásico as Hansi Flick’s side ran riot in second half
Amine Harit (third from right) reacts after being sent off by François Letexier.
“There is an understanding that a league table does not truly “take shape” until clubs have played 10 of their allotted matches in that season’s competition. It is an ancient and arbitrary threshold we have created for ourselves, but it has merit. First, it is a nice round number. Second, it’s… double figures. …”
“
“Conventional wisdom has it that being tall is advantageous. The problem with conventional wisdom is that it’s often wrong. There are studies that correlate height with happiness and higher salaries, admittedly at the cost of shorter lifespans. In certain sports, elite athletes are almost exclusively big, such as basketball, rowing (except the cox) and volleyball (except the libero). Successful Olympic swimmers have become 
“Jhon Duran. Villa Park. Champions League nights. It is a combination that has provided nothing but unbridled joy to Aston Villa so far. 
“It was 
“
“For long periods of their 2-1 victory over 
“The woman behind the counter hands me a piece of cardboard and tells me to hold it up in the air if I want to bid. I’m number 7002 and that makes me feel uneasy. Is that how many people are going to be involved? Inside the auction room, it is a 
“For the third time in eight games this season, 
“Walking through the streets of Barcelona, there’s a common slogan you are bound to spot among the graffiti around the city: ‘Barca o mort’ (Barca or death, in Catalan). For some of Barca’s most fervent fans there is an almost religious bond with the club. Almost 5,000 kilometres away on the west coast of Africa, a similar expression reflects a very different reality. In Senegal, it is ‘Barca ou Barzakh’. Barzakh is an Arabic word that literally means ‘isthmus’. In Islam, it describes a stage of the afterlife where souls rest until judgement day. The phrase is like a rallying cry. It is an expression of solidarity, of shared hope before a voyage towards peril, leaving peril behind. Reach Barcelona, or die trying. …”
“The thing with 
“
“The map shows the 18 clubs in the current season of the French Ligue 1 [2024-25]. The map features the locations and crests of the 18 current Ligue Un clubs, plus the recently-promoted and -relegated teams are noted. (Promoted in 2024: Angers, Auxerre, and Saint-Étienne; relegated in 2024: Metz, Lorient, Clermont.) Also shown on the map are the 10 largest French cities, and the 
“It’s the firmly established anthem for calms before sporting storms — but what’s the maximum number of times you’d want to listen to 
“It is a rarity to see 
“
“Life at 
“Football Manager 25, scheduled for release next month, has been delayed until March. This is the first major delay for an edition of Football Manager since 2002 and will impact millions of gamers worldwide. The 2024 edition of the game was played by seven million players within 100 days of its release. Football Manager content creators attract hundreds of thousands of subscribers on YouTube. And Sports Interactive, the creator of Football Manager, had revenues of over £66million in the financial year ending in March 2023, according to Companies House. …”
“What are 
Adi Hütter
“‘At three o’clock on Saturdays, we know who we are, where we belong, and where we should be even when we aren’t,’ wrote Daniel Gray, the author and historian, in his 2016 book Saturday, 3pm: 50 Eternal Delights of Modern Football. Gray calls that sacred point in the English week ‘football time’, the opportunity for hundreds of thousands to escape the humdrum and stresses of everyday life and find a fleeting, common sanctuary. ‘What a privilege that is,’ he concludes. …”
“When Nicolas Jover signed up for an online set-piece course last summer, the tutors initially thought it was a prank. Despite transforming 
Aberdeen and St Johnstone
“It is unwise to 
“The map page shows a location-map for the 18 clubs in the 2024-25 Bundesliga, with recently promoted and relegated teams noted. (Promoted in 2024: FC St. Pauli, Holstein Kiel; relegated in 2024: FC Köln, Darmstadt.) The map also shows the 16 Federal States of Germany, and the 14 largest cities in Germany, with 2021 population estimates listed at the the top of the map. …”
