“The best and worst of the weekend’s Spanish football, in handy tapas-sized dishes…” (Four Four Two)

“The footballing floater that the Spanish team have been trying to flush down the U-bend is a now a problem that Barcelona are suffering from too – the inability to finish games off. It eventually took a late Fernando Llorente winner against Scotland to pick up the three points for Vicente Del Bosque’s men after Spain trotted to an easy 2-0 lead. However, the Barça side which contributes the bulk of La Selección’s stars have not been so lucky this season.” (Football 365)

“With Barcelona and Real Madrid hogging every inch of Spain’s media duvet, it’s easy to get the impression that la Liga shares the philosophical poser of whether falling trees make any noise when there’s no-one around to hear them. For the most part, news of managerial hirings and firings, injuries or even matches taking place far from the attention-demanding duo are covered by a couple of sentences stuck away on page 37 of the country’s main sporting pages.” (Football 365)

“At times it seemed that the players during Manchester United’s Champions League clash at Valencia were on some kind of pre-planned go-slow. It could have been a lot worse, though. Some of them could have actually been on strike. Wednesday was General Strike day in Spain, 24 hours of action called by the country’s main unions in protest over the government’s austerity measures and planned changes to the employment laws, which it claims are required to tackle the country’s debt and improve the crippling 22% unemployment rate.” (Football 365)

“The first managerial firing in la Primera wasn’t José Aurelio Gay, coach of bottom-of-the-table Zaragoza who are still without a win in the new campaign. Nor was it the mournful figure of Miguel Angel Lotina, whose unabashed love of a 5-5-0 formation now sees his Deportivo team failing to score a single goal from open play in six league games, with just two wins in 18, and so brain-shatteringly dull to watch you’d think you’d chosen Alan Shearer’s dream-state as the location for an ‘inception’ attempt.” (Football 365)

“Those who suggest – often quite forcibly – that LLL has absolutely no clue about anything are probably quite right. The blog went to bed (extremely late thanks to evil Spanish TV bosses) having watched an unspectacular but perfunctory 3-0 win for Real Madrid against Espanyol. ‘No story here,’ thought LLL. ‘Ten points from 12. Team still gelling but winning nonetheless. Benzema scoring. Higuaín scoring. Ronaldo scoring. And passing, too. Nothing to see. Move along, now.’” (FourFourTwo)

“Well, LLL didn’t see that one coming and anyone else who predicted Barcelona being butt-rumbled at the Camp Nou is a liar, liar, pants of fire – apart from Hércules coach, Esteban Vigo, who seemed fairly confident of pulling something spectacular off before the game. Vigo apparently showed DVD’s of the Inter v Barça clashes from last season’s Champions League as inspiration ahead of the game and it seemed to do the trick with Hércules hustling away in midfield and counter-attacking with some panache.” (FourFourTwo)


“La Liga Loca may be fairly ambivalent to the whole concept of international football – a bit like the Europa League, but not as high-octane – but it really looks forward to the break in the domestic game it demands. First off, Deportivo won’t be playing. Second, the blog generally has less work to do. Third, the four main sports papers cranking up the batsh*t-o-meter to a billion is guaranteed. Marca has been leading the way in the loony stakes, this week. Of course.” (FourFourTwo)

“Hope you had a good summer, and can enjoy what’s left of it – or depending on your hemisphere, I hope the early spring´s all green and gambolling. The World Cup seems strangely distant, and I’ve just got back from California where I took the family on holiday and where football (I mean soccer) was never far away. I missed Real Madrid by a day in Los Angeles and then by a day again in San Francisco, but never mind because I’ll be seeing them again very soon in Anoeta. Real Sociedad´s stadium is once again host to the top flight, but I’ve just missed out on their 1-0 win over an allegedly poor Villarreal because I’m still in England, where it’s predictably blowing a gale as I write.” (ESPN)

“As the new La Liga campaign kick-offs in Spain we travel to Madrid and Barcelona. Can Jose Mourinho turn his squad of under-achieveing Galaticos into a winning team? And is the dominance of Spain’s two biggest clubs a cause for concern? We also visit Milan as the Italian season gets underway and talk to the former Juventus and Chelsea striker gianluca Vialli.” (BBC)

“Every summer, football clubs all over the world throw their money away. In Granada CF’s case, quite literally. One morning in July, the Spanish second-division team awoke to find that the money earned from season-ticket sales — which it had handily “stored” in bin bags — had been thrown out by the cleaner. Already racked by debt and in administration, Granada had lost an estimated $500,000 thanks to a woman with a mop and bucket. Luckily, in the end most the cash was found in a recycling box.” (SI)

“Every society has a cultural expression for childhood fear. In the United States of America, a land of abundance, vast homes, and suburban distance, the isolation manifests itself in the form of monsters. These monster do not lurk in the woods, the roof, or the basement. Rather, these insidious fiends dwell in the vacant spaces that we reserve for our bloated quantity of non-essential material possessions: the closet, under the bed. At night, after you parents have left and the clouds have strangled any glimpse of light out of the moon, you can hear the creepy critters scattering about. You pull the sheet up and over your head, but to no avail. The monster can hear you breathing. And, more disturbingly, you can hear them breathing.” (futfanatico)

“The football season in Spain still has over a week to go before it finally gets going, but everything is already a touch topsy-turvy with la Liga’s supreme beings, Barcelona and Real Madrid. The narrative in recent years reads that the president of the Camp Nou likes to humour his managers by affording them a certain freedom in the hiring and firing of players. The coach’s job at Real Madrid tends to be given as much importance as the poor soul responsible for oiling up Cristiano Ronaldo’s pre-match pecks. Come to think of it, the latter still had more say at the club than Manuel Pellegrini did during his one and only year under Florentino Pérez.” (Football365)

Özil’s latest dream comes true
“If the front cover of Marca is to be believed – which it never should be, really – Real Madrid have landed themselves an absolute charmer of a footballer in Mesut Özil. According to Wednesday’s edition, the German told his former club, Werder Bremen, that “either you sell me or I won’t play” ahead of their Champions League clash with Sampdoria on Wednesday night.” (FourFourTwo)

Leo Messi
“It’s not big and it’s not clever but sometimes swearing is the only thing that will do. Sometimes you’ve used up every other word and nothing else quite hits the spot. You’ve rummaged round the back of the sofa, rifled through the drawers, turned out your pockets and still come up empty. Pep Guardiola insisted that he was clean out of adjectives and frankly so was everyone else. Spain was suffering a severe shortage of superlatives last night. The Catalan newspaper Sport invited readers to send in headlines for what they had just witnessed and there were plenty of super, sensational and sublimes, some magic, magnificent and marvellouses, wows and wonderfuls, plus deities by the dozen, and even a Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, but still there was no way to really do it justice. No polite way anyway. Just wide eyes, a wider mouth and a simple: holy shit!” (Guardian)

Super Cup sulking and Özil obstruction
“On Saturday night, LLL was considering breaking a firm blog tradition by sacrificing its precious time to watch a pre-season friendly. In this case, the first leg of the Spanish Super Cup between Sevilla and Barcelona. That was, until it discovered that Barça bigwig Sandro Rosell wasn’t bothering to travel to the Sánchez Pizjuán – apparently because he wanted to make his official debut at the Camp Nou next week, showing that the expansion of his presidential ego is progressing at a very pleasing place.” (FourFourTwo)

Philips Wouwerman, Battle scene, ca. 1655-60
“In July last year, Real Madrid president Florentino Perez made a major push to get at least one La Liga game a week played earlier in the day to attract Asian audiences and support: ‘The change is vital if the Spanish league is to compete with the English,’ he said. ‘The revenue figures for our clubs this year will be around the €1.55bn mark, in England the figure is closer to €2.4bn. It is not just the TV deals themselves but the potential repercussions that being shown prime time in Japan can have on marketing revenues.’ A year on, and it looks like this change to La Liga kick-off times will actually happen, following an offseason that has revealed just how parlous Spanish finances are, Barcelona’s debt and Mallorca’s financial troubles only the most obvious examples.” (Pitch Invasion)

“It’s a fairly testing task for the folks at Marca to hold just one coherent thought in their tiny little minds at any one time, never mind two. But that’s the contorting conundrum in the complex realm of Raúl that has been on the paper’s journalistic agenda ever since Florentino Pérez came back to the club last summer.” (Four Four Two)

“Guti leaves Real Madrid. For the casual fan, the question is: so what? Guti played the part of supersub for 15 years but little more. His record – most sub appearances in La Liga history – does not place him on the same pantheon as Di Stefano. But in a club that routinely ships their cantera players to mid-tier clubs, Guti was the exception. His leaving is a loss more in emotional terms than futboling concerns. So indulge us in some word-association games to commemorate the occasion.” (futfanatico)