THE PANDEMIC may be having an unexpected impact on the football management sector in that fewer managers have been sacked so far in 2020-21. With the Premier League at the halfway stage, only one manager, West Bromwich Albion’s Slaven Bilic, has departed in a mid-season taxi. There will surely be more to come, but the […]
THE WORST kept secret in European football became reality as Mauricio Pochettino took the plunge and joined Paris Saint-Germain on an 18-month contract. Why 18 months (with an option for a further year), you might ask, is there not enough confidence in the deal to give the former Tottenham manager a longer-term contract? Let’s face […]
SOMETHING strange is happening this season, a curious set of events very much in keeping with the peculiar world we are watching behind our surgical masks. The Champions League last 16 has a familiar look, as it always does, but among the usual suspects there is not a single league leader. Early season tables are […]
IT MAY be a clash of the titans, but Paris Saint-Germain go into their first UEFA Champions League final on August 23 as the underdogs, a role they are relatively unaccustomed to, such has been their dominance of French football. Bayern Munich, meanwhile, judging by their form in the competition and in post-lockdown Germany, are […]
AND SO, UEFA gets the final it probably hoped for, the emerging force of Paris Saint-Germain against German aristrocrats Bayern Munich. New versus old money. It will be the first time since 1997-98 that two teams have reached the final having qualified for the competition as champions. The fact a team does not have to […]
FOR RB LEIPZIG it was probably a semi-final too soon, for Paris Saint-Germain, the accumulated experience of a series of setbacks and slip-ups finally came good. Now only Lyon or Bayern Munich stand in their way of achieving what Qatar Sports Investments have strived for all along, the biggest prize in European football. There were […]
PARIS SAINT-GERMAIN’s last-ditch victory over Atalanta, as exciting as it was, provided further proof there is nothing more compelling than sudden death knockout football. It gives us shocks, minor surprises, a sense of urgency and high tension. PSG may have won, but they were literally just a couple of minutes away from a transformational result […]
THIS COULD be the year in which one of the clubs that has had its eyes on the UEFA Champions League for the past decade could finally lift the trophy they all covet. With Manchester City reprieved from a two-year ban, which had greater implications than an absence of UCL football, they can go into […]
IF Paris Saint-Germain were not such a cast-iron certainty for the Ligue 1 title, then the French football authorities might not have been so hasty to call time on the 2019-20 season. Actually, PSG were “only” 12 points ahead, so in theory, somebody could have caught them in the last 10 games, but it is […]
