2023-24 Spanish La Liga Discussion Thread

[Shaazzam]

Comeback complete 8 mins into stoppage time with a Bellingham orchestrated assist to Carvajal. Reffing was very biased towards Madrid and they got lucky.

lol at the "shoulder" goal

but Bellingham is a **** animal, holy **** he's good

[MetalFingaz]

Barca out of the Copa del Rey. Athletic Club are a fun team to watch. Nico Williams is an incredible talent.

[SgtPepper]

I'm not surprised by it. Athletic has the best wingers on both flanks in the league currently. I didn't remember at the time, but Valverde was also an ex-Barca manager who was chronically underrated for being there when Messi left the club. The match was indirectly about a real football coach outclassing a big name homer. Next round of the cdr will probably be more competitive than the upcoming ucl ko round.

[SgtPepper]

Fun to see Isco in the la liga team of the season so far too. The guy was a free transfer and unemployed a year ago after misses with Sevilla(#17) and Union(#15). Good reminder that European clubs are still pretty tribal considering Isco took massive wage cuts both when immediately leaving Madrid and in signing with Betis. Given the slew of randos clubs like Chelsea have gone for this was a big missed discount opportunity.

On the other end Javi Galan, the best leftback in the league of the last 3 seasons, has been loaned out from Atleti 6 months into his transfer. Let's see what they do with Felix as well, since the lad has been the face of clubs in crisis 3x in a row now.

[SgtPepper]

The coup de grace is it's Xavi's birthday and he's thinking of resigning. He hasn't done awful work but pretty much all their inbound signings over the last 2 windows have been mistakes or failed because of him. The best business conducted while he was a coach was the renewal and sale of Dembele, who is now breaking out at PSG. He's been complaining for a year that he lacks a DM replacement for Busquets despite buying Inigo Martinez from Athletic last summer, who made his name as a DM and ballplaying defender, and couple of other midfielders who never fit this profile who have failed to break into rotation. I think serial underrated performers like Frenkie must be holding their breaths.

Inter Miami probably has a more competitive starting squad than Barca currently since it's mostly Messi and his Barca retiree friends. Barca fans are very proud of all the 16yo's Xavi has blooded into the squad in these past 2 matches due to the club's poverty and are already waxing lyrical about the makings of another 2010 homegrown team despite the recent loans/future sales of other teenage wonderkids like Ansu fati, Abde Eze, Junior Firpo, Ricky Puig, etc.

I also get the sense that Barca is actually the 2nd rank b (City 2B) team behind Girona (City 2A) for City group, barely beating out other feeder clubs like Bahia and Montevideo. Apparently the favourite successor if Xavi gets sacked is the current Girona manager Michel (short for Miguel Munoz, which is also ironically the name of Real Madrid's longest tenure and most trophied manager).

[wco81]

Wow, what a decline for Barca.

May be a long time before they get out of their financial difficulties. But are they still filling the Camp Nou?

[SgtPepper]

No idea, they just got smashed by midtable Villareal giving midtable Napoli hope in the UCL. Xavi just confirmed he's leaving at the end of the season. It's the interim one redux. Since Barca sources it's coaches exclusively from Spain, Argentina, and Netherlands is Ten Haag going to the homeland?

[MetalFingaz]

I feel a bit for Xavi. The tactics aren't there, sure, but Barcelona players make so many individual mistakes. Players like Ferran are just not good enough for top, top teams.

[The_Brecht]

Yeah, the recruitment has been woeful at Barcelona.

[SgtPepper]

^^Ferran was looking like a worldbeater at City just 2 seasons ago.
I don't feel for Xavi much because most Barca coaches got much less and did better yet were appreciated less since they weren't ex-players. Barcelona managed to turn over most of its squad in the last 2.5 years in large part from free transfers of established footballers willing to take huge pay cuts to play for this club with such a strong legacy and because la liga loosened FFP specifically for them the past 2 years to improve the waning competitiveness of the league.
The part I feel a bit for Xavi is that the club including Xavi fell into a media trap Madrid set up (the kind Barca used to set up in 2010). The club's idiocy in participating in the Almeria backlash amplified the crow they ate when they immediately lost to Athletic and Villareal. Even now with this midseason announcement of quitting is politically stupid because now fans and players will wonder whether to terminate him early. Just 1 year ago Madrid were in a similar place from a sporting perspective. Madrid lost all the big cups and just landed a copa de rey, and questions of an Ancelotti sack were in the air. But that club had the sense to speak like gentlemen in the press and defer the decision to the summer.

[MetalFingaz]

Ferran had promising and underwhelming moments at City. The out of possession stuff hasn't seemed to develop for him, although admittedly I don't watch Barcelona every week.

[SgtPepper]

Everyone who went from City -> Barca looked and quantifiably were better at the former. It helps that Pep is a better coach and that City a better team but it is conspicuous how the only player development at Barca were the kids who were breaking though to 1st team and Araujo which is basically the same thing.

[SgtPepper]

Coming 2 week could be decisive for whether la liga gets decided or remains a slow cold war. Madrid and Girona have a head to head on the 10th, and Madrid has 2 other fixtures in the interim including Atleti, so by the time Madrid/Girona happens they'll have played the same # of games and after that fixture Madrid will finished the most difficult part of their liga fixture list from a strength of schedule perspective.

Tuchel has been making noises showing interest in the Barca job. Both the neutral and Real fan troll in me would like to see it happen, since expectations at Barca would be easier than Bayern. Tuchel has also been a long-term fan of Pep and even shadowed him for a while when the latter worked at Barca.

[SgtPepper]

^Let's see. There's rumors they'll loan him to Girona next season (https://www.tribalfootball.com/articles/girona-favourites-as-man-city-discuss-echeverri-options-4481334). The weighing scale of proof will only come in Dec 24 or future windows as we won't see which clubs the current Girona squad move from/to. From a strategy pov, it makes sense why CIty would want a LL feeder though. One of the big stories of last winter was about their failed bid for Enzo, and the drivers for the failure include slow citizenship timelines and lower odds of protection till naturalization due to competitive squad.

As for the names mentioned - my main point is that they fit within a bilateral view of the continental transfer window. You don't see win-win free market transfers coming out of the City allied clubs outside the cartel anymore, such as when Madrid really needed Cancelo over 2021-2 and Guardiola was underusing him. There is a clear preferenced relationship between City to Barca like Benfica to a bunch of the continental clubs, and if UEFA didn't have such a consistent history of corruption or if this was a different market this would be enough of a basis for anti-trust lawsuits since it hurts the competitiveness of Europe and player mobility.

The citizenship/naturalization point is a very interesting one! It's unfortunate that ownership is moving in this direction, especially with teams leading La Liga acting as feeders for the Premier League. Very bad long term.

Looks like it's already starting: https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/1ajomr3/romano_manchester_city_agree_deal_to_sign_s%C3%A1vio/

City are probably doing it specifically to troll FFP and the passive EPL regulators. It doesn't make logistic sense to call in an un-naturalized teenage Brazilian into a squad where he's competing with Doku, Foden, Grealish (lol).

From this moment forward I'll refer to Girona as City B and Barcelona as City C.

[MetalFingaz]

I imagine Chelsea and Arsenal are fighting for the City D spot, though it'll probably be Chelsea who take Grealish off City's books for £80m.

[SgtPepper]

Chelsea are Utd Jr in every sense nowadays; Arsenal were City B last season but are veering off in a different direction now. That team may be more assimilated with Arteta now but the transfers last window were way less efficient. Though I think they could beat City head-to-head, I don't think they have the depth for a real EPL run this time. I'd love to see Arteta commit to the UCL.

[SgtPepper]

The good news is that there does seem to be some regulatory resistance to such an obvious cartel move. Surprisingly the PFA are insisting on a price check and whether operations of these clubs comply with definitions of independence. Probably City will qualify for the latter since the law has never specified independence conditions beyond the minority shareholder 30/49% rule. But definitely the proposed transfer is well under market value considering the EPL, especially clearlake fc, has made a tradition of spending 100+M on such speculative transfers. I would have expected la liga to react more strongly than the EPL though considering they are losing more from this transfer and general pattern than the EPL. City having a zone of influence means a pipeline of talent who develop through la liga are now guaranteed to leave the league rather than the default of funneling up to the top la liga clubs. Perhaps Tebas will stop sitting on his hands when Aleix Garcia leaves next summer or later.

[SgtPepper]

Rumors are that Mbappe has agreed terms with Real. I'm very bummed out about it, because he's way overpaid and is redundant at every position other than center forward. Even in that spot the fluidity of Madrid's offense will be hurt by adding him, and a consequence will be that Rodrygo probably gets benched or sold.

Chelsea may continue needing to sell at discount, so I'm more excited by a potential Reece James buy (Gracies Mudryk). Looking forward to the future where the whole Madrid squad except Courtouis and Valverde are black to take to stadiums like the Metropolitano which have large notoriously white supremacist fan sections.

[SgtPepper]

Real smashed Girona 4-0 on the return. As far as I'm concerned la liga is over, and this has shaped into the 2nd least competitive league race at the top (after Barca's implosion 2 years ago which allowed Real to focus on the CL and win a double) since I became a football fan and probably means Real will be a much more serious contender in the CL this year too. The most impressive part of the victory is the clean sheet, as all 4 of Madrid's starting centerbacks and Courtouis were out injured in this match. Altogether only 1 of the back 5 used is a normal starter deployed in his best position, and one of the centerbacks was Carvajal who is Madrid's shortest outfielder.

If Girona weren't a City feeder I may have decried the decline of la liga but in truth this season seems like foreshadowing for further decline since clubs like Atleti are worse than before from losing players to KSA and GIrona's lineup contains many of the most promising players so the league will lose when those players get called to the English league.

[wco81]

But that's not a new thing, for long stretches of time, La Liga was mostly a 2-team league, with occasionally a club like Sevilla or Atletico breaking up the duopoly.

The inequality in resources and revenues are structural and won't really be changed.

That's also the case to an extent with Serie A and Bundasliga too. These leagues don't have PL TV money, from global licensing rights. So smaller clubs have always fed the richest clubs or sold their good players to the PL.

Even in the PL, you have a one year wonder like LC but they can't sustain that success, their best players move on or they have to sell them when their value is the highest.

Large markets and global following, with TV rights, make all these leagues play on an unlevel field.