They only scored 1 goal. They allowed more than 2 goals only once. They reached the UCL Round of 16 in 2016-2017 and the Quarterfinals in 2015-2016. Clubs can have surprising eliminations. Atletico Madrid were eliminated in the Group Stage, and they're certainly among the best 16 clubs, and possibly the best 5, in domestic league games only. Benfica is in 15th in the five season club coefficients, and their 4.000 club coefficient this season is the worst season by any of the top 22 clubs in the last five seasons excluding the country part of the coefficients and excluding when clubs were not in the UCL or UEL in a season. The standard deviation of their five seasons is higher than the standard deviation of the clubs near them. This is off a tangent from the USMNT.
There is no forced parity in European soccer. So, comparing leagues is hard, probably a Fool's Quest. Americans are so used to parity, it is natural to think any team in the Bundesliga is better than every team in Portugal. But the leagues are so top heavy it probably isn't the case. The salaries at Hamburg are probably better. But the situation is terrible. Especially for an attacking player as the team will set up defensive in 60-80% of games. This is why i believe it is important to get USMNT players on UCL contending teams, from any top 10 league to start. Then they can transfer to UCL knockout teams from there.
Pulisic should be joined in the Champions League next season......................by Weston McKennie and Schalke. They are now "all but qualified" in 2nd place. A miraculous series of events will have to occur over the next two weeks for Schalke to miss out. Dortmund is playing Bremen right now, and a win for them will put them in the same position. 6 points up with two games to play and a significantly better GD than Leverkusen currently in 5th. Dortmund just went 1-0 up in the 19th minute. Of course, I'm not 100% convinced Pulisic will be there next season................... Also qualified for the Champions League next season is Timothy Weah and PSG (if he's there and not out on loan).
Saief at Andelecht is in a Qualifying spot at #2 (into the 3rd qualifying round),. I think they have four games left and a two point lead. Hamid at Mid. is five points off with I don't know how many games left. Amon at Nord. is not going to make it. The big one is Parks at Benfica. They are tied for the last Qualifying spot with Sporting but ahead in the first tiebreaker. They would also start in the 3rd Qualifying round. I can't imagine anyone transferring into a UCL side this Summer, but we will see.
I haven't watched him at all, so this is extremely speculative, but it seems like Taitague is well-regarded at Schalke and might have a shot at making the 1st team for next year. I also wonder about Miazga. It seems like he's ready for a step up from Vitesse. That likely wouldn't be to a UCL team from one of the big 4 leagues, but maybe a Dutch or Belgian UCL team would be interested.
Yes, as soon as I posted I thought it possible that Miazga could move or be on the bench at Chelsea. Probably won't go to a UCL team, but maybe a Top 4 team in the Europa League? It is possible he is bought by a UCL team like Eindhoven. Taitague seems to have Hyndman disease, in that he keeps getting hurt a lot and at the wrong times.
I don't think it really matters whether Taitague is injured now. He's played over 2000 minutes for their U-19 squad, I think they've already made a decision. It seems like Taitague is in a battle for a spot with Goller. The knocks on Taitague are his end product is very underwhelming, the knocks on Goller are that his performances are very inconsistent and he's physically weak. I can't imagine both get a contract, there's also a chance neither do. It seems like Kubler and Kruger are near locks for a contract, and then there's also a decent chance Czyborra gets a contract, and outside chances for Weiner and Fleckstein. Kutucu who plays all along the front four is supposed to move up to the first team next year from the '00 year (he already was given a contract to wade off Monaco interest), so they could just decide not to promote either Taitague or Goller. Hard to know if Taitague will get a contract, but it seems less certain than it was with McKennie and Wright last season. Even if Taitague does, I don't suspect he's looking at first team minutes next season. Likely a loan.
It would be nice if there was some parity in soccer. It's getting now that money is almost exclusively correlated with results, and you can pre-determine a champion based solely on their wage bills. Sure, money is generally linked with success in sports - but there are usually outliers. And those outliers make it interesting. Cases where the big-money team flops hard, or the low-money team beats the field. Shame we don't see more of that in European soccer.
Didn’t that happen two years ago in biggest money league in the world? Chelsea in 10th (Liverpool in 8th and ManU in 5th) and Leicester winning the league.
All good info. I was just responding to the idea Taitague could get a run out in a Schalke game if they wrap up UCL qualification. He is injured right now, so that would probably be no. Hyndman-esque.
Focusing on one part of the pyramid and saying it should be made more like American salary cap sports is missing the point. Parity is gained by going up the pyramid. Those teams like BM, RM, Barca, ManU, ManCity outspend their domestic leagues but then are on more equal footing in the UCL. Big money flop? PSG? Low money team overperforming? Roma, Liverpool? Last year it was PSG again flopping, and Munich thanks to terrible ref, and Monaco was in the Semis. That is why there is really one major league in Soccer, the Champions League. Everything else is a step in the ladder to it. Which is why we need our players playing there.
I said nothing of the kind - just that some more parity would be nice. The phrase "parity is gained by going up the pyramid" is a bit self-fulfilling; "Teams are more equal if you focus only on the top teams and don't include the lower teams" - well ... yeah. Of the eight teams in the UCL quarterfinals, seven of them rank in the top 20 clubs in terms of average annual salary. The exception is Sevilla, which ranks 21st. While relatively speaking, Roma and Liverpool have lower wage bills than Madrid and Bayern, they're still very much among the biggest spenders in the world. They're the 1% of the 1% - hardly low-money teams. European soccer is not a sport for parity; it's a sport in which upwards mobility means a very high bar for entry at each level, in terms of both amount of money invested and amount of years of consistent success required. It's also a sport with a very large margin of safety for a top team to fall from grace - even if a team like Chelsea has a bad year, they'll have the money, investment, infrastructure, and connections to bounce back quickly. And that's all fine. I'm perfectly entertained with the product as it is now. But it still would be nice to see moments like Leicester happening more frequently at high-level European soccer - even in the Champions League, perhaps. We consider Roma making the quarterfinals with the 17th-highest wage bill in Europe to be an upset. And it truly is. I'm saying - it would be nice if that was a little less of a surprise. (*As a disclaimer, these numbers aren't complete - it's from Global Sports Salaries Survey 2017, which only includes EPL, La Liga, Serie A, Ligue 1, Bundesliga, Scottish Premiership, MLS, China, and J-League. So, it doesn't include teams like Porto, Basel, Shakhtar Donetsk, and Besiktas, who were all in the UCL Round of 16. I would note, all the other teams in the UCL R16 were in the top 20 soccer clubs of the GSSS report - except, again, Sevilla, which was 21st.) I did exaggerate though - your wage bill is not an absolute indicator of success. Plenty of teams overspend and fail. West Ham is 13th in the GSSS rankings, and they're 15th in the league table. So it seems while money is increasingly a requirement for success, it's not sufficient to attain it. Poor West Ham. They're really getting nothing for their money.
Why? Isn't it their fault if the players they think will be good aren't good? Shouldn't you feel sorry for the clubs who will never have much money to spend?
This whole premise strikes me as simply too arbitrary. I would not suggest that a place on some random UCL group stage team from some secondary league (player and manager and play-style fit considerations aside, of course) is truly a better place than, say, Arsenal. But in any case, this is neither here-nor-there, as the real world considerations of who a player's manager is, the player's PT prospects, the team's play style and the player's fit within it and so forth trump discussions of whether league A is better than league B or league C or whether league C plus a few UCL games are better competition than league B and the Europa League, etc., etc., etc.
CL or not, it seems to me like we've got more up and coming players than we've ever had. Which means ...... three! We've never had the equivalent of a McKennie at Schalke, Puli at Dortmond, and ...... Weah at PSG. And, we've got a lot more options for parts to build around them. Imo, despite the flame out in WCQ, the future of the talent pool has never been more bright.
Since Americans' Champions League involvement has always been fairly limited and sporadic, I propose another metric for evaluating whether the USMNT has enough players starting at a high level to be competitive internationally. I posted this list in another thread earlier this year, as a part of a much larger list, but I think it's worth reposting here now that all of the relevant seasons are over. This is a list of players at the end of each World Cup cycle who started at least half of their team's available games during at least one of the prior 2 seasons in the Bundesliga, La Liga, Premier League, or Serie A or for a Champions League knockout stage quality side. The caveat is I have excluded any players whose sides were relegated during those seasons or who found themselves in a 2nd division by the end of the cycle. 1994: Dooley* 1998: Keller, Reyna* 2002: Friedel, Keller, Sanneh, Reyna, O’Brien* 2006: Keller, Cherundolo, Bocanegra, Reyna, Beasley, McBride 2010: Howard, Hahnemann, Cherundolo, Spector, Bradley, Dempsey, Donovan 2014: Howard, Guzan, Johnson, Chandler, Cameron, Bradley, Jones, Dempsey, Altidore* 2018: Yedlin, Chandler, Pulisic, (Brooks?) *John Harkes and Eric Wynalda were playing in 2nd divisions heading into the '94 World Cup despite top flight experience earlier; David Regis's Karlsruher were relegated at the end of the 1998 cycle, as was Cory Gibbs's St. Pauli at the end of the 2002 cycle; and Danny Williams was playing in the Championship by the end of the 2014 cycle. As you can see, the number was steadily and consistently increasing for six cycles, before shrinking significantly this cycle. Wood's Hamburg were just relegated, as was Cameron's Stoke (although Cameron wouldn't have started enough games in either of the last two seasons to merit inclusion on the list regardless). Brooks' Wolfsburg may yet be relegated. Johnson hasn't started regularly for years now. And considering that Chandler has always been an anomaly in that he might be the only player in USMNT history who has not started for the national team while starting regularly and consistently in a top league for a midtable side, we are effectively ending this cycle with the lowest level of regular starters at Premier League or Bundesliga quality clubs since the 1990's. There's a good chance Weston McKennie will bump that number up slightly next year if he becomes a regular starter. Perhaps someone like Miazga or Ream will do so as well. But this is still a concerning indicator. And I'm not sure there's anybody in MLS right now who would clearly be boosting those numbers if he hadn't decided to stay in MLS. There are a few who very well might, but no completely obvious names like there were in earlier cycles.
'11 to '12 we had: Johnson starting at Hoffenheim Williams starting at Hoffenheim Chandler starting at Nurnberg Morales playing at Berlin Boyd making 18's at Dortmund
In other news, Keaton Parks came on at 90+2" as Benfica sewed up second place and a spot in a Champion's League playoff....
Ethan Horvath and won the Jupiler League today. [He's started the last couple of games.] If he's still there next season, he's another one for the Champions League.
Ok. But, I wouldn't call Williams "up and coming" at that point - he was 23. Johnson either - how old was he? (I'm a Fab fan). he was 24. Morales never looked like he was on the level of Puli, McKennie, & probably Weah. Chandler had already shown to be undependable for the NT I'll give you Boyd. There was one guy in there that I would describe as "up and coming." If you want to count Fab and Danny as "up and coming", I'll give you that. You can say the future looked as bright in 2011-2012. But, I still say, I'm optimistic about the trajectory of U.S. soccer.
I have the feeling that we had fewer American players in the big five leagues in Europe during this cycle than the previous two - but I'm not sure if that's actually true. Can anyone confirm or deny?