It's great apart from Bayern - very competitive which makes for fun games. Bayern have 300m+ more than BVB every season. Raving on about mentality is kind of lazy - the issue is the players are not quite good enough in a variety of ways and you won't fix that by psychology. Indeed it was a big over performance for them in the Rückrunde plus Bayern falling to pieces that even enabled them to get in the mix. But this was not the level of team that could expect to beat Mainz
Well whatever that means, i believe mentality is a bit of a lazy scoreboard explanation for why teams like BVB and Arsenal struggle to win 'must win' games against weaker sides when the financial powerhouses like Bayern and City tend to win those games. Remember BVB had to sell Haaland at the start of the season and really that is the difference. If they had him, you might well expect them to win games like this one.
Well someone took BVB’s champion bottler trophy can’t even win that! Poor BVB lol jk but Chivas was up 2-0 in the 2nd leg of the final vs Gignac’s Tigres but lost 2-3 in extra time the new bottler king…CHIVAS!
I went to Leeds Uni so sucks to see them go down. Big Sam played us. If anything Leeds got worse under him!
I don't tend to follow DBL much at all, but just enough to know a little about BVB's history. There was a chat about them on today's Totally Football podcast, led by Raf Honigstein. And for what it's worth the word he used was "choke".
Right - he said similar things on his own podcast but i find his reasoning rather circular. Before the run in Rafa looked at the games BVB and Bayern had, and it was a very tricky schedule with BVB eventually dropping 5 of those points, though ironically winning the hardest game. Bayern were also only minutes away from 'choking" in their game - but of course the difference was Tuchel can take off Mueller and Leon Goretzka and bring on Musiala - a generational talent who essentially snatched the title from the fire with a moment of individual brilliance. Meanwhile BVB sold their generational talent (Haaland) and slumped to 6th in the first half of the season, and will now sell their other generational talent Bellingham. He also pointed out but then seemed to ignore that BVB have become a 70pt team and not an 80+ pt team Pundit world tends to see it as a mental failure because it was just one game against a weaker side but it is unlikely BVB can simply decide to be psychologically stronger - it's about skill, talent, experience etc So yeah it was a great opportunity but I think pundit land tends to always claim BVB have weak mentality while ignoring Bayern have 300M+ more budget than them every single season
IMO the failures of Arsenal over the last 10 years show the problems with the mentality arguments. Supposedly the problem at Arsenal was always a loser mentality, just being happy to play nice football. This is very similar to the BVB narrative. But as we saw, the issue was the players were nowhere near good enough, the front office was nowhere near good enough in terms of talent recruitment and the first team coaching was deficient. Just being 5% off in all those things matters. Then when our 'lackadaisical' stars declined, suddenly we saw how deeply ordinary the squad was without them. So Stan goes out and rebuilds the entire team with a huge investment, and suddenly look how far we came - but still 'bottled' the league. Our winter reinforcements of Trossard and Jorgy are wildly more than BVB could hope to get - I think it just shows the gulf to teams like Bayern and City, in terms of what they can afford
There was absolutely huge investment, but the real coup was getting one generational talent and 3-4 good rotation players out of the academy.
yeah - i think this is really the problem of the supposed liverpool model e.g. no one would really predict that Martin O would suddenly rival KDB as the best midfielder in the league. You need those breaks, like they got with the breakout of Salah
Any of y'all been to Stockholm? We're planning a trip for July and I assume it's great. Probably gonna have a good 6 days or so, definitely want to take in some football. I'm not much of a nature lover (I like museums and fancy restaurant) but my better half likes a good mix of urban and nature on her holidays. I assume Stockholm checks both boxes?
I went in January 2015 and it was my now-wife's favorite place she has ever been. You can spend an entire day getting lost in the Djurgarden, which, coincidentally, is next to the coolest museum I've ever been to, the Vasamuseet. The museum is (literally) built around a 17th-century warship that sank in Stockholm Harbor on its maiden voyage and sat perfectly preserved under the water for 350 years before the government pulled it out in the 1960s. Extremely cool, I recommend it to everyone who's going anywhere near Stockholm. Similarly old and nearly as cool was Den Gyldene Freden, a very good restaurant that has been open since 1722. Beautiful city, jealous you're going in the summer.
I really don't want Roma to win since Jose is the gaffer, but if they do end up winning today they will have won the Conference League last year to get entry to Europa League this year which they will have then won to get into the Champions League next year, so put some money on them to win the CL I realize they would've qualified for the Europa League this year without winning the Conference League last year, but still.
It's been a very Mou kinda match. They just said the goal scored against Roma was the first time a Mou managed team has conceded a goal in a cup final since Larsson scored against Porto in 03...
And an absolutely surprisingly good rookie coach? Unless of course, that’s who you meant by “generational talent“
Nah. Buying an 18 year old for 6m who turns out to be an above average starter happens fairly often. Academy player turning into a superstar at a CL club? How often has that happened in the Premier League in the last ten years? By my count, and being generous with superstar: Kane Foden (maybe) Sterling (and his sale paid for much of Liverpool's rebuild) Trent Rashford Doesn't happen that often, and Saka's better than all of those players bar Kane.