of course they will make it to the top 24, but not finishing in the top 8 means you need to play 2 more games. Knockout round play-offs at February when you don't know how hard team you will face.
Experience matters in the CL and Europe in general, that's why young teams like a Barcelona in the past few years will struggle there. They've seen spanish teams, fields, coaches and schemes their entire life, but the travel and routine for a CL game is very different, you play against a team that plays and communicates differently. Besides the player quality, there's a reason why we didn't have all that many issues with Atalanta, but a less experienced team will begin having to figure them out first. If you get red carded in that phase, you're essentially on the backfoot for the entire game. The same thing often happens at Bayern in my opinion when they bring in a lot of foreign players at once and they look a bit like a fish out of water in Germany but look their old self in Europe. It all takes experience.
I’ll never not find it hilarious how ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN both sides think the other cheats. It really is funny
There are ref mistakes which are part of the game. And there are some decisions like the Suarez foul on Varane before assisting Messi, which looks like being taken off an episode of a sitcom. What makes it worse is the reports of the assistant referee/4th official reporting the foul to the first ref and being ignored. These are the strange suspicious ones in my opinion.
“In the Premier League we don’t play teams like Atalanta.They mark you man to man… their center backs follow you into your own area.”Declan Rice to Sky via @CronacheTweet pic.twitter.com/ezvJlaZFrt— Italian Football TV (@IFTVofficial) September 19, 2024
The truth is 80% of football is highly mediocre and gets by on emotional attachment, holding the fans hearts hostage.
We don't have to explain or rationalize this. If it weren't so damn important barca wouldn't have paid such an amount for the services for two decades. We can see the results as well in Europe. @J-Mezzy is clowning Arsenal for not showing consistent results because EPL gets hyped but will ignore barca hasn't due to them getting preferential treatment. The fact barca consistently gets preferential treatment doesn't mean every officials goes out of their way to harm Madrid. There will be a handful that always screw us but not all. The reality is they don't need officials to harm us, they just need officials to help them.
Or perhaps they are good in Spain? They are winning games by a lot of goals. Not like they are winning games by 1 goal off a bad decision Arsenal flops in Europe, nobody accuses them of cheating in the PL City dominate the PL and have 1 CL to show for it. some teams are good in their league some are good in cups like Sevilla was some, like us, are truly great and do well In both
For me I don’t see the point of following a sport which I am convinced is rigged what is the point? When we win it’s because of us. When we lose it’s because they cheat! There is no joy or pride in that man. I am not naive but I am also not cynical. in sports, the good teams not only manage to win but all of them, us included, get the benefit of the whistle more often than not. But I don’t think anything beyond that if I did, why waste my valuable time following the sport I also hate that SOOOOOO MANY people swear our success is only due to cheating and buying refs. I won’t do that to other teams
As long as this criminal fails "up", meaning gets reelected, then he has a mandate to continue to be a criminal. It's actually one of the staples globally in politics.
Remember when we got the late penalty vs Juve practically everybody was saying it was rigged for us. It's just a ridiculous at this point.
Probably the most misleading approach is to watch a clip or a series of clips and draw conclusions. To fairly judge the officiating in a match, one must view the entire game in context. Football is rife with poor decisions, but using highlight reels to claim that a particular team cheated is an unjust way to analyze the sport. Furthermore, you could take any club, including ours, and use one of these highlight compilations to "prove" that they didn't deserve a trophy.
No offense, but you sound 500 years old writing this. Also using terms like "hearts hostage" implies that isn't a good enough reason to watch football and that the level of quality should be the reason to watch football, which is a bizarre statement. But maybe you didn't intend for it to come out like that...
Someone in here recently was incredulous that a poster could think that defending in Spain was just as good as defending in the EPL, i'm not sure what metric he was using to come to that conclusion except maybe "the EPL is the bestest league ever", it was very odd That old guy is right, from his time, back in the 1940's and 50's or whatever, of course life and times have moved on .....