Mostly discusses how the club is doing under new/old president Florentino Pérez…the authors are spot-on by calling him “the George Steinbrenner of international soccer.”
This is actually a really good Reader’s Digest version on the history of Real Madrid whom, I’m proud to say, are destined for some sort of greatness this year.
Netherlands coach Bert van Marwijk is starting to get ticked off that his two main players, Klaas-Jan Huntelaar and Rafael van der Vaart, are not getting enough playing time with their club, Real Madrid. He isn’t full on P.O. ‘ed yet, but he’s getting there.
van Marwijk should be concerned about Real’s health overall. While Huntelaar and van der Vaart are two of the better Real Madrid/Dutch players, Arjen Robben and Wesley Sneijder also play on both teams and provide valuable contributions. Real Madrid has turned into real breeding ground for Dutch football. Clarence Seerdoff did time at both squads as did Ruud van Nistelrooy until he quit the Dutch team last year. And newcomer Royston Drenthe currently plays the wing for los blancos with the hopes that he’ll someday play for his country.
I’ll just assume that Bert van Marwijk isn’t a Barcelona fan.
Courtesy Reuters.
I’m trying to drum up a new section called “Soccer Books,” which is a collection of my personal reviews of footie-related literature. Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains The World has received wide praise from football fans of all stripes so this is the best book with which to start things out.
A bit about Foer. As of this writing, he’s the editor at The New Republic whose writing has appeared in Slate and New York magazine. In the interest of full disclosure, it seems that Foer went to my high school (go Hoppers), so I’m slightly biased going into this post. He played soccer as a kid, although not well by his own admittance. Along with a plethora of document research, Foer traveled to far reaching corners of the world to interview a wide array of subjects in order to tell this story: from soccer players to old-time footie hooligans to former henchmen of Slobodan Milosevic.
The subhead of the book is “an {unlikely} theory of globalization” and I agree that it is. Merriam Webster defines “globalize” as “to make worldwide in scope or application” and if you want to make a comparison centered around a worldwide application, soccer’s a really good a centerpiece. Foer describes the backdrop role that footie plays in ten social, political and economical instances. the Kosovo Conflict, the role of the church in Old Firm Derby, Islam’s archaic rules preventing women from participating in soccer, the strong Jewish football community in pre-Nazi Austria…to name just a few instances.
How Soccer also provides an excellent case study in the global gentrification of the game mostly due to the fourth and sixth chapters-respectively “How Soccer Explains the Sentimental Hooligan” and “How Soccer Explains the Black Carpathians.” The former takes an in-depth look of Chelsea’s role in moving football’s traditional hooligan and middle class fan base out of view in order to gain an upper class one. The latter observes football in the post-communist Ukraine, where the new club owners went on a buying spree for top Nigerian footie talent. The new talent didn’t fit into the country’s fabric too easily as the simultaneously enjoy praise and racism from the fans.
But Foer’s states in the prologue that the How Soccer story “begins bleakly and grows progressively optimistic” and the optimism is best expressed in the book’s eighth chapter, “How Soccer Explains the Discreet Charm of Bourgeois Nationalism,” the chapter that put a smile on my face six pages into it. Here, Foer recalls Franco-era Spain and how the forward thinking region of Catalonia held it’s own against the many backwards thinking ones. How the Catalonian capital’s team, FC Barcelona, fits into all this is a fascinating story. And Foer, and admitted die-hard Barca supporter, waxes poetically about all that’s good about not only the team but of Barcelona itself. So poetic that I told my wife, a lover of all thing’s Spain like me and herself a die-hard Barca supporter, not to read the book because of this chapter. If she did, I warned, then she would insist that we move to Barcelona ASAP.
Football’s long-standing xenophobic fabric isn’t How Soccer’s central theme, which is correct since there’s so much more to the game then that. Sadly, racism is part of the game and Foer didn’t try to hide or dress up this fact, also correct. Along with the “Black Carpathians” chapter, the racist past of many big name clubs is reviewed, including my that of my beloved Real Madrid whom Francisco Franco staunchly supported. Chelsea’s long past of hooligan-led antisemitism isn’t glossed over. And in the books final chapter, “How Soccer Explains the American Culture Wars,” America itself is held accountable it’s own long-standing soccer prejudice.
This post may seemingly suggest that the book is more down than it is up, but that’s incorrect. While there are sections where the content is tough to take in, the sum is greater than the parts. How Soccer’s simply describes how football is an integral part of the global stage (except for the states) and it’s effect on past, present, and future communities. The second-to-last a chapter may discuss why women can’t play soccer in Islamic communities, but that chapter is called “How Soccer Explains Islam’s Hope.” And hope is the operative word here as it tells of a people’s rebellion to get women involved in the game.
As an addendum, the book is filled with some fascinating trivia. I didn’t know that Pele was broke, got rich, went broke again and then got rich again. I learned the “hows” and “whys” of Celtic’s and Ranger’s seemingly infinite hatred of one another. And if your curious as to how Real Madrid aquired David Beckham, Ronaldo and Zinedine Zidane seemingly all at once, How Soccer explains why.
I highly, highly, HIGHLY, suggest the book to everyone. Die-hard football fans, those curious about soccer itself or people that simply just like to read! How Soccer Explains The World is a fascinating sociological study of the beautiful game. And while the story is a tough read sometimes, the story doesn’t make the game any less beautiful.
Buy it at either Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
According to Real Madrid forward Raul Gonzalez, the recent resignation of the club’s president, Ramon Calderon, has assisted in damaging the club’s image. He states:
“There are situations that one cannot control. The most damaged things are the image and the history of the club. It is clear that we are not happy and the club has to present another image to the outside world.”
This isn’t the whole quote so go over to Goal.com and read the entire article. But my personal opinion is that while Calderon’s quitting certainly sucks, it hasn’t had any effect on Real Madrid’s image. Had he stuck around, their image would still be tarnished.
Real Madrid has been plagued with injuries since the before the season began and Wesley Sneijder got hurt in the Emirates Cup. Injuries have shifted Arjen Robben, Sergio Ramos and Raul himself in and out of match play and have also put Ruud van Nistelrooy and Mamadou Diarra (two of the team’s linchpins) out for the whole season. None of these are nickel-and-dime losses.
To deal with these losses, Real Madrid have brought new players into the mix, including their palace coup of plucking Klaas-Jan Huntelaar from Ajax. They’ve also brought in ex-Tottenham Hotspur boss Juande Ramos in the hopes he’ll lead the team back to the top of the La Liga table. Factor these recent additions in with their preseason signing of Rafael van der Vaart, and it appears, from a birds-eye view, that their issues are on their way to being repaired.
But something I’ve learned about football this season is that any new club additions need time to acclimate to the team system before they start yielding the dividends (instances such as Fernando Torres yielding dividends his first day at Liverpool are rare). Yes, the Real veteran players are doing well along side Juande Ramos, Huntelaar and van der Vaart. But they committed a sloppy loss against Barcelona and are getting low-scoring 1-0 wins, as always. Change may have to come to America, but it has yet to reach the Santiago Bernabéu stadium.
Still, some positive results have come from Real Madrid’s moves. They currently hold the No. 2 spot in La Liga, which is tough to do in one of the world’s most competitive football leagues. They also seem to be on the comeback trail from of all their losses with five consecutive wins as of this post. Sneijder, Raul, Robben and Sergio Ramos are healthy, van der Vaart is finding his role, and both Huntelaar and Juande Ramos are settling in.
All this being said, FC Barcelona is No. 1 and holds that lead by 12 points. For them to lose the lead requires that they go on a four-week string of losses and/or draws as Real goes concurrent string of wins, and that’s a doubtful chain of events. And as healthy as all those Real Madrid guys are, Lionel Messi, Samuel Eto’o, Thierry Henry over at Barca are REALLY healthy and are practically scoring in their sleep. The general consensus among many in the football community is that Barcelona has the league title sewn up, so much so that four-and-a-half months before the season even ends, bookies are already making payouts to those that bet on them winning the whole season.
This isn’t the end of the world for RM. Teams from all levels of sports have bad years, and dynasties such as the Jordan-era Bulls or the Brady-era Patriots are not frequent occurrences. But for the past decade, Real Madrid have been a footie powerhouse, taking in three La Liga and three Champions League trophies. They’ve been able to easily snag the best of the best players for their squad, including Zinedene Zidane and Ronaldo. Now it appears that the La Liga championship is out of their reach, that they’ll nail down the second 09/10 Champions League spot at best and both Cristiano Ronaldo and Kaka dismissed them when they tried to acquire them (not so much Ronaldo).
With their rushed signings yet to play out in full, the injuries and having to deal with an ostensibly unstoppable Barcelona, Real Madrid simply isn’t the dominate Spanish club that it’s been for the past two years. They are smack dab in-the-middle of a fall from grace and I think that is what’s hurting their image. More so than Calderon quitting.
Is this the end of Real Madrid? Good Lord, no. This is just Barcelona’s year and not Real Madrid’s, and it’s been the other way for a while now. Things are different now for RM and it may be like that for another year or two if Barca keeps up at their current rate. Welcome to football.
This was not an easy decision to make. I REALLY wanted to support one of the non-big name teams in the Italian Serie A footie league, namely AS Roma. But I think I made the right decision: I’m official supporting AC Milan.
I was leaning towards AS Roma in the beginning because they’re giant killers. Not only did they take out my Real Madrid team in last year’s Champions League competition, but they’re to Serie A what Aston Villa is to the English Premier League. AS Roma is a team that isn’t holding one of the top spots of the table but always have a chance to beat the teams that are, as they did recently against Juventus. I really wanted to root for the underdog here and since I doing that with Hull City in the EPL and this is failing, I really thought that supporting AS Roma would make up for it.
But then I took a look at AC Milan and realized that I sort of am rooting for the underdog. See, Ronaldhinho had a really tough time at FC Barcelona last season. Although his lackadaisical attitude bears some responsibility for that, he went on record saying he was “depressed” (see my previous post about this here). Ronnie-Baby seems to be reinvigorated since moving to AC Milan, sometimes playing the leader, sometimes playing the supporting role. I want him to do well and that’s part of my reason in throwing my support to Milan.
And then there’s A.C.’s recent signing, David Beckham.
If anything would prevent me from supporting this team, you’d think it would be this. Becks went from playing top level football at both Manchester United and Real Madrid, to playing eighth grade level football at the L.A. Galaxy in the MLS. His mission to raise footie awareness in the U.S. was a bust as he spent more time cultivating his brand image, alienating hardcore American soccer fans in the process. Once that happened, his public image was under constant attack by both fans and pundits.
Also, I didn’t want to support AC Milan because of the fear of being seen as someone that just supports anything David Beckham does, football-wise. Doing so is a common fear among American footie fans and I’ve mentioned this in my About section. But I also stated in that section that I personally want Becks to finish his career at either Real Madrid or one of the big Italian teams and he’s doing that latter. He certainly didn’t go to AC Milan to make me happy, but he is doing something that I wholeheartedly wished for, and must therefore wholeheartedly support. There’s enough flip-flopping of opinions in soccer as there is…I feel that by support AC Milan, I’m standing behind what I said.
My point is, I want this team to succeed as a whole, and I want both Ronaldhinho and David Beckham to be integral to this success. I want them to play alongside Kaka, Alexandre Pato, Clarence Seedorf and Gianluca Zambrotta and redeem themselves in the eyes of the football community.
But this support may be temporary. For starters, I don’t know how long Ronnie-Baby and Becks will stay with the squad, particular Becks who’s only with AC on a loan deal with the Galaxy. And while I support this talented cast of football stars, other big name clubs are starting to knock on their doors and hope to pluck them away from the Milan. There are rumors abound that Kaka was offered some sort of deal from Real Madrid and Pato is a young scoring machine, something that the managers of both Arsenal and Man United covet. This being said, AS Roma is always in the back of my mind
But that’s for another day. For now I want AC Milan to win the Serie A title. And since they were knocked out of the Champions League, I’ll root for AS Roma to beat Arsenal in the first round of that competition.
Makes me wanna cry….for about 2 minutes.
On one hand, this bites. After David Beckham left Real Madrid in ‘07 for the LA Galaxy, it was Ruud van Nistelrooy that stepped up to take his place. Not in the midfield mind you, but as a strong supporting player that can score. With the team struggling this season, this is an ill-timed loss and on a more personal note, Ruudy’s my second favorite RM player after Iker Casillas. But on the other hand, history has proven that Real Madrid can win without him. And as proof of this, I’ll simply point to last season, when Ruud was injured for a looooooong time, yet the team went onto win the La Liga championship without him by more than enough points.
I’ll be honest though: Barcelona appears to have the league championship sealed this year when you look at the following parallel. Barca and Real Madrid have traditionally held the top two spots in La Liga and they usually end up competing for the league cup towards the end of the season. A big reason that Madrid took the cup last year was Ronaldinho’s implosion and somewhat early defection from the blaugranas…without him, Barcelona didn’t have a chance. The same may hold true for RM not having Ruddy in the strike position.
But the truth is, no one knows what’s going to happen in football. One thing that I’ve learned in this journey is that the footie game is much more unpredictable than other sports. Yeah, there were a lot of sports surprises this year. The New York Giants beat the seemingly impenetrable New England Patriots in the Super Bowl. The Philadelphia Phillies won the World Series while competing in one of the toughest MLB divisions. And after years of being second best at Wimbeldon, Rafael Nadal (one of Real Madrid’s most staunch supporters) snatched that trophy from Roger Federer’s hands. All these examples, however, are inconsistent ones-ones that happen during one big game (or seven in the case of the World Series) whereas an entire football season, it seems top me, is chocked full of surprises. This season is no exception.
My point is: while it may appear that Barcelona can now make room for another league trophy, Real Madrid may surprise all of us this season, regardless of this loss.
When you’re blogger, it’s a must that you carefully consider how to categorize each post. I put this one under ‘Football Knowledge’ but I swear that for a nanosecond, I considered creating a category called “What Are You Smoking” in reference to this story. Tottenham Hotspur Chairman Daniel Levy insists that his team is the fifth best in the Premier League right now. He goes on to say that it’s still early in the season and that the Spurs have the potential to turn things around.
Now as most footie fans know, the timing of this comment makes the comment all the more humorous. A few months before the start of the season, many (including myself) hailed Tottenham Hotspur as “The Chosen One”. A decent finish during the 07/08 season and some key additions to the roster like Giovanni Dos Santos made the team look primed to finish at least fifth in the EPL. That they lost Jermain Defoe to Portsmouth was something that they could work around.
But the loss of both Defoe AND Dimatar Berbatov to Manchester United was simply too much for them to work around. One thing I’ve learned about footie is that all the top tier teams either have at least one marquee player for scoring or have a whole team of hard working guys that play their positions well and develop into a cohesive unit that can get the ball to the back of the net. Once Berbatov was gone, the Spurs had neither. The end result: top-tier and mid level teams pimp-slapped them all over the pitch and they lost games…a lot of games. Hull City was now hailed as “The Chosen One”. The Spurs wound up in the relegation zone. Manager Juande Ramos was served his walking papers.
While many are now writing them off and mentally sewing Championship League patches onto Spurs jerseys, I’m gonna hold off. Because there is such a thing as the “Business End of the Season,” when teams who know that they have to win games, go out and win games! Look at Fulham last season . They were kissing the relegation zone but won enough games towards the end to avoid it. Real Madrid were written off as finishing in second place in La Liga in 06/07 and 07/08 and ended up capturing the League title for both seasons. Both of these teams acheived their goals towards the close of the season.
My point is that one of the qualifications of good team is one of the simplest: get all three points when you need to. For many teams this qualification manifests itself during the last weeks of the season. I don’t know if it will manifest itself for Tottenham, but their past performance is good enough for me to say that it’s possible.
Maybe this is old news but I’m just hearing about it. SI.com is reporting that FC Barcelona is in talks with MLS officials in setting up a sister team in the Miami area, provided that they get some sort of tax break. And apparently, Real Madrid has already set one up with Real Salt Lake.
If the deal goes through, then the new club will setup two soccer academies. I have a couple of nephews that are really REALLY good at footie and are based in Atlanta…which is a little less than 700 miles from Miami. So my nephews have a chance to hit that camp if all this works out…a little greedy on my part perhaps but I’m cool with that.
So says Transfer Market Web. Ramos has been very central to Real Madrid’s defense and I think they’ll fight to keep him so I’ll believe it when I see it.
Chelsea, along with Man City, is listed as a possible suitor so that’s good news for me. Chelsea can certainly use him right now but, again, I’ll believe it when I see it.
Only posting this because I’m a Chelsea guy…
Too bad…I thought that they had a GREAT showing in Euro ‘08 because of Ruudy. He’s going to put is focus on Real Madrid, which I’m personally happy about.
Reuters reports not only that but also that he won’t need surgery!!! Great news!!!
As we all know by now, an Emmanuel Adebayor penalty shot resulted in Arsenal taking Real Madrid out 1-0 in the Emirates Cup. News outlets and bloggers alike seem to be focusing on two things: Wesley Sneijder’s injury and how Adebayor is slowly starting to redeem himself with Arsenal supporters after trying to hop over to FC Barcelona.
The Adebayor stories deserve notice. Overall, UK football fans are loyal to the whole club before the individual player and Arsenal fans are legendary for having a fanatical loyalty to their team (because of this fanatical loyalty, some people-not me-have nicknamed Arsenal supporters "scientologists" ). When a player on their team turns on them, which Emmanuel did in a way, the fans will show their displeasure as they did when they booed him during the Arsenal/Juventes match. The PK is slowly getting him back into Arsenal fans good graces.
As a staunch Real Madrid supporter, the Sneijder injury peaks my interest more than the Adebayor story. Why? Because I’m not surprised that they lost. Yes, I have only been watching European footie for a short period of time, but in the time period that I’ve been watching it, I don’t think that Real Madrid are as good as many other do…they’re good but not great. They won the 2007/08 La Liga title by a landslide because the second best team in the league (Barcelona) imploded halfway in into the season, not because of brilliant pitch moves. Yes, they won the 2006/07 title but not until the last day, and their even having a chance to win that day was a real uphill battle. And let’s not forget the ‘08 Champions League tournament when Roma took them out of the competition and barley broke a sweat doing it.
My point is that Real Madrid need Sneijder badly, even if Pretty Boy Ronaldo joins the club. Wes is an outstanding midfielder that provides excellent support to his strikers, be they Van Nistelrooy, Raul, or any one of the two Ronaldos. The sooner that his back, the better.