First Qualifying Round- First Leg Results
By: Dan |
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Competitive football returns: in gamecast form for me, visually for luckier individuals.
Sutjeska Niksic 1 - MTZ RIPO 1
Lahti 4 - Dinamo Tirana 1
Grevenmacher 0 - Vetra 3
NSI Runavik 0 - Rosenborg 3
Szombathelyi Haladas 1 - Irtysh 0
Sligo Rovers 1 - Vllaznia 2
Olimpi Rustavi 2 - B36 Torshavn 0
Anorthosis 5 - Kaerjeng 0
Slaven Koprivnica 1 - Birkirkara 0
Zimbru Chisinau 1 - Okzhetpes 2
Lisburn Distillery 1 - Zestaponi 5
Helsingborg 3 - MIKA 1
Valletta 3 - Keflavik 0
Dinaburg 2 - JK Nomme Kalju 1
Buducnost 0 - Polonia Warsaw 2
Narva Trans 0 - Rudar Velenje 3
Motherwell 0 - Llanelli 1
Banants 0 - Siroki Brijeg 2
Spartak Trnava 2 - Inter Baku 1
Dinamo Minsk 2 - Renova 1
Randers 4 - Linfield 0
Simurq Zaqatala 0 - Bnei Yehuda 1
Fram 2 - The New Saints 1
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Random Thoughts on the First and Second Qualifying Rounds
By: Dan | Add Comments
Even taking UEFA’s excessively long ceremonies for its competition draws into account, no one is going to accuse the early qualifying rounds of the Europa League of vulgar, conspicuous consumption. Although a familiar name pops up now and again, this time of year is the domain of Europe’s minnows, who are ready for their big day out.
These are Europe’s smallest qualifiers. Some come from leagues that have always been near the bottom of the food chain, like Wales, the Faroe Islands, Luxembourg and Malta. Not to belittle their efforts, but in the bygone days of open draws, these are the teams that everyone would have hoped to be drawn against. If you go through the results of past competitions, you’ll see twelve and thirteen goal aggregate losses. The number of minnows in European Competition was increased by the respective breakups of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, as previously nondescript teams found themselves moved up the pecking order of their newly independent nations. This ultimately led to the creation of preliminary qualifying rounds.
Detailed information on many of the early qualifying rounds’ clubs is not particularly accessible, so all this is really a roundabout way of saying that we’re about to enter a realm of pure speculation and opinion.
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Red Bull, Again
By: Dan | 1 Comment
Just when it seemed that I could not possibly write another piece on news going on outside the transfer window, comes a head-in-hands piece of bad news from the eastern German city of Leipzig. Tinned beverage manufacturer Red Bull has ‘rebranded’ another club, Germany’s fifth division SSV Markranstädt, with the hopes of establishing the new club as the preeminent football power in the former East Germany. The new entity will be known as Rasen Bull Leipzig.
Surprisingly enough, there is more to object to this time around than the ham fisted plastering of the Red Bull name over every available surface. As Red Bull’s involvement has been responded to by some Markranstädt supporters with vandalism and violence, as was their previous attempt to enter German football via Leipzig, with Sachsen Leipzig, the company has decided to tar all opponents of the venture with the hooligan brush. It’s difficult to decide if this is more disingenuous or illogical.
The dissenting position is simple enough to understand. Fans object to having an established club, with its own history and identity wiped off the face of the earth to become a walking advertisement. I’m sure Red Bull and its defenders would point to the money invested in return and the potential success on offer, but that has never really been a satisfactory explanation for me. Volkswagen and Fiat have managed, for many years, to put money into Wolfsburg and Juventus, respectively, without decking the team out in silver and blue or renaming the club Fiat-Torino. One might be forgiven for concluding that Red Bull would benefit from these relationships more than the clubs ever could. Let’s say, hypothetically, that a Red Bull team actually does reach the dizzying heights of a Champions League final; Red Bull benefit from the exposure, and the association in the moldable consumer mind (sigh) with winning. The actual team in question would end up in as object of scorn, a team that sold its soul for trophies. Read the rest of this entry »
Leave The Capitol: Foreign Player Limits Come to Bulgaria
By: Dan | Add Comments
One of the major issues that invariably comes up as part as proposed reforms to the game is a return to the days of limits on foreign players. The current incarnation under discussion is the 6 + 5 rule. Usually, these limits are discussed in terms of the larger leagues as a punitive imposition from above, as opposed to something that would be adopted willingly. So, Bulgaria’s recent declaration of a self-imposed limit on foreign players (3 non-EU per squad) and CSKA Sofia’s proposal to field an entirely Bulgarian team should reignite the discussion about this topic. Amid the usual summer transfer scramble, it’s not too surprising that this piece of news is being reported very much in brief.
Because the issue of foreign players has so often focused on the Premier League, the circumstances that exist in England have become the standard template for discussing this issue. For starters, the insularity of English football when it comes to foreign players is legendary. England never experienced a steady, natural integration of foreign players over the years, which created a twofold problem. First of all, the development of the game in England occurred in something of a vacuum, which meant when foreign players did eventually arrive, that they would immediately be placed in an adversarial relationship with the prevailing ethos. Secondly, from the perspective of the fans, having foreign players arrive as a mass influx served to depersonalize them to an extent. This was only exacerbated by the arrival of foreign managers like Arsene Wenger, Rafael Benitez and Jose Mourinho, who introduced tactics and methods that, for England, were far from traditional. These managers have often claimed that English players are not suitable for the demands their respective systems require. The end result in England, where the top clubs are essentially international corporations, staffed internationally, that happen to be based in English cities represents the most extreme conclusion of the current status quo. Read the rest of this entry »
Debt and the Maiden
By: Dan | 1 Comment
Despite Real Madrid’s best efforts to buy everybody, I still consider this time of year, the first few weeks after the end of the season, to be unbearably slow. There is, however, one issue that doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon: debt. The troubled world economy has pushed club finances to the forefront of public consciousness. The difficulty is, there are so many conflicting points of view on the implications of debt; depending on who you listen to a club could either be equipped to buy a new first eleven, or have their stadium turned into a strip mall by the end of the business day. In many cases, the opinions about a club’s financial situation seem to be taking place along partisan lines. The end result is, it’s rather difficult to make sense of all this.
In my opinion, the biggest disservice that the sensationalistic approach has done is to treat debt as an entirely new development while reducing it to its most literal definition. In basic terms, a person who buys a new refrigerator and a person who buys one of everything from the shoe department at Barney’s are both in debt; they are differentiated by their ability to pay back the debt with available future income. In other words, there is manageable and unmanageable debt.
Obviously, the finances of big business are more complicated than the personal finances of an individual, so identifying good and bad debt among football clubs is slightly more complicated. As I am far from an expert on the somnolent subject of economics, I decided to consult the lynchpin of modern free market theory, Adam Smith, finally allowing me to make a modicum of practical use out of my copy of The Wealth of Nations. Read the rest of this entry »
Goodbye Lenin (and Cottbus)
By: Dan | Add Comments
As 2009 progresses, it seems that nearly every day that goes by is the anniversary of a significant landmark of East Germany’s dissolution. For the football clubs of the former GDR, marking this anniversary by seeing their only Bundesliga representative, Energie Cottbus, unceremoniously discarded from the top flight by Nurnberg is a coincidence cruel enough to seem by design. German reunification has been far from easy for everyone involved, but the Eastern football clubs might be forgiven if they look back with a greater sense of ostalgie than most. In many ways, it has been a strange twenty years.
German reunification occurred soon after Franz Beckenbauer managed West Germany to the 1990 World Cup title. Beckenbauer’s response was strictly football related of course; he declared that the incorporation of the East’s best players would make the new German national team unbeatable. Oddly enough, the Kaiser’s innocent optimism closely mirrored the debate around reunification that was taking place in the real world. Beckenbauer’s image of a unified, unbeatable Germany was the exact worry, both in terms of historical guilt and future risk, which many outside observers fretted over. As it turned out, unifying the two Germanys was not so simple.
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Europa League to Host Referee Experiments
By: Dan | Add Comments
If you have not seen Daryl’s entry on the front page, UEFA has declared that their experiments with two extra officials, placed behind the goals, will take place during the Europa League next season.
Any experiment, to move beyond theory, will have to be tested in the real world at some point. Running these tests over the course of a highly competitive, season long tournament simply makes the most sense if there is going to be a likelihood of having a contentious decision, in a high pressure atmosphere that the extra officials contribute to.
The big question this raises is whether or not making a major tournament a staging ground for a new procedure affects the integrity of the Europa League games. Ultimately, I don’t think this particular situation is an issue. The two extra officials are only serving as additional eyes in an attempt to have all areas of the pitch as closely watched as possible. If UEFA were experimenting with something, like video replay, that would fundamentally alter the structure of the game, there would be cause for alarm and outrage, but this is, thankfully not the case. We’ve already seen the Champions League parachute clubs, the introduction of group stages, and, finally, the Europa League itself. It should be safe to just sit back and wait for the first qualifying round draw on the 22nd.
Idle speculation about next season.
By: Dan | 2 Comments
With the exception of the Romanian qualifiers, next season’s Europa League teams are now firmly in place. UEFA probably could not be more pleased with the way events have played out. Of course there is the usual mixture of up and coming teams, Metalist Kharkiv is back, for instance, and big names from smaller leagues like Club Brugge, FC Basel, and Rapid Vienna. Oddly enough, the key to the inaugural edition of the UEFA Europa League will be big names from big leagues.
Marquee names will abound in the Europa League, but they will not be the kind of stumbling giants like AC Milan or Bayern Munich for whom missing out on the Champions League represents a year in purgatory. A large number of teams that find their European destinies teetering between the two competitions have fallen on the Europa League side of the line. Clubs like Roma, Werder Bremen, Valencia and PSV are accustomed to, and would probably rather be competing in the Champions League, but they cannot pretend that they stand a realistic chance of winning that competition or that they wield the kind of money that ensures perennial qualification. Perhaps I’m hopelessly naïve, but the combination of having a very real chance at a winning a European trophy, and the need to prove themselves after an subpar season should mean that we’ll see a real commitment to winning the Europa League from the outset.
European Restructuring Part Two: New Boots and Contracts
By: Dan | 1 Comment
The decision to expand the UEFA Champions League was one of the most significant in the modern history of the European game. As discussed in part one, the emergence of vast sums of television money fundamentally altered the club landscape in favor of the richest and most powerful. After systematically robbing Europe’s smaller leagues and clubs of the means to compete with the big clubs, the same big clubs had the gall to complain that being forced to play against the smaller clubs made for an inferior, and more importantly, unprofitable, competition.
The first casualty of the great restructuring was the Cup Winners’ Cup. An expanded Champions League probably spelled doom for this competition no matter what. No one wanted to be left out of the rush to the Champions League ATM, so a potential domestic runner up and cup winner would opt for the Champions League, leaving a beaten finalist to fill the nation’s CWC spot. The Dutch league provided the first example of how this would backfire in the long run. In 1997-98, PSV and Ajax, who both qualified for the Champions League, also contested that season’s cup final. Defeated semi-finalists Heerenveen became Holland’s entrant in the following Cup Winners’ Cup. Once the expanded Champions League allowed more than two teams, the potential for multiple repeats of this situation made the entire competition untenable. The fragmentation of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia introduced a larger number of competitors into the competition. An influx of comparative minnows provided an out for the bigger nations; the marquee value was diminished, so there was simply not enough money to be made to justify the hassle of the CWC fixtures.
The UEFA Cup also suffered from being branded a ‘devalued’ competition. In practice, the UEFA was always a ‘best of the rest’ situation, but as ‘the rest’ of the larger leagues ended up in the Champions League, the UEFA Cup found itself lacking big names. In turn, this has led to some teams, usually English clubs with pretensions of Champions League qualification, complaining that the UEFA Cup fixtures weren’t profitable enough to justify full strength participation. In fairness, the addition of a nonsensical group stage and the presence of Champions League drop-ins did make progressing through the tournament a much more convoluted affair. Generally, the UEFA Cup has more admirers than detractors. In terms of the on field product, the UEFA Cup has thrived despite the lack of big names. The chance for a variety of smaller clubs to test themselves in European competition has also been a happy, if unintended, side effect.
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Hertha In Europe: Sensible Bites
By: Dan | 3 Comments
Remaining objective about the team you support is one of the great challenges in football. Even if you aren’t writing about it, there’s always the impulse, as a fan, to view every decision against as a grave injustice, to confuse the affection you have for a player with a realistic assessment of his skills. In short, our hopes sometimes get the best of our reality based expectations. This somewhat schizophrenic conflict has been especially virulent throughout Hertha Berlin’s remarkable season, so it’s with some disappointment that I admit, realistically, I am relieved that Hertha have finished the season with Europa League qualification.
Even though Hertha were not nearly as hapless as their detractors would have you believe, they are an obviously limited side. A defensive unit that proved above average by Bundesliga standards and some intelligent counter attacking was the basis for a lot of narrow league victories. It was not going to win a lot of neutral admirers, but I still don’t know why the nature of Hertha’s success was questioned so often when calling us ugly would have sufficed. At any rate, the prohibitive UEFA Cup campaign demonstrated that these tactics didn’t necessarily translate to European success, although I do expect (or should that be hope for) a stronger showing next season.
Other than fast cash, it’s difficult to see what a Champions League showing that, in all likelihood, end up being a fight to drop into the Europa League would do for the club. I didn’t buy any of the arguments that Hertha potentially performing badly in the Champions League meant that they somehow owed it to the rest of Germany not to qualify, as Bayern Munich is the only team in Germany with a chance of surviving in the ten thousand dollar minimum bet VIP room in the first place. My biggest concern is that a poor showing would undermine the progress that Hertha have made this season and even, in a severe enough panic, cost Lucien Favre his job, which would be a bigger disaster than any on field loss right now.
There’s no doubt that 2009-10 is going to be a stern test for Hertha Berlin; they certainly aren’t going to take anyone by surprise next term. Now that the potential for achievement has been so superbly unearthed, chalking up whatever future successes or failures occur to the crazy old Hertha Berlin rollercoaster ride that human machinations have little to no influence over isn’t going to cut it. As far as Europe is concerned, competing against clubs of a similar stature, absent the three ring circus hype of the Champions League will benefit Hertha no matter what.
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