niceYeah but there's no symmetry there!
Mmm i think it's actually pretty close, and really hard to compare. At a simple "which team would win" City would smash barcelona 8 times out of 10, but that's a byproduct of eras. The closest thing that Barcelona side faced to this City would be Bayern in '13, and they had a manager with cancer and an injured Messi at the time, but the games were so uncompetitive it's hard to envision much would have changed anyways. Simply put City play too fast, too physical, for Guardiola-era Barcelona. They're also far more used to facing sides like them then the opposite. Again, the only thing even close to City they faced was Bayern the one time, City don't face Messi and Iniesta but they are facing teams who are just as tactically organized and similar in playing style on a relatively regular basis.I see Guillem Balague has said that this side is better than Guardiola’s Barcelona
Hard disagree. Messi alone was a question with no answer for most of Guardiola’s period there. And as good as De Bruyne is, Xavi and Iniesta?! Come on. Madness.
Which is entirely predictable. Does anyone care that Silvio Berlusconi bankrolled Milan in the 80s, breaking transfer records left and right? In the FFP era, he wouldn't have been able to pour money from his other businesses into Milan without cooking the books. But now, more than thirty years later, no one calls it financial doping and everyone remembers Sacchi's Milan as a brilliant and truly revolutionary football team - which it was.
Liverpool didn't win the league for 30 years, and if City were still championship fodder then United would have won just two titles out of the last ten, such is our bad management and our (correct) punishment for being so inept.
If you take out City the winners of the PL over the years would have been Arsenal, Liverpool, United and the financially doped Chelsea
Leicester, who got back to the PL thanks to financial doping from a billionaire owner, and are now facing relegation in large part because ownership decided to stop bankrolling them.
Why no hope? If we continue being run into the ground by the Glazers and Liverpool under Klopp and Arsenal under Arteta share the next 10 PL titles wouldn’t their revenue and value see an enormous rise and ours gradually fall? We’re slowly falling behind in infrastructure it’s possible in other metrics too. With City not being there to cheat you’d see the likes of Spurs or even Brighton make the CL more as well. What’s the point of allowing rules to be broken and a government propping up one club at the expense of others who stand no chance anymore?
Well Said brilliant post .
And Liverpool and Arsenal just happen to be biggest Clubs in terms of Domestic Titles behind United .
And that is always the case. Generally only a couple of the traditionally big clubs are being well run so it always leaves space for others to enter.
I don’t think you’re getting the point. There’s no denying that the idea of Bournemouth making their way to regular PL title challengers is delusional. That’s not a football problem but a life problem as even in the real world challenging a bohemian that has spend decades building its stature, takes something special - as it should. However, whether we go under tomorrow or not, achievements being organic or as much as they can, are crucial for the sanctity of the sport. For some, they just want to see more competitors regardless of how they are funded and who whored themselves to which billionaire for a promise of being their fun play thing. For others, the road to success has to be grounded in the organic reality of that club. You could even find a middle ground but I don’t agree with no FFP.
The heat might have affected them.
Not THE treble.
