Link of the Day

Just a quick link today (real life sometimes gets in the way of blogging) but a good link: here is Phil Ball's latest column on La Liga, Death, Dying, and Relegation. I think Ball might be the best writer on football right now easily availiabe to American readers (he has a weekly column on ESPN.com) and I will keep pitching his great stuff until I am convinced that everyone is reading him regardless.

His latest peice can be found here: http://soccernet.espn.go.com/columns/story?id=405471&root=europe&lpos=spotlight&lid=tab2pos3&cc=5901

A Tale of Two Transfers

This morning, as has been expected over the past few days, it was announced that Ronaldo has been transferred from Real Madrid to AC Milan. While one can question if this transfer will have great effect (Big Ronnie hasn’t played much lately) there is no doubt that Ronaldo will be the biggest name to transfer this month.

Personally, I am on record as saying I like Ronaldo, and I hope he does well. The sport as a whole is more fun when larger-than-life superstars like him are doing well and scoring goals. Hopefully this move will shine a little much-deserved light on Series A and perhaps give Milan the nudge they need to start winning a few more games.

All that being said, I am a little surprised at how things played out for Real Madrid this transfer season. If you had asked me a few months ago what would have happened to Real’s last few Galacticos, I probably would have said that at least one of them would be gone. But I would not have predicted where.

I honestly believed that David Beckham would have stayed in Europe. Believe what you will about Beckham, but he has always been a fierce competitor, and at 31 I thought he was too young to give it all up to come to America. I thought there was a decent chance Beckham would re-sign with Real (and they eventually did offer him everything in the world except playing time) and if not I believed he would sign in Italy; perhaps with one of the Milan clubs or Juve. Instead, Beckham signed with the LA Galaxy. He said it was to open up the sport of soccer to the big time here in America. Others believed he was seduced by the fame and relatively stress-free lifestyle the MLS would promise. I guess time will tell.

On the other hand, if you remember, there were a number of credible rumors that the New York Red Bulls, the Big Apple’s MLS franchise, was going to make a play for Ronaldo. That, to me, made sense. Ronaldo had the reputation as a fun-loving party guy who had become too fat for football but not too big for the ladies. He still loved soccer, but he could play it on the weekends in front of undemanding fans and have fun the rest of the time. On top of all that, it was a much shorter flight to Rio!

But Ronaldo proved me wrong. Aside from the fact that New York probably couldn’t match Milan’s fee, it was obvious that Ronaldo still had something to prove at a big club; for better or worse he still sees himself as a top player, and that is something that is to be admired. While Beckham has taken what could be argued is the easier path, Ronaldo has chosen to test himself again against the world’s best. We will see how it goes in the long run, but I will find myself again rooting for Big Ron.

Chelsea Nonsense and Zidane News that Makes No Sense

Even when Chelsea wins, as they did this past weekend as they destroyed Nottingham Forrest, one cannot shake the feeling that the club is, at heart, nothing more than the incredibly apt description once voiced by the magazine When Saturday Comes: “A financial basket-case club run like a third-world diamond republic by a mysterious and shadowy foreign billionaire.” While that sounds neat, I do believe I will stick with Sheffield United.

Here are just a few of the fun things that have emerged from Chelsea over the past week or so:

· World-class striker Didier Drogba publicly calls out his fellow forward Andriy Shevchenco, suggesting to the media that Sheva doesn’t pass enough. Apparently Drogba didn’t finish his sentence, as he meant to say that Sheva didn’t pass TO HIM enough. But whatever.

· Drogba also took time out of his busy schedule to reportedly criticize Michael Ballack (who makes $250,000 per week for playing the same position as teammate Frank Lampard. At least Ballack does it with less whining and without writing dreadful books.) Anyway, Drogba later denied those criticisms.

· Speaking of Ballack, last week German legend Franz Beckenbauer said Ballack made a mistake by signing with Chelsea. I’m sure Ballack can think of millions of reasons why Beckenbauer is wrong, and Ballack basically said he didn’t need to be a surf to Bayern Munich the rest of his life, which is a pretty good point. Still, I’m sure no German soccer player wants to get on Beckenbauer’s bad side. That would be like a Brazilian footballer being criticized by Pele; like an Argentine being criticized by Maradona; like an American being called to the carpet by…Alexi Lalas? Kobi Jones? Mia Hamm? Maybe Rodney Dangerfield from that Ladybugs movie?

· Finally, the circus around Coach Jose Mourinho continues to be just exhausting. Regardless of what everyone is saying, I don’t think at this point that anyone really knows whether the special one is leaving or not. I think Jose is a lot of fun, but frankly, I think he’s nuts to stay. He needs to pretty much win everything every year, or he will be hammered in the press. With an unlimited payroll and any players you may wish for, you have no excuse but to win. Still, he seems to like being at the center of it all; and lets face it, Chelsea is never dull. Or, at least, hasn’t been since the mysterious and shadowy foreign billionaire took over.

One other interesting bit of news came out this weekend; apparently the Chicago Fire made an attempt to sign the recently retired Zinedine Zidane.

Now obviously I really like the Footballfan-atic poster boy. He’s one of my favorites. But it’s kind of hard to imagine the great man plying his trade in…Chicago. The city of broad shoulders. The city where women induce early births so there husbands can go to the Bears game. Would Zidane have been bigger than Jordan? Bigger than Ernie Banks? Bigger than Bill Murray? Perhaps; and it is certainly fun to imagine Zidane warbling through a rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner” at Wrigley before catching a late dinner with Mike Ditka and Ben Wallace at the Chicago Steak and Chop house. However, I do believe Zinedine is enjoying his happy retirement in France with his family, and that is probably where he should stay. He can leave America to be conquered by the Beckhams.

Weekend Matches: January 26-27

While nothing could top last week’s slate of great games, there are some interesting match-ups this weekend, including one potentially great game in Italy (the Milan game) and a few interesting things in Spain. England is having a “cup weekend” so this is also a chance to see some of the big boys play some teams that normally do not get any television time at all here in the states. It also looks as if the always-intense John Terry might come back this weekend for Chelsea, so we will see if he cripples some poor Nottingham striker due to his pent-up rage.


Saturday

Tottenham vs Southend Utd. 10:00am FSC

Atl. Madrid vs Racing 2:00pm GolTv

Villareal vs Real Madrid 4:00pm GolTv

Boca Juniors vs Racing 8:00pm FSC



Sunday

Milan vs Parma 9:00am GolTv

Levante vs Sevilla 11:00am GolTv

Barcelona vs Celta 1:00pm GolTv

Chelsea vs Nottingham Forrest 5:00pm FSC

Sampdoria vs Inter 5:00pm GolTv

Transfer News

Just a couple of quick thoughts about the transfer market today…

• It seems that it’s becoming a certainty that Ronaldo will be transferred to AC Milan in the next day or so. Good for big Ronnie, who as I’ve said before deserves to be on a big stage, and good for Milan for not overpaying. The numbers being reported right now are still sketchy, but it looks as if Milan will pay about 8 million dollars for the transfer, a number that is staggeringly smaller than the 28 million they offered for the player this past fall. One could argue that the new price is a testament to Milan’s negotiating savvy, but it must also be acknowledged that Madrid has acted like armatures the entire time. It seems, in retrospect, that Capello never wanted Ronaldo as a player, which is fine. But to turn down a 30 million dollar offer, only to put the player on the bench and see his value decline dramatically, is absurd and reeks of inexperience. Madrid President Calderon’s insistence on getting midfielder Kaká in the original deal was not only stupid (since it was never going to happen) but also very hurtful to his own club in the long run. In a just world he would probably fire himself form his job; somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen.

• Another piece of transfer news that I found surprising was Ashley Young’s ₤8 million sale from Watford to Aston Villa, a number that could rise up to £10 million with incentives. Young, who was a backup at Watford, and who is definitely a “prospect,” hopes to have a steady starting job under Martin O’Neil. The outrageous sum Villa paid, in my mind, is related to the effect that Andriy Shevchenko has had on English football. Shevchenko, who last year at this time was still considered one of the best strikers in the world, has been a qualified failure at Chelsea, in spite of his two goals in a cup match the other night. This seems to have crystallized the fear in many English manager that foreigners simply cannot adapt to the ‘English’ game, or at least not adapt fast enough for the manager not to get fired. Thus they are over-paying for home-grown English talent, even when that talent is of the very mediocre variety. I suspect that this will not help the English game in the long run, and will eventually reward those still willing to take a gamble on a player born outside the merry realm.

Book Review: Ronaldo: Journey of a Genius by James Mosley

*Note*
One of the things I wanted to do when I started this website was to review books about soccer. I decided that I would only set one rule for myself as I wrote them: I would only write reviews of books that are easily acquired here in America. As you can imagine, countries like England, Italy and elsewhere have an enormous range of books on football for sale. Here in America that selection is much more limited. Yes, of course, books can be ordered from overseas, and it is especially easy with services like Amazon.co.uk. But these overseas books can be prohibitively expensive and also be hard to find. Thus I will only review books that can be had easily here in the states, which means that the book can be bought from your average Barnes and Noble or Borders or ordered through a company like our domestic Amazon.com. With that caveat, away we go. I will publish these reviews periodically, when I have the time to write a fuller blog entry than usual.



Ronaldo: The Journey of a Genius is the only English-language biography available here in the states of the great Brazilian and Real Madrid striker Ronaldo. It covers his life from birth to last year’s season with Real; it was published before the ’06 World Cup and this current season that Ronaldo is “enjoying” with his Madrid employers.

Ronaldo is the first book ever written by James Mosley, and, for the most part, it reads like it. Mosley is virtually star-struck as he writes about his idol, and works hard to explain away every miscue and bad decision made by his Brazilian hero. For instance, Ronaldo demonstrates a pattern throughout his career of constantly leaving his current team whenever there was a chance he could make more money elsewhere. This was true at Barcelona and Inter, even though both teams paid him very handsomely and also paid world-record fees for him. It would be easy to characterize Ronaldo as a sleazy money-grubber with no discernable loyalty, but Mosley simply describes him as “savvy.” Each time Ronaldo does some stupid, like publicly insults the employers who are paying him massive wages, Mosley explains it away by citing Ronaldo’s “frank and open personality.” The author even goes so far as to explain away Ronaldo’s propensity for weight gain by essentially explaining that he is “big boned.” Geez, he sounds like my mother.

When Mosley excoriates the Madrid fans for having the gall to boo Ronaldo during one of his down patches, the reader is quite certain he is not reading a balanced account of the striker’s life.

So this book is by no means a shining example of the biographer’s art. However, it does have some value. Because of the lack of good football books here in America, it is one of the few places where readers can get information about things like Brazilian soccer and the sleazy underside of world football, the transfer business. Although in this book Ronaldo always comes out smelling like a rose, the author leaves no doubt that the transfer business is bad for poor countries, good for rich ones, and in general leaves everyone involved covered in a certain stench.

The book also has its charms: although the author’s nativity is shocking as he explains away every Ronaldo action, Mosley’s admiration of his hero is more appealing than much of the negativity and cynicism that accompanies many modern sports biographies. If I am not convinced by Mosley’s book that Ronaldo is a saint, I don’t particularly believe he is a great sinner either. Ronaldo is in fact, to no reasonable man’s surprise, somewhere in the middle: a remarkably great footballer (perhaps one of the ten best who ever played) who was often driven by money and fame as guiding principles. Ronaldo was certainly a genius on the field, less so off it, but overall a decent man who enjoyed life and the pleasures that came with his fame and fortune. For fans of Ronaldo, and I count myself among them, we shall wait with anticipation to see what fate next brings to the big Brazilian.

As for the book, it is, as I said, not a very strong example of the power of good biography, but it is also not without its charms, and draws its greatest strength from the fact that here in the United States, there are just not many other competitors to give it any trouble.

U.S. Youth Movement and Some Fanciful Predictions

Sports Illustrated writer Greg Lalas (Alexi’s brother) has an article on the recent U.S. men’s national team win in a friendly over Denmark, which can be found here:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2007/writers/greg_lalas/01/22/us.youth/index.html

Greg makes the point that the U.S. has a number of up-and-coming young players who will now have the benefit of a solid pro league in which to develop; this, he believes, will lead to success in the World Cups of ’10 and ‘14.

Good article, Greg. You had me up to there. Bu the U.S. team hasn’t showed any indication of progressing on the national stage. The 2002 World Cup is looking more and more like a fluke, as the team was woefully under-powered in Germany this summer. That generation of players (including Landon Donavan and Brian McBride) were as golden to our country as England’s were to theirs; both, however, met with failure, and it is probably over-optimistic to think that anything will change with the passage of a few more years.

With all that said, still a good read, especially as a means of keeping an eye on good young American talent, some of which will be on display in the MLS this summer.