I don’t even like Man City but it must be so infuriating to lose your main striker because he got injured on a fucking friendly against Faroe Islands.

Camavinga got injured in a training session, to play a qualification game for a competition France have already qualified, against Gibraltar.

Seriously, fuck off with those international breaks, teams don’t pay millions for their players only to see them getting injured against literal part-time footballers.

The defending on south american leagues is laughable. In Saudi League at least they have some sense of positioning and tactics.

A key to comparing players is to do it in competitions they’ve both played, preferrably in the same era. For example, Ronaldo and Messi played in the UCL at the exact same time, yet Ronaldo has achieved much more success (objectively), both in team achievements and individually (goals, assists, wins, trophies).

Also people comparing players based on their NT careers is useless. Yeah Mbappe has a better NT career than Haaland, who would have thought.

People don’t understand that different celebrities have different personalities. Not everyone is an NPC who is afraid to speak his mind.

I’m a huge Ronaldo fan myself, but no, he is not one of the best right now. Same goes for Messi, Suarez, Cavani and other players who are doing well in minor leagues, there’s a reason those players don’t play in Europe anymore.

That being said, his performance is still one of the best we’ve ever seen from a 38 (soon 39) year old player, objectively. Also to all the people saying about Saudi League being “terrible”, yeah it’s not the top 5 leagues, but it’s definately much better in terms of quality, tactics and defending right now than all the other leagues players typically go to “retire” (MLS, South America, China etc). The league is not as bad as people try to pretend it is, there are at least 30 players that used to play in the top leagues some months ago. Let’s not pretend that Mahrez, Benzema or Bono became terrible players overnight. Plus Ronaldo is also proving himself consistently in the Asian CL and the Euro Qualifiers.

Long story short, is he one of the best? Nope. Is his performance still very decent for his age, for both club and country? Absolutely. There’s a reason he’s gonna be a starter in the Euros and he 100% deserves that spot.

It’s just not worth posting. Are we gonna make a new post on every single qualifying and friendly game there is?

Totally surprising, also just Googled Immobile and he has only scored 17 goals for Italy. I mean they haven’t been at their best lately (except for 2021), but hasn’t Immobile been their starting striker for almost a decade now? The guy has had many club seasons with 20+ league goals.

Football is the by far the most popular sport in the world, so it makes sense that more money is involved. Huge transfers are part of the excitement of the game nowadays, but without proper management, they mean nothing. Chelsea and Manchester United spent millions (billions?) to rebuild their teams and they’re still average. PSG have spent more than a billion on transfers and wages in order to win a UCL, but they fail miserably every year.

But in Europe, low level teams will generally NEVER compete with top teams.

That is so not correct. Just look at the current La Liga table, Girona are first right now. Speaking of La Liga, Athletic Club is always one of the top 6-8 teams in Spain, but they aren’t allowed to play non Basque players as a principle, so they almost never buy players in general.

Inter were in the UCL final last year and most of their key players were either extremely cheap or free transfers: Onana, Darmian, Dimarco, Acerbi, Calhanoglu, Brozovic, Mkhitaryan, Dzeko etc. All these players costed less than 10M each (some were free) for Inter. Some of them were on really low wages too. Speaking of UCL, almost every year we get a surprise or pretty unexpected team reaching the semis, a team that usually spends far less money than their competitors. 2023 Milan, 2022 Villareal, 2020 Lyon etc.

Other obvious examples are Leicester winning the 2016 EPL or Lille winning 2021 Ligue 1. Huge salaries and transfer fees aren’t as important as most people think.

Nah it makes no sense.

It’s just a random qualify game, relax.

Realistically speaking, none of them. 99% of football viewers watch European leagues and the rest might as well watch the Saudi League which is full of star players, if they want to try something new. Nobody really cares about these clubs outside of South America.

Me and everyone who watches football.

2016/17 was an amazing UCL season for various reasons:

1. Real Madrid become the first team to ever win back to back UCL titles.
2. La Remontada (Barcelona 6-1 PSG, after losing 4-0 in the first game).
3. Kylian Mbappe introducing himself to the world of football. And he did it in style.
4. Monaco reaching the semis, with Mbappe, Falcao, Bernardo Silva, Fabinho, Ben. Mendy, Bakayoko, Lemar. Iconic underdog team.
5. Juventus’ team was iconic as well, that run was the last dance in the competition of so many great players: Buffon, Dani Alves, Higuain, Marchisio etc. Dybala was one of the best players in the world back then.
6. Leicester City in the UCL quarter-finals. Do I need to say more?
7. Bayern 10-2 Arsenal in two games.
8. The top scorer battle. When the round of 16 games ended, Messi had scored 11 goals and Ronaldo had scored only 2. After the final, it was Messi 11, Ronaldo 12. Truly iconic.

That’s why the current criteria for Ballon d’Or make zero sense. If Kolo Muani had scored in the WC final, that automatically made Mbappe the Ballon d’Or winner and Messi 2nd or 3rd, same if Montiel had missed his penalty.

The same of course applies to any situation.

That’s why you can’t compare players on one game, even based on one tournament. Players should be compared on whatever they did throughout the 50+ games of a season, Ballon d’Or is not a player of the match award for 2-3 games.

Lucas Vazquez is the definition of that. He is just decent/okay at many things on the pitch, but he isn’t really good at anything, except passion and workrate. When Real Madrid signed him in 2015 for 1M, he was supposed to be a 3rd-4th choice winger, I’m pretty sure he never expected to play over 300 games for them, winning 4 UCL titles and also getting some caps for Spain.

I don’t understand why people bring up Ronaldo’s personality as a negative trait of a potential coaching career.

One of the most succesful managers of the past decades was… Jose Mourinho, the guy who called himself the special one.

As a Real Madrid fan, this guy better be the next R9 without injuries, or else we’re completely fucked. So many among our fanbase believe he’s gonna immediately occupy the starting striker position once he arrives and I have a bad feeling that the board thinks the same way. That’s way too much pressure for a 17 year old, I think we should wait at least 3-4 years before (and if) he is ready for pretty much the most important role any footballer in the world could have, being the starting number 9 of Real Madrid.

I wish we could have bought an actual world class and proven striker like Kane instead of chasing every 17 year old available, but it is what it is I guess.

Some tackles can be awful, but at the end of the day tackling is part of the game, some of them are gonna just be misjudged or mistimed.

On the other hand repeatedly biting people intentionally shouldn’t have any place in football, especially if “the biter” is also a racist piece of shit. So yeah, I think Luis Suarez is worse than every single player listed here.

Also different players peak at different times. Both Rooney and Benzema were far better than the vast majority of footballers at the age of 16-20.

The big difference is that Rooney remained great in his 20s and then completely fell off, while Benzema was okay-ish (if by okay-ish you mean being a starter for Real Madrid) in the age most players typically peak (27-31). But Benzema around 30-35 was once again far better than almost all (sometimes actually all) his colleagues, while Rooney was just a ghost of his former self. Rooney is only 2 years older than Benzema, but he has left United since 2017. Big Benz was Madrid’s starting striker up until some months ago.

Reece is amazing ability wise, but when was the last time the guy managed to play full 90 minutes? He is 23 and he is always injured, I wouldn’t be surprised if the guy is already retired by 30.