Nobody took advantage and overtook them between 66 and 98 though and then the gap was smaller. That’s not a good reason to suggest another club would close the gap even if they got lucky enough for Madrid to drought for 32 years again
During that huge 32 year gap no other club - not Liverpool not Bayern or milan (who already had one before the gap began) could match them to 6 never mind overtake.
Now Madrid’s lead is 7, and that’s just over Milan, Liverpool or Bayern would need 8 more again just to match. If Real Madrid can win 6 titles in 11 years from 55-66 and 8 in 27 years from 95 to 22. Then it doesn’t even matter if they take another 32 year break no other club has been able to win 8 in the 68 years of the competitions existence
I mean Guardiola mooted that a player strike might happen on this issue about a month ago. It was certainly an issue in the last pfa election https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/59347490.amp
I suspect the problem is ultimately for competitive animals - which the top players are. Refusing the opportunity to play goes against their nature. All players are drilled to seek out and seize opportunities for first team football. You don’t make it out of the academy (and the majority of people don’t make it as pro footballers) to the first team if you don’t have an insanely professional mentality and strive to play every minute you can. A lot of players would fear being dropped permanently if they asked managers for rest or getting benched by a sub or rotation option impressing when called upon. Pep himself has said he has to rotate purely to keep players happy with their minutes. Zidane spoke about how difficult it was to convince Cristiano Ronaldo to sit on the bench even if it was obvious that as a guy in his mid 30s his career would be longer and better if he missed the odd game where he wasn’t needed like a copa del rey tie vs a 3rd division side or a UCL group stage dead rubber.
This factors into the other issue. It affects such a small proportion of the players. The vast majority of professional players play outside the top leagues and top divisions and therefore don’t play anything other than league and cup games and don’t get called up in international breaks. Even in the premier league the majority of teams don’t play European football, even amongst those who do play in Europe there’s no guarantee they go all the way to the final every year. Even on the teams who can guarantee that (basically just Man City) they have a deep bench and rotate - Haaland and Rodri are the only guys who play every game for their club and their country when fit. For the majority of players who the unions represent they want more game time not less. There are far more players in the situation of (picks random cb) James Tomkins who plays every now and then for Crystal Palace so is rarely playing midweek and always has the international breaks off than Virgil Van Dijk (in the same position) who plays pretty much every game as Liverpool captain regularly making deep runs in both cups and Europe every season so playing multiple midweek matches and captaining the Netherlands every international break and 2 summer tournaments in a row.
Most players have Tomkins match load not Van dijks
Burnley have made a massive shift in play style under new ownership and kompany was a huge part of that. The owners have a lot of loyalty to him as a result and a lot of belief that these are still temporary trouble as part of a shift.
At Sheffield it’s the opposite the owners been trying to sell for ages as a result he’s not been putting any cash in to replace key players like Ndiaye who left in the summer - the owner knows it’s a poor squad that no other manager is gonna do better with and sacking heckingbottam would just cost more money
1970 - 1990 is the peak of low scoring football. Goals per game in world cups just to cite one statistic were at their lowest in tournaments in this era. There are multiple possible reasons for this (poor pitch quality, poor fitness, tactical trends towards favouring defence and 1-0 wins over free flowing goal fests) but it’s a well observed trend among many football statisticians that the 70s and 80s represent the nadir for goal scoring in professional football.
I doubt Lillian Thuram was scrounging to feed Marcus and Khephren or Peter Schmeichel struggling to raise kasper
Winners: France 🇫🇷
Runners up: England 🏴
Dark horse: Spain 🇪🇸
Top Scorer: Mctominay
Top playmaker: Musiala
Flop: Portugal 🇵🇹
Barcelona have an incredibly clear style of play rooted in a philosophy. They play out the back - usually in a 4-3-3 always looking for the most creative and when you have graduates from la masia who’ve perfected the art of doing that from a young age linking up with some of the most technical players from South America and across Europe plus Messi you tend to dominate most teams across 38 games.
Real Madrid got that dawg in them
Yep. I spend way too much time thinking about this sport but even then football on its own ain’t good enough that I can care about Man City vs Fulham.
It’s interesting at the World Cup where each team is attached to a tangible world culture I find it easier to watch games as a neutral but generally the beauty of the game or just watching skilled players use those skills isn’t enough for me I need narrative and the average Prem game just doesn’t have enough of that
Lazio really looked like they had hit the point under Sarri where they should be challenging for the league title this season.
At the end of last season they were playing like the 3rd best team in Italy behind only inter and Napoli (and arguably were the 2nd best once Napoli tailed off having secured the title so early) really looked like everyone had fully absorbed sarri’s ideas and were about to hit the same kind of form his Napoli did in their third season where they nearly won the title.
Now this season they look completely mid very little fluency probably fighting for a Europa league spot - Milinkovic Savic was a big loss but one player going shouldn’t have made them so stale.
Chelsea are bad.
This is compounded at home, because when the team plays bad the fans turn hostile and reduce the players confidence further. For teams with such a poor relationship with their fans playing in front of them at home can actually be a disadvantage
I’d say Americans are still very much not considered good technical players. With the exception maybe of Reyna at Dortmund, the best American players are very much good at elements of the game involving, pace, physicality and aggression rather than what to do with the ball at their feet