da doce： As the European leagues come back from their winter breaks, and the Premier League is over its bruising Christmas schedule, we are well and truly into the second half of the season now. And this year there is a very different scenario all over Europe.
da lvbet： Last year, Paris Saint-Germain won the French Ligue 1 title by 31 points, finishing on a goal difference of +83 and Juventus won Serie A by nine points despite giving the rest of the league a head start. Bayern Munich ran away with the Bundesliga crown, too.
This year, not only are PSG not winning the league in France, they’re three points behind leaders Monaco who are only ahead of second-placed Nice on goal difference. In Italy, Juventus are leading again, but only by one point (albeit with a game in hand), and the same can be said for Real Madrid, who lead La Liga in Spain by a point, though they too have an extra game to extend their advantage. In Germany, too, Bayern Munich are only one defeat away from finding themselves level on points with newcomers RB Leipzig.
And the question is, how did it come to this?
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Last season, Leicester’s victory in England prompted a sort of bizarrely misplaced jingoistic glee: a league title won by a club whose rightful place really was to be fighting against relegation showed that English football really is the most competitive in the world. And that opinion had plenty of fertile soil to grow in given results from around the continent.
Easy victories for big established clubs helped the narrative, too: why would you want to watch PSG, Juventus or Bayern Munich walk the league when you could watch the big boys falter and lose to Leicester City? Even Spain wasn’t immune – Barcelona may not have had it all their own way in the end, but they were battled only by the two clubs who contested the Champions League final. Hardly an unexpected turn of events.
The bit where that school of thought falls down, though, is probably the bit where Leicester won the league by 10 points themselves. The Premier League wasn’t competitive either, and the fact that everyone expected Leicester to crumble doesn’t mean that it wasn’t comfortable.
But if this season is different, the question is why? Why are all the top leagues in Europe so competitive this season? (Including the Premier League, even if Chelsea are top by a bigger margin than any other league in Europe’s top divisions).
I don’t know the answer, but here is a thought.
How much has a shift in the tactical makeup of the game changed things this season? How important is individual excellence in a game that now seems to be about attacking as a well-drilled unit, hunting in pressing packs, and playing out from the back?
Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi still lead the way this season in Spain’s goalscoring charts, but Ronaldo’s 12 goal tally is only one better than Iago Aspas at Celta Vigo and equal to Jermain Defoe’s haul at Sunderland. Messi has 14, only one more than Anthony Modeste of Cologne in Germany. Does this show that the importance of individual performances are being tempered, while tactics and teamwork become more important?
There’s more evidence for this than a glance at a list of top scorers, but most of it is fairly anecdotal and requires a bit of thought and imagination.
Think about the best teams so far in each league, and what they’ve done this season: Real Madrid and Sevilla lead the way in Spain, but Cristiano Ronaldo isn’t hitting the ridiculous tally he often does, and Sevilla don’t have a player who lifts them above their level. Last year we saw Jamie Vardy and Riyad Mahrez do that for Leicester, and Hatem Ben Arfa managed it at Nice.
In Germany, it’s the same story at Leipzig. In France, ditto with Nice and Monaco. In England, how many of Liverpool’s typical starting XI would break into Manchester City’s this season? That’s always a loaded question for football fans, but if you’re going on name and reputation alone, it’s probably not that many. And yet no one could – in seriousness – be more impressed with City than Liverpool. The key is teamwork. Whilst Philippe Coutinho and Sadio Mane are excellent individual players, they are playing in a team where you just can’t think about individual parts. You have to think about they all fit together, and that means few standout geniuses. The struggles of PSG, Bayern Munich and Manchester United so far this season bear that out. All have players capable of individual brilliance. None have shone properly, though all remain competitive.
And one final thought is this: how can Chelsea play so badly at the start of the season and then so well for the rest of it once they changed system? The answer surely has to have something to do with how the whole functions, not the individual parts.
Cristiano Ronaldo is coming to the declining point in his career and Lionel Messi is finding it hard this season, too. All of the best teams in the top leagues are being challenged by upstarts, many with no standout ‘best players’ but with great partnerships and tactical abilities instead. There will always be room for stunning individual players and performances that change games, but are we finally coming to a point where the team around them matters ever more?
And if that’s true, is there hope for football yet? Can we start to hope that even the teams with all the money and the players can be challenged by a team with the tactics, the work rate, and the team ethic?
And even if we can’t, wouldn’t some competition be nice at the very least?
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