A big week for
The league phase has been previewed as Barcelona’s first step toward reclaiming a crown last lifted in 2015, with disappointments aplenty since. Lionel Messi claiming just one Champions League title in the last decade of his time at Camp Nou is the starkest statistic. The player anointed as Messi’s successor, Lamine Yamal, is already a European and world champion for Spain, so this is the next frontier. A soggy Wednesday evening at Camp Nou saw Hansi Flick’s team show their attacking chops remain of the highest quality in a 5-1 defeat of Feyenoord. The club presidential regime of Joan Laporta continues to pull levers to confound financial experts, with Gabriel Jesus, one of the summer’s arrivals, scoring his first Barca goal. Yamal got on the scoresheet via a scruffy free-kick after Raphinha had reminded there are further dimensions to that all-star attack, his first goal of his pair two sending Feyenoord defenders skidding.Weird scenes after Fenerbahce’s 1-1 draw with Roma when Ismail Kartal, the Turkish club’s veteran coach, resigned post-match “to clear the way”. The drama was heightened when the Fenerbahce president, Aziz Yildirim, said he would not be accepting the resignation. “There’s no need for him to say that he’d continue,” Yildirim said. “I am his senior, I told him to continue and that’s it. We are a family.” The explanation given for such a sudden exit was Kartal’s annoyance at a bottle being lobbed in his direction. Watch this space.
Player of the week
Ballon D’Or season is upon us, and a leading nominee must be Bayern’s brilliant Michael Olise, who scored two goals against Bodø/Glimt. The Norwegians attempted to aggressively mark him but were left with twisted blood as his team scored five second-half goals. The Frenchman gave a typically dry post-match interview. Asked how it feels to score great goals, he said: “I don’t know … I just shoot and it goes in.”Club in focus
Manchester United on Thursday faced a club formed in 2017, three years after Luke Shaw, who missed the game, was signed. Sabah, Azerbaijan’s champions last season, breaking the dominance of Qurban Qurbanov’s Qarabag, are coached by Valdas Dambrauskas, a former United soccer schools and Brentford youth coach who also worked as a pub cleaner and gardener in the UK. His journey from Lithuania to Manchester was funded by a win on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, where he walked away from Vilnius’s equivalent of Regis Philbin with a sum commensurate with a year’s salary. The homecoming was not too happy as United were ready 4-0 winners, Youri Tielemans and Bruno Fernandes in particular turning on the style. “He absolutely destroyed us,” Dambrauskas said of Fernandes. That did not bode well for Sabah’s matches ahead: Dortmund, Barcelona and Napoli travel to Azerbaijan, while a trip to Arsenal awaits.
They said it
“There’s a lot of criticism when a match is boring, but it was crazy today. . … It could easily have ended 7-6. Our midfield was weak, they made changes very early, and I didn’t have much to work with in the centre of the pitch. … I agree with Raul that the goals came as a result of their errors.” José Mourinho’s Real Madrid return is already under scrutiny, and before being interviewed on Movistar after a close-run 2-1 defeat of Inter, he had to listen to on-air criticism from Raúl González, a Madrileno legend. Those midfield comments appeared directed at Trent Alexander-Arnold, who played as one of the trio on a night where fans at the Santiago Bernabéu made clear that better is expected.Looking ahead
The other side of an elongated international break, the wait will be long – more than a month – for the second round of matches. Holders Paris Saint-Germain, looking for their third straight title, travelling to Manchester City is the grand-slam fixture. Enzo Maresca has made a decent fist of succeeding Pep Guardiola, with four wins in four. Erling Haaland’s pair of goals at Porto took him to 167, third on his club’s all-time scorers’ list, 10 behind Eric Brook, who played his last game during the second world war.Mourinho, should he remain in charge at Real Madrid, will return to Roma while Manchester United travel to Atlético Madrid, who knocked out United in the last 16 in 2021-22, their only previous meeting in the competition.