Village Idiot

Manuel Neuer Roberto Carlos Sergio Ramos Stefan De Vrij Jordi Alba Alessandro Nesta Andrés Iniesta Alessandro Del Piero Ole Gunnar Solksjaer (meh) Romario De Souza Alfredo Di Stéfano Manager: Ottmar Hitzfeld

With a manager that can motivate him (not an easy task) Bale's still a monumental goalscorer. Could do worse as long as trophy signings go.

So La Liga wants to restart in June, play every 3 days, PCR-testing everybody (players, staff) 24 hours before the game (that's circa 1,000 tests per each set of games of the first and second divisions). That's not going to sit well with the public given how much tests are needed elsewhere... The Spanish FA has already scrapped the non-professional and women's football seasons, but La Liga is run by the clubs (very much like The Football League and the Premier League)

Media linking Coutinho if Pochettino gets appointed Tbf we're desperate to ship him off.

It looks like the Spanish FA will abandon the rest of the Women's Football season and declare Barça champion, with no relegations but with promotions (and adjusting league sizes with extra relegation slots next season). They have followed a similar formula for regional men's football. Men's professional leagues are not run by the FA (but by La Liga) so this may not be the case for the top men's 2 divisions.

Beautiful article from Sid Lowe on Michael Robinson https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/apr/28/michael-robinson-european-cup-winner-voice-spanish-tv-died-61 El Día Después was the best football programme ever made in Spain imho, my generation grew up loving the game watching it.

Christ.

Not so strange. They used a celebrity cast for the Spanish version of Shrek films, and Robinson was a celeb.

Damn, two from Villarreal, and Mazinho also player for Valencia. Should be fixed now. Kameni (Espanyol, Camerún) Dragutinovic (Sevilla, Serbia) Diego Godín (Atlético, Uruguay) Celso Ayala (Valencia, Paraguay) Lizarazu (Francia, Athletic) Marcos Senna (España, Villarreal) Rijkaard (Zaragoza, Netherlands) Ettien (Levante, Ivory Coast) Cronaldo (R. Madrid, Portugal) Bebeto (Depor, Brazil) Messi (Barcelona, Argentina) That front 3 should carry me most games.

Fuck, spent an hour doing this. Kameni (Espanyol, Cameroon) Dragutinovic (Sevilla, Serbia) Diego Godín (Atlético, Uruguay) Celso Ayala (Valencia, Paraguay) Lizarazu (Athletic, France) Marcos Senna (Villarreal, Spain) Mazinho (Brazil, Celta) Karpin (Real Sociedad, Russia) Cronaldo (R. Madrid, Portugal) Rossi (Villarreal, Italy) Messi (Barcelona, Argentina) Two leftbacks, Dragutinovic will have to play out of position. Shit, I misread the rules and I thought it was only teams in the top league *right now*. Having Zaragoza and Depor eligible adds a ton of options (Chilavert for giggles), but I'm not redoing this.

Michael Robinson, former Liverpool and Osasuna player, has died of cancer. After retiring in the late 1980s he went on to be a football pundit in Spain, and he was massively popular among those of my generation. RIP.

Hibbert - Baines was one of the most hilariously lopsided fullback pairings I can remember in the PL.

Our press is linking Emerson with NUFC, Spurs, Everton and West Ham. Happy to see NUFC back on lazy journalists' lists of "PL clubs outside the top 5 to link players to" .

The FA (or probably FIFA) should be looking to change the rules regarding registration to get around the contracts quagmire - perhaps a player can’t transfer his league registration until his old club’s season has finished. FIFA already likely to state a footballing contracts purpose is "until the end of the season", not June 30th, so players will have to see out their seasons should their respective leagues run over June 30th. The FA's issue however is that British employment law counteracts FIFAs interpretation, so players in England can challenge FIFAs ruling and likely leave on a free on June 30th anyhow. Yeah, the same would happen here. Spanish courts do have a established history of putting regular labor law above FIFA/UEFA rules.

The transfer market is going to be massively depressed this year. 50m might not be as bad as it looks, many clubs will be desperate to get rid of wages or just make up the losses with any kind of transfer income.

They are starting to cancel the lower leagues over here, so it's a matter of time it goes all the way up.

What a stat

Barça to sell stadium name rights and give all proceeds to the fight against Covid. It's the UNICEF trick all over again. Get fans used to sponsorship with one that you can't possibly argue against, before slapping one for $$.

I can't possibly support two rich clubs. Something's gonna go wrong here.

That Rivaldo goal

Only manager to coach both Madrid and Barcelona, and the kind of manager that left fans a good taste nearly everywhere he worked. For us, he took a team in catastrophic free fall and put us back on our feet before Rijkaard took over. He moved Xavi from the Guardiola role in DM to further upfield, the rest is history. RIP.

Class Can even smell the covid-19 contagions from here.

This will probably be the first season since 2006-2007 that the Spanish league champ scores under 80 points.

Read somewhere that Ronaldinho "doesn't understand" why he's been arrested - the news story was accompanied by a pic of the Dinho's goofiest grin. I've heard of footballers being divorced from reality in some daft ways, but this seems to be a special case... His lawyer has indeed claimed that he's too dumb to know what he was doing was illegal.

That's us in a couple weeks, and you in a month.