World cup success story: Qatar and Russia played it right, others failed.

How predictable! The easiest way to cover someone flaws and failure is to accuse others and underestimate their success. That was exactly what we witnessed in the last 24 hours after FIFA announced Russia and Qatar to host the following two worldcups, 2018 and 2022 instead of great and developing football nations like England, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, Belgium, Australia and USA. At the heat of the moment, things turned ugly. I mean, really ugly.

Maybe for the first time, I had no clear favorites. Yet, if I had a vote, I would have voted for Russia and Australia taking in consideration their geographic location on the planet’s map and the fact that they never hosted the competition before.  No doubt, Middle East is a fitting region for a worldcup –again if you browse the map of previous worldcup tournaments. But Qatar? I don’t know about that. UAE (with Qatar maybe), Egypt, Morocco, or some other co-hosting creative arrangements like Syria-Lebanon, Syria-Jordan, etc… In that deserted corner of my mind, I could sense the cross paths leading Qatar to pull out a surprise, but I refused to believe it will happen that fast. Till the last moment, I thought Qatar’s campaign was more a PR project promoting the country, and creating a portfolio for the following attempts. I was aware they WILL get a decent number of votes, though not that many.

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Spain and Barcelona: Mastering Total Football AND Total Catenaccio

Preface

This is not the first time I write about football styles and methodologies- that’s why a decent part will be a compilation of what I wrote in some articles before. Yet, the world cup and the Pundits’ inputs about it force to take the big tournament as a demonstration and case study. Especially that, as usual, there were more attempts to look at the empty part of the Spanish glass rather than analyzing it for what it is for real, With its flaws and benefits.

When Italy won the world cup in Germany, football romantic analysts claimed that they didn’t deserve it because they played a so-called “Passive football style”, the pragmatic football analysis responded by pointing out that the most important thing in professional football is winning titles. Football exhibitions place is freestyle tournaments, not world cup. They also recalled that defense is also football, and a team that produce quality defense the way Italians did, deserves the title as much as a team that win it depending on offense brilliance . 

The anti-Italy pundits were basically attacking football admirers, added to the Majority of journalists in UK who slate and underestimate any success if it’s not English. 

The analysts who defended Italy were basically the pragmatic ones who place result over anything else, beside the Italian journalists who rightfully defended their national team achievement. 

Four years later, Spain won the world cup. And as usual, there were journalists who hailed the achievement as a victory of offense football and beautiful game. They are basically the romantic analysts mentioned above who believe there is a right way and a wrong way to play football. The argument that “the right way” wins no title is proven wrong again. Spain won the title. Take that pragmatics!

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The best league in the world: Where to find it?

English premier league was the subject of the first part about the best league in the world. I apologies first for some spellings in the first part –I updated the post fixing where I thought there was a need for editing. This part will be brief as there are lots of factors the EPL have in common with the rest of the world leagues.

If it’s not convincing to consider the EPL as the league to crown, its more unlikely to find a sold case for the liga to consider it the best league in the world.

Evaluating the EPL in the first part was based on what the league generally stands for:

“Is it an exhibition to enjoy the game? Is it the level of competition? Is it the mechanism that helps the domestic level to improve and feed national teams that represents the respective country? Is it an environment that helps the game’s evolution throughout the tactical clashes that take place between the clubs involved? Is it the mean that transform football from a game to an economic module helping the country and the people financially? Or maybe, it’s a mix of this and that.”

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