Superstars of Real and Barcelona get all the recognition but English game has important qualities that the La Liga giants lack
Out came the sticks when the Premier League suffered another shut-out in football’s global awards. Best league in the world? Thwack, take that. The English game was every bit as excluded as Sepp Blatter as the industry worshipped again at the twinkling feet of Barcelona and Real Madrid.
To have no players in the world XI elected by a representative ballot is worrying. To have no British player other than the Spain-based Gareth Bale on the 23-man Ballon d’Or short-list hardly suggests London, Manchester and Merseyside are magnets to the finest talent. But we can take comfort in all this from the distorting effect of La Liga-philia, which causes voters to automatically plump for Real Madrid and Barcelona stars at the expense of others in Europe.
Travelling from Real Madrid to Zurich this weekend offered a useful perspective. You go to Spain these days the way you might have toured a Hollywood studio in the 1950s. You leave with a glow after watching Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo. But then you remember that Atletico Madrid are roughing both teams up at the top of the league, with a galactico-free team; or you scan the latest Premier League results and marvel at the volatility and unpredictability of a division lurching, against all odds, towards greater equality.
Guilty is how I would plead to the charge of sometimes obsessing about where the most technically gifted players are. It is not only the genius of Messi and Ronaldo that draws the eye south. In Spain, you get to see Andres Iniesta, too, and Toni Kroos and Ivan Rakitic.
Plainly there is nothing in England, Germany or Italy to match the concentration of virtuosity at Spain’s two mega clubs. The Ballon d’Or short-list said it all: Messi, Ronaldo, Neymar, with the third Barcelona forward, Luis Suarez, hammering on the door. The Fifa/FIFPro XI meanwhile contained eight from Real Madrid or Barcelona and one each from the Bundesliga (Manuel Neuer), Serie A (Paul Pogba) and Ligue 1 (Thiago Silva).
But there are other ways to judge vitality, beyond the clusters of megastars, which partly reflect the work of super-agents (Jorge Mendes especially), and Real Madrid’s ability to conjure out of thin air fantastical transfer fees and wages. As La Liga games flowed onto screens at the weekend, it was noticeable for example how many Spanish grounds are still stuck in the 1980s.
Premier League spectators would trade their ticket prices for those in the Bundesliga, or Spain, but would be slow to give up the dread that comes with English fixtures. A trip to Stoke? Oh, no. Watford coming on Saturday? That could be tricky. To judge a league solely by the stockpiling of household names at two vast institutions who won 5-0 (Real) and 4-0 (Barcelona) on Saturday is lazy.
The voting can be lazy too, as Jamie Carragher has pointed out. Just as we are sucked into the neon of a Sunday night Barcelona game (that radiance, that creativity), so the electorate tick Fifa’s boxes for Messi, Ronaldo and Neymar without bothering to think much.
The world XI now has the feel of a team selected on auto-pilot – as it was last year when David Luiz somehow made it into central defence after being nutmegged too many times to count.
On Saturday in Madrid, Luka Modric took his former Spurs team-mate, Gareth Bale, to one side after Bale had scored a hat-trick against Deportivo de La Coruna. “I told him that if he keeps playing like this then I do not see any reason why he can’t be here in the top team and then go on to win it,” Modric said in Zurich. “He has all the possibilities. He is a great player. Powerful, quality, everything. I hope in the future he will be here.”
Some encouragement there for British, or Welsh football. But Modric, who made the world XI, is among those who followed the glamour trail from England to Spain, with Ronaldo, Bale and Suarez.
The shift in power, he says, is undeniable: “When you look at this team [the world XI], it seems so. The best players are now playing in Spain. England has so many great players but La Liga is now number one. It is probably a little bit of everything really, the weather, the glamour, those two clubs. These two clubs are the best in the world and that certainly helps.”
From the Premier League, only David de Gea could make a case for inclusion, with Mesut Ozil making headway. Even then most would still argue for Neuer. Sergio Aguero, when fit, is elite class, but would not dislodge the reigning front three. Vincent Kompany in his pomp would have beaten Thiago Silva to a centre-back shirt. But Eden Hazard, the No 1 in England last year, has dropped away. Predictably, a move to Real Madrid is proposed as the cure for all his ills. Yaya Toure is on the slide. Kevin De Bruyne might come with a run, but it will be from a fair way back.
England’s top division is not the only one with a sore heart. In Germany, the formidable Robert Lewandowski is an also-ran in both the Ballon d’Or and world XI. Yet nobody would consider Bayern Munich vastly inferior to Real or Barcelona. The wailing comes chiefly from England, because the Premier League sold itself so heavily as the “best in the world,” before having to settle for the most competitive.
This phase will pass. Messi and Ronaldo will depart. The cosy agent tie-ups can be broken under challenge from other, super-rich clubs. The universal law that takes all top players to Real Madrid and Barcelona will find its counter-force.
Those two teams are spectacle, art, escapism. Yet many find Atletico just as interesting. And Zinedine Zidane’s big challenge at Real? “To make us play more like a team,’ Modric says. Stardom can buy you audience gasps, but not unity. There is so much more to the modern game than the uber-fame of the Ballon d’Or peacocks. And much of it can be found out there in the cold, in the shape of the Premier League.
Bold Scholes daring to criticise United
The marvelous economy of language with which Paul Scholes delivered his views on the big issues of the day was always cherished by Sir Alex Ferguson, who could expect an answer to a question in three words, or even fewer. Scholes hated verbosity almost as much he loathed people tip-toeing around the truth.
Ferguson drew on this extreme honesty to gauge the mood among senior players, especially when a member of the team had become disruptive. Nowadays Scholes is paid to give his opinions, which requires a bit more detail and longer sentences, but he is still setting an example to all United players with his directness.
This, from him after the FA Cup third-round, is about as candid as its gets: "The [United] players looked bored themselves. There's no spirit, there's nobody having a go at each other, there's no smiling, there's no entertainment.”
By the standard dressing room code, Scholes is going too far here. But in the real world he is going just far enough, and more ex-players need to join him, even if they are paranoid about turning into Liverpool, where criticism from retirees flows more freely. Everyone at United knows the club is on dangerous ground. Bravo to Scholes for having the courage to say so. SOURCE:telegraph
