Write On Sports LLC - "Everything Right Is Wrong Again" by Mark T.R. Donohue

Everything Right Is Wrong Again

2006-09-16 22:27:29 | By: Mark T.R. Donohue

The World Cup's unprecedented American television ratings could carry over into more New World interest in European football this season than ever before. If you're one of the curious American sports fans just looking around to see what the Champions' League, Premiership, and Serie A have to offer, you couldn't have picked a better time.

After several years of predictable domestic league finishes, change is in the air. Look no further than the transfer of Argentines Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano from Brazilian side Corinthians to England's West Ham United, only two years removed from promotion. The English standings look topsy-turvy. There's Manchester United and Chelsea near the top of the table as expected, but Everton, Villa, and Portsmouth? Liverpool and Spurs are off to disheartening starts. Only goal differential separates winless Arsenal from the relegation zone.

In Spain and France, it's still the dynastic Barcelona and Lyon and everybody else, but the fallout from the scandals in Italy and arms race in England has left everything feeling a little unsettled. The German national team's success has proved a bit of a setback for the Bundesliga, as superteams elsewhere in Europe have been eager to poach many of the German club league's best players. Defending champs Bayern Munich will have to get by without Michael Ballack, off to a Chelsea roster that frankly already had more attacking midfielders than it needed. Perhaps it's not the best year to an established fan of Arsenal, Madrid, or (saints preserve us) Juventus, but if you're new to the scene, all the upheaval ought to make for some highly unpredictable, and thus highly entetrtaining, soccer.

If you're new to club soccer, you should know that the sport's financial system rewards success. Winning a cup trophy or a domestic league means higher ticket sales at higher prices, to begin with, just as is the case in American professional sports. There's additional rewards however. Bigger teams have bigger sponsors, for one thing. There's also European football to take into account. The top finishers in each of the major domestic leagues get invitations to the Champions' League, which in addition to being quite prestigious and occasionally televised in the United States on channels that don't have three digits means guaranteed big-money fixtures against the biggest, best-drawing teams in the world. For the second group of teams in each league there's the UEFA Cup, which is sort of like the NIT to the Champions' League's NCAA tournament. Like the NIT, it's better than nothing.

If the stakes for managing to somehow claw yourself into the top six or seven of your league's final standings seem high, remember what the consequences are for finishing in the bottom three. Relegation isn't the absolute end of the world for a football club, but it's near the edge. Let's take the case of West Ham. A single goal against Preston in the final of the Championship playoffs in May of 2005 is all that separated the club, one with a noble history, from complete oblivion. In England a team that gets relegated gets a cash stipend for two years from the Premiership to soften the blow. In 2004-05, its second year after being relegated, West Ham finished sixth in England's second division, the last place possible to qualify for the playoff. (The first and second place finishers gain automatic promotion while the third through sixth engage in a playoff.) At the time of their match against Preston, the Hammers were 30 million pounds in debt. A loss would have meant selling off the rest of the team's quality players who had stayed after relegation. It could have been decades before West Ham was ever heard from in the top flights again.

But the Hammers won, and now they are in the UEFA Cup with a very good chance to return to European play next year. Or so it seems at the moment. Anyone trying to make much sense of the play thus far in the English Premier League would have to be either crazy or far smarter than I. While experts will try and sell you at length on the superiority of Italy's Serie A or Spain's La Liga, English football is the most accessible for U.S.-based fans for a variety of reasons. There's more American players there than anywhere else in Europe, and we get more of the games. Fox Soccer Channel, which is now standard on most digital cable and satellite packages, runs as many as ten EPL games a week, many live on Saturday and Sunday mornings. FSC runs Italian games much more sparingly and other European league games hardly at all.

That's not to say you can't decide to be a fan of French soccer if you so choose -- Euro sports teams have been if anything more proactive than their American counterparts in providing Internet listening and viewing options for their far-flung fans. At the moment, every league seems to have one ridiculously well-funded superteam against which everyone else is ill-equipped to keep pace. Barcelona is so dominant that they hardly bother to make sure everyone shows up for league fixtures; their focus continues to be the Champions' League, which they won last year and will be favored to win again. Lyon is working on their sixth consecutive title in France's first division. Bayern Munich have taken the Bundesliga title three of the last four years, twice in a row, and Ballack or no Ballack are favored to take it again in 2007. Europe's smaller leagues all resemble the American League East, with one historically dominant side, a less successful and fanatically bitter rival, and a lot of also-rans. (Of course the Yankees-Red Sox comparison hardly does justice to the vitriol associated with Scotland's legendary Celtic-Rangers blood feud. But I hardly think you can just become a fan of Scottish football. That insanity, you have to be born into.)

The real reason that European soccer has a different feel this season is a subject we've been dancing around, which is the points penalties given to several Italian sides and the wholesale demotion of twice-running Serie A champion Juventus. Italian soccer has always had a reputation of being far less competitive and far more corrupt than Western Europe's other leagues, which is as you would expect for a nation where power-brokering has always been kind of the real national pastime. The consequences that Juventus, AC Milan, Lazio, Reggina, and Fiorentina have suffered for their alleged match-fixing shenanigans have had widespread effects all over the continent. The most obvious beneficiaries are perennial bridesmaids Inter Milan, who ought to have an unobstructed path to the league title this season. (A cynical observer might say that Inter were just the first of the traditional Italian powers to not get caught, not the best of the teams who were playing it fair.) Appeals kept all of the cheating clubs save one from being relegated. Juventus, however, didn't escape the executioner's axe and have lost almost an entire first-choice side's worth of players. Most of the big names went to Spain, continuing the ever-escalating cold war between Barcelona (Gianluca Zambrotta, Lilian Thuram) and Real Madrid (Fabio Cannavaro, Emerson) or to last-man-standing Inter. As a result the balance of power in Europe hasn't been affected profoundly, except perhaps in a psychological sense.

If anything will fell the superteams that aren't (as far as we know) fixing matches, it'll be character issues. Barca has been very successful at keeping all of its huge talents happy but it remains to be seen whether Chelsea will be able to establish itself on the same level. Having won two Premiership titles in a row, Chelsea's polarizing Russian billionaire chairman Roman Abramovich has set his sights on crushing all Europe under his heel. The Blues have added Michael Ballack, Ashley Cole, Khalid Boulahrouz, and Andriy Shevchenko to a team that didn't particularly need upgrades anywhere. Midfielder Frank Lampard, one of the best players in the world, didn't mesh well with Steven Gerrard on the English team in the World Cup; it remains to be seen how he'll get along with Ballack. Taking playing time away from worthies like Didier Drogba, Michael Essien, and Claude Makalele might cost Chelsea's progress at home. In their early games, especially a loss to Liverpool in the Community Shield and a surprising regular-season loss to Middlesbrough, the side has looked always in search of the perfect goal rather than taking a chance or two and actually scoring a couple of ugly ones.

In any game where scoring comes at such a premium, any result is possible and things can always turn in a matter of moments. The season is barely a month gone in most countries and not even a week old in Italy, and we've already seen some bizarre results. Last Saturday Reading and Blackburn Rovers played to a scoreless tie in a game that featured no fewer than three second-half penalty misses. In the Champions' League this week lightly regarded French champs Lyon decisively beat Italian power Real Madrid and in the UEFA Cup microscopic Irish side Derry City eked out a scoreless draw with the somewhat more pedigreed Paris St. Germain. In their first match after getting waxed by doormats Portsmouth 4-0, Middlesbrough drew Arsenal 1-1 in front of a stunned crowd at the Gunners' shiny expensive new stadium. You think you know what's going to happen, but you never really do. In that, what's endlessly appealing about their football isn't at all removed from what's great about our football.

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