In my ongoing quest to blog about something other than the car wreck merged with dumpster fire merged with shit show that is national politics in the US, I spent a good five minutes casting around for ideas about what to post today. Do I talk about Dunkirk, which I saw last night? Do I discuss my initial thoughts on the Defenders on Netflix?
Or I can go with the other old standby, which is football, and which is what I'm doing today. I'm about a week late to talk about the return of the Premier League, but given that the start of a season is a bit irrelevant and not always indicative of what's going to happen at the end, I feel like it's still worthwhile to chat about what I've seen so far.
Because I'm a statto, I've started putting together a spreadsheet to draw trends from the previous 25 seasons of the Premier League. I think I mentioned at around the time that Leicester City was driving toward its title that this would be the first time since the start of the EPL that the winner would come from outside the top three. What I didn't mention, but what is undoubtedly true, is that it happened again last season, when Chelsea won the league after placing tenth the previous year.
More interestingly, I saw an article this week that suggested how hard it's been for title-winning managers to keep their jobs. Claudio Ranieri got the sack at Leicester partway through last season, after presiding over a terrible run of form and some uninspired signings, while Jose Mourinho was out of a job midway through the season before after guiding Chelsea to a win.
Obviously people started measuring Antonio Conte's coffin after last week's loss to Burnley, but that talk should die down after today's result, where Chelsea beat Spurs. But if things go south for Chelsea this season, and he gets the sack, then we can point to it as a full-blown trend.
What makes a giant?
Another thought I had while watching the Spurs-Chelsea match at the gym this morning was about Bayern Munich, and why people call them "European giants". They're undoubtedly a great team, and ridiculously dominant in their home league, but I saw someone call them giants recently and had to dispute that.
Bayern occupies a similar role in the Bundesliga that Real Madrid and Barcelona have held in Spain, namely the onrushing juggernaut that just keeps winning championships. They are, in fact, so dominant that no other team has won the Bundesliga since 2012.
But success in Europe has been harder to come by, even when they were being managed by Pep Guardiola before he decamped for Manchester City. Sure, they won in 2013 against Borussia Dortmund, and lost against Chelsea in 2012, but haven't even gotten to the final since then.
I am aware of my standing as a Juventus fan, given that my team is notoriously bad at winning the Champions League, but I think it's worth delving deeper into why I think Bayern's maybe a smidgen overrated. One key thing is probably the players - undoubtedly a talented bunch, but I feel that it's more of a selling club than a buying club, and that the guys who've pitched up there are frequently misfits who didn't really fill their potential elsewhere.
I'm thinking of Franck Ribéry and Arjen Robben, which may be a little harsh, given how many leagues they've won between them. But Ribéry is tainted by his association with France's off-pitch collapse in 2010, and has never really won major trophies away from Munich. Robben, meanwhile, has bounced around a number of clubs and won championships in every league that he played, but I have to admit that I'd completely forgotten he was at Chelsea back at the start of the Abramovich era.
Again, my assessment of misfits may be harsh, because Ribéry and Robben are undoubtedly talented, and there are also a number of great players, like Robert Lewandowski or Thomas Müller, who just go from strength to strength there. But on the other hand, James Rodríguez and Arturo Vidal pitching up in Munich when they've been deemed surplus to requirements at Real Madrid and Juventus proves my point, especially given how well their previous teams have done without them.
Maybe I'm being mean, and maybe it's easy to see everything as being a little skewed when Spanish teams have been so dominant in Europe since 2013. But it's probably fair to say that Bayern aren't really performing at the level they should be, given the talent they have - even if they'll probably romp to the title again this year.
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