Meet Granada CF, The Newly Promoted Club On Top Of LaLiga
Granada is top of the LaLiga table. No, not the country. Granada CF, the football team from Granada, Spain. The same Granada that appointed Tony Adams in 2017 and was relegated.
Granada is top of the LaLiga table. No, not the country. Granada CF, the football team from Granada, Spain. The same Granada that appointed Tony Adams in 2017 and was relegated.
Gareth Bale is still in the midst of a never-ending transfer saga at Real Madrid, but his focus isn’t on where he might be playing next.
Nor is Bale focusing on his play on the field.
Gareth Bale, 30, is mostly worried about what he’s going to do when he retires — golf and going unnoticed.
We’re almost a third of the way through the 2019-20 European club season, giving us an ample enough sample size to analyze this year’s current statistics in a somewhat meaningful way. There’s one giant caveat to it all and that’s Lionel Messi’s restricted start to the campaign due to a calf strain followed by an abductor muscle injury. He’s only started three of Barcelona’s nine league games thus far, so he's yet to dominate every statistical category.
Some big news coming out of UEFA Youth League Group F on Wednesday — perhaps the biggest UEFA Youth League Group F news we’ve ever presented on the hallowed pages of The18: In the group’s early match, 18-year-old American winger Konrad de la Fuente scored two great goals as Barcelona thumped Slavia Prague 4-0. Later in the day, Inter Milan responded to Borussia Dortmund’s early goal with four unanswered, but that Dortmund opener was scored by Youssoufa Moukoko.
Barcelona needed everything it could muster to hold on to a narrow 2-1 win over Slavia Prague on Wednesday in the Czech capital, surviving a late flurry from the hosts.
The three points would have been much easier to come by had it not been for a once-in-a-lifetime miss from Barcelona’s No. 10.
Barcelona had to leave for Eibar a day early due to massive political protests around the city, but the Blaugrana got out of town with an easy three points on Saturday.
MSG all found the back of the net in the same game for the first time for Barcelona, which cruised to a 3-0 victory over Eibar, momentarily leapfrogging Real Madrid into first-place. Los Blancos can surge back into first place in LaLiga with a win over Mallorca later Saturday.
El Clásico will not go on as scheduled next week, LaLiga made this much clear. But why was El Clásico postponed and when will the match be made up? Here’s a quick explainer of everything going on in Spain right now.
The first El Clásico of the season — the biggest club match in the world — was slated for Saturday, Oct. 26 at Barcelona’s Camp Nou. Now it appears the match will be rescheduled for either Dec. 4 or Dec. 18 (both Wednesdays).
But why was El Clásico postponed in the first place?
It’s been exactly 15 years to the day since Lionel Andrés Messi Cuccittini hopped off the bench in the 82nd minute of Barcelona’s 1-0 derby victory over Espanyol to mark his LaLiga debut. The 17-year-old replaced midfield maestro Deco and gave a tantalizing glimpse of what was to come.
What followed, in league play, is currently 453 more appearances, 420 goals, 164 assists and 10 titles. You could say that things have gone well.
Following a 9-0 beatdown of San Marino on Thursday, Belgium became the first nation to book its place at next summer’s European Championship. Today, the Red Devils maintained their 100 percent record in Euro 2020 qualifiers with a 2-0 victory over Kazakhstan in Nur-Sultan.
As the world’s top-ranked side, Belgium boasts an embarrassment of attacking riches. After netting goals 50 and 51 for the national team against San Marino, striker Romelu Lukaku was rested against Kazakhstan, but it was his replacement, Michy Batshuayi, who opened the scoring in the 21st minute.
Sunday marked the 21st time in Luis Suárez’s six-year Barcelona career that he’d hammered a ball flush in the air — be it a volley, scissor or overhead kick — and into the back of the net. Frankly, there’s no one better on the planet with this demanding technique. Here’s that strike against Sevilla.