Thursday's Champions League group stage draw yielded one matchup no football fan in the world will want to miss: Pep Guardiola's new club, Manchester City, versus his formative one, Barcelona. It won't be Guardiola's first return to his old stomping grounds. During the 2014-15 Champions League semi-finals, Guardiola's Bayern Munich came up against Barca.
Pep Guardiola doesn't coach Barcelona anymore (he'll stop by the Camp Nou for a visit with Manchester City in the UCL group stage), but the Blaugrana can still tiki-taka teams to death.
During last season's UCL group stage, they did their whole "death by 1,000 paper cuts" routine on Roma and it won UEFA's Goal of the Season award. Messi, the finisher, is technically the recipient, but we think the whole damn team should get a trophy for that move.
Ronaldo confirmed his status as the best young player in the world after scoring 54 goals in 57 games across all competitions for PSV Eindhoven. “The Phenomenon” wasn’t even 20 years old yet when Barcelona became interested in signing the Brazilian.
Barcelona finally landed Ronaldo by paying a then world record fee of $19.5 million, with the striker set to join the side for the 1996-97 season.
There are no easy matches in the Champions League — or are there? According to Barcelona’s Gerard Pique, Real Madrid got the rub of the green with regards to Champions League draws last season.
Real Madrid’s route to the final included victories over clubs that were, at the time, hardly at the top of their domestic leagues. So, when a fan asked Pique via Twitter what he’d like to see from Thursday’s group stage draw, Pique couldn’t resist a very obvious dig at Real:
In the deliriousness following Brazil's Olympic win, Neymar has apparently gone a bit overboard and dyed his hair blonde. Apparently the entire team did this, which means that must have been some party.
Neymar with his blonde hair pic.twitter.com/ZaM3fAfPnF
— njrstats (@njrstats) August 21, 2016
Earlier this week at Barcelona practice, new signing Andre Gomes crashed his team-issued Audi SUV into the back of Luis Suarez's team-issued SUV. This doesn't strike a good way to endear yourself to your new teammates, but Europe is a weird place. Maybe Gomes was just looking for attention.
In July of 2014, FiveThirtyEight published an article entitled “Lionel Messi Is Impossible” which attempted to evaluate Messi’s goal-scoring abilities through the use of statistics and data.
One of the most ridiculous findings from all the number crunching was how much better Messi was than everybody else at shooting from distance. In fact, Messi’s efficiency from outside the box was almost as good as most other players inside of it.
As recently as January 2016, Real Madrid were a club in crises. Having been defeated 4-0 by Barcelona in late November, kicked out of the Copa del Rey in the round of 32 after fielding an ineligible player and dropping points to both Villarreal and Valencia in the space of a few weeks, manager Rafa Benitez was given his marching orders on January 3rd.
Like father, like son. Enzo Alan Zidane Fernandez, known commonly as Enzo, registered a fantastic assist in a friendly match between Real Mardid and Stade de Reims.
Enzo’s nonchalant style, his effortless ability to stroll beyond would-be tacklers and his penchant for Cruyff turns, step overs and beautiful passing makes him a carbon copy of his father.
Except for the head of hair that is.
Well, that’s that then. Barcelona have eliminated Arsenal in the 2016-17 UEFA Champions League round of 16, taken it to Paris Saint-Germain in the quarters and will finally receive their first stern test in the semi-finals.
Try as Arsenal might in their all-too familiar opening day loss to Liverpool, the Gunners were simply unable to overcome Barcelona, the Catalan giants throttling Sevilla 5-0 on aggregate in the Supercopa Espana.