The big winners
Barcelona’s youth system. Ahead of Sunday’s edition of El Clásico between Barcelona and Real Madrid, the two clubs won their midweek matches. Real Madrid’s opponents were Juventus, in the type of heavyweight clash the Champions League’s rejig into a 36-team group stage was supposed to throw up on a regular basis. Wednesday’s meeting fell short of classic encounters like 2003’s meeting of Madrid’s Luís Figo and Zinedine Zidane with Juve’s Pavel Nedvěd and Alessandro Del Piero. In 2025, Juventus are not the force of yore, though they made Madrid sweat. The sole goal came from Jude Bellingham, England’s great enigma.
Barcelona meanwhile, continue to show the depth of their La Masia youth academy. Fermín López, 22, scored a hat-trick, while 17-year-old attacking midfielder Pedro “Dro” Fernández supplied an assist on his Champions League debut in a 6-1 drubbing of Olympiakos. Last weekend, Toni Fernández, six months younger than Pedro, started against Girona in La Liga. Each may play some part in Sunday’s big match, with Madrid two points ahead of their eternal rivals.
Bayern Munich. Another European giant is enjoying a flowering of youth. On Tuesday, Bayern’s coach, Vincent Kompany signed a three-year extension after his side’s faultless start to the Bundesliga campaign. The club hierarchy approves of Kompany’s blooding of players like Lennart Karl and Wisdom Mike, two more 17-year-olds. Karl, whose muscular 5ft 6in frame recalls 1990s German great Thomas Hässler, completed a solo effort with a fine finish to become his club’s youngest ever Champions League scorer in a 4-0 thrashing of Club Brugge.
“He simply has balls,” said teammate and midfielder Aleksandar Pavlović, who, at 21, is another youngster Kompany is trusting. Meanwhile, Harry Kane continued an incredible scoring run, and has now notched 20 goals in 12 games across all competitions this season. He has only failed to score in one of those games, and in that one he registered two assists. Meanwhile, Luis Díaz, the summer’s big signing, scored his first Champions League goal for Bayern. Díaz is making his best ever start to a season with seven goals and four assists from 12 matches.
Premier League strength. This week saw a deluge of goals – 71 over two nights, 43 on Tuesday. This makes for a great highlights package, but questions of competitive balance may be raised. Five Premier League clubs enjoyed comfortable wins, including Liverpool ending their losing run by winning 5-1 at Eintracht Frankfurt. Newcastle beating Benfica 3-0 and Chelsea’s 5-1 win over Ajax were punishing defeats for two classic clubs from the European Cup era. Arsenal’s 4-0 defeat of Atlético Madrid was perhaps most striking. Mikel Arteta’s team were too powerful for Diego Simeone’s to withstand. The breakthrough, a Gabriel header, was their 10th set-piece goal this season.
As Manchester City won 2-0 at Villarreal, Erling Haaland extended his scoring run to 12 matches, closing in on Robert Lewandowski’s run of 15 in 2021 – the best such mark this century. Letting the English side down was Tottenham’s 0-0 draw at Monaco, who took 21 shots on Guglielmo Vicario’s goal. A face in the crowd on Wednesday was Paul Pogba, yet to begin his comeback at Monaco from his drugs ban after another setback in training.
Player of the week
Dennis Man, PSV Eindhoven. The week’s most striking result was PSV’s 6-2 defeat of Napoli, with US striker Ricardo Pepi scoring as a substitute. It was Man, a Romanian winger, at the centre of things. He had two goals and a series of dribbles into the heart of the Italian champions’ defence. Man’s second goal, his team’s fourth, was the highlight, drilled with his left foot. The first was a delicate finish.
“As I’ve said many times before, you shouldn’t write players off after a few weeks,” said the PSV coach Peter Bosz of a player criticised since signing from Parma.
They said it
“The biggest exception for me today compared to the other games we’ve played was the playing style of our opponent. We got some energy out of the moments we could press them, which in the last four or five games we played we were not able to press the opponent because the ball wasn’t on the ground, it was in the air.”
– Liverpool manager Arne Slot comments on the win in Frankfurt, and inadvertently issues Brentford manager Keith Andrews his tactical plan for the team’s game on Saturday. (And probably everyone after that, too.)
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The pundit’s chair
“I remain convinced that if the Paris Saint-Germain players manage to maintain this joy of playing together, they will always manage to perform well. It feels like they still have room for improvement.”
– France 1998 World Cup winner Emmanuel Petit, speaking on RMC after the defending champions won 7-2 at Bayer Leverkusen.
Looking ahead
The fourth week throws up a real heavyweight clash as PSG face Bayern. The Parisians are not having it their way in Ligue 1, where Roberto De Zerbi’s Marseille are leaders; Marseille’s loss to Sporting Club on Wednesday had the Italian fuming. Bayern, after recent turbulence, are back dominating the Bundesliga. This one might well be a dry run for a higher stakes meeting in the latter stages.
Real Madrid v Liverpool fits a similar bill – Xabi Alonso facing Slot, with the Basque Real Madrid boss having been many people’s pick to succeed Jürgen Klopp. In the Champions League era, Madrid have beaten Liverpool in two finals, though a 2-0 Liverpool win last November at Anfield in the group stage loosened Carlo Ancelotti’s tenure, a night when Kylian Mbappé and Mohamed Salah both missed penalties.
In the early 1990s Sir John Hall, the Newcastle chair, revealed a dream for his club to become a “team full of Geordies”, modeled on Athletic Club’s Basque-only recruitment policy. That never came to pass, especially not today. Eddie Howe’s squad is a league of nations, with only Dan Burn, teenage midfielder Lewis Miley and reserve keeper Mark Gillespie fitting Hall’s bill. The clubs meet at St James’ after heartening wins this week. Wednesday saw Athletic land their first win with a 3-1 comeback against Qarabağ.
