\n<\/p>\n
Barcelona\u2019s youth system<\/strong>. Ahead of Sunday\u2019s edition of El Cl\u00e1sico between Barcelona and Real Madrid, the two clubs won their midweek matches. Real Madrid\u2019s opponents were Juventus, in the type of heavyweight clash the Champions League\u2019s rejig into a 36-team group stage was supposed to throw up on a regular basis. Wednesday\u2019s meeting fell short of classic encounters like 2003\u2019s meeting of Madrid\u2019s Lu\u00eds Figo and Zinedine Zidane with Juve\u2019s Pavel Nedv\u011bd 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\u2019s great enigma.<\/p>\n Barcelona meanwhile, continue to show the depth of their La Masia youth academy. Ferm\u00edn L\u00f3pez, 22, scored a hat-trick, while 17-year-old attacking midfielder Pedro \u201cDro\u201d Fern\u00e1ndez supplied an assist on his Champions League debut in a 6-1 drubbing of Olympiakos. Last weekend, Toni Fern\u00e1ndez, six months younger than Pedro, started against Girona in La Liga. Each may play some part in Sunday\u2019s big match, with Madrid two points ahead of their eternal rivals.<\/p>\n Bayern Munich<\/strong>. Another European giant is enjoying a flowering of youth. On Tuesday, Bayern\u2019s coach, Vincent Kompany signed a three-year extension after his side\u2019s faultless start to the Bundesliga campaign. The club hierarchy approves of Kompany\u2019s 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 H\u00e4ssler, completed a solo effort with a fine finish to become his club\u2019s youngest ever Champions League scorer in a 4-0 thrashing of Club Brugge.<\/p>\n \u201cHe simply has balls,\u201d said teammate and midfielder Aleksandar Pavlovi\u0107, 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 D\u00edaz, the summer\u2019s big signing, scored his first Champions League goal for Bayern. D\u00edaz is making his best ever start to a season with seven goals and four assists from 12 matches.<\/p>\n Premier League strength. <\/strong>This week saw a deluge of goals \u2013 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\u2019s 5-1 win over Ajax were punishing defeats for two classic clubs from the European Cup era. Arsenal\u2019s 4-0 defeat of Atl\u00e9tico Madrid was perhaps most striking. Mikel Arteta\u2019s team were too powerful for Diego Simeone\u2019s to withstand. The breakthrough, a Gabriel header, was their 10th set-piece goal this season.<\/p>\n As Manchester City won 2-0 at Villarreal, Erling Haaland extended his scoring run to 12 matches, closing in on Robert Lewandowski\u2019s run of 15 in 2021 \u2013 the best such mark this century. Letting the English side down was Tottenham\u2019s 0-0 draw at Monaco, who took 21 shots on Guglielmo Vicario\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Dennis Man, PSV Eindhoven. <\/strong>The week\u2019s most striking result was PSV\u2019s 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\u2019 defence. Man\u2019s second goal, his team\u2019s fourth, was the highlight, drilled with his left foot. The first was a delicate finish.<\/p>\n \u201cAs I\u2019ve said many times before, you shouldn\u2019t write players off after a few weeks,\u201d said the PSV coach Peter Bosz of a player criticised since signing from Parma.<\/p>\n \u201cThe biggest exception for me today compared to the other games we\u2019ve 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\u2019t on the ground, it was in the air.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 Liverpool manager Arne Slot comments on the win in Frankfurt, and inadvertently issues Brentford manager Keith Andrews his tactical plan for the team\u2019s game on Saturday. (And probably everyone after that, too.)<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Sign up to Soccer with Jonathan Wilson<\/span><\/p>\n Jonathan Wilson brings expert analysis on the biggest stories from European soccer<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 France 1998 World Cup winner Emmanuel Petit, speaking on RMC after the defending champions won 7-2 at Bayer Leverkusen.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s Marseille are leaders; Marseille\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Real Madrid v Liverpool fits a similar bill \u2013 Xabi Alonso facing Slot, with the Basque Real Madrid boss having been many people\u2019s pick to succeed J\u00fcrgen 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\u2019s tenure, a night when Kylian Mbapp\u00e9 and Mohamed Salah both missed penalties.<\/p>\n In the early 1990s Sir John Hall, the Newcastle chair, revealed a dream for his club to become a \u201cteam full of Geordies\u201d, modeled on Athletic Club\u2019s Basque-only recruitment policy. That never came to pass, especially not today. Eddie Howe\u2019s squad is a league of nations, with only Dan Burn, teenage midfielder Lewis Miley and reserve keeper Mark Gillespie fitting Hall\u2019s bill. The clubs meet at St James\u2019 after heartening wins this week. Wednesday saw Athletic land their first win with a 3-1 comeback against Qaraba\u011f.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The big winners Barcelona\u2019s youth system. Ahead of Sunday\u2019s edition of El Cl\u00e1sico between Barcelona and Real Madrid, the two clubs won their midweek matches. Real Madrid\u2019s opponents were Juventus, in the type of heavyweight clash the Champions League\u2019s rejig into a 36-team group stage was supposed to throw up on a regular basis. Wednesday\u2019s<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30071,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[9406,2926,1732,17700,8136,3504,1085,666,3904],"class_list":{"0":"post-30070","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-barcelona","9":"tag-bayern","10":"tag-champions","11":"tag-deluge","12":"tag-goals","13":"tag-league","14":"tag-review","15":"tag-rules","16":"tag-youth"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30070\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/30071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Player of the week<\/strong><\/h2>\n
They said it<\/strong><\/h2>\n
The pundit\u2019s chair<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Looking ahead<\/strong><\/h2>\n