JustinWK wrote:
Österreich

issoisso wrote:
Suddenly all of Denmark will start considering Spartak as a giant of european football

How many true #10’s are there in England? Joe Cole who will never be allowed to play the role and Elano at Manchester City.



Werder has Diego, Bayern has Ribery, BVB has Hajnal, Hannover has Bruggink and the league lost two in Wolfsburg’s Marcelinho and Hamburg’s van der Vaart recently. It is a very common position that is the pinnacle of technical football; yet, it doesn’t exist in England, because it slows the game down.



Nonetheless, the Bundesliga is no slower than the EPL. In fact if you compare distance covered, the Bundesliga and the EPL are slightly behind France as players cover 10km per game. While much more time is spent sprinting in the EPL (210m vs 169m), when it comes to high intensity runs the EPL is barely above the Bundesliga with each player running 241m at high intensity compared with 224m. But for the slight advantage they have in sprinting, English teams don’t even complete 60% of their passes, while the Bundesliga compares with La Liga at 63.5% completion rate.



Another telling problem for England is that there are 50 more challenges per game, which is due to the defensive nature of the league. Even worse is that the EPL has 10 more air challenges per game, proving that “Rt. 1� football is far from dead. Meanwhile England has the lowest number of touches per game and Germany the most.



And all of that leads to the most telling factor: For 19 straight years, the Bundesliga has had the most goals per game of any of the five biggest leagues in Europe (2.81 last year). England, who claims that Italy is the land of defensive football, has managed to average more goals than Italy just three times this decade. The last time England even came close to the Bundesliga was 1999-2000 when they scored 2.78 vs 2.80 gpg. Most years, the most “exciting� league in the world is statistically more like Ligue 1, which is desperately trying to get its clubs to play offense. It has many less shots on goals, significantly less goals, and many more challenges. In effect, take an Englishman’s worst stereotype of Italian football and it describes his league perfectly.



Germany on the other hand, seems to be the middle ground between the highly technical Spanish and Italian leagues and the fast-paced, physical English and French leagues. And that seems to me to be the perfect place to be in a tactical sense.

issoisso wrote:
In 2005, just before a Newcastle - Chelsea game, somebody stole the tactical analysis of the Newcastle team from Mourinho's PC. After all this time I finally managed to get a hold of it.

I find it funny how many times the words "Boumsong", "silly mistakes" and "exploit!!!" can be found close to each other