Five Reasons to Watch Soccer This Weekend

Image by Marta Parszeniew

Pardew's Last Stand
When it comes to stereotypes among fanbases, it’s hard to justify the ill-opinion of Newcastle—which seems to come even from supporters of much more successful teams—that the club’s support is a deluded and paranoid one. Geordies are good people, and have probably the least objectionable fans in the country. The fact the team has been so poor despite enjoying such a huge support is the precise reason for their anger, along with having one of the worst owners in the country and a terrible manager they can’t get rid of.

That may be about to change, however. Pardew is an easy man to dislike. People sniffed when Newcastle fans dismissed him as part of the "cockney mafia," but neglected to realize that, well, cockneys largely are dickheads, and Geordies largely aren’t. They don’t demand to swap meals with their friends at restaurants and then say, “When you’re the king, you can do what you like.” They don’t say the problem with their academy is that it’s full of thick working-class kids. And they don’t call women "females." So their suspicions proved to be well-founded in the end. But who can replace him?

Step forward the man linked to the Newcastle United job more than any other, and coincidentally, the man who Pardew will be facing at what may well be his last stand: Steve Bruce. It’s worth wondering whether Ashley specifically planned this—the two men will be pitted against each other in a gladiatorial scrap to the death, to decide their own fates and the future of Newcastle United. And what a clash—north versus south, the affable Geordie versus the evil cockney. A man whose most famous moment was one of unbridled joy and glory, versus one whose biggest claim to fame was a bad food truck line headbutt.

It’s likely that Bruce will win, but the reason for that is a strange one—because Hull are just plainly a better side than Newcastle at the moment. Not only has he managed them well, but he’s also bought excellently. Whether Bruce will trade in a well-balanced squad that seems prepared to fight for him to bellow at a collection of disinterested continentals in the name of romance is anyone’s guess.

The Strange Canary Wharf Existence of Sam Allardyce
Still, if we’re looking for the new Alan Pardew, we only have to go to his old club. Sam Allardyce is equally loathed by his own fans but also has a board reluctant to fire him as they fear the experience of another miserable relegation. They’ve spent heavily this summer, and on decent players, but still look terrible, as Allardyce’s continued insistence that he is a modernizer who wants to play better soccer looks completely at odds with what’s actually happening on the pitch.

Allardyce is another strange man. At first glance, his soul does not seem to be as black as Pardew's, but he seems to be getting even more conservative in his old age. He reportedly refused to play the club’s two most exciting players, Ravel Morrison and their fancy new signing, Mauro Zarate. The excuse for the former may be that Morrison is something of a tearaway, a young player who seems to be routinely in trouble with any authority he encounters. So how did Allardyce look to help? According to Morrison, by trying to pressure him into replacing his agent and freezing him out when he refused. Allardyce denied this—presumably the court summons is still in the post, much like the time he said he’d sue the BBC for accusations of similar agent-based trickery.

Yet perhaps the stangest thing about Allardyce is this—he lives in Canary Wharf. Instead of simply getting the big house in the suburbs like a normal rich man, he decided to buy a place up in the heavens along with the bankers. It’s strange behavior, but perhaps part of the identity crisis that beats in the heart of the man. How could such a long-ball throwback northerner be a supposed modernizer who uses statistics more than any other manager? How could a man who brought Jay-Jay Okocha and Fernando Hierro to Bolton Wanderers be such a killjoy? And above all, why is he attempting to live like Frasier Crane?

Who’ll replace him at West Ham is anyone’s guess. Paolo di Canio and Malky Mackay are now non-starters, and there’s a real dearth of talent available. But since West Ham’s owners don’t appear, like Mike Ashley, to exist solely for the purpose of pissing off their own fans, the "Allardyce Out" movement will surely have their way. In one cringeworthy interview about his Canary Wharf lifestyle, he claimed to regularly take the subway and not get any hassle at all. That’s probably not true any longer.

Van Gaal’s Ongoing Revolution
Manchester United will look to continue turning that corner against Leicester City, after finally winning a game last week. True, it was against Queens Park Rangers, but this is a team remember that lost by the same scoreline to MK Dons. Harry Redknapp’s rabble were not the variable here. Instead, it was the new players. After seemingly spending the summer attempting to build an entire team of players who would rather be at Real Madrid, Angel di Maria, Falcao, and others were all wheeled out in front of the press and, like politicians during election season, all suspiciously used the same phrase in their interviews. In this case, they had all joined The Biggest Club In The World.

It must have come as a shock to them when, upon taking the field at Old Traffod, the natives cooed, gasped, and applauded as they performed tasks that almost any professional soccer player ought to be able to do. A routine tackle was met with thunderous applause, and actually running at an opposition full-back brought a chorus of oohs and aahs, like a crowd of medieval peasants being shown a weird new type of foreign bear. Or, if you prefer, like Manchester United fans who have been watching Michael Carrick, Tom Cleverley and Antonio Valencia for four years seeing actual soccer player. Daley Blind probably came close to being sacrificed in the center-circle as a witch after the game for passing forwards.

For the moment, they have the easiest job in the world to appease the entertainment-starved United faithful. Van Gaal might not get the kind of loyalty the club’s fans had programmed into themselves to give David Moyes, but as even a vaguely competent man, that will probably be enough to get him hailed as the second coming.

Money Can't Buy You Personality, Apparently
The luster of petrobillions has now worn off both of these teams, who, thanks to The Way Soccer Works Now, could both carry on quite smoothly as top-tier outfits without significant backing from their wealthy overlords. So instead of "The oil derby!", "El Cashico!" stuff we used to get punted around this fixture, it’s now just a contest between two good teams. Probably the best two teams in the country.

So what, then, do they represent instead? Well, Chelsea have their legendary players in John Terry and now Didier Drogba again. They also have José Mourinho, continuing the theme of modern Chelsea being a solid juggernaut of a team. Added to that the newfound ruthlessness of Diego Costa and Cesc Fabregas, and there’s definitely something to like there. Or, equally, something to hate.

At Manchester City, it’s a bit less obvious. It seemed at one time that they would become, to use an epithet originating from United fans, the "Gorton Globetrotters"—they might be sellouts, but they’d get a team of world-class players playing with flair and excitement to entertain the masses. But this hasn’t really happened. The number of genuine world-class players the team possesses is still pretty few. Sergio Aguero and David Silva are debatable, if Vincent Kompany is, it may only be by virtue of the worldwide center-back shortage, and Yaya Toure looks more disinterested the more sensational a player he becomes. All of the above players are adored by their fans, perhaps more than any of those at United, but to the untainted eye, City still seem a bit lacking in identity.

Maybe for that reason alone, it was a terrible mistake getting rid of Mario Balotelli. It’s not that Manchester City are so hard to like—it’s the fact that, for so many of their rivals, they’re that hard to hate, too.

On the Continent: Milan-Juventus
Juventus have done pretty well in the past few years, dominating their domestic league and starting to grow in Europe, while Milan continued to sink ever-lower under the hapless Max Allegri. This, however, is Italy, and they don’t do things normally. Despite rivalries being numerous and intense, players cross the divide happily and freely, and on this occasion, so do managers, as Juventus inexplicably decided to replace the outgoing Antonio Conte, responsible for their recent success, with the man who ruined their rivals.

So yes, Allegri is in many ways a sort of handsome, swarthy version of Alex McLeish; a kind of Ferris Bueller figure to Conte's mad bloke out of Falling Down. The even stranger thing about this is that Milan, despite losing all of their good players and pissing around with managers, have somehow managed to keep picking up points. Their last game was the perfect illustration, a bonkers 5-4 win against Parma that included conceding a goal from a backpass that drifted past the goalkeeper.

Milan are one of those clubs that will just always be box-office for one reason or another, and it’s well worth tuning in to see what kind of deranged mayhem they can offer to not be totally humiliated by a far superior Juventus side.

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