Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Abdullah Al Ahmed Al Thani could have done anything with his time, and with all of his responsibilities on his docket, president of a football club would seem to be near the bottom of his list.  Born from Qatari royalty, the Sheikh billionaire currently sits on the Board of Directors of Doha Bank and the Qatar Equestrian Federation as well as running a business empire including but not exclusive to hotel chains, shopping malls, and cellular phone companies.

Sheikh Al Thani, however, worked and negotiated to buy Málaga Club de Fútbol for a price of €36 million in June with then-owner Lorenzo Sanz and president Fernando Sanz, while devoting and extended four to five months to this acquisition.  Foreign ownership has become the rage throughout Europe, but La Liga, and Spain in general, has historically kept ownership and president roles to Spanish citizens only.  When the Sheikh took over Málaga in June, he opened the old boys’ club and became the only non-Spanish owner in the top flight of Spain.

Whereas most of the new crop of foreign owners in Europe keep to the matter of their own clubs and merely worry about big-money signings, Sheikh Al Thani put his nose into the internal issues of Spanish football.  Aside from the historical teams in Spain, the rest of the clubs usually have little say when it comes to the RFEF (the governing body of football in Spain), but Al Thani cared little for the normal protocol when the issue of revenue sharing came to light.

The new TV deal will come into effect starting in the 2014-15 season, and according to the contract, Real Madrid and Barcelona will take 34% of the pot, Atlético Madrid and Valencia will garner 11% of the money, 1% will be held for those who get relegated to the Segunda División, and the rest will be split among the remaining La Liga teams.  Several of the clubs symbolically spit on this contract, Sevilla president José María del Nido leading the charge.  While Málaga agreed to the terms of the deal, Sheikh Al Thani still voiced a dissenting opinion concerning the future TV contract:

“The situation now honestly is not good, regarding the TV rights,” he said, according to Reuters.  It’s not good for the clubs, because only the two big teams are leading the whole issue.  We wish to have the same system as they have in England because it’s much more fair.  There are some clubs at the bottom, they have some financial problems.  It doesn’t make for fair competition.”

While these statements might come off as a tad (or completely) hypocritical since he has the billions to pay for any player in the world, his sentiments are no less correct or meaningful.  Usually, any new owner, whether domestic or foreign, wants to assimilate himself into the league and the other owners before speaking out on important football issues, but Sheikh Al Thani has been a trend-breaker in his business career, and his association with Málaga has not changed the way he operates.

One of the trends, however, that he has followed has been the tendency for new owners to make an immediate impact with a multitude of new signings.  Sheikh Al Thani was not shy in splashing the cash during the summer transfer window, but knowing Málaga’s modest standing in Europe and Spain’s pecking order, Al Thani did not immediately start with huge, mega-million Euro bids like what Sheikh Mansour executed when his Abu Dhabi United Group purchased Manchester City in 2008.  The club spent a relatively middling €16.15 million on eight different players, the two most expensive being €4 million striker from Banfield, club-record signing Sebastián “Seba” Fernández, and €3.5 million striker from Las Palmas, Salomón Rondón.

With this infusion of new players, Jesualdo Ferreira replaced incumbent Juan Ramón López Muñiz as manager of Málaga, and the new dawn was supposed to rise on the Costa del Sol.

Nine matches into this season, with losses in their first five home matches and a grand total of seven points earned, Sheikh Al Thani fired Ferreira, who José Mourinho described as “a story of a donkey who worked for thirty years but never became a horse.”  Seba found it hard to adjust to life and football in Spain, a goalkeeping crisis hit the club with three different goalkeepers having to start within those nine matches, and the defense leaked an astonishing twenty-one goals in that short nine-game span.

Sheikh Al Thani’s experiment was blowing up in his face, but he made a big and surprising splash with the hiring of former Villarreal and Real Madrid manager Manuel Pellegrini to replace Ferreira.  Unfortunately, for Pellegrini and Málaga, the situation did not improve significantly as los boquerones only gained six points in seven matches to end 2010, and if there were one owner in Spain to mark as the wheeler and dealer of the January transfer window, Sheikh Al Thani was the odds makers’ favorite.

Six new players joined Málaga in January, and while new club-record signing and Pablo Piatti clone Diego Buonanotte will arrive in the summer, the other five players can be sorted into two different groups: the has-beens and the could-bes.

If this were 2005, Martín Demichelis, Enzo Maresca, and Júlio Baptista would have been quite a triumvirate of transfers.  Baptista signed from Sevilla for €20 million to Real Madrid, Maresca joined Sevilla from Fiorentina for €2.5 million and became a staple in the attacking midfield for los nervionenses, and Demichelis established himself as an ever-present in the Bayern Munich central defense, with whom he was a part of three Bundesliga titles, three DFB-Pokal (German Cup) crowns and a finals appearance in the 2009-10 UEFA Champions League.  Now, these three are in the twilight of their careers, hoping to recapture the magic they wielded in the past.

Ignacio Camacho and Sergio Asenjo were supposed to be the future of both Atlético Madrid and the Spanish national team.  Camacho rose through the ranks of the Atleti cantera to the first team while captaining the Spanish under-17 team to a European Championship in 2007.  He could not supplant the likes of Paulo Assunção, Tiago, Raúl García, Cléber Santana, etc., so Atlético let go their once promising midfielder to Málaga for a bargain-basement price of €1.5 million.

Asenjo was presumed as the heir to Iker Casillas in the Spanish national team.  He was the first-choice goalkeeper for the Spanish under-21 team at the 2009 European Championships and the 2009 FIFA U-20 World Cup, and when he supplanted both Ludovic Butelle and Alberto López as the undisputed number one goalkeeper for Real Valladolid at the end of 2007, he became the youngest starting keeper in La Liga at the tender age of eighteen.

Atlético thought so highly of Asenjo that they let go of Grégory Coupet and long-time starter Leo Franco and brought Asenjo from Valladolid for €5 million in the summer of 2009.  A nervous start and some unforgivable gaffes saw his grip on as first-choice Atlético keeper loosened completely with Roberto Jiménez taking over, and eventually David de Gea rose above both Roberto and Asenjo with Asenjo relegated to third choice, a stunning and immediate fall from grace.

Manuel Pellegrini drafted all five of these players directly into the starting eleven, but circumstances had not improved.  Four points out of five matches in January, including conceding a late goal that lost a match 1-2 to relegation rivals Real Zaragoza, had the Andalucian club at the foot of the table, four points below the safety line.  So when Málaga traveled west to their provincial rivals Sevilla on Sunday afternoon, the gloaming looked to continue los boquerones.

Málaga had conceded forty-seven goals in La Liga prior to Jornada 22, eleven more than any other team in the Primera División, and with a rojiblanco team loaded with talented attacking players like Frédéric Kanouté, Luís Fabiano, Jesús Navas, etc., it was not a question of if but how many would they allow.

Sevilla trainer Gregorio Manzano, however, strayed from the normal 4-4-2 and employed a 4-2-3-1 with Fabiano as the lone striker up front in order to shore up a midfield that had given up a plethora of scoring chances in the past few weeks.

Manuel Pellegrini changed his tactics for this match by closing his open, attacking style and employing Eliseu Pereira, the attacking left winger, at left back ahead of the incumbent Patrick Mtiliga.  Pellegrini’s strategy worked to perfection, as his team allowed only one scoring chance and gave up three shots, only one of which was on target, in the first half.  Eliseu bottled up Jesús Navas on the right wing for the most part, and while Eliseu could not bomb forward because of the Navas threat, he unearthed defensive acumen that apparently Pellegrini only saw.

The match did not perk up that much in the second half, and Málaga nearly stole the three points in the fifth minute of stoppage time.  In the last action of the match, Eliseu whipped in a free kick into a host of bodies in the box, and Weligton got a surprisingly unmarked header on target.  Andrés Palop, who had little to do for the whole match, came up with a flying parry that saved the draw for Sevilla, and Seba Fernández fluffed a potential reply from Palop’s save as it screwed miles wide of the right near post.

0-0 fulltime, and Málaga could not be more pleased with a boring, tedious draw.

Málaga fully deserved to come out of the Ramón Sánchez Pizjuán with at least a point, and while the match was a snoozer for the neutral and a frustration for the Sevilla fans, this match was a very positive sign for Málaga, not only because they got a point in the middle of a relegation battle against a European-caliber team but also because they kept a clean sheet for only the third time all season.  While Pellegrini will likely not apply this type of defensive strategy too often, he made a point of making Sevilla have to penetrate a Fort Knox-like team to signal to his players that they are capable of playing well defensively while limiting the egregious turnover and mistakes to a minimum.

If Pellegrini can keep his team this organized while opening up a little more to allow Baptista, Rondón, and the other attacking personnel to express themselves in the final third, they should rise above the bottom three by the end of the season.  Pellegrini’s main objective is to keep Málaga in La Liga, and if he accomplishes this task, Sheikh Al Thani has shown that he is fully invested in all facets of this club besides player transfers but will also provide all the funds necessary for Pellegrini to craft this team in the way Pellegrini wants.  Bright days are ahead of this club that has been known as the classic yo-yo team, bouncing up and down from the first division, and if Málaga becomes a mainstay in La Liga, what player would not want to play in a beautiful city on the Costa del Sol that is bankrolled by a billionaire?

Fueras de Juego

- Villarreal must have assumed that playing at El Madrigal against a modest Levante team would require little effort, but their sleepwalking performance inspired Levante to channel this disrespect into a positive outcome, and Levante shocked their Comunitat Valenciana neighbors 0-1, handing Villarreal only its first loss at home all season.  With Valencia comfortably handling Hércules 2-0 at the Mestalla in the other Comunitat Valenciana derby on Sunday, Valencia is only one point behind Villarreal for third in the table, and the Yellow Submarine will regret their arrogant attitude against Levante if Valencia and they remain close together at the end of the season.

- Many assumed Osasuna would experience a massive letdown after the physical and emotional nirvana of defeating Real Madrid 1-0 at the Estadio Reyno de Navarra last weekend in front of their ravenous home faithful, but while they only managed a 1-1 draw at home to Mallorca to remain one point above the relegation zone, Osasuna performed with a surprising vim and vigor throughout the ninety minutes, scoring within the first ten minutes from a Miguel Flaño goal.  Six of Osasuna’s next seven fixtures feature teams tenth or below in the standings, so the gorritxoak could sew up top-flight football for another year in this stretch.

- FC Barcelona won their sixteenth consecutive La Liga match on Saturday, breaking the 1960-61 Real Madrid record of fifteen, and Lionel Messi scored another hat-trick to raise his total to a mere twenty-four goals in nineteen starts in the league and thirty-seven goals in thirty-one appearances in all competitions.  What is new?  Not much, and that is the brilliance of this streak.  They have had more 5+ goal victories (Sevilla, Almería, Real Madrid, and Real Sociedad) than one-goal victories (Valencia and Levante) during this run, and besides the occasional knocks and niggles, the squad has been healthy for the most part.

Real Madrid kept pace to stay seven points behind Barcelona after they cruised to a 4-1 victory over Real Sociedad, but to expect Barcelona to drop points in three or four matches in order for Real Madrid to catch up seems improbable at this point.  With the Champions League returning next week, that might provide the only plausible avenue for Barcelona to drop points, balancing La Liga and the Champions League with possible squad rotation and general fatigue.

Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Abdullah Al Ahmed Al Thani could have done anything with his time, and with all of his responsibilities on his docket, president of a football club would seem to be near the bottom of his list.  Born from Qatari royalty, the Sheikh billionaire currently sits on the Board of Directors of Doha Bank and the Qatar Equestrian Federation as well as running a business empire including but not exclusive to hotel chains, shopping malls, and cellular phone companies.

Sheikh Al Thani, however, worked and negotiated to buy Málaga Club de Fútbol for a price of €36 million in June with then-owner Lorenzo Sanz and president Fernando Sanz, while devoting and extended four to five months to this acquisition.  Foreign ownership has become the rage throughout Europe, but La Liga, and Spain in general, has historically kept ownership and president roles to Spanish citizens only.  When the Sheikh took over Málaga in June, he opened the old boys’ club and became the only non-Spanish owner in the top flight of Spain.

Whereas most of the new crop of foreign owners in Europe keep to the matter of their own clubs and merely worry about big-money signings, Sheikh Al Thani put his nose into the internal issues of Spanish football.  Aside from the historical teams in Spain, the rest of the clubs usually have little say when it comes to the RFEF (the governing body of football in Spain), but Al Thani cared little for the normal protocol when the issue of revenue sharing came to light.

The new TV deal will come into effect starting in the 2014-15 season, and according to the contract, Real Madrid and Barcelona will take 34% of the pot, Atlético Madrid and Valencia will garner 11% of the money, 1% will be held for those who get relegated to the Segunda División, and the rest will be split among the remaining La Liga teams.  Several of the clubs symbolically spit on this contract, Sevilla president José María del Nido leading the charge.  While Málaga agreed to the terms of the deal, Sheikh Al Thani still voiced a dissenting opinion concerning the future TV contract:

“The situation now honestly is not good, regarding the TV rights,” he said, according to Reuters.  It’s not good for the clubs, because only the two big teams are leading the whole issue.  We wish to have the same system as they have in England because it’s much more fair.  There are some clubs at the bottom, they have some financial problems.  It doesn’t make for fair competition.”

While these statements might come off as a tad (or completely) hypocritical since he has the billions to pay for any player in the world, his sentiments are no less correct or meaningful.  Usually, any new owner, whether domestic or foreign, wants to assimilate himself into the league and the other owners before speaking out on important football issues, but Sheikh Al Thani has been a trend-breaker in his business career, and his association with Málaga has not changed the way he operates.

One of the trends, however, that he has followed has been the tendency for new owners to make an immediate impact with a multitude of new signings.  Sheikh Al Thani was not shy in splashing the cash during the summer transfer window, but knowing Málaga’s modest standing in Europe and Spain’s pecking order, Al Thani did not immediately start with huge, mega-million Euro bids like what Sheikh Mansour executed when his Abu Dhabi United Group purchased Manchester City in 2008.  The club spent a relatively middling €16.15 million on eight different players, the two most expensive being €4 million striker from Banfield, club-record signing Sebastián “Seba” Fernández, and €3.5 million striker from Las Palmas, Salomón Rondón.

With this infusion of new players, Jesualdo Ferreira replaced incumbent Juan Ramón López Muñiz as manager of Málaga, and the new dawn was supposed to rise on the Costa del Sol.

Nine matches into this season, with losses in their first five home matches and a grand total of seven points earned, Sheikh Al Thani fired Ferreira, who José Mourinho described as “a story of a donkey who worked for thirty years but never became a horse.”  Seba found it hard to adjust to life and football in Spain, a goalkeeping crisis hit the club with three different goalkeepers having to start within those nine matches, and the defense leaked an astonishing twenty-one goals in that short nine-game span.

Sheikh Al Thani’s experiment was blowing up in his face, but he made a big and surprising splash with the hiring of former Villarreal and Real Madrid manager Manuel Pellegrini to replace Ferreira.  Unfortunately, for Pellegrini and Málaga, the situation did not improve significantly as los boquerones only gained six points in seven matches to end 2010, and if there were one owner in Spain to mark as the wheeler and dealer of the January transfer window, Sheikh Al Thani was the odds makers’ favorite.

Six new players joined Málaga in January, and while new club-record signing and Pablo Piatti clone Diego Buonanotte will arrive in the summer, the other five players can be sorted into two different groups: the has-beens and the could-bes.

If this were 2005, Martín Demichelis, Enzo Maresca, and Júlio Baptista would have been quite a triumvirate of transfers.  Baptista signed from Sevilla for €20 million to Real Madrid, Maresca joined Sevilla from Fiorentina for €2.5 million and became a staple in the attacking midfield for los nervionenses, and Demichelis established himself as an ever-present in the Bayern Munich central defense, with whom he was a part of three Bundesliga titles, three DFB-Pokal (German Cup) crowns and a finals appearance in the 2009-10 UEFA Champions League.  Now, these three are in the twilight of their careers, hoping to recapture the magic they wielded in the past.

Ignacio Camacho and Sergio Asenjo were supposed to be the future of both Atlético Madrid and the Spanish national team.  Camacho rose through the ranks of the Atleti cantera to the first team while captaining the Spanish under-17 team to a European Championship in 2007.  He could not supplant the likes of Paulo Assunção, Tiago, Raúl García, Cléber Santana, etc., so Atlético let go their once promising midfielder to Málaga for a bargain-basement price of €1.5 million.

Asenjo was presumed as the heir to Iker Casillas in the Spanish national team.  He was the first-choice goalkeeper for the Spanish under-21 team at the 2009 European Championships and the 2009 FIFA U-20 World Cup, and when he supplanted both Ludovic Butelle and Alberto López as the undisputed number one goalkeeper for Real Valladolid at the end of 2007, he became the youngest starting keeper in La Liga at the tender age of eighteen.

Atlético thought so highly of Asenjo that they let go of Grégory Coupet and long-time starter Leo Franco and brought Asenjo from Valladolid for €5 million in the summer of 2009.  A nervous start and some unforgivable gaffes saw his grip on as first-choice Atlético keeper loosened completely with Roberto Jiménez taking over, and eventually David de Gea rose above both Roberto and Asenjo with Asenjo relegated to third choice, a stunning and immediate fall from grace.

Manuel Pellegrini drafted all five of these players directly into the starting eleven, but circumstances had not improved.  Four points out of five matches in January, including conceding a late goal that lost a match 1-2 to relegation rivals Real Zaragoza, had the Andalucian club at the foot of the table, four points below the safety line.  So when Málaga traveled west to their provincial rivals Sevilla on Sunday afternoon, the gloaming looked to continue los boquerones.

Málaga had conceded forty-seven goals in La Liga prior to Jornada 22, eleven more than any other team in the Primera División, and with a rojiblanco team loaded with talented attacking players like Frédéric Kanouté, Luís Fabiano, Jesús Navas, etc., it was not a question of if but how many would they allow.

Sevilla trainer Gregorio Manzano, however, strayed from the normal 4-4-2 and employed a 4-2-3-1 with Fabiano as the lone striker up front in order to shore up a midfield that had given up a plethora of scoring chances in the past few weeks.

Manuel Pellegrini changed his tactics for this match by closing his open, attacking style and employing Eliseu Pereira, the attacking left winger, at left back ahead of the incumbent Patrick Mtiliga.  Pellegrini’s strategy worked to perfection, as his team allowed only one scoring chance and gave up three shots, only one of which was on target, in the first half.  Eliseu bottled up Jesús Navas on the right wing for the most part, and while Eliseu could not bomb forward because of the Navas threat, he unearthed defensive acumen that apparently Pellegrini only saw.

The match did not perk up that much in the second half, and Málaga nearly stole the three points in the fifth minute of stoppage time.  In the last action of the match, Eliseu whipped in a free kick into a host of bodies in the box, and Weligton got a surprisingly unmarked header on target.  Andrés Palop, who had little to do for the whole match, came up with a flying parry that saved the draw for Sevilla, and Seba Fernández fluffed a potential reply from Palop’s save as it screwed miles wide of the right near post.

0-0 fulltime, and Málaga could not be more pleased with a boring, tedious draw.

Málaga fully deserved to come out of the Ramón Sánchez Pizjuán with at least a point, and while the match was a snoozer for the neutral and a frustration for the Sevilla fans, this match was a very positive sign for Málaga, not only because they got a point in the middle of a relegation battle against a European-caliber team but also because they kept a clean sheet for only the third time all season.  While Pellegrini will likely not apply this type of defensive strategy too often, he made a point of making Sevilla have to penetrate a Fort Knox-like team to signal to his players that they are capable of playing well defensively while limiting the egregious turnover and mistakes to a minimum.

If Pellegrini can keep his team this organized while opening up a little more to allow Baptista, Rondón, and the other attacking personnel to express themselves in the final third, they should rise above the bottom three by the end of the season.  Pellegrini’s main objective is to keep Málaga in La Liga, and if he accomplishes this task, Sheikh Al Thani has shown that he is fully invested in all facets of this club besides player transfers but will also provide all the funds necessary for Pellegrini to craft this team in the way Pellegrini wants.  Bright days are ahead of this club that has been known as the classic yo-yo team, bouncing up and down from the first division, and if Málaga becomes a mainstay in La Liga, what player would not want to play in a beautiful city on the Costa del Sol that is bankrolled by a billionaire?

Fueras de Juego

- Villarreal must have assumed that playing at El Madrigal against a modest Levante team would require little effort, but their sleepwalking performance inspired Levante to channel this disrespect into a positive outcome, and Levante shocked their Comunitat Valenciana neighbors 0-1, handing Villarreal only its first loss at home all season.  With Valencia comfortably handling Hércules 2-0 at the Mestalla in the other Comunitat Valenciana derby on Sunday, Valencia is only one point behind Villarreal for third in the table, and the Yellow Submarine will regret their arrogant attitude against Levante if Valencia and they remain close together at the end of the season.

- Many assumed Osasuna would experience a massive letdown after the physical and emotional nirvana of defeating Real Madrid 1-0 at the Estadio Reyno de Navarra last weekend in front of their ravenous home faithful, but while they only managed a 1-1 draw at home to Mallorca to remain one point above the relegation zone, Osasuna performed with a surprising vim and vigor throughout the ninety minutes, scoring within the first ten minutes from a Miguel Flaño goal.  Six of Osasuna’s next seven fixtures feature teams tenth or below in the standings, so the gorritxoak could sew up top-flight football for another year in this stretch.

- FC Barcelona won their sixteenth consecutive La Liga match on Saturday, breaking the 1960-61 Real Madrid record of fifteen, and Lionel Messi scored another hat-trick to raise his total to a mere twenty-four goals in nineteen starts in the league and thirty-seven goals in thirty-one appearances in all competitions.  What is new?  Not much, and that is the brilliance of this streak.  They have had more 5+ goal victories (Sevilla, Almería, Real Madrid, and Real Sociedad) than one-goal victories (Valencia and Levante) during this run, and besides the occasional knocks and niggles, the squad has been healthy for the most part.

Real Madrid kept pace to stay seven points behind Barcelona after they cruised to a 4-1 victory over Real Sociedad, but to expect Barcelona to drop points in three or four matches in order for Real Madrid to catch up seems improbable at this point.  With the Champions League returning next week, that might provide the only plausible avenue for Barcelona to drop points, balancing La Liga and the Champions League with possible squad rotation and general fatigue.

"Please, no acclaim, I'm just a humble footballer... who scored twice from two incredible free kicks."

The group stage of the Champions League began on Tuesday evening, and two La Liga outfits looked to initiate the exorcism of their personal demons.

Real Madrid and its galácticos played its first Champions League match of the season against an upstart FC Zürich team who, before the match, seemed more interested in whom they would swap shirts.  It is no secret of Madrid’s lack of success in the Champions League in the past five seasons, and even more than recapturing La Liga from FC Barcelona, Madrid desperately wants to regain their status as THE team in Europe.

For the first twenty-five minutes, the team in white played as though it showed why it spent millions of Euros to bolster its squad.  The only caveat was that FC Zürich wore the white kit and did not seem the least bit intimidated by Real Madrid, the men in black.  Rather than resorting to a direct, long ball approach with physicality as the answer, Zürich displayed a flowing game of football, including an audacious attempt at a back-heeled goal in the ninth minute.

The fans chanted, the electric atmosphere buoyed Zürich to outplay their modest abilities, and they truly believed they had a legitimate chance to obtain a result against Real.  Then Cristiano Ronaldo stepped up to take a twenty-five meter free kick and struck it with venom past Zürich keeper Johnny Leoni.  From that moment, Madrid stepped on the pedal and suffocated Zürich with their relentless offensive pressure.  By halftime, Real Madrid engineered a 3-0 advantage at the Letzigrund Stadion, and Zürich looked like the long shots that the odds makers thought of them.

For the first ten minutes of the second half, it was more of the same from Real Madrid.  Then on a sliding tackle of Johan Vonlanthen, Xabi Alonso apparently injured his right ankle, and Fernando Gago replaced him in the 59th minute when it was clear that he could not carry on anymore.  Madrid lost focus as they cruised with their three-goal lead, and in a span of one minute, they conceded two goals to Zürich, which gave them life once again.  While the first goal came as a result of a dubious penalty, similar to the Eduardo situation against Celtic, Real’s concession of a second goal less than a minute later against an inferior team was inexcusable for a club that has Champions League aspirations.  Real would score two late goals, including another free kick from Ronaldo, but they still have yet to show that they can consistently keep a tight defense.  Until that happens, the demons will hang around within the team.

"We could not score against APOEL at home!?!?"

Atlético Madrid’s demons were more of a recent phenomenon.  They tried to forget a horrendous 0-3 beatdown at the hands of Málaga and a lackluster 1-1 draw at the Vicente Calderón against Racing Santander by capturing a win against the Cypriot champions APOEL Nicosia.  Even though APOEL was the bottom seed in Group D alongside Chelsea, FC Porto, and Atlético Madrid, none of those teams should underestimate this plucky side from Nicosia.  Only look to last season’s Champions League when group stage newcomers Anorthosis Famagusta wreaked havoc on a group that included Inter Milan, Werder Bremen, and Panathinaikos.

The first half was tactical with few chances.  The two best opportunities fell to the boot of Constantinos Charalambides, who made Atlético keeper Sergio Asenjo generate a terrific stop at his near post in the 8th minute and missed a splendid chance in the 43rd minute when a one bounce cross found his run inside the six-yard box and missed wide from four yards.  Sergio Agüero was the bright spot for Atlético as his tireless engine created space for his teammates as well as set himself for shots on goal.  Diego Forlán and Simão Sabrosa were held in check for the most part due to APOEL’s discipline and organization in defense.  Already under fire for their mediocre performances this season, the fans at the Vicente Calderón whistled at the players going into and out of the dressing room for the second half and deemed a 0-0 score unacceptable.

Atlético manager Abel Resino made an early substitution in the second half, sending in winger Maxi Rodríguez for the defensive midfielder Cléber Santana in the 51st minute because Maxi would bring more punch in the final third, and Atlético showed that they would be able to put the clamps on the APOEL attack without the extra defensive midfielder.  For the rest of the match, Atlético continually assailed the APOEL penalty area and goalkeeper Dionisis Chiotis.  APOEL rarely had possession, so this forced a strategy to camp ten men behind the ball in the hope that they would somehow protect a 0-0 draw and gain a point away from home.  Resino further added to the attack in the 67th minute by taking out right back Luis Perea in favor of forward Florent-Sinama Pongolle.

Atlético had seventeen shots, nine of those on target, in the second half but never breached the APOEL goal.  Man of the Match Dionisis Chiotis made some spectacular saves; the most important of those saves came in the third minute of stoppage time when his leaping save prevented another Forlán rasping bullet from heading toward the top corner of the net.  Forlán also had a free kick that struck the intersection of the post and the crossbar in the 84th minute.  Not withstanding Atlético’s poor start in La Liga, dropping points at home against APOEL when they also have to face Chelsea and FC Porto twice is the worst kind of start possible.  With Chelsea looking as the favorite to win Group D, these two points dropped could be crucial in deciding the second team in the group to advance to the knockout stages of the Champions League.

With the Spanish football season only two and a half weeks away, teams are finishing their last preseason friendlies and making their final changes in preparation for the La Liga season.  There are many questions concerning each of the twenty teams in La Liga, and this preview will explore the most important question for each La Liga team.  Today, this preview will discuss seven teams, next Wednesday will discuss the next seven teams, and the Wednesday before the start of the season will discuss the final six teams.  The preview will be in alphabetical order, so part one of the season preview will include Almería, Athletic Bilbao, Atlético Madrid, Barcelona, Deportivo La Coruña, Espanyol, and Getafe.

Almería

Who will accept the scoring burden that Álvaro Negredo shouldered?  With thirty-two goals in seventy matches for the past two years for Almería, including nineteen this past season, Negredo displayed the talent that Real Madrid saw in him when he came from Rayo Vallecano.  The next highest goal scorer was Kalu Uche with only eight goals; only four players even had more than one goal the entire season.  Now that Real Madrid bought back Negredo and Almería accepted a €2.9 million bid from Fulham, Henok Goitom looks to be the man that Almería leans toward for this season.

A €2.2 million transfer from Real Murcia, he spent last season on loan with Real Valladolid with ten goals in twenty-nine appearances.  Real Murcia had the option to buy back Goitom but decided to take the transfer fee from Almería.  Playing in the Segunda División, Real Murcia only finished fourteenth out of twenty-two teams, and its forty-eight goals in forty-two matches did not signal that a goal-scorer like Goitom would be surplus to their team, so on the surface, Real Murcia’s release of Goitom does not seem to be a ringing endorsement for him.  A physical forward, Almería will most likely use him as a target so that players like Pablo Piatti and José Ortiz can run onto his passes.

Athletic Bilbao

Is Joaquín Caparrós correct in keeping faith in his current group of players?  According to the Spanish newspaper Marca, Caparrós said, “In terms of additions, I don’t expect anything more.  We have a competitive workforce and there are guys like (academy graduate) Iker Muniain who are strong and joining the first-team fold. My duty is to get the maximum performance out of the players we have.”

Led by talisman Fernando Llorente and Bilbao legend Joseba Etxeberria, Los Leones finished a disappointing thirteenth, only two points above possible relegation; however, they enjoyed a successful Copa del Rey run, where they made it all the way to the final, only to be outclassed by Barcelona 4-1.  Bilbao has a core group of veterans, such as Francisco Yeste, Pablo Orbaiz, and Joseba Etxeberria, bringing in the Basque kids, such as Javi Martínez, Susaeta, and Fernando Amorebieta.  The main problem was the defense, who gave up sixty-two goals, third worst in La Liga.  While goalkeeper Gorka Iraizoz did not have a stellar season by any indication, the Bilbao defense left him out to dry too many times.  Bilbao’s concession of thirty-five goals in the second half of games, including thirteen in the final fifteen minutes, cost them a multitude of points as they lost nine games by a one-goal margin and had eight draws.  While Joaquín Caparrós’ confidence in his midfield and forwards is warranted, Caparrós might want to look into his academy to replace some of his defense.

Atlético Madrid

Can Sergio Asenjo improve a mediocre defense?  Last season, Atlético Madrid’s defense allowed fifty-seven goals, which was only eleventh out of twenty teams.  Apart from the signing of veteran Real Betis defender Juanito on a free transfer and the releasing of Giourkas Seitaridis, the back four remains intact for the most part, which leaves the goalkeeping situation where Atlético Madrid made their most significant changes.  Grégory Coupet only started six times in the league, and Atlético Madrid released him.  Leo Franco, the regular starting goalkeeper, had a pedestrian season and after five years of service, Atlético Madrid released him as well.

Atlético Madrid then signed Sergio Asenjo from Real Valladolid for €5.5 million to be their goalkeeper for many years to come.  Asenjo is the starting goalkeeper for the Spanish U-21 national team, having played in all three games of the 2009 UEFA U-21 European Championships, and he is tipped to be the most likely successor to Iker Casillas on the senior national team.  Because of these accolades, Asenjo will face the pressure of lifting the struggling Atlético Madrid defense.  If he is capable of performing up to the vast talent that he possesses in the face of lofty expectations, Los Colchoneros should finish in a Champions League spot as well as contend in the later stages of the UEFA Champions League.

Barcelona

Will the switch from Samuel Eto’o to Zlatan Ibrahimovic improve a treble winning team?  When a team wins every competition they enter, the tendency is to want to be the same team the next season.  For the most part, Barcelona followed this policy, but the transfer of Zlatan Ibrahimovic from Inter Milan to Barcelona in exchange for Samuel Eto’o and €46 million replaces a vital part of a Barcelona offense that scored an astonishing 105 goals in a thirty-eight match season.  While Samuel Eto’o scored thirty goals and finished second to Diego Forlán in the Pichichi trophy, he was not originally in Pep Guardiola’s plans for last season.  Guardiola said he had a change of heart after watching Eto’o in the preseason, but there were many rumors suggesting that it was not a change of heart but rather a lack of suitors for Eto’o and an inability to find a suitable replacement.  When Zlatan Ibrahimovic clamored to have a new challenge and leave Serie A, Barcelona found the replacement for Samuel Eto’o.

The two players are different kinds of forwards.  While Eto’o used his speed and poaching skills to become one of the top scorers in La Liga, Ibrahimovic is more of a traditional number 9, where he uses his height as a target man as well as having amazing technical skill.  For the blaugrana to repeat as La Liga champions, Zlatan Ibrahimovic must be able to adapt to the Barça way as quickly as possible, as well as provide the assists to his forward counterparts Thierry Henry and Lionel Messi to keep the Barcelona attack as potent as ever.

Deportivo La Coruña

Can Deportivo La Coruña crack the top six and earn a guaranteed place in a European competition?  Depor participated in the UEFA Cup last season but only through the UEFA Intertoto Cup, which now no longer exists.  Since the 2003-2004 season where they finished third and made it to the semifinals of the Champions League, they have been a consistent top ten team apart from an anomalous thirteenth in 2006-2007 but not good enough to grab a direct spot in either the Champions League or the Europa League.  The departure of Joan Verdú due to contractual differences with the team will hurt Depor’s midfield, as he was the main playmaker that set up goals for Riki and Ángel Lafita.  For Depor to improve on their eighth place finishes, Adrián will have to continue his development as a striker.  He gained valuable experience on loan with Málaga last season, starting nineteen matches with a team that contended for a European spot all season.  Riki has to increase the goal output, and expect the young French striker Lassad Nouioui to be a significant part of the Depor attack.  These three will be vital for Depor to rise into European competition.

Espanyol

How will Espanyol respond to the death of their captain, Daniel Jarque?  Los Perequitos had been flying high since the beginning of April, when relegation was a certainty.  They went 8-1-1, including wins over Deportivo La Coruña, Valencia, and Málaga, and they rose from the bottom of the table to finish an incredible tenth.  In the close season, Espanyol acquired young Chelsea starlet Ben Sahar and Celtic star Shunsuke Nakamura, and they named academy graduate Daniel Jarque as their new captain.  They moved in to their new, modern stadium, Estadi Cornellà-El Prat, and they christened the stadium on August 2 with a convincing 3-0 victory over Liverpool.  Then on August 8, the unthinkable happens: their newly named captain Daniel Jarque dies of a heart attack while on a preseason tour in Italy.

Before the tragedy befalling Daniel Jarque, Espanyol looked like a team that could contend with the likes of Deportivo La Coruña, Málaga, and Valencia for a top six finish.  That season-ending run showed that when Espanyol scores, they are a daunting team to play because of the defense led by Cameroon international Carlos Kameni and the central defense of Jarque and Nicolás Pareja.   Is Espanyol still this same team now?  No team is the same when they lose a player and, more importantly, a leader, like Dani Jarque, but they will need to move on from this tragedy and prepare even more diligently for a physically and emotionally tough season.  If Espanyol plays with a new sense of purpose and is inspired by the memory of Dani Jarque, they will be in contention for a European spot.

Getafe

Will Getafe be able to rise from a team fighting relegation to the mid-table team of previous seasons?  Similar to Athletic Bilbao, Getafe’s main problem was giving up late goals.  Getafe gave up fourteen goals in the last fifteen minutes of matches, and Getafe had eleven losses by one goal and twelve draws.  Roberto Abbondanzieri started the first half of the season as goalkeeper, but his relatively poor play and his move back to Boca Juniors in January made the goalkeeper job open to Jacobo, who Getafe loaned from Real Valladolid.  Jacobo was not much better, and he was only temporary.  Oscar Ustari suffered a knee injury while with the Spanish national team at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and was only able to start five matches.  With a healthy Oscar Ustari, he should be a boost to that struggling Getafe defense.  Another piece of the puzzle added to the defense is the €2.5 million capture of Mané from Almería.  A left back that is equally competent in defense and in the attacking third, he will boost an otherwise leaky defense.  Getafe’s prospects do not look promising, but these improvements in defense should help in avoiding relegation but not enough to be safe from the relegation fight.