A Football Report

With rumours spanning from the Premier League to the Los Angeles Galaxy, Raúl has finalised his transfer to German club Schalke. The Royal Blues are set to officially unveil him at the Veltins Arena on Wednesday, a day earlier than expected. For Raul to get his beloved number 7, former wearer Hao Junmin had to discreetly give it up.

Some 50,000 Schalke shirts with Raul’s name and the number seven have been ordered by the Champions League participants for the game against Hamburg. The club’s website crashed on Monday when BILD first broke news that the transfer deal was done. It’s safe to say that Germany is catching Raúl fever.

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Mario Balotelli is Italy’s most talented footballer nowadays. Pick anyone in the streets of the Belpaese and eveybody will agree with that.

Problem is that talent is difficult to manage 90% of the time and even more difficult to manage when it is not assisted by the right attitude you expect from a youngster: the will to improve, the will to learn, the will to work hard.

You may say this is something easier to find in less talented players: they have to balance the lack of quality with intensity, pressing, quantity in their plays. True.

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By Eric Beard, writing from Boston

According to the BBC, Barcelona’s debt is 442 million euros (£369.5m) after a loss of more than 77m euros (£64.36m) last season. The club’s costs in the 2009-10 season rose to £400m, with their income at £341.7m.

Operating costs of £400m? To run a football club? As they say, Barcelona is Més Que Un Club, or more than club. But even so, this appears to be more than your average debt.

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Owen Coyle is the happiest man in Bolton tonight as he was able to add to his side’s squad depth by signing 19-year-old Marcos Alonso from Real Madrid. Alonso, who plays left back, realised that he was unlikely to get regular first team football in Madrid, which led him to pursue his options elsewhere. Bolton has signed the talented youngster on a three-year deal.

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No, his career will never be over. In fact, Sol Campbell was quite the hot item this summer, and Newcastle United have made the most attractive offer to the 35-year-old defender, beating out Sunderland and Celtic. So what was the deal? Well, a reported £35,000-a-week. But the big question that remains is whether Sol will be fit come mid-August. Campbell turns 36 in September and has missed much of pre-season training having returned from his honeymoon only at the weekend.

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By Eric Beard, writing from Boston

PUMA has announced an initiative that links the WPS with support for the fight against breast cancer. The name of the project? Well, Project Pink of course.

Launching July 31 at wps.pumafootball.com/projectpink you can nominate breast cancer charities with nonprofit status and vote for the winner, who will receive a donation consisting of 100% of the profits from the sale of PUMA Project Pink product. The nomination period will open on August 7; voting will begin on September 13. The winner will be announced and the donation made in late October.

But beyond that, Puma has launched a pretty awesome Twitter-based way to support breast cancer. For every tweet using the hash tag #projectpink from July 31 through October 18, PUMA will donate an additional $1 to the Project Pink cause, up to a maximum of $25,000. PUMA will count one tweet using the hash tag per user per day.

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Spain defeated England 3-1 in the semifinals of the EURO U-19 tournament, and there was nothing better than Sergio Canales’ goal to take the scoreline from 2-1 to 3-1 to cap off yet another great win for La Furia Roja. Just like Canales took Spain into the final with style, finishing off a wonderfully executed set piece, Novalima’s “Yo Voy” has this sequence captured. Listen to it while watching the video, si es posible.

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One might think that Andrés Iniesta’s volleying the World Cup-winning goal with his Nike CTR360 boot, David Villa with his Adidas Adizero scoring match-winner after match-winner, or Diego Forlan leading Uruguay to victory after victory might be enough to garner a performance of the tournament award. However, according to the Castrol Index Rating that has been endorsed by FIFA, Philipp Lahm’s performance in Germany’s 1-0 win against Ghana in the group stage has been deemed the best (9.72 out of 10). Makes just about as much sense as the FIFA rankings. Another fairly comprehensible Castrol ranking is Luis Suarez’s infamous match against Ghana where he handled the ball in the 120th minute and was sent off. Well, he was given a 9.65 rating.

Below are all of the performance rankings of a player in a single match that were above a 9.00.

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CSKA Moscow goalkeeper Igor Akinfeev seems set to move to a top English club after spending seven years in the Russian capital. Since finishing third in Euro 2008, Akinfeev has been at the top of many clubs’ lists across Europe but only after his great performances in last season’s Champion’s League have clubs begun to seriously pursue the 24-year-old. Manchester United, a side looking to line up a replacement for the aging Edwin van der Sar after offloading Ben Foster to Birmingham city, and Arsenal, who need to sort out their goalkeeping situation after several seasons with a lack of confidence between the sticks, are the front runners in race to sign the Russian international who is valued at £8 million.

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By Ulysse Pasquier, writing from Montreal

    Laurent Blanc and the French Football Federation have announced none of the 23 players that went to South Africa would be part of the squad facing Norway, Blanc’s first friendly in charge of Les Bleus. This rather shocking news could be the first of many sanctions that await the “mutineers of Knysa” who refused to train following the Nicolas Anelka incident during the World Cup group stages. 

This is the first important move Laurent Blanc has made as coach of the French team and it could set the tone for what we can expect in the future. This shows Blanc is trying to differentiate himself and the team from the World Cup fiasco. I believe he has understood that French Football is suffering from deep-rooted issues and I don’t think many people will criticize him for the steps he takes, as drastic as they may appear to be. 

The match, which will take place in Oslo on August 11th, is of course only a friendly but it will be interesting to see some new faces as well as a different dynamic. The French team needs a new identity after what happened in South Africa and we can expect Blanc to mix players from the 23 and the ones who will play against Norway to create a solid team for the 2012 Euro. 

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