As the season nears its end,  the race for the Ligue 1 title mirrors a summer festival lineup. Are Auxerre and Montpellier opening acts – doing their best to gear up the crowd despite waning interests on a scorching day – only for headliners Marseille, Lyon and Bordeaux to take center stage [...]

Last week’s Champion League action saw some of everything – great goals, goalkeeping howlers, dodgy refereeing decisions and one significant upset.
This week’s games, as a whole, look to be even tougher to call – anything can happen.
Today, a resurgent Stuttgart side hosts the competition’s defending champion, Barcelona. Also, the top team in France – Bordeaux [...]

If you are looking for more certainty as to which clubs will advance to the knock-out round, Tuesday’s UEFA Champions League results did not help. Draws by the leaders of Groups B, C, and D drew trailing teams closer to the top, and while all the names at the top remain in the same, [...]

Groups A through D resume UEFA Champions League group play on Tuesday, as the tournament’s initial stage enters its home-stretch: the reverse fixtures; second-half of the schedule; the point after which we can start comparing teams with more certainty.
To this point, we can only be reasonably confident that (from these groups) Chelsea, Porto, and [...]

No teams exemplify the fluidity of the Top Ten better than Internazionale and Bordeaux. Two weeks ago, the clubs had either fallen out of the list (Inter) or were on the verge. Now each team is in the top five.
Part of that is attributable to strong league performances from José Mourinho’s and Laurent [...]

Thanks to the international break, it’s been almost a month since our last ranking. In the interim, every team from our previous list has stumbled at least once. Even Barcelona – who has been number one since our first edition of the WSR World Club Top Ten – was tripped up. Twice.
That kind of [...]

It was not as big an upset as Tuesday’s result at Camp Nou, but Milan’s late goal at the Santiago Bernabéu – handing Real Madrid their first home loss of the Galactícos 2.0 era – was enough of a shock to knock Rubin Kazan out of the headlines, earning the Italians a 3-2 win.
Perhaps as [...]

Between them, Real Madrid and AC Milan have 16 European titles, finishing second another seven times. In the 54-year history of the European Cup and Champions League, roughly two-fifths of the finals have featured one of these clubs. Milan’s presence has been slightly less frequent, having made eleven finals appearances (winning seven), but [...]

The Spanish takeover of European football is happening, if World Soccer Reader’s Club Top Ten is any indication.
The rumored shift of power from England and Italy to Spain deserves more discussion (and data points), but the early season returns from the league’s top three clubs provide plenty of evidence for those arguing Spanish primacy. [...]

You’re going to hear a lot about FC Zürich over the next two days (and rightfully so), but they were not the only little-club-that-could on Wednesday. They were just the most successful. Today, two other clubs that would not have been in this competition last season almost made a name for themselves.
In Bordeaux, [...]