Joe Green Sports

Tottenham Hotspur Expectations - Build on last season's run to the Champions League final by cementing their place as the 3rd best team in England with a view to challenging for the title next season Reality - Out of the title race before the end of August, permanent inconsistency has secured yet another trophyless season for Spurs League Form A 1-0 home defeat to Newcastle early in the season set the tone for the rest of 2019, as just 3 wins by mid-November left the club 14th in the league and Mauricio Pochettino without a job. An initial improvement under Jose Mourinho saw the Lilywhites rise as high as 5th, although a chance to move ahead of Chelsea into the top 4 was wasted in December when they were outclassed by their London rivals in a 2-0 home defeat. A woeful run of form over Christmas seeped into the new year and beyond, with just 3 wins from their last 10 outings leaving Mourinho's men in 8th, 7 points off the top 4. What About the Cups? The Carabao Cup was...

Anyone who follows football is aware of how inflated transfer prices have become in recent years, with European super-clubs paying well over the odds for up-and-coming stars. However, over the past year a new trend has developed, which has seen clubs stockpile talent for extortionate prices only to then restrict such talent to the substitutes bench for most or all of the season. Here are some examples of this worrying new development which could see some of Europe's best players regressing to such an extent that their careers cannot recover. Mariano Diaz A product of the Real Madrid academy, Diaz rejoined the Spanish giants in 2018 having been offloaded only a year previously to Lyon, where he scored 18 goals in 37 games. Arriving with a £22m price tag and the Number 7 on his back, which had only just been vacated by a Juventus-bound Ronaldo, few expected Diaz to be CR7's successor but most will have hoped for more than just 4 league goals in his 2 years back at Madrid. With...

With a youthful squad consisting of largely unknown players, AS Monaco embarked on an extraordinary giant-killing season in 2016/2017 that began with knocking Tottenham and Man City out of the Champions League and concluded with a remarkable league-and-cup double ahead of PSG and an enthralling European semi-final defeat to Juventus. In a season where Monaco seemed to be defying the odds on a weekly basis, the performance which affirmed their status as a genuine contender for Europe's biggest prize came on the 19th April 2017 via a 3-1 win over Borussia Dortmund in the 2nd leg of their quarter final tie, which saw them progress to the final four by an aggregate score of 6-3. The starting XI that day is now scattered all across Europe and worth hundreds of millions of pounds, but did the the upward curve continue for Monaco's starlets or has the bubble burst? Goalkeeper: Danijel Subasic - One of the experienced heads in a youthful team, the now-35 year old Croat was influentia...