European soccer review: Valverde wonderstrike keeps Madrid in title race

Throughout the course of the weekend, the LaLiga title race went from wide open, to totally over, to back as it was before a ball had been kicked. Credit to Real Madrid for sticking around while their season is on the brink of imploding around them.

In the Premier League, the title race is nearly officially over, but the race for European places is as competitive as ever. Just two points separate third from seventh, meaning that one bad day at the office could be the difference between a place in the UEFA Champions League and a season full of dates in the UEFA Conference League.

Meanwhile, in the Bundesliga, Germany’s last remaining clubs were knocked out of European competition, but Bayern Munich returned to some sense of normalcy by dismantling a relative minnow.

All that and more in this edition of Weekend Review as Sam Tighe, Alex Kirkland and Constantin Eckner look across Europe for the big takeaways and highlights from the weekend.

Top takeaway: Champions League pressure cranked up on Forest

Nottingham Forest will have watched, with increasing concern, as Manchester City, then Aston Villa and then Chelsea won this weekend. It’s the last thing they needed as they gear up to face Tottenham Hotspur on Monday, knowing that despite a near-perfect season to date, they’ve been dragged back into the fight for a top-five berth — and with every passing week, their grip on one of those places has appeared to slip.

The nature of some of those results will have alarmed the Tricky Trees, too. Chelsea showed a surprising resilience to come from behind and beat rivals Fulham in the 94th minute, Villa dismantled a Newcastle United team that had won five in a row and City — for all their faults — found a way to win again.

Forest, meanwhile, urgently need to set the form book straight: They have not responded well to a couple of key recent injuries, losing twice on the spin. A trip to the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium will not be easy — especially as Spurs just put in their most accomplished performance in months against Eintracht Frankfurt last Thursday — and they’ll be feeling the heat generated by their rivals’ results.

Will the pressure make them or break them?

Best match: Brentford 4-2 Brighton & Hove Albion

Cheekily dubbed the “well-run club derby” on local radio before the game, this match did anything but go to plan. Bryan Mbeumo and Yoane Wissa continued their scoring sprees and the Seagulls refused to quit despite Joao Pedro’s red card for violent conduct on the hour.

Best goal: Gabriel Martinelli at Ipswich Town

Lesley Ugochukwu (Southampton), Amadou Onana (Villa) and Pedro Neto (Chelsea) all scored phenomenal, thumping efforts this weekend, but there’s just something about the move for Martinelli’s goal for Arsenal that we can’t shake off. It was so precise and so deft, with Mikel Merino’s brilliant back-heel taking it from “well worked” to “a class above.”

MVP of the weekend: Ollie Watkins, Aston Villa

Watkins delivered a No. 9 masterclass at Villa Park on Saturday. He scored one, assisted another, hit the post, struck the bar and left central defender Fabian Schär utterly dazed by his relentless movement, speed and hold-up play. It was an unbelievable display. — Tighe

Top takeaway: Valverde wonderstrike keeps Madrid in title race

Two questions dominated the buildup to Real Madrid’s game with Athletic Club on Sunday. How would the team react to their midweek Champions League elimination? And how would the crowd at the Santiago Bernabéu? In the end, neither quite lived up to expectations.

Madrid were mostly flat, dominating possession and creating chances, but never with enough urgency or intensity to put Athletic under sustained pressure. The closest Madrid had come to scoring was in the 80th minute — when Vinícius Júnior’s pinpoint shot was disallowed for offside — before Federico Valverde stepped up with a 93rd-minute golazo, volleyed into the net with unerring accuracy, to earn a 1-0 win.

As for the crowd, there were fewer whistles than expected for coach Carlo Ancelotti and his players as their names were read out over the stadium tannoy prematch. The loudest the fans’ displeasure got was when Kylian Mbappé — suspended and injured — was shown on the Bernabéu’s giant screens, watching in the stands. Mbappé was whistled as he limped off against Arsenal in midweek, too.

As the game went on, the fans’ frustration grew. Ancelotti threw on one substitute after another — Endrick, Arda Güler, Brahim Díaz — to try to spark the team into life, but it was Vinícius, another recent target for the crowd’s ire, who looked most likely to make something happen, until Valverde’s moment of late genius.

The victory leaves Madrid four points behind leaders Barcelona, with six matches left. It’s not an impossible margin to overcome; but they’ll need to play better than this to stand a chance of winning the league.

Best match: Barcelona 4-3 Celta Vigo

Celta looked to have blown the title race wide open when Borja Iglesias put them 3-1 up at Montjuïc after an hour, but that feeling lasted just two minutes. Dani Olmo pulled a goal back, Raphinha leveled four minutes later, and then converted a penalty — awarded after a VAR check, for a foul on Olmo — in the 98th minute. Barça won 4-3, maintaining their lead at the top. No points for Celta: just another reminder that they’re LaLiga’s great entertainers.

Best goal: Yeremy Pino, Pape Gueye or Etta Eyong vs. Real Sociedad

Villarreal scored three brilliant goals against Real Sociedad at La Cerámica. Sadly for them, none of them counted. Pino’s chipped finish from Juan Foyth’s clever pass was disallowed for offside. Gueye’s smooth volley was ruled out, Ayoze Pérez judged to interfering with play. And then Eyong’s first ever senior goal — which would have made it 3-2 in the 96th minute, after Nicolas Pépé’s jinking run — was disallowed for a Pepê foul.

“We played an extraordinary game,” coach Marcelino said. “We scored five goals, but only two counted.”

MVP of the weekend: Borja Iglesias, Celta Vigo

Spare a thought for Celta’s Iglesias, who scored a hat trick against Barcelona, but still ended up on the losing side. The forward they call “The Panda” hadn’t found the net in LaLiga since January. Here, he scored three — the third the pick of the finishes, coolly beating Wojciech Szczesny — but it still wasn’t enough. — Kirkland

Top takeaway: Back to business for Bayern

The Bundesliga suffered heartbreak in midweek, as all three of its remaining teams were eliminated from European competition. Bayern Munich, in particular, seemed distraught following their loss to Inter Milan, as their dream of playing the UEFA Champions League final at their own Allianz Arena is well and truly over.

In order to bring home at least one piece of silverware this season, Bayern need to avoid any slip-ups in the next few weeks. Vincent Kompany’s team faced Heidenheim on Saturday, with the hosts hoping to keep their 16th place in the Bundesliga standings, which would qualify for the relegation playoffs against the third-placed team from the 2. Bundesliga. Having won only two of their past six games across competitions, Bayern took out their anger on Heidenheim, beating the hosts 4-0.

This one-sided win might actually fuel criticism, though, because the widespread argument these days is that Harry Kane & Co. can only beat up the little guys in the Bundesliga and fall short against top-tier competition. At least this win increases Bayern’s chances of reclaiming the German championship.

Best match: Union Berlin 4-4 VfB Stuttgart

The first half of this game deserves a movie being made about it. With eight goals scored in the first half, the two teams set a new Bundesliga record. The lead changed multiple times, and it was the kind of game where no one wanted the half-time whistle to blow. It was just too much fun. As far as Stuttgart are concerned, their best chance of qualifying for European competition at this point is winning the German Cup final against third-tier Arminia Bielefeld.

Best goal: Leopold Querfeld vs. Stuttgart

The fifth goal of that game was a real beauty and came out of nowhere. Querfeld had a bit of space to enter the Stuttgart half, but no one expected him to shoot from roughly 38 yards out and find the top corner of the goal. The 21-year-old might never hit the ball as perfectly ever again in his career.

MVP of the weekend: Lucas Höler, SC Freiburg

A name you might not read often, but Höler has been one of Freiburg’s more consistent performers for quite a couple of years, although he has not scored as regularly this season. Saturday was different, as the 30-year-old striker contributed two goals to Freiburg’s 3-2 win over TSG Hoffenheim, which keeps their Champions League hopes alive. — Eckner

What else you missed this weekend

Mbappé’s week from hell continues

Mbappé endured a tough week both on and off the pitch.

On the pitch, his Real Madrid side crashed out of the Champions League at the hands of Arsenal and he limped off injured late on after attempting a tackle. His participation in next weekend’s Copa del Rey final against Barcelona is now in question.

Off the pitch, things arguably went worse. The striker is the majority owner of French club Stade Malherbe Caen, who lost 3-0 on Friday night to Martigues, a result that officially relegated them to the Championnat National (France’s third tier) with three games to play.

It marks the end of a disastrous campaign for Caen, who dropped from Ligue 1 to Ligue 2 in 2019, and had hoped for brighter horizons following Mbappé’s takeover. Things have only got worse, though; in January the fans protested against the way the World Cup winner was running the club, and now relegation to the semiprofessional third rung has been confirmed. — Tighe

Beautiful football in a beautiful locale

Looking at the Serie A table, one would not be too impressed by Como’s position. The team from picturesque Lago di Como are currently 13th in the standings, but that only tells part of the story, because manager Cesc Fàbregas has done a tremendous job in developing a side who feel quite comfortable in possession, recording the seventh-highest average ball possession percentage and the sixth-highest shot output. Unsurprisingly, rumors linking Fàbregas with a club like RB Leipzig have emerged in recent times.

Before the weekend, Como had won their previous two games against Monza and Torino. They faced Lecce at the Stadio Via del Mare on Saturday and beat Marco Giampaolo’s side 3-0. While Como’s defense allowed a number of chances, their attack involving playmaker Nico Paz looked pretty great once again.

Despite the attractiveness of the city and a famous minority owner in Thierry Henry, Como as a club has a ceiling in Serie A. Fàbregas is making sure they hit it as soon as possible. — Eckner