It’s only days away from the opening of the transfer window — a time when much cash will be splashed and many sides will be re-shaped and benches re-inforced. Because there can be some major impact signings, I am waiting to analyze the match-ups in the Champions League Round of 16 and the Europa League Round of 32 until after the transfer window closes. Those competitions do not kick off again until February 16th. Here are a few articles I’ve been checking out the past few days in anticipation of the spending spree.

Real Madrid’s Surplus Goods List
Fulham are also doing some house cleaning

Depending who you want to believe, Valencia sniper David Villa is going to Manchester United, Chelsea, or Real Madrid. It looks like Villa will move either in January or the summer transfer window as Valencia will likely have to sell two from Villa, David Silva and Juan Mata in a bid to cut down their £450m in debt.

Chelsea may be more interested in a striker from another debt-laden Spanish club, Atletico Madrid’s Kun Aguero.

Luca Toni will be another name featuring in many headlines with a return to Italy looming. Will he land at Internazionale?

Zenit St Petersburg are said to be considering a move for Fiorentina’s striker Adrian Mutu
after declining on a purchase option on PSG forward Mateja Kežman.

Special Note: Be sure to check out Major League Soccer Talk as they will have the most in-depth coverage of the Landon Donovan loan spell with Everton.

I have to start this off by saying thank you to the people behind the scenes at uefa.com for moving their subscription video service away from Windows Media and into a Flash-based format. It’s allowed me to follow all the games from the comforts of my Mac. If you’ve not done so, I strongly recommend checking out their Replay service. I think it would be well-worth the price even if I only accessed the extended highlight packages never mind the full-match replays that I’ve watched.

Now onto the big story from Matchday 3 in the Europa League, which was Everton being thrashed 5-0 by Benfica. One could argue that Everton entered the game with a weakened squad.

They have several senior players out injured (Neville, Yobo, etc) and two players are Cup-tied (Johnny Heitinga and Lucas Neill) so manager David Moyes had to field a makeshift backline due to the late withdrawal of Leighton Baines. While they did show weaknesses at the back with two inexperience fullbacks, Everton’s midfield were also outclassed depsite fielding regular starters like Tim Cahill, Marouane Fellaini and Diniyar Bilyaletdinov.

It would be wrong to put the defeat solely on Everton, credit must be given to Benfica for a good performance. In particular one of European football’s forgotten stars, Javier Saviola (the former Barcelona and Real Madrid striker is pictured above), played a vital role. Saviola scored a wonderful volley and had a big part in two of the other five goals. Saviola combined nicely with midfielder Angel Di Maria, who assisted on three of the goals and nearly scored one of his own.

I have to admit that I have an affinity for the Czech Republic as well as teams from the Czech league. So it put a smile on my face to see the results from Matchday 3 for Slavia Prague and Sparta Prague. Last season’s Czech champions SK Slavia Praha have struggled mightily thus far in the Europa League with 2-0 and 5-1 losses to Genoa and Lille respectively.

Going into Thursday’s match, history was against the Czech-based side as Valencia had never lost in six games against Czech sides and were unbeaten over 90 minutes in their last 14 UEFA club competition games. To be fair to Valencia they did dominate the latter stages of the match and looked likely to go on to win, especially after Slavia’s Hocine Ragued was sent off after receiving a second booking for a foul on Rubén Baraja. David Villa was poised to be the hero again off the bench and nearly produced from the free kick resulting from Ragued’s foul. He saw his curled effort crash off the upright and Valencia’s hopes of retaining top spot crashed soon after as Villa received a straight red card for kicking out at Benjamin Vomácka.

Cross-town rivals of Slavia, AC Sparta Praha defeated Romanian club CFR 1907 Cluj by a 2-0 score to climb up to second place in Group K. The win ended a six-year drought for Sparta, who had not recorded a home victory in a European club competition group-stage since beating Lazio in the Champions League on December 9, 2003. This was the first time that CFR and Sparta had met and Sparta’s only previous home game against Romanian opponents ended in a 5-1 defeat by FC Steaua Bucuresti in the first round of the 1988/89 European Champion Clubs’ Cup.

First-half goals from Juraj Kucka and Roman Hubník settled the contest and despite Cluj pressing the home side for long periods of the match, they were unable to find a way past goalkeeper Jaromír Blažek. Group K has become tighter with PSV top on 7 points and the other three clubs (Sparta, Cluj and FC København) all within a point of each other.

At just 32, former Danish international Thomas Gravesen has called time on his career. The combative central midfielder started his career with hometown club Vejle Boldklub (VB). He was soon on the move and  played for Hamburg, Everton and Real Madrid. He didn’t last long at Madrid, as his combative style spilled over into training sessions and many Madrid stars were unhappy with his rough tackling. He did enough to get Robinho to take a swing at him (as pictured above). He was soon on his way out the door to Celtic after that incident. His last appearance was actually in an Everton shirt, as he spent the full After the last game of the 2007-08 season on loan from Celtic. He failed to feature regularly for Everton and  was released during by Celtic this past summer. He had hoped to secure a spot with a top club, but failing that he has decided to call it a day.

Gravesen is quoted by Danish website Sporten.dk as saying : “I have spent some extraordinary years abroad, I have played and lived in four countries. But I’m 33 in March, so before age and health force my hand I have opted to take the decision to stop myself.”

Gravesen had called an end to his international playing days back in 2006, after having scored five goals in 66 appearances for Denmark.

I’m surprised that a Danish club such as Aalborg could not have used a player like Gravesen but perhaps the wages he would ask for and the reputation that hangs over him from the Madrid incicdent were not viewed as a good risk.

Here’s a link to a video showing one of Gravesen’s final goals, which came in a Celtic shirt.

In a new experiment, I am going to try a weekly wrap-up of news stories that caught my eye but that I don’t think require pages of analysis as I am prone to doing

So, here they are, concise and hopefully interesting.

1. UEFA are expected to formally confirm in December that Wembley will host the 2011 Champions League final. The British government confirmed in May that there will be an exemption to tax rules for players appearing in the final and the decision awarding the final to Wembley will likely be rubber-stamped by UEFA’s next executive committee on December 16. Dublin’s Lansdowne Road is rumoured to be the favourite for the 2011 Europa League – the old UEFA Cup – final.
2. Bulgarian champions CSKA Sofia will take legal action against their national football union after being excluded from the European Champions League. CSKA were banned from European competition after the Bulgarian Football Union (BFU) said in June that they had failed to meet licensing criteria because they owed money to the state and creditors. CSKA has retained lawyer Thomas Summerer, who has worked with some of the leading teams in the Bundesliga, and he told a press conference that “The BFU didn’t observe its own normative documents and didn’t treat CSKA as it should have done.” CSKA president Alexander Tomov has promised to reveal the complete truth about the club’s revoked license and has released the information on the CSKA website (Note: the link is a Google translated version of the page so may not be completely accurate in grammar or meaning but should give some overview to CSKA’s view of the matter).
3. Thierry Henry has revealed he will demand talks with Barcelona coach Pep Guardiola if he continues to be played out on the left wing. Henry had started the pre-season in a more central role but the return of Samuel Eto’o has seen him shifted out wide again. I can understand where Henry is coming from and I would agree that he’d be better off in the middle of the field playing almost as a number 10 behind the main strikers but to start this discussion through the press is perhaps not his wisest move.
4. While we are in Spain, can we spare some sympathy for poor Sporting Gijon? They were hammered twice (7-1 by Real Madrid and 6-1 by Barcelona) in the span of a week and my friends over at La Liga Talk suggest that their season might well be done already. Despite the vast number of injuries to top midfielders for Real (Sneijder,Guti, Gago), they are still loaded and Robben, Van Der Vaart and Ruben De la Red. De la Red was much talked about over the summer after his inclusion in the victorious Spain squad at Euro 2008. De la Red recently revealed that Tottenham tried to sign him during the summer and says he is keeping his options open when the transfer window re-opens in January. I think Real Madrid would be making a mistake in letting him go but with such a packed midfield someone else of quality would have to go. The question is who? Guti, while a candidate based on age, is unlikely to go because of his standing as vice-captain.
5. It’s a derby weekend with two of the more intense rivalries on display. In Serie A, it’s AC v Inter in the Milan derby while Liverpool and Everton contest the 208th Merseyside derby. In terms of world football derby matches or rivalries, what’s your favourite? I think I would choose Real-Barcelona (El Clasico) as the one to watch with the Boca-River Plate and Old Firm derbys coming in a close second.