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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Sport
Barry Glendenning

Two seasons in a day: the Champions League and Club World Cup overlap

Otto Rosengren and Pontus Jansson of Malmö arrive  at the airport for their Champions League trip to Tbilisi.
Otto Rosengren and Pontus Jansson of Malmö arrive at the airport for their Bigger Cup trip to Tbilisi. Photograph: Petter Arvidson/Bildbyran/Shutterstock

FOOTBALL. NEVER. STOPS

Football Daily would prefer not to have to think about Copa Gianni at all but we have a certain professional obligation to do so and have never knowingly been found shirking in the face of our responsibilities. To keep things simple, we prefer to view the tournament as a stand-alone competition that’s taking place between the end of the last season and the beginning of the next one, but the fact that it’s being contested by clubs instead of countries leaves plenty of room for debate. Watching Kingsley Coman “sprint” on to a through-ball from Harry Kane during Bayern Munich’s defeat by PSG as if he was running in knee-deep wet cement, we were presented with the sight of a player in next season’s kit who was quite clearly exhausted by the exertions of the one that may or may not have ended before the tournament in which he was playing started. Does the goal he didn’t score go down in the official xG column of last season, next season, or neither?

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