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Champions League Returns Missing Mbappe, Rodri, Barella as Injury Wave Hits European Soccer

Football - LaLiga - Real Madrid v Deportivo Alaves - Santiago Bernabeu, Madrid, Spain - September 24, 2024 Real Madrid's Kylian Mbappe celebrates scoring their second goal. (Reuters)
Football - LaLiga - Real Madrid v Deportivo Alaves - Santiago Bernabeu, Madrid, Spain - September 24, 2024 Real Madrid's Kylian Mbappe celebrates scoring their second goal. (Reuters)
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Champions League Returns Missing Mbappe, Rodri, Barella as Injury Wave Hits European Soccer

Football - LaLiga - Real Madrid v Deportivo Alaves - Santiago Bernabeu, Madrid, Spain - September 24, 2024 Real Madrid's Kylian Mbappe celebrates scoring their second goal. (Reuters)
Football - LaLiga - Real Madrid v Deportivo Alaves - Santiago Bernabeu, Madrid, Spain - September 24, 2024 Real Madrid's Kylian Mbappe celebrates scoring their second goal. (Reuters)

Key players will be sidelined when the Champions League resumes Tuesday after a wave of injuries within a week of the new-look competition starting.

Kylian Mbappe’s sore hamstring is likely to sideline him beyond Wednesday when he was due to return to France with defending champion Real Madrid to face Lille.

Serious knee injuries mean Manchester City midfielder Rodri is out for the season and Barcelona goalkeeper Marc-André ter Stegen will miss at least most of it.

Inter Milan midfielder Nicolo Barella, who was a standout playing against Rodri on Sept. 18, will miss at least one Champions League game because of a thigh strain.

The injuries to four players who were involved at the European Championship into the knockout phase have sharpened the debate about player workload in a calendar made more congested by the bigger Champions League.

The extended program is what influential clubs all-but forced UEFA to create and the 18 games this week, split between Tuesday and Wednesday, still leaves each of them with six more to play through January.

Another final rematch

There were two repeats of past finals in the first week of games that relaunched the Champions League in a single-standings format. Man City and Inter drew 0-0 and Liverpool won 3-1 at AC Milan.

The next rematch comes Wednesday when Aston Villa hosts Bayern Munich, a giant of the European Cup era that was shocked 1-0 in the 1982 final.

Villa Park will host a first game in the competition since March 1983 when the English side’s title defense was ended by Juventus.

Both eased to winning starts two weeks ago. Villa won 3-0 at Young Boys and Bayern’s nine goals against Dinamo Zagreb was a record for any team in the 33-season Champions League era.

Harry Kane scored four in Bayern’s 9-2 win and has a good record visiting Villa, with five goals there in five Premier League games for Tottenham. He faces a late check on an ankle injury.

Kane edges Haaland

Kane’s fast start to the season with 10 goals in seven games for Bayern has outpaced even Erling Haaland’s 10 in eight games for Man City.

Haaland was kept quiet by Inter for the second time in 16 months, a fact he was reminded of in a post-game talk with the Italian champion’s center back Francesco Acerbi, who smiled and held up two fingers.

Haaland should find it easier on Tuesday in Slovakia when Man City faces Slovan Bratislava, which took the second biggest beating in the opening round, 5-1 at Celtic.

Crowd size and fan fervor

The pulsating atmosphere at Celtic Park for a rare European win by the Scottish champion stood out in an opening week where anticipation was not universal.

Pundits including former Man City goalkeeper Peter Schmeichel noted a quietness about the stadium for the Inter game. The attendance was nearly 2,000 higher five days later when Man City met Arsenal in a tempestuous Premier League clash where title ambitions were already in play.

Milan-Liverpool was a heavyweight European fixture yet far from sold out, with fewer than 60,000 at San Siro. The crowd topped 70,000 at each of Milan’s first two Serie A home games this season, and 66,000 on the equivalent Champions League opening night last season to see another English club, Newcastle.

Paris Saint-Germain drew at least 46,000 fans for each home game in Ligue 1 this season — and all three Champions League group-stage games last season — yet fewer than 40,000 were at Parc des Princes to see European debutant Girona two weeks ago.

Sporting Lisbon also had 40,000 fans for a Champions League opener against Lille that was 6,000 down on the crowd for a domestic league game against Porto.

The attendance and atmosphere trends will be watched as fans respond to the longer and more expensive program of four Champions League home games. The 36-team standings is set to be more dynamic for the final two rounds in January.

Tuesday's games

The raucous atmosphere should follow Celtic to Borussia Dortmund whose fans in the Yellow Wall tribune are among the noisiest in Europe.

Bundesliga champion Bayer Leverkusen hosts Milan after making a fast start in a 4-0 rout at Feyenoord. San Siro now reverts to Inter to host Red Star Belgrade.

Arsenal hosts PSG in a meeting of two teams chasing a trophy they never won. Each was a beaten finalist once. Also, Barcelona hosts Young Boys.

Wednesday's games Even without Mbappe, Madrid should have too much for Lille playing in the stadium that hosted basketball group-stage games at the Paris Olympics.

Premier League leader Liverpool hosts Bologna, and Girona’s first European visitor to the Montilivi stadium is Feyenoord.

Dinamo Zagreb fired its coach, Sergej Jakirovic, after the drubbing at Bayern and brought back Nenad Bjelica for a second spell. He starts in the Champions League hosting Monaco.

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Sports

Algeria’s Luca Zidane Doubt for World Cup After Jaw Fracture

Luca Zidane. (AFP)
Luca Zidane. (AFP)
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Algeria’s Luca Zidane Doubt for World Cup After Jaw Fracture

Luca Zidane. (AFP)
Luca Zidane. (AFP)

Algeria goalkeeper Luca Zidane is a doubt for the World Cup after suffering a jaw and chin fracture while playing for his club Granada in Spain's second tier.

The son of former France great Zinedine Zidane was taken off with a concussion after colliding with an opponent during his team's 4-2 home defeat by Almeria on Sunday.

The 27-year-old is expected to miss the rest of the season and could be out for even longer if he needs surgery.

"The player, in consultation with the club's medical staff, will decide in the coming hours on the course of treatment to be followed," said the club in a statement late Monday.

Luca Zidane is Algeria's first-choice goalkeeper and their back-up options Anthony Mandrea and Melvin Mastil are also currently out injured.

Algeria's World Cup campaign begins on June 16 against reigning champions Argentina.

Sports

A Bird Leaves Nothing Behind: The Lesson Behind Japan’s World Cup Stadium Cleanups

Japan supporters clean the stands at the end of the World Cup group E football match between Germany and Japan, at the Khalifa International Stadium in Doha, Qatar, Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2022. (AP)
Japan supporters clean the stands at the end of the World Cup group E football match between Germany and Japan, at the Khalifa International Stadium in Doha, Qatar, Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2022. (AP)
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A Bird Leaves Nothing Behind: The Lesson Behind Japan’s World Cup Stadium Cleanups

Japan supporters clean the stands at the end of the World Cup group E football match between Germany and Japan, at the Khalifa International Stadium in Doha, Qatar, Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2022. (AP)
Japan supporters clean the stands at the end of the World Cup group E football match between Germany and Japan, at the Khalifa International Stadium in Doha, Qatar, Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2022. (AP)

If there's one country guaranteed to clean up at the World Cup, it's Japan.

Literally.

Scenes of Japanese football fans sweeping stadiums and picking up trash after a match first drew public attention in France in 1998 — Japan's first appearance in the World Cup.

The tradition has continued every four years. It happened at the World Cup in Qatar in 2022, and it's certain to continue when Japan opens play in June with group games in Arlington, Texas, and Monterrey, Mexico.

The cleanup astonishes non-Japanese who might be accustomed to leaving stadiums and stepping over half-eaten food, shredded paper wrappers, and cups — empty or with liquid dribbling out.

At the World Cup in Russia in 2018, Japanese players famously cleaned the dressing room after a loss and left a thank-you note in Russian. In 2022, fans left thank-you notes on rubbish bags written in Arabic, English and Japanese.

Why do Japanese behave this way? It's not that complicated. Beginning in elementary school, students are socialized to behave this way — in the classroom, in the school yard or on a playing field.

“Japanese sports fans at world events who clean up the stadium are behaving much the same way they did when they learned how to enjoy sports as school boys and girls,” Koichi Nakano, who teaches politics and history at Sophia University, told The Associated Press.

There is a phrase in Japanese that explains it.

“Tatsu tori ato wo nigosazu.”

The literal translation is: “A bird leaves nothing behind.”

Rendered in English the message is: “Return it the way you found it.”

Many Japanese elementary schools don’t have janitors, so the clean-up work is left to students. Office workers often dedicate time to sprucing up their areas.

Also, there are relatively few trash containers in public spaces in Japan, so people take their waste home with them. This keeps the sidewalks cleaner, saves the cost of emptying trash cans, and keeps away vermin.

“The way most ordinary soccer fans experience soccer at school is no different from other sports, and the emphasis is not just on physical education but also on moral education as well,” Nakano added.

Collective vs. the individual

Raised in Germany, Barbara Holthus is the deputy director of the German Institute for Japanese Studies in Tokyo. A sociologist, she agrees it's prudent not to put Japanese on a pedestal. Japan, like any country, has its own challenges and shortcomings.

“An academically sound explanation is that people in Japan just happen to be socialized different,” she told The AP. “If you grew up with a certain way of how things are being done, you apply that to even cleaning up a stadium afterwards.”

At work here is also the Japanese concept of “meiwaku,” which implies not causing trouble or annoying others. From the Japanese point of view, leaving rubbish piled up in a stadium would be a bother to others.

Japan is a relatively crowded place, and greater Tokyo alone has about 35 million people, almost the population of the entire state of California. People need to get along.

“Japanese learn early on that you don't want to inconvenience other people,” Holthus said.

She said the focus is often on the collective, compared with the West where the emphasis is on the individual and individual rights.

“You don’t want to bother people. It goes to all areas of life in Japan,” Holthus added. “We are raised (in the West) that we don’t have to clean up after ourselves in public spaces because there is going to be some kind of public service doing that.”

And because Japanese people have received widespread praise for the clean-up, the behavior has been reinforced.

“Now that the media has latched onto the story and lavished praise on Japanese fans, they have made it a point of pride to display those values and norms,” Jeff Kingston, who teaches history at Temple University in Japan, wrote in an email.

A Japanese tradition

The clean-up tradition is not limited to football’s marquee tournament. The same thing happened last year at the Under-20 World Cup in Chile as Japanese fans cleaned up after a match. And even more recently last month at Wembley Stadium in London where Japan defeated England 1-0 in an international friendly.

“It’s one of our traditions,” said Toshi Yoshizawa, who was leading the cleanup in Chile. “We grew up with the teaching that we should leave a place cleaner than when we arrived.”

William Kelly, an emeritus professor of anthropology at Yale University and a specialist on Japan, said the tradition is linked to football more than other sports. He speculated it's tied to the establishment of Japan's professional football league more than 30 years ago.

“It (the J-League) was trying to distinguish itself from baseball by emphasizing teams’ community embeddedness and commitment,” Kelly wrote in an email. “Soccer fans felt, and feel, more a part of the club and its stadium.”

Sports

Riyadh to Host Joshua vs. Prenga Showdown in July

Boxing - Jake Paul v Anthony Joshua - Kaseya Center, Miami, Florida, US - December 19, 2025 Anthony Joshua after winning his fight against Jake Paul. (Reuters)
Boxing - Jake Paul v Anthony Joshua - Kaseya Center, Miami, Florida, US - December 19, 2025 Anthony Joshua after winning his fight against Jake Paul. (Reuters)
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Riyadh to Host Joshua vs. Prenga Showdown in July

Boxing - Jake Paul v Anthony Joshua - Kaseya Center, Miami, Florida, US - December 19, 2025 Anthony Joshua after winning his fight against Jake Paul. (Reuters)
Boxing - Jake Paul v Anthony Joshua - Kaseya Center, Miami, Florida, US - December 19, 2025 Anthony Joshua after winning his fight against Jake Paul. (Reuters)

Chairman of the Board of Directors of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority Turki Alalshikh announced the return of British boxer Anthony Joshua to the ring in “The Comeback,” scheduled for July 25 in Riyadh.

The 36-year-old Joshua will fight Kristian Prenga, an Albanian with 20 victories and one loss.

Joshua’s last fight was a knockout victory over YouTuber Jake Paul on Dec. 19. Ten days later, he was injured in a car crash in Nigeria that killed two of his friends.

“It’s no secret I’ve taken some time to consolidate and rebuild to be ready for stepping back into the ring,” Joshua said in a Matchroom statement, “and today is the next step on that journey.”

In the statement, Joshua said the fight with Prenga is the first in a “multi-fight deal."

The event forms part of the Kingdom’s continued hosting of major international boxing matches, further cementing Riyadh’s status as a premier destination for global sports and entertainment.

The bout will be broadcast live worldwide on DAZN.