At 90min towers, there’s one thing we love to do.
Rank things.
From sifting through Lionel Messi’s eight Ballon d’Or successes to deciding the best club badge in the Premier League, there’s nothing quite like putting things in a structured, highly agreeable order.
That’s where 90min’s power rankings come into play.
Each and every week, we digest everything that’s gone before us in the footballing world to pick out the ten best teams currently strutting their stuff in Europe.
Luckily for us, and for you, there hasn’t been an international break this week to ruffle our feathers…so let’s dive into the offerings from week six of 2023/24.
Newcastle United, Liverpool, Sporting CP, Juventus, PSV Eindhoven
There’s a number of considerations when deciding which teams should be entered into any given week’s power rankings.
Has enough consistency been shown? Does the strength of a team’s league reflect their standing in the continent as a whole? Is it funny to intentionally leave a team out?
With all of that in mind, Newcastle, Liverpool, Sporting CP, Juventus and PSV Eindhoven haven’t yet made the grade, but they’re very much knocking on the entry door (particularly PSV, who are absolutely smashing it up in the Netherlands).
Bayern Munich, Feyenoord
Usually a staple fixture among the best teams in Europe, it’s absolutely impossible to include Bayern Munich this week despite their 8-0 annihilation of Darmstadt in their last Bundesliga fixture.
Not only do Bayern score truck loads of goals all the time – their weekend haul was the 13th time (including friendlies) that they’ve scored four or more in a game this calendar year – but they were then dumped out of the DFB-Pokal in the second round by third division Saarbrucken.
Who, you ask? Saarbrucken.
Worse still, Thomas Tuchel only rotated a couple of his best players out of the side – Manuel Neuer, Kim min-jae, Matthijs de Ligt, Alphonso Davies, Joshua Kimmich, Leroy Sane and Thomas Muller all started and Serge Gnabry, Kingsley Coman, Jamal Musiala and Konrad Laimer were used from the bench.
Yikes.
As for Feyenoord, they lost 2-1 to Twente in the Eredivisie and now sit fourth in the table. Simple as that.
Being part of the City Group is undoubtedly a benefit to Girona, who get to gobble up Manchester City’s unwanted castoffs and emerging players.
But take nothing away from the La Liga minnows, as they’re now 11 games into the 2023/24 La Liga season and have a record of nine wins, one draw and one defeat.
Their latest success came courtesy of a stoppage-time winner from Yangel Herrera, who they signed from *checks notes* Manchester City. Of course.
Manchester United supporters will be desperately hoping that Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s imminent 25% minority investment in the club happens to include a clause of signing every OGC Nice player possible.
Sir Jim’s multinational chemicals company INEOS are in total charge of Nice down in the south of France, and the club are unbeaten at the top of the Ligue 1 table ahead of Paris Saint-Germain.
Takes a bit of doing, that.
The good news for Arsenal this past week was they smashed Sheffield United 5-0 at the Emirates Stadium.
The bad news for Arsenal is that Sheffield United’s playing ability has resembled that of a National League side rather than a Premier League outfit.
The extremely bad news is Arsenal then followed that win up with a dreary performance in the 3-1 defeat to London rivals West Ham in the Carabao Cup. Mikel Arteta was not amused.
Over in Italy, three teams are emerging as frontrunners for the Serie A title – Inter, Juventus and AC Milan.
Of the three, it’s Inter who are currently setting the pace, with an eighth win of the season against Jose Mourinho’s Roma complementing an unbeaten Champions League group stage campaign.
And if for any reason consistently good results weren’t enough to get the Nerazzurri faithful grinning from ear to ear, the fact they picked up Marcus Thuram – Lilian’s son and match winner on Sunday – on a free transfer will likely do the job.
Over in the Spanish capital, Diego Simeone and his dark art Atletico Madrid crusaders are cruising along nicely.
It’s now six wins on the spin for Atleti in La Liga – they now sit third behind Real Madrid and Girona and behind Barcelona – with things also going relatively well in the Champions League.
Manchester City losing three domestic games in a row was undoubtedly a shock to the system.
But as we so often see from Pep Guardiola’s army of robots, they’ve put those disappointments firmly in the rear-view mirror. At the weekend, neighbourhood rivals United were dispatched 3-0 on their home patch, and the worrying this is that City barely broke a sweat.
Some will point to the fact that Luton Town were the visitors to Villa Park last Saturday, attempting to downplay the achievements of Unai Emery’s in-form side.
Villa emerged 3-1 winners, that wasn’t wholly unexpected. But what nobody would have expected is for them to ever go on a run of winning 12 Premier League home games in a row. That you must applaud.
Truth be told, Bayer Leverkusen didn’t really do anything wrong this week.
They won in the Bundesliga to remain top, and they comfortably saw off Sandhausen (take note Bayern) in the DFB-Pokal. But despite that, they still drop down a place in the power rankings because…
…of Jude Bellingham’s existence, basically.
A goal down in the Clasico against Barcelona with just over 20 minutes remaining, Real Madrid saw their marquee summer signing step up to the plate with a thumping effort that saw Marc-Andre ter Stegen barely sniff the ball as it passed him.
The German was then scooping the ball out of his net in injury time, with Bellingham in the right place at the right time to earn Madrid victory in the biggest club game in world football.
Crystal Palace aren’t the world’s greatest football team, but you’d be hard pressed to find many top sides who would want to face them on their own patch on a Friday night under the lights.
That’s exactly what Premier League table-toppers Spurs had to do, less than four days after cruising past Fulham at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
Spurs did it well, maintaining their unbeaten start to the season under Ange Postecoglou courtesy of a gift-wrapped Joel Ward own goal and an eighth of the season for captain Son Heung-min.
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