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Hello! That Julian Alvarez penalty, and the ‘El Pupas’ jinx… are you kidding me?!?
On the way:
🫢 Spot-kick shock in Madrid
💰 FIFA’s $38k-a-day grumbles
👕 Realities of fake shirts
🟥 How not to appeal a red card
Champions League ‘curse’: Atletico’s nightmare returns after Alvarez’s penalty slip against Real
Time to revisit an old proverb, which applies perfectly to Real Madrid versus Atletico Madrid in the Champions League: they tear strips off each other for as long the game lasts, and then Real Madrid win.
It happened in 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017 and now, once again, in 2025, a clean sweep on the part of one half of the city. At Atletico, they call it ‘El Pupas’, a curse on their house. Except nothing remotely compares to 2025 and the way they went down last night. I’m still trying to process it.
Real were 2-1 up in a penalty shootout, with all takes converted, when Alvarez stepped up for Atletico’s second. His shot flew into the roof of the net but there was immediate commotion — Real’s players haranguing the match officials and gesturing (inoffensively) with two fingers. Perceptively, they’d all spotted something.
Though Alvarez scored, he had also slipped on his run-up. The referee paused and awaited VAR guidance before ruling that the striker’s sliding left foot had glanced the ball fractionally before his right drove it in (see for yourselves, above — I really can’t decide). According to UEFA, in-ball technology wasn’t called upon.
By the letter of the law, two touches made it an illegal penalty. A taker is only allowed to strike the ball once, and in shootouts, unlike normal play, it’s not permitted to score on the rebound. The Metropolitano stadium crowd watched in utter disbelief as the effort was disallowed.
We’ve seen double hits before but I can’t ever recall it happening at such a vital stage of a mega-contest. And while there was so much more to come in the shootout — Lucas Vazquez missing for Real, Marcos Llorente hitting the crossbar for Atletico, Antonio Rudiger squeaking the winner past Jan Oblak — the Alvarez thunderbolt knocked Diego Simeone’s side out of kilter, changing the tone and defining the night.
The tie had otherwise gone well for Atletico, too: Conor Gallagher levelling it up on aggregate after just 27 seconds (the fastest Champions League goal by an Englishman) and Vinicius Junior missing a normal-time penalty (below) which just about landed on the Moon. But it’s Simeone’s destiny to be pipped at the post by Real — and Alvarez’s slip will haunt him in his sleep.
‘The ball doesn’t move’
This is what Atletico’s Simeone and his Real counterpart Carlo Ancelotti had to say when the dust settled:
🗣️ Simeone: “If someone present here saw Julian touch the ball twice, raise your hand. Who raises their hand? You didn’t raise it. Right, next question. When he puts his foot down and kicks (it), the ball doesn’t move even a little bit.”
🗣️ Ancelotti: “When we realised this doubt, it had already been detected by the VAR. I didn’t notice this. I’ve seen it and it seems to me that he touches (the ball) with his left foot for the second touch.”
They were never going to agree on it but the facts are 15-times holders Real roll on to the quarter-finals. They so often do, by hook or by crook. Next for them are Arsenal, who finished off PSV 9-3 across both legs. Up in Birmingham, Aston Villa’s 6-1 aggregate rout of Club Brugge was a statement of intent by a manager, Unai Emery, who has a history of winning European trophies for fun.
But all the talk focused on Madrid and that one, critical technicality. They’ll talk about it forever and a day.
News round-up
- Atletico’s Angel Correa came off the bench last night but unless his club appeal, he’s about to start a five-match La Liga ban for calling a referee a “son of a huge b****, piece of s***, mother-f***er”. What a charmer.
- Former Brazil striker Ronaldo was planning to stand for election as the country’s football federation (CBF) president. But he’s pulled out, citing a near-total lack of support from the CBF’s 27 administrative bodies. “I found 23 doors closed,” he complained.
- Brazilian teams, meanwhile, have written to South American governing body CONMEBOL demanding meaningful action over racism offences. It comes after a young Palmeiras player, Luighi, was racially abused during a CONMEBOL Libertadores Under-20 fixture.
- Premier League side Crystal Palace are talking about extending the contract of manager Oliver Glasner. It makes sense. Little by little, they’ve been finding their rhythm under him.
VIP venues: Club World Cup teams scrap over training bases
FIFA’s Club World Cup should be a case study in reverse engineering: commit to it over hell or high water and then figure out how on earth it will work.
The world governing body has its broadcast partner and its venues are finalised, so job done on those two fronts. But when one frontier resolves itself, another one pops up, and the next round of wrangling concerns training sites and sustenance for the 32 teams involved this summer.
Here’s what’s going on, all told by Adam Crafton:
- For each club, FIFA is willing to pay $15,000 a day for training facilities and $38,500 a day for food, travel and other expenses. Don’t laugh, but certain clubs think they’re being undercut. As Adam puts it, CWC contenders want VIP treatment.
- FIFA is demanding that training grounds close to other users 28 days before the teams arrive in June, to make sure they are prepared. But it won’t offer compensation for the 28-day shutdowns. Two potential bases, Princeton and Harvard Universities, have chosen to back away. They have lucrative sports programmes of their own, after all.
- UCLA is a sought-after location but the Los Angeles university requested that FIFA meet the cost of relaying one of its pitches. FIFA refused but Inter were keen to lodge there, so they bypassed FIFA and struck a private deal with UCLA themselves.
Adam’s full article has a wealth of other details on this. FIFA, as per, gives the impression everything is falling into place in time for the tournament and, let’s be honest, it probably will. But has ever a concept been asked to clear so many hurdles?
Feedback loop
The response to The Athletic’s investigation into the global fake football shirt racket was vast. So vast, in fact, that we decided to run a survey to gauge public opinion on the subject.
The results were pretty fascinating. Almost 80 per cent of those who replied said they had bought a counterfeit top, which caught me on the hop. I assumed plenty of people would say yes. I just didn’t expect a majority so high.
Close to 90 per cent think Premier League clubs should cap prices for genuine shirts which, I’m sorry to say, is wishful thinking. Likewise the clamour to fix prices at £40 to £50 ($52 to $65). Scrooge didn’t get rich by celebrating Christmas, and the Premier League didn’t take over the world by virtue of its altruism.
Its members should ponder this, though: 66 per cent of respondents would either buy a fake top again or for the first time, and 84 per cent who buy counterfeit alternatives claim they do so because they cannot, or will not, pay for official versions. The demand is there, hence the supply, it doesn’t bode well for the sport’s desire to kibosh the underworld.
Around TAFC
Catch a match
(Selected games, times ET/UK)
Europa League last-16 second leg (all Paramount+/TNT Sports): Athletic Club (1) vs Roma (2), Eintracht Frankfurt (2) vs Ajax (1), Lazio (2) vs Viktoria Plzen (1) — all 1.45pm/5.45pm; Manchester United (1) vs Real Sociedad (1), Rangers (3) vs Fenerbahce (1), Tottenham Hotspur (0) vs AZ (1) — all 4pm/8pm.
Conference League last-16 second leg (both 4pm/8pm and Paramount+/TNT Sports): Chelsea (2) vs Copenhagen (1); Fiorentina (2) vs Panathinaikos (3).
And finally…
You don’t ask, you don’t get. And sometimes when you ask, you don’t get either.
Especially when you’re showing more neck than a giraffe, like Hull City trying to overturn a red card issued to forward Joao Pedro at Bristol City.
His offence was a two-footed tackle, it came from behind and even though an effort was made to suggest he pulled out of it at the last minute, no football association on earth would have rescinded his dismissal on appeal — which England’s didn’t. God is supposed to love a trier but I doubt the big man approved of this effort.
(Top photo: Angel Martinez/Getty Images)
