Si.com’s Jonah Freedman is at it again with his rankings. Instead of botching World Cup rankings, this time he has moved on to club rankings.

His rankings start off poorly with his placement of Chelsea at #1. Freedman states “Until the Blues again show they can’t come up big in Europe or have trouble closing down the stretch, Roman Abramovich’s free-spending has made Chelsea the team to beat again.” Again show that they can’t perform in the European competitions? Wouldn’t that comment alone mean that Chelsea should not be in the top position in his rankings? Chelsea, for all their great performances in the Premier League (winning the past two seasons), still have not made the final of the Champions League during this period, losing to eventual champions Liverpool and Barcelona the last two years. It is true that Roman Abramovich has spent a lot of money putting a team full of stars together, but if anything has been proven in recent years, it is that spending great amounts of money building a team does not necessarily equal success in the extended European competitions. You just need to look at Real Madrid (who also didn’t make his top ten, but this was before the signing of Ruud Van Nistelrooy) for proof of this.

Barcelona, who Freedman had ranked at #2, won the Champion’s League last year and only got better during the offseason. Why then would Barcelona be placed behind Chelsea in the rankings? To be the best, you have to beat the best, and currently Barcelona are the best team in the world.

Two other things I found interesting were the exclusion of Manchester United from the top 10. Although they didn’t have a great Champion’s League last year, they still finished second in the Premier League - ahead of both Arsenal and Liverpool (#4 and #5 respectively on Freedman’s list) - and should have warranted a mention in his top 10. What makes this exclusion even worse is the fact that Freedman included D.C. United as an honorable mention. What is an American team doing in the honorable mention section of a top 10 list? If D.C. United could beat any team from League 1 in England - let alone the Premier League - I would be absolutely shocked. I thought I was patriotic towards Australia, but you wouldn’t see me putting Sydney F.C. in any honourable mention list when it came to club rankings. How can anyone take anything Freedman says relating to soccer seriously?

This entry was posted on Friday, July 28th, 2006 at 10:27 am and is filed under Soccer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.