Atalanta, Lazio move up in Italian lineal soccer standings

For once in 2019-20, Juventus didn't win everything within sight of Italian soccer. Indeed, the perennial Italian champions failed in their only attempt during the season to win the Italian traveling championship, allowing Atalanta and Lazio to shine.

In addition to the difference coronavirus made across the Italian Serie A in 2019-20, the season played out unlike any other so far in the traveling championship.

Juventus, of course, won the league for the ninth straight time. However, for the first time in five years of tracking the lineal soccer championship across Italy, Juventus held the title for not even a single day.

The Serie A tightened up a lot during the pandemic season. Within five points of Juventus in the season's final standings were three other teams. Two of them, Atalanta and Lazio, also made huge gains in the traveler.

Atalanta finished the season with 16 games of championship, bringing itself up to 18 all-time. It would have been enough to push Atalanta into third-place in the all-time Italian standings, except that AS Roma, which brought the title into the season, produced four straight defenses immediately and raised its historical total to 20.

Lazio, the second team in Rome, produced its first 11 games of traveling championship in five years of tracking and now is up to fifth place all-time. 

Napoli remains second all-time at 26. The Neapolitans failed in two challenges during the 2019-20 season after failing their only two challenges a year earlier.

Of course, Juventus still leads all time with 73 games of championship.

Lazio lays into 10-game title for linear lead in Italy

As popularity goes among the top Roman soccer clubs, Lazio is second to AS Roma. But Lazio is making a bid this year to unseat Juventus as the Serie A champions, and the Eagles are chugging through the traveling championship pretty well, too.

Lazio, the second soccer club in Rome, has played for 90 years in Serie A and only won it twice.

So, there is scepticism concerning whether Lazio can actually pull it off this year. At this moment, the Eagles are right there, second place, 59 points in the Serie A standings, a mere one point behind eight-time defending champion Juventus.

Lazio is the most surprising contender in Europe this year, which is saying something because, these days, it's surprising when anyone challenges the likes of Juventus, Paris-Saint Germain, Bayern Munich or the two leading Spanish clubs. 

But Lazio is doing it, and putting together a pretty impressive run with the Italian traveling soccer championship. Lazio's 10-game title is current, including eight wins and two draws. The next challenge will take place at home on Feb. 29 against a Bologna squad that is right in the middle of Serie A.

Lazio and Juventus will meet again on April 26 in Turin, nine games down the road for the traveling champions. Can Lazio hang in there long enough to make that game really count? Though Lazio is the upstart this year and Juventus is the perennial power, the Roman side has prevailed strongly in their two meetings so far, a Serie A game in Rome on Dec. 7 and the Italian Super Cup in Saudi Arabia on Dec. 22, each by 3-1.

Lazio won the linear title on Dec. 16 with a 2-1 win at Cagliari. Before that game, the Eagles had failed all eight of their challenges for the prize going back to the start of tracking in 2015-16, losing six of them. On this new winning streak, Lazio has outscored its opposition 22-8.

Somehow, the Serie A has kept Juventus away from a title shot this year. But Juve remains well ahead of every other Italian club with 73 games of domestic linear championship. Napoli remains second at 26, losing all three of its challenges in the last two seasons. AS Roma has added four games of title this year and now stands third with 20.

Shakhtar holds season lead for Euro/world travelers

Shakhtar Donetsk compiled 13 games of championship in the European and world travelers, ending with its Champions League rematch with Atalanta in December. Now, Sassuolo holds the titles after holding off AS Roma at the start of February.

When last we left the European and International traveling soccer championships, the Ukranian club Shakhtar Donetsk was at the start of what proved to be an impressive run of titles for a club that's not from a more western location.

One might expect, and we have seen, long runs by Spanish clubs Barcelona and Real Madrid, and we have seen the titles spend a lot of time in Italy. 

But Shakhtar put together an especially good streak, 13 games of championship in each case (the European and International lineals have been stuck together now for more than two seasons). Included in Shakhtar's run of titles were three defenses in the Champions League, including two draws against the Croatian side Dinamo Zagreb and another draw at Manchester City.

Finally, though, Atalanta got its rematch. The Goddess dropped the prizes to Shakhtar on her home ground on Oct. 1. On Dec. 11, they met again, in Kharkiv. This time, the Italian squad put a 3-0 drubbing on the Ukrainians, sending the titles back to Italy.

No club since then has assembled a championship longer than three games, which is the Sassuolo's current championship. Sassuolo held on with an upset win, 4-2 at home against AS Roma, which brought both championships into the current season.

Barcelona remains the leader all-time with 36 wins in the world competition, but Roma is second at 23. In Europe, Real Madrid has the all-time lead with 44 games of title, followed by Roma with 23.

Ukrainian power takes world, Euro soccer travelers

The world and European traveling championships in soccer have entered a new country, with the top club in Ukraine wrestling the prizes from the Italian club Atalanta at the start of October.

This is the quite interesting crest for the Ukrainian soccer club Shakhtar Donetsk, which now controls the world and European traveling championships. You might want to run a translator on this account of the logo from the club's website.

Running together, as they do, the European and World traveling soccer titles have been around quite a bit in less than two months since the European seasons began.

The big traveling occurred within a split second on Oct. 1, when a 20-year-old Israeli midfielder, off the bench, scored five minutes into extra time, giving Shakhtar Donetsk a 2-1 win over Atalanta in the group stage of the Champion's League.

With that, the European and World prizes moved from Italy to Ukraine under the flag of Shakhtar Donetsk. It appears unlikely that the prize will get lost deeper in the Ukranian Premier League. Shakhtar has played nine games in its domestic league so far and won all of them.

We like to keep the real world out of sports, but where do we play sports except in a real world? The part of the world concerning us here is the basin of the Donets in southeastern Europe, a region known as the Donbas that includes far eastern Ukraine and southwestern Russia. The unofficial capital of the region has traditionally been Donetsk, a metro of about two million that is on its fifth name since 1779. Donetsk is a resource town known for its easy business climate and fatal mining accidents. The region is split pretty evenly between Ukrainians and Russians as the dominant ethnicities.

Ukraine, of course, once was part of the Soviet Union, becoming independent in 1991 as the Soviet arrangement came apart from the edges. We know, too, that independence is something of a mislabeling. No nation is truly independent. You need allies. What are your defense arrangements? Who are your trade partners? Who are you going to line up with? 

All of that has been something of a stuck-in-the-middle proposition for Ukraine, especially the Donbas, where no clear mandate exists about whether to face Europe or Eurasia. These last three decades have been quite a strain on Ukraine, which has dropped more than three million souls to a nudge fewer than 44 million in the last 25 years, due mostly to death rates being higher than birth rates.

Ukraine and NATO have had their eyes on each other from the start. The Russians, meaning Vladimir Putin, would much rather have Ukraine in fold than on the border. And Ukraine was just about to work up an association agreement with the European Union (EU) in late 2013. The balance was tipping strongly toward Europe.

At about that time, though, the Ukranian president, Viktor Yanukovych, thought it might be better to try an agreement with the Russian Federation and Putin's dream of a Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) instead. Hoping to keep debt-strapped Ukraine in orbit, Putin offered to purchase $15 billion in Ukranian government bonds and slash 33 percent from the price of Russian natural gas. 

Yanukovych said at the time that Ukraine would need $20 billion to enact the reforms needed for EU membership. But for Ukrainians worried that Putin was attempting to reconstitute the Soviet Union on a trade basis, the EEU was the wrong play.

Ukrainians favoring European affiliation took to the streets and a wave of demonstrations ensued with calls to replace the government. Naturally, the Ukranian parliament fanned the flames by banning pubic demonstrations. Violence was inevitable. It didn't take long for Russians in the Donbas to demonstrate support for the Russian government. The Russians sent in forces and annexed Crimea. 

When the EEU nations sat down with their founding papers in May 2014, Ukraine was not present. The Yanukovych government had been run out of Kyiv and a new president, Petro Poroshenko, charted a course toward European partnership, signing an EU association agreement in late 2014. Estimates at the time said Ukraine would have been the second-largest nation in the EEU, but five years of war later, Ukraine would be down to fourth on that list. At $9,283 in Gross Domestic Product per capita purchasing power (according to 2018 International Monetary Fund figures), Ukraine would, by far, be the smallest EU nation, with not even half the economy of the next smallest nation (Bulgaria, $23,156).

Upheaval continues to rage. The city of Donetsk now is under control of the pro-Russian Donetsk People's Republic, which is not recognized by the United Nations. Going on 10,000 have died in less than six years of fighting, which continues. 

One imagines that it's tough to run a football business in this environment, and Shakhtar didn't wait for us to figure that out. In 2017, the team temporarily picked up its stakes, placing its administration in Kyiv and playing its home games in Kharkiv, about 200 miles north-northwest of Donetsk. 

Pro-Russian sentiment runs heavily in Kharkiv, too, but the Ukranian forces have kept that city in their fold. So, that's where Shakhtar Donetsk plays its home games, until it's safe again to really go home. Another Donetsk club in the Ukranian Premier League, Olimpik Donetsk, has moved its home games to Kyiv until it's safe to go back.

That's where the European and World traveling soccer championships live at the moment, in war-torn eastern Ukraine, which is so war torn that it can't be there. Not surprisingly, the hostilities have done terrible damage to the Ukranian Premier League. At least four clubs have been wrecked financially and the league now is down to 12 clubs after playing with 16 clubs as recently as 2014.

Subsequent to winning the traveling championships, Shakhtar defended them domestically with a 2-0 road win against Dnipro-1 in Dnipropetrovsk on Oct. 6. The smart money says Shakhtar still will have the titles after its home tilt with Kolos Kovalivka on Oct. 18 and will take them back to the Champions League on Oct. 22 against a Croatian side, Dinamo Zagreb. A regional power going back to the earliest days of the old Yugoslav First League, Dinamo is second right now in the Croatian First Football League, barely trailing arch-rival Hajduk Split.

The European and World traveling championships began the year in a Mediterranean setting, Rome, to be precise. AS Roma held both international championships, as well as the Italian title. The Romans defended the titles with Serie A draws against Genoa and Lazio before notching a 4-0 win against a Turkish side, Istanbul Basaksehir, on Sept. 15, in the Europa League.

A Roman win at Bologna in the domestic league followed, but then an emerging Atalanta squad entered Rome on Sept. 25 and claimed a 2-0 win to simultaneously take the Italian, European and World traveling championships. After an easy win at Sassuolo in Serie A, Atalanta met in Milan with Shakhtar Donetsk for a Champions League group match at the start of October.

Atalanta took the lead in the 28th minute, when Zapata found the goal, but the Ukrainians tied it before half with a score by Júnior Moraes. In the 69th minute, the young Israeli Manor Solomon entered the game as the inside left forward in Shakhtar's 1-4-1-4 look, replacing Alan Patrick. The game remained 1-1 until five minutes into extra time, when Solomon scored the game winner.

Bella Dea. The Goddess is beautiful. That's the kind of sentiment filling the headlines of the Italian sporting press in the aftermath, even though the Goddess lost, 2-1, to the Ukranian miners. Now with two losses in as many outings in Group C, Atalanta still faces two games in the group with Manchester City and one each against Shakhtar and Dinamo Zagreb, which beat Atalanta, 4-0, in their pool opener. The chance of Atalanta advancing to the knockout phase is remote.

It also appears that the dream of taking the world traveling prize to the Club World Cup in December and separating it from the European prize is all but out of the question. The only team that can take it there is Liverpool, as the defending European champions. It happens that Shakhtar and Manchester City of the English Premiership are scheduled to meet in the Champions League on Nov. 26. But Manchester City and Liverpool already will have played in the Premiership on Nov. 10. So, even if City wins on Nov. 26, the chance of Liverpool taking the world prize before the Club World Cup is lost.

With four defenses to begin the year, AS Roma improved its position in three different traveling championships.

In the world competition, Barcelona remains the all-time leader with 36 games of championship, but Roma is second at 23. In Europe, Real Madrid has the all-time lead with 44 games of title, followed by Roma with 23. Juventus, which has been no factor in the world or European titles, dominates the Italian title with 73 games in four years. Napoli is second there at 26, followed by Roma with 19.

Once more, Juventus unstoppable in Italy

Juventus romped through another year with the Italian traveling soccer championship in 2018-19 and now has 73 games of title in four years of the competition.

One stock criticism of the European top-level domestic soccer leagues is that they are one-sided.

One pretty much knows nowadays at the start of the year that it's going to be Paris Saint-Germain in France, it's going to be Bayern Munich in Germany and, even though the top of the top in Spain is deep and tough, it's probably either Barcelona or Real Madrid in the end.

If you want a counter-example, you're certainly not looking at Italy, where Juventus has won the Serie A eight consecutive times through 2018-19. Our Italian traveling championship, with four years on its books through 2018-19, has the same finding.

Juventus enjoyed another dominant season with the traveling championship in 2018-19, entirely on a 24-game championship streak that began on Sept. 16 with a 2-1 home win against Sassuolo and ended with a 2-0 loss at Genoa on March 17.

The streak is the third-longest in the four-year history of the Italian traveler. Juventus worked up a 25-game streak in 2015-16, the first year. Napoli followed that with a 26-game streak that began the next season and ran into 2017-18 before Juvenal ended it with a 1-0 decision in Naples on Dec. 1, 2017.

All-time, Juventus now has 73 games of title through four years. The second-place team, Napoli, failed in two attempts to claim the title in 2018-19 and remains with 26 games. AS Roma, which added seven games of title to its resume in 2018-19 is third all-time with 16 games.

AS Roma declines ICC, Euro and world titles still stuck

The world and European traveling soccer championships have been stuck together for two years. We thought we might have a solution, but not quite.

This enterprise began tracking traveling championships across big league baseball in 2011, designating one championship within each of the leagues and another across both leagues. Before long, a problem arose.

It became easy for two of the championships to get stuck together. For example, the National League champion could simultaneously be the interleague champion. Nothing terribly wrong with that, but the more two titles run together, the less interesting it is to run them separately. So, methods are needed to un-stick titles.

In baseball, it's easy enough. Interleague play occurs regularly, and in those series only the interleague title can be contested. A team entering an interleague series with that title and its league title could lose the interleague title and retain the league title. Also, because baseball often ends in split series, we decreed that tiebreakers would come into play for the league titles. But the interleague champion would be considered to have defended it successfully in a split series. To be the man, you have to beat the man, a man once said. It's quite possible to get two different results from the same series that way and unstick the titles.

The matter arises here because anyone who looks at these standings a little bit will notice that the European and world traveling soccer championships have been stuck together for two solid years through the 2018-19 season.

One problem is that there isn't a lot of international club competition between continents, so we should expect some continent's championship to run with the world championship quite a lot.

It only took a year. We started in 2016-17 with Barcelona as the world champion and Real Madrid as the European champion. They were the right teams; Barcelona had won the last club World Cup and Real Madrid had won the last European Champions League. At the end of the year, they switched, with Real Madrid holding the world title and Barcelona holding the European championship.

It happened that the two clubs were to meet at the very start of the 2017-18 season in the Supercopa de España, as Barca now held the Copa del Rey and Real was to defend its La Liga championship.

Real Madrid united the traveling titles by winning both legs of Supercopa. And they have stayed that way.

So, we look now to the Club World Cup for the chance to unstick the titles, because the world traveling title will be contested in that tournament, but the European title will not. The only way for the world title to enter the Club World Cup is for Liverpool to take it there, as the Reds just won the 2018-19 Champions League and are the European entrant. Each continent gets one.

There is some chance of Liverpool holding the titles when it plays its World Cup opener in Qatar on Dec. 18. The Premiership and Serie A both are well represented in the European competitions, which both are now in the late qualifying rounds.

AS Roma, the team now holding the traveling titles, is entered in the group phase of the secondary tournament, the Europa League, along with Lazio of Serie A. That phase starts on Sept. 19. Another Italian club, Torino, is in qualifying for the same tournament and looks like a good bet to make the final round of group qualifying after a 5-0 first-leg win against the Belorussian squad Shakhtyor Soligorsk.

England has three clubs in the Europa League. Arsenal and Manchester United are entered to the group stage, and Wolverhampton Wanderers won the first leg of their present qualifier 4-0 against the Armenian squad Pyunik. We don't know how these Italian and English clubs will be grouped yet, but a path from AS Roma to Liverpool runs through this tournament, and the group stage will be about done when the club World Cup takes place.

The potential for interplay between England and Italy is even greater in the Champions League, in which each league enters four clubs directly to the group phase, which begins on Sept. 18. The English clubs are Liverpool, Manchester City, Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea. The Italian clubs are Juventus, Napoli, Inter Milan and Atalanta.

It would be rather surprising if the championships weren't in the hands of one of these clubs and some point in the next few months, and probably several. But we never know. We could end up sending these titles to six countries and it would be fascinating, but the only way to unstick them is to send them with Liverpool to the club World Cup.

In view of the difficulty involved in separating some continent's championship from the world championship, a more-or-less pragmatic decision came from headquarters this spring granting the International Champions Cup (ICC) standing for contesting the world traveling title.

The decision came with some reluctance because the ICC is a series of friendlies in which American promotors bring top European clubs to the states and other locales for preseason exhibition matches. Exhibition matches don't count because they shouldn't.

But that bullet will be bit here because the ICC brings in legitimate top-tier clubs who face off against each other multiple times, the crowds are terrific, and enough of a tendency has been established for teams entering this exhibition at the start of the year to still be standing for the final rounds of the UEFA Champions League. The last three years say that much, anyway.

In 2016, Juventus and Paris Saint-Germain won ICC championships and Real Madrid played in the tournament. At the end of that season, in the 2017 European Champions League, Juventus beat Real Madrid in the finals and PSG made it to the round of 16.

When the 2017 ICC rolled around, Barcelona and Inter Milan won championships, while Real Madrid, Roma and Bayern Munich played in the tournament. At the of that year, in the 2018 Champions League, Real Madrid won it all, but Roma and Bayern both reached the semifinals.

Tottenham Hotspur, which hadn't been a huge player in Europe, won the ICC in 2018. Turned out to not be a freak occurrence, because Hotspur made it to the 2019 Champions League final before losing to Liverpool. Of the eight Champions League quarterfinalists, six -- Hotspur, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Juventus and Barcelona -- were in the ICC that preseason. Another seven clubs from that ICC -- Borussia Dortmund, Real Madrid, Atletico Madrid, PSG, Lyon, Bayern and Roma -- reached the Champions League round of 16.

It would be better for our purposes if the promotors would mix in some South American, Asian and African clubs, but what they have here certainly counts for "international" competition. So, it was decided to put the world title on the line in the ICC, but not the European.

It happened that at the end of 2018-19, the team holding the two traveling championships was AS Roma, and Roma was going to enter the ICC in 2019. But anything involving AS Roma is complicated these days.

At the end of a difficult season, Roma was sixth in Serie A, which qualifies for nothing better than a preliminary round entry in the Europa League. On June 12, AS Roma passed along its regrets that it could not compete in the ICC because it now had to deal with Europa preliminary rounds as early as July 23. The ICC was scheduled for July 16-Aug. 10.

The fifth-place team in Serie A, which qualifies directly to the group stage of the Europa League, was AC Milan. UEFA tried to ban AC Milan for two years last summer over spending beyond the prescribed limits from 2015-17. The club fought off the ban temporarily last year by appealing to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, a European quasi-judicial body that ultimately answers to the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland.

But AC Milan apparently tired of fighting and agreed to a one-year ban if UEFA would quit hounding them. So, on June 19, the club announced that it would sit out the Europa League. And that means AC Roma moves up one spot, to the one occupied by AC Milan, and now goes directly to the group stage.

So, the world traveling could have gone up for good fun in the ICC, but for poor timing. If AC Milan and UEFA could have reached an agreement two weeks earlier, it would have.

Amid turmoil, AS Roma completes best year in Euro traveler

The 2018-19 season was difficult for AS Roma, which lost a good number of people over it. But AS Roma did come out of it with the best season of anyone in the European traveling championship.

It would seem that there's some tension between the Romans and the Americans where AS Roma is concerned.

The Roman squad endured a difficult year in 2018-19, highlighted by internal disputes. A group of American investors bought the club from a Roman family in 2011, but Roma hasn't won a major trophy since.

For some reason, the Roma management team sold Egyptian power-hitter Mohamed Salah and goaltender Allison to Liverpool at the start of the season. The forward responded with 30 goals for his new club, 22 of them in the Premiership. The goaltender played a key role enabling Liverpool to win the Champions League.

The Romans were eliminated from the Champions League in March and fired their manager. When it ended, Roma finished sixth in Serie A, ticketing the club for qualifying in the Europa League, Europe's secondary competition.

Ending the year, the club decided to not resign one of their greats of all time, Daniele De Rossi, infuriating supporters. Another of the team's all-time greats, Francisco Totti, quit his position with the club's management. Totti, who retired as a player a couple of years ago, complained that the American ownership, led by Chairman James Palotta, wanted "the Romans out of Roma."

De Rossi and Totti both are born-and-bred Romans. De Rossi later signed with Boca Juniors in Argentina.

Little did any of them know that they were just wrapping up a pretty good 2018-19 season in the European and world traveling championships.

AS Roma took the championships into the season and defended them four times before losing to Real Madrid in the Champions League. The prizes kicked around Spain and Russia for about six months before Juventus carted them back to Italy with a 3-0 win at home against Atlético Madrid in a March 12 Champions League meeting.

A month later, Roma won it again, then defended it six times to complete the season. Roma will take the championship to begin the 2019-20 campaign.

For the year, Roma had 11 games of championship, most of any club in Europe. Sevilla, which has won the championship at least once in all three years of the competition, finished second in 2018-19 with seven games.

Overall, Real Madrid has a commanding lead in the European traveling championship with 44 games. Roma moved to second place with 19 games, followed by Barcelona with 17 and Sevilla with 14.

Juve, Nap tussle for traveling Italian title in 2017-18

Napoli posted a championship streak just longer than the previous record by Juventus with the Italian traveling soccer championship. But Juve snapped the streak, then began one of its own.

The game of the year for the Italian traveling soccer championship in 2017-18 took place on Dec. 1, Juventus at Napoli.

Juventus began these proceedings as the caretaker champion in 2015-16 and tore off 25 straight defenses. That stood to be the record title streak for a long time.

But Napoli picked up the championship with a 2-1 win at AS Roma on March 4, 2017, and held onto it for 11 defenses, a total of 12 games with the championship. The Neapolitans then took the title to the start of the 2017-18 season and worked up 14 more defenses, bringing their streak to 26 games, one better than the record held by Juventus.

It happened, then, that Napoli put its 26-game title streak on the line against Juventus on Dec. 1, and Juventus made sure it would go no longer. Juve posted a 1-0 win in Naples and then tacked up 18 straight defenses, going all the way through the Serie A rotation before meeting Napoli again, this time at Juventus, on April 22.

The Naps won that one, 1-0, ending the 19-game streak for Juventus. But Napoli immediately lost the championship in a 3-0 decision at Fiorentina on April 29, so a rebound streak was not to be.

Three years into this exercise, Juventus is the runaway all-time traveling champion in Italy, holding the title for 49 games. Napoli occupies a distant second place with 26. AS Roma is an even more distant third place with nine games of title.

Barcelona tops table in 2017-18 world traveler

Despite being unable to wrestle for world traveling soccer title from Real Madrid to begin 2017-18, Barcelona won it back later in the year and increased its all-time lead in the competition.

During the first year of traveling soccer championships across Europe and the world, each prize took a completely different route to the same destination. That destination was the opening game of the 2017-18 season for the holders of those championships, Barcelona and Real Madrid.

At the start of 2016-17, Barcelona held the world championship, but Real Madrid held it at the end. At the start of 2016-17, Real Madrid held the European championship, but Barcelona held it at the end.

And then the two met to begin the 2017-18 season for the Supercopa de España, which pits the previous season's top tier domestic champion against the winner of the previous season's national cup competition. That would be Real Madrid, as defending La Liga champs, against Barcelona, which won the Copa del Rey.

Real Madrid won both legs, convincingly, and thus added the European title to the world title it already held. Unfortunately, the paths for the two championships never diverged. Real Madrid was, indeed, headed for the Club World Cup in December and would have at least put up the world title against a club from the United Arab Emirates (Al-Jazira) and a club from Brazil (Grêmio).

But Los Blancos fell to Real Betis in La Liga on Oct. 20 and the titles passed eight times through seven Spanish clubs before Barcelona took them from Eibar on Feb. 17. Then, Barcelona went on the best tour of the season, ten title defenses, ending the season with the best showing in Europe and the world.

Barcelona's first defense was a 1-1 draw at Chelsea in the Champions League. European wins against Chelsea and AS Roma followed. But the Roman club won the Champion's League rematch in Italy and both champions moved to Serie A for a moment. 

But AS Roma had to tangle with Liverpool in the Champions League. The Reds won their opener, 5-2, at home and defended it once in the Premiership before the return match in Rome, won by the Italian side. AS Roma finished out the season with three title defenses in Serie A.

Italy and England became the third and fourth countries to hold the world championship, after Spain and France both had it in 2016-17. 

Barça loses Euro traveler, gains it back

Barcelona lost the European traveling soccer championship to Real Madrid starting 2017-18, but took it back later and kept it for long enough to gain slightly on its rivals in the all-time standings. And Barça might even be ahead, depending on how we keep score.

What can be said about the European traveling soccer championship in 2017-18 that can't be said about the world championship played out at the same time?

Very little. It happened that the season began with the European titlist, Barcelona, taking on the world champ, Real Madrid, in the Supercopa de España. Short of two draws, the championships were going to be unified.

Real Madrid won both games decisively, and, thus took the European title on the same path that the world title was taking. Both paths ended the season with AS Roma.

Although Real Madrid unified the championships, Barcelona gained on the Madrid side in both competitions. Barcelona picked up both titles in mid-February and held them for 11 games, the best showing of the year across Europe and the world.

Real Madrid remains the all-time leader in Europe with 42 games of championship, compared with 17 for second-place Barcelona. That's even after Barcelona out-gamed Read Madrid 11 to six in 2017-18.

Of course, 27 of those wins for Real Madrid were in the caretaker role to begin the championship. Real Madrid absolutely was a legitimate caretaker and proved it by defending that provisional title 27 times. But if we date it back to when the first championship actually was won on the field, then Barcelona has a 17-15 lead all-time in games of championship.

Napoli closes strong for Team of the Year in Italian traveler

With a title and 11 defenses at the end of the year, Napoli surpassed AS Roma for Team of the Year in the Italian soccer traveling championship. Juventus, which dominated with 25 games of championship possession a year ago, slipped to five games this season.

Dreis Mertens scored 28 goals this season for Napoli, including his 50th career goal for the Neopolitans on the final day of the season (Anders Henrikson/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license).

Napoli won its first Italian soccer championship on March 4 and rode it out to the end of the year, rallying for Team of the Year honors.

The Neopolitan side won out against AS Roma, which won its first two titles in 2016-17 and defended them a combined seven times in nine tries.

But that didn't match Napoli, which has defended its title 11 straight times and still holds the Italian crown entering the 2017-18 season.

Juventus, which dominated the Italian traveling title competition in 2015-16, won two titles this past season. However, Juve couldn't sustain defenses either time and held the title for only five games after holding it for 25 games a year earlier.