{"id":12007,"date":"2025-09-30T22:17:20","date_gmt":"2025-09-30T21:17:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/?p=12007"},"modified":"2025-10-02T13:53:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-02T12:53:10","slug":"alpha-arsenal-to-beta-olympiacos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/?p=12007","title":{"rendered":"Alpha Arsenal to beta Olympiacos"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Image from www.arsenal.com<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

And so to the Stadium of Stone on Wednesday evening, when we host Olympiacos for the second game of this term’s Champions League league phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Greek football remains somewhat of a closed book to many. There are a few well-known clubs, including our guests, their Athenian neighbours, AEK and Panathinaikos, and the Thessalonians, PAOK. Yet, few beyond dedicated followers of the Souroti Super League could extend that list much — if at all. Among UEFA’s 55 European leagues, Greece ranks 11th, which is a decent standard but not top drawer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Olympiacos is undisputedly Greece’s top team at the moment, and would claim that it has the trophies to justify that it always has been. It is the defending league champion and domestic cup holder, and remains unbeaten at the top of the Super League this season with four wins and a draw, having scored 13 goals and conceded three.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They come into this game off the back of a 3-2 victory over APO Levadiakos, although the winner came six minutes into stoppage time. In their first matchweek of the CL league phase, they drew 0-0 at home to the Cypriot champions, Pafos, 54 places below them in the UEFA club coefficient rankings, despite playing for an hour with a one-man advantage (and for a while, two if you count the presence of David Luiz in the Pafos team).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fishy<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

My favourite ‘fact’ about Olympiacos, which is based in Athens’ seaport, Piraeus, is that the team got one of their nicknames, the Anchovies, after some Panathinaikos fans hurled crates of anchovies they got from the quays at Olympiacos fans. I put ‘fact’ in quote marks because the story falls into the category of being too good a tale to investigate its veracity. A history of bitter, class-based and frequently violent rivalry between the two clubs and their fans \u2014 matches between them are known as the Derby of the Eternal Enemies \u2014 lends at least a patina of plausibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Olympiacos wears its maritime working-class roots proudly, although several prominent members of the Piraeus business community were behind the establishment of the Olympic Association of Piraeus Sportsmen in 1925. They created a multisports club embracing Olympic ideals, which the football team remains part of to this day. The club has won European titles in six sports. The badge worn by all its teams features an Olympian wreath of laurel leaves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Its football team’s trophy room is stacked: 48 league titles (five with unbeaten seasons), 29 domestic cups (19 as part of a double) and four super cups, all Greek records. Five sets of five or more league titles in successive seasons is a world record. Olympiacos is also the only Greek football team to have won a senior UEFA trophy, the Conference League in 2023-24.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1979, a group of eminent shipowners took control of the club. Among them was Miltiadis Marinakis, father of Evangelos, who would buy the club in 2010 and whose sporting empire now includes Nottingham Forest and Edu.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The opposition<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Olympiacos is managed by Jos\u00e9 Luis Mendilibar, a 64-year-old Basque who coached a 13-year-old Mikel Arteta. He is well-travelled in La Liga, but this is his first appointment outside Spain. He arrived in February 2024 from Sevilla, with whom he won the Europa League. He was La Liga’s manager of the year in 2016-17 when he was at Eibar. He is a wily old head not to be underestimated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He likes to set up in a 4-2-3-1. There will not be many familiar names.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Konstantinos Tzolakis, the 22-year-old Greek national keeper, is Mendilibar’s first choice between the sticks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Club captain, Johannesburg-born Panagiotis Retsos, another Greek international and who spent time at Sheffield United, will likely share centre-back duties with 23-year-old Italian Lorenzo Pirola, who captained Italy’s U-21 Team but has yet to advance to the senior team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the veteran Brazilian full-back Rodinei reportedly injured, Costinha, a 25-year-old Portuguese who came through Braga’s youth ranks and, like Pirola, earned numerous U-21 caps but has not progressed to the senior national team, will likely start at right-back, with one-cap Argentine international Francisco Ortega on the left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the double pivot, Mendilibar will perm two from 35-year-old Spaniard Dani Garcia, Argentine international Santiago Hezze, 12 years Garcia\u2019s junior, and Christos Mouzakitis, an 18-year-old who already has five full caps for Greece and is likely headed for Milan or Turin before too long. The Argentine Lorenzo Scipioni, 20, another of Olympiacos’s promising youngsters, is out injured.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Portugal international Gelson Martins would be Mendilibar’s first choice for the right wing. However, he is working his way back from injury, so Gabriel Strefezza, who arrived from Como in the summer after bouncing around Serie A for most of a decade, could start. The opposite flank is likely to be occupied by Daniel Podence, a Portuguese winger who Olympiacos sold to Wolves, then borrowed back, and has again been borrowed back this season after Wolves sold him to Al-Shabab. Ex-Newcastle winger Remy Cabella is ineligible following his transfer from Lille.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chiquinho, a Brazilian who has played most of his professional football in Portugal, most recently with Benfica, is now the playmaker, following Brighton’s purchase of Charalampos Kostoulas for \u20ac35 million, a tidy sum for an 18-year-old. Charalampos’s father, Athanasios, played for Olympiacos in the noughties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ayoub El Kaabi, a seasoned centre-forward with more than 50 caps for Morocco, will lead the line. He scored 27 goals for Olympiacos in 44 matches last season, including seven in eight Europa League games. Roman Yaremchuk, a centre forward with 63 Ukraine caps, is out with a calf injury.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From the bench, Mendilibar will be able to call on veteran Iran forward Mehdi Taremi, who was in the Porto side we played last year and the Inter team we faced the season before that. The manager also has Giulian Biancone, a French utility defender who was previously at Nottingham Forest, and winger Stavros Pnevmonidis, another promising teenager who has come up through Olympiacos’s youth teams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Olympiacos added experience over the summer to support its young players for this CL campaign, but that has resulted in it having the third-oldest squad in this season’s CL, behind Inter and Pafos, with an average age of 29 years and 263 days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Head-to-head<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We have played Olympiacos a dozen times: four CL ties (2009, 2011, 2012 and 2015) and two in the Europa League (2020 and 2021). The tally stands at six wins apiece. The home games split similarly: we won the first three and lost the three most recent. The away games are a mirror image: we lost the first three but won the most recent trio.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The last time the two sides met was in 2021 in the Europa League round of 16. We lost a match played behind closed doors because of COVID-19, 1-0, but progressed 3-2 on aggregate. Only one Arsenal player who started that match, Gabriel, is still at the club, although Martin \u00d8degaard and Gabi Martinelli came off the bench.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Arsenal<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Piero Hincapi\u00e9 and Noni Madueke join long-term absentees Gabriel Jesus and Kai Havertz on the off-games list. Arteta says everyone else is available. He also says he expects a tough game, as he always does, but I suspect he will utilise our squad depth to get some minutes into lesser-used legs. Thus:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Raya<\/p>\n\n\n\n

White, Saliba, Gabriel, Calafiori <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00d8degaard, Zubimendi, Merino<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Saka, Gy\u00f6keres, Martinelli<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many of Dowman, Nwaneri, Lewis-Skelly, Rice, Mosquera, Timber, Eze, Trossard and Norgaard should get a decent run-out off the bench.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The momentum from Sunday’s win up North should carry through to Wednesday evening for players and fans alike. We should be faster, higher and stronger than our opponents, so I\u2019ll hazard a routine 3-0 to take them down from their mount.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Enjoy the game, ‘holics, far and wide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014-<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And so to the Stadium of Stone on Wednesday evening, when we host Olympiacos for the second game of this term’s Champions League league phase. Greek football remains somewhat of a closed book to many. There are a few well-known clubs, including our guests, their Athenian neighbours, AEK and Panathinaikos, and the Thessalonians, PAOK. Yet, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12007"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12007"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12007\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12019,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12007\/revisions\/12019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}