Yesterday marks the end of the 2024-2025 European Football season, marked by the Champions League final. Today (Sunday, June 1st) marks the beginning of my plan to remember the 100 best games of that season. Here’s my plan of how to do so.
Starting today, I will begin releasing one game a day in a top 50 games of the 2024-25 season, divided into a Top 25 Apertura games (from August to December) and a Top 25 Clausura games (from January to May). That should take us to July 20th and produce an initial top 50 games of the season.
From there, I will seek to expand this list to a full 100 best games of the 2024-25 European football season, adding two games a day in hopes of completing this expansion by August 14th. While this expansion will probably include almost all of the original top 50 games, there may be some later revisions to make the Top 100 games more representative of the season as a whole (I will say more about the logic of any potential changes at the start of the expansion process).
I do, however, have a bit more to explain about the logic of this slow march toward a Top 100 Games of the European 2024/25 Football Season. I’m one individual writing about a season that involved 1752 regular season games across the top 5 leagues. Each of those leagues also have at least one if not two cup competitions, and are also involved in the Champions League, Europa League, and UEFA Conference League. The players on these teams also return to their national clubs during international breaks which are also (at least in my view) an important part of the comprehensive season as well.
Of these other competitions, only the Champions League (with 189 games, excluding qualification rounds, in the newly introduced Swiss League model) demands full attention, but even that brings the seasons games to 1941 games. If we add 15 games for each of the remaining competitions (quarterfinals on for each of the 3 UEFA competitions and for 6 national cup competitions), as well as an arbitrary 10 games for each of the four international breaks occurring during the 2024-25 season, that would bring the total of games needing review to 2116.
That’s a lot of games for one person to review, even acknowledging that many of these games can only be reviewed via highlights (I only use extended highlights except when absolutely unavailable). Though I take notes on games that I have watched and that deserve consideration over the course of the season, it still leaves me a lot of processing come the end of the season.
Happily, starting with a Apertura Top 25, including only games in the first half of the season, allows me to determine a confident Top 25 over the winter break. Now that the season has completed its Clausura, I will use the next 25 days while releasing the Apertura games to finalize my list of Top 25 Clausura games, which will begin being released on June 25th.
Likewise, that 25 days will help me to flesh out these 50 games with the other fifty games needed to make up a Top 100 games of 2024-25. Though it is impossible to capture every top moment of a season in 0.47% of the games played, my goal is to find the best games to summarize the season as a whole. These games will ideally be released more quickly than the previous 50 games in order to get the list completed by the start of the new (2025-26) season.
Though the games will be released as independent posts, links of the posts as a list will be included below, so you can always come to this post to get caught up.
Top 25 Apertura Games of the 2024-25 European Football Season
Fri, 23 August. Borussia Monchengladbach 2 – Bayer Leverkusen 3.
Sun, 25 August. Wolverhampton Wanderers 3 – Chelsea 6.
Mon, 26 August. Villarreal 4 – Celta de Vigo 3.
Sun, 15 September. Atalanta 3 – Fiorentina 2.
Wed, 18 September. Manchester City 0 – Internazionale 0.
Sun, 22 September. Olympique Lyonnais 2 – Olympique de Marseille 3.
Stoopid American 