From the first international break in September 2018, UEFA's carefully planned UEFA Nations League will be officially unveiled to the public. The main reason for the birth of this tournament is to make the world rankings of each national team more reasonable, so as to avoid second-rate teams such as Poland and Switzerland from dominating the top 10 positions all year round, which makes the grouping of the World Series very unfair.

The tournament will be held every two years, replacing most of the original friendly matches for national team football, making the two sides more evenly matched, attracting more fan attention, and also serving as a World Series qualifier in the past, with the inaugural tournament producing four direct qualification spots for Euro 2020 finals.

According to the rules introduced earlier, the 55 members of UEFA will divide the current world ranking into four levels, forming a tiered league similar to the relegation system. The top group in League B, League C and League D will be promoted, while the last place in each group will be relegated. The group winners from each league will be guaranteed a place in the play-offs for Euro 2020 Stage 2.

Taking the A-level national league as an example, the four groups are Germany, France, and the Netherlands in Group A; Belgium, Switzerland and Iceland in Group B; Portugal, Italy, and Poland in Group C and Spain, England, and Croatia in Group D, each group will play a two-legged home-and-away round-robin match, and finally the first, second and third places in their respective groups will be eliminated.

The top four groups will qualify for the finals of the UEFA Nations League, which will be held in the summer of 2019 in the semi-finals format of the World Cup, where the winner of the UEFA Nations League will be determined (of course, only the winner of the A division will be called the winner of the entire competition). The eventual winners of all four divisions will receive a direct ticket to Euro 2020, which provides these teams with an opportunity outside of the normal qualifiers.

For Italy and the Netherlands, which have just suffered the shadow of defeat in the World Cup qualifiers, they will still attach great importance to this new competition, and the rest of the teams such as Germany, France, Spain and England will not have the mentality of rushing to deal with it, after all, it is also an extremely embarrassing thing to be relegated to the B division, and no one wants to be a laughing stock of the outside world.

As a result, in the new national team squad announced after the World Cup in Russia at the end of August, almost all teams have their strongest squads, and some of the original veterans have chosen to withdraw, so that many outstanding Torino players finally get the opportunity to play for their country.

Italy's Ranocchia, Barreca, Baseli, Belotti and Immobile; Andre Gomes and Bruno Fernandes in Portugal; Glick of Poland; Montenegro's Vukocevic, the Red Bulls, contributed a total of nine internationals during the national team break, eight of which will play in the A-League Nations League. This figure is naturally not comparable to Juventus, whose team is full of internationals, and is also behind Roma and Napoli, but similar to Inter Milan (only counting players from European countries), which is the first time in more than two decades.

Moreover, the Red Bulls also have Savic Jr., Issa Diop, Ascarcibal, Pellegri and Johannes Egerstein, who are considered by the outside world to be selected for the national team in the future, so they have received enthusiastic attention from the media and fans for a while, making the already extremely hot Turin City more and more noisy.

However, Li Mudi's mood these days is not very good, and the mutual grievances between the national team and the club because of the use of players must be clear to every fan. Due to the lack of sufficient professional care and the impact of the spirit of playing for the country, the probability of players being injured in the national team game is much higher than when they were in the club, although there is a compensation mechanism on the part of FIFA, but not to mention whether the money can be worth the loss of the player's long-term absence, even if a large amount of euros is given, it cannot solve the problem of the club team losing an important rotation or even the main core.

So in the following week, the Torino manager, like his colleagues, has been praying in his heart for his players to return safely, and the two games of Italy's home game against Poland and away against Portugal on the night of the 7th and 10th respectively need to be watched for the whole process.

These two goals were the third and fourth games since the arrival of the new Azzurri coach Roberto Mancini, who had previously played a friendly match against France and the Netherlands, but the result of 1 defeat and 1 draw was obviously not satisfactory to the majority of Italian fans. After Buffon, Chiellini and other veterans quit the national team, there are only two veterans over 30 years old in the new squad, Sirigu and Bonucci, and the addition of newcomers such as Chiesa Jr., Mandragora and Bareka has further reduced the average age of the team, but correspondingly, it is naturally lacking in experience.

Therefore, in the warm-up match against the Dutch team, Mancini sent a lot of players who did not have much experience in the national team in the start, such as Verdi, Cristante, Bonaventura and other former fringe internationals, hoping to let them grow up as soon as possible through actual combat. Belotti also appeared in the starting line-up, which means that he will probably still play a role as a substitute under the new manager.

Sure enough, against Poland, who were known as the weakest group seeds in the World Cup in Russia, Red Bebe sat on the bench, but it was not his friend Immobile who started because the latter was injured in training, and the prayers of the non-believing Li Mudi did not seem to have any positive effect. Fortunately, it is only a contusion of the right toe, and it can be recovered after about half a month of rest, otherwise the Torino coach would really dare to point to the national team and scold his mother.

However, Balotelli, who failed to find a new club and was forced to stay in Ligue 1 and became the laughing stock of the outside world again, was like sleepwalking in the game, completely losing himself in the Polish team's not very strong backline. Zaza and Junior Chiesa, who came off the bench in the second half, were also unable to take advantage of the visitors' defenders led by Glick, but Lewandowski's sluggish form has continued from the World Cup to the present, with both sides showing weaknesses in attack. In the end, the two teams exchanged blanks and opened the group with an extremely boring 0-0 game.

Three days later, Italy, who were in a weak state of fitness, visited the Portuguese capital of Lisbon and struggled to get a 1-1 draw thanks to Belotti's header near the end of the game. Although the result of only two points in two games is not ideal, at least they hold on to their hopes of topping the group, and if they can win both of their games in the following games, then they can still lock up a place in the semi-finals of Group A and then qualify for the championship and direct qualification for the European Championship.

However, when these internationals return to the club, the problems for the coaching staff are far more troublesome than the prospects of their respective national teams, and the players are in a state of near-exhaustion, although they can barely participate in training after a night's rest, they still need to take some risks if they want to play in three days' time.

And this is the result of UEFA's Nations League plan, after all, the opponents are all countries on the continent, and if they fly around the world like before, it will be more physically demanding for the players.

Excluding injuries and a few individuals who are out of fitness, Torino departed for the southern city of Genoa on the morning of 14 September, where they will travel to Sampdoria, the club's number two rivals, on Sunday afternoon.

After last season's highs and lows, Samp, nicknamed the Old Sailor, did not completely overturn the rebuild as Lee Moody had previously speculated, although he could not resist the lure of Arsenal's huge transfer fee, the sale of midfielder Andreas Torreira, and the buying out of Roma by the rising star of striker, in addition to the departure of homegrown goalkeeper Viviano and the free departures of two Croatian fringe internationals, Strinic and Budimir, have all reduced the strength of the team's bench.

However, after retaining the original main players such as Yankto and Prait, and introducing Gambia international central defender Kore and Slovenia's No. 3 national Bellek, the skeleton of the team has not been scattered, and it has basically maintained the level of the same period last year, so this opponent is not easy to deal with.

The course of the game also confirmed the prediction of the Torino coach, although after buying out Colombian center Zapata on loan from Napoli and loaning him to Atalanta, but the rapid growth of young Polish international Kaunacki and short shadow striker Caprari from the Roma academy, coupled with the support of Quagliarella, who was a veteran last season, Samp's attacking ability should not be underestimated.

In the whole game, the home team gained a huge advantage of 18 to 10 in shooting statistics, and the possession rate also got 60%, which can be said to occupy a large advantage. However, Torino played one of their best counter-attacking tactics since the start of the new season, replicating the performances of the French and Belgian national teams at the World Cup, using two near-perfect quick-multiplayer tactics to score goals from Bruno Fernandes and substitute Boyer. Although he was later scored by Uruguayan Ramirez with a brilliant direct free-kick, he still managed to hold on to the 2-1 score and bring home a victory from the Luigi Ferraris Stadium.

The four-game winning streak was second only to last season's five-game winning streak, creating the second best start for the Red Bulls in nearly three decades, and becoming the subject of many media reports in Italy.

However, the attention of Torino fans has clearly been temporarily deflected off the league range this week, as their side will embark on their second Champions League journey since their establishment. In 1976, the Red Bulls won their last Serie A title to date, thus qualifying for their first European Champions Cup in the following season.

Unfortunately, the Champions League had just gone through two trebles of Ajax and Bayern Munich, and was about to usher in a six-year period of English domination, and the Torino team failed to make it past the round of 16 and ended their debut in a hurry. Little did anyone know at the time that the Red Bulls would have to wait a full 41 years to return to the world's most influential club competition after that Champions League farewell.

Despite being placed in a highly competitive group and seeded Torino with a serious lack of Champions League experience, the Europa League title won four months ago will inevitably lead to some inexplicable illusions about the team coached by Moody Lee. Even after the draw came out, the vast majority of the media and betting bodies were not very optimistic about the prospects of the Torino team, and many even said that they might not even qualify for the group stage, but the people of Torino City firmly believe that their team will surprise the outside world.

On the evening of September 18, the first round of Group E of the Champions League began as scheduled, with one of the matches being played at the Olympic Stadium in Turin. As a result, the home team, which has less than 30 Champions League games combined, defeated the visiting Russian Premier League powerhouse Moscow by a huge margin of 4-0 in the cheering of the 27,958 live crowd in a packed home stadium. The Central Army, which defeated the league's champions Lokomotiv in European competition last year, has brought new scars to the fighting nations.

In particular, Barella, a young Italian midfielder born in 1997, also scored a stunning super long-range shot from 36 meters away in the game, which severely humiliated the Russian international Akinfeev who showed great courage in the just-concluded World Cup, and also made the BBC's live commentator repeat "hat a goal!" seven times in a row, becoming one of the hot spots on the world network for a period of time afterward.

The victory made it the second time in the history of the Red Bulls that they tasted victory in the Champions League, and the record of one win, two draws and one defeat in the four games played by their old-timers 41 years ago has finally been rewritten by a new generation of Torino players after nearly half a century.

Of course, if in . The situation is even more ideal if the central army coach Goncharenko did not say after the game that he would "repay" the humiliation they suffered at home today. Because Moscow in December was extremely unfriendly to all non-fighting peoples, the Italians, who had adapted to the Mediterranean climate, went there and seemed to have little choice but to be turned into popsicles.

However, Li Mudi's mood is still good, he took the opportunity of the Youth Champions League to be held a day earlier, and specially went to the scene to meet the play in person. Li Tenglong, the center of the Celestial Empire of the Central Army Youth Team. Born in 2001, the mixed-race center has a potential value of 134 in the FM system, and his mental attributes are far higher than his peers in China, making him the best future development prospect among his group of Celestial Dynasty players.

Li Mudi, who found this youngster when searching with scouting tools at the end of June, almost jumped up in excitement, thinking that he had finally found a good seedling worthy of his own cultivation. Unfortunately, the subsequent progress was far more complicated than he imagined at the time.