Looking back on the year in soccer around the world

Kaká guided Milan to the European Cup and swept all three big awards, but was nowhere to be found for the Brazilian national team. AP

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Twelve months is a long time in soccer. In 2006, Italy demonstrated the international game's ability to triumph in adversity. A year later, the club game fought back and reasserted itself over national-team concerns.

Kaká's multiple accolades as the world's best player in '07 can be directly attributed to his spectacular, goal-laden performances for AC Milan in the Champions League. In contrast, the Brazilian declined to play for his country in the biggest international tournament of the year, the Copa América.

That Ronaldinho -- the man Kaká has overtaken as the planet's most desirable player -- also opted out of the Copa confirmed that the club vs. country divide is the defining fault line of the modern game.

Nowhere is the division more pronounced than in England, where the national team's failure to qualify for Euro 2008 was in stark contrast to the inexorable rise of the Premier League and its clubs, three of which reached the semifinals of the '06-07 Champions League.

In many ways, Steve McClaren's departure as England manager -- fired with a payoff of $5 million -- was symptomatic of a moneyed football culture that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

A host of new foreign investor-speculators have been lured by the financial power of the Premier League over the past 12 months. Such figures as Thaksin Shinawatra (Manchester City), George Gillett and Tom Hicks (Liverpool) and Stan Kroenke and Alisher Usmanov (Arsenal, potentially) could have moved in on clubs in Italy or Spain. But they chose England because of the potential profits on offer through the rising value of global TV rights.

There seems to be no end to the money flooding into English soccer from TV and foreign investors. Chelsea and England captain John Terry became the highest-paid player in the Premier League when he signed a contract worth $260,000 a week. He and teammate Ashley Cole missed England's decisive Euro '08 defeat to Croatia at the new Wembley Stadium because of injuries, though both played for their club three days later.

An underlying theme of the postmortem of England's failure -- aside from the argument that foreigners were inhibiting the progress of home-grown youngsters -- was the belief that England's highly compensated players lacked motivation when selected to play for their country.

Whether that was the case or not, European club soccer was what mattered most in '07. The big beasts asserted themselves. The league titles in England, Italy and Spain were all won by traditional powers who had endured varying periods without success.

Real Madrid ended its longest trophy drought in more than 50 years when it secured its first league title. David Beckham, having been dropped by coach Fabio Capello, reveled in his new status as soccer's comeback kid to play a crucial role in the success before jetting off to a new life in America. Capello was not so lucky, despite having done what he was asked to do: introduce more discipline to a Madrid squad that had been indulged during the Galáctico era. The Italian was fired and replaced by German Bernd Schuster.

In Italy, Inter Milan again won the Serie A title. But while the '06 championship had been won by default, after Juventus and Milan were caught up in the Calciopoli match-fixing scandal, the '07 title was won on the pitch, Inter's first such triumph in 18 years. The return to Serie A of Juventus, which had been demoted as punishment, has provided Inter with a bigger challenge this season.

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