Boavista host Benfica for this Liga Portugal round 23 clash at Estádio do Bessa Século XXI in Porto early Saturday morning. The odds on the visitors are not veru high but the difference in raw class is substantial here. I recommend my fans to watch this league too moving forward as it is better than many football fans believe. Roughly speaking, the top-3 teams - Porto, Sporting Lisbon and Benfica are capable of very good football even by European standards and often play pretty aggressive and fast-tempo football. These 3 teams are clearly better than the rest of the field. Porto for example went all the way the Champions League quarter finals last season but lost to eventual champions Chelsea 1-2 on aggregate. Porto lead Liga Portugal at the moment and have 10 points more than Benfica who are in 3rd place but having followed this league closely I can say that the difference between the three teams is small and Benfica would have deserved more points! They have scored the most goals - 58  - and allowed 20. Away from home they have been excellent winning 9 of 11 matches and allowing only 8 goals and have scored 31! The overall level of the this league has been on the rise in recent year and despite the fact that it is in general of course nowhere as good as Spanish La Liga, English Premier League, Italian Serie A, German Bundesliga or even the French Ligue 1 it is still pretty high level and entertaining football with a long list of young, very promising players - both from Portugal and from outside Europe whom the big clubs, with more resources, in better leagues keep an increasingly close eye on - even the biggest clubs in England like Liverpool and Man United.. Benfica have many promising talents in the squad too.

Benfica played very well in the Champions League last autumn and qualified from the tough group toppling for example Barcelona! They beat them 3-0 at home and in Barcelona it was a goalless draw. B. Munchen was too good for them though and they finished second in the group. Porto did not qualify this year but Sporting did - defeating a tough German team Dortmund.. Benfica will challenge Ajax in the Champions League play offs but luckily the match is no sooner than on Wednesday so they will surely give their best here and probably win as the host have no weapons to really challenge Benfica - other than pure luck.