Another day, another two games I did enjoy for different reasons. At least when their own countries are playing, we saw that US and Canadian fans can absolutely deliver good atmospheres at the World Cup. I’ve zero complaints on that front today. Let’s get into it.

The first half of this newsletter will be free, and then the second half will be for paid subscribers only. These newsletters are going to run every single matchday. If you want to come along for the ride, I have a special offer running right now, giving you 20% off for a year. That’s £4.80/$6.40/€5.60 a month, or you can save in the long run by getting a whole year for £48/$64/€56.

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Canada 1-1 Bosnia and Herzegovina

This game was played at a really high tempo, which made up for a lack of technical quality. If you can’t make it silky smooth, at least make it fast.

I have… complicated feelings about Canada head coach Jesse Marsch. I think he’s a really switched on coach who’s been pretty cutting edge about a lot of things, and he’s clearly a charismatic person capable of galvanising a squad. But I don’t like the model of play that he espouses. I think it has some pretty big issues he can’t solve without changing tack.

Brief history lesson: Marsch spent his playing career in the United States and Mexico, before becoming an assistant to Bob Bradley with the US side. Bradley’s USMNT were a pretty straightforward defensive side, working hard and sitting deep to make life difficult for more talented opponents. But Marsch’s bigger influence came from 2015 onwards, when he took over the New York Red Bulls and found himself inside the Red Bull organisation. He impressed enough to move to Red Bull Salzburg and then RB Leipzig, really getting exposed to the ideas of Ralf Rangnick. “That was like an explosion of ideas in my head”, Marsch said. “It really, I think, created a spark in me to be the trainer1 and the coach I am now”.

Rangnick’s Red Bull operation was built around a repeatable model of intense pressing, rapid transitions and fast vertical movement. It was all about forcing the opponents to make mistakes and pouncing, getting the ball into the half-spaces2 on the counter over and over again. It was genuinely revolutionary and clearly a set of ideas that shaped almost every top football side today. But I don’t think it’s an accident that no team playing this style of football has won a major European league title since Jürgen Klopp’s Borussia Dortmund in 2012 (his Liverpool side were different). It is far too easy to defend deep, sit in a low block, and just deny any transition opportunities. Rangnick and Marsch’s model of play can’t conceive of the most basic way to defend in football.

And so in this game, Bosnia and Herzegovina did sit fairly deep, inviting Canada to figure out answers here. This game was high tempo, and Canada were trying to force the issue without a great deal of smart football to create chances. It really felt like a set-piece match in the first half, with Bosnia getting ahead from a corner that I’m not sure could’ve easily been stopped. They meatwalled it. We’ve seen this all season in the Premier League. It was the only meaningful thing they did in that first half, but Canada didn’t produce much better.

It wasn’t pretty, but Canada were getting better at brute forcing the issue in the second half. Cyle Larin got his goal by giving the team a focal point that they needed, receiving the ball with his back to goal and getting a really good shot away on the turn. To play this style of football, I think Canada are going to need a striker to do the job of holding the ball up more consistently. I know how crude it sounds, but it just makes it so much harder for teams to sit deep and creates a lot more options for Marsch’s transition game to work properly. Canada were the better side here, but not by enough that I think they deserved the three points. B-, good elements but room for improvement.

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United States 4-1 Paraguay

Yep, that’s how you do it.

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These matches were played in Mexico City and Guadalajara. Unlike some of the host cities in this tournament, these are footballing hotbeds. So I was disappointed to see that the atmospheres were, overall, pretty stale. The contingent of travelling Korean fans did make some noise, but otherwise, you could really feel the issue with the high ticket prices. Setting the price so high means that the people at the games are more likely those with a lot of disposable income than the people who most want to be there. Mexico obviously has a very loud and passionate culture of football supporters. But I felt like there weren’t so many of those people in these grounds.

Anyway, onto the actual games. The first half of this will be free and then the second half will be for paid subscribers only. These newsletters are going to run every single matchday. If you want to come along for the ride, I have a special offer running right now, giving you 20% off for a year. That’s £4.80/$6.40/€5.60 a month, or you can save in the long run by getting a whole year for £48/$64/€56.

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Mexico 2-0 South Africa

“Low tempo” might be the right phrase here.

Opening games generally aren’t very good. Ecuador’s 2-0 win over Qatar four years ago and Russia’s 5-0 victory against Saudi Arabia in 2018 were pretty comparable to this. There will be better football to come.

As you can see in the expected goals race chart below, it was one way traffic.

Mexico were getting into a slower rhythm of the game to gradually grind South Africa down, but their opponents decided to ruin a perfectly good sufferball strategy through gifting the game to Mexico. Goalkeeper Ronwen Williams plays a poor short pass straight forward to midfielder Yaya Sithole, who has a shocker of a first touch and gifts the ball away on the edge of the box. Érik Lira wins the ball pretty easily and the ball just rolls to Julián Quiñones, who knows exactly what to do.

Every football data analyst I know has said the numbers are clear that passing it short from the goalkeeper is the safer option. I accept this. I do not doubt that the knock-on effects from booting it up the pitch and easily giving away possession are meaningful. “In this house we believe science is real”, etc etc. I know that my stupid ape brain has a bias here and I remember the big errors like this one more than all the times a goalkeeper went long and lost possession. But I still instinctively panic every time a team tries to play it short like this, and that goal will probably replay in my head the next time someone does it.

Mexico did put some pressure on it in the first half before the tempo dipped after the first drinks break and never really recovered. Then, early in the second half, Sithole really ends the game. First of all, South Africa are playing an absolutely ludicrous high line for a team that was applying almost no pressure on Mexico. And still, Sithole manages to be too high. Centre back Nkosinathi Sibisi is too deep at the same time, leaving a weird gap. Or maybe he’s the only sensible one, since the other players look like they’re trying to play an offside trap IN MEXICO’S OWN HALF. I’m starting to sound like Roy Keane here. It’s embarrassing.

Sithole still makes a mess of it afterwards, but it was the terrible defensive structure that put him in a position of having to make a last man challenge with a serious risk of a red card. Mexico were a man up and were always going to find it easy after that.

The second goal was exactly what you’d expect from Raúl Jiménez based on his Premier League career. I always think that old fashioned conventional “penalty box strikers” are more useful at international level, and having him as a presence to put crosses into is great here. South Africa are obviously dreadful, though.

A whole lot of nonsense happened after this point, but it doesn’t really matter because the game was dead. South Africa’s Belgian coach Hugo Broos did an abysmal job. He says he’s retiring after this tournament and, frankly, I’m not sure he should be allowed back in the country after this.

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South Korea 2-1 Czech Republic

This game was fun.

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Ok, let’s get to the important bit before I ramble on about my usual bullshit:

• The World Cup starts on Thursday. You may have heard about this.

• I will be writing a newsletter every single matchday, covering something on all the games played (save for the 24th June when the very talented Catalina Bush will be covering for me)

• Half of these articles will be free, and half will be for paid subscribers

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• That works out at £4.80/$6.40/€5.60 a month, or you can save in the long run by getting a whole year for £48/$64/€56. I believe all major currencies are accepted, but you’ll have to check on the exchange rates.

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Alright, then. Let’s get into it.

When the United States hosted the World Cup in 1994, it felt like a geopolitical statement and the dawn of a new era. It was the first World Cup after the end of the Cold War. America had won so completely in the battle for the future that its ideas and values were to take hold everywhere. It only stood to reason, then, that America would get to have football’s biggest event. It had everything else. It was the 90s. You were going to pledge allegiance to the flag of liberal democracy and free market capitalism. There was no alternative.

That held true for a while. The 1998 tournament was held in France as the country celebrated the brilliant “Black, Blanc, Beur” (“Black, White, Arab”) national team made up of a racially diverse squad celebrating a more open and tolerant country. Four years later, Jacques Chirac comprehensively beat Jean-Marie Le Pen in the French presidential election with 82% of the vote, to show a country utterly rejecting the politics of the far right1.

2002 saw the World Cup head to Asia for the first time, with Japan and South Korea hosting together. This felt like a new horizon for football, unlocking audiences and spreading the word. The sport could be more than just Europe and South America. For the first time, the World Cup could truly belong to the world.

2006 kept that good feeling going. Germany hosted the event for the first time since reunification and used it as an opportunity to show everyone that it had become a modern, open and tolerant country. The tournament was a huge success, arguably proving to be the best off-pitch experience of any modern World Cup.

Then we reached arguably the peak of the “more open and tolerant world” model: South Africa in 2010. This is the tournament where Didier Drogba rushed back from a broken arm to play in the competition because Nelson Mandela called him and said one of Africa’s biggest football stars needed to be at the first African World Cup. As the South African football journalist Melissa Reddy put it, “the streets cascaded with an electricity that seemed to sit on the skin, a rapture that you couldn’t shake”. Apartheid was long over. South Africa was part of a newer, better world, and football was witness to it.

Then things started to change. I don’t think anyone would dispute Brazil’s claim to host a World Cup. Personally speaking, I’d say it was the most enjoyable edition I have watched at home on television. But there were things we didn’t see onscreen. The country had pretty large protests against FIFA and the World Cup. There was real anger at the way the tournament sucked up money from cities in Brazil with little return. All of this was largely absent from broadcasts. I often think about the comedy satire website ClickHole’s 2014 article, “7 Differences Between The TV Version Of The World Cup And The Novel”. It makes some very silly jokes, then sneaks in with the macro-story of the tournament: “The large-scale demonstrations protesting the relocation of impoverished Brazilians are largely glossed over by the TV version, whereas they are a prominent storyline in the book”.

If you remember anything at all about that World Cup, it’s probably the hosts losing 7-1 to Germany. If the Seleção is a symbol of Brazilian identity, then public anger was at a real high. Over time, once left-wing protests against the country’s government morphed into a strange kind of far-right politics, reaching its pinnacle once Jair Bolsonaro was elected President. When Bolsonaro lost in his re-election bid, his supporters stormed the government buildings in the country’s capital, all wearing their own uniform: yellow Brazil national team shirts. I’m not saying this all stemmed from the World Cup, but it’s not not a part of the story.

FIFA got engulfed in a corruption scandal pretty quickly after the 2014 World Cup. President Sepp Blatter resigned, opening up a brief possibility for real reform that got very quickly shut down. Gianni Infantino, formerly of UEFA and the embarrassment of a “research centre” known as CIES, won the FIFA presidential election by saying whatever any voters wanted to hear. The man clearly had no intention of cleaning up FIFA, but his grand vision would reshape the flavours of corruption going forward.

Next up was Russia in 2018. For all the political controversy beforehand, this tournament felt like an unambiguous success story for Vladimir Putin. “I think we were sportswashed four years ago when we were in Russia", then-BBC presenter Gary Lineker said in 2022. A lot was said in the West about all sorts of problems Russia’s World Cup might have, which meant that Putin scored a PR win when it all ran smoothly. Based on the media coverage, ordinary Russians turned out to be perfectly lovely people, which helped shift the narrative away from the Putin regime’s obvious issues. This was textbook sportswashing in that the football created a positive image and shifted everyone’s attention away from the serious issues. Then Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine four years later, and it’s still happening. Again, the World Cup was a tiny piece of this, but it didn’t exactly hurt.

Qatar 2022 was different in that sense. I don’t think Qatar wanted to host the World Cup for pure sportswashing reasons. It was partially about bragging rights. They obviously wanted everyone to have a brilliant time and think “wow, what a lovely country”. US broadcaster Fox Sports, for example, had reportedly planned to cover the tournament remotely on the cheap before Qatar Airways stepped up with a significant sponsorship deal. But they didn’t just want to project a friendly image. They wanted to project a powerful image. Alcohol was banned from stadiums at the last minute, in a blow to FIFA and its commercial partner Budweiser, seemingly just to show who was in charge here. Qatar used the World Cup as a tool to get the planet’s attention and make everyone listen. In that regard, it was a huge success.

It is 2026 and, once again, America is hosting the World Cup. And once again, there is no alternative.

Regardless of what’s happening in the White House, this was always going to be different. Russia and Qatar were both awarded their hosting status back in 2010 under Blatter’s presidency. Back then, the FIFA executive committee got to decide and, being a very small number of people, their decisions could be opaque. But Infantino changed that. In the new model, each FIFA member country (meaning that nation’s football administrator) would get one vote. Democracy, if that means Gibraltar carrying as much weight as India. With a very large number of member organisations being notoriously corrupt, this system once again runs on bribes and self-interest. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

But Infantino’s other big World Cup promise was to expand the tournament to 48 teams, up from 32. This is a great vote winner because it means an awful lot of countries have an increased chance of playing at the World Cup. But it also means more games, requiring more venues, more training facilities, and just generally more. Fewer countries can logistically host such a large tournament, especially with restrictions about continents having to sit out the next two World Cups after hosting one. Morocco provided the only other bid, which was considered to be much higher risk than the North American option due to the lack of existing infrastructure. Realistically, it was always going to be the “United 2026” bid.

If not for the 48-team tournament, FIFA might have preferred Morocco. It is not especially democratic, and the World Cup would be very important to the country, meaning FIFA could theoretically strongarm the government into doing all sorts of things that suited the executives. But Infantino’s grip on the organisation is weaker than Blatter’s, and the members chose North America.

The main reason this bid won, of course, is to make money from the American consumer. I can’t really judge FIFA here since I’m trying to do the exact same thing with this newsletter. But that’s the prize. A lot of rich people live in the United States. FIFA can sell astronomically high tickets to them. Brands can pay FIFA to market to them. Everyone gets a big ol’ slice of the American pie. Drove my Chevy to the levee, and the levee was overflowing with cash. The idea of including Canada and Mexico made everyone feel good about a more united, open and tolerant continent.

The challenge was always going to be logistics. When you have a World Cup across three different countries and 14 different states or provinces, coordination is going to be hard. And with the exception of Mexico, these places are not especially motivated by the idea of hosting the World Cup. Countries usually make a lot of exceptions to host a World Cup because they really want it to go well. Laws are temporarily changed. Things are different for ordinary citizens feeling the hype of the tournament. Not this time. The average person in New York or Los Angeles will not particularly care about the tournament. These places hold major sporting events all the time, and the World Cup isn’t automatically a special category for them. For perhaps the first time ever, FIFA has to play by the rules here.

This is why FIFA must have felt like they won the lottery in November 2024.

Donald Trump is their kind of guy. He can be bribed. He can be corrupted. He can bend the rules to suit their needs, if they suck up to him hard enough. So that’s what Infantino has done. He’s tried to become Trump’s best friend, making big gestures and positioning himself as the administrator of the MAGA World Cup. He invented the FIFA Peace Prize to give it to Trump. It has worked to an extent, and Trump has clearly enjoyed the way Infantino butters him up. But I’m not sure it’s been worth a great deal. It hasn’t ensured every player and official makes it through US customs. It hasn’t prevented the Iran national team from having to stay in Mexico despite their games happening in the US. Infantino has kissed the ring over and over, but the mafia protection doesn’t seem to be happening.

The only thing we know it’s definitely accomplished is tarnishing the World Cup brand by associating it with such a globally disliked figure. Great job, Gianni.

Ok, ok, that’s nearly 2,000 words about politics. Let’s get down to why we’re actually here in the first place.

I love the World Cup. I love it more than the entire rest of football combined. Yes, the tactical and technical quality is not as high as elite European football. No, I don’t think any side playing in North America this summer could beat Paris Saint-Germain. But it’s a different beast entirely. There’s a simplicity to international football that can’t be replicated. The stakes are much cleaner. I don’t need to explain the relevance of Germany to non-football fans the way I might with Bayern Munich. The best football match I’ve watched in recent years, by far, was the 2022 World Cup final between Argentina and France. Before that, the last one that struck a chord with me so deeply was Germany’s 7-1 win over Brazil in 2014. I can’t totally explain it. It’s the World Cup. It just hits different. Even when the football isn’t great, it hits.

There are… a lot of games on at this tournament. And, being spread over multiple time zones, the kick-off times are labyrinthine. There is going to be so much football happening at so many times, almost all of it extremely late if you’re on my side of the Atlantic. The “earliest” kick-offs for UK viewers are at 5 pm, while the “latest” games will end just before 7 am the next morning. I think a lot of us are used to football catering to the European consumer, and that just isn’t happening here. Even if you live on the East Coast of the US, that’s from noon to 2 am. If you’re on the West Coast, that’s 9 am to 11 pm. And I’m assuming most of you have jobs and lives and such happening.

I’m going to be covering every matchday and every game here. You’ll be able to read my analysis of what you’ve just watched and learn about the games you missed because you’re a functioning adult with stuff on. Here’s an example of the kind of daily newsletter I wrote during the last World Cup. I think the format might be a little looser this time, just because there are likely to be more games without a huge amount of intrigue, so I reserve the right to keep my thoughts shorter on a boring match if something really exciting happens elsewhere.

I do, as ever, intend to get pretty nerdy about stats and tactics while keeping it accessible. If you want a tiny trade secret, my usual approach (which I’m told other people also do) is to imagine myself saying these newsletters to my dad. If it sounds too nerdy or insular for a conversation with him, it’s not getting published. I’m going to be writing a lot of words in this tournament, and hopefully most of them are pretty good.

To be clear, I won’t stop talking about the political issues. But I’ll hopefully find the right way to weave them together with discussion about what’s happening on the pitch. For all my anger at so much surrounding the tournament, I remain genuinely excited about it, and I hope you’re willing to come along for the ride with me.

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Real Madrid, we keep having to be reminded, aren’t like other clubs.

Well, they’re like other clubs used to be. Arguably, they’re the ones that haven’t changed. We’re all living in Pep Guardiola’s world, everywhere except in Madrid. Almost every other big club has spent the last 15 years trying to integrate a proactive style of football built around dominating possession and pressing, with a coach trying to teach a philosophy to a squad aiming for cohesion rather than individual quality. It’s become very systematised and structured, many would argue to a fault. Whether it’s attacking or negative, basically every top club is all about structure and organisation now, at every level, that’s just how it is.

But not at Real Madrid. They have defined themselves as the anti-Barça, for multiple reasons. The most obvious is that they don’t, I think, want to be seen as copying Barcelona, and see themselves as the pioneers. The second reason is that what they’re doing works, with all those Champions League wins to back it up. But the fundamental story is that this is how Florentino Pérez runs things. He’s less “galactico” obsessed than the stereotype suggests, putting a correct emphasis on signing younger players and avoiding overstuffing the side with attackers. But he’s someone who favours impulsive decisions, personal connections, and a sense that he is in charge, not the coach or sporting director and certainly not some overriding philosophy.

When Madrid have tried to change, it hasn’t worked. The Xabi Alonso era was an experiment in bringing Barcelonaism to the Bernabéu, and it obviously did not take. The players rejected it, which makes the whole model unworkable. If Madrid really wanted to change, they’d have to undergo a transition period accepting fewer trophies, and that’s not happening. So it’s back to what works. Sort of.

If there’s one thing Pérez likes doing, it’s hiring managers he’s already worked with. Even Alonso played for the club, as did Álvaro Arbeloa (before working at the club as a youth coach). Before Alonso, the club employed Carlo Ancelotti in his second spell in charge. Before that, it was Zinedine Zidane in his second spell. Zidane was brought back due to the disaster of Julen Lopetegui, a relative outsider (who still played for the club and briefly managed the B-team), to bring things back to order less than a year after ending his first spell. Zidane’s first time in charge came about precisely because Pérez knew and trusted him, turning to the former superstar player after Rafa Benítez wasn’t exactly inspiring that dressing room. Benítez took over after Ancelotti’s first spell fizzled out, at a time before Pérez got locked into hiring trusted faces. Ancelotti initially succeeded because he was a relaxed personality who formed a trusted bond with the players, in stark contrast to his predecessor… José Mourinho.

Mourinho was at the peak of his powers when Madrid first hired him in 2010 having just won the treble with Inter Milan. That time in Spain was in many ways the beginning of his decline, but also delivered arguably his best and most effective side. His title-winning team in 2011-12 scored 121 times, setting the record for the most goals scored in a season in La Liga. Yes, they scored more goals than Guardiola’s Barcelona. No, it wasn’t exactly harmonious off the pitch, which caused real problems the next year, but it was something to behold.

That team set the tactical template he’d spend the next decade trying to recreate. It was a 4-2-3-1 shape built around asymmetry and counter-attacking with speed. Sergio Ramos and Pepe were the centre backs, with left back Marcelo allowed to get forward, but right back Arbeloa was much more disciplined. Xabi Alonso and Sami Khedira balanced duties in the midfield double pivot. Ángel Di María played a very Mourinho role as the hard-working and disciplined winger who nonetheless proved a crucial provider. Mesut Özil was the perfect number ten for this team, totally selfless in allowing some bloke called Cristiano Ronaldo to play very high on the left as the team’s primary attacking threat and goalscorer. Karim Benzema and Gonzalo Higuaín competed for the striker role, with Benzema linking better but Higuaín a more consistent goalscorer. This team didn’t have the ideas in possession of Barcelona, but they’re arguably the best counter-attacking side we’ve ever seen. Yes, it helps to have Ronaldo, but still, come on.

Real Madrid are singularly obsessed with winning the Champions League, so no one really remembers this team that “only” won La Liga, even if that is probably a harder task over a full season. After Mourinho seemed to fall out with the dressing room the following year, he left the club and returned to Chelsea, where he sought to copy his Madrid template. Gary Cahill and John Terry were at centre back. Right back Branislav Ivanović had freedom to get forward, while César Azpilicueta stayed deeper on the left. The midfield was a little different, with Nemanja Matić more of a pure water carrier to make up for Cesc Fàbregas, a brilliant creator who didn’t always provide the best work defensively. Willian was an ideal substitute for Di María as someone who could work hard on both sides of the ball on the right wing. Oscar copied Özil in taking up intelligent positions and being a foil for the real superstar on the left, this time being Eden Hazard. Diego Costa was the all-around centre forward threat. Different players; same template.

Of course, his combative personality again got the best of him in his second spell at Stamford Bridge, winning the league title before the players completely downed tools on him, and the third season descended into chaos. Chelsea had been worthy champions, though the Premier League was not at its strongest in that era. The season Mourinho’s side won it, second place went to Manuel Pellegrini’s Manchester City, followed by Arsène Wenger’s Arsenal. Mourinho’s teams simply had to be better coached and organised than that, with comparable firepower. Mourinho’s existing template was more cohesive than what Pellegrini or Wenger could coach, so it was relatively plain sailing.

During his next job at Manchester United, things were changing. Manchester City hired Pep Guardiola at the same time, while Jürgen Klopp was already at place at Liverpool and Mauricio Pochettino was earning himself a decent reputation at Tottenham. Antonio Conte had replaced Mourinho at Chelsea. All of these coaches – Guardiola being the driving force – embraced the newer model of structured ideas in both attack and defence. More concerningly, this had become standard across the Premier League. Mourinho’s model of more brute force counter-attacking with blistering pace was becoming less effective in an era where teams were structured enough to stop it. They were better able to sit in a low block and ask richer sides what to do in possession to break them down. Mourinho’s template hadn’t really considered this.

I’d go as far to say Mourinho’s entire coaching model has no room for this. Mourinho is football’s most famous advocate of “tactical periodisation”, the model of integrating tactical, technical, physical and psychological aspects into a single cohesive training model. This model, invented by football coach and university professor Vítor Frade, was one of the most revolutionary ideas to enter football in the last 40 years. “Many clubs do fitness work separately sending players for 45 minutes with a fitness coach”, Mourinho explained in 20051, “but I don't believe in this, because there are exercises that can improve your physical qualities using the ball. I make the players play a simple, small-sided game of football but they can only cross the halfway line if they are sprinting.

“Players don’t enjoy working without the ball, so why take it away from them? A great pianist doesn’t run around the piano or do push-ups with the tips of his fingers to be great; he plays the piano. The best way to become a great player is to play football.”

Every top club uses some aspects of tactical periodisation. Pepijn Lijnders is an advocate of it, for example, and his last two jobs have been as assistant to Pep Guardiola and Jürgen Klopp. Mourinho was a genuine pioneer here. But we’ve also moved on. Mourinho’s “pure” model of periodisation doesn’t allow for the kind of detailed work on patterns of play we associate with modern top sides. Mourinho’s teams will never develop “automatisms” — the kind of passing moves practised on the training ground so many times that they become second nature to the players — under his training model. This is something the Madrid players reportedly complained about during his first spell in charge.

His teams will never be able to really manipulate space in a possession-dominant way, and I don’t think this is something he’ll ever adapt to. His whole coaching model doesn’t allow for that work. Because every aspect of his training sessions are integrated into one whole, he’d have to completely start over and figure that out from first principles. He’s not going to change. The Mourinho we’ve seen is the Mourinho we’re going to get, end of.

But what if Real Madrid is the only big club where that’s ok?

“Some teams are a bit more structured in terms of the passing styles and the patterns of play”, Jude Bellingham said in April 2024, on the way to yet another Champions League win for Real Madrid under Carlo Ancelotti, “and it’s really interesting to watch, and it’s definitely difficult to play against, but I think one of our biggest strengths is that we’re so off the cuff.”

I don’t want to suggest that Real Madrid just don’t have the tactical issues that most clubs solve with structured positional work and automatisms. They do. But they’re not going to change their approach now. The Alonso experiment reinforced that this is how things are in Madrid. Players will do what players do. Tactical solutions need to be solved within that framework, probably by signing a really good deep-lying passing midfielder. It would be much harder to go against a cultural climate where players are used to a certain approach. In many ways, this is Mourinho’s ideal job.

In other ways, it’s his worst nightmare.

One of Alonso’s biggest failings at Madrid was his relationship with Vinícius Júnior. “It was a difficult moment because I was playing lots of games but I had not many minutes," the player explained. "But every coach has their own method, every coach has their things, and I think I wasn’t able to connect with what [Alonso] wanted and what the team needed.” Mourinho, meanwhile, used language some have called gaslighting after Vinícius accused one of the Benfica manager’s own players, Gianluca Prestianni, of racial abuse.

“Viní was not just happy to score that astonishing goal and the game was over. When you score a goal like that, you celebrate in a respectful way.

“I told [Viní] that when you score a goal like that, you just celebrate and walk back. When he was arguing about racism, I told him that the biggest person in the history of this club is Black. This club, the last thing that it is, is racist. If in his mind, there was something racist — this is Benfica.

“There is something wrong because it happens in every stadium. Every stadium where Vinicius plays, something happens. Always.”

Let’s leave aside the fairly ludicrous logic that Prestianni cannot racially abuse someone because Eusébio played for the same club 50 years earlier, and that Mourinho, of all people, cannot accuse anyone of celebrating too aggressively. Managing Real Madrid is a job about keeping the biggest stars happy and engaged. Only Viní himself can answer the question of how he feels about Mourinho, but things need to change here if the manager has any chance whatsoever of succeeding.

Viní is one high-profile example, but far from the only one. Mourinho favours a confrontational approach, which has both succeeded and failed at times in his career. He is not going to change here. Maybe all that macho bullshit is what the big personalities in the Madrid dressing room love. I don’t know. But this is what has to be true if things are going to work out for him.

From a distance, it seems like Pérez wants Mourinho specifically because he can be the alpha and set some of the players straight. I don’t know if that’s a good idea or not, but it’s Pérez’ big roll of the dice, because something bigger is coming. Something that could make this entire newsletter so far essentially redundant.

Pérez has lined up Mourinho as the next manager. But Pérez, frustrated and perhaps paranoid about his enemies lurking behind the scenes, called for a new election for the role of Real Madrid president in a bizarre press conference. Pérez is 79 years old, while his election opponent, Enrique Riquelme, is 37. Riquelme claims his project on the sporting side is radically different to what Pérez is going for. “We are going to appoint a coach who fits a long-term project”, he explained. “Members are going to feel very proud of the profile we bring to Real Madrid. This is a project designed to generate excitement from day one, but also to create a truly professional structure with hierarchy, organisation and real management capacity.

“Real Madrid cannot continue operating with short-term thinking. This is a moment for a genuine change of cycle. Of course, everything that has been achieved so far deserves recognition, but our proposal is about building a project for the short, medium and long term under a different model of professionalisation and modernisation.”

Riquelme “cannot say” whether Klopp is an option, which isn’t exactly a no. For what it’s worth, I’m unconvinced Klopp would be willing to take the job. He’s been clear many times in the past that he would not manage in a country where he lacks a strong grasp of the language, and, as far as we know, he does not speak Spanish. He seriously considered turning down the Liverpool job because he wasn’t sure he could work in a foreign language at all, and his English is excellent, so the bar is high here. He’s said over and over that he doesn’t miss being a football manager. Perhaps most importantly, his methods require a squad willing to run hard and learn a whole bunch of intricate movements with and without the ball.

Riquelme wants to turn Real Madrid into a “normal” club. Though he obviously can’t say it, he wants to make Madrid more like Barça, with a clear vision and philosophy that involves a manager coaching a progressive style of football. It seems like everyone expects Pérez to win, but it’s not like YouGov are out there polling the Real Madrid members. Winning the election would be a personal win for Pérez that guarantees Mourinho and, ultimately, keeps the club away from “Barcelonaism”.

I do think there’s value in Madrid being different and staying the course. I probably wouldn’t hire Mourinho personally, but nor would I hire someone like Klopp and attempt to run this club like every other one out there. Infuriatingly, the Madrid election is happening four days before the start of the World Cup, so I won’t have time to write about it if Riquelme pulls off a shock win.

Mourinho always brings fireworks, but Madrid will probably provide them anyway this time.

No side in my lifetime has been as heavily favoured to win a World Cup as Brazil in 2014.

Nate Silver, a man disliked by just about everyone now but widely praised in 2014 for his incredible ability to crunch the numbers and accurately predict major events, was all in on the Seleção. “This World Cup is being played in Brazil”, he wrote at the time. “No country has beaten Brazil on its home turf in almost 12 years. Brazil’s last loss at home came in a friendly on Aug. 21, 2002 [in a friendly where the side heavily rotated].

“To find a loss at home in a match that mattered to Brazil — in a World Cup qualifier, or as part of some other tournament — you have to go back to 1975, when Brazil lost the first leg of the Copa América semifinal to Peru. None of the players on Brazil’s current World Cup roster was alive at the time.”

Brazil, it seemed, tended to play very well on home soil. The domestic public were exceedingly confident. From the moment FIFA announced Brazil would host the tournament back in 2007, everyone expected this to be their moment. But it hadn’t been an easy ride to get there.

The bid was won a year after Brazil’s disappointing 2006 World Cup campaign, in which the side couldn’t make a group of superstars cohere into a team (I wrote about that here). The issue, in my opinion, was that Brazil were poorly structured in attack in 2006, not understanding how to manipulate space in order to get Ronaldinho, Kaká, Ronaldo and Adriano into positions where they could damage opponents, and having no ideas of how to break down low blocks. But that’s not really the conversation the Brazillian public were having. To them, this failure evoked a conversation dating back to the 1982 World Cup.

Brazil played scintillating football in the summer of ‘82 in Spain. They earned plaudits around the globe for their style, even as they failed to make the semi-finals. But this was not acceptable in their native country, which prides itself on winning much more than the samba football stereotype suggests. “The 1982 side had demonstrably not won, and therefore they could only be classified as failures”, according to Tim Vickery, probably the foremost English-language expert on Brazilian football. “Dunga, 1994 World Cup-winning captain and coach of the 2010 side, once described the 1982 team as ‘specialists in losing’. The early elimination of 1982 hastened a rethinking of Brazilian football, a process which had already started when the 1974 side were outdone by the dynamism of the Dutch.

“The question remained the same – how to win. But the answer changed. Before it was based on possession, on passing, on finding a balance between attack and defence and then letting the talent free. Now there was an obsession with the physical development of the game. Two conclusions were drawn. One, that less space on the field meant more physical contact, so the central midfielders needed to be 6-footers to cope. Two, that there was no longer the room to play elaborate passing moves. The way forward was to counterattack, with quick thrusts down the flanks.”

This approach, I would personally argue, was part of the problem in 2006. They had no idea of how to score goals other than on the break. But domestically, it seemed that Brazil hadn’t committed enough to becoming a physical side. They needed to ditch the individualist superstar culture to win again. Dunga, the captain of the winning ‘94 side who had been so critical of the ‘82 generation, got the managerial job and played functional football. This team actually had some interesting ideas, but they were a tough watch, eliminated in the quarter-finals of the 2010 World Cup without many outside Brazil shedding a tear. But focus immediately shifted to the one they were destined to win, the one on home soil.

Mano Menezes took over the team. But after a poor Copa América in 2011 followed by losing the final of the 2012 Olympic tournament, Menezes was out. The view internally seemed to be that Brazil needed an experienced head, someone who knew what he was doing. So Brazil did what they so often do and hired someone who managed the side before. Luiz Felipe Scolari, popular for the 2002 World Cup win, returned to the job.

I really liked the 2002 Brazil team. Scolari played a 3-4-3 that perfectly suited his squad, using Cafu and Roberto Carlos to provide the width as wing-backs while creating space for the famous front three of Rivaldo, Ronaldinho and Ronaldo. The manager got it exactly right, even if he kind of stumbled into the system. After winning the World Cup, Scolari decided to try his luck in Europe, coaching the Portugal national side to some decent tournament runs without winning a trophy. This earned him arguably his most challenging job to date, as coach of Chelsea. His time at Stamford Bridge was a huge mess in which he didn’t last the season, seriously damaging his reputation and ending the notion that he could be called a “top” manager.

Scolari took a very high-paid job in the Uzbekistan Super League before heading back to his native country, briefly managing Palmeiras before losing the job. Then Brazil called and he was back as though the last decade never happened. In his second spell, Scolari prioritised dressing room cohesion above all else. He wanted this team to be a team, so he kept a close-knit squad that many talented players couldn’t break into. This was his group, and no one was changing his mind. The football itself was, well, it wasn’t great to watch, but Brazil had told themselves that this is how you win. Brazil were victorious at the Confederations Cup a year earlier, memorably beating Spain 3-0 in the final. That served as the template for Scolari, to the point where his starting eleven at the World Cup was the exact same team that played almost every match the previous summer. These were the players who had earned the manager’s trust, and no one else was going to change that.

Júlio César had been Brazil’s established number one goalkeeper since 2007 and that wasn’t going to change. He wasn’t exactly in the form of his life, though, and his club career had fallen from winning the treble with Inter Milan to getting loaned out to Toronto FC by Queens Park Rangers. But he was the big name who had to start, so that was that.

Dani Alves came off a bit of a disappointing season at Barcelona, but he was still widely considered one of the world’s best right backs, so he was an easy pick. Thiago Silva, along with being the captain and key dressing room figure, was arguably the world’s finest centre back at the time and rightly the side’s second most important player. He had a strong connection with David Luiz, justifying that player’s selection which many in England raised their eyebrows at. You know who David Luiz is. His ability on the ball far exceeds the vast majority of centre backs but he produces some infamous clangers that got Gary Neville to compare him to a “Playstation defender”. Things were generally better at Brazil because Thiago Silva was the organiser. We’ll see how that pans out. Left back was another pretty straightforward pick, with Marelo in his prime at Real Madrid.

Things get controversial in midfield. Luiz Gustavo of Wolfsburg was a useful midfield destroyer, and made a lot of sense even if he wasn’t the most exciting player in the world. Next to him was an absolute sure thing in Scolari’s head: Paulinho. At the Confederations Cup, Paulinho had been a key player, showing exactly the box-to-box energy that impressed Tottenham enough to sign him from Corinthians for £17 million. But the move had been a disaster, and Paulinho was clearly low on confidence. Even at his best, Paulinho was a limited passer, best at working hard and crashing late in the box. If this double pivot worked properly, it would be all about physicality and offer little in terms of technique and passing range. Brazil wouldn’t be able to build up by passing the ball calmly through midfield, and would have to rely more on the full backs to get it up the pitch.

The team’s superstar and most important player, obviously, was Neymar. He had already scored 31 goals in 48 matches at age 22. It’s hard to emphasise just how good Neymar was for the national team, dominating the side in a way no one else really had for decades. We’re used to Brazillian superstars but, in terms of Seleção importance, this was something beyond that of Kaká, Ronaldinho, Ronaldo, Rivaldo or Romário. This was Neymar’s team.

Neymar had generally played on the left, but often liked to move inside, and at this tournament played as a number ten. That meant his foil, Chelsea’s Oscar, playing out wide. Oscar was the perfect tactical counterpart to Neymar, all about making intelligent movements and working hard for the team. On the other flank was Hulk, who did not do those things. Hulk was another physical player whose game was mainly about running and shooting from range. He had scored goals in Portugal and Russia without getting tested in a top league. My hunch is he wouldn’t have made the grade against tougher opponents. But Scolari trusted him, and that was all that mattered.

Upfront, Brazil were in something of a crisis, lacking anything close to a top level centre forward. Ok, that’s not entirely true. Diego Costa had been one of the best strikers in Europe that season, and played for the Seleção as recently as March 2013. But, for whatever reason, he didn’t convince Scolari during that single international break, and was left out of the Confederatons Cup squad that summer. Costa then decided to make the switch to play for Spain. Scolari wasn’t to know that Costa was about to go supernova in the 2013-14 season but, at the same time, Costa knew that the Brazil squad was a closed shop he wasn’t getting into. I suspect Scolari would’ve left Costa out of the squad anyway.

That meant we had Fred upfront. He became a figure of ridicule, but Fred was a perfectly serviceable target man. His job in this team was to create space for Neymar much more than trying to score goals himself, which is fine. The whole side, really, is built around optimising for Neymar. It wasn’t ideal that Neymar himself had struggled a little in his first season at Barcelona, but the feeling was that this wouldn’t matter in a Brazil shirt. This was his time.

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If Manchester City manage to win the Premier League this season, it will be their ninth title in the last 15 years. For pretty much all of those wins, most supporters of other clubs have preferred them to the alternatives.

Their first league title of the modern era came with high-stakes drama, as Sergio Agüero scored in the 94th minute to win the trophy ahead of Manchester United. At the time, this was an easy thing to enjoy. United had been dominating English football for the past 20 years, and seeing them succumb to their local rivals, new at the top, so late on was pretty funny. It wasn’t particularly that people were thrilled at City winning, but everyone laughed at United’s loss.

The next win in 2014 felt both similar and different. City were up against Liverpool, another “old money” traditional power in English football, but one that had gone over 20 years without a league title. Again, it wasn’t that neutrals felt great joy at City’s victory so much as they found Steven Gerrard’s slip, followed by the 3-3 collapse to Crystal Palace, funny. In the popular imagination, City didn’t “win” that title so much as Liverpool lost it. And that was funny.

After three underwhelming years, City swept all opponents aside to set a record-breaking 100-point season in 2016-17 under Pep Guardiola. This one felt less like a race than a procession, though Man Utd were their closest challengers. And, again, fans of other clubs generally wanted City to win it. The prospect of United getting good under José Mourinho was scary, and the concept of that whole project failing was funny. City becoming an all-time great team, by comparison, didn’t really scare anyone because they had no innate dislike of the blue half of Manchester.

City won the title again the next year, though it was a much closer affair with Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool finishing just a point behind. This was the first season when I really heard a version of the current narrative set in. Liverpool fans, many felt, were really annoying, and they would be absolutely insufferable if their team finally won the Premier League. City represented a feeling of beige nothingness by comparison. Liverpool fans would never shut up about winning the league. City fans… well, there aren’t too many of them about, so no one would have to hear from them.

Liverpool won the league the next season, though Covid forced them to wait a few extra months and do it behind closed doors. This prompted endless cries and jokes about the title having an asterisk next to it, because the season was delayed, because some of the games had no fans, because any reason you’d like. If City had won the league in 2020, I can’t imagine anyone would care enough to create an asterisk narrative. In fact, we know this because City won the title the following year, in a campaign played almost entirely behind closed doors, and no one disputed the validity of the win (well, they did, but for other reasons we’ll get to later). No one cared enough for that.

In 2021-22, City beat Liverpool to the title by a point again, and they were broadly favoured by supporters of other clubs keen to avoid the unbearable gloating of Liverpool fans. After that season, City’s primary title opponents shifted from Liverpool to Arsenal. But the narrative stayed the same. Arsenal “bottled” the league in 2022-23, and everyone found it very funny. Again, no one really cared that City had won the league as much as they found it funny that another club had lost it.

City won their fourth consecutive league title in 2023-24, making them the first club to ever do this in England. There were definitely some concerns about one side dominating the league, but not enough for a majority of fans to support Arsenal’s title challenge. Their fans would’ve been so annoying about it, and that matters more.

City had a mess of a year last season, but they’re back in contention now, sitting level on points with Arsenal as we have just four games left to play. Once more, the narrative has been loud and clear: “everyone” would rather City win to avoid insufferable Arsenal fans. The thought of the Arsenal supporters in your life experiencing joy is apparently just too much to take for most of you. Yes, Mikel Arteta’s style of football is absolutely dire, but Klopp’s wasn’t and you were saying the same thing, so you’re out of excuses. Man City winning the league isn’t a good or bad thing because it doesn’t count. City winning the league essentially means “no one” won it that year.

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Hi, I should start by apologising for a late newsletter. I’ve been pretty sick recently and that’s largely kept me out of action, otherwise this would’ve been published on Monday. I’m hoping I can start getting back on track from here onwards. Thanks for understanding.

Arne Slot made what was supposed to be a very hard job look easy last season.

Liverpool were probably expected to dip a little bit after Jürgen Klopp left. He had become such a huge figure. Upon winning the League Managers Association Manager of the Year award in 2020, Klopp was told in the presentation that his “personality runs right throughout the whole club” by the man they named the trophy after, Sir Alex Ferguson.

There’s clearly a cautionary tale here. But Liverpool successfully avoided a David Moyes-style mistake when Arne Slot won the Premier League title in his first season. That does develop a level of trust and buys him some time internally. It’s very hard to know what a club is actually thinking, as they almost always want to create an image of stability to the outside, which is why it’s hard to parse recent reports that Slot is to stay next season.

Those at the top, namely Fenway Sports Group and their CEO of Football Michael Edwards, “believe there is mitigation for performances”, according to Sam Wallace and Mike McGrath in the Telegraph. While I don’t know the actual internal views of Edwards et al, I think it’s pretty likely someone important at Liverpool did say this to the journalists. “The death of Diogo Jota [is] principle among them, given its effect on his team-mates at the start of the season […] while Slot is acknowledged to have made errors, the feeling is that he deserves four transfer windows before a judgment is made.

“Slot has a contract until the end of next season, and the club are of a mind to persevere into the last season of that deal before making any decision on a renewal or otherwise.”

Again, I don’t know if this is what Edwards actually thinks, but I do think it’s pretty likely this is the genuine line being given. I don’t exactly think much of the newspaper, but I don’t think the Telegraph are making this up. But for Liverpool’s sake, you’d hope they’re lying to the journalists, because this is the exact wrong way to think about the problem at hand. Let’s break down why.

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Welcome to another one of these retrospectives, on teams that were widely expected to be serious contenders in previous tournaments, but, for whatever reason, it just didn’t happen at all. What went wrong? What are the key takeaways? Can we learn important things about how sides should approach the World Cup? I think these failures should tell us just as much as the success stories.

Previous editions: France 2002, Brazil 2006, Argentina 2010

Spanish football was all-conquering for a minute there.

You could see the seeds planted in 2006, when a team of exciting youngsters couldn’t quite make it click with the veterans. Two years later, though, the new guard had fully taken over the side and won Euro 2008 with some really exciting football on display.

2008 was probably the best Spain team of this era, but it’s not really the one you think of. At the same time that La Roja were showcasing their talents in Austria, a certain Pep Guardiola was preparing for his first preseason as manager of the Barcelona senior side. His structured possession game was about to take over the world with a core of Spain-eligible players (and some bloke called Lionel Messi). The national team, under Vicente del Bosque, inevitably copied this approach to great success. In truth, the Spain version was always slower and more negative than the Barcelona variant. Barcelona passed the ball to create space and goalscoring chances. Spain, it felt like, passed the ball to kill games off and keep a clean sheet.

This approach won the 2010 World Cup, and then it delivered Euro 2012 with largely the same group of players. But 2014 was a new test. The players were a little older. The tiki-taka approach was showing signs of weakness at club level. A year earlier, Spain had been demolished at the 2013 Confederations Cup final. Whereas they felt like obvious frontrunners in the three previous tournaments, it was a little dicier this time.

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Hello, everyone. Grace here.

Look, this newsletter has done ok over the years. It’s given me a platform to write about my favourite sport and get paid for it, which I never dreamed would be possible. I really can’t complain.

But let’s be realistic here. The world is changing all the time and we can’t get stuck in our ways. The Premier League might be the most popular league in the world, but this isn’t a game primarily followed by Brits anymore. It’s a global sport. And we all know that the biggest global market of English speakers is the United States. Coincidentally, it’s the very country hosting the World Cup this summer.

With this in mind, it’s time for the rest of us to all accept that the Americans have won. It’s their sport now. I’m officially rebranding this newsletter to Grace on Soccer. I look forward to discussing teams’ offensive plays. Let’s look into who deserves to start games and who should be riding the pine. It’s all happening in this newsletter.

Let’s go, Grace on Soccer nation!

Sometimes things are meant to be, but not at that exact moment.

Liverpool liked Mohamed Salah for a long time. That’s why they really wanted to sign him from Basel in January 2014. The rumours had been swirling for a couple of months that the club had made him their number one target that transfer window. The infamous “transfer committee”, largely driven by director of technical performance Michael Edwards, were sold on the player. “But the proposed transfer fee kept on increasing”, Liverpool’s director of research Ian Graham wrote in his book, How to Win the Premier League, “enough to make me very nervous. It looked like we’d have to break the Swiss transfer record by 50% to secure the services of [him].

“In the end my nervousness didn’t matter. Basel stopped taking our calls. We’d been gazumped by Chelsea. The price had already increased to £12 million, way beyond the Swiss record. But Chelsea had been offered £40 million by Manchester United for Juan Mata. With money to burn, they offered Basel £20 million and Basel stopped negotiating with us.”

Chelsea saw Salah as a depth piece and a potential member of the infamous “loan army” spearheaded by then director of football Michael Emenalo. Playing a 4-2-3-1 formation, José Mourinho liked to start Eden Hazard, Oscar and Willian in the band of three attacking midfielders behind the striker. André Schürrle was often used off the bench, but Mata had been sold, and Kevin De Bruyne decided he didn’t want to sit around not getting chances. They were a little short, and Salah filled a role in the squad while also scuppering a rival’s transfer plans.

Salah started six league games over the rest of the season, playing 500 minutes, which could have been a reasonable bedding-in period. Not for Mourinho. Late in the campaign, Salah started a low-stakes Premier League match against Norwich before getting taken off at half time. Mourinho was apparently furious at his players during the interval, especially Salah, telling him to come back next season “ready to be a footballer”. John Obi Mikel claims that Mourinho “massively ripped into him […] he destroyed the kid and then pulled him off”. In the following campaign, he played just 33 minutes of Premier League football before getting loaned out to Fiorentina in January 2015. José’s done it again.

The easy conclusion is to say that history tells us Salah made the wrong choice (or had the wrong choice made for him), that he was later able to correct. He was always “supposed” to go to Liverpool, but it just took him a few years longer than it needed to. But to be honest, I’m not convinced things would’ve turned out much better for him had he chosen red over blue in 2014. At the time, Brendan Rodgers had built an incredibly exciting counter-attacking side around Luis Suárez and Daniel Sturridge, with a young Raheem Sterling increasingly becoming the third prong in that attack. Rodgers was very stubborn in his feuds with the transfer committee, preferring “his” players in his attempts to accrue power. I think Salah would’ve found himself on the bench here. The following season, Suárez was sold, and Sturridge suffered from injuries, so the team did naturally have a Salah-shaped hole. But would Rodgers have used the Egyptian? Would he have put him out at wing-back, or even favoured Jordon Ibe at times to make a point to the owners? I don’t think Salah moving earlier is a slam dunk.

Anyway. Salah went on loan to Fiorentina and impressed pretty quickly in his six months in Florence, enough for the club to activate their option to buy. Salah wasn’t interested in making the move permanent, which caused some controversy, but more immediately, it meant he would spend the 2015/16 season on loan at Roma instead. There, he looked a pretty useful wide forward, prompting the Giallorossi to make the move permanent, and Salah said yes to this club. He was even better the next year, getting 15 goals and 11 assists in just over 27 games worth of minutes in Serie A, but he didn’t get the headlines because Edin Džeko was having a monster season upfront. That meant Salah was always going to be a supporting player a little further from the box than he’d like.

A smarter club might have recognised that Džeko was 31 while Salah was 25 and seen where the future of the team lies. But not Roma. Džeko was the side’s biggest star, and Salah could be sold for a healthy profit. Liverpool hadn’t forgotten about him. “We had little competition from within the Premier League”, Graham explained. “He’d ‘failed’ at Chelsea and our English rivals did not want to risk repeating Chelsea’s mistake.”

Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool were showing signs of promise at this point. The front three of Philippe Coutinho, Sadio Mané and Roberto Firmino were very exciting, and not exactly lacking in terms of pace and movement. Coutinho and Mané both missed stretches of the 2016/17 season, with Divock Origi being the first attacker off the bench. Daniel Sturridge was still around, but injuries had taken their toll, and he lacked the acceleration of a few years earlier. They were really struggling for depth options, and another attacker was needed. At the same time, Klopp wanted to move Coutinho into a deeper role and play with two “explosive” wingers rather than an explosive winger and a “playmaker” winger. Klopp took some persuading, presumably because of the consensus view that Salah “failed” at Chelsea. “Michael Edwards, [director of recruitment] Dave Fallows, [chief scout] Barry [Hunter], they were really in my ear and were on it: ‘Come on, Mo Salah, he’s the solution!’”

Liverpool fans really love a superstar to really worship and get behind. During the 2000s, they celebrated Fernando Torres with a religious fervour. The day he left the club, they bought Suárez (and someone else we don’t need to mention), who seamlessly slotted into the now vacant “god figure” role. When Suárez was sold to Barcelona in 2014, it wasn’t clear who would become the icon here. Supporters really got behind Mario Balotelli in a way that perhaps surprised outsiders, but obviously, he did not end up fitting the bill.

Coutinho had largely become that figure, though, personally speaking, I’m not sure his performances quite merited it. But the way the Liverpool fans can get behind star players is a good way to market yourself into a superstar, so Coutinho found himself on Barcelona’s radar after that club lost Neymar. Salah was never intended as a replacement. Liverpool absolutely did not want to sell Coutinho until Barça and the player were so insistent and willing to pay the absolute maximum fee. He was to complement what they already had, not to build around.

That changed pretty quickly. By the end of calendar year 2017, he’d scored 17 Premier League goals (zero penalties) at a rate of about one every 90 minutes. By the time he played football in 2018, Coutinho had been sold, and everyone knew Salah was this team’s superstar. He ended the Premier League season on 32 goals, both the PFA and football writers’ player of the year awards, and enough respect that Sergio Ramos seemed to think the best chance of winning the Champions League was to take Salah out of the game after half an hour.

Nerds did correctly point out that he overperformed xG that campaign, but not by a ludicrous margin. We were looking at about 24 expected goals and 8 expected assists, in what should still be considered his best season at Anfield. The team really played for Salah that year. Mané and Firmino increasingly had to sacrifice their own games to get the Egyptian into goalscoring positions. He turned up at Liverpool and immediately turned it into his team.

Things did come back down to Earth a bit in the next couple of seasons. His next three campaigns saw him score an average of 16-17 non-penalty goals each league campaign, along with 10 assists each year. These are outstanding numbers for a wide forward, yes, but one with a balanced role in a team. After that blockbuster first year, Klopp gradually pivoted to giving Salah and Mané more similar tactical roles in the team, spreading out the good work more evenly. Salah was first among equals here rather than the obvious king.

Of that classic front three, I’d never call him a lazy player, but he was less of an absolute pressing machine the way Firmino and Mané were. Liverpool clearly made pressing a priority in the transfer market, adding the late Diogo Jota in September 2020, then Luis Díaz in January 2022. These players did offer something different, but the essential formula didn’t really change until Darwin Núñez arrived in summer 2022. History will be harsh on this signing. “The difficulty with Núñez”, according to Graham, who left Liverpool around this period, “was that he was a very different type of player to Firmino. My questions were: ‘Are we going to change our style or formation for him?’ Is he a good enough player that it might be worth making those changes?’

“I wouldn’t say that the data said no to Nunez. It’s more ‘if we sign this player we have to understand this is the role we’ve seen him be effective in and is there currently a slot for him in our squad?’. And if you’re spending a large amount of money on a player then he has to start. The worst thing you can do is buy a squad player and spend money that could be out there on the pitch.”

Salah was, in theory, the player who could suffer most from a genuine number nine upfront. He was the one benefiting from Firmino creating space for a wide forward to attack and score goals. But, for reasons I can’t quite explain, Salah and Núñez really hit it off. They had a telepathic understanding on the pitch at times. It doesn’t really make tactical sense, but I wish they had more time playing together. I think there was something worth developing there.

That didn’t happen. Klopp left to be replaced by Arne Slot, who really did give Salah a lot of trust in the team. “I told [Slot], ‘look, as long as you rest me defensively, I will provide offensively’”, Salah said in a surprising moment of honesty after winning the Premier League last season. Slot tweaked the formation to a 4-2-3-1, with Dominik Szoboszlai as the number ten and usually two of Díaz, Diogo Jota and Cody Gakpo playing left wing and striker. That meant three very fluid, interchanging and hard-working attacking players willing to do the boring bits to let Salah shine. This was “his” team, and he delivered big time in terms of raw goals and assists. There is air in those numbers, but they still look outstanding. The 29 goals included nine penalties, even as he finished in line with his xG. The 18 assists were slightly better than expected, but it still all comes out at about one non-penalty expected goal and assist per 90. Liverpool did a lot to make Salah’s life easier, but he certainly delivered on his end of the bargain.

So then we get to what we now know will be his last season in red. I think he’s both meaningfully declined and had to face a different tactical environment. Hugo Ekitike has offered a genuine striker option occupying space in the box, but without the understanding Salah had with Núñez. Ekitike and Florian Wirtz have been less proactive in pressing to cover for the Egyptian. The whole thing feels so poorly thought out that I’d have to assume the club had an eye on transitioning him out of the side starting from now, except he had just signed a new contract.

But that’s not what I’ll remember. What I’ll remember is the sheer level that he hit the cultural stratosphere. Everyone from the Financial Times to Pop Base has reported on his exit. He arguably did more than anyone over the last decade to change people’s mental image of where a “superstar” footballer is supposed to be from and what they’re supposed to look like. He was probably more notable as a cultural icon than as a footballer, and he was damn good at football.

Even if he made it at Chelsea, I don’t think there’s a world where he gets afforded the same superstar stature he reached at Liverpool. Hazard was already established in that role. If he went to an even bigger club like Real Madrid or Barcelona, he might have been a bit lost among the sheer concentration of big names. Liverpool was exactly the right spot for him to make a huge impact. It was a perfect fit of club and player at exactly the right time for each.

So long.

On the 7th July 1974, Germany (then known as West Germany) won their second ever World Cup with a 2-1 victory over arch rivals the Netherlands on home soil in Berlin. About 300 miles away, in a small village in Baden-Württemberg, a nine-year-old Hansi Flick was almost certainly celebrating.

A Bayern fan, Flick’s childhood favourite was Gerd Müller, the man who scored that day in Berlin (and on a lot of other days) to sink Dutch hearts. That team had a very clear influence on Flick’s life. Jupp Heynckes, a substitute that day, would later manage Flick the player for three seasons at Bayern, winning two Bundesliga titles in the process. Attacking midfielder Uli Hoeneß would later become the club president who hired Flick, first as assistant, then as Bayern manager. This generation of German footballers were the people who helped open doors for him. Flick is the next generation carrying their legacies.

Yet all these years later, he has completely swapped sides from that day in 1974, fully renounced the faith and become a cardinal at the Church of Johan Cruyff.

“Cruyff painted the chapel”, Pep Guardiola famously said, “and Barcelona coaches since merely restore or improve it”. It’s fairly obvious that Cruyff was a huge part of what we now call the Barcelona philosophy, but that’s not what sticks with me about Guardiola’s quote. What sticks with me is the religious comparison. Like most larger Western cities, Barcelona as a place is increasingly metropolitan, with surveys suggesting only about half the population identify as Catholic today. But the city has a long history of Catholicism, which means, inevitably, major institutions get built in the image of the Catholic Church.

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“The English-style manager comes in and wants to get rid of half the players and bring in his own, so the club writes off millions, selling at a loss and buying all over again. The odds are always stacked against that quick fix, so the new manager goes after two years and you’re back to square one, writing off another £10m.”

— Daniel Levy, 2005

For most of the last 15 years or so, I had been working on an assumption that went like this:

The Premier League was split into the top six and the rest. That didn’t guarantee those teams would finish in the top six places every season. What it did mean was that if any of those teams had a truly disastrous season, an “everything that could possibly go wrong, went wrong” year, the worst they could do was finish midtable. Think Chelsea in 2015-16, in which they had the José Mourinho implosion in the first half of the season followed by Guus Hiddink and players phoning it in, but still finished tenth. That’s as bad as it would get. For the other 14 teams in the division, a season where everything went wrong would mean relegation.

That’s clearly over now. It’s been over for a little while. Tottenham Hotspur, Manchester United and Chelsea have all put up bottom-half finishes this decade, and there’s an actual chance Spurs could pay the big price. They’re currently sitting in 16th, but only one point ahead of West Ham in the relegation zone. In terms of the statistical modelling, Scott Willis of Cannon Stats gives Tottenham a 28% chance of going down, while Simon at Analytic FPL has the figure at a much more cautious 10%. I think Scott and Simon are both pretty smart at this sort of thing, so there really is a lot of uncertainty here. The major bookies are punchier on this, with their odds putting the implied probability at around 33-40%, though it’s worth saying this isn’t a very “liquid” market, and might be responding to a fair few “dumb” bets from rival supporters who just think it’d be really funny if Tottenham get relegated.

If you want to make the case for Spurs going down, you’re looking at bad form. They’ve lost all of their last six games, and the performances have been pretty rough. The graph below doesn’t include their last league match against Crystal Palace, but it tells a pretty clear story: Tottenham are conceding a lot more good chances than they’re creating right now. Keep playing like this, and they’re well in range for the drop. If you want to make the case Spurs will be safe, you’re relying more on the poor standard of teams around them than anything they’re actually doing themselves.

So how did this happen? There’s both a “what’s wrong with Spurs?” question here and a “why did the top six get softer?” question. For the latter, the most popular theory I’ve seen around is that “the rest” got better and richer. The baseline standard of opponent is higher now than it was a decade ago. I’m not totally sure I buy that. Those clubs are certainly richer than they were in the 2010s, but so are the top six. I honestly don’t know if the gap between rich and poor within the Premier League has grown or shrunk. It’s one for another day.

My personal pet theory, that ties both questions together, is that the big six got dumber while the rest of the league got more intelligent. At the start of the 2016-17 season, the big six employed the following managers:

Antonio Conte (Chelsea), Mauricio Pochettino (Tottenham), Pep Guardiola (Man City), Jürgen Klopp (Liverpool), Arsène Wenger (Arsenal), José Mourinho (Man Utd).

Everyone else, meanwhile, employed these coaches:

Ronald Koeman (Everton), Claude Puel (Southampton), Eddie Howe (Bournemouth), Tony Pulis (West Bromwich Albion), Slaven Bilić (West Ham), Claudio Ranieri (Leicester City), Mark Hughes (Stoke City), Alan Pardew (Crystal Palace), Francesco Guidolin (Swansea City), Sean Dyche (Burnley), Walter Mazzarri (Watford), Mike Phelan (Hull City), Aitor Karanka (Middlesbrough), David Moyes (Sunderland).

We can quibble about some of the names, but you would not have been insane if you claimed in 2016 that the first six names here were better than the next fourteen.

Now let’s look at the so-called “big six” managers right now:

Mikel Arteta (Arsenal), Pep Guardiola (Man City), Michael Carrick (Man Utd), Liam Rosenior (Chelsea), Arne Slot (Liverpool), Igor Tudor (Tottenham).

And “the rest”:

Unai Emery (Aston Villa), Keith Andrews (Brentford), David Moyes (Everton), Andoni Iraola (Bournemouth), Marco Silva (Fulham), Régis Le Bris (Sunderland), Eddie Howe (Newcastle United), Oliver Glasner (Crystal Palace), Fabian Hürzeler (Brighton and Hove Albion), Daniel Farke (Leeds United), Vítor Pereira (Nottingham Forest), Nuno Espírito Santo (West Ham), Scott Parker (Burnley), Rob Edwards (Wolves).

I don’t think we’re looking at close to the same talent gap. “The rest” have hired better coaches in some cases, but the biggest shift, I think, is the talent drain at the top. Guardiola is the same, while Arsenal have upgraded with Arteta instead of Wenger. But the other four? I think the vast majority would agree that Klopp and Pochettino are simply better football managers than Slot and Tudor. Carrick and Rosenior, meanwhile, may well prove to be excellent coaches, but they are punts compared to highly established figures Mourinho (who had won the Premier League as recently as 2014/15) and Conte. This is the visible change, but I feel like in some cases, we’ve seen a comparable decline in terms of squad quality and institutional structure. As the “best of the rest” started getting their act together, the “worst of the best” got awfully weak.

Yes, Spurs are the most extreme case of this.

If we look at Tottenham on the Euro Club Index (basically think FIFA rankings, but for European clubs), they reached their highest level in December 2018.

Pochettino was obviously the manager at the time. Their strongest eleven, I would say, looked like this:

Hugo Lloris (age 31), Kieran Trippier (27), Toby Alderweireld (29), Jan Vertonghen (31), Ben Davies (25), Eric Dier (24), Mousa Dembélé (31), Christian Eriksen (26), Dele Alli (22), Son Heung-min (26), Harry Kane (25).

Things got worse pretty quickly after that. Spurs reached the Champions League final in 2019, but their Premier League form had collapsed, winning just three of their last twelve matches. Dembélé had been sold in January, while Trippier went to Atlético Madrid in the summer. Pochettino was sacked in November. All it needed was some smartarse to claim this was obvious because nerd shite said their numbers had been trending down for a while. Thankfully, I was around at the time to point out their xG difference had been looking concerning for a little while and this had been a team clearly in need of a refresh.

Of that “strongest lineup”, the most recent signings were Son, Alderweireld and Dele, who had joined the club way back in summer 2015. Those three deals were all driven by head of recruitment Paul Mitchell, who came from Southampton alongside Pochettino but seemed to fall out with both the manager and chairman Daniel Levy, deciding to resign a year after he was appointed. Pochettino and Levy largely took control of transfers between them afterwards.

Spurs employed various different structures before this point, but were generally considered pretty sharp. “I think people get too hung up on job titles”, Levy claimed at one point. “In terms of how we run this club, whether a person is called director of football, sporting director, chief scout, head of recruitment, their job is ultimately to assist the manager in finding quality players. It doesn’t really matter what the title is”.1 That did seem to be the case for many years, with the rest of that “strongest” side (bar Kane, an academy graduate) getting bought through a mix of structures alongside managers Pochettino and predecessor André Villas-Boas2.

This was a club ahead of its time in embracing approaches now considered standard. Tottenham started employing the services of Decision Technology, driven by Ian Graham who would later work at Liverpool, as early as 2007. They were doing some impressive things that Liverpool would essentially copy with more money several years later. Levy took over as chairman of a midtable Premiership (as it was called back then) club in 2001 and oversaw their transformation into Champions League mainstays by the 2010s.

His most famous quality was both a huge strength and weakness: sacking the manager and changing everything. Football clubs, like many businesses, are often prone to sunk cost fallacy. Levy was never scared of just changing things if they weren’t working, which avoided wasting years heading down the wrong path but could also make it harder to build something. Pochettino seemed like the first manager he was entirely satisfied with in the dugout.

At the same time, his happiness with the manager meant ceding the recruitment infrastructure to Pochettino’s will. For all his good work, he never had any idea of how to sign players for the football he wanted to play. The summer 2016 signings were Moussa Sissoko, Victor Wanyama, Vincent Janssen and Georges-Kévin Nkoudou. Wanyama was pretty good, though obviously signed purely because Pochettino worked with him at Southampton. Sissoko ended up vaguely useful at times, but well short of the player Spurs seemed to think they were signing. Janssen did exactly the “scored loads in the Eredivisie” arc you’ve seen numerous times, while you probably forgot Nkoudou existed.

It continued like this the following year, with Davinson Sánchez proving a reasonable signing while Lucas Moura, Serge Aurier and Fernando Llorente never looked the part (shout out to Juan Foyth, who struggled here but did turn his career around somewhat at Villarreal). The following year, they signed… no one. I actually did really like all three of Tanguy Ndombélé, Giovani Lo Celso and Ryan Sessegnon at the time in 2019, but none worked out at all. Maybe Tottenham and I were both wrong, or maybe the team was suddenly a very difficult side to settle into, as the squad had decayed so much and Pochettino’s fatherly bond got replaced by Mourinho’s “good guys don’t win trophies” macho bullshit.

It seems ridiculous to say it, considering he was Tottenham’s best manager in my lifetime and the team continued to get excellent results for the next few seasons. And I certainly don’t think it’s the only wrong decision, or that it put them on an unavoidable path here. But if there’s a critical turning point for the club, the point when decisions from top to bottom went from “largely good” to “largely bad”, it’s the moment when Levy promoted Pochettino from Head Coach to Manager and gave him control of transfers after Mitchell resigned in summer 2016. Levy should’ve put his foot down and insisted on a continental structure, hiring someone who fit the forward-thinking model Spurs had at the time. Instead, the manager and the chairman became the entire club.

This was supposed to be the moment when Tottenham modernised. They were replacing the old White Hart Lane with a brand new stadium that could generate huge revenues with more fans at the games, more corporate hospitality facilities, and more major events outside of the kind of football you play with your feet. All of that was correct, but getting the ground built was always going to be a huge undertaking. With Levy focused on the stadium, he needed trusted hands to keep the football side ticking over. As it was, Pochettino took full control.

Once results started to slide, Levy inevitably reverted to type and sacked Pochettino, replacing him with whichever available manager most embodied the quality he was perceived to lack. I think Mourinho was the wrong choice for all the reasons we now know. But with Pochettino and his staff being the footballing infrastructure, Tottenham lacked the expertise to figure out where to go next. Levy, undoubtedly smart at running the business, just went with his gut and put Mourinho in charge.

Levy used to crave a director of football. “I decided there was something fundamentally wrong with the way clubs are structured in England”, he said in 2005. “The odd examples of stability, such as Manchester United and Arsenal, are the exception. I went on a fact-finding mission across Europe, and decided on a two-tier management structure, which is the norm on the Continent, with a sporting director working with a head coach.” The way this model is supposed to work is that the sporting director uses his relevant knowledge to hire (or at least recommend) the right manager. It’s a system designed to avoid exactly this outcome, but Levy had blown it up a few years earlier under the belief he’d found his own Sir Alex Ferguson.

Levy, as I said, was not afraid of changing things that didn’t work. Spurs were quicker than most to notice when Mourinho was dragging the club down and made the change after 17 months in charge. Once again, there was no plan and infrastructure. Levy decided he needed a sporting director but, in a situation that sums up the whole problem, Spurs didn’t have the footballing knowledge to find the right sporting director. Fabio Paratici, a man with a lot of trophies at Juventus but not a clear sense of how he did it, got the job for two years before “resigning” (with rumours he was still floating around in the background) due to getting banned from football over a false accounting scandal at Juventus. Yeah. Great infrastructure you’ve got there.

Paratici ran things in a very “who you know, not what you know” sort of way, even as his connections were much weaker in England than his native Italy. After Nuno Espírito Santo proved an immediate bust, Paratici turned to his former Juventus colleague Antonio Conte, obviously an excellent manager but an explosive personality to have in the room with Levy. Conte did what he does, overseeing an instant improvement in results before gradually wearing everyone down with his combative attitude. When Conte and Paratici were both (officially) gone in 2023, there was nothing substantive left from this Italian revolution.

Of the 17 players signed under Paratici, seven were from Serie A, including two from Juventus. Paratici was trying to operate the way Juventus operate without any of the specifics that made it work in Turin. You can’t build a Juventus model from the ground up because it relies on an awful lot of history and specific personal relationships. Juventus do not have a philosophy like Barcelona or Ajax, very proudly claiming that winning trophies is “the only thing that counts”. There isn’t a “Juventus model” that clubs can copy and build elsewhere. When Paratici got banned, all he had to take credit for were some mediocre signings.

Johan Lange, formerly of Aston Villa and Copenhagen, was hired as “technical director” in 2023, with Paratici still vaguely involved. The manager by now was Ange Postecoglou, trying to implement a more progressive style of football with a squad built out of patchwork approaches. Spurs’ transfer work shifted towards the domestic market, with some of the costly mistakes you can make if you buy English. Postecoglou probably got hamstrung by being very set in his ways in terms of how he wanted to play without the squad to suit, but the recruitment didn’t seem to be actively addressing this. It never felt joined up. It never felt like a football club, but rather a collection of individuals running different departments.

Postecoglou’s sunshine football didn’t take so, once again, Spurs completely reverted with a “pragmatic” manager in Thomas Frank, even though he also demanded a specific style of play that Tottenham didn’t have the squad for. I do think Frank was very unfortunate with injuries, but so too did he play an unsuited style. There has not been any kind of cohesive vision of what Tottenham should be, across recruitment and coaching, in over a decade at this point. It’s produced a group of disparate, disinterested, and some-other-word-beginning-with-dis players. Let’s go with disorganised, sure, that sort of works.

At the same time, Spurs have arguably smashed it on the business side. They were a midtable club in every sense when Levy took over, and he built solidly “big six” revenues while keeping the spending and wage structure under control. He locked in potential for even more revenue growth with the new stadium, surely his most important achievement. But all of that growth was ultimately set in place by good performances on the pitch. Spurs got rich by getting good. They will not be anywhere near being one of the six highest revenue clubs in the country if they get relegated.

Levy got forced out of Tottenham in September by the people who ultimately own most of the club, the “Joe Lewis family trust” (definitely not Joe Lewis himself). This was probably inevitable towards the end. Levy hadn’t built any sort of serious infrastructure behind him, and he ran on a “sack someone if results are poor” model. As Qui-Gon Jinn would say, there’s always a bigger fish, and the Lewis family decided to sack Levy for poor results this time. They obviously wanted something resembling a modern football structure but hired Vinai Venkatesham, formerly of Arsenal, as the CEO above Lange and Paratici as joint sporting directors. This all feels very agent-led and very clash of cultures.

So we have Igor Tudor parachuted in and possibly parachuted out pretty soon. There’s just no plan. All of this could’ve been avoided many times, but the path was set by a reactive structure. Levy’s greatest strength became Spurs’ greatest weakness. The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium built on the sand.

Spurs should probably survive. I don’t know where they go from there. Obviously, they need to develop a credible long-term plan, but I don’t know what that looks like. I don’t know what a reasonable timeline is for them to be challenging for Champions League football again. I don’t know anything, which is exactly the sort of quality analysis you come to this newsletter for.

I just know this is a shitshow that needs to change.

Welcome to another one of these retrospectives, on teams that were widely expected to be serious contenders in previous tournaments but, for whatever reason, it just didn’t happen at all. What went wrong? What are the key takeaways? Can we learn important things about how sides should approach the World Cup? I think these failures should tell us just as much as the success stories.

Previous editions: France 2002, Brazil 2006

There’s an easy story to tell here.

It goes like this: Argentina had all the talent a team could ever need going into the 2010 World Cup. The star man everyone looked to was surrounded by illustrious names like Ángel Di María, Javier Mascherano, Carlos Tevez and Gonzalo Higuaín. This was the most talented group of players at the tournament in South Africa. The only problem was that the Argentine Football Association (AFA) lost their minds and hired Diego Maradona as manager. Any good work was undone by nonexistent tactics and a naive “attack, attack, attack” philosophy. Yes, everyone loves Maradona, but come on now. It would be like England hiring Gazza.1

But is any of this actually true?

Despite all this talent, Argentina were a mess. Veteran coach Alfio Basile had made a mess of the early stages of World Cup qualifying, picking up just one win in his last six competitive games. A 1-0 defeat to Chile was the final straw, and he got the sack. Another coach vastly experienced in Argentine domestic football, Carlos Bianchi, had been considered the frontrunner, while under-20s coach Sergio Batista, journeyman coach Miguel Ángel Russo, and some young chancer by the name of Diego Simeone were also thought to be in the running. I joke, but he already had an impressive CV managing Estudiantes and River Plate by this point, along with obviously being a famous former player. But not nearly as famous as Maradona.

The AFA had at least thought about Maradona’s lack of coaching experience. Carlos Bilardo, manager of the 1986 World Cup-winning team that Maradona played in, was brought in as technical director. Bilardo was a pretty strict tactician who had his Argentina team play a very disciplined style of football, relying on a few moments of magic from Maradona but otherwise keeping it tight at the back. If this was going to work, Maradona probably needed to rely on Bilardo’s tactical acumen here. This was someone he could trust after his most famous career success.

Maradona was, as much as anything else, a magnetic and galvanising personality. I do think that if he had recognised his strengths were as a man manager, and hired others to do detailed coaching and tactics work, there was potentially something here. Instead, he went a different route. His assistant was Alejandro Mancuso, a man without any prior coaching experience. He desperately needed his opposite, but instead chose someone close to him.

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It used to be much simpler than this.

Back in the day, when a team in England needed a new manager, the challenge was pretty obvious: find the best person available. You were planning to give this person several years to sign their own players and build a new team. Tactics weren’t seen as so important back then, and there weren’t an awful lot of players who just wouldn’t fit the manager’s ideas. Just find the best one, and it should all work out.

That’s what Manchester City did when hiring Pep Guardiola. He felt like the centrepiece of a project they had wanted to build for a while, with Guardiola’s former Barcelona colleagues Ferran Soriano and Txiki Begiristain running the show at the Etihad. To be honest, they didn’t do a great job of planning for this on the pitch, as Guardiola inherited a squad ill-suited to his football in many ways. But he wasn’t a short-term fix. He was given time to build the team he wanted, to play his football. Guardiola wasn’t hired for results, or even titles. He was hired to build a dynasty.

The next Man City manager will not be hired to build a dynasty. He will not, in all likelihood, be in charge for the next decade. Welcome to the real world.

The rumours keep on swirling that Guardiola will leave City at the end of the season. Even if it doesn’t happen this year, it will happen at some point. We’ll get onto who I think they should hire eventually, but I think the way to tackle the problem is to think of it the same way they would go about signing a player: first identify the specific skillset the team needs, then look for the options most fitting that profile. Some excellent footballers just aren’t going to fit City’s needs in a particular position. The manager job is no different. I would think the same way about any club looking for a new boss, so all of this can and should apply elsewhere. But let’s use City as an interesting example.

Guardiola’s methods have essentially been institutionalised, which is exactly what he was hired to do. Things haven’t been static. All sorts of things have changed about how he works, especially this season. But the basic rhythm of the day-to-day training sessions, and certain patterns of play, probably feel like second nature to a lot of this squad. Bernardo Silva and Phil Foden could do the basics of Guardiola’s football with their eyes closed. That gets us to the key question: how much should the next manager change things?

There are plenty of examples of managers coming into clubs and changing too much, too fast. The Manchester United squad didn’t take too kindly to David Moyes overhauling what had been a very successful approach. The nightmare scenario here is that, save for the trophies won, the legacy Guardiola left behind goes down the drain in one season, as a new man in charge throws out all of those foundations carefully built over ten years. That’s a real possibility City should be guarding against.

At the same time, Guardiola himself would not be static. He wouldn’t play some reheated version of his own football. He’d look to freshen things up, both with new players and new tactical approaches. The players expect to be challenged at this point, and they appreciate learning new things. Keeping things the same with a lesser coach than Guardiola doesn’t inspire.

This gets to the problem Bayern had when replacing Guardiola with Carlo Ancelotti. Obviously, Ancelotti isn’t particularly like Guardiola in his methods. He’s a laissez-faire manager who wasn’t going to institute his own ideology on the squad, but that was precisely the problem. The term “low intensity” got thrown around a lot in Munich around that period. After a period with Guardiola, players expect and demand certain levels every day that a lot of managers just aren’t going to meet.

So there are a lot of ways to get it wrong and not so many ways to get it right. This is a tricky problem to solve.

It’s a more interesting question because the people making it are a bit of a blank slate. Begiristain retired last summer, replaced as City’s sporting director by Hugo Viana. We don’t really know how Viana thinks about this problem. His major hiring decision at Sporting was to appoint Ruben Amorim, which worked out brilliantly. Amorim was hired on the back of doing impressive work with Braga, his first senior job. I don’t think Viana will be able to do something similar here, finding a really impressive manager overperforming at another Premier League club. Nor will he be able to call on his contacts in Portuguese football, since we all saw how things went once Amorim came to Manchester. Viana has to do something more impressive here.

I’d be surprised if he had free rein in this appointment. Soriano will surely have a big say. But this isn’t something City as an institution have needed to think about for a long time. Guardiola was such a no-brainer that anyone could’ve made that call. Before that, the current leadership hired Manuel Pellegrini, a perfectly agreeable coach who would not fit the bill this time. It’s going to need to be someone who can balance a lot of conflicting issues. So let’s run through the likely names, and I’ll tell you who I’d go for.

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Last summer, Brentford did something no other Premier League club has ever done or, likely, would ever have thought to do.

Manager Thomas Frank had left the club to join Tottenham, meaning someone new needed to be hired. Being Brentford, they avoided the obvious names and made an internal appointment.

The assistant manager? Good guess, but no, Claus Nørgaard also left the club to take over as manager of Vejle Boldklub.

A senior player who had the respect of the dressing room? Wrong again.

Brentford promoted the set piece coach to the role of manager. They hired Keith Andrews, probably otherwise best known for playing in midfield at Sam Allardyce’s Blackburn. Even the most dedicated Premier League viewer could be forgiven for forgetting he existed.

Meanwhile, about ten miles Northeast of Andrews’ current job, another former Brentford set piece coach is playing a big part in putting Arsenal at the top of the table.

Something is happening.

Everyone’s talked about the number of set piece goals this season. I don’t need to tell you that more of them are going in, but here’s a nice graph from Michael Caley, from his amazing study on the matter that informed basically all my thinking here.

Not all set pieces are equal here. As Caley notes, free-kick goals are actually down this season. What we’re seeing is two specific kinds of set piece goals. The first is long throws. A pretty minor concern a couple of years ago, teams are now throwing the ball straight into the box at will when they get a chance to. It is very on trend that when you get a throw-in within the final third, you use that as a set piece rather than a quick restart.

The other kind of set piece is really an evolution on an existing part of the game. Teams keep taking a very specific corner: play an inswinger right into the six-yard box, and crowd out the goalkeeper with as many of your players as possible. Obviously, putting the ball closer to the goal is a good idea, but only if you can take the ‘keeper out of the equation. Teams have found an answer to it: a lot of attackers in the way. Flood the zone. Or, as it’s colloquially known now:

The Meat Wall.

Fun story: this term was first coined on the Trivote Discord server (which you can join here!!! Unless you’re my dad, then no, you can’t). Bill described Tottenham’s preseason defensive corner shape as “meatwall defending”.

At some point pretty quickly afterwards, the term started being used to describe attacking corners seen more often at Chelsea and Arsenal. Caley published his study and deliberately avoided the term, but he did a podcast episode talking about the new approach as the “meat-wall”. Jonathan Norcroft of the Sunday Times was apparently listening and gave us this two-page spread.

So that’s it. It’s the meat wall now. It’s stuck, and as a tactic, it seems to be doing a great job of putting the ball in the net.

There are two main schools of thought on what this all means. The first is easier to swallow: it’s just a new tactical trend. Plenty of people working in football think this way. “Five years ago”, now-former Nottingham Forest manager Sean Dyche said a few months back, “people were going “why do you rely on set pieces?” Now they’re in vogue. That’s just the way it goes, it’s just the cycle. Skinny jeans, flared jeans, skinny jeans, flared jeans.”

There’s probably some of that, but at the same time, these are huge changes in the numbers. This isn’t a gradual thing, like the rise of pressing or short passing. It’s a big leap that suddenly happened this season. Skinny jeans didn’t take off one day and die overnight like the meat wall and the long throw. We’re watching a different sport to what we were seeing two years ago.

I was trying to think of other changes in the Premier League that seemed to happen very quickly, and something came to mind from the 2000s: ditching the 4-4-2 to play a dedicated defensive midfielder and just one striker. José Mourinho arrived at Chelsea and embarrassed almost every manager in the country just by playing a 4-3-3 shape. “If I have a triangle in midfield – Claude Makélélé behind and two others just in front”, Mourinho said at the time, “I will always have an advantge against a pure 4-4-2 where the central midfielders are side by side”.1 Very quickly, it felt like an extra midfielder was a must for any competitive side.

But it wasn’t a change that came out of nowhere. Arsenal and Manchester United had both been often playing systems we’d today call 4-2-3-1 for a few seasons. And this approach had become standard elsewhere in Europe for a while.

The Premier League changed a lot in the mid-2000s. It got more defensive, more tactically organised, and more physically demanding. We might be going through a similar moment here. In truth, I think plenty of the changes from 20 years ago have been absolute, rather than a cycle. We’re not going back to training fitness and tactics separately. We might not go back on set pieces here.

In fact, this might have already happened in Denmark.

Back in July 2014, English businessman and professional gambler Matthew Benham bought Danish Superliga club FC Midtjylland. Two years earlier, he took over at Brentford, the team he supports and cares about the most. Benham is a big advocate of using data analytics to inform decision-making. While this was employed at Brentford, Midtjylland were to be even bolder, serving as a sort of testing ground for analytics-driven approaches in football. Any nerd with a laptop could produce reams of theory about how football might work. Midtjylland were going to literally do the field work and put it into practice.

So what did Midtjylland do? They focused on set pieces, especially innovative routines. Did it work?

A year after Benham bought Midtjylland, they won the first Danish league title in the club’s history. It isn’t a long history, having been founded in 1999, but that alone should tell you Midtjylland are not exactly giants of Danish football. Obviously, the rest of Denmark took notice. Other teams started trying similar tricks from set pieces, to the point where Danish football is now famous for it. We even see it with the national team. And it’s pretty easy to see where that came from.

“In 2014-15, [Midtjylland] were the only team in the league to crush this particular phase of the game, scoring 25 goals, while three other teams barely cracked ten”, wrote Ted Knutson, who served as Head of Player Analytics at the club during this period. “Three years later, eleven of fourteen teams were in double digits.”

Ok, so one super nerdy team in Denmark won the league by scoring loads of set piece goals, and then everyone else copied. But what does that mean for open play, you might ask? Knutson says he always believed you could simply score more goals by adding good set pieces, while his colleague Marek Kwiatkowski wondered if it might cause trade-offs elsewhere, simply redistributing the goals and ultimately reducing the open play excitement. As of Knutson’s article in summer 2018, the goals just went up.

“Set piece goals per game have gone up by [0.2 goals per game], while overall scoring is up [0.5 goals per game]. This lends weight to the bigger pie hypothesis, and not merely different sized pieces.”

About a year later, Knutson’s company StatsBomb (since sold to Hudl) produced a report for the Danish league organisation into how the Danish Superliga compares to the English Premier League and the German Bundesliga. StatsBomb again found that while set piece goals increased significantly, open play scoring also went up, mirroring numbers from the Premier League (Denmark is in red, England in blue and Germany in yellow).

I do quibble a little with these findings in that the 2014-15 Danish Superliga season was, in itself, unusually low scoring. The rise in set piece goals happened alongside a return to pre-14/15 scoring levels in Denmark. Since this information was published, goals per game declined in Denmark for a couple of years before rising again this season and last. I don’t know why any of this is happening, but it’s interesting, and the overall picture is definitely more complicated than “set pieces go brrr”.

But I think we can see something important from Denmark: you don’t have to stop attacking in open play just because you’re scoring more from set pieces. That is a choice, and it might not even be the optimal one.

But it’s one that Premier League clubs are making. As Scott Willis showed recently, 19 of the 20 teams are creating fewer expected goals from open play this season compared to last. The entire league has just started playing less football, almost overnight. Managers might be following the data on set pieces, but they’re not particularly analytics-driven otherwise. Mikel Arteta, Pep Guardiola and the rest don’t play a certain style of football because anything in the data told them to. They do it because that’s what they believe in, based on who knows what. Man City’s number crunchers could produce reams of data saying that the team should completely change their style of play. What do you think the reaction would be if some lowly analyst knocks on Guardiola’s door and tells him he’s completely wrong about football because the numbers said so? You and I both know that analyst would be finding a new job tomorrow. Managers are taking fewer risks in open play not because the data says so, but because they believe in it.

(Ruben AmorIN? I kid.)

Perhaps teams can optimise for set pieces and still score lots of goals from open play. They might get worse at both attacking and defending in open play if they spend a lot more time on the training ground drilling set pieces. But I don’t personally think it can be isolated entirely. Clubs will presumably look to sign players better in the air to both attack and defend set plays. If corners and throw-ins are so valuable, teams might start actively trying to win them. And what could that look like? Perhaps they will look to get the ball wider more often (the StatsBomb report did note that more chances were created in wide areas in Denmark). That might mean using wingers who “get chalk on their boots” and play on the same side as their dominant foot. If the ball is going wide more often, teams might see less use for extra central midfielders and players who can thread a pass through the middle of the pitch. And if it’s going wide so often, perhaps it will be a good idea to have another striker in the box, getting on the end of things. Maybe the old-fashioned British 4-4-2 is the system more optimised for a set piece-heavy sport.

Skinny jeans, flared jeans.

That’s a complete guess on my part. Maybe we’ll see football change any number of ways. The point is it will change, for any number of reasons. Personally, I don’t like the rise of these set-piece goals because I don’t really enjoy watching them. It’s not the football I’m here to see. But it’s going to cause all sorts of responses and changes we can’t predict. Let’s check in sometime later and see how teams are adapting to the meat wall, yeah?

Yeah.

Welcome to another one of these retrospectives, on teams that were widely expected to be serious contenders in previous tournaments but, for whatever reason, it just didn’t happen at all. What went wrong? What are the key takeaways? Can we learn important things about how sides should approach the World Cup? I think these failures should tell us just as much as the success stories.

Content warning: brief mention of sexual assault

This was supposed to be easy.

There’s always going to be a great romance about Brazil at the World Cup, even when they don’t deliver. They were short of their best in the 1970s and ‘80s, but it didn’t really change the way the world looked at them. Brazil are the best, and they maintain this by playing the most entertaining and carefree style of football. Or so people say.

The second great era of the Seleçao wasn’t quite so flamboyant. Brazil ended a 24-year wait to win the World Cup in 1994 by getting more solid. The manager, Carlos Alberto Parreira, was a pragmatist who played a compact 4-4-2 shape built around moments rather than continued spectacle. As noted brilliant football writer Grace Robertson put it a few years ago:

“24 years after that golden run of three World Cup wins in four tournaments, this return to the top arguably set the template for Brazil going forward. They would be physical and disciplined in midfield, rely on flair only in the final third, and have the solidity to compete with anyone. It was elements of good football built to win. Sometimes that would work tremendously well. Other times it would be a disaster. But right there in California in 1994, it had rebooted the Seleção. Brazil were back and certainly deserved their title.”

1994 was the first time Brazil picked a squad with around half playing their club football outside their native country. This trend would obviously continue to the point where we just assume an entirely Europe-based starting eleven. This made them feel less “exotic” to those of us from outside South America, but it worked. Brazil were looking more and more like a European side, and they were getting results. The ‘94 win was followed by a final defeat in 1998, but they were back on top in 2002. That version played much better football than the gritty side from ‘94. The 3-4-3 shape got Roberto Carlos and Cafu high up the pitch in wide areas, creating more space for a delightful front three of Ronaldinho, Rivaldo and Ronaldo. They were just the best.

Luiz Felipe Scolari resigned after the victory, wanting to try his hand at managing a European team. Not to worry. Brazil played it safe by re-appointing Parreira, with all his experience in winning a World Cup. They had a proven formula. You could bet your house on Brazil turning up in Germany that summer.

Parreira knew the team he wanted. “The side he built had Ronaldinho in the forward line alongside Ronaldo, Kaka operating behind them and a midfield trio of Juninho on the right, Emerson holding the fort and Ze Roberto on the left”, wrote Tim Vickery in 2006. This was an efficient side, but not a popular one. As time went on, Parreira couldn’t ignore Adriano, the Inter Milan striker deemed the next big thing in Brazilian football. A front three became a front four, which meant an altogether different style of football. The side got faster and more direct. "Every time you lose the ball, Brazil kill you”, said Argentina manager José Pékerman after losing to Parreira’s side. “They are not what people think. They don't dominate you. They're a counter-attacking team.”

That was the side that breezed through South American qualification, especially notable after Brazil struggled so much to qualify in 2002. Brazil had the best players. They had the manager with his head screwed on. They were the whole world’s favourites. Everything should work out fine, right?

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“I’ve heard people saying, “We need Michael to play to keep the ball”. However, when I did play, these same people were saying all I do is pass sideways. They demand eye-catching actions and moan when you keep the ball for a spell because ‘it’s not the English way’. We played in straight lines over the years — 4-4-2 with no fluidity — and found it very difficult to control games in possession.”

— Michael Carrick, on his time in the England national team

Michael Carrick was always different. He was the exception that proved the rule.

For Alex Ferguson, he solved a long-running tactical issue. Manchester United won the treble in 1999 playing a classically British 4-4-2 system, making them surely the last great side to employ that version of those tactics. Things changed straight away after that. They had four excellent midfielders in David Beckham, Roy Keane, Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs, but European sides were putting a third man in the middle and outnumbering United in Champions League knockout ties. Ferguson accepted his team had to change in 2001, when he spent big on Juan Sebastián Verón and started playing Scholes or Giggs as a number ten behind Ruud van Nistelrooy.

That didn’t work, partly because Verón didn’t adapt to United and partly because the other players didn’t adapt to Verón. He was sold two years later, but the problem didn’t go away. It got worse because it wasn’t just European clubs doing it anymore. Chelsea, under José Mourinho, won back-to-back Premier League titles, flummoxing every British manager with the radical continental tactic of playing a 4-3-3. Yes, this is literally what happened. It wasn’t this country’s finest hour. Ferguson decided he needed a different sort of central midfielder, someone who could pass the ball and dictate tempo without being the wrong side of 30. So he signed Carrick.

This was, by any measure, a brilliant signing. United won the Premier League for the next three seasons in a row, with Carrick starting regularly. They lifted the Champions League in 2007/08, as Carrick started 11 of 13 games in that tournament, including every match from the quarter finals onwards. Carrick was a huge part of that team’s success.

Carrick was, famously, beloved by some big names. Pep Guardiola called him “one of the best holding midfielders I've ever seen in my life by far”. "I've always seen myself in him”, said Xabi Alonso. “He could play in the Spain national team”. That was felt internally. “The team-mates around him had huge appreciation for him”, according to Gary Neville. “He made everybody play better”. But it was not felt by the general public. “Even amongst my friends and even when we were winning leagues”, Neville claimed, “there were challenges to convince people about how good a player Michael was, and how important he was to the team”.

Carrick was, to the median British football fan in the late 2000s and early 2010s, “shite”. He didn’t run. He didn’t tackle. He didn’t score or assist goals. He just passed the ball sideways. Fans didn’t really understand what a player like that was adding to a team. We talk about him today in conversation with Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard, but you’d have been laughed out of the pub for saying so at the time. A lot of United fans preferred Darren Fletcher or even Anderson. At least they could run. This country is not programmed to value someone who gains value for the team by passing the ball and making quiet interceptions. Carrick felt lab-built to do everything we don’t value.

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Fabio Capello had a problem.

His England team had looked nowhere near good enough at the 2010 World Cup. After being hired to be the great saviour of English football, he was suddenly lucky to stay in the job. The Three Lions were short in many areas, but compared to champions Spain, it really stood out how poor they were at keeping hold of possession in midfield. They seemed to lack that sort of technical passer in the middle to keep things ticking over. They needed to get a little more Spanish.

The answer, as it seemed, was right there. Everton midfielder Mikel Arteta was impressing in the Premier League with exactly those qualities. Though he was born in San Sebastián, he had lived in the country long enough to earn a UK passport and, theoretically, play for England. Capello was reportedly interested, as was the player. “I would have done it”, Arteta said many years later. “I feel very proud about it.

“I look English, I’ve been here so long. I’ll tell you right now, the feeling I have, for me this is like home. I’ve been here for 22 years.”

As it was, Arteta had been capped by Spain at Under-16 to Under-21 level. This in itself does not stop a senior player from switching countries, but these appearances came long before he was eligible for England, which FIFA states is reason to deny him the right to switch. Arteta never did get the chance to play at senior international level.

No English manager has ever won the Premier League. The way things are going, that doesn’t look likely to change any time soon. Unless.

English football likes to brand itself as “fast”, “intense”, and even “physical”. There is some truth to that, but if we’re being honest, it’s not really a cohesive identity anymore. If you watch the Bundesliga, La Liga or Serie A, you can see plenty of distinctly German, Spanish or Italian football. Those leagues are dominated by managers native to said countries, who share a certain tactical identity that has been shaped by a national “way of playing”. The same can’t be said in England. Most managers are hired from abroad, and even the few domestic coaches aren’t particularly wed to a philosophy. Other than nationality, there is nothing particularly linking the way Sean Dyche, Eddie Howe and Scott Parker play football. It’s a mish-mash. The Premier League’s strength has been exactly that. It has outperformed other leagues by importing the best talent and being open to all sorts of different ideas. As strange as it sounds, this isn’t as new as you might think.

Before England poached top talent from continental Europe, it did so from another foreign land: Scotland. Nine managers have won the English top flight at least four times. Of those nine, five (Alex Ferguson, George Ramsay, Matt Busby, Frank Watt and Kenny Dalglish) are Scots. One other is Catalan (take a guess which one). That leaves just three Englishmen to achieve the feat: Bob Paisley, Tom Watson and Herbert Chapman. Of the three, Paisley is the only one to win after the Second World War, and he was arguably building on the success of another Scot, Bill Shankly. Scots have consistently shaped the way the English play football.

It was in Scotland where the short passing game was first celebrated, while in England the “manly” way to play was to keep your head down and dribble. Scotland was the engine for ideas in the early history of football, so it made perfect sense that the country would develop a strong tradition of managers, of which many of the best would move south.

Alex McLeish is not one of the best. But he had his eye on the ball when he signed Arteta at Rangers in 2002. At this point, Arteta had spent his career at Barcelona (failing to reach the first team) and Paris Saint-Germain. Scottish football might’ve been a shock to the system, but it’s one he adapted to well before heading back to Spain to sign for Real Sociedad. That lasted six months before another Scot, David Moyes, brought him to the Premier League.

Moyes, as you know, has his way of playing. Arteta was a pivote in Spain, playing as a passer to build play just in front of the back four. Moyes, however, used him as the more creative central midfielder next to a destroyer. Everton were compact and disciplined, playing two banks of four and prizing solidity above all else. Training sessions must have involved a lot of work on team shape without the ball. They weren’t a long ball team to the extent of Sam Allardyce or Tony Pulis’ sides, but they were direct and physical. Arteta was the exception, the spark of variety in a team with Tim Cahill and Marouane Fellaini.

Moyes’ first spell at Everton was all about the long, hard grind of working on predictable patterns in training, with and without the ball. It was tough, it was boring, and it was unglamorous, but it gradually and consistently improved the team.

Everton didn’t have the money to keep their best players forever, so Arteta was sold to Arsenal in 2011. This was a very different football club under a very different manager. Moyes was about discipline and structure in every sense, on and off the pitch. Arsène Wenger, conversely, is the most laissez-faire manager I can remember seeing at the very top.

During his first season at the Emirates, he played as the more creative midfielder in a double pivot next to Alexandre Song. 12 months later, Song left for Barcelona, and Arteta now returned to his pivote role, frequently playing as the more reserved midfielder next to Aaron Ramsey or Jack Wilshere. This really summed up the differences in priorities: Arteta’s job was to distribute the ball to players better than him in the final third. He wasn’t the source of variety anymore. He was at the expected standard in terms of technical ability, passing it to real wizards like Santi Cazorla and Mesut Özil.

Arteta played regularly for three seasons at Arsenal, eventually becoming the club captain but playing much less in his final two years before retiring in 2016. Everyone expected him to go into management at some point, and he landed the dream apprenticeship as Pep Guardiola’s assistant at Manchester City.

There was a time when most of us thought of Wenger and Guardiola as being fairly similar. They both liked to play good football built around a short passing game. It’s funny how much the dividing lines have changed, because now they almost feel like polar opposites. Whereas Wenger focused on building an environment where players could express themselves with freedom on the pitch, Guardiola is an obsessive when it comes to structure, with and without the ball.

Arteta spent time at La Masia learning the basics of Barcelona’s positional play, but I don’t think that’s why Guardiola hired him. Guardiola doesn’t need help with that because he’s already the world’s number one expert at coaching it. But I think what Guardiola did need is someone who had lived in both worlds, who understood positional play and the Premier League. Guardiola often mentions the anecdote that Xabi Alonso (a player of his at Bayern) told him that he’d have to adapt to defending second balls in England, something he’d never previously given much thought. Arteta had thought about second balls.

And so he has demonstrated at Arsenal. There are absolutely elements of positional play in Arteta’s football. I don’t think we can doubt that a lot of the structure comes from there. At the same time, everyone knows how much Arsenal use set pieces. No one in Spain does that. Here’s a fun graph from friend of the newsletter Michael Caley, looking at the percentage of goals scored from set pieces, by individual season in each of Europe’s top five leagues. This year’s Premier League campaign leads the way. La Liga has just one of the top 20 places, from a season that took place over a decade ago.

I don’t want to suggest that Spanish football is exciting and technical while English football is physical and boring, because I don’t think that’s true. “Positional play” is essentially a Dutch idea reinterpreted as part of a Catalan natonalist project. It’s not really that “Spanish”. Spain has more than its fair share of reactive managers, focusing more on countering the opposition than developing their own game. Unai Emery is probably the best practitioner of this style right now. I’ve always felt that the typical Spanish manager is less like Guardiola and more like Rafa Benítez.

But it’s different to the British version. Anyone who watched Merseyside football in the 2000s could tell you that. In words that would later haunt him, Benítez called Everton a “small club” in 2007, after Moyes’ side successfully earned a 0-0 draw by parking the bus at Anfield. The Spanish version of this would probably be to stifle the opposition by playing a little higher up the pitch, making more fouls to break up the play, focusing a lot less on long balls and set pieces. It’s a different flavour of vomit. When Arteta’s Arsenal produce some of the worst 1-0 wins you’ve ever watched, they do it the British way.

Arteta might be the ultimate product of the Premier League. He’s a Basque-born former player who learned a mix of Scottish and Catalan ideas about football while in England. It could only happen here. Arteta is the result of a footballing culture more cosmopolitan than elsewhere. English football has been in an identity crisis for a long time now, ever since pundits on TV started complaining about the number of foreign players and managers. But what if this is who we are now? What if Arteta, an immigrant long settled in the country, best represents what the Premier League is about?

I can’t think of a single more “Premier League” manager than him. And for that, maybe he deserves to win the title this season.

elbeastogrande asks…

“How should we be thinking about depth as a roster variable these days? Pep Guardiola famously wanted a small squad. Is that just done because of where the meta is on pressing and athletic expenditure in every game?”

Because I’m the most annoyingly argumentative person on the planet and like to start answering any question I’m asked by challenging the premise, let’s find out if Guardiola has actually changed the way he manages his squad. He can talk about anything, but what he does should be more revealing.

Here are the number of outfielders who have played at least 20% of Man City’s league minutes, per season, since Pep arrived:

25/26: 14 (so far)

24/25: 17

23/24: 16

22/23: 17

21/22: 17

20/21: 18

19/20: 19

18/19: 19

17/18: 16

16/17: 17

To quote the beloved (by almost no one other than me) HBO series Westworld, it doesn’t look like anything to me.

That matches the man’s words. “I said to the club I don't want that [a bigger squad]”, Guardiola told us in May 2025. “I don't want to leave five or six players in the freezer. I don't want that. I will quit. Make a shorter squad, I will stay.”

City have some injury problems at the moment, with Guardiola even talking about how they’re running thin and having to make do. Someone like Nathan Aké might have been allowed to leave this month with a fully fit squad, but as it stands, City probably twist his arm and make him see out the season. There’s probably a real argument that squads do need to get bigger for a few reasons.

Firstly, the game has become more physically demanding. While footballers aren’t playing more minutes or even covering more ground, they’re sprinting more than they used to. I don’t need to tell anyone that a 100 metre sprint is a lot more exhausting than a 100 metre jog. I do not doubt that clubs are now much more advanced in terms of fitness and sports science, helping their players exert more energy on the pitch. But a substitute is always going to sprint more in the last 20 minutes of a game than someone who started. If the modern game is about sprinting, that’s a useful card to play.

Teams also have five substitutions to play with. I don’t think most managers have adjusted to this rule change. It’s a huge advantage to richer clubs with the ability to bring on quality players from the bench, and it’s just not being used. Teams near the top of the table seem to be making fewer changes, presumably because the manager thinks “it’s going well, so we’ll leave it as it is”. I think this will seem hopelessly naive in 20 years. Make more subs!

And third, while the data footballers are not playing more minutes overall, any increases in workload are heavily concentrated towards teams at the top of the table. Expanding the Champions League only impacts clubs playing in it. City typically go on deep cup runs, and while the Club World Cup might be a minor impact on football as a whole, I’d bet Guardiola’s squad felt the impact of those extra games.

So, in conclusion, yes, I think we should consider it an important variable in an ideal world. But if managers aren’t going to utilise it, then it causes more trouble than it’s worth.

Brian asks…

“How would you resolve the ongoing problems at Man U. Mid table, manager merry go round and reducing revenues”

I would start with the question: Who is in charge?

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