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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Happy New Year, everyone! Today, we’re starting a brand new series that will run occasionally in the run up to the World Cup this summer. It’s going to be looking at 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. The first one, on France in 2002, is free to read. Subsequent editions will be paywalled.

France were hot as shit heading into the 2002 World Cup.

For the second time ever, a single country became the reigning champions of both the World Cup and their continent’s major trophy. France lifted the World Cup trophy on their home soil in 1998 (which I wrote about previously), then really established a new hierarchy by winning Euro 2000 in Belgium and the Netherlands (not exactly the longest trek, yes).

Manager Aimé Jacquet stepped down after the 98 victory to be replaced by his assistant, Roger Lemerre. Unsurprisingly, Lemerre largely stuck by Jacquet’s players in 2000 with pretty minor tweaks. All of the starting eleven that won the Euro 2000 final – Fabien Barthez, Lilian Thuram, Marcel Desailly, Laurent Blanc, Bixente Lizarazu, Didier Deschamps, Patrick Vieira, Youri Djorkaeff, Zinedine Zidane, Thierry Henry and Christophe Dugarry – started at least once at the ‘98 World Cup. It’s not like Lemerre didn’t have options. David Trezeguet and Sylvain Wiltord were surely more exciting attackers than Dugarry by this point. In fairness, Lemerre had largely used Nicolas Anelka upfront during the tournament, but poor form meant he opted for a tried-and-trusted Dugarry for the final. The system worked. France won while playing better football than they had at the World Cup two years earlier. They added the Confederations Cup in 2001 with a heavily rotated squad, cementing their status on top of the world.

All of this led to Lemerre making an understandable but catastrophic error in 2002: he stuck with the players who had won in the past, ignoring the sands of time. I think this will be a familiar theme in the series as we go through teams that messed up.

Barthez was playing for Manchester United by 2002 and, while his form wasn’t quite perfect, he was pretty unanimously France’s number one goalkeeper at age 30. The news gets worse from here, as Lemerre stuck with a back four of Thuram, Desailly, Frank Leboeuf (long a deputy for the now-retired Blanc) and Lizarazu. Thuram, 30, was starting regularly for Serie A title-winning Juventus, so it’s hard to argue too much with him on paper. Desailly was captain but, at 33 years old, Chelsea were already phasing him out for John Terry and William Gallas (who didn’t even make the French squad). That’s at least better than Leboeuf, 34, who Chelsea had sold to Marseille a year earlier. Lizarazu was still an important player for Bayern at age 32, but that’s an entire back four over thirty.

Deschamps, arguably France’s best performer in ‘98, did his country a huge favour in that he had already retired from football by 2002, forcing Lemerre to freshen up the midfield. At age 25, Vieira was considered one of the best players in the Premier League, making him an easy pick. Emmanuel Petit, 31, had spent three years forming an excellent partnership with Vieira at Arsenal, even if he left the Gunners in 2000 and now meant another older player in the side.

When you think about France in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, chances are the first player who comes to mind is Zidane. He was a national icon going way beyond football in France. He set a new record for the most expensive player in history in 2001, when hotshot Florentino Pérez made him a centrepiece of the galácticos project at Real Madrid. At Euro 2000, he delivered on the hype, dominating the tournament with a much better performance than his inconsistent ‘98 World Cup. He was everything, and he was injured in a warm-up match. Zidane still made the squad, but he would be unavailable for the first two games, forcing a rethink. An obvious understudy, Robert Pires, also missed the tournament through injury.

Lemerre did exactly what you’d expect him to do and started a trusted veteran, Djorkaeff, at number ten. Djorkaeff obviously had a great career, but he was 34 years old and playing for Sam Allardyce’s Bolton Wanderers. It is what it is.

That’s the “slow” part of the team out of the way. Now we can talk about the “fast” part. Wiltord, 28, preferred to play upfront but was very accustomed to starting on the right wing for Arsenal, which made him an easy pick here. At age 24, Henry had come into his ludicrous peak for Arsenal and was probably the best player in the squad at this time (yes, even including a fully fit Zidane, I said what I said). He was the focal point for everything at Arsenal, playing as the lone striker but with the freedom to drift wide.

That could never happen with France because of Trezeguet, also 24, who was looking electric upfront for Juventus. Matching their ages, each had scored 24 goals in the Premier League and Serie A that season. It’s a very nice problem to have, but fitting them in together was always going to be a puzzle. For everything else they had, France rarely produced “proper” wingers in this era, relying more on converted forwards and creative midfielders. There wasn’t a quality left winger in this squad, which means Henry paid for his versatility. He started out wide while Trezeguet got the plum spot as the striker. The shape of the team was a pretty conventional 4-2-3-1 without too many complications.

They were facing Senegal in their opening game. This was always going to be politically charged as Senegal is, after all, a former French colony. But it was particularly resonant in this moment. The French won the previous World Cup with a team celebrated for its ethnic diversity. “Black, Blanc, Beur” (Black, White, Arab) became a slogan coined to celebrate these players from different backgrounds all coming together to produce something truly “French”. It’s one thing to celebrate this in the context of French national identity, but it’s another to look at it through the lens of a country France once colonised. There were a lot of players developed in France with ties to West African nations. Desailly, for example, was born in Ghana before moving to Northern France at age four.

More relevant for this game would be Vieira, Senegal-born but France-raised. This kind of story would actually be much more common in the opposing camp. All but two of Senegal’s squad played their club football in France. Suddenly, France’s diverse inclusion became a colonialist sneer: Senegal could be dismissed as “France B”. Surely any of these players would’ve followed Vieira’s path to Les Bleus had they been “good enough” for France. In truth, most of the Senegal squad moved to Europe in their teenage years, and I have no idea how many would’ve theoretically been eligible to play for the French. But the narrative was set. People from all of France’s former colonies are welcome and embraced, so long as they advance the interests of the white Frenchman. The Senegal players were the “bad” immigrants, not respecting the proper order of how things simply must be. Are they not grateful or all that France has done to for them!?

Senegal’s strategy was obvious from the start: sit back, let France have the ball, then get El Hadji Diouf running at those older defenders on the counter. They’d very frequently have everyone but Diouf in their own half, behind the ball. They exposed the threat pretty early on, when Diouf caught Lizarazu unaware to blitz past him, dragging Desailly wide before beating him on the dribble and putting in a cross for a decent chance. It might be hard to believe in light of his later career, but at 21 years old, Diouf was electric in this Senegal team, and exactly the type of attacker those French defenders didn’t want to face.

It shouldn’t have been this easy to frustrate France with a low block, but their lineup felt almost lab-built to suffer here. As wingers go, Henry and Wiltord weren’t really the type to get chalk on their boots and put crosses in. They wanted to run in behind. That made it easy for Senegal to stay deep and compact, leaving all the space out wide. Henry especially struggled with this, as the positions he took up were too narrow to cause any problems (understandable, considering how he played for Arsenal at the time). This meant both full backs had to push higher up the pitch to offer genuine width, making France easier to expose on the break. Honestly, Senegal weren’t brilliant at this. There were a few moments where they got undone by poor organisation, and France had a chance straight down the middle. It just really spoke to a lack of ideas that the French couldn’t make this happen more often.

And then, half an hour in, the moment. Djorkaeff is too casual on the ball trying to do some clever but useless trick or something on the halfway line, allowing Senegal left back Omar Daf to win the ball off him.

Daf then passes it straight to Diouf attacking France’s right side. Thuram has been caught up the pitch, forcing Leboeuf to come wide and leaving France looking pretty open.

Diouf dribbles past Leboeuf with ease, but he then makes a poor decision, going towards the byline instead of cutting inside and getting a 1-v-1 with Barthez. As it was, he had to put a cross in for one Senegal player against six Frenchmen.

I can’t quite get a good image for this, but Diouf puts in a scruffy ball that France do a dreadful job of defending. Petit gets in the way of the cross and sends it straight to Barthez, who spills it only for Papa Bouba Diop to get a tap in. It’s one thing to get undone by pace. It’s quite another for defenders with this much experience to fail at the basic task of stopping one man in their own box.

If you’ve watched literally any football in your life, you can guess what happened next. Senegal sat even deeper to protect their lead, while France threw more and more at it to try and get a goal. But I’m not sure France had a great idea for how to do this. Djorkaeff came off for Dugarry after an hour, with Lemerre going for the old “throw on another striker” trick that definitely always works. Dugarry played on the left, with Henry now partnering Trezeguet upfront in a 4-4-2. It really speaks to how short France were of genuine wide players that this was the only move to get Henry in the box. He came close to producing one of those moments of magic he so often delivered at Arsenal in this era when he hit the bar from outside the box, but it wasn’t quite enough. Henry was clearly the team’s biggest threat once moved upfront. It suddenly felt like even more of a waste that he started on the left.

France were better in the second half. The change of shape, as well as tiring Senegalese legs, helped them find more space. I don’t think Senegal were particularly impressive here. Their approach was pretty obvious, but they weren’t as defensively organised as they could be. France probably could’ve found an equaliser in the second half, though I don’t think this was a huge injustice. They didn’t have the solutions. The team’s lack of genuine width was a huge problem that Senegal pretty easily exploited.

Lemerre’s last throw of the dice was to bring on Djibril Cissé for Wiltord. I don’t quite understand the thinking here beyond “Cissé scored lots of goals this season”. He’s not really suited to stretching the play as a winger, and there were already three natural strikers on the pitch. Cissé ended up taking positions that were too narrow for what France needed, and he didn’t have any impact in his ten minutes on the pitch. That was that. Senegal got their famous win, and as much as I love to be a contrarian, France didn’t do enough to argue it was unfair.

Lemerre made just one change for the second match against Uruguay: Johan Micoud in for Djorkaeff. I don’t think anyone could argue with that, but it seemed a bit minimal. I would’ve at least changed the back four a little bit, but Lemerre clearly disagreed. The shape and approach was unchanged. Uruguay had a tough run of qualifying for this World Cup, having to go through the intercontinental play-off after just scraping fifth place in the South American qualification. They finished level on points with sixth-placed Colombia, needing to rely on goal difference. For a fan of European club football, Uruguay’s biggest star at the time was Álvaro Recoba, the number ten then of Inter Milan aged 26. The most familiar name to modern eyes, Diego Forlán, had not yet established himself and sat on the bench.

Leboeuf picked up an injury after 16 minutes to be replaced by Vincent Candela, a natural right back forcing Thuram to move to his preferred (but less often seen) centre back spot. I don’t know why Candela didn’t just start after Leboeuf’s stinker against Senegal. The start of the game was really open, with chances for both teams and neither system able to really shut down the opponent. Uruguay left a lot more space in behind for France to exploit than Senegal did.

Henry tried to win the ball back to launch a fast counter after 24 minutes, but did so with the sort of “striker who doesn’t know how to tackle” challenge. He flew in on Marcelo Romero and got himself a straight red card. That was his World Cup finished, not that he knew it at the time. France, meanwhile, were already coming under pressure from Uruguay’s attack. Unsurprisingly, Micoud moved to the left and France played a 4-4-1 shape.

France’s overall approach didn’t really change that much with ten men. They still wanted to win the game and tried to do so. Uruguay played a narrow system and dominated central areas with their intricate build-up play, whereas France used width and long balls up to Trezeguet. Uruguay really started to exert control on the game during the second half, but France still had real chances. It was a very entertaining 0-0, but one that France should’ve been pleased to get out of alive. Henry was an idiot for getting sent off, but otherwise I don’t think France were poor with ten men against a good side.

They needed to beat Denmark and overturn a goal difference deficit, while also hoping the other game went their way. Denmark had beaten Uruguay before drawing against Senegal. This was not a vintage Danish team, obvious to everyone after an abysmal showing at Euro 2000. A front three of Dennis Rommedahl, Martin Jørgensen and Jon Dahl Tomasson could cause problems, but France were obviously the more talented side. A draw would’ve been enough to see Denmark qualify.

It would take a lot to get France into the knockouts. But anything was possible. France could dream. They could dream because Zidane was back.

Leboeuf presumably still wasn’t fit enough to play, so Thuram continued at centre back with Candela at right back. Claude Makélélé replaced Petit in midfield. This was because Petit picked up a suspension from consecutive yellows, and yet I wonder why a player of Makélélé’s quality wasn’t starting the whole time. Henry was now suspended, so makeshift winger Dugarry played on the left. Zidane, obviously, took over from Micoud in the number ten role. France were otherwise as they were

France started pretty well. Zidane helped early on, as the side had a much better way of progressing the ball through the midfield. But it was actually a counter attack, when Denmark sloppily gave the ball away, that saw Wiltord through on goal before sending the side’s best chance of the tournament so far straight into the goalkeeper’s hands. Zidane then miscontrolled a brilliant chance in the box after Vieira played a really good clipped ball over the top. This was better, though. This felt like a real football team.

And then.

Denmark put a long throw in France’s box that Vieira heads “away”, before it lands straight back into danger and he has to clear it with his feet. He makes a terrible clearance straight to a Denmark shirt on the edge of the box. Denmark then float in a cross to Rommedahl, who at the back post just near a completely unaware Candela. Again, you expect this team to get undone by speedy forwards. You don’t expect them to fail at basic defensive jobs like a full back switching off.

And yet France kept playing good stuff. They created more chances in the first half than the previous two games combined. This was fluid, entertaining stuff. Zidane, and a lack of Henry, gave the team a much better balance. I don’t agree at all with the view that he looked short of match fitness here. He was the best player on the pitch in the first 45 minutes. The ball just didn’t cross the line.

Dugarry picked up a knock and Lemerre, with a sense of “fucking hell, we need a goal here”, brought on Cissé. I understand the panic, but Cissé recreates the same tactical problems Henry caused in previous games, except with a significantly worse player. But maybe I’m just seeing Cissé’s subsequent career and not the promising youngster in 2002. I still think it would’ve tactically made more sense to bring on Micoud.

France had played really good attacking football in this game. They were clearly the better side throughout. And yet that still meant nothing because football loves a punchline. They just got undone so easily by a pass straight through the heart of the team from Thomas Gravesen to Jesper Grønkjær, who squares it pretty easily for Tomasson to score a tap in. France created so many good chances here but they could get undone this simply. They admirably kept trying to score a goal, but it was over. France were going home.

I don’t think France were quite as poor as “three games, one point, zero goals”, but they can’t really argue they deserved to get out of this group. As far as I’m concerned, there were two main issues here.

The first is injuries. Zidane made the whole attack click so much better in the third game and would’ve obviously been a huge asset against Senegal and Uruguay. The attack needed someone who could slow down the play instead of wanting to run in behind at pace. Pires would’ve also brought this, along with the added benefit of not having to play Henry on the left (even as that meant dropping one of him or Trezeguet). The side was just unbalanced in attack.

The second, and less forgiveable, issue was trusting in the old guard. Neither Leboeuf nor Desailly should’ve been starting games at this point. Mikaël Silvestre was not a defender of their quality, but he could run, and that alone would’ve solved issues were he next to Thuram at the heart of defence. Starting Djorkaeff against Senegal was silly. I know it’s hard to perform that cultural reset, to say “thanks for everything you’ve done, but it’s time to move on”. I’m pretty sure that’s going to come up again in this series.

Lemerre’s successor, Jacques Santini, didn’t fare that much better at Euro 2004. He played an interesting system with Zidane narrow on the left and Henry partnering Trezeguet in a sort of 4-4-2. Ideas were there, but they came unstuck against that Greece team man-marking their way to glory. Things were better in 2006, when enough fresh faces helped the veterans reach the World Cup final before Zidane… you know. It happens.

Next time: Brazil, 2006 World Cup

Yes, I am about to talk a whole lot about politics here. Proceed at your own risk.

Content warning: sexual assault, homophobia, transphobia, racist abuse

Last month, the streaming service Paramount+ won the rights to broadcast most Champions League matches in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Germany, reportedly spending quite a bit more than the previous rights holders to do this.

While Paramount hasn’t dipped its toes in European football broadcasting before, this isn’t the most shocking news in the world, on the face of it. Paramount+ already broadcasts the Champions League in the United States, and we’re pretty used to new players entering the market on this side of the Atlantic, which usually means streamers these days.

But Paramount weren’t exactly spending this money two years ago. The company was on the verge of financial ruin, debt-ridden and miles behind its competitors. The Redstone family, which held a majority of voting rights at the company, was desperate for a seller, with most expecting Paramount to get strip mined for parts under a new owner. As it turned out, Paramount got bought by film producer David Ellison and merged with his existing company Skydance Media, a tiny player compared to one of the most famous studios in Hollywood.

Ellison wasn’t able to put together a bid for Paramount through his own hard work and reputation. He’s the son of Larry Ellison, founder of software company Oracle and one of the top five richest men in the world. Larry has been busy recently. A Republican Party donor since 2016 who may or may not deny that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, has been angling to position himself as a powerful player in media as a close ally of Donald Trump.

It hasn’t, in truth, been going very well, with Trump not lifting a finger to stop Netflix’s rival bid to take over Warner Bros, a company the Ellisons covet. There was slightly “better” news elsewhere, as Oracle became part of the new, administration-approved, ownership structure of TikTok’s US operations. But the Ellison strategy continues at Paramount: prioritise making Trump happy over all else, since this is now the way you make it in America.

With the money involved in its Champions League various rights deals, Paramount is now probably UEFA’s single most valuable commercial partner. They will not want to upset their most important source of income.

That means UEFA, too, must now bend the knee to Trump.

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Hi, I’ve still been pretty sick with the flu, so again, I’m sorry this took so long. I do think I’m getting better even if this cough won’t shift, so the disruption shouldn’t last, hopefully.

The perils of writing an article while the team keeps playing games.

I had a whole argument about how much Chelsea were improving, how they were clearly developing into a more coherent side. Then they go and shit the bed and the narrative completely shifts. Ah, well. At least it gives us some things to talk about. Chelsea are now eight points behind Arsenal at the top of the table, but they continue to be a team with some positives.

We all know how much BlueCo made a mess of things early on after buying the club from Roman Abramovich. Obviously, they’ve spent a decent amount money to fix it, and we’ll get into what that means later on. But on the pitch, they’re pushing high up the Premier League table with the youngest squad (weighted by minutes played) in England’s top flight. That’s exciting.

Their xG difference per game of +0.47 is third best in the league, albeit a fair way off Arsenal and Man City. That’s mainly powered by a very strong attack and a slightly iffy defence (more a story in the xG than the actual goals scored and conceded). This is all, to be honest, pretty similar to last season. Enzo Maresca’s Chelsea have pretty clear strengths and shortcomings at this point, and I don’t think we’re going to see something radically different over time. They’re going to get better or worse based on the players. We saw how much they seemed to fall apart when Maresca heavily rotated against Leeds. So let’s look at how the players have changed this season compared to last, and what difference it’s made.

Levi Colwill played the vast majority of the Blues’ league games last season. This year, he hasn’t kicked a ball yet thanks to an ACL injury. Trevoh Chalobah has been a regular at centre back, with Tosin Adarabioyo and Wesley Fofana each getting minutes next to him. The full backs are unchanged, with Marc Cucurella an ever-present at left back whereas Reece James and Malo Gusto split minutes on the right.

Moisés Caicedo and Enzo Fernández played almost every game together in midfield last season. They’re still playing a lot, but often joined by a third central midfielder, with James finding a new lease of life in a different role. That’s been possible because Cole Palmer, who demands to play at number ten and thus in a shape that makes room for him, keeps picking up injuries. Palmer is finally available again, so we’ll see how that impacts those just behind him.

Wingers Noni Madueke and Jadon Sancho have both now left the club, as have Christopher Nkunku and Nicolas Jackson (albeit on loan). That means Pedro Neto is the only part of Chelsea’s attack to play a lot of games both this season and last. They’ve struggled to find consistency in terms of attacking lineups. João Pedro and Pedro Neto are the ones playing a lot, while Estêvão Willian, Alejandro Garnacho, Jamie Gittens and Liam Delap have played here and there. The good news is that this attack should surely improve once Palmer is at the heart of it.

Depth is definitely a concern right now. Chelsea can barely put out a competent midfield even when all players are fit. Caicedo, James and Fernández clearly need an energetic and reliable alternative to rotate in and out of the side. It’s possible Andrey Santos matures into this player, but even then I still think they’d need someone else, especially if James has to play an extended period at right back.

In the forward line, meanwhile, most are young enough to improve and you maybe don’t want to rock the boat with a marquee senior signing. At the same time, Liam Delap clearly isn’t good enough even when he is fit, which isn’t very often. But they’ve already signed so many players, which brings us to the ever present question.

You can’t talk about Chelsea without talking about finance. Premier League clubs recently voted to replace the existing rules around financial constraints with a “Squad Cost Ratio”, limiting club spending as a percentage of revenue. Assuming Chelsea continue to qualify for European competitions, they would be allowed to spend up to 70% of their revenues on “squad costs” before beginning to break the rules.

As the Swiss Ramble wrote in his inevitably excellent guide to the changes, Chelsea would have breached SCR rules over the previous monitoring period had the rules been in place. The Blues were able to get around the old PSR rules last time by selling assets such as the women’s team, but this doesn’t count for the new rules. “Despite impressive player trading and decent revenue”, he explained, “significant investment in the squad took the Blues’ SCR to 81%, which would be 11% worse than the 70% target”.

Chelsea would have to be all the way at 30% above the target to suffer sporting sanctions, though continual breaches will apparently cause this buffer zone to shrink. BlueCo might be willing to accept paying a few fines in the early years of SCR, but they’re eventually going to have to make sure they’re under the limit. I’ve said this before, but I do, now, think we’re coming to the end of Chelsea’s big spending years. They won’t enter an era of austerity, but it will be more targeted and less “buy all the kids”, I think. None of this would be the worst thing in the world from a sporting perspective.

It… does not beg the question becuase that phrase means something else, but: what is Chelsea’s project now? It’s been about buying up young talent to develop and grow in value, but they have to pivot at some point, right? The logical strategy would be to focus on a smaller number of players a little closer to their peak years, to enhance rather than overhaul what they have. I found Chelsea’s summer really bizarre because they decided not to do this, instead rolling the dice on some newer young players.

I, personally, would target three or four players next summer, in positions like central midfield and upfront, somewhere around the age 23-26 bracket. I’d give Maresca until the end of the season, but if it’s more of the same, look for a manager who can coach a more coherent playing style and really work to improve this existing crop of young talent. I’d be looking at seriously challenging for the league title in 2-3 years, which means focusing on a squad that will start peaking around then. I wouldn’t mess around with more young players and I’d try to trim things in places to better meet financial rules. But I don’t know what BlueCo will do. All of this seems pretty common sense to me. I’m not playing 5D chess like they are. We’ll see what happens.

Stats are from FBRef unless stated otherwise.

At the start of every year, I get very invested in the Oscars.

I’ll try to watch as many of the nominated films as I can. I’ll “stay up” (ok, I’d probably be awake anyway) until the early hours of the morning watching the ceremony. Why do I do this? I don’t really know. I think the Academy voters tend to be pretty poor judges of good films. I get infuriated by the whole thing, year after year, with only some incredibly stale jokes from the TV broadcast to break up the irritation. But what gets me, what really gets under my skin, is when some people think they’re oh so clever for pointing out that the best films never win, therefore the whole awards circuit is a waste of time.

No shit. We’re not here because we think this is an accurate judge of quality. We all know that. In truth, it would be boring if the best films actually won every year. But once in a blue moon, great movies do actually win, and it’s thrilling.

That’s kind of the lens through which I view the Ballon d’Or.

A few weeks ago, Mike Goodman and Michael Caley of the Double Pivot Podcast told me they were doing “nerd based ballon d’or rankings” throughout this season and asked if I wanted to contribute to the conversation. They did a podcast on the subject recently, and I realised I was coming at it from a different place. They’re viewing the contemporary European football landscape from a lifetime of watching American sports and trying to find the players who add the most “value” to a team. Even though I’m pretty sure they have criticism of those awards, they’re trying to bring the framework of US sports’ individual prizes to the Ballon d’Or.

I did not grow up in America and have essentially no idea how any of its most popular sports work. So that’s not really how I’m ever going to think about individual awards here.

The Ballon d’Or wasn’t really the award we know today until fairly recently. Handed out by the magazine France Football, the award was only open to players with a European nationality until 1995. Yes, that would have made Lionel Messi ineligible. It still limited entry to those playing for European clubs until 2007, when it really shaped itself as a “best in the world” honour. Even then, I don’t remember people taking it seriously, especially here in England. No one in his native country cared at the time when Kevin Keegan won the award twice in the 1970s. Michael Owen didn’t particularly seem to care when he won the trophy at the time. Before the internet, at least on these shores, it was an obscurity for football nerds.

The internet probably served as a gateway to the Ballon d’Or’s popularity, only for the Messi/Cristiano Ronaldo rivalry to supercharge things. I guess what I’m saying is that we don’t need an all-important award for the best player of the season. The Oscars at least serve a purpose in that they’re supposed to encourage film studios to make “good” films instead of just crowdpleasing blockbusters. I think footballers already had plenty of incentives to play well. If anything, an individual trophy like this just distracts from the bit that actually matters: helping the team win games.

It’s clearly not what it used to be, but growing up in the UK, the most well-known individual prize across sport was the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award, and that’s sort of my framework here. It’s explicitly an award with “personality” in the title, a title less about “objective value” than who did the best job of capturing the public’s imagination. This is how I’ve come to think about the Ballon d’Or. It’s about the player who most excites people, who does something that drives narrative. It’s a popularity contest that has nothing to do with helping the team win football matches and that’s just fine. It’s not about who actually plays the best football, necessarily. Winning trophies and earning money are rewards enough for that.

Ok, so the Ballon d’Or is an award for the player with the best vibes. So now, way out in November, let’s try and project who might have the best vibes at the end of the season.

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Stats are from Opta Analyst unless stated otherwise

To be honest, Arsenal have been “good enough” for a while now.

They led the league for most of the 2022-23 season before falling short of a Manchester City team that was admittedly better than them. The following year, they legitimately played the best football in England, only for City to finish their chances exceptionally well. Last year, they, like other sides, were below their standards, with Liverpool holding it together well enough to get across the line. Across those three seasons, they’ve been “good enough” that random chance could’ve easily broken towards Arsenal winning a league title. It hasn’t. But maybe it is now.

Liverpool, as we all know, have been a mess this year. City still can’t get Rodri fit, much as I continue to believe he will fix all their problems like the second coming of Christ. But Arsenal? It is November, and they have not conceded a goal since September. Things have been breaking their way recently. You have to be the right mix of good and lucky to win the Premier League. So far, Arsenal have been the best and luckiest of England’s elite clubs.

Arsenal have conceded three goals in ten Premier League games. Three in ten.

Chelsea in 2004/05 currently hold the record for the fewest goals conceded across a whole season, with 15. If Arsenal were to maintain their current pace of 0.3 goals against per game, they’d end the season having conceded just eleven times. The expected goals are a little less astounding, at 0.56 xG against per game. If they were to maintain this rate and start conceding as many as expected from here onwards, Arsenal would end the season short of the record with 19 goals against. They would need a little bit of overperformance to break the record, but that’s why it’s a record. That we’re talking about this is a testament to just how good the Gunners are defensively. They’ve had probably the best defence in Europe over the last couple of seasons, and that’s never been as true as this year.

Arsenal have conceded fewer shots than any other side in England’s top flight (75). At the same time, the quality of shots conceded is also the lowest in the division (0.07 xG/shot). They have the best defence in terms of both quality and quantity, which feels vaguely insane. The way it normally works is that if you want to limit the opponents’ chance quality, you defend a little deeper and end up inviting potshots from range against a low block. And if you want to limit the volume of shots conceded, you push up a little higher and press them, but run the risk of high-quality chances on the counter. But Mikel Arteta has apparently solved defending.

Obviously, that does come at a cost. Football, they say, is a short blanket. “If I cover my head, I uncover my feet, and vice versa”. (Everyone in England credits that phrase to Rafa Benítez, but it’s a common concept in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking football cultures. It just wasn’t known over here before Benítez said it in English.) You only have eleven players on the pitch, and you only have so many hours on the training ground. If you want to be the best defensive side in the world, that usually means pushing fewer players forward, playing less expansive football and, well, getting called “boring” by neutrals.

You know the story at this point. Arsenal have scored 18 Premier League goals this season. 10 of those have been from set pieces, plus two penalties (which are set pieces, yes, but it’s a separate skill, come on now). They are ranked 16th in the “open play goals” table. It’s worth saying that some of this is a bit exaggerated by finishing streaks. Arsenal have scored about three goals more than their xG from set pieces (yes, yes, xG might be wrong there, we’ll get to it later) but have underperformed by about three goals in open play. About 57% of Arsenal’s non-penalty xG is coming from open play this season. It’s not as skewed as the real goals scored, but it’s still a big deal. When it comes to open play xG, Arsenal are the eighth-best team in the Premier League.

So here’s what we know about Arsenal:

1. they have a god-tier defence,

2. their attack in open play is slightly above midtable,

3. but it hasn’t mattered because they’ve been so good at set pieces.

Arsenal have been scoring enough goals this season. None of the big clubs have really been prolific by their standards, but if you’re Arteta, you have to assume they will be at some point. Let’s say that Arsenal’s current goalscoring rate is the bare minimum needed to get this team across the line. More would be nice, duh. But can they keep scoring like this from set plays? Can the open play attack become more fluid?

It’s really hard from the outside to know why the Gunners are scoring so many goals from set pieces and if they can keep it up. The xG models we have are going to be more reliable from open play. Set pieces often come from a lot of “blind spots”, where the models can’t quite see critical information about the chance it’s putting a number on. At the same time, a lot of high-xG shots from set pieces come from weird situations that aren’t totally repeatable. The models we have just aren’t as useful here.

So let’s apply some outside context. Arsenal’s set piece coach Nicolas Jover was hired in the summer of 2021, clearly doing excellent work ever since. But in Jover’s four previous seasons, Arsenal have fairly consistently scored just under a goal every other game from (non-penalty) set pieces. Last year was bang on that trend with 0.45 set piece goals per game (per Sky Sports). This year, it’s 0.9 per game. I can accept he’s doing brilliant work. I can accept Arsenal have tweaked something this season to improve things further. I’m not quite sure they’re twice as good at set pieces as they were last season.

You can disagree but this is my current view: they might win it anyway, to win the title, Arsenal need to at least play like a top four side when attacking in open play.

The easiest way that happens is if things change in the one area Arsenal haven’t been lucky: injuries. We have a few seasons now of consistent injury issues, so I’m open to the idea that Arteta and his staff are partly responsible here. But when your two most consistent attacking players over the last few years have been Bukayo Saka and Martin Ødegaard, they need to stay fit somehow. Saka hasn’t looked his best recently, but I’m open to the idea that he’s been short of his physical peak. Obviously, the hope is that he’ll play his way back into it, so we’ll see. Ødegaard is currently out injured, which isn’t new.

There’s probably an argument that Arteta has decided to focus on set pieces to grind through games knowing the attack isn’t going to be firing on all cylinders. Saka and Ødegaard have only started one game together since August, and it was one where the Norwegian only managed half an hour before getting injured. Yes, the club signed capable deputies in Eberechi Eze and Noni Madueke, but we’re not talking about players of the same callibre here. If Saka and Ødegaard stay fit for most of the season, Arsenal should have a very good attack. But that’s a big if.

The short blanket metaphor is true from the manager’s perspective. Arteta actually used it himself last year. But better players make the blanket longer. If your centre backs aren’t reliable, say, you might have to play more conservatively to protect them. Sign better defenders and you can push up more. On the other hand, if you have brilliant individual attackers, you might not have to collectively throw so many players forward to score a goal, meaning you can better protect the defence.

If Arsenal get their best attackers fit, or they keep scoring so many goals from set pieces, then they can maintain this style that prioritises having the best defence in the world. If that doesn’t happen, Arteta might need to really think about pulling the short blanket up a little bit. I’ll be clear on this: Arsenal are the title favourites right now for a reason. I think they’ve clearly got a better shot at it than anyone else (yes, I know I said City were my pick a few weeks ago, but things change fast!) Nonetheless, these are the choices that define whether Arteta gets his team over the line or not. We’ll see in due course if he chooses right.