To dream the impossible dream...?

Every four years (well, every two years...), Englishmen have to try very hard not to get their hopes up about our chances in the next big international tournament.

But this time, not only do we have a really exceptional crop of young players to choose from, we also seem to have a manager who may know what he's doing....

Top Youtube football analyst Adam Clery puts forward this bold thesis that, quite apart from tactical insight and astute man management, Thomas Tuchel might be unique among recent England managers in having the cojones to leave out some of our starriest players in order to achieve a better balance in the side.

I find it difficult to disagree too much with any of Adam's ideas - because he's a very shrewd observer of the game, and also an irresistibly likeable, down-to-earth chap. I'm kind of 50/50 on this one, though. I approve of the general point (it's exactly what I said when Tuchel first took over, about having the courage to regard no player as a sacred cow); and I'm very excited about the stability Elliot Anderson suddenly seems to be giving our central midfield. But you have to be a little bit wary of getting over-excited about our smooth progression through a particularly puny qualifying group (even teams that have looked vaguely threatening in recent years - Serbia, Albania - suddenly weren't again!!).

And I am not completely convinced about the current personnel - or the the notion of omitting major talents for this to become our regular starting lineup. I'd probably prefer to build for the next 10 years around Palmer and Bellingham (and Saka and Eze...), rather than go with a bunch of slightly less stellar options who 'fit better with Harry Kane' (for this one tournament!). But it's certainly something to think about.

What's DIFFERENT this year?

 Or..... The Rise of the Defenders!!

Yes, the most striking oddity of this season so far in FPL is the predominance of defenders at the top of the player rankings at the moment.

Apart from Haaland, way out in front, Joao Pedro is the only other forward just barely scraping into the Top 15, while the rest of that list is filled out at the lower end by 3 defensive midfielders and a couple of goalkeepers (which is also very odd). And we find 6 of the first 9 spots are filled by defenders, who've all managed to average 6 points per game or better.

Folks on the FPL forums are getting tempted to say that it must be down to the new 'defensive points' this season. But in fact, those high-performing defenders have mostly not done exceptionally well on this new metric (no better than a lot of others, anyway); clean sheets, bonus points, and attacking contributions are still what's really making the difference. Most of the top-ranked defenders are conspicuous for having scored a goal (or 2!) already.

[There's a similar thing going on with the defensive midfielders. People say 'defensive points' are what's elevating them to such unaccustomed heights. But they've all been scoring goals as well this year! Yes, we know there are a few, like Enzo Fernandez, Bruno Guimaraes, John McGinn, and Declan Rice, who like to get forward occasionally and do often pick up 4 or 5 goals or so over a season.... But this year, we have Ryan Gravenberch already having claimed a couple, Martin Zubimendi getting a brace in one game, and Moises Caicedo now having racked up 3 goals - a strike-rate a forward would be pretty happy with, so early in the season. These are players who are very infrequent goalscorers, not usually more than 1 or 2 per season. So, this certainly looks like a very weird statistical blip.

Aha - a few days later my man Adam Clery produced a short video on this. He thinks it's probably a deliberate policy to try to exploit the fact that central defensive midfield players are usually somewhat overlooked in marking systems and can thus sometimes push forward without anyone picking them up. That does seem very plausible; although you'd think that should be a relatively easy tactical problem to fix - and thus these goals from central midfielders should be only a transient phenomenon, as defences adapt to snuff it out.]

Is there any particular reason why we've seen so many defenders (20 of them!) scoring goals this season?

Well, I suspect that more and more teams are now following Arsenal's example, and prioritising set-piece plays to try to gain the advantage in tight games. (Heck, we've even seen the long overdue reappearance of the long throw!! welcome back - we've missed you!!)

However, an awful lot of these goals have come from open play. So, perhaps there is also an element of pushing defenders up into the attack more often, when sides are enjoying sustained possession in the final third. Pep seems to have kicked off a fashion for playing one or other (or occasionally even both) of the full-backs in an advanced role - but now supporting, or even joining the front-line in more central areas, rather than hugging the touchline and overlapping the wide attacker in the more traditional fashion.

But it is still very early in the season, so this goals-from-defenders 'trend' might not be significant at all - just a fleeting statistical aberration. We'll need another month or so at least before we can really start to form a clear opinion on this. And I suspect that over that time, the strength of this new phenomenon will at least diminish somewhat.

Also, it should be noted that this unusually strong performance from a lot of defenders is only so conspicuous because there have not so far been any big contributions from any other positions (only the inevitable Erling Haaland among the forwards, only Antoine Semenyo and Jaidon Anthony among the attacking midfielders). With DeBruyne, Son, and Luis Diaz transferring overseas this year, Bowen reclassified as a forward (and struggling in a disastrous West Ham team anyway), Salah marginalized in a Liverpool going through an awkward reinvention phase, Maddison ruled out for the season, Saka and Palmer also having injury problems early on (Marmoush and Cherki and Foden too), and Wirtz, Eze, Mbeumo and Cunha still finding their feet at their new clubs,.... the 'usual suspects' among the attacking midfielders have been ABSENT so far this season. But that will change - soon.

There has, so far, often been a good case for starting 4 - or occasionally, perhaps, even 5! - defenders. But that is a freakish circumstance. And that too will surely soon change.

The next 8 or 10 games, I'm fairly sure, will see The Return of the Midfielders!

Yes, HISTORY can be fun!

 

The excellent DK Falcon doesn't post all that often (about once a month, at best) and tends to cover broader football topics rather than just recent matches or current shifts in tactics. But I always find his videos a good watch, and this latest one is particularly entertaining: a rundown of the more obscure labels for particular player styles/positions - many of which derive from countries other than England, and/or from more distant football eras, but are nevertheless still occasionally part of the current lexicon.

If you ever have nightmares about the possibility of being stumped at your next pub trivia quiz when challenged to explain the meaning of enganche, trequartista, ramdeuter, carillero, volante - then this is a must-watch for you!

'Buying success' is the end of football...

The phenomenon in the modern game that saddens me most is the increasing tendency from just about all managers nowadays to seek to solve problems and improve their team's performances simply by buying new players, to 'spend their way out of trouble'.

Partly, of course, this has been happening because, since the advent of pay-per-view television, the game has become awash with more money than it knows what to do with. And also, in the past couple of decades, statistical analysis has been given more and more weight, so that managers now get tempted to think that the 'numbers' reveal very slight and subtle benefits that might be derived from one player rather than another. And hence, for example, if you're worried that you're conceding a few too many goals because your left full-back occasionally gets done by a pacey winger, you could 'fix' that flaw by dropping 50 million euros on a quicker full-back, or one who's a bit better against someone taking him on one-to-one.

But of course, there are other things you could do. You could give your vulnerable full-back some specific coaching on dealing better with these dangerous one-on-ones; or you could remember to hold him in a deeper position when he's up against a quick opponent, and/or assign another player to give him back-up on that marking assignment. There is an immediate tactical or coaching 'solution' to the issue, and it might work out better than buying an expensive new player for the role.

When the supposed 'statistical advantage' is so slight, and based on such a flimsy sample size - perhaps just a handful of incidents in a handful of games, each of which may have been in some way untypical, anyway - it may easily prove to be illusory. Trying to deal wtih the problem now, with your available resources, surely makes more sense than taking a punt on trying to fit a completely new peg into this awkwardly shaped tactical hole. Your new boy might indeed be a speed-demon and adept at nicking the ball off a crafty dribbler - but what about his crossing, his tackling, his positional sense, his workrate, his professionalism, his mental toughness, his competitive mentality? Some of the things that are going to make the biggest difference to your team dynamic are essentially 'intangibles' - matters of personality and character rather than just skill and athleticism - and the stats aren't going to be of any help to you there. Also, of course, it's going to take a while for anyone new to get up to speed on your tactical approach and to bond with his new teammates. Even if he is - in theory - much, much better than the player he's displacing,... in all probability, he won't be for at least a couple of months.

But, for me, the risk of overestimating a new player, being misled by statistics as to his overall abilities or just not anticipating how he would fit into your team - or fail to - for other reasons beyond his core 'skill profile', is less important than the cost of constantly discarding players for some supposed minor shortcoming, even after they've made some outstanding contributions to your club, perhaps over a number of years. When you suddenly ditch players who've played well for you - to replace them with someone supposedly slightly better - you risk damaging the spirit in the dressing-room and the whole ethos of the club. All players start to feel less secure in their tenure - and hence less loyal to the manager and the club, and perhaps they might thus also become a little less sharp in their competitiveness. Fans, too, are often shocked and disappointed to see a popular player suddenly depart. And that adds unwelcome extra pressure on his successor to prove himself to a sceptical fanbase. 

For younger players, this kind of snub can be especially dispiriting - and perhaps a fatal setback to their career development. And it may be particularly short-sighted of the clubs to mistreat their rising stars like this, because if they continue to give these players regular minutes, big game experience, show trust in them by giving them key responsibilities on the pitch, and perhaps by sticking with them through a spell of shakey form - they can become hugely better players, and so command a much higher transfer fee in a year or two's time. And if they've come up through your Academy system, or were purchased at a young age for a fairly low price, that's almost all pure profit; one or two nice deals like that can put your PSR worries to bed for a good long while. (Perhaps I have an unduly romantic notion of how much showing trust in a player can boost their confidence and ability? It is possible, I suppose, that I am a little too much influenced by a management sim I played a lot in the early Noughties, in which this was the big secret of the game: if you gave players a run of regular starts, in games where they'd mostly win, and including some high-profile fixtures,.... their self-belief apparently soared; and with that, their overall consistency and dependability as well as their ratings on key playing attributes would soar very quickly as well. Reserves or youth team players could grow into formidable assets within a couple of months, and become potential international stars within a year or two. The effect may not be quite so dramatic in real life - but I'm sure it exists.)

If a player has chosen to leave, or is obviously not adequate to his role at the top level, then fair enough: we accept the necessity of the change, and we're all eager to see how the new man will do. But most of the time these days, this does not seem to be the case; a player who was at least perfectly adequate, if not pretty good in his role, suddenly gets canned for a new signing - who is often not an obvious improvement. And a key thing that this hard-nosed approach to trying to buy marginal advantages (which sometimes fail to materialize anyway!) overlooks is that a football club is not just about football; it's about continuity and community, it's about the bond that develops between players, staff, and fans - over an extended period of time (even expanding over generations into the distant past; it'a about history). People want to see players grow and change over time, they want to see promising youngsters stay at their club and develop a mature career there. They don't really want to see a revolving door of 'big names' trotting through their club for a year - or two or three - before looking for a bigger move.

This might seem a quaintly 'old-fashioned' view now, I fear. Yes, I did grow up in the era of Brian Clough and Peter Taylor. And their distinctive genius lay in being able to take a bunch of apparent 'journeymen' players and find a balance in the team that tapped into unsuspected synergies. Individually, very few of their players looked like world-beaters, especially in the earlier days at Derby and Forest; but collectively their teams always managed to be far stronger than the sum of their component parts would suggest was possible. I worry that this knack - one of the great arts of football management - has now been largely lost. Most modern managers, rather than thinking, "How can I get the best out of these players?" seem to ask instead, "Which of these players can I change for someone else?" (Of course, Brian and Peter weren't spoiled by that 'luxury': in their day money was tight, and most clubs rarely made more than two or three transfers per year.)

Now, every season, we seem to see multiple examples of this change for change's sake, changes just because we can afford it. I am a huge fan of Cody Gakpo (he's been a mainstay of my international Fantasy teams in the last few tournaments); but was he really a necessary purchase for Liverpool? Is he really better than Luis Diaz? Well, it's invidious and futile to make direct comparisons between great players; they each have unique attributes, different strengths. But I think Diaz's tireless enthusiasm, his workrate in the press, and his willingness to hold the width when needed, rather than always look to drift into his preferred inside-forward space, meant that he was absolutely tailor-made for Klopp's Liverpool; and Slot's Liverpool have not so far been all that different in their style of attack. But they let Diaz go? I was very sad to see that. And now there's a danger that Gakpo himself might get forced back to the sidelines by the arrival of Ekitike and Isak...

I am a huge fan of Bryan Mbeumo and Mateus Cunha as well. But Manchester United really didn't need them. Amad Diallo and Bruno Fernandes are tailor-made for Ruben Amorim's 'joint 10s' roles, and had started to look very impressive in them last season. Admittedly, Mbeumo and Cunha could also play as a central forward - although neither of them really likes that, they both prefer to start out wide and drift into the inside-forward area (which is not really what the Amorim system is looking for....). Again, this seemed to be a case of just blindly throwing money at a 'problem', hoping that bringing in new super-talented players, glamorous big-name signings would be a magic cure-all for a broken tactical system.

Is Jeremie Frimpong a better right-back than Conor Bradley? NO - don't make me laugh. He's presumably been bought primarily for his attacking potential as a wing-back; but damn, Bradley isn't bad in the final third either. There might be some doubts about the young Irishman's experience or injury-proneness, but he looks plenty good enough to hold down the 'No. 1' spot in that position, and they could have looked for a back-up to him,... rather than relegating him to occasional-rotation limbo for however many more years.

Is Riccardo Calafiori better than Myles Lewis-Skelly? Well, maybe; but not by much. And surely the homegrown youngster deserves the chance to develop further, after making such an impressive debut last season? Admittedly, Calafiori was probably bought before Lewis-Skelly's potential was recognised, and when all their other left-backs seemed to be perpetually injured. But most Arsenal fans I know feel the start ought to be Myles's to lose, after last season, and that the Italian should be the back-up. Jakub Kiwior was quite hard done-by too; no, he's not a great player, but he had done a perfectly decent job of filling in whenever needed in both central defence and at left-back - he might not be stellar, but he was plenty good enough.

Is Rayan Ait-Nouri a better left-back than Nico O'Reilly? Well, yes - probably. But is he better enough to make a big difference? That I'm not so sure about. And like Lewis-Skelly, surely O'Reilly did well enough last season to deserve further opportunities in the role this year? I know a lot of City fans feel that way.

Is Gianluigi Donnarumma better than Stefan Ortega or Jamie Trafford? Well, yes, I suppose so - he's widely regarded as the best goalkeeper in the world. But is he so far their superior that he's bound to make a substantial difference to City's prospects in the Premier League? I don't think so. And it's the treatment of Stefan Ortega that really bothers me. The guy has waited patiently for his chance to be promoted to first choice for the last three years, and has been superb whenever he has been called upon. Now, when Ederson wants to leave, he suddenly suffers in rapid succession the double insult of first being replaced by a kid who still has a lot of rough edges on his game, and then by a 'big name' from the continent - who maybe isn't that much better than him. Loyalty matters. Loyalty matters ethically; but it also pays practical dividends. Fans want and expect to see loyalty to their club being recognised and rewarded. Players expect that too; and they respond very powerfully to it. If Ortega had been elevated to the starting place he deserved this season, he would have been the most emotionally engaged keeper in the league - super-passionate, super-revved-up for every single game. That additional level of motivation is worth far more than any slight marginal advantage in a few areas of the game that statistics may purport to reveal. And I wouldn't want to support a club or a manager who treated its players so direspectfully.

These days, it seems, everybody's playing 'Fantasy Football' - just splashing cash on the most eye-catching transfer options, the most glamorous names. But this 'Galacticos' approach rarely works out in practice. You don't need all the 'best' players to create a successful football team; you need the players who will work best together. And the stats still can't show you that.

The Community Shield 2025 - What did we learn?

Well, as usual, not that much. It's the first 'competitive' match of the year, but it's still only pre-season. The Premier League competition is a whole different beast.

Both teams put out what looked like a 'full-strength' side, a fair indication of how they're likely to line up next weekend (unless Liverpool have poached any more top players from other clubs before then....). The Liverpool new boys all looked quite sharp. And it seemed to be quite an entertaining game, open and often end-to-end, with several good chances for both sides.

Some of The Sheep are already bleating nervously about Salah having scuffed his only decent chance on goal straight at the keeper, and then skying the opening penalty in the climactic shootout. But that's nonsense; he had a pretty decent game. 

If anyone were giving slight cause for concern, I'd say it might be Wirtz, who, apart from feeding Ekitike on the edge of the box for the opening goal, appeared fairly anonymous in the match - at least on the fairly brief highlights I've been able to find so far. I don't have too many concerns about his long-term impact, but I've always feared it might take him a while to settle in and find his feet in the new team - and he might thus not be a great pick for the initial squad.

In fact, it was ultimately the 'smaller' side who looked more hungry for it, and provided the most eye-catching performances. Mateta, Sarr, Wharton, and, of course, Henderson in goal, were all absolutely outstanding.

That might be the major takeaway from the game for early FPL contemplation. Folks who were feeling pretty set on the idea of trebling up on Liverpool, with picks like Alisson, Frimpong (don't get too excited about his goal: it was a complete fluke!), Van Dijk, Macallister, Wirtz, Gakpo, and even Ekitike heading up many people's shopping lists,... might now be thinking about Henderson, Munoz, Guehi, Wharton, Eze, Sarr, and Mateta instead.

EDIT: My man Adam Clery was very quick to put out an excellent video dissecting why Palace were ultimately so much better in this game than Liverpool. This is the kind of thing that I think is essential preparation before beginning to make any decisions about this season's FPL squad.

But it's still really too early to be thinking about any of that. (New injury news is emerging daily. And there are still a few big transfer stories unfolding....)

Just find some highlights of the game to enjoy - and then chill out a bit longer. DEADLINE DAY is Friday: that's when you should pick your opening squad.

The shape of things to come...?

The Athletic's breezy young Scots tactics guru (one of my favourites!), J. J. Bull, put out this video a couple of weeks back, discussing five major shifts in tactics he expects to see becoming important during the coming season. Well worth a look.

As if we didn't have enough to ponder with the protracted transfer sagas over the likes of Gyokeres, Sesko, Isak, Watkins, and Jackson, and the early injuries to Maddison, Colwill, Kelleher, Rogers et al, the colossal spending on squad rebuilds by a few clubs like Liverpool and Manchester United, the decimation in this transfer window of some poorer clubs like Bournemouth and Brentford and Wolves, and the cautiously whispered possibility that perhaps not all of the promoted clubs will be completely hopeless this year,... we also have major tactical evolutions to take into consideration.

Also, it seems, there are to be a number of other - mostly peripheral/cosmetic - changes being introduced this season, a couple that are actually tweaks to the rules of the game.  So much to take on board!!!

Damn, being an FPL manager is almost harder than the real thing....!

The ONES you should be watching

 

Not players you should be watching out for (still far too early to be giving much thought to that!)... Rather, the online 'experts' I think are most worth giving your attention to.

As I've said a few times before (most notably here), the self-styled FPL 'gurus' are mostly moronic charlatans (and even the handful of 'good' ones aren't really all that brilliant or insightful) and are best avoided. The people I look to for help in understanding the game are online tactical analysts. And these, I believe, are the best of them.

My Top Youtube Resources for helping with FPL

Chirpy Geordie Adam Clery remains my No. 1 favourite: amusing as well as informative - and he doesn't go on too long. He was doing regular tactical breakdowns for FourFourTwo's Youtube channel over the past couple of years, but a few months ago he launched his own Adam Clery Football Channel (ACFC), in partnership with the UK's The Independent newspaper.

A very close second is Cormac McAinsh of Football Meta.

I also rather like the style of DK Falcon, although his output is a bit more intermittent - and he puts out a lot of more 'broad topic' pieces reviewing, for instance, the evolution of Pep Guardiola's tactical ideas. He's done quite a fun one of the overall history of football tactics from the game's inception in the mid-1800s to the present.

I think Chris French's Football Made Simple is also very good - although he also tends to do more broad overview discussions than breakdowns of individual matches. Also, some of his videos run just a little long, and - for me - I find that he sometimes gabbles a bit, racing on just a little too fast in his delivery, without enough appropriate phrasing or pausing to give us time to fully grasp what he's saying (particularly as he swaps very quickly to and fro between talking about the attacking and defending sides in a match, and seems to assume that you will have memorised the entire lineup for both teams as thoroughly as he has!). So, yes, he can be just a little bit hard work at times - but worth it. [He's recently started running an online Introduction to Tactical Analysis course. Unfortunately, I can't currently spare the time or the money to give it a try myself, but it looks very interesting. He also puts out an occasional newsletter via Substack that you can sign up for.]

I really like the Tactical Football Fanatic too, although his posting has been very sparse over the last year.

Football Manager Insider also has some good stuff (a bit of a Liverpool bias lately; but that might be down to them being champions, favourites to retain the title, and hyper-acive in the transfer market this summer - rather than a personal affection!).

Zekko Football is also sometimes worth a look; although he's another presenter who tends to rush his delivery a bit, and his diction is so poor that I often find it impossible to follow him without cueing up the closed-caption subtitles! He is perhaps a bit over-prolific too; I don't find his content compelling enough to be worth checking in on two or three times a week. He does a lot of breakdowns of recent games - especially in the Premier League - which can be informative (perhaps particularly useful if it's a game you happened to miss!); but I find most of his pieces fairly superficial, describing what happened in some detail -  rather than teasing apart how and why it happened.

Finally, one of my more recent discoveries in this field that also shows a lot of promise is Tactics Dojo.

Alas, I find most of FourFourTwo's Youtube content these days very dull and obvious (though the print magazine is still very good), and The Athletic isn't much better (the weekly 'podcasts', in particular, usually hosted by Ayo Akinwolere, are just painfully over-long...), but their occasional tactics or squad-building episodes with J.J. Bull and Jon Mackenzie are still worth a look. (I wish J.J. would branch out on his own. I think he could give Geordie Adam a run for his money as the most entertaining and accessible content-creator of this kind.)

I have a strong affinity for The Purist Football as well, though this is more of a 'general interest' channel than one that's ever likely to be directly useful in the week-to-week trench warfare of FPL. He only puts out a video every month or two, at most, and they tend to be more philosophical essays on the state of the game than dissections of particular teams or players. For me, this video on the impact of Guardiola's ideas, good and bad, is essential viewing.

I also have a soft spot for Alex Moneypenny's The Different Knock. He's an Arsenal uber-fan, so his channel is pretty much exclusively focused on The Gunners. But his breadth of knowledge and tactical acuity are very impressive; so, often the observations he has to offer on Arsenal will have direct or indirect relevance to other Premier League teams as well.

I thought The Football Analyst had looked very promising; but he soon seemed to give up on his Youtube platform, after posting some interesting stuff early last year. However, he's still posting some good pieces on his website. [I would particularly recommend an article of his from this time last year on Fabian Hurzeler's 'tactical identity', and this most recent one assessing the prospects of Benjamin Sesko.]

I also often enjoy The Athletic's Tifo sub-channel on Youtube, for more general observations on the game. They've recently started a fun little mini-series on The Entire History of Football.

I really think any of these channels - even frivolous little Tifo!! - will help your football understanding (and hence, your FPL prospects!) far more than following any so-called FPL 'experts'.

A cracking game indeed!!

We don't often get the greatest football in a tournament final, as fatigue and nerves (or cumulative injuries and suspensions) get the better of the teams, or fear of failure comes to dominate, and the game ends up being mostly an edgy, cagey stalemate. Approaching Sunday's climax of the first Club World Cup in New Jersey, we were all hoping for the best - bur rather fearing the possibility of the worst.

Or indeed, many people - probably a significant majority - were expecting a rather drably one-sided contest. Paris St Germain had simply been so good over the last several months, and in most of this competition, while Chelsea, coming off a turbulent and inconsistent season, appeared to be still mired in the midst of a difficult rebuild - well, very few people gave the London team much of a chance, and it was widely anticipated that PSG might prevail over them as easily as they had in their semi-final against Real Madrid. Some of the bookies were offering more than 2-1 against Chelsea lifting the trophy, and although those odds shortened slightly in the last 24 hours or so before kick-off, really not many were seriously fancying the Chelsea win. 

Now, I try never to talk myself up on here, but.... I will allow myself to occasionally acknowledge when I've got a big call right. And I did indeed predict a Chelsea win - in my last post on here before the Final, and even before the start of the tournament. [That foresight enabled me to enjoy a strong MatchDay 7 in the Fantasy game, as well as a nice little return from the bookmaker!]

PSG didn't do themselves any favours: perhaps being guilty of a little over-confidence, they persisted with their usual open attacking style, pushing both full-backs up the field as often as possible. I had really thought that they would appreciate the potential danger posed by players like Neto and Gusto (and Palmer and Cucurella and Pedro) in the wide areas, and try to hold Nuno Mendes and/or Hakimi much deeper most of the time. Perhaps they just dismissed this threat because they hadn't expected that Robert Sanchez, so long derided for his sloppy distribution, would suddenly have figured out how to ping accurate long balls into those inviting spaces on the flanks behind the over-advanced full-backs. Chelsea were perfectly set up to exploit this weakness, and Sanchez created a dangerous counter-attack with almost every long clearance from his box. But they were impeccable in their defensive set-up too, with their effcient pressing and fluid positional rotations completely stifling PSG in the middle of the pitch. 'Tactical masterclass' is becoming a bit of an overused cliché, but it might be justified here: Maresca's gameplan was exemplary. And every single one of his men absolutely played their socks off! It was pretty much the perfect team performance. Well done, lads!

And then of course, we ended the day with that wonderful comedy moment when a bumbling Donald Trump refused to leave the stage after the trophy presentation. (Who could have foreseen that?? Oh, wait.......)

Alas, a lot of people are refusing to share in the joy of having been able to watch a fine game of football, to witness a superb achievement from a new coach and a renascent club (and yes, English fans should be allowed - should be expected - to indulge in a little bit of a patriotic buzz about one of our country's teams having come out on top, even if it's a team we revile and root against in domestic competition...). Instead, they're still bitching about the tournament and its winners, yet again rehashing the ridiculous argument that the tournament really has no value, isn't respected by anybody, and doesn't mean anything, that it isn't a true 'world championship'.

I have some hard news for those people: your opinion doesn't matter. FIFA is the world governing body of our game, and - for better or worse - only they get decide on the status of a tournament. This IS the definitive 'world championship' for clubs - because they say it is.

Moreover, now that it's all over - only Chelsea fans any longer have the right to make legitimate criticisms about the tournament and its perceived status in the game. If you voiced those criticisms before it started, and if you managed to frame them within a genuinely broad view of the world game, untainted by personal resentments about whether your favourite team was going to be involved (most gripers were not thus reasonable), then fair enough. But most of the criticisms - the standard of football is going to be poor, none of the big teams are going to take it seriously, nobody's going to go to the games, nobody's going to watch, nobody's going to care about the outcome - have now been emphatically disproved by events. It has been a very successful, very entertaining tournament, with every participating team looking fully committed to trying to win it.

And now, if you continue to whinge like this, it just sounds like sour grapes - not reasoned criticism, but surly resentment that a team you like better than Chelsea didn't win it. 

If Chelsea fans, despite the euphoria of such an impressive victory, and the pride of having such an impressive-looking trophy to add to their cabinet, still want to voice doubts about the tournament's worth - they would deserve to be listened to. But everybody else should just shut the f*** up!

However, Chelsea fans shouldn't get too big for their boots. Being the official 'Club World Champions' doesn't necessarily make them the best team in the world. They'll have to sustain this sort of performance level for a full year, beat a bunch more top sides, and, ideally, claim another big trophy - the Premier League or Champions League title - at the end of the coming season before they can be in that conversation. They're off to a flying start with this magnificent win; but they'll need to build on that....

PS: I'm glad to see that my two favourite Youtube tactical analysts, Adam Clery (who has his 'own' channel now, bless him) and Cormac of Football Meta, were both quick to put out videos breaking down Chelsea's success this weekend: worth a look.

[And finally..... I generally rather like the Irish commentator, Conor McNamara; but recently it has started to grate on me a little that he always seems to pronounce the French champions as Barry St Germain. I suddenly find myself growing obsessed with the idea of trying to write a novel around this fascinating character.]

Rediscovering the 'Beautiful Game'

I came across this fantastic Youtube post (about the place of tactical systems in modern football, and their limitations) from The Football Purist a few days ago, and felt I had to share it. (I don't think I'd come across him before; he hasn't been posting much recently - but a piece like this obviously takes a long time to prepare. I note that much of his previous output has been on a similar theme - celebrating the primacy of individual creativity over rigidly structured tactical systems.)

This video essay promotes the idea that individual flair can still trump tactical structures, and should be prioritised over them. Taking an analogy from complex adaptive systems found in Nature, like ant colonies, it suggests that a 'collective intelligence' between players can be an emergent phenomenon within the team performance - if they are given the freedom to 'self-organise' and improvise their own solutions to challenges on the pitch, rather than following 'rules' conditioned into them as part of their coach's game model. Further, it demonstrates that the swift and fluid passing patterns that grow out of such an approach - lightning-quick intuitive interactions between players that theorists have dubbed synergies - can still be cultivated through structured training drills (slightly paradoxical though that may seem!).

Some coaches, like Ancelotti and Scaloni, seem to be achieving a lot of success with this kind of philosophy. 

Let us hope that this is the 'future' of our game - a game that can once again be less like a chess match and more like a piece of art.

The FOLLY of always looking over your shoulder...

 

Or of fretting needlessly about someone looking over yours....

The FPL forums over this past week have been utterly overrun with people seeking advice on how to clinch a mini-league victory.

My bitterer impulses are to tell them that if they can't make their own unaided selection decisions, they don't deserve to be anywhere near the top of even the shittiest mini-league. But I can sympathise with the anxiety. Very early in the life of this blog, I recognised that mini-leagues are - rightly - the main focus of most FPL managers' aspirations; I think that's useful for maintaining focus and motivation. [As I said back then: Playing against people you know rather than just anonymous netizens puts far more fire in your belly!]

But is there really anything specific you can do to improve your chances against one or two particular opponents?  NO.

The attempt to do so is misguided; more often than not, self-harming.

If 'chasing' - seeking to overtake a rival a short way ahead of you - the tactic of desperation (that's all it is; it does nothing to actually improve your chances of achieving the result you crave) is to focus on choosing as many different players to your opponent's selection as possible; and, usually, such left-field choices that there is little chance your adversary (or many other people at all.....) would think of choosing them!

If defending a fragile lead, people attempt to 'block' by doing the exact opposite, trying to load up on as many of the same players as your opponent as possible - to reduce the scope for 'luck' to operate in the opponent's favour.

Now, there is an argument to be made for either of these approaches - but it is not the one most of their adopters seem to want to believe. 

The first tactic, in particular, may be justified as a last desperate throw-of-the-dice - hut that's all it is. By taking so many wild gambles, so many long shots, you are giving yourself a very small chance of achieving a big return that most others will miss out on; but that comes at the cost of vastly increasing the likelihood of a below-average return for the week. Your chances of a big success with a play like this are infinitesimally small: in every thousand or so of the possible alternate universes, there may be a few where you're a very happy camper; but in the vast majority of all possible universes - including, almost certainly, this one -  you have a miserable week, and drop places rather than gain them.

When 'blocking' a pursuer, the argument in favour only really works if..... a) you have a fairly substantial lead, and b) you can limit the differences in your starting eleven to just 2 or 3 players.

Even then, it's not a terribly convincing ploy, because.... you don't know exactly what you're going to be up against until after the gameweek deadline. Even the most 'similar' teams almost always have at least 2 or 3 different players, usually slightly more. And your opponent has at least one Free Transfer to use. He might surprise you by spending points on one or two additional ones, and making that work for him. He might also make some surprising selections from his bench, or get very lucky with his captaincy pick.

Even if you have restricted him to just 2 or 3 'differentials' in comparison to your starting team, that might still be enough for him to overhaul your lead, if the Fates smile on him. And there is always a chance that he's boosted that 'differential' number to 4 or 5 - or more - with his last week's transfers.

By focusing only on trying to thwart one particular opponent, you will often fail even in that; and you'll almost certainly diminish your squad's overall performance - perhaps even to the point where you might get caught and overtaken by one or two other players who were a long way behind you.

A truly 'optimized' selection is optimized against EVERYONE, not just one other manager.

One forum panicker I saw just now was worried that his antagonist's captaincy pick might prove to be better than his! Yes, indeed it might. And, if there's a small gap between you, that will probably prove decisive. But if you trust your captaincy pick, stick with it. There is no point second-guessing yourself,... or endlessly trying to anticipate what your nemesis might do....

This is a harsh and unfair game: it depends very largely on pure LUCK. There is no point losng sleep about the potential for bad outcomes. You just have to accept that they are possible,... likely; laugh them off when they happen, be duly grateful and relieved when they don't.

The essence of the game is to pick what you think is the best team for the week. You do that in isolation, in a vacuum - relying on your own knowledge and judgement of the EPL teams and players - without reference to what any other FPL managers are doing. You follow that same principle every week, including the final week of the season. And you see what happens.  If a lot of your picks work out, you have a good week. If you have a lot of good weeks, it becomes a good season. But if not,... then you don't. C'est la vie.

You play THE GAME; you don't play individual opponents.

It HAD to be said....

Football Meta's amiable and insightful Cormac has become one of my favourite Youtube tactical analysts over the past year or so. And I was particularly glad to see him just drop this video, detailing the shortcomings of the dread 'building out from the back' philosophy. (For me, he doesn't really go far enough in his critque...)

I find this tiresome dogma, which has become almost universal in the Premier League during the past decade, is stifling the life out of the game - it is the new anti-football.

It is painfully dull to watch.

It imposes far too much pressure on keepers and defenders - which, I think, wears them down mentally, undermines their confidence, and utlimately tends to make them more error-prone not just in build-up, but in all aspects of their play. (Because mistakes by a keeper or his defenders often tend to be castastrophic, yielding a goal and perhaps costing the game, their errors are placed under far closer scrutiny than those of attacking players, and tend to be given more weight than their successful defensive actions. And when they are on the ball so much, in dangerous situations, and committing costly errors - or at least coming close to doing so - so often, in almost every game, these poor buggers are often now getting pilloried by the fans.... when it's really not their fault; it's down to their manager's style of play.)

And it is founded on what I believe is a fundamental misconception: the fearful, over-conservative conviction that restricting the opponent's chances is more important to ensuring victory than creating your own. (The problem here is that you cannot play football purely as a matter of statistics, because the element of chance can never be eliminated. Even if you can prevent your opponent from getting any clearcut chances [which is just about impossible], while you manage, say, 10 chances,.... your finishing might not be good enough to convert any of the 10 chances, while your frustrated opponent might yet produce a worldie of a goal out of nothing, or perhaps pick up a soft penalty. This approach does not guarantee wins; in fact, it makes them painfully hard to achieve. If you're content to accept a more free-flowing, 'chaotic' sort of game, in which both sides might enjoy something like 20 chances, you should be able to win - and win more easily, and by bigger margins - so long as you can defend the chances made against you better than the other side defends against yours.)

Even if the core philosophy behind it weren't so misguided, it is still wrong-headed in practical terms. Its supposed justification is encapsulated in the tiresome mantra: "The quicker it goes up, the quicker it comes back." Build-up from the back started because managers like Pep became afraid that long balls out from the goalkeeper were too often resulting in an immediate loss of possession, and the more patient approach was seen as being a way to hold on to the ball more effectively,.... and eat minutes off the clock.

However, that's a very questionable proposition. If your goalkeeper can kick accurately, and if you have some well-drilled routines to create different medium- and long-range passing options for him, and if you have very quick players who can run into space behind the opposing back line to chase down a long ball over the top, or big strong players who can win most of their aerial duels and hold the ball up until other teammates can link up with them,.... there's really not that much of a problem in retaining possession from a keeper's kick. Well, yes, it is always going to be a little risky; and you might end up losing possession perhaps as much of half of the time (at worst...). But so what? Losing possession in the opposition defensive third of the pitch shouldn't be a big deal. You ought to be set up for a quick counter-press to win the ball back again, or at least hamper the speed and ease with which the other side can start to move the ball back up the pitch. And even if they do start quickly on the counter, you should have good defensive midfielders who can snuff out most such moves in the middle of the park.

A loss of possession deep in the opponent's half isn't often going to result in a goalscoring chance against you. A loss of possession in your own final third, however, almost always does.

And we are seeing such turnovers during failed build-up play more and more often in recent years.

Perhaps when building-out-from-the-back first started to appear, there was some clearer benefit to it. It had the advantage of novelty in its favour; and most sides weren't equipped to counter it very well.

Teams were still often only playing with one outright forward, or at most two; and 'high pressing' wasn't yet much of a thing. So, a back-four, or even a back-three, usually had a comfortable numerical advantage in the first line, even without having the keeper step up into the back-line to create an additional passer - and sides playing out from the back could thus usually bypass initial pressure quite easily.

But now,.... many more teams are playing with a front-three,... and are regularly pushing one or more of their midfielders or advanced full-backs up on to the opposing back-line as well; sometimes, the numerical advantage is with the attacking team. And even though it mostly still isn't, pressing has become much more sophisticated and well-drilled: teams will choose their moments to press most vigorously, saving their energy for when it can be most effective, most devastating; and they'll target particular players or areas of the pitch, so that, even though they are outnumbered across the whole back-line, they can quickly achieve a crucial overload in the area around the ball.

The slow build-up idea might have 'worked' up to a point, when it was a surprising innovation. But things have moved on, the game has caught up with it - and overtaken it. 

Any tactical idea becomes limiting, self-damaging if it is too obvious, too predictable. And we now see so many managers who are so insistent on the slow build-up that they almost never stray from it, never allow their players to vary the way they play out. And that makes them very easy to 'read', easy to press,... easy to nick the ball off in dangerous positions.

I'm not sure that building-out-from-the-back ever really worked all that well. But it has now clearly become an absolute liability for many teams.

And did I mention, it's SO FUCKING BORING to watch? Aesthetics matter; this is 'the beautiful game', after all. Most fans, I'm sure, would far rather see their team come out on the losing end of a 4-3 humdinger of a game occasionally than watch them grinding out arid 1-0 and 2-0 wins most weeks. I know I would, anyway.

I think, I hope we are now seeing the last days of ponderous slow build-up from the back, in favour of more diverse, dynamic approaches to moving the ball forward from your own penalty area. It's been a long time coming. Too, too long....

Too much 'CONTROL'?

 

Alex Moneypenny - an Arsenal uber-fan who runs a Youtube channel on his obsession called The Different Knock (although it's pretty much exclusively Arsenal-focused, I find a lot of his observations - like this one - have wider applicability) - recently posted this video about a possible weakness in Mikel Arteta's (and many other modern football managers') general approach to the game. [The pertinent part of the discussion begins at around 10.14.]

He suggests that an excessive desire to assert 'control' in a game, and thereby to reduce as far as possible all elements of risk and unpredictability, may be misguided, counter-productive. It is unrealistic, impossible to expect to be able to eliminate risk altogether: so many games turn on a single against-the-run-of-play goal,... or a single terrible decision from the referee. But the single-minded pursuit of this unattainable ideal often comes at the cost of making your own game extremely conservative - perhaps more predictable, and certainly less exciting: if you take fewer risks, you create fewer chances for yourself. And if you have fewer chances to score in a game, you are perhaps putting yourself at a greater, not lesser, risk of losing a game to a single, untypical action, or a mere stroke of luck from your opponents.

Alex points out that drawing analogies from other sports about the value of focusing on fine margins may be misleading for football. Most sports are far more high-scoring than football, and thus the number of such 'margins' in a game that might swing the outcome will be much larger. In basketball or baseball or tennis there are dozens or even hundreds of individual actions in every game that may have a decisive influence on the final result; in a game of football, there are often only a handful - sometimes just one.

It has long been my own view that it is more important in football to play an effective attacking game yourself than to try to prevent your opponent from playing at all, it is better to create a lot of scoring chances for yourself than to attempt to limit the opponent's opportunities to zero. As Alex says here, "When you try to stifle the opponent, sometimes you stifle yourself."

Also, of course, it makes for better entertainment. While fans of successful but mostly unadventurous football teams can usually force a smile through a string of arid 1-0 wins, we know in our hearts that they - like the rest of us - would really far prefer to be witnessing a 3-2 or 5-3 thrillfest most weeks....