verlaine1979

I assumed since Udinese only bought Beto this summer that there's no chance they'd sell him. But according to Wikipedia it was an obligation to buy after his loan year, so possibly less of an about-face if they do cash in.

Hopefully Alcaraz is the creativity and drive through central midfield that we've badly needed since... a depressingly long time ago. It's a gamble, but we can't afford south american talent that's already proven in Europe, so if we want those gems we have to find them ourselves. Sign a striker, and suddenly the team looks well balanced for 4-2-3-1

I guess that makes sense, though I wonder if there are any metrics in football beyond an attacker's chance conversion that correlate as closely with the outcome of a game/xG as each individual players metrics do cumulatively in baseball.

It's the fact that each incident of throwing, hitting or catching is much more closely correlated to the outcome of the game. Football has a lot more potential datapoints as it is a vastly more random and unstructured game, but not many of them are as directly related to the outcome as whether you can reliably connect bat and ball, whether you can steal a base effectively, or your fielding accuracy. Baseball was always much more data-driven than football, going back decades - the innovation of Moneyball was that Beane and co. realised that a bunch of previously under-appreciated or under-calculated metrics were more predictive of game outcomes than the ones everyone else was using at the time.

Eh, the near-unanimous dislike is what I find interesting. When thousands of people highly motivated to pay close attention to you immediately decide you're a twat, chances are you're a twat.

The universal dislike of Jones is quite something. He's just so unmistakably small time. I wonder if the reason Ankerson didn't pick up on it is cultural. All the Jones signifiers - the clothes, the thin-lipped smirk, the shouting and pouting - they're all distinctly British. The stench of loserdom just radiates from him, but maybe Rasmus couldn't smell it.

Just goes to show, you can't take anything for granted in this game. I had "mincing", "sons in law" and "in the mixer" on my Lord Duckhunter bingo card. Felt sure of victory, ended up with nothing.

Could be, but I'd be astonished if this was a data-driven decision. Are there enough top-level clubs playing 5 at the back to give you confidence in any statistics about the success of that formation vs. a more traditional back four? With all the other noise inherent in a non-structured sport like football, it seems unlikely. Maybe just based on the fact that they think we have a higher degree of quality in our CB recruitment than in any other area of the pitch? That said, since it sounds like we went for Jones based on his points/budget ratio (a completely inappropriate metric for comparing performance between levels of the game where financial power is highly stratified) maybe this lot really don't know what they're doing. After all, the person who did all the actual analysis in Moneyball was a Harvard-educated economist.

Just staggering. Playing long ball football to a 5'9 target man. Jones is every bit as thick as he looks.

This is dire. We've got absolutely no control of the ball at all. Hit and hope from the back every single time.

Suspect Jones' thinking on this is as simple as "surely you always pick the Brazilian player". I can't think of a more plausible explanation.

I think you have us mixed up with Brentford. We're led by people who made their money in cable/telecoms (Solak), investing (Kraft) and as far as Ankerson goes, he's actually spent most of his career in football. There's also a common misconception about "moneyball", insofar as the process described in the book can't really be applied to football as the game is too unstructured for the kind of statistical analysis used in baseball. As for whether data is useful in identifying players for the scouts to take a closer look at - well of course it is. There's a lot the stats can't tell you, but in many cases, they tell you everything you need to know. For example, comparing Danny Ings and Che Adams chance conversion data would immediately show you that one of those players is an unusually effective finisher, and one of them is unusually terrible.

I guess we'll never know, but lifting top players from Benfica and PSV always seemed like we were kidding ourselves. When was the last time we signed a starter from a first-rank European club? Udinese, Zagreb and wherever that Argentinian kid plays are all more our speed.

Bah. Look at Cork offloading the ball and immediately running into space. WTF has happened with our squad of midget statues?

Are they playing in the same positions? Adams and Armstrong both strikers for Brum and Blackburn, while Tella seems to be playing on the wing? Also Adams and Armstrong both the main men in mediocre sides, while Tella is contributing in a team with several high performers. To be clear, I've not seen a minute of Burnley's games this season, but with the above in mind, comparing his numbers to those of Adams and Armstrong seems pretty pointless.

Yeah, I think the analogy to Lavia being missing is what sparked the memory. What we've got left in the squad isn't good enough to stick with a CM/DM two, so we should play three there instead.

Surely when JWP+1 is getting overrun whoever we play alongside him, the answer is to play a compact, as-mobile-as-possible three in the middle? Isn't that one of the tricks Koeman used to arrest one of our slides back in the day? I seem to recall a game against Everton where he gave Reed a start to make the midfield harder to play through in a 3-5-2 and it worked well.

Perhaps a smidge over-assertive, though there was still a caveating modifier. But the fact remains, Semmens is a club employee with zero skin in the game. If you'd prefer to believe that Gao handed him complete authority to dispose of a c.300m (purchase price) asset however he saw fit, be my guest. But it doesn't pass the sniff test of how any other HNWIs I've encountered operate. EDIT: By zero skin I mean he wasn't several hundred million in the hole and personally liable for most of that in the form of high interest loans sourced in Macau. I have no specific knowledge of the situation and have never met Semmens (I live in California), but I do know a couple of people out here with that kind of wealth, and they don't ever abdicate those kinds of decisions. With a quarter of a billion quid on the line, who Martin Semmens wanted as his next boss would have been vanishingly low down on Gao's list of priorities when seeking a buyer.

Hah, and didn't notice the Athletic article also mentioned how keen NJ is on keeping Walcott for all his invaluable experience. This is going to be a disaster.

As directors of an entity majority owned by Gao, I'm confident that they had no veto over who took over the club, which is really all that matters here. Look at the timeline of the last two take-overs: in both cases, KL and Gao were highly motivated to sell (for KL Saints was apparently the highest value asset in her inheritance by far, for Gao he was bleeding cash from high interest loans and bought the club at the precise moment with the Chinese government stopped capital outflows for sport). But in both cases it took almost two years to find a buyer. For the simple reason that we're not an attractive proposition for investment. Hardly anyone was interested. And yet, in both cases the club spun it as a careful process to bring in the only person capable of moving us forward. Which is of course, far preferable to saying that you sold to the only buyer who showed a serious interest.

I suspected he'd wind up one of those conservative types who tries to cram as many mediocre old pros into the side as he can. But never in my worst imaginings did I think he'd want to bring Bednarek and Stephens back to the squad. Stinks of management by cliche.

For several seasons now I've had the feeling when we try to pass and move that we're playing at the very limits of our capabilities. I can't remember the last time I saw us move the ball with the simple fluidity that Brighton were able to summon against us - maybe that Newcastle win immediately after the pandemic restart? Everything is so frantic with us. But maybe it's just the case that our limitations are well known. Clubs understand that we have no capacity to move the ball through the middle, so we'll always look to the fullbacks on the touchline as soon as we can, where there is much less space and less margin for error.

All of which means "we spent the past two years desperately seeking an investor to buy this rapidly depreciating asset off the Chinese national that bought it, but that's been incredibly hard as other investment opportunities have massively outperformed sport during the pandemic. Now the owner has accepted he has to take a 100m haircut on his investment, and Serbia's only billionaire has decided to take a punt on it." The idea that Semmens was fending off the wrong kind of billionaires for two years until he found one that would do his bidding is just fantasy.

Seen a few people saying Semmens is responsible for SR and hand-picked them. This is clearly a nonsense. As with when Gao came along, it's an almost total certainty that SR were the top bidder from a very, very short list of interested parties. In both cases, I wouldn't be surprised if they were the only candidates to make a solid offer. Semmens is an employee, not a king-maker.

Yeah, I should've said, some of the kids we recruited this summer have a few of those qualities. But they should be garlanding a solid squad,not our last hope to stay up. My mind goes back to our attempts to recruit Sangare. He's an absolute unit in midfield, with pace and power from what I've seen. How did Diallo end up as our back up after that transfer fell through? Did we suddenly decide we didn't need presence in the middle any more?