The Red Card verbal announcement still sucks. No need for it if it’s gonna sound like crap. Clearer info with “I saw it on the screen (draw a TV), and it’s a red card (pull out the red card)” with no words spoken at all.
MCI need players who have not won.
Forest have fired Nuno. That seems stupid to me.
1 Like
Another opening for Pocchetino.
National teams are harder when soccer is not the National Sport of the Nation.
1 Like
Liverpool may have spent too much on MF and forwards but team is deep. Wirtz off to ridiculously slow start but others look good. Would sell Wirtz for CB right now. Slot is an excellent manager.
Could the American influence see the sport’s top domestic league move toward NFL- or NBA-style salary caps, player trading, drafts and even regular-season games being played overseas?
Bigger Potential Issue would be the removal of promotion/relegation, as American Sports prefer their owners risk as little as possible.
Another Potential Issue: teams moving to another city because the city didn’t build them a new stadium from which the team then controlled all revenue. Fuck the local fans, “they didn’t do enough to keep the team where they were.”
1 Like
Wow, LIV on the losing side of a final-minute goal. Watching the bonus coverage after the MCI win, and figured LIV would pull another rabbit out of the hat.
CP has been tough on Liverpool last few years.
Man United keeps getting worse and worse.
Didn’t think that was possible.
Here are a lot of words about Salah:
Buried the lede and the only thing anyone needs to know:
Now Salah is 33, and maybe he just doesn’t have the legs to create and get near the goal, game after game. Not only are the shots down, but so is the dribbling. He has attempted eight take-ons and completed one – both rates of attempt and success that would easily be career-lows for him at Liverpool.
Oh, and this:
More specifically, though: There’s no more Trent Alexander-Arnold.
Whole article doesn’t even note TAA’s age (I looked pretty hard): 27, today!
This is a young man’s league. Not the MLS.
Nice reminiscence of LEI:
OK, back to EPL matches!
Not sure the “dice game” analogy works here:
Roll a dice, so it’s random. What game makes the 6 better than the 1? Why is EPL Soccer “like a dice game”? It’s not.
Sounds a bit crude but the ARS-FUL match is now on.
My English SIL and his brother are passionate about these two teams but support opposite sides.
What a load of crap:
It makes the sport “more boring”? An increased opportunity to score is “more boring”??
Then he launches into a “Moneyball made baseball more boring” rant. The data were there for everyone to see. What “ruined” it (for OAK, at least) was that information getting out so all teams could use it. And, as stated in the MLB Baseball Thread earlier, using Analytics helps win regular season ball games, but the playoffs are still a toss-up. LAD have been owned for 13 years. Only two WS titles (though a third was cheated way).
But it’s not just true in soccer – it’s true in every sport. These billion-dollar organizations that employ people to play games for a living need to entertain. If they’re not entertaining fans, then the fans won’t pay to watch them play, and if the fans don’t watch them play, then these teams are no longer worth billions of dollars. And if they’re not worth billions of dollars, then why are we so concerned with the cold-blooded science of discovering more wins, anyway?
Counterpoint: This is an American school of thought, brought on by closed franchise systems in which nothing is truly at risk EXCEPT the possibility of that money not coming in. Entertaining thus is REQUIRED. Changing rules for more excitement is required. Ignoring players’ long-term health for short-term entertainment is required. Requiring a cap on player salaries and holding a draft to make the teams “more evenly matched” is required.
There’s this quaint observation:
Almost all of the analytical breakthroughs across the major sports are obvious in retrospect: walks count the same as hits, a three-point shot is worth more than a two-point shot, and touchdowns are worth more than field goals.
Yes, because the data were always there to determine this. What is also quaint were people who said out loud that the data were bunk, looked at by “people who didn’t play the game.”
That’s not the case with set pieces, though: I’m talking about corners, free kicks, and throw-ins. Nerds have been extolling the virtues of dead balls for a long time now. I’ve been writing about them for this website since the 2010s and while this doesn’t feel like an “analytical” idea, per se, the value of set pieces has been confirmed by data analysis and real-life events.
Of course, slurs help the argument. “NERDS Killing the game!!”
Note that reading his prior article from 2019 and now and there are identical paragraphs. This recent one, though is more of a “STOP THE INSANITY OF SET PIECES!” hit piece.
And, it comes down to the same as OAK Baseball in the early 2000s: “It was cool when only a few teams did it, and, more importantly, I Knew Their Secret. Now, everyone is doing it, so it’s ‘boring.’”
WTF is BOU doing at #3?
Besides alphabetical, I guess.
Tied with LIV in GD and Goals Scored.
LIV beat BOU, though, on 8/15. Since this doesn’t affect any of the Euro positions, I guess it’s moot.
The “stats are for nerds” people in all sports are clueless IMO. Top level sports are about exploiting weaknesses and taking advantages wherever you can. The smart clubs use all techniques available to them, and analytics is but one tool in the overall kit.
I love it when people come up with a way to do something differently that is surprisingly effective, and don’t care if they came up with it on the whiteboard, training room, or the computer.
A fun recent example to me: how is Burnley doing what they are doing?
SUN and BOU are surprising this year.