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Why the referee going to the pitchside monitor is not what it seems
By Stuart James and Luke Bosher Oct 2, 2020
73
Time to dispel a myth or, as one leading figure in the industry puts it, “to let the genie out the bottle”.
What sort of conversation do you think has taken place with the video assistant referee (VAR) to prompt the match referee to stop the game and walk over to the pitchside monitor to review an incident?
For a lot of football fans, the assumption would probably be that the VAR, after watching footage back, believes that the referee’s interpretation of an incident may not be quite right and that the man in the middle would benefit from a second look. In other words, everything hangs in the balance until the referee has had a chance to watch a few replays and come to his own conclusion.
The reality, The Athletic learned this week, is rather different.
Would it surprise you if we told you that, deep down, the referee knows what decision he is going to make long before looking at the pitchside monitor? What about if we told you that even you, the football fan watching at home on the sofa, can figure out what is going to happen next?
There is no need to wait for that imaginary television screen to be drawn. The clues are there when you go back over the list of incidents this season when the pitchside monitor has been used:
September 12 — Crystal Palace v Southampton
51st minute — Jon Moss goes to monitor to check Kyle Walker-Peters tackle, overturns red card and downgrades to yellow
September 19 — Man United v Crystal Palace
70th minute — Martin Atkinson goes to monitor to check Victor Lindelof handball, overturns decision and gives penalty to Palace
September 20 — Newcastle v Brighton
87th minute — Kevin Friend goes to monitor to check Yves Bissouma “tackle” on Jamal Lewis, overturns yellow card and upgrades to red
September 20 — Southampton v Tottenham
87th minute — David Coote (below) goes to monitor to check Matt Doherty handball, overturns decision and gives penalty to Southampton
September 20 — Chelsea v Liverpool
45th minute — Paul Tierney goes to monitor to check foul by Andreas Christensen on Sadio Mane and upgrades it from a yellow to red card
September 26 — Crystal Palace v Everton
37th minute — Kevin Friend goes to monitor to check Joel Ward handball, overturns decision and gives penalty to Everton
September 26 — Brighton v Man United
48th minute — Chris Kavanagh goes to monitor to check Paul Pogba foul on Aaron Connolly, overturns decision and rescinds Brighton penalty
Injury time — Kavanagh goes to monitor to check Neal Maupay handball, overturns decision and gives penalty to United
September 27 — Tottenham v Newcastle
Injury time — Peter Bankes goes to monitor to check Eric Dier handball, overturns his decision and gives penalty to Newcastle
September 28 — Fulham v Aston Villa
56th minute — Stuart Attwell goes to monitor to check foul on Ezri Konsa in build-up to Bobby Decordova-Reid goal, overturns decision and disallows Fulham goal
In short, the referee’s original decision has been overturned every time the pitchside monitor has been used in the Premier League — and last season in other competitions for that matter. It is, as one well-placed source puts it, “a fait accompli” and is likely to continue to be because of the way the VAR protocol, which was devised and written by David Elleray, the International Football Association Board’s technical director, works.
“There’s this popular misconception among the public that they think the VAR has looked at, let’s say a handball that’s 50/50, and said, ‘Mr Referee, you might want to have another look at that.’ But that couldn’t be further from the truth because that is not allowed under IFAB’s protocol,” the source explains.
According to that protocol, on-field reviews should be mainly used for subjective decisions, such as the intensity of a foul challenge, interference at offside or handball considerations. The Premier League reinforces that message and, in many ways, raises the threshold. “There will be a high bar for VAR intervention on subjective decisions to maintain the pace and intensity of Premier League matches”, it notes in the Premier League’s VAR guidelines.
In those subjective scenarios, the VAR essentially has two choices, to either support the on-field decision, or to recommend to the referee that he views the incident on the pitch-side monitor.
Although the final decision always rests with the on-field referee, as outlined in the laws of the game, that isn’t as straightforward as it sounds because of the way VAR operates. A cornerstone of VAR is that it will only be used for “clear and obvious errors” or “serious missed incidents”. So the first thing that a referee thinks when the voice in his ear recommends the use of an on-field review is that his original decision was wrong. It is certainly not the case that the VAR is unsure and inviting the referee to take another look to try to clear things up; the VAR is insinuating that a clear and obvious error has been made.
In IFAB’s VAR handbook, which is quite a read, it also goes on to say that the on-field referee can use the pitchside monitor if they feel it will “assist match control/player management or will help sell a decision”.
A good example of the latter is when Jarred Gillett, the EFL referee, took charge of his last game in the Australian A-League. A goal was reviewed in that match because of a contentious offside decision that was made complicated by the fact that the ball glanced off the head of one of the defending players in the build-up. “Do you want me to come and have a look to sell it?” Gillett, who wore a microphone for the whole game, said to the VAR, who felt that the goal should stand. “I think I’d better. Because the players are expecting it.”
Those incidents, however, are few and far between. In the vast majority of cases, and certainly all of those in the Premier League this season, the referee is walking across to the pitchside monitor because the VAR is recommending an on-field review. Or, to put it another way, indirectly telling the referee he has made the wrong call.
It is possible, of course, that a referee (probably one of the more experienced officials) will at some point go over to the pitchside monitor, watch the replays and stand by their original decision, which they are perfectly entitled to do under the VAR protocol. By doing so, though, they will be openly casting doubt on the judgment of the VAR’s ability to identify a clear and obvious error, which means that the VAR thinks that the on-field referee got the decision wrong in the first place, and that the on-field referee thinks that the VAR was wrong to recommend a review. A bit of a mess, really.
There is a feeling that if that was going to happen with an incident this season, it would have been during Brighton’s 3-2 home defeat against Manchester United last month, when Kavanagh, the referee, awarded a penalty after Pogba tangled with Connolly. It was a highly debatable decision — Rio Ferdinand, covering the game for BT Sport, was adamant that Kavanagh was right to point to the spot — and certainly not clear and obvious that a mistake had been made by the referee. Kavanagh, however, backed down after watching replays of the incident and the penalty was rescinded.
Looking back, maybe it’s not that surprising that it took a long time for pitchside monitors to be used in the Premier League. Mike Riley, the general manager of Professional Game Match Officials Limited (PGMOL), discouraged officials from doing so during the first half of last season. Indeed, it wasn’t until the FA Cup third round in January, when Michael Oliver upgraded a yellow card for Luka Milivojevic to a red, that a referee made history (that’s how it was reported in the media at the time) by using a pitchside monitor in English football.
Some would like to see the remit of the VAR changed, so that there can be more of an open discussion with the referee (which is probably what a lot of football fans imagine happens) before the pitchside monitor is used, bearing in mind decisions aren’t always clear-cut. “Sometimes it would be better to say to the ref, ‘I’ve had a look from a couple of angles, I’m undecided but see what you think.’ That’s dead against IFAB’s VAR protocol,” the source adds. “But I think there’s room to say to the ref, ‘You might want to look at that again.’”
In a way, there is something far more credible, authentic and acceptable about the match referee making a decision after viewing it back himself, as opposed to it being made by somebody who is nowhere near the stadium, and that is probably why most football fans welcomed the news that pitchside monitors were going to be used. Like many things in life, though, it is not quite what it seems.
By Stuart James and Luke Bosher Oct 2, 2020
Time to dispel a myth or, as one leading figure in the industry puts it, “to let the genie out the bottle”.
What sort of conversation do you think has taken place with the video assistant referee (VAR) to prompt the match referee to stop the game and walk over to the pitchside monitor to review an incident?
For a lot of football fans, the assumption would probably be that the VAR, after watching footage back, believes that the referee’s interpretation of an incident may not be quite right and that the man in the middle would benefit from a second look. In other words, everything hangs in the balance until the referee has had a chance to watch a few replays and come to his own conclusion.
The reality, The Athletic learned this week, is rather different.
Would it surprise you if we told you that, deep down, the referee knows what decision he is going to make long before looking at the pitchside monitor? What about if we told you that even you, the football fan watching at home on the sofa, can figure out what is going to happen next?
There is no need to wait for that imaginary television screen to be drawn. The clues are there when you go back over the list of incidents this season when the pitchside monitor has been used:
September 12 — Crystal Palace v Southampton
51st minute — Jon Moss goes to monitor to check Kyle Walker-Peters tackle, overturns red card and downgrades to yellow
September 19 — Man United v Crystal Palace
70th minute — Martin Atkinson goes to monitor to check Victor Lindelof handball, overturns decision and gives penalty to Palace
September 20 — Newcastle v Brighton
87th minute — Kevin Friend goes to monitor to check Yves Bissouma “tackle” on Jamal Lewis, overturns yellow card and upgrades to red
September 20 — Southampton v Tottenham
87th minute — David Coote (below) goes to monitor to check Matt Doherty handball, overturns decision and gives penalty to Southampton
September 20 — Chelsea v Liverpool
45th minute — Paul Tierney goes to monitor to check foul by Andreas Christensen on Sadio Mane and upgrades it from a yellow to red card
September 26 — Crystal Palace v Everton
37th minute — Kevin Friend goes to monitor to check Joel Ward handball, overturns decision and gives penalty to Everton
September 26 — Brighton v Man United
48th minute — Chris Kavanagh goes to monitor to check Paul Pogba foul on Aaron Connolly, overturns decision and rescinds Brighton penalty
Injury time — Kavanagh goes to monitor to check Neal Maupay handball, overturns decision and gives penalty to United
September 27 — Tottenham v Newcastle
Injury time — Peter Bankes goes to monitor to check Eric Dier handball, overturns his decision and gives penalty to Newcastle
September 28 — Fulham v Aston Villa
56th minute — Stuart Attwell goes to monitor to check foul on Ezri Konsa in build-up to Bobby Decordova-Reid goal, overturns decision and disallows Fulham goal
In short, the referee’s original decision has been overturned every time the pitchside monitor has been used in the Premier League — and last season in other competitions for that matter. It is, as one well-placed source puts it, “a fait accompli” and is likely to continue to be because of the way the VAR protocol, which was devised and written by David Elleray, the International Football Association Board’s technical director, works.
“There’s this popular misconception among the public that they think the VAR has looked at, let’s say a handball that’s 50/50, and said, ‘Mr Referee, you might want to have another look at that.’ But that couldn’t be further from the truth because that is not allowed under IFAB’s protocol,” the source explains.
According to that protocol, on-field reviews should be mainly used for subjective decisions, such as the intensity of a foul challenge, interference at offside or handball considerations. The Premier League reinforces that message and, in many ways, raises the threshold. “There will be a high bar for VAR intervention on subjective decisions to maintain the pace and intensity of Premier League matches”, it notes in the Premier League’s VAR guidelines.
In those subjective scenarios, the VAR essentially has two choices, to either support the on-field decision, or to recommend to the referee that he views the incident on the pitch-side monitor.
Although the final decision always rests with the on-field referee, as outlined in the laws of the game, that isn’t as straightforward as it sounds because of the way VAR operates. A cornerstone of VAR is that it will only be used for “clear and obvious errors” or “serious missed incidents”. So the first thing that a referee thinks when the voice in his ear recommends the use of an on-field review is that his original decision was wrong. It is certainly not the case that the VAR is unsure and inviting the referee to take another look to try to clear things up; the VAR is insinuating that a clear and obvious error has been made.
In IFAB’s VAR handbook, which is quite a read, it also goes on to say that the on-field referee can use the pitchside monitor if they feel it will “assist match control/player management or will help sell a decision”.
A good example of the latter is when Jarred Gillett, the EFL referee, took charge of his last game in the Australian A-League. A goal was reviewed in that match because of a contentious offside decision that was made complicated by the fact that the ball glanced off the head of one of the defending players in the build-up. “Do you want me to come and have a look to sell it?” Gillett, who wore a microphone for the whole game, said to the VAR, who felt that the goal should stand. “I think I’d better. Because the players are expecting it.”
Those incidents, however, are few and far between. In the vast majority of cases, and certainly all of those in the Premier League this season, the referee is walking across to the pitchside monitor because the VAR is recommending an on-field review. Or, to put it another way, indirectly telling the referee he has made the wrong call.
It is possible, of course, that a referee (probably one of the more experienced officials) will at some point go over to the pitchside monitor, watch the replays and stand by their original decision, which they are perfectly entitled to do under the VAR protocol. By doing so, though, they will be openly casting doubt on the judgment of the VAR’s ability to identify a clear and obvious error, which means that the VAR thinks that the on-field referee got the decision wrong in the first place, and that the on-field referee thinks that the VAR was wrong to recommend a review. A bit of a mess, really.
There is a feeling that if that was going to happen with an incident this season, it would have been during Brighton’s 3-2 home defeat against Manchester United last month, when Kavanagh, the referee, awarded a penalty after Pogba tangled with Connolly. It was a highly debatable decision — Rio Ferdinand, covering the game for BT Sport, was adamant that Kavanagh was right to point to the spot — and certainly not clear and obvious that a mistake had been made by the referee. Kavanagh, however, backed down after watching replays of the incident and the penalty was rescinded.
Looking back, maybe it’s not that surprising that it took a long time for pitchside monitors to be used in the Premier League. Mike Riley, the general manager of Professional Game Match Officials Limited (PGMOL), discouraged officials from doing so during the first half of last season. Indeed, it wasn’t until the FA Cup third round in January, when Michael Oliver upgraded a yellow card for Luka Milivojevic to a red, that a referee made history (that’s how it was reported in the media at the time) by using a pitchside monitor in English football.
Some would like to see the remit of the VAR changed, so that there can be more of an open discussion with the referee (which is probably what a lot of football fans imagine happens) before the pitchside monitor is used, bearing in mind decisions aren’t always clear-cut. “Sometimes it would be better to say to the ref, ‘I’ve had a look from a couple of angles, I’m undecided but see what you think.’ That’s dead against IFAB’s VAR protocol,” the source adds. “But I think there’s room to say to the ref, ‘You might want to look at that again.’”
In a way, there is something far more credible, authentic and acceptable about the match referee making a decision after viewing it back himself, as opposed to it being made by somebody who is nowhere near the stadium, and that is probably why most football fans welcomed the news that pitchside monitors were going to be used. Like many things in life, though, it is not quite what it seems.
So who really is England’s biggest club?
Jack Pitt-Brooke and more Sep 30, 2020
396
Additional contributors: Ali Humayun, Charlotte Harpur, Luke Bosher and Holly Percival
If you like football, you will probably have found yourself at some point trapped in a futile discussion about which club is the biggest.
It matters so much to people, because so many fans want to be associated with prestige, fame, tradition and glamour. But it is also impossible to pin down, because those very qualities are difficult to quantify. There is no metric for glory, that is the whole point.
Well, at The Athletic we like to try to solve debates and explain things, so we have tried to quantify who really is the biggest club of them all, and produce a ranking — based entirely on objective criteria — so we can try to categorise the small clubs from the big clubs, the giant clubs from the massive clubs.
We are indebted to Nick Harris who made his own attempt at this in the Daily Mail five years ago, and our metrics are an updated version of his, while we have also added an extra category we felt was essential. We have tried to come up with a broad enough range of rankings to recognise different aspects — popularity, success, visibility, tradition, quality and so on. All of our measurements are objective, which does not make them perfect — you may well not agree with our framings — but does at least mean the rankings are based on more than just our own hunches and biases.
We do not expect people to agree with the outcomes either — some clubs are surprisingly low — but we hope this provides you with a picture.
CROWDS
This has to start with popularity. A big club is a popular club, no-one can argue otherwise. There are different types of popularity, and we will get onto the matter of global fanbases. But our starting point here is bums on seats.
To watch any game in the last six months in an empty stadium is to be reminded of the power of a crowd. Football is not the same without one. And while that is as true of non-League as it is of the Premier League, the bigger the crowd the more power it conveys. Nothing projects size and status like a full Nou Camp or Old Trafford.
So the obvious starting point here is to rank teams by their average attendance from last season (pre-pandemic). Obviously, this has Manchester United (72,500) on top, then Arsenal (60,279), then West Ham United (59,925), and so on.
But we also know that some teams are trapped by having a smaller stadium, and could sell far more tickets if they wanted. So we decided to slightly weight that measure, multiplying the average attendance by the percentage of the maximum capacity it represented. So, in theory, a team getting 40,000 in an 80,000 stadium (50 per cent full) would have that number halved down to 20,000, while a team selling out a 30,000 seater (100% full) would stay at 30,000. This way teams like Everton (98.9 per cent of capacity) and Leeds (99.3 per cent) would not get punished for having smaller stadiums. Newcastle United (92.2 per cent full) get weighted down. That adjusted figure gave us our first ranking in this category.
However we know that just looking at last season can never tell the whole story. Some clubs used to get bigger crowds, in bigger grounds. Other teams have only just moved into shiny new stadiums. We wanted to record that historic support too. So we have ranked all the clubs by their highest ever attendance. Tottenham are top with their 85,512 at Wembley in 2016, then Manchester City with 84,569 at Maine Road in 1934, then Chelsea with 82,905 at Stamford Bridge in 1935.
So we had two rankings for all clubs — weighted last season attendance, and historic high. And we took an average. Two clubs tied for top. Manchester United (first last season, fourth historically) and Tottenham (fourth last season, top historically). Then Manchester City (fifth and second), Arsenal (second and ninth) and Chelsea (ninth and third). So the big six, in this sense, is the big six. Aston Villa (eighth and sixth), Everton and Newcastle made up the best of the rest.
GLOBAL FANBASE
Modern football is global, and even before COVID-19 not every fan of every team could get to every game. It is also very expensive to follow a Premier League team, and so we wanted to include a measurement that recognised there are more fans than just the ones in the ground. We wanted a measure that was more inclusive, and took into account the fact that our top teams are hugely popular all around the world. So we decided to look at social media.
It might not be a traditional sign of prestige but it does say a lot about the cachet of a club nowadays. Even before the pandemic, social media was the main way that most fans could actively participate in supporting their team. It is not just passive, it’s a way to live your support day in, day out.
Fortunately, measuring social media popularity compared to some of the other metrics is also extremely easy. You just add up the numbers of fans. We decided to take the most popular platforms, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (at the start of September) and combine them. Snapchat, Weibo, TikTok didn’t make the cut, but who knows how we would do this in a few years’ time. And if fans were counted multiple times on different platforms, well, that’s just a reward for loyalty.
On all three platforms, and on the total, the Big Six is very much the Big Six. On Facebook, which has by far the biggest numbers, United have a huge lead with more than 73 million, ahead of Chelsea in second place, with City back in third. On Instagram, United are top again, ahead of Liverpool then Chelsea. And on Twitter, United are top, followed by — and this will surprise no-one who uses the platform — Arsenal, then Liverpool, then Chelsea.
On no platform did anyone outside the Big Six get near, but the best performers were Leicester City, whose Instagram following is just over half of Tottenham’s. That was as close as it got.
In the final analysis, United’s combined following – more than 132 million – was miles clear of Chelsea, with Liverpool in third, Arsenal in fourth, City in fifth and then Tottenham in sixth. Leicester, Aston Villa and Everton, this time, made up the best of the rest.
MAJOR TROPHIES
Big clubs need to be popular, but they also need to be successful. Prestige in football is inseparable from silverware. There is a reason that so much of football one-upmanship is about trophy cabinets, empty or not.
Every football club in the world boasts about its past successes. Clubs name parts of their stadiums after the greatest players and managers. Fans grow up learning this history too. There is a reason that Liverpool sing about their six European Cups or Manchester United their 20 league titles. These records still shape how we understand the game.
So we wanted to turn that 130 years of competitive English football into one easy to understand ranking. We allocated points for each trophy, judging by importance: 10 points for a Champions League, eight for a top-flight title, five for an FA Cup or Europa League, three for a League Cup, Club World Cup or Cup Winners Cup, and one for a lower league title.
No surprises, then, who the top two teams were. Liverpool (293) just edged out Manchester United (280) for first place. United have the edge on league titles (but only just, and maybe not for much longer), but Liverpool’s six European Cups squeeze them into first place.
Then we have a huge gap of 95 points down to third place, held by Arsenal, with their 13 league titles and 14 FA Cups, before Chelsea come into fourth, buoyed by the domestic and European successes since Roman Abramovich bought the club in 2003.
While many of our metrics are dominated by the Big Six, this one is not, because it reaches so far back. So in fifth place we have Aston Villa, who won five league titles and three FA Cups in the Victorian era, and have a European Cup (1982) as well. And then in seventh, ahead of Spurs, is Everton, with their nine league titles and five FA Cups.
RECENT MAJOR TROPHIES
But when it comes to trophies, recent success must be judged too. Over time, the shine on a trophy wears off. Those league titles that Sunderland and Aston Villa won in the 1890s are impressive, but they simply do not convey the same prestige as Liverpool winning it this year, or Manchester City the year before. There’s a reason people always talk about “trophy droughts”, and why there used to be a banner at Old Trafford about City’s long wait.
So we wanted a separate — and new — metric to recognise this. Rather than introducing another weighting mechanism, we decided simply to go for a cut-off. There’s an argument for 1992, for obvious reasons, but decided to go for 2000 instead. Twenty years is a big enough data set to work.
On top, and you will be used to this by now, is Manchester United. No league title for seven years, no problem. Their eight 21st century Premier League titles are enough to put them clearly on top. (If we had cut off at 1992 rather than 2000 they would be even clearer in front). With the 2008 Champions League too, they finished on a healthy 104 points.
In second and third we had the two big winners from the 2000 cut off, Chelsea and Manchester City, whose takeovers in 2003 and 2008 respectively transformed the landscape of English football, and the fortunes of the clubs. Chelsea’s five post-Abramovich titles, and the 2012 Champions League, puts them in a close second. City, with four league titles in the Abu Dhabi era scrape into third, just ahead of Liverpool and then Arsenal, whose haul of FA Cups isn’t quite enough.
This is one of the few metrics where the Big Six isn’t the top six, with Leicester City’s 2016 title putting them sixth. Tottenham’s one League Cup, under Juande Ramos, means they have to settle behind Wigan Athletic and Portsmouth and Swansea City in the table.
Villa, Everton and West Ham have all won nothing in the last 20 years — which meant they finished a lowly joint 48th in this category.
Wolves and Newcastle both picked up two single points for their two Championship titles, as well as a League One title in the case of Wolves, which helped boost their overall ranking.
But we have 47 clubs accruing points here, and 80 per cent of them (362/450) belong to our top five. Which tells you everything you need to know about the stratification of football this century.
Jack Pitt-Brooke and more Sep 30, 2020
Additional contributors: Ali Humayun, Charlotte Harpur, Luke Bosher and Holly Percival
If you like football, you will probably have found yourself at some point trapped in a futile discussion about which club is the biggest.
It matters so much to people, because so many fans want to be associated with prestige, fame, tradition and glamour. But it is also impossible to pin down, because those very qualities are difficult to quantify. There is no metric for glory, that is the whole point.
Well, at The Athletic we like to try to solve debates and explain things, so we have tried to quantify who really is the biggest club of them all, and produce a ranking — based entirely on objective criteria — so we can try to categorise the small clubs from the big clubs, the giant clubs from the massive clubs.
We are indebted to Nick Harris who made his own attempt at this in the Daily Mail five years ago, and our metrics are an updated version of his, while we have also added an extra category we felt was essential. We have tried to come up with a broad enough range of rankings to recognise different aspects — popularity, success, visibility, tradition, quality and so on. All of our measurements are objective, which does not make them perfect — you may well not agree with our framings — but does at least mean the rankings are based on more than just our own hunches and biases.
We do not expect people to agree with the outcomes either — some clubs are surprisingly low — but we hope this provides you with a picture.
CROWDS
This has to start with popularity. A big club is a popular club, no-one can argue otherwise. There are different types of popularity, and we will get onto the matter of global fanbases. But our starting point here is bums on seats.
To watch any game in the last six months in an empty stadium is to be reminded of the power of a crowd. Football is not the same without one. And while that is as true of non-League as it is of the Premier League, the bigger the crowd the more power it conveys. Nothing projects size and status like a full Nou Camp or Old Trafford.
So the obvious starting point here is to rank teams by their average attendance from last season (pre-pandemic). Obviously, this has Manchester United (72,500) on top, then Arsenal (60,279), then West Ham United (59,925), and so on.
But we also know that some teams are trapped by having a smaller stadium, and could sell far more tickets if they wanted. So we decided to slightly weight that measure, multiplying the average attendance by the percentage of the maximum capacity it represented. So, in theory, a team getting 40,000 in an 80,000 stadium (50 per cent full) would have that number halved down to 20,000, while a team selling out a 30,000 seater (100% full) would stay at 30,000. This way teams like Everton (98.9 per cent of capacity) and Leeds (99.3 per cent) would not get punished for having smaller stadiums. Newcastle United (92.2 per cent full) get weighted down. That adjusted figure gave us our first ranking in this category.
However we know that just looking at last season can never tell the whole story. Some clubs used to get bigger crowds, in bigger grounds. Other teams have only just moved into shiny new stadiums. We wanted to record that historic support too. So we have ranked all the clubs by their highest ever attendance. Tottenham are top with their 85,512 at Wembley in 2016, then Manchester City with 84,569 at Maine Road in 1934, then Chelsea with 82,905 at Stamford Bridge in 1935.
So we had two rankings for all clubs — weighted last season attendance, and historic high. And we took an average. Two clubs tied for top. Manchester United (first last season, fourth historically) and Tottenham (fourth last season, top historically). Then Manchester City (fifth and second), Arsenal (second and ninth) and Chelsea (ninth and third). So the big six, in this sense, is the big six. Aston Villa (eighth and sixth), Everton and Newcastle made up the best of the rest.
GLOBAL FANBASE
Modern football is global, and even before COVID-19 not every fan of every team could get to every game. It is also very expensive to follow a Premier League team, and so we wanted to include a measurement that recognised there are more fans than just the ones in the ground. We wanted a measure that was more inclusive, and took into account the fact that our top teams are hugely popular all around the world. So we decided to look at social media.
It might not be a traditional sign of prestige but it does say a lot about the cachet of a club nowadays. Even before the pandemic, social media was the main way that most fans could actively participate in supporting their team. It is not just passive, it’s a way to live your support day in, day out.
Fortunately, measuring social media popularity compared to some of the other metrics is also extremely easy. You just add up the numbers of fans. We decided to take the most popular platforms, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (at the start of September) and combine them. Snapchat, Weibo, TikTok didn’t make the cut, but who knows how we would do this in a few years’ time. And if fans were counted multiple times on different platforms, well, that’s just a reward for loyalty.
On all three platforms, and on the total, the Big Six is very much the Big Six. On Facebook, which has by far the biggest numbers, United have a huge lead with more than 73 million, ahead of Chelsea in second place, with City back in third. On Instagram, United are top again, ahead of Liverpool then Chelsea. And on Twitter, United are top, followed by — and this will surprise no-one who uses the platform — Arsenal, then Liverpool, then Chelsea.
On no platform did anyone outside the Big Six get near, but the best performers were Leicester City, whose Instagram following is just over half of Tottenham’s. That was as close as it got.
In the final analysis, United’s combined following – more than 132 million – was miles clear of Chelsea, with Liverpool in third, Arsenal in fourth, City in fifth and then Tottenham in sixth. Leicester, Aston Villa and Everton, this time, made up the best of the rest.
MAJOR TROPHIES
Big clubs need to be popular, but they also need to be successful. Prestige in football is inseparable from silverware. There is a reason that so much of football one-upmanship is about trophy cabinets, empty or not.
Every football club in the world boasts about its past successes. Clubs name parts of their stadiums after the greatest players and managers. Fans grow up learning this history too. There is a reason that Liverpool sing about their six European Cups or Manchester United their 20 league titles. These records still shape how we understand the game.
So we wanted to turn that 130 years of competitive English football into one easy to understand ranking. We allocated points for each trophy, judging by importance: 10 points for a Champions League, eight for a top-flight title, five for an FA Cup or Europa League, three for a League Cup, Club World Cup or Cup Winners Cup, and one for a lower league title.
No surprises, then, who the top two teams were. Liverpool (293) just edged out Manchester United (280) for first place. United have the edge on league titles (but only just, and maybe not for much longer), but Liverpool’s six European Cups squeeze them into first place.
Then we have a huge gap of 95 points down to third place, held by Arsenal, with their 13 league titles and 14 FA Cups, before Chelsea come into fourth, buoyed by the domestic and European successes since Roman Abramovich bought the club in 2003.
While many of our metrics are dominated by the Big Six, this one is not, because it reaches so far back. So in fifth place we have Aston Villa, who won five league titles and three FA Cups in the Victorian era, and have a European Cup (1982) as well. And then in seventh, ahead of Spurs, is Everton, with their nine league titles and five FA Cups.
RECENT MAJOR TROPHIES
But when it comes to trophies, recent success must be judged too. Over time, the shine on a trophy wears off. Those league titles that Sunderland and Aston Villa won in the 1890s are impressive, but they simply do not convey the same prestige as Liverpool winning it this year, or Manchester City the year before. There’s a reason people always talk about “trophy droughts”, and why there used to be a banner at Old Trafford about City’s long wait.
So we wanted a separate — and new — metric to recognise this. Rather than introducing another weighting mechanism, we decided simply to go for a cut-off. There’s an argument for 1992, for obvious reasons, but decided to go for 2000 instead. Twenty years is a big enough data set to work.
On top, and you will be used to this by now, is Manchester United. No league title for seven years, no problem. Their eight 21st century Premier League titles are enough to put them clearly on top. (If we had cut off at 1992 rather than 2000 they would be even clearer in front). With the 2008 Champions League too, they finished on a healthy 104 points.
In second and third we had the two big winners from the 2000 cut off, Chelsea and Manchester City, whose takeovers in 2003 and 2008 respectively transformed the landscape of English football, and the fortunes of the clubs. Chelsea’s five post-Abramovich titles, and the 2012 Champions League, puts them in a close second. City, with four league titles in the Abu Dhabi era scrape into third, just ahead of Liverpool and then Arsenal, whose haul of FA Cups isn’t quite enough.
This is one of the few metrics where the Big Six isn’t the top six, with Leicester City’s 2016 title putting them sixth. Tottenham’s one League Cup, under Juande Ramos, means they have to settle behind Wigan Athletic and Portsmouth and Swansea City in the table.
Villa, Everton and West Ham have all won nothing in the last 20 years — which meant they finished a lowly joint 48th in this category.
Wolves and Newcastle both picked up two single points for their two Championship titles, as well as a League One title in the case of Wolves, which helped boost their overall ranking.
But we have 47 clubs accruing points here, and 80 per cent of them (362/450) belong to our top five. Which tells you everything you need to know about the stratification of football this century.
Part 2
LEAGUE FINISHES
We know that some teams have been short-changed by just counting up trophies, and recent ones too. Because success isn’t just winning trophies. It’s also to do with simply being a good team.
So we looked at the all-time league records of teams. One point for being top of the top flight, counted all the way down to the fourth tier. And we took an average, from every league finish in their history. Because consistency isn’t just about winning five games in a row, it’s about being in the top flight for 20 straight years.
Top of this metric was Liverpool, with an average league finish of just 7.8. Not just for their 19 league titles (although they certainly help) but for that remarkable run, from the Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley years and beyond, of finishing in the top flight every year from 1966 to 1992. Then we have Arsenal at 8.4, beneficiaries of playing in the top flight consistently since World War I (even if they relied on a clever bit of politics to get them there).
Next, in the highest finish by any team from outside of the Big Six in any of our metrics, is Everton (9.1). Not only are they a founder member of the Football League but they have only played four seasons outside of the top flight since 1888, and have been there unbroken since 1954 (only Arsenal have been there for longer). They had just one finish outside the top six in the 1960s, and were in the top half from 1982 to 1992.
Then there is Manchester United (9.8), thanks in part to those great spells under Matt Busby and Ferguson. Then Tottenham with 11.2, having only had one season — 1977-78 — outside the top flight in 70 years. Aston Villa are next while Chelsea (12.6) and Manchester City (13.1) are squeezed down to seventh and eighth respectively.
PLAYER QUALITY
Prestige is not just carried by the clubs themselves, but by their players too. And big players can bestow some of that on their teams by the simple act of pulling on the shirt. Just look at how Everton feel like a bigger club now that James Rodriguez plays for them. And Spurs will too when Gareth Bale makes his second debut this month.
But how do you measure player quality and glamour? Transfer fees are no true sign, and we will come onto money later. Social media followings have been covered already. Stardom is difficult to objectively measure. So we decided to look away from the club game and at the biggest stage in football: the World Cup.
Seeing players from your own club perform in a World Cup conveys a status in itself. So we looked at all the squads from the 2018 World Cup (32 teams, 23 each, 736 in total). Each player means one point for that particular club (which were counted at the time of the World Cup). No differentiation between players either, so Sergio Aguero, Willy Caballero and Marcos Rojo each count the same. Clubs are effectively rewarded for the depth of their squad, and also its cosmopolitanism.
So in first place we have Manchester City with 16 players at the World Cup, the most of any club in the world. In second place we have Tottenham Hotspur (fifth in the world), who had five England players but seven others as well. That makes up our first ranking in this category.
Again, we didn’t want to be too rooted in the present day. There is a historical element to cachet and charisma as well. We all remember that Bobby Moore played for West Ham, Bobby Charlton for Manchester United, Pele for Santos, Eusebio for Benfica. That matters, but it is hard to build a numerical system around all international players in football history. So we decided to take all England players instead. Even if that means Arsenal missing out on credit for having Emmanuel Petit, Patrick Vieira and Thierry Henry.
Each club gets a point for one of their players representing England. (So Ashley Cole would mean one point for Arsenal and one for Chelsea, rather than one for every cap). The result, like our ranking of averaged all-time league position, sees Chelsea and City pushed down at the expense of historically bigger clubs. Tottenham are top with 78, then Liverpool and Aston Villa tied on 74, Everton on 68, then Manchester United on 67. Blackburn Rovers on 48 nearly push City (49) out of ninth place.
As with the attendance section, we have two rankings, and we took an average of the two. Tottenham (second on World Cup, first on England) are comfortably top with a 1.5 average. Liverpool (second and sixth) and Manchester United (fifth and third) share second place. Then City and Chelsea, both with lower scores on England, are pulled up to fourth and fifth by their 2018 rankings. Again, the Big Six is the top six, with Aston Villa and Everton dragged down to seventh and eighth because they finished joint-12th in their 2018 ranking. Being rich now ultimately counts for more than being good in the past.
COMMERCIAL REVENUE
Now it might be easy to turn your nose up this section. Nobody got into football as a child because of the allure of global commercial revenue. It has nothing to do with romance or mythology or excitement or drama. But football in 2020 is an ugly place, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The fact is that at the top level of the game, how much money you can bring in is central to what you can do on the pitch.
That is the reason why clubs push so hard for these. This is what top clubs nowadays truly aspire to, even if they might not always explicitly admit it. This is why Manchester United have an Official Global Lubricant Partner and Fuel Retail Partner, an Official Digital Transformation Partner, an Official Global Mattress and Pillow Partner, an Official Forex and Online Financial Trading Partner and the rest.
These partners are hugely lucrative for clubs, and explain why commercial revenue is growing so fast as a proportion of what the big clubs bring in. But they have a relevance here beyond simply money. They also tell us something about the attractiveness of any club’s brand, how much companies want to be associated with it. And these deals provide a global visibility and projection beyond anything the club can do on the pitch.
So it is no surprise that Manchester United, struggling on the pitch but kings of commercial revenue, come out top on this score. Their £275.1 million (from their last set of accounts from 2018-19) is well clear of Manchester City back on £227 million. Then Liverpool, Chelsea, Tottenham and Arsenal. No one could have expected the grip of the Big Six to be broken on this particular score. Everton are seventh, with just over one third of Arsenal’s commercial revenue.
OVERALL RANKING
Seven categories ranked with the best team at one. All we had to do to get the final tally was to add the points together. The lower your score, the bigger you are.
Manchester United have not won a Premier League title for seven years but Richard Arnold and Ed Woodward can put their feet up: they are judged to be the biggest club in the country and it is not even close. Their score of 12 points across seven categories is half the size of the second-place team. They scored top on attendance, global fanbase, recent trophies and commercial revenue, indicating that when it comes to commanding the eyes of the world no-one else can match them. The dominance of the Ferguson years, just as the Premier League was expanding globally, came at the perfect time. The fans are not happy with the direction of the club, but with this many eyeballs and this much money, why does it matter where you finish?
In second place, some way from United, is Liverpool. They won the all-time trophies and all-time average league position categories, pointing to their historical strength, but were ultimately dragged down by the crowds metric, where they finished 10th. Anfield, one of their great strengths as a club, effectively cost them a challenge to United for top spot here.
Most people would agree on Liverpool and United in the top two spots (the order is more subjective), but third and beyond is harder. Just two points separated the third, fourth and fifth teams.
Chelsea scraped into third, largely thanks to finishing second on global fanbase and 21st century trophies, underlining the huge growth the club has enjoyed in the Abramovich era. Their average league finish is seventh, but the more modern metrics make up for that.
Then we had Arsenal, who might be aggrieved to miss out to Chelsea for third given the tradition of the club. But they only had one second-place score (average league finish). And then Manchester City, whose strong performances (commercial revenue and recent trophies) again pointed to their modern growth, while not being able to make up for worse scores on average league finish (City were in the third tier 21 years ago remember) and all-time trophies. Tottenham finished sixth out of the Big Six.
But it says everything about modern football that the gap between sixth and seventh is so big. Seventh place Newcastle United (87) accrued more than double the number of points of sixth-placed Tottenham (36), but their historic trophy, two Championship titles and league success was enough to make them the best of the rest. Which is how many of their fans see it.
Then we had Everton, strong on the historical fields, dismal in terms of recent trophies, tied with Wolves, consistent across the board. Then Aston Villa, with a similar profile to Everton, and then Leicester City, buoyed by that 2016 title and the social media followers it drove to the club. Then another gap, and then West Bromwich Albion perhaps surprisingly beating Leeds United into 12th place.
You might disagree with some of the individual rankings but the overall picture is clear. English football is still dominated by the twin giants of Manchester United and Liverpool, but while there are gradations within the Big Six, there is a bigger gulf between those six and the rest. This is a stratified game, and the strata are moving away from one another faster than ever before. Even the great clubs of the past — Everton and Villa — cannot compete financially with the rest, although this could be the year that Everton finally break back in.
Most of the have-nots are left looking enviously on, clutching only to their former glories.
LEAGUE FINISHES
We know that some teams have been short-changed by just counting up trophies, and recent ones too. Because success isn’t just winning trophies. It’s also to do with simply being a good team.
So we looked at the all-time league records of teams. One point for being top of the top flight, counted all the way down to the fourth tier. And we took an average, from every league finish in their history. Because consistency isn’t just about winning five games in a row, it’s about being in the top flight for 20 straight years.
Top of this metric was Liverpool, with an average league finish of just 7.8. Not just for their 19 league titles (although they certainly help) but for that remarkable run, from the Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley years and beyond, of finishing in the top flight every year from 1966 to 1992. Then we have Arsenal at 8.4, beneficiaries of playing in the top flight consistently since World War I (even if they relied on a clever bit of politics to get them there).
Next, in the highest finish by any team from outside of the Big Six in any of our metrics, is Everton (9.1). Not only are they a founder member of the Football League but they have only played four seasons outside of the top flight since 1888, and have been there unbroken since 1954 (only Arsenal have been there for longer). They had just one finish outside the top six in the 1960s, and were in the top half from 1982 to 1992.
Then there is Manchester United (9.8), thanks in part to those great spells under Matt Busby and Ferguson. Then Tottenham with 11.2, having only had one season — 1977-78 — outside the top flight in 70 years. Aston Villa are next while Chelsea (12.6) and Manchester City (13.1) are squeezed down to seventh and eighth respectively.
PLAYER QUALITY
Prestige is not just carried by the clubs themselves, but by their players too. And big players can bestow some of that on their teams by the simple act of pulling on the shirt. Just look at how Everton feel like a bigger club now that James Rodriguez plays for them. And Spurs will too when Gareth Bale makes his second debut this month.
But how do you measure player quality and glamour? Transfer fees are no true sign, and we will come onto money later. Social media followings have been covered already. Stardom is difficult to objectively measure. So we decided to look away from the club game and at the biggest stage in football: the World Cup.
Seeing players from your own club perform in a World Cup conveys a status in itself. So we looked at all the squads from the 2018 World Cup (32 teams, 23 each, 736 in total). Each player means one point for that particular club (which were counted at the time of the World Cup). No differentiation between players either, so Sergio Aguero, Willy Caballero and Marcos Rojo each count the same. Clubs are effectively rewarded for the depth of their squad, and also its cosmopolitanism.
So in first place we have Manchester City with 16 players at the World Cup, the most of any club in the world. In second place we have Tottenham Hotspur (fifth in the world), who had five England players but seven others as well. That makes up our first ranking in this category.
Again, we didn’t want to be too rooted in the present day. There is a historical element to cachet and charisma as well. We all remember that Bobby Moore played for West Ham, Bobby Charlton for Manchester United, Pele for Santos, Eusebio for Benfica. That matters, but it is hard to build a numerical system around all international players in football history. So we decided to take all England players instead. Even if that means Arsenal missing out on credit for having Emmanuel Petit, Patrick Vieira and Thierry Henry.
Each club gets a point for one of their players representing England. (So Ashley Cole would mean one point for Arsenal and one for Chelsea, rather than one for every cap). The result, like our ranking of averaged all-time league position, sees Chelsea and City pushed down at the expense of historically bigger clubs. Tottenham are top with 78, then Liverpool and Aston Villa tied on 74, Everton on 68, then Manchester United on 67. Blackburn Rovers on 48 nearly push City (49) out of ninth place.
As with the attendance section, we have two rankings, and we took an average of the two. Tottenham (second on World Cup, first on England) are comfortably top with a 1.5 average. Liverpool (second and sixth) and Manchester United (fifth and third) share second place. Then City and Chelsea, both with lower scores on England, are pulled up to fourth and fifth by their 2018 rankings. Again, the Big Six is the top six, with Aston Villa and Everton dragged down to seventh and eighth because they finished joint-12th in their 2018 ranking. Being rich now ultimately counts for more than being good in the past.
COMMERCIAL REVENUE
Now it might be easy to turn your nose up this section. Nobody got into football as a child because of the allure of global commercial revenue. It has nothing to do with romance or mythology or excitement or drama. But football in 2020 is an ugly place, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The fact is that at the top level of the game, how much money you can bring in is central to what you can do on the pitch.
That is the reason why clubs push so hard for these. This is what top clubs nowadays truly aspire to, even if they might not always explicitly admit it. This is why Manchester United have an Official Global Lubricant Partner and Fuel Retail Partner, an Official Digital Transformation Partner, an Official Global Mattress and Pillow Partner, an Official Forex and Online Financial Trading Partner and the rest.
These partners are hugely lucrative for clubs, and explain why commercial revenue is growing so fast as a proportion of what the big clubs bring in. But they have a relevance here beyond simply money. They also tell us something about the attractiveness of any club’s brand, how much companies want to be associated with it. And these deals provide a global visibility and projection beyond anything the club can do on the pitch.
So it is no surprise that Manchester United, struggling on the pitch but kings of commercial revenue, come out top on this score. Their £275.1 million (from their last set of accounts from 2018-19) is well clear of Manchester City back on £227 million. Then Liverpool, Chelsea, Tottenham and Arsenal. No one could have expected the grip of the Big Six to be broken on this particular score. Everton are seventh, with just over one third of Arsenal’s commercial revenue.
OVERALL RANKING
Seven categories ranked with the best team at one. All we had to do to get the final tally was to add the points together. The lower your score, the bigger you are.
Manchester United have not won a Premier League title for seven years but Richard Arnold and Ed Woodward can put their feet up: they are judged to be the biggest club in the country and it is not even close. Their score of 12 points across seven categories is half the size of the second-place team. They scored top on attendance, global fanbase, recent trophies and commercial revenue, indicating that when it comes to commanding the eyes of the world no-one else can match them. The dominance of the Ferguson years, just as the Premier League was expanding globally, came at the perfect time. The fans are not happy with the direction of the club, but with this many eyeballs and this much money, why does it matter where you finish?
In second place, some way from United, is Liverpool. They won the all-time trophies and all-time average league position categories, pointing to their historical strength, but were ultimately dragged down by the crowds metric, where they finished 10th. Anfield, one of their great strengths as a club, effectively cost them a challenge to United for top spot here.
Most people would agree on Liverpool and United in the top two spots (the order is more subjective), but third and beyond is harder. Just two points separated the third, fourth and fifth teams.
Chelsea scraped into third, largely thanks to finishing second on global fanbase and 21st century trophies, underlining the huge growth the club has enjoyed in the Abramovich era. Their average league finish is seventh, but the more modern metrics make up for that.
Then we had Arsenal, who might be aggrieved to miss out to Chelsea for third given the tradition of the club. But they only had one second-place score (average league finish). And then Manchester City, whose strong performances (commercial revenue and recent trophies) again pointed to their modern growth, while not being able to make up for worse scores on average league finish (City were in the third tier 21 years ago remember) and all-time trophies. Tottenham finished sixth out of the Big Six.
But it says everything about modern football that the gap between sixth and seventh is so big. Seventh place Newcastle United (87) accrued more than double the number of points of sixth-placed Tottenham (36), but their historic trophy, two Championship titles and league success was enough to make them the best of the rest. Which is how many of their fans see it.
Then we had Everton, strong on the historical fields, dismal in terms of recent trophies, tied with Wolves, consistent across the board. Then Aston Villa, with a similar profile to Everton, and then Leicester City, buoyed by that 2016 title and the social media followers it drove to the club. Then another gap, and then West Bromwich Albion perhaps surprisingly beating Leeds United into 12th place.
You might disagree with some of the individual rankings but the overall picture is clear. English football is still dominated by the twin giants of Manchester United and Liverpool, but while there are gradations within the Big Six, there is a bigger gulf between those six and the rest. This is a stratified game, and the strata are moving away from one another faster than ever before. Even the great clubs of the past — Everton and Villa — cannot compete financially with the rest, although this could be the year that Everton finally break back in.
Most of the have-nots are left looking enviously on, clutching only to their former glories.
Will we see ‘Premflix’ – a Premier League streaming service – any time soon?
Matt Slater Oct 1, 2020
97
Like fake crowd noise and branded face masks, tweets from EFL club accounts telling season ticket-holders to check their spam filters for an iFollow match passcode have become just another part of football’s new normal.
As the majority of these codes provide access to a no-frills, single-camera live stream, they are not the type of thing you would expect to attract envy from supporters of Premier League clubs. But they do.
In fact, the desire for an iFollow-style service is one of the few things that unites most top-flight fans. Even before COVID-19 shut stadiums, there were regular calls for the Premier League to follow their customers online and give them the right to watch all of their team’s games legally, via a high-quality streaming product, in the same way fans of baseball, basketball and Barnsley can.
Those calls were rendered moot by the Premier League’s decision, with a hint of arm-twisting by the government, to make every game during Project Restart available on television, many of them on free-to-air channels. But that was meant to be temporary and the league started this season with every intention of going back to the old normal: fans in grounds, the pick of the weekend’s action behind BT’s and Sky’s paywalls, a few games on Amazon Prime each season and Match of the Day highlights for everyone and everything else.
Pandemics are stubborn buggers, though, and this one scuppered that plan as quickly as it has ruined autumn wedding plans, freshers’ weeks and gym re-openings. This has led many fans to ask if now is a good time for the Premier League to crack on with that “Premflix” idea it floated earlier this year.
The answer has been… silence. Streaming, it seems, is the topic no club or league official wants to talk about anymore. Instead of match passcodes, Project Restart has resumed.
A few days before the new season started, the league announced the first three rounds of games would be shared between its domestic broadcast partners — including the junior members of that gang, Amazon Prime and the BBC — while last week it tacked on this weekend’s fourth round of games, although these have been reserved for BT and Sky. With an international break to follow, there was no need for the clubs to discuss what happens after that during Tuesday’s shareholders’ meeting but there is another meeting next week and it is as nailed-on as another handball controversy that they will decide to dish out more freebies to the broadcasters.
So why is the Premier League giving away something it has worked so hard to turn into a slice of premium live entertainment when an EFL club can charge £10 a pop for a League Two game filmed by one camera? With the traditional broadcast blackout for Saturday 3pm kick-offs lifted, why not use the crisis as an opportunity to test the market for a direct-to-consumer, “over-the-top” service?
“Two reasons: technology and cash,” says Roger Domeneghetti, a senior lecturer in journalism at Northumbria University and author of the 2014 book From The Back Page To The Front Room: Football’s Journey Through the English Media.
Domeneghetti believes rights-holders such as the Premier League will “always be nervous about the potential poor-quality product a streaming service might provide” until 5G mobile connectivity is standard across the country. Broadcasters can deliver high-quality pictures come what may, but many fans have suffered the frustration of a stream buffering when their team is on a break, a putt is rolling towards the hole or a race comes to the final lap.
To be fair, these fears were voiced before Amazon Prime’s bow as a Premier League broadcaster last December and the American tech giant managed to avoid any major mishaps, although latency, the delay on the stream, did force some viewers to turn off the goal alerts on their phones as they were spoiling the drama. But Domeneghetti also notes Netflix and other platforms had to reduce the picture quality of their streams during lockdown when the world sat down together to binge boxsets.
“It would be untenable for the Premier League to try and set up their own streaming service from scratch at the moment due to these technological issues, but that isn’t to say it won’t become more viable in the future,” he says.
“The other reason the league hasn’t moved to streaming yet is because, well, why would they, when they are still getting billions from Sky and BT? Yes, the value of the last domestic deal fell a little (down 10 per cent in February 2018 to £4.5 billion) but that was more than made up by the sale of the overseas rights.
“Things ain’t really broke, so there’s no need to fix them. The Premier League will only really look at OTT services seriously when the value of the rights begins to fall significantly through the current model. When will that be? Who knows?
“But if Amazon and/or another streaming service get serious about buying the rights, I think Sky, in particular, would bid high to preserve what they have. This would also be the case for other traditional broadcasters around the world. So, the entry of a streaming service into the market might push the value up without the league ultimately going to a streaming platform.”
Jamie Vardy with his hat-trick ball from Leicester’s win over Manchester City on Sky Sports (Photo: Catherine Ivill/Getty Images)
As Domeneghetti mentioned, Premier League chief executive Richard Masters told reporters in February that the league considered trialling an OTT service during the current three-year rights cycle, with Singapore understood to be the market identified for the pilot, but the clubs were not ready to give up the guaranteed income of a traditional, territorial rights deal, even in a relatively small one, just yet.
When pressed for when and where he might try again, Masters said: “I’m not saying it will happen in the next cycle, or when it will happen, but eventually the Premier League will move to a mix of direct-to-consumer and media-rights sales — it is impossible to say when that will be.”
But Domeneghetti is not the only expert who believes the prospect of a Premier League streaming service — in Britain, at least — could be a long way off. Far from it; it is the consensus view.
“The question for the Premier League will be: is there an existential threat that justifies disrupting a very good business model by setting up a potential rival to it?” explains Charlie Beall, a partner at digital sports consultancy Seven League.
“How you answer that will depend on your long-term view of the value of the league’s rights. I think we’re at a high-water mark for rights in general but the Premier League may be able to hold steady for a while longer. It could take a bit of a haircut domestically but there may still be upside internationally, or in terms of how they’re packaged. That’s probably the case for all tier-one sports rights at the moment — it’s the second- and third-tier rights that are looking at significant falls.
“Do I think the Premier League will launch an OTT service at so me point? Maybe, but I don’t think it will be anything significant unless it forms its own bundle alongside other football content, but we’re a long, long way from that happening globally or at scale.”
Former Sky Sports managing director Barney Francis agrees.
You might say “of course he does”, but the Premier League and Sky have grown up together, so nobody understands the league’s business model better. Francis has also spent the last year as chief executive of “future sport” at Sky’s parent company Comcast and has recently joined the advisory board of new sports marketing agency WePlay. He is no dinosaur.
“Every club needs money up front,” Francis tells The Athletic. “When you’re trying to improve your squad in a transfer window, you need to know how much money you’ve got to spend. That’s why the certainty that the current broadcast model provides is so important.
“If you were to give that up by suddenly moving to an OTT model, the clubs would have no idea how much they can spend. I’d argue certainty in your broadcast contracts is even more vital now, with the shortfall from match day. Every business needs certainty. Hope isn’t a business plan.
“Yes, consumer habits are changing but there are no easy answers here. Sports like football, boxing and cricket have all become more professional over the last 30 years because of their relationships with broadcasters.”
Beall, whose job it is to persuade clubs and leagues that the future is digital and help them navigate away from their old analogue habits, is equally bearish on the Premier League’s pivot to OTT.
“The conversation about when to go for a direct-to-consumer OTT product will differ from sport to sport but I don’t think the Premier League will ever be in a position where it will go from sticking to the traditional model on day X and then turn to OTT on day Y: they will take baby steps and trial it first in a market where they feel they’re not going to get a good traditional deal.
“But if you are looking for reasons why the Premier League could start its own OTT service relatively quickly, the first would be that it’s relatively cheap and easy to do from a technology point of view. They could buy what they need off the shelf from any number of providers (companies such as the EFL’s service provider Endeavor Streaming) and then it would just be a case of deciding the business model. They could go for monthly subscriptions, advertising or pay-per-view, or TVOD (television on demand), as its known.
“In some markets, where credit-card penetration is low, you might struggle to get lots of little payments from consumers, and does the Premier League even want to be doing that? It would much rather receive a big cheque and let another company collect individual consumer payments in markets where they have deeper consumer understanding.”
That leads us to a question every expert has identified: the Premier League has spent 28 years being one thing and got very good at it, but starting an OTT business would mean becoming something completely different.
“Reorienting the business to be consumer-facing rather than (business to business), is fundamental and it’s expensive,” says Beall. “Right now, the Premier League never has to answer a call about buffering or deal with a payment issue from an angry customer. Sky and BT do that for them. Building that type of operation takes years and many millions of pounds.”
Richard Gillis, the host of sports business podcast Unofficial Partner, puts it like this.
“It would require a total transformation of the organisation’s culture and personnel,” he explains. “Take Richard Masters. He might be the best TV rights salesman in the world but he has never run a customer-facing operation. He might be able to do it but, like every other aspect of this, it would be a big bet to make.”
Beall’s point about creating “a bundle” of football content is also significant, as recent history is littered with examples of streaming services that tried to be “the Netflix of something” but just did not have enough content to attract customers and make them stay.
Dr Jonathan Cable, a lecturer in sports journalism at the University of Gloucestershire, thinks it is “inevitable” the Premier League will eventually develop its own streaming service “due to necessity rather than want, because it solves a number of different issues”.
In his view, it would help the league appeal to younger people, many of whom have stopped watching linear television, and it could also help in the fight against digital piracy, as it would add “a layer of control”, as well as providing another advertising platform. But what it would really need to take off, though, is a back catalogue.
“This would be an ideal starting point to begin the transition: put up all recorded matches and charge for access,” said Cable.
“This was part of the success of the WWE Network, the ability to go back and relive ‘classic’ events. This does mean buying back the rights from Sky, though, but it’s a wealth of content not available anywhere else. A perfect example of this is the launch of Disney+: they needed to acquire 20th Century Fox and other Fox properties before they felt they had enough content to compete with Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu.”
But here we go full circle once more.
“Sport is yet to have its (Disney boss) ‘Bob Iger moment’,” says Beall. “That time when you do what Disney did and say, ‘OK, we’re going to take all our content off Netflix and every other platform and do it ourselves’. Iger knew to build Disney+ he’d have to lose millions in the short term, put premium content on the service and restructure the organisation to be more consumer-facing. And he got buy-in from his board, who knew they’d be losing a lot of money in the short term to build a long term direct-to-consumer business.”
Are Masters’ shareholders ready to sign off that kind of move any time soon? Even Cable cannot see it.
“The amount of money the Premier League makes from just broadcasting is staggering and, even in times of economic uncertainty, the value of football hasn’t really gone down,” he says. “The league’s global appeal remains high. What the Premier League gets in broadcasting rights is substantially more than other elite European leagues.
“Markets like certainty and turning around to this elite club and saying, ‘We’re going to change it all and you might not get as much money. Now please vote for it’, is akin to turkeys voting for Christmas. There is no guarantee people will subscribe to an OTT service and this will always hold back those who are risk-averse or just want the money.”
OK, we get it, but how did the EFL make this leap of faith three years ago?
“They didn’t really have a choice because the majority of their games weren’t being shown anywhere,” explains Cable. “This follows from the 2002 collapse of ITV Digital, which had agreed to pay the EFL £315 million for three years of broadcast rights but then couldn’t afford to meet this. The knock-on effect was that clubs were left out of pocket and many spent the broadcast money before getting it. The hangover was still being felt in 2018, when the controversial (five-year, Sky Sports) deal was struck, leaving many Championship clubs unhappy, and the subsequent renegotiation during the pandemic to allow clubs to stream non-televised games.
“What that might tell you is what the broadcasters see as the shiniest bauble in a competitive fight for eyeballs. The Premier League is more commercially attractive, so getting more of those games on air is preferable to showing more EFL.”
Domeneghetti puts it like this.
“It comes back to technology and cash,” he says. “Sports with lower viewing figures than the Premier League are ideal partners for streaming services at the moment because a) the technological demands are lower and b) their rights packages can be obtained relatively cheaply, either because they had no TV deal before or they are not seen as ‘key’ to companies like Sky, who are thus less motivated to get into a bidding war.
“This allows the streaming companies to experiment both in terms of the technology and the presentation. It’s why we are seeing a range of less popular or smaller sports experimenting with a range of streaming services, including even Twitch (the Amazon-owned streaming platform for gamers) as a broadcast partner.”
There is one notable exception to this rule, though.
“The NFL’s Thursday Night Football is a good example of a hybrid model,” says Francis. “Fox has the free-to-air rights and gets a return on investment from the advertising income, while Amazon Prime has the streaming rights and tries to convert viewers into customers.
“It works for both but the UK doesn’t have a big enough population for a free-to-air broadcaster to be able to afford Premier League rights. The NBA, MLB, WWE are all able to experiment with streaming, while continuing to get guaranteed income from the main broadcasters, because of the size of the North American market.”
It is true the sheer size of Canada and the United States, both in terms of people and time zones, does give the North American leagues an advantage when it comes to managing that transition from territorial rights deals to direct-to-consumer relationships, but Domeneghetti believes the Premier League can still learn from the NFL’s Thursday night experiment.
“It will be interesting to see how their next rights auction goes in 2022,” he says. “Do streaming services enter a real bidding war with the traditional broadcasters? Does the NFL have more streaming-only packages for sale? If the latter, does that prompt traditional broadcasters to up their streaming game? That will give us an indication of where the Premier League will go, and how fast.”
It is worth remembering at this point that nine of the Premier League’s current clubs are majority- or minority-owned by Americans, with four of those investors also owning NFL franchises, and most sports business pundits can only see that number increasing.
But that also underlines just how gradual the move towards a “Premflix” will be.
Nothing will happen until someone else has tried it, in a very controlled experiment, first, and even then, the majority of games are likely to stay with established broadcasters who are willing to keep sending the clubs big cheques every season, while handling any complaints about picture quality and direct debits from irate punters.
The Premier League has had it pretty easy since 1992. This crisis is unlikely to knock its confidence for too long.
Matt Slater Oct 1, 2020
Like fake crowd noise and branded face masks, tweets from EFL club accounts telling season ticket-holders to check their spam filters for an iFollow match passcode have become just another part of football’s new normal.
As the majority of these codes provide access to a no-frills, single-camera live stream, they are not the type of thing you would expect to attract envy from supporters of Premier League clubs. But they do.
In fact, the desire for an iFollow-style service is one of the few things that unites most top-flight fans. Even before COVID-19 shut stadiums, there were regular calls for the Premier League to follow their customers online and give them the right to watch all of their team’s games legally, via a high-quality streaming product, in the same way fans of baseball, basketball and Barnsley can.
Those calls were rendered moot by the Premier League’s decision, with a hint of arm-twisting by the government, to make every game during Project Restart available on television, many of them on free-to-air channels. But that was meant to be temporary and the league started this season with every intention of going back to the old normal: fans in grounds, the pick of the weekend’s action behind BT’s and Sky’s paywalls, a few games on Amazon Prime each season and Match of the Day highlights for everyone and everything else.
Pandemics are stubborn buggers, though, and this one scuppered that plan as quickly as it has ruined autumn wedding plans, freshers’ weeks and gym re-openings. This has led many fans to ask if now is a good time for the Premier League to crack on with that “Premflix” idea it floated earlier this year.
The answer has been… silence. Streaming, it seems, is the topic no club or league official wants to talk about anymore. Instead of match passcodes, Project Restart has resumed.
A few days before the new season started, the league announced the first three rounds of games would be shared between its domestic broadcast partners — including the junior members of that gang, Amazon Prime and the BBC — while last week it tacked on this weekend’s fourth round of games, although these have been reserved for BT and Sky. With an international break to follow, there was no need for the clubs to discuss what happens after that during Tuesday’s shareholders’ meeting but there is another meeting next week and it is as nailed-on as another handball controversy that they will decide to dish out more freebies to the broadcasters.
So why is the Premier League giving away something it has worked so hard to turn into a slice of premium live entertainment when an EFL club can charge £10 a pop for a League Two game filmed by one camera? With the traditional broadcast blackout for Saturday 3pm kick-offs lifted, why not use the crisis as an opportunity to test the market for a direct-to-consumer, “over-the-top” service?
“Two reasons: technology and cash,” says Roger Domeneghetti, a senior lecturer in journalism at Northumbria University and author of the 2014 book From The Back Page To The Front Room: Football’s Journey Through the English Media.
Domeneghetti believes rights-holders such as the Premier League will “always be nervous about the potential poor-quality product a streaming service might provide” until 5G mobile connectivity is standard across the country. Broadcasters can deliver high-quality pictures come what may, but many fans have suffered the frustration of a stream buffering when their team is on a break, a putt is rolling towards the hole or a race comes to the final lap.
To be fair, these fears were voiced before Amazon Prime’s bow as a Premier League broadcaster last December and the American tech giant managed to avoid any major mishaps, although latency, the delay on the stream, did force some viewers to turn off the goal alerts on their phones as they were spoiling the drama. But Domeneghetti also notes Netflix and other platforms had to reduce the picture quality of their streams during lockdown when the world sat down together to binge boxsets.
“It would be untenable for the Premier League to try and set up their own streaming service from scratch at the moment due to these technological issues, but that isn’t to say it won’t become more viable in the future,” he says.
“The other reason the league hasn’t moved to streaming yet is because, well, why would they, when they are still getting billions from Sky and BT? Yes, the value of the last domestic deal fell a little (down 10 per cent in February 2018 to £4.5 billion) but that was more than made up by the sale of the overseas rights.
“Things ain’t really broke, so there’s no need to fix them. The Premier League will only really look at OTT services seriously when the value of the rights begins to fall significantly through the current model. When will that be? Who knows?
“But if Amazon and/or another streaming service get serious about buying the rights, I think Sky, in particular, would bid high to preserve what they have. This would also be the case for other traditional broadcasters around the world. So, the entry of a streaming service into the market might push the value up without the league ultimately going to a streaming platform.”
Jamie Vardy with his hat-trick ball from Leicester’s win over Manchester City on Sky Sports (Photo: Catherine Ivill/Getty Images)
As Domeneghetti mentioned, Premier League chief executive Richard Masters told reporters in February that the league considered trialling an OTT service during the current three-year rights cycle, with Singapore understood to be the market identified for the pilot, but the clubs were not ready to give up the guaranteed income of a traditional, territorial rights deal, even in a relatively small one, just yet.
When pressed for when and where he might try again, Masters said: “I’m not saying it will happen in the next cycle, or when it will happen, but eventually the Premier League will move to a mix of direct-to-consumer and media-rights sales — it is impossible to say when that will be.”
But Domeneghetti is not the only expert who believes the prospect of a Premier League streaming service — in Britain, at least — could be a long way off. Far from it; it is the consensus view.
“The question for the Premier League will be: is there an existential threat that justifies disrupting a very good business model by setting up a potential rival to it?” explains Charlie Beall, a partner at digital sports consultancy Seven League.
“How you answer that will depend on your long-term view of the value of the league’s rights. I think we’re at a high-water mark for rights in general but the Premier League may be able to hold steady for a while longer. It could take a bit of a haircut domestically but there may still be upside internationally, or in terms of how they’re packaged. That’s probably the case for all tier-one sports rights at the moment — it’s the second- and third-tier rights that are looking at significant falls.
“Do I think the Premier League will launch an OTT service at so me point? Maybe, but I don’t think it will be anything significant unless it forms its own bundle alongside other football content, but we’re a long, long way from that happening globally or at scale.”
Former Sky Sports managing director Barney Francis agrees.
You might say “of course he does”, but the Premier League and Sky have grown up together, so nobody understands the league’s business model better. Francis has also spent the last year as chief executive of “future sport” at Sky’s parent company Comcast and has recently joined the advisory board of new sports marketing agency WePlay. He is no dinosaur.
“Every club needs money up front,” Francis tells The Athletic. “When you’re trying to improve your squad in a transfer window, you need to know how much money you’ve got to spend. That’s why the certainty that the current broadcast model provides is so important.
“If you were to give that up by suddenly moving to an OTT model, the clubs would have no idea how much they can spend. I’d argue certainty in your broadcast contracts is even more vital now, with the shortfall from match day. Every business needs certainty. Hope isn’t a business plan.
“Yes, consumer habits are changing but there are no easy answers here. Sports like football, boxing and cricket have all become more professional over the last 30 years because of their relationships with broadcasters.”
Beall, whose job it is to persuade clubs and leagues that the future is digital and help them navigate away from their old analogue habits, is equally bearish on the Premier League’s pivot to OTT.
“The conversation about when to go for a direct-to-consumer OTT product will differ from sport to sport but I don’t think the Premier League will ever be in a position where it will go from sticking to the traditional model on day X and then turn to OTT on day Y: they will take baby steps and trial it first in a market where they feel they’re not going to get a good traditional deal.
“But if you are looking for reasons why the Premier League could start its own OTT service relatively quickly, the first would be that it’s relatively cheap and easy to do from a technology point of view. They could buy what they need off the shelf from any number of providers (companies such as the EFL’s service provider Endeavor Streaming) and then it would just be a case of deciding the business model. They could go for monthly subscriptions, advertising or pay-per-view, or TVOD (television on demand), as its known.
“In some markets, where credit-card penetration is low, you might struggle to get lots of little payments from consumers, and does the Premier League even want to be doing that? It would much rather receive a big cheque and let another company collect individual consumer payments in markets where they have deeper consumer understanding.”
That leads us to a question every expert has identified: the Premier League has spent 28 years being one thing and got very good at it, but starting an OTT business would mean becoming something completely different.
“Reorienting the business to be consumer-facing rather than (business to business), is fundamental and it’s expensive,” says Beall. “Right now, the Premier League never has to answer a call about buffering or deal with a payment issue from an angry customer. Sky and BT do that for them. Building that type of operation takes years and many millions of pounds.”
Richard Gillis, the host of sports business podcast Unofficial Partner, puts it like this.
“It would require a total transformation of the organisation’s culture and personnel,” he explains. “Take Richard Masters. He might be the best TV rights salesman in the world but he has never run a customer-facing operation. He might be able to do it but, like every other aspect of this, it would be a big bet to make.”
Beall’s point about creating “a bundle” of football content is also significant, as recent history is littered with examples of streaming services that tried to be “the Netflix of something” but just did not have enough content to attract customers and make them stay.
Dr Jonathan Cable, a lecturer in sports journalism at the University of Gloucestershire, thinks it is “inevitable” the Premier League will eventually develop its own streaming service “due to necessity rather than want, because it solves a number of different issues”.
In his view, it would help the league appeal to younger people, many of whom have stopped watching linear television, and it could also help in the fight against digital piracy, as it would add “a layer of control”, as well as providing another advertising platform. But what it would really need to take off, though, is a back catalogue.
“This would be an ideal starting point to begin the transition: put up all recorded matches and charge for access,” said Cable.
“This was part of the success of the WWE Network, the ability to go back and relive ‘classic’ events. This does mean buying back the rights from Sky, though, but it’s a wealth of content not available anywhere else. A perfect example of this is the launch of Disney+: they needed to acquire 20th Century Fox and other Fox properties before they felt they had enough content to compete with Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu.”
But here we go full circle once more.
“Sport is yet to have its (Disney boss) ‘Bob Iger moment’,” says Beall. “That time when you do what Disney did and say, ‘OK, we’re going to take all our content off Netflix and every other platform and do it ourselves’. Iger knew to build Disney+ he’d have to lose millions in the short term, put premium content on the service and restructure the organisation to be more consumer-facing. And he got buy-in from his board, who knew they’d be losing a lot of money in the short term to build a long term direct-to-consumer business.”
Are Masters’ shareholders ready to sign off that kind of move any time soon? Even Cable cannot see it.
“The amount of money the Premier League makes from just broadcasting is staggering and, even in times of economic uncertainty, the value of football hasn’t really gone down,” he says. “The league’s global appeal remains high. What the Premier League gets in broadcasting rights is substantially more than other elite European leagues.
“Markets like certainty and turning around to this elite club and saying, ‘We’re going to change it all and you might not get as much money. Now please vote for it’, is akin to turkeys voting for Christmas. There is no guarantee people will subscribe to an OTT service and this will always hold back those who are risk-averse or just want the money.”
OK, we get it, but how did the EFL make this leap of faith three years ago?
“They didn’t really have a choice because the majority of their games weren’t being shown anywhere,” explains Cable. “This follows from the 2002 collapse of ITV Digital, which had agreed to pay the EFL £315 million for three years of broadcast rights but then couldn’t afford to meet this. The knock-on effect was that clubs were left out of pocket and many spent the broadcast money before getting it. The hangover was still being felt in 2018, when the controversial (five-year, Sky Sports) deal was struck, leaving many Championship clubs unhappy, and the subsequent renegotiation during the pandemic to allow clubs to stream non-televised games.
“What that might tell you is what the broadcasters see as the shiniest bauble in a competitive fight for eyeballs. The Premier League is more commercially attractive, so getting more of those games on air is preferable to showing more EFL.”
Domeneghetti puts it like this.
“It comes back to technology and cash,” he says. “Sports with lower viewing figures than the Premier League are ideal partners for streaming services at the moment because a) the technological demands are lower and b) their rights packages can be obtained relatively cheaply, either because they had no TV deal before or they are not seen as ‘key’ to companies like Sky, who are thus less motivated to get into a bidding war.
“This allows the streaming companies to experiment both in terms of the technology and the presentation. It’s why we are seeing a range of less popular or smaller sports experimenting with a range of streaming services, including even Twitch (the Amazon-owned streaming platform for gamers) as a broadcast partner.”
There is one notable exception to this rule, though.
“The NFL’s Thursday Night Football is a good example of a hybrid model,” says Francis. “Fox has the free-to-air rights and gets a return on investment from the advertising income, while Amazon Prime has the streaming rights and tries to convert viewers into customers.
“It works for both but the UK doesn’t have a big enough population for a free-to-air broadcaster to be able to afford Premier League rights. The NBA, MLB, WWE are all able to experiment with streaming, while continuing to get guaranteed income from the main broadcasters, because of the size of the North American market.”
It is true the sheer size of Canada and the United States, both in terms of people and time zones, does give the North American leagues an advantage when it comes to managing that transition from territorial rights deals to direct-to-consumer relationships, but Domeneghetti believes the Premier League can still learn from the NFL’s Thursday night experiment.
“It will be interesting to see how their next rights auction goes in 2022,” he says. “Do streaming services enter a real bidding war with the traditional broadcasters? Does the NFL have more streaming-only packages for sale? If the latter, does that prompt traditional broadcasters to up their streaming game? That will give us an indication of where the Premier League will go, and how fast.”
It is worth remembering at this point that nine of the Premier League’s current clubs are majority- or minority-owned by Americans, with four of those investors also owning NFL franchises, and most sports business pundits can only see that number increasing.
But that also underlines just how gradual the move towards a “Premflix” will be.
Nothing will happen until someone else has tried it, in a very controlled experiment, first, and even then, the majority of games are likely to stay with established broadcasters who are willing to keep sending the clubs big cheques every season, while handling any complaints about picture quality and direct debits from irate punters.
The Premier League has had it pretty easy since 1992. This crisis is unlikely to knock its confidence for too long.
Part 2
By Phil Hay and Sam Lee Oct 2, 2020
119
Every now and again, a video cassette would drop through the letterbox. The deliveries took time, covering thousands of miles between Europe and South America, but Marcelo Bielsa was prepared to wait. He loved the days when the post arrived, bringing footage and news of Ajax.
Ajax were his case study, the team he liked to pore over, using grainy images and written match files, but the real attraction was Louis van Gaal. The Dutchman’s fingerprints were all over Ajax and, driven by his coaching, the Amsterdam club had Europe under their spell. Van Gaal’s football hooked Bielsa in. Of all the European managers, Van Gaal was the one to follow. Bielsa sat through 200 of Ajax’s matches, watching and learning. He knew the result by the time the videos reached him, so slow were the dispatches, but the tactics were there to be picked apart.
“After game 150, I asked a collaborator — well, I asked my wife — to tell me in which minutes Van Gaal made his substitutions,” Bielsa told the Aspire Academy’s global summit in 2016. Without reading the reports, he challenged himself to guess how, or with whom, Van Gaal would change his team when he turned to the bench. “I never believed I knew what Van Gaal knew because I don’t know how he feels,” Bielsa said, “but this was the only piece of his mind I could get hold of.” In that small way, Bielsa was able to think like him.
Bielsa’s coaching has long had a European streak about it and today, at Leeds United, there are shades of Van Gaal in him still: the pressing, the rotation of players’ positions, the insistence on maintaining numerical superiority at the back. Bielsa was the coach who saw no room for Juan Roman Riquelme in the Argentina squad. Van Gaal was the boss who let Wim Jonk, Bryan Roy and Dennis Bergkamp slip away from Ajax, in the interests of promoting collective thinking and tactical balance. They were on the same wavelength and Bielsa made a point of eulogising Van Gaal after the 69-year-old’s retirement last year. “My only desire is to say ‘thank you’ in public for what I learned from him,” Bielsa said.
Pep Guardiola had a love affair with 1990s Ajax too. His relationship with Van Gaal was different to Bielsa’s; more personal, in as much as he played for Van Gaal at Barcelona and earned the captaincy under him, yet slightly less engaged. Guardiola credited his evolution as a coach to Johan Cruyff and when it came to the stage of deciding if he was made for coaching at all, it was Bielsa he sought out for guidance and advice on a retreat in Argentina (although Van Gaal’s name came up in that conversation). But Ajax, to Guardiola, were no less of a phenomenon. “Van Gaal’s Ajax gave lessons to those who knew the game perfectly,” he wrote in the 2011 book Mi Gente, Mi Futbol.
Bielsa and Guardiola aspired to treat football in the same way; to master it, change it and own it. The men who will stand a few yards apart on the touchline at Elland Road this afternoon have been chasing the impossibility of perfection for longer than they can remember, kindred spirits who are as tied to the pursuit of brilliance as Van Gaal was in Amsterdam and as Bielsa and Guardiola were when they first shared a pitch in 2011.
The rain poured that night as Barcelona and Athletic Bilbao fought each other to a standstill in a 2-2 draw. “Your players are beasts,” Guardiola whispered into Bielsa ear at full-time. Bielsa chuckled. “And so are yours.”
On the way back to Buenos Aires, after a marathon 11-hour conversation on Bielsa’s ranch in Rosario, Guardiola called Matias Manna and declared, “I’ve just been with the man who knows more about football than anybody.”
Guardiola had first been intrigued by Bielsa in 1998, when he was still playing at Barcelona and the Argentinian was in the midst of one of his famously short managerial spells, this time at Barcelona club Espanyol.
In much the same way that Guardiola saw Juanma Lillo’s Real Oviedo side and thought, “Something is happening here”, he regarded Bielsa’s team as special. Guardiola asked his team-mate Mauricio Pellegrino, who had played for Bielsa at Velez Sarsfield, what he was like and something of an obsession was born.
Guardiola was told by Gabriel Batistuta during their time together at Roma, “if you want to coach, you have to talk with Bielsa”, but the Catalan was already paying close attention. During the 2002 World Cup finals (below), when Bielsa’s Argentina were knocked out at the group stage, Guardiola wrote a passage that is proof that he held his coaching beliefs long before he ever actually became a coach.
“I still like Argentina, although they did not get out of the group, because I think they played very well; although we know that we live in a world in which if you win you are good and if you lose it does not matter what you have tried. It doesn’t matter if you’ve had the ball, if the team was well organised or if you go with a 3-4-3, like Bielsa did. If you lose, they say you failed. I see it in another way.”
In that sense, they have always been on the same page and, with Guardiola weighing up his first moves into coaching, he visited Argentina in 2006. He had always had an affinity for the country’s footballing heritage, sometimes getting his old Barcelona team-mates to teach him songs from the terraces of El Monumental (River Plate’s stadium) and La Bombonera (the home of Boca Juniors) so he could whistle them around the training ground.
On his fact-finding mission, he sat down with Cesar Luis Menotti, the 1978 World Cup winner, Ricardo La Volpe, a renowned tactician, and also Manna, an amateur coach who had written a book on Bielsa and had been blogging about Guardiola and his footballing outlook for several years.
Guardiola quizzed Manna about Bielsa — El Loco — although by that stage he too had only observed him from afar, and ran through the subjects he wanted to find out from the man himself from their meeting the next day. Things like how to build a team of backroom staff, the importance of analysts to study the opposition, how to handle the media and, perhaps most of all, the relationship between video analysis and how it can be used to complement a playing style.
Manna gave Guardiola a copy of his book, Guardiola used it as a reference point during the famous sit-down with Bielsa, and a few months later Manna was called to Bielsa’s office. “You’re Guardiola’s friend,” he said to the young coach, and made him one of his cherished analysts. They had both made a big impression during that exhausting chat.
The meeting itself has gone down in a particular corner of footballing history, a pow-wow between two of the most intense men ever to set foot in a dugout. Of course, back then Guardiola hadn’t set foot in one, but he turned up at Bielsa’s ranch well prepared to pick the brains of somebody who did things the way he intended to.
David Trueba, a novelist and director, accompanied his old friend Guardiola on the four-hour car journey from Buenos Aires and in fact spent an hour talking with Bielsa about cinema, until Trueba turned to Guardiola and said, ‘You haven’t come all this way to talk about films, have you?’”
Trueba, who ended up getting used as a mannequin in certain demonstrations, described what came next in an article in El Pais, once Guardiola had established himself as one of the world’s top coaches.
“There were heated discussions, they consulted the computer, reviewed techniques, practised positioning. There were complicated questions; Bielsa asked, ‘Why do you, someone who knows all the rubbish that surrounds the world of football, the high degree of dishonesty of certain people, still want to go back there and get into coaching? Do you like blood that much?’ Pep didn’t think twice. ‘I need that blood’.”
In August, for the first time, Guardiola provided a slightly different version of events. For years, the quote “I need that blood” had been attributed to him. “But the story was not like that,” Guardiola said in an interview with DAZN. “When we were talking about the media, I was the one who said to him, ‘If we complain so much about a world that sometimes doesn’t let us live, how come you don’t manage a youth team or a more amateur team and forget the professional world?’ He was the one who answered me, ‘I need that blood’.”
Bielsa also took the chance to enhance his own knowledge and was especially keen to know more about Van Gaal and Ajax, the 1995 Champions League winners who served as a reference point for both men. Bielsa classed Ajax as his favourite overseas team due to their tactical discipline and understanding. Guardiola had spent more time talking to the Dutchman about football than perhaps any other coach, even Cruyff.
“I think I managed to bore him by the eleventh hour,” Bielsa said years later, in his inimitable way, “but I thought he was like that from the beginning and he didn’t try to leave. That was the only time in our lives that we saw each other. Speaking so many hours about quite a few topics shows we had a pleasant time, but I don’t have any knowledge that Guardiola doesn’t have.”
Indeed, he has always refuted the idea that he taught Guardiola anything, but the younger man came away completely enthused and motivated to begin his coaching career, his ideas on the game and how it should be played completely reinforced, with additional tips — like avoiding one-on-one media interviews and the importance of video analysis preparation — scribbled in a notebook.
“I respect and admire Bielsa a lot,” he has said. “He opened the doors of his home to me when I hadn’t even begun to coach. I’ve been influenced by other coaches, like Cruyff, who I was with for eight years, but I would have liked to have played for Bielsa, or been part of his staff.”
They had both been at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, where Bielsa coached Chile, with Manna on his staff. Interested in Alexis Sanchez, Guardiola solicited Bielsa’s advice by telephone and he was assured the forward was “buena gente” — a good person — and Barcelona duly signed him.
But they didn’t see each other again for more than five years, by which time Guardiola had built the best team on the planet, perhaps in history, one that had won everything there was to win, and Bielsa was proving yet again with Athletic Bilbao that trophies are not always the best measure of success.
By Phil Hay and Sam Lee Oct 2, 2020
Every now and again, a video cassette would drop through the letterbox. The deliveries took time, covering thousands of miles between Europe and South America, but Marcelo Bielsa was prepared to wait. He loved the days when the post arrived, bringing footage and news of Ajax.
Ajax were his case study, the team he liked to pore over, using grainy images and written match files, but the real attraction was Louis van Gaal. The Dutchman’s fingerprints were all over Ajax and, driven by his coaching, the Amsterdam club had Europe under their spell. Van Gaal’s football hooked Bielsa in. Of all the European managers, Van Gaal was the one to follow. Bielsa sat through 200 of Ajax’s matches, watching and learning. He knew the result by the time the videos reached him, so slow were the dispatches, but the tactics were there to be picked apart.
“After game 150, I asked a collaborator — well, I asked my wife — to tell me in which minutes Van Gaal made his substitutions,” Bielsa told the Aspire Academy’s global summit in 2016. Without reading the reports, he challenged himself to guess how, or with whom, Van Gaal would change his team when he turned to the bench. “I never believed I knew what Van Gaal knew because I don’t know how he feels,” Bielsa said, “but this was the only piece of his mind I could get hold of.” In that small way, Bielsa was able to think like him.
Bielsa’s coaching has long had a European streak about it and today, at Leeds United, there are shades of Van Gaal in him still: the pressing, the rotation of players’ positions, the insistence on maintaining numerical superiority at the back. Bielsa was the coach who saw no room for Juan Roman Riquelme in the Argentina squad. Van Gaal was the boss who let Wim Jonk, Bryan Roy and Dennis Bergkamp slip away from Ajax, in the interests of promoting collective thinking and tactical balance. They were on the same wavelength and Bielsa made a point of eulogising Van Gaal after the 69-year-old’s retirement last year. “My only desire is to say ‘thank you’ in public for what I learned from him,” Bielsa said.
Pep Guardiola had a love affair with 1990s Ajax too. His relationship with Van Gaal was different to Bielsa’s; more personal, in as much as he played for Van Gaal at Barcelona and earned the captaincy under him, yet slightly less engaged. Guardiola credited his evolution as a coach to Johan Cruyff and when it came to the stage of deciding if he was made for coaching at all, it was Bielsa he sought out for guidance and advice on a retreat in Argentina (although Van Gaal’s name came up in that conversation). But Ajax, to Guardiola, were no less of a phenomenon. “Van Gaal’s Ajax gave lessons to those who knew the game perfectly,” he wrote in the 2011 book Mi Gente, Mi Futbol.
Bielsa and Guardiola aspired to treat football in the same way; to master it, change it and own it. The men who will stand a few yards apart on the touchline at Elland Road this afternoon have been chasing the impossibility of perfection for longer than they can remember, kindred spirits who are as tied to the pursuit of brilliance as Van Gaal was in Amsterdam and as Bielsa and Guardiola were when they first shared a pitch in 2011.
The rain poured that night as Barcelona and Athletic Bilbao fought each other to a standstill in a 2-2 draw. “Your players are beasts,” Guardiola whispered into Bielsa ear at full-time. Bielsa chuckled. “And so are yours.”
On the way back to Buenos Aires, after a marathon 11-hour conversation on Bielsa’s ranch in Rosario, Guardiola called Matias Manna and declared, “I’ve just been with the man who knows more about football than anybody.”
Guardiola had first been intrigued by Bielsa in 1998, when he was still playing at Barcelona and the Argentinian was in the midst of one of his famously short managerial spells, this time at Barcelona club Espanyol.
In much the same way that Guardiola saw Juanma Lillo’s Real Oviedo side and thought, “Something is happening here”, he regarded Bielsa’s team as special. Guardiola asked his team-mate Mauricio Pellegrino, who had played for Bielsa at Velez Sarsfield, what he was like and something of an obsession was born.
Guardiola was told by Gabriel Batistuta during their time together at Roma, “if you want to coach, you have to talk with Bielsa”, but the Catalan was already paying close attention. During the 2002 World Cup finals (below), when Bielsa’s Argentina were knocked out at the group stage, Guardiola wrote a passage that is proof that he held his coaching beliefs long before he ever actually became a coach.
“I still like Argentina, although they did not get out of the group, because I think they played very well; although we know that we live in a world in which if you win you are good and if you lose it does not matter what you have tried. It doesn’t matter if you’ve had the ball, if the team was well organised or if you go with a 3-4-3, like Bielsa did. If you lose, they say you failed. I see it in another way.”
In that sense, they have always been on the same page and, with Guardiola weighing up his first moves into coaching, he visited Argentina in 2006. He had always had an affinity for the country’s footballing heritage, sometimes getting his old Barcelona team-mates to teach him songs from the terraces of El Monumental (River Plate’s stadium) and La Bombonera (the home of Boca Juniors) so he could whistle them around the training ground.
On his fact-finding mission, he sat down with Cesar Luis Menotti, the 1978 World Cup winner, Ricardo La Volpe, a renowned tactician, and also Manna, an amateur coach who had written a book on Bielsa and had been blogging about Guardiola and his footballing outlook for several years.
Guardiola quizzed Manna about Bielsa — El Loco — although by that stage he too had only observed him from afar, and ran through the subjects he wanted to find out from the man himself from their meeting the next day. Things like how to build a team of backroom staff, the importance of analysts to study the opposition, how to handle the media and, perhaps most of all, the relationship between video analysis and how it can be used to complement a playing style.
Manna gave Guardiola a copy of his book, Guardiola used it as a reference point during the famous sit-down with Bielsa, and a few months later Manna was called to Bielsa’s office. “You’re Guardiola’s friend,” he said to the young coach, and made him one of his cherished analysts. They had both made a big impression during that exhausting chat.
The meeting itself has gone down in a particular corner of footballing history, a pow-wow between two of the most intense men ever to set foot in a dugout. Of course, back then Guardiola hadn’t set foot in one, but he turned up at Bielsa’s ranch well prepared to pick the brains of somebody who did things the way he intended to.
David Trueba, a novelist and director, accompanied his old friend Guardiola on the four-hour car journey from Buenos Aires and in fact spent an hour talking with Bielsa about cinema, until Trueba turned to Guardiola and said, ‘You haven’t come all this way to talk about films, have you?’”
Trueba, who ended up getting used as a mannequin in certain demonstrations, described what came next in an article in El Pais, once Guardiola had established himself as one of the world’s top coaches.
“There were heated discussions, they consulted the computer, reviewed techniques, practised positioning. There were complicated questions; Bielsa asked, ‘Why do you, someone who knows all the rubbish that surrounds the world of football, the high degree of dishonesty of certain people, still want to go back there and get into coaching? Do you like blood that much?’ Pep didn’t think twice. ‘I need that blood’.”
In August, for the first time, Guardiola provided a slightly different version of events. For years, the quote “I need that blood” had been attributed to him. “But the story was not like that,” Guardiola said in an interview with DAZN. “When we were talking about the media, I was the one who said to him, ‘If we complain so much about a world that sometimes doesn’t let us live, how come you don’t manage a youth team or a more amateur team and forget the professional world?’ He was the one who answered me, ‘I need that blood’.”
Bielsa also took the chance to enhance his own knowledge and was especially keen to know more about Van Gaal and Ajax, the 1995 Champions League winners who served as a reference point for both men. Bielsa classed Ajax as his favourite overseas team due to their tactical discipline and understanding. Guardiola had spent more time talking to the Dutchman about football than perhaps any other coach, even Cruyff.
“I think I managed to bore him by the eleventh hour,” Bielsa said years later, in his inimitable way, “but I thought he was like that from the beginning and he didn’t try to leave. That was the only time in our lives that we saw each other. Speaking so many hours about quite a few topics shows we had a pleasant time, but I don’t have any knowledge that Guardiola doesn’t have.”
Indeed, he has always refuted the idea that he taught Guardiola anything, but the younger man came away completely enthused and motivated to begin his coaching career, his ideas on the game and how it should be played completely reinforced, with additional tips — like avoiding one-on-one media interviews and the importance of video analysis preparation — scribbled in a notebook.
“I respect and admire Bielsa a lot,” he has said. “He opened the doors of his home to me when I hadn’t even begun to coach. I’ve been influenced by other coaches, like Cruyff, who I was with for eight years, but I would have liked to have played for Bielsa, or been part of his staff.”
They had both been at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, where Bielsa coached Chile, with Manna on his staff. Interested in Alexis Sanchez, Guardiola solicited Bielsa’s advice by telephone and he was assured the forward was “buena gente” — a good person — and Barcelona duly signed him.
But they didn’t see each other again for more than five years, by which time Guardiola had built the best team on the planet, perhaps in history, one that had won everything there was to win, and Bielsa was proving yet again with Athletic Bilbao that trophies are not always the best measure of success.
Part 2
It is no night for football. The heavens have opened, the temperature is dropping towards single figures and a sea of ponchos fills the stands of the San Mames Stadium. Guardiola will lose his voice before the end of the evening and the ball will hold up in puddles of water as the pitch becomes more sodden and treacherous. But somehow, the spectacle is La Liga at its best.
Guardiola and Bielsa had seen the flames in each other’s eyes, the whirring of cogs in complex minds as they sat together in Argentina five years earlier, but they had never before thrown themselves against each other as coaches. Bielsa will discover what it is like when Barcelona’s tiki-taka toys with you; when you “surround them but the ball gets out anyway,” as Bielsa laments with a smile afterwards. Guardiola will feel the weight and ferocity of Athletic Bilbao’s press, the sprints, the energy, the batteries which refuse to go flat. The game leaves Barcelona’s manager hoarse and a little stunned. “I’ve never played against a team so intense,” he says.
To a point, Guardiola saw an epic game coming. He had spoken beforehand about Bielsa’s team “not letting you breathe. They attack the box with seven players. Then they lose the ball and defend with 11.”
He understood the theory and the process. But in the flesh and in the Spanish rain, the football is something else. La Liga has its milestones and memories but aficionados say the 2-2 draw between Bilbao and Barcelona on November 6, 2011 would sit comfortably in any tribute to the division. Rodri Errasti, a Spanish journalist, was covering Bilbao for Eurosport at the time. “It’s one of the best matches I ever watched,” he says.
Claudio Vivas, Bielsa’s assistant at Bilbao, recalls how the day before the match — a day on which Spanish players liked to rest — Bielsa put his squad through a hard training session, a last chance to fire them up.
“The most significant thing about that game was that we had more of the ball than them, a team that normally has 70 or 75 per cent of possession,” Vivas tells The Athletic.
“There’s more to winning games than possession, it depends on many things, but in that game in particular Guardiola’s team wanted to control it. We didn’t let them. It wasn’t worth much in the end because we drew but afterwards it was something that everybody praised.”
Guardiola goes 4-3-3, with Cesc Fabregas in the middle of a front three. Bilbao are closer to 4-1-4-1, with Fernando Llorente up front and Ander Iturraspe in a holding role. Llorente is not famed for covering the pitch but Guardiola watches with surprise as the forward makes 40-yard runs back and forward, covering defensively whenever Barcelona retrieve possession.
Bielsa realises quickly that even on a pitch so churned and appalling, much of Barcelona’s passing will be flawless. Javier Mascherano, his fellow Argentinian, is everywhere from the off. “He goes out to the flanks and is a winger,” Bielsa says. “Then he marks Llorente as a central defender. And then moves up the field as a holding or attacking midfielder. Honestly, I’m proud to call Mascherano a compatriot.”
The risk to Bilbao is the death by a thousand cuts that Barcelona, under Guardiola, perform in their sleep. The risk to Barcelona is Bilbao’s high press and their willingness to commit so many bodies forward.
Bilbao score first when their positioning forces a risky pass from Victor Valdes to the right wing. Mascherano slips and Ander Herrera curls in a shot from the edge of the box. Ironically, it is the only good goal of the night. Fabregas nods in a free header after Bilbao’s defence go missing. Nine minutes from the end, Gerard Pique turns a corner into his own net. Barcelona have not lost all season but defeat is on the cards.
And then, in the 91st minute, Ander Iturraspe and his goalkeeper Gorka Iraizoz go for the same ball inside their own box. They collide and deflect it to Lionel Messi, who rolls a shot into an empty net.
Bilbao look shattered. Everyone looks shattered. A drenched Guardiola makes a beeline for Bielsa, to shake his hand and commend him on dragging Barcelona so far out of their comfort zone. “The result is hard to take,” Bielsa says, “but it was a lovely game.”
Someone asks him why it took until the last five minutes for him to make substitutions. “Because I wanted to take off someone who wasn’t playing well,” he says.
All these years later, Bielsa is still in awe of the team Bilbao faced. Ask anyone who tangled with Guardiola in that era, he says, and they will tell the same story. “The memories I have are that Barcelona managed to neutralise our efforts to impose ourselves,” Bielsa said during his weekly press conference on Thursday. “Everybody would give you this answer — the opinion that they are the best team in the history of football. His teams play like no other team.”
Guardiola’s time at Barcelona was coming to an end. He would leave at the end of that 2011-12 season, concluding the first stage of the career Bielsa encouraged him to begin. But Bilbao had announced themselves and Bielsa’s reputation permeated the game. It is not that Europe knew nothing about him or what he was renowned for but, in plain sight, the composition of his team and his tactics were wonderful. In a matter of months, this side would knock Manchester United out of the Europa League. In May, Bielsa and Guardiola contested the Copa del Rey final, their last skirmish with each other until, eight years later, Leeds meet Manchester City today.
Bilbao’s campaign, though, poured fuel on the fire of the Bielsa burnout theory, the perception that the way he cracks the whip with his players causes them to hit a wall. Across La Liga, the Europa League and the Copa del Rey, Bilbao had 63 games to contend with. Incredibly, winger Markel Susaeta played in the lot. “But by the end of the season, the players were so, so tired,” Errasti says. Fatigued or not, Bilbao had two big dates to aim at: the Europa League final on May 9 and the Copa del Rey final two weeks later.
Defeat in one blew their chances in the other. Barcelona were heavy favourites to win the Copa del Rey but Bilbao fancied their chances against Atletico Madrid in the Europa League showpiece. There was little between the clubs in the domestic table. They had each beaten the other at home in the league. Bilbao flew to the final in Bucharest with confidence oozing but got soundly beaten 3-0, conceding to Radamel Falcao twice in the first half.
“To play so bad, the impact was big,” Errasti says. “If they had beaten Atletico, they would have thought that they might beat Barcelona. But to lose to Atletico like that, there was no chance against Barca. No one really believed. The team looked exhausted and you knew that only Barcelona could win that match.”
Barcelona and Bilbao met in Madrid at the old Vicente Calderon and there were no parallels with their November rumble at San Mames. The pitch at Atletico’s former home was dry and fast and Barcelona scored three times in the opening 25 minutes.
Bilbao looked passive, second to everything, and there was a telling moment in the 20th minute when Messi rifled Barcelona’s second goal into the roof of the net. A jaded Jon Aurtenetxe switched off and gave up on Messi’s run, devoid of intensity. At 3-0 down, Bilbao started to play but were already beaten. Bielsa said Bilbao struggled to beat Barcelona’s press. Guardiola, for Bielsa’s sake, tried not to dwell on the scoreline or the result. “I don’t think we are very conscious here of everything this coach is doing for football,” he said. “We were facing the best manager on the planet.”
Vivas is not convinced that Athletic were mentally or physically shot. “No, no, no,” he says. “It was quality above physical aspects. The reality was that Messi was inspired, and Pedro and (Andres) Iniesta. It was Guardiola’s best Barca that season. Their opening period destroyed us.
“We tried but to be honest, we were never close to a result. There was tremendous disappointment because the whole Basque country was looking forward to it and we couldn’t live up to those expectations.”
Guardiola was finished at the Nou Camp. His time was up and he was speaking as Barcelona manager for the final time. “The loss is huge, because he made this sport shine,” Bielsa added. “The title of maestro is justified by his work. The work I have done in football doesn’t justify this title. If we were to establish maestro and student, I wouldn’t be the maestro.”
Bielsa was possibly leaving too. He and Bilbao were about to discuss his future, the way forward for the 2012-13 season, and Bielsa couldn’t say with any certainty he would stick around. He told his players as much in a private dressing-room conversation, the audio of which was leaked to the media a few months later (and after Bielsa agreed to stay on as manager).
The recording was made by one of Bilbao’s players but nobody has ever taken responsibility for it, or explained how it was that it reached the press. “Actually, in the eyes of the public, it was not bad for him,” Errasti says. “What he said (in that conversation), people were thinking.” In it, Bielsa accuses his squad of being “premature millionaires”. He saw some of them laughing after the Copa del Rey final and their brevity angered him. You don’t suffer like ordinary people in Bilbao, he told them. You cannot let them down like this.
“He was disappointed because the whole Basque country were behind us,” Vivas says. “So many fans came to the game, even without tickets.
“He didn’t complain but it was a speech based on reality. Maybe it could upset some people but for others it could be useful. A player thought the speech could hurt him (Bielsa) but the fans liked Marcelo even more because of it. He was praised by the Basque people. The player betrayed him. He recorded it and published it. We don’t know who it was but whoever it was it didn’t go very well for him because the fans loved what Marcelo said in that private chat.”
In spite of his ire, Bielsa could not deny that the squad’s application in the build-up had been exemplary. “You trained like animals for 10 days,” Bielsa told his players. “You obeyed, submitted and applied yourselves to everything I asked of you.” Bielsa had done likewise, compiling a vast analysis document detailing every aspect of Barcelona’s system. Afterwards, he gave it to Guardiola as a gift and a sign of respect for him. “You know more about my team than I do,” Guardiola joked. “But it was useless information,” Bielsa admitted during his famous Spygate briefing at Leeds last year, “because we conceded three goals.”
Vivas was closely involved in the preparation of that document, working for hours to help pull it together. “Before the final (Bielsa) told me to watch every Barcelona game from that season, to cut up every game and split them into different videos — goalscoring opportunities, chances they conceded, how they played out from the back, the different tactical systems Guardiola used in the 64 games, including friendlies,” he says.
“The only thing he asked for was to give solutions to the players so they had the knowledge to come up with the answers on the pitch. What happens when you play against a team like Barca is that with everything we planned, some of the things went well and others didn’t. They overcame us with their attacking ability. They were very efficient.
“I’m sure Pep loved the scout report. It was a very complete work. Marcelo polished it and made it better. The result wasn’t what we wanted but that’s how we prepared for it. After the game he sent it to Barca’s dressing room as a gift.”
The relationship between Guardiola and Bielsa was rare. They were respectful to the point of being reverential and each man preferred the other to be held in higher regard. Their encounters in the heat of battle did not alter their opinion of one another, except for the better. Bielsa could delight in Guardiola’s successes. Guardiola played them down when Bielsa’s name came up in the conversation. “I don’t dare call him,” Bielsa once said. “I feel inhibited by what he is.”
Even this week, as a long-awaited reunion came around, the phone line stayed quiet.
In England, personal meetings between Guardiola and Bielsa have been relatively few. They are understood to have met for dinner in Leeds and Manchester and their paths crossed in the transfer market when the Yorkshire club first signed Jack Harrison on loan from Manchester City in 2018 but they have their own jobs, their own lives and their own daily stresses.
“I don’t see him every week but the pleasure when I spend time with him, it’s always so inspirational for me,” Guardiola said on Friday. “He is probably the person I admire most in world football. My theory is that, for a manager, it’s not about how many titles you win. I have won many titles but my knowledge of things is far away from his.” The Athletic has been told that City’s last training session before their visit to Elland Road was a double session — the first time Guardiola has done that in four years as City’s manager.
The two men made beasts of Barcelona and Bilbao. At Elland Road this evening, they will find the same old spirit at work: City’s 4-2-3-1 meeting Leeds’ 4-1-4-1, Kevin De Bruyne colliding with Kalvin Phillips and Guardiola jousting with an ageless Bielsa. That wet night at San Mames almost eight years ago will feel like yesterday, like a light that never goes out.
In Thursday’s pre-match press conference, Bielsa was drawn into speaking about the new and beleaguered handball rule; how to change it, how to fix it, how to make it work for everyone. One sentence in his answer jumped out, unrelated to him or Guardiola but inadvertently describing their respective journeys through management.
“In the search for perfection, you know where it starts,” Bielsa said. “But you never know where it ends.”
It is no night for football. The heavens have opened, the temperature is dropping towards single figures and a sea of ponchos fills the stands of the San Mames Stadium. Guardiola will lose his voice before the end of the evening and the ball will hold up in puddles of water as the pitch becomes more sodden and treacherous. But somehow, the spectacle is La Liga at its best.
Guardiola and Bielsa had seen the flames in each other’s eyes, the whirring of cogs in complex minds as they sat together in Argentina five years earlier, but they had never before thrown themselves against each other as coaches. Bielsa will discover what it is like when Barcelona’s tiki-taka toys with you; when you “surround them but the ball gets out anyway,” as Bielsa laments with a smile afterwards. Guardiola will feel the weight and ferocity of Athletic Bilbao’s press, the sprints, the energy, the batteries which refuse to go flat. The game leaves Barcelona’s manager hoarse and a little stunned. “I’ve never played against a team so intense,” he says.
To a point, Guardiola saw an epic game coming. He had spoken beforehand about Bielsa’s team “not letting you breathe. They attack the box with seven players. Then they lose the ball and defend with 11.”
He understood the theory and the process. But in the flesh and in the Spanish rain, the football is something else. La Liga has its milestones and memories but aficionados say the 2-2 draw between Bilbao and Barcelona on November 6, 2011 would sit comfortably in any tribute to the division. Rodri Errasti, a Spanish journalist, was covering Bilbao for Eurosport at the time. “It’s one of the best matches I ever watched,” he says.
Claudio Vivas, Bielsa’s assistant at Bilbao, recalls how the day before the match — a day on which Spanish players liked to rest — Bielsa put his squad through a hard training session, a last chance to fire them up.
“The most significant thing about that game was that we had more of the ball than them, a team that normally has 70 or 75 per cent of possession,” Vivas tells The Athletic.
“There’s more to winning games than possession, it depends on many things, but in that game in particular Guardiola’s team wanted to control it. We didn’t let them. It wasn’t worth much in the end because we drew but afterwards it was something that everybody praised.”
Guardiola goes 4-3-3, with Cesc Fabregas in the middle of a front three. Bilbao are closer to 4-1-4-1, with Fernando Llorente up front and Ander Iturraspe in a holding role. Llorente is not famed for covering the pitch but Guardiola watches with surprise as the forward makes 40-yard runs back and forward, covering defensively whenever Barcelona retrieve possession.
Bielsa realises quickly that even on a pitch so churned and appalling, much of Barcelona’s passing will be flawless. Javier Mascherano, his fellow Argentinian, is everywhere from the off. “He goes out to the flanks and is a winger,” Bielsa says. “Then he marks Llorente as a central defender. And then moves up the field as a holding or attacking midfielder. Honestly, I’m proud to call Mascherano a compatriot.”
The risk to Bilbao is the death by a thousand cuts that Barcelona, under Guardiola, perform in their sleep. The risk to Barcelona is Bilbao’s high press and their willingness to commit so many bodies forward.
Bilbao score first when their positioning forces a risky pass from Victor Valdes to the right wing. Mascherano slips and Ander Herrera curls in a shot from the edge of the box. Ironically, it is the only good goal of the night. Fabregas nods in a free header after Bilbao’s defence go missing. Nine minutes from the end, Gerard Pique turns a corner into his own net. Barcelona have not lost all season but defeat is on the cards.
And then, in the 91st minute, Ander Iturraspe and his goalkeeper Gorka Iraizoz go for the same ball inside their own box. They collide and deflect it to Lionel Messi, who rolls a shot into an empty net.
Bilbao look shattered. Everyone looks shattered. A drenched Guardiola makes a beeline for Bielsa, to shake his hand and commend him on dragging Barcelona so far out of their comfort zone. “The result is hard to take,” Bielsa says, “but it was a lovely game.”
Someone asks him why it took until the last five minutes for him to make substitutions. “Because I wanted to take off someone who wasn’t playing well,” he says.
All these years later, Bielsa is still in awe of the team Bilbao faced. Ask anyone who tangled with Guardiola in that era, he says, and they will tell the same story. “The memories I have are that Barcelona managed to neutralise our efforts to impose ourselves,” Bielsa said during his weekly press conference on Thursday. “Everybody would give you this answer — the opinion that they are the best team in the history of football. His teams play like no other team.”
Guardiola’s time at Barcelona was coming to an end. He would leave at the end of that 2011-12 season, concluding the first stage of the career Bielsa encouraged him to begin. But Bilbao had announced themselves and Bielsa’s reputation permeated the game. It is not that Europe knew nothing about him or what he was renowned for but, in plain sight, the composition of his team and his tactics were wonderful. In a matter of months, this side would knock Manchester United out of the Europa League. In May, Bielsa and Guardiola contested the Copa del Rey final, their last skirmish with each other until, eight years later, Leeds meet Manchester City today.
Bilbao’s campaign, though, poured fuel on the fire of the Bielsa burnout theory, the perception that the way he cracks the whip with his players causes them to hit a wall. Across La Liga, the Europa League and the Copa del Rey, Bilbao had 63 games to contend with. Incredibly, winger Markel Susaeta played in the lot. “But by the end of the season, the players were so, so tired,” Errasti says. Fatigued or not, Bilbao had two big dates to aim at: the Europa League final on May 9 and the Copa del Rey final two weeks later.
Defeat in one blew their chances in the other. Barcelona were heavy favourites to win the Copa del Rey but Bilbao fancied their chances against Atletico Madrid in the Europa League showpiece. There was little between the clubs in the domestic table. They had each beaten the other at home in the league. Bilbao flew to the final in Bucharest with confidence oozing but got soundly beaten 3-0, conceding to Radamel Falcao twice in the first half.
“To play so bad, the impact was big,” Errasti says. “If they had beaten Atletico, they would have thought that they might beat Barcelona. But to lose to Atletico like that, there was no chance against Barca. No one really believed. The team looked exhausted and you knew that only Barcelona could win that match.”
Barcelona and Bilbao met in Madrid at the old Vicente Calderon and there were no parallels with their November rumble at San Mames. The pitch at Atletico’s former home was dry and fast and Barcelona scored three times in the opening 25 minutes.
Bilbao looked passive, second to everything, and there was a telling moment in the 20th minute when Messi rifled Barcelona’s second goal into the roof of the net. A jaded Jon Aurtenetxe switched off and gave up on Messi’s run, devoid of intensity. At 3-0 down, Bilbao started to play but were already beaten. Bielsa said Bilbao struggled to beat Barcelona’s press. Guardiola, for Bielsa’s sake, tried not to dwell on the scoreline or the result. “I don’t think we are very conscious here of everything this coach is doing for football,” he said. “We were facing the best manager on the planet.”
Vivas is not convinced that Athletic were mentally or physically shot. “No, no, no,” he says. “It was quality above physical aspects. The reality was that Messi was inspired, and Pedro and (Andres) Iniesta. It was Guardiola’s best Barca that season. Their opening period destroyed us.
“We tried but to be honest, we were never close to a result. There was tremendous disappointment because the whole Basque country was looking forward to it and we couldn’t live up to those expectations.”
Guardiola was finished at the Nou Camp. His time was up and he was speaking as Barcelona manager for the final time. “The loss is huge, because he made this sport shine,” Bielsa added. “The title of maestro is justified by his work. The work I have done in football doesn’t justify this title. If we were to establish maestro and student, I wouldn’t be the maestro.”
Bielsa was possibly leaving too. He and Bilbao were about to discuss his future, the way forward for the 2012-13 season, and Bielsa couldn’t say with any certainty he would stick around. He told his players as much in a private dressing-room conversation, the audio of which was leaked to the media a few months later (and after Bielsa agreed to stay on as manager).
The recording was made by one of Bilbao’s players but nobody has ever taken responsibility for it, or explained how it was that it reached the press. “Actually, in the eyes of the public, it was not bad for him,” Errasti says. “What he said (in that conversation), people were thinking.” In it, Bielsa accuses his squad of being “premature millionaires”. He saw some of them laughing after the Copa del Rey final and their brevity angered him. You don’t suffer like ordinary people in Bilbao, he told them. You cannot let them down like this.
“He was disappointed because the whole Basque country were behind us,” Vivas says. “So many fans came to the game, even without tickets.
“He didn’t complain but it was a speech based on reality. Maybe it could upset some people but for others it could be useful. A player thought the speech could hurt him (Bielsa) but the fans liked Marcelo even more because of it. He was praised by the Basque people. The player betrayed him. He recorded it and published it. We don’t know who it was but whoever it was it didn’t go very well for him because the fans loved what Marcelo said in that private chat.”
In spite of his ire, Bielsa could not deny that the squad’s application in the build-up had been exemplary. “You trained like animals for 10 days,” Bielsa told his players. “You obeyed, submitted and applied yourselves to everything I asked of you.” Bielsa had done likewise, compiling a vast analysis document detailing every aspect of Barcelona’s system. Afterwards, he gave it to Guardiola as a gift and a sign of respect for him. “You know more about my team than I do,” Guardiola joked. “But it was useless information,” Bielsa admitted during his famous Spygate briefing at Leeds last year, “because we conceded three goals.”
Vivas was closely involved in the preparation of that document, working for hours to help pull it together. “Before the final (Bielsa) told me to watch every Barcelona game from that season, to cut up every game and split them into different videos — goalscoring opportunities, chances they conceded, how they played out from the back, the different tactical systems Guardiola used in the 64 games, including friendlies,” he says.
“The only thing he asked for was to give solutions to the players so they had the knowledge to come up with the answers on the pitch. What happens when you play against a team like Barca is that with everything we planned, some of the things went well and others didn’t. They overcame us with their attacking ability. They were very efficient.
“I’m sure Pep loved the scout report. It was a very complete work. Marcelo polished it and made it better. The result wasn’t what we wanted but that’s how we prepared for it. After the game he sent it to Barca’s dressing room as a gift.”
The relationship between Guardiola and Bielsa was rare. They were respectful to the point of being reverential and each man preferred the other to be held in higher regard. Their encounters in the heat of battle did not alter their opinion of one another, except for the better. Bielsa could delight in Guardiola’s successes. Guardiola played them down when Bielsa’s name came up in the conversation. “I don’t dare call him,” Bielsa once said. “I feel inhibited by what he is.”
Even this week, as a long-awaited reunion came around, the phone line stayed quiet.
In England, personal meetings between Guardiola and Bielsa have been relatively few. They are understood to have met for dinner in Leeds and Manchester and their paths crossed in the transfer market when the Yorkshire club first signed Jack Harrison on loan from Manchester City in 2018 but they have their own jobs, their own lives and their own daily stresses.
“I don’t see him every week but the pleasure when I spend time with him, it’s always so inspirational for me,” Guardiola said on Friday. “He is probably the person I admire most in world football. My theory is that, for a manager, it’s not about how many titles you win. I have won many titles but my knowledge of things is far away from his.” The Athletic has been told that City’s last training session before their visit to Elland Road was a double session — the first time Guardiola has done that in four years as City’s manager.
The two men made beasts of Barcelona and Bilbao. At Elland Road this evening, they will find the same old spirit at work: City’s 4-2-3-1 meeting Leeds’ 4-1-4-1, Kevin De Bruyne colliding with Kalvin Phillips and Guardiola jousting with an ageless Bielsa. That wet night at San Mames almost eight years ago will feel like yesterday, like a light that never goes out.
In Thursday’s pre-match press conference, Bielsa was drawn into speaking about the new and beleaguered handball rule; how to change it, how to fix it, how to make it work for everyone. One sentence in his answer jumped out, unrelated to him or Guardiola but inadvertently describing their respective journeys through management.
“In the search for perfection, you know where it starts,” Bielsa said. “But you never know where it ends.”
Are footballers employees or assets?
By Michael Walker Oct 1, 2020
23
“To football clubs, players are just expensive pieces of meat,” Roy Keane once said.
Matt Piper was stunned. He was in the manager’s office at Leicester City, being told by Dave Bassett and Micky Adams that if Piper really loved his local club and all who worked there, he would leave immediately. The worst consequence of him staying, he was led to understand, was Leicester’s possible “liquidation”.
Piper was 20 years old. He had already said no once to a proposed £3.5 million move to Sunderland, then no to a £2.5 million move to Southampton. Piper was from Leicester and had just broken into his hometown’s first team. He wanted to stay.
But, over the course of a long last week at the troubled club, Piper realised he had to go. He was given no choice; he was an asset to be traded. Piper joined Sunderland; Leicester banked the money.
Sunderland manager Peter Reid had suggested this was how it would play out when they had first met. As Piper recalls: “Peter Reid told me:, ‘All I know about football, son, is that if a club wants you to go, they’ll find a way to get you out. I’m pretty sure I’ll see you in the next couple of weeks’.”
Reid was right. Piper did not understand, he was a young player “dreaming of being on Match Of The Day”. But he understands today: “I was a commodity and while you’re a commodity, a club will do anything for you.”
This was August 2002, almost seven years after the Bosman Ruling. It was thought the ruling had given players such overwhelming power in the transfer system that it would mean an end to traditional trading. Even today, though, players are still “sold” to balance the books, because footballers are not standard employees, they are also assets to be traded if necessary.
Our perception is that, since Bosman, players have all the power, but this perception is shaped by footballers at the top of the sport. The daily reality for most is different. Footballers remain unique employees who cannot resign, who cannot give three months’ notice as the rest of the employed population are entitled to do.
“It’s probably the only industry where this still exists,” says Mark Hovell, a lawyer who works for the Professional Footballers’ Association and CAS – the Switzerland-based Court of Arbitration for Sport. “If you’re a lawyer and you decide you want to leave your firm, you hand in your notice and walk across the street to another firm — for free. In football, as players have signed up to a fixed-term contract — they can’t just give three months’ notice to leave. Unless the club agrees, they have to see out the entirety of the contract. Clubs typically only agree if they are compensated with a transfer fee. We still have the buying and selling of registrations. With younger players there are further restrictions, as the previous club can claim training compensation at the expiry of the fixed term too.”
There are examples of players effectively resigning through mutual agreements with their club, as Piper was to do at Sunderland. And, of course, there are less mutual separations — or attempts at them. Pierre van Hooijdonk’s ‘strike’ at Nottingham Forest in 1998 was a major post-Bosman moment. Dimitar Berbatov admitted he refused to come off the bench for Tottenham Hotspur in 2008 as he pushed through his move to Manchester United and three years ago Diego Costa sat in his remote Brazilian village saying: “I am waiting for Chelsea to set me free.”
Players can appear powerful provocateurs and clubs will say that they have decreasing strength in negotiations. But it is still a two-way contract and the players do not always win. When Angel Di Maria left Real Madrid for Old Trafford in 2014, he wrote an open letter to the Spanish club’s fans stating: “Unfortunately today I have to go, but I want to make clear that this was never my desire.”
It may help explain his form at United, and why he lasted only one season in Manchester.
There will hardly be mass sympathy for Di Maria given his finances and the fact he moved on to Paris Saint-Germain. But even that lush environment can be harsh — Adrien Rabiot was sent to train with the reserves last year following an internal row over his contract. In the summer of 2017, Virgil van Dijk was excluded from Southampton’s first-team training and sent to train on his own as Liverpool tried to force through his signing. Again, sympathy will be rare, especially from Southampton fans, but this situation and response simply would not occur in another workplace. HR departments ensure that.
Footballers are different and contracts do not always protect them.
For most of Europe, this transfer window — which as one experienced agent put it “will always be remembered as ‘the COVID window’” — closes on Monday night. In England, there is an additional 11-day period where Premier League clubs can trade with EFL clubs, for loans or permanent transfers, but not internationally. After that, whisper it, the next window is 10 weeks away.
And as Monday night becomes Tuesday morning, it will be 25 years to the day since the submission of the legal case that would lead to the European Commission’s Bosman Ruling of December 1995. The issue was restraint of trade, of players being unable to dictate their careers due to restrictive contracts.
Matt Piper’s position at Leicester shows that although there had been changes in the relationships between players and clubs that were beneficial to the players, it was not all one-way. Not every player was Steve McManaman leaving Liverpool for Real Madrid.
In 2002, Piper had none of McManaman’s power. He had just signed a new contract at Leicester and, without an agent, ultimately he was exposed to club pressure and moved against his will. Piper had four injury-hit years on Wearside before he and Sunderland agreed to terminate his contract, but the club retained the most crucial document, his registration. Without it, no footballer can play. Piper later requested it back, just in case he wanted to re-try with a local junior club in Leicester. Sunderland did him a favour, but legally they did not have to.
A decade on, Piper saw a comparison in Jack Rodwell’s situation at the Stadium of Light. But in the period between 2002 and 2017, player-club relationships had unquestionably changed.
In 2001 the European Commission, FIFA and other key influences in the sport globally agreed a set of regulations to govern in a post-Bosman football world. In England, this coincided with a jump in the Premier League’s television rights sale past £1 billion. Gradually, players, supported by an industry of agents which had not been there immediately after Bosman, grasped and tilted the economic balance of power.
It was 2001 when Keane made his “meat” reference, about team-mate Jaap Stam’s sale by United to Lazio. Today, Keane must think some clubs look like an all-you-can-eat buffet to players and agents.
“Look at Jack Rodwell at Sunderland,” Piper says. “He wouldn’t leave because he wanted to stay on his big wages, even though the club was bottom of the Championship. The club were digging him out publicly, but he had the power.
“The club wanted him to do what I did. I was injured and one of the highest-paid players. They asked me to defer wages. I said, ‘No problem, I’m not playing at the minute, I’m not a commodity.’ I didn’t have to do that. Five players, the highest earners, were offered that and only three did it. They asked me to sign an extra year but with the same total money of the contract. I did it, but Rodwell wouldn’t, so it probably has moved towards the players more.
“But it depends. Rodwell had the power in his situation but there’s one coming up at Leicester with Demarai Gray. He’s out of favour with the manager and ideally it would be best for all if he moved on. But he’s one year left and the club have offered him the same money for another two years because they’re in Europe. I think Demarai wants to get out for his career but the club could just sit on him for another year and keep him. He can’t just hand his notice in and leave. The club have power — they hold his registration.”
Gray is 24. The Bosman Ruling stated players of that age could leave clubs for free at the end of their contracts. The age was deemed to be halfway through a typical career of 16 to 32 and the idea was to compensate the club which had developed the young player. At 28, there is another less-used contractual element to contracts, but it means clubs must plan carefully not just who they sign but when, and for how long.
Well-run clubs do this, but even they sometimes panic in the last week of transfer windows.
Arsenal bought Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang on the final day of the January 2018 window as the club felt their options decrease. According to Football Leaks, Arsenal agreed to pay Aubameyang a £15 million ‘loyalty bonus’ in four instalments to the end of his contract in June 2021. This was on top of his basic annual salary of £10.3 million and a transfer fee to Borussia Dortmund of €63.75 million. That £15 million over the period works out around £90,000 per week as ‘loyalty’. Aubameyang probably owes Jean-Marc Bosman a cup of tea.
Timing was critical in shaping those sums. At the end of a window, Arsenal’s determination to replace Alexis Sanchez had grown and in such situations agents understand that desperation equals remuneration.
Dortmund, the selling club, know and work the market accordingly, buying and moving stock — players — as traders do. It is why Brighton & Hove Albion’s long-serving secretary Derek Allan says: “Players are still assets — for a certain period of time.”
Allan has been at the club since shortly before the Bosman Ruling and, though Brighton have spent most of that time outside the Premier League, he has seen contractual change from the inside. Of players as assets rather than regular employees, Allan says: “The problem is you can’t really call them assets once they reach 24 and on, because they can walk out once their contract’s up. They’re an asset while you’ve got them and you can still sell them while they’re under contract. But in the last six months, they’re not assets.”
Danny Ings is an example. In June 2015, Ings was a soon to be 23-year-old Burnley player wanted by Liverpool. He was at the end of his contract at Turf Moor and had agreed to go to Anfield. But his age meant Burnley were owed a developmental fee and when it came to a tribunal, they were offered £6.5 million, plus £1.5 million in add-ons. Had Ings been 24, he could have moved for zero cost.
That would have felt unjust on Burnley who had invested £1 million in signing Ings from Bournemouth, as well as time and coaching. They had polished their asset.
Age criteria has implications for a 20-year-old such as Rhian Brewster and the length of his next contract — as does the loan market, as does COVID-19. Should Liverpool choose to sell Brewster to Crystal Palace this week, for example, they will be compensated via a healthy transfer fee; if Brewster goes on loan to Sheffield United, as suggested, the parent club will also pocket a large loan fee.
The loan fee has evolved into another way for clubs to make income from their employees, albeit without selling. In 2004, a £1 million loan fee was paid between two Premier League clubs for a future England international, and £2 million-£3 million is the going rate today for a player such as Brewster.
Premier League clubs have loans managers now, so important is this part of their business. Asset management, you could call it. Chelsea have their former goalkeeper Carlo Cudicini in that role and the club has made enormous sums by loaning out dozens of their players each season. Famously, or infamously if you’re Stoke City, Chelsea received a £7 million loan fee in 2017 for Kurt Zouma’s season on loan in the Potteries. Zouma’s middle name is Happy. I’m sure Chelsea were.
But there has been a lack of spending this summer in the Championship — Nottingham Forest aside — and the slashed income due to COVID-19 is a factor. Efforts to shift players out on loan have also been hit by the salary cap imposed on Leagues One and Two. August’s introduction of a collective £2.5 million cap for League One squads meant that when a promotion-chasing manager in that division recently rang a Championship counterpart about a fringe squad defender, he was informed the 24-year-old is on £16,000 per week. The pursuing manager could offer £2,000 per week, so the player stayed on the edge of a squad, effectively stuck. While financially secure, there are questions about his career path.
Opportunities, moreover, may diminish further. With coronavirus threatening the viability of some League and non-League clubs, lawyer Hovell has already seen an impact. His firm recently assisted the PFA and National League player who had 20 per cent of his wages deducted during COVID-19, without his consent.
“If that happens once, then a disputes panel is unlikely to say the player can terminate his contract,” Hovell explains, “but if it’s persistent, say three months in a row, that’s different. This was for four months and the player hadn’t agreed. The club said it was because of COVID, and it might have been, but he didn’t agree to it. He gave notice under his contract to say it was a persistent breach of his contract. The club had an opportunity to remedy the breach by paying the player the money it had withheld, but it failed to do so.”
At an independent tribunal, the player won his case. “He’s now a free agent.”
Cases like this reinforce the idea of player power — even if there was a contract breach. Non-payment, partial payment and late payment are problems the international players’ union, FIFpro, see regularly. The union is still in contact with Bosman and is still fighting restrictive practices and contractual abuses — in 2016, a FIFpro survey of 14,000 players in 54 countries found that 29 per cent had been forced to move by clubs.
“The worst case I had was at CAS in dispute with a Russian club, where an overseas player was ushered into a windowless room at the stadium by the chairman and introduced to his ‘new agent’,” Hovell says. “The player said, ‘I’ve got an agent, thanks’, but the chairman closed the door and the new agent, basically a local mafia guy, pulled out a gun and said, ‘You’ll sign these two agreements or I’ll shoot you dead’. He was basically left with no choice other than to sign what the agent and the club needed to end his employment contract.”
It is easier being a footballer in some countries than others. But even in established soccer cultures, says a FIFpro spokesman, “There is a pressure point in the last year of a contract when some clubs try to extend the contract so they can get a fee. That’s when a player can be classed in their eyes as an asset. Outside the big leagues, there are so many cases where players are used as pawns, where players are tied to clubs. Then there are buy-out clauses which stipulate where a player can’t go or the buy-out is unreasonably high.”
FIFpro’s activities concern the poorest professionals in Africa but also Lionel Messi, whose €700 million buy-out clause at Barcelona might be considered “unreasonably high”.
There is a philosophical argument — at the moment — that this could be a restraint of trade. But it would take time. Time that Messi, 33, does not have for him to join the three significant football cases since Bosman — Andy Webster at Hearts in 2008, the Brazilian Matuzalem at Real Zaragoza in 2009 and Morgan De Sanctis at Udinese in 2011.
The Webster ruling solidified the Bosman interpretation of players’ rights but Roy Vermeer, FIFpro’s legal director, argues: “Matuzalem and De Sanctis definitely put the power back to the clubs after Webster.”
Disaffected players, he says, “will be reluctant to terminate” contracts as compensation is variable, not fixed and “without this legal certainty, no player will risk to terminate the contract before its expiry because the compensation can be millions.”
Certainty is rare in professional football but one certainty is that a playing career is short. It remains the most obvious difference between regular employees and footballers. As an agent says: “There’s short-termism in the market, the last-day madness. But there’s the short-termism of a footballer’s career. A player’s career generally ends around 34. The rest of us have maybe 30 years’ work after that. It’s still the biggest difference when comparing players to other employees.”
By Michael Walker Oct 1, 2020
“To football clubs, players are just expensive pieces of meat,” Roy Keane once said.
Matt Piper was stunned. He was in the manager’s office at Leicester City, being told by Dave Bassett and Micky Adams that if Piper really loved his local club and all who worked there, he would leave immediately. The worst consequence of him staying, he was led to understand, was Leicester’s possible “liquidation”.
Piper was 20 years old. He had already said no once to a proposed £3.5 million move to Sunderland, then no to a £2.5 million move to Southampton. Piper was from Leicester and had just broken into his hometown’s first team. He wanted to stay.
But, over the course of a long last week at the troubled club, Piper realised he had to go. He was given no choice; he was an asset to be traded. Piper joined Sunderland; Leicester banked the money.
Sunderland manager Peter Reid had suggested this was how it would play out when they had first met. As Piper recalls: “Peter Reid told me:, ‘All I know about football, son, is that if a club wants you to go, they’ll find a way to get you out. I’m pretty sure I’ll see you in the next couple of weeks’.”
Reid was right. Piper did not understand, he was a young player “dreaming of being on Match Of The Day”. But he understands today: “I was a commodity and while you’re a commodity, a club will do anything for you.”
This was August 2002, almost seven years after the Bosman Ruling. It was thought the ruling had given players such overwhelming power in the transfer system that it would mean an end to traditional trading. Even today, though, players are still “sold” to balance the books, because footballers are not standard employees, they are also assets to be traded if necessary.
Our perception is that, since Bosman, players have all the power, but this perception is shaped by footballers at the top of the sport. The daily reality for most is different. Footballers remain unique employees who cannot resign, who cannot give three months’ notice as the rest of the employed population are entitled to do.
“It’s probably the only industry where this still exists,” says Mark Hovell, a lawyer who works for the Professional Footballers’ Association and CAS – the Switzerland-based Court of Arbitration for Sport. “If you’re a lawyer and you decide you want to leave your firm, you hand in your notice and walk across the street to another firm — for free. In football, as players have signed up to a fixed-term contract — they can’t just give three months’ notice to leave. Unless the club agrees, they have to see out the entirety of the contract. Clubs typically only agree if they are compensated with a transfer fee. We still have the buying and selling of registrations. With younger players there are further restrictions, as the previous club can claim training compensation at the expiry of the fixed term too.”
There are examples of players effectively resigning through mutual agreements with their club, as Piper was to do at Sunderland. And, of course, there are less mutual separations — or attempts at them. Pierre van Hooijdonk’s ‘strike’ at Nottingham Forest in 1998 was a major post-Bosman moment. Dimitar Berbatov admitted he refused to come off the bench for Tottenham Hotspur in 2008 as he pushed through his move to Manchester United and three years ago Diego Costa sat in his remote Brazilian village saying: “I am waiting for Chelsea to set me free.”
Players can appear powerful provocateurs and clubs will say that they have decreasing strength in negotiations. But it is still a two-way contract and the players do not always win. When Angel Di Maria left Real Madrid for Old Trafford in 2014, he wrote an open letter to the Spanish club’s fans stating: “Unfortunately today I have to go, but I want to make clear that this was never my desire.”
It may help explain his form at United, and why he lasted only one season in Manchester.
There will hardly be mass sympathy for Di Maria given his finances and the fact he moved on to Paris Saint-Germain. But even that lush environment can be harsh — Adrien Rabiot was sent to train with the reserves last year following an internal row over his contract. In the summer of 2017, Virgil van Dijk was excluded from Southampton’s first-team training and sent to train on his own as Liverpool tried to force through his signing. Again, sympathy will be rare, especially from Southampton fans, but this situation and response simply would not occur in another workplace. HR departments ensure that.
Footballers are different and contracts do not always protect them.
For most of Europe, this transfer window — which as one experienced agent put it “will always be remembered as ‘the COVID window’” — closes on Monday night. In England, there is an additional 11-day period where Premier League clubs can trade with EFL clubs, for loans or permanent transfers, but not internationally. After that, whisper it, the next window is 10 weeks away.
And as Monday night becomes Tuesday morning, it will be 25 years to the day since the submission of the legal case that would lead to the European Commission’s Bosman Ruling of December 1995. The issue was restraint of trade, of players being unable to dictate their careers due to restrictive contracts.
Matt Piper’s position at Leicester shows that although there had been changes in the relationships between players and clubs that were beneficial to the players, it was not all one-way. Not every player was Steve McManaman leaving Liverpool for Real Madrid.
In 2002, Piper had none of McManaman’s power. He had just signed a new contract at Leicester and, without an agent, ultimately he was exposed to club pressure and moved against his will. Piper had four injury-hit years on Wearside before he and Sunderland agreed to terminate his contract, but the club retained the most crucial document, his registration. Without it, no footballer can play. Piper later requested it back, just in case he wanted to re-try with a local junior club in Leicester. Sunderland did him a favour, but legally they did not have to.
A decade on, Piper saw a comparison in Jack Rodwell’s situation at the Stadium of Light. But in the period between 2002 and 2017, player-club relationships had unquestionably changed.
In 2001 the European Commission, FIFA and other key influences in the sport globally agreed a set of regulations to govern in a post-Bosman football world. In England, this coincided with a jump in the Premier League’s television rights sale past £1 billion. Gradually, players, supported by an industry of agents which had not been there immediately after Bosman, grasped and tilted the economic balance of power.
It was 2001 when Keane made his “meat” reference, about team-mate Jaap Stam’s sale by United to Lazio. Today, Keane must think some clubs look like an all-you-can-eat buffet to players and agents.
“Look at Jack Rodwell at Sunderland,” Piper says. “He wouldn’t leave because he wanted to stay on his big wages, even though the club was bottom of the Championship. The club were digging him out publicly, but he had the power.
“The club wanted him to do what I did. I was injured and one of the highest-paid players. They asked me to defer wages. I said, ‘No problem, I’m not playing at the minute, I’m not a commodity.’ I didn’t have to do that. Five players, the highest earners, were offered that and only three did it. They asked me to sign an extra year but with the same total money of the contract. I did it, but Rodwell wouldn’t, so it probably has moved towards the players more.
“But it depends. Rodwell had the power in his situation but there’s one coming up at Leicester with Demarai Gray. He’s out of favour with the manager and ideally it would be best for all if he moved on. But he’s one year left and the club have offered him the same money for another two years because they’re in Europe. I think Demarai wants to get out for his career but the club could just sit on him for another year and keep him. He can’t just hand his notice in and leave. The club have power — they hold his registration.”
Gray is 24. The Bosman Ruling stated players of that age could leave clubs for free at the end of their contracts. The age was deemed to be halfway through a typical career of 16 to 32 and the idea was to compensate the club which had developed the young player. At 28, there is another less-used contractual element to contracts, but it means clubs must plan carefully not just who they sign but when, and for how long.
Well-run clubs do this, but even they sometimes panic in the last week of transfer windows.
Arsenal bought Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang on the final day of the January 2018 window as the club felt their options decrease. According to Football Leaks, Arsenal agreed to pay Aubameyang a £15 million ‘loyalty bonus’ in four instalments to the end of his contract in June 2021. This was on top of his basic annual salary of £10.3 million and a transfer fee to Borussia Dortmund of €63.75 million. That £15 million over the period works out around £90,000 per week as ‘loyalty’. Aubameyang probably owes Jean-Marc Bosman a cup of tea.
Timing was critical in shaping those sums. At the end of a window, Arsenal’s determination to replace Alexis Sanchez had grown and in such situations agents understand that desperation equals remuneration.
Dortmund, the selling club, know and work the market accordingly, buying and moving stock — players — as traders do. It is why Brighton & Hove Albion’s long-serving secretary Derek Allan says: “Players are still assets — for a certain period of time.”
Allan has been at the club since shortly before the Bosman Ruling and, though Brighton have spent most of that time outside the Premier League, he has seen contractual change from the inside. Of players as assets rather than regular employees, Allan says: “The problem is you can’t really call them assets once they reach 24 and on, because they can walk out once their contract’s up. They’re an asset while you’ve got them and you can still sell them while they’re under contract. But in the last six months, they’re not assets.”
Danny Ings is an example. In June 2015, Ings was a soon to be 23-year-old Burnley player wanted by Liverpool. He was at the end of his contract at Turf Moor and had agreed to go to Anfield. But his age meant Burnley were owed a developmental fee and when it came to a tribunal, they were offered £6.5 million, plus £1.5 million in add-ons. Had Ings been 24, he could have moved for zero cost.
That would have felt unjust on Burnley who had invested £1 million in signing Ings from Bournemouth, as well as time and coaching. They had polished their asset.
Age criteria has implications for a 20-year-old such as Rhian Brewster and the length of his next contract — as does the loan market, as does COVID-19. Should Liverpool choose to sell Brewster to Crystal Palace this week, for example, they will be compensated via a healthy transfer fee; if Brewster goes on loan to Sheffield United, as suggested, the parent club will also pocket a large loan fee.
The loan fee has evolved into another way for clubs to make income from their employees, albeit without selling. In 2004, a £1 million loan fee was paid between two Premier League clubs for a future England international, and £2 million-£3 million is the going rate today for a player such as Brewster.
Premier League clubs have loans managers now, so important is this part of their business. Asset management, you could call it. Chelsea have their former goalkeeper Carlo Cudicini in that role and the club has made enormous sums by loaning out dozens of their players each season. Famously, or infamously if you’re Stoke City, Chelsea received a £7 million loan fee in 2017 for Kurt Zouma’s season on loan in the Potteries. Zouma’s middle name is Happy. I’m sure Chelsea were.
But there has been a lack of spending this summer in the Championship — Nottingham Forest aside — and the slashed income due to COVID-19 is a factor. Efforts to shift players out on loan have also been hit by the salary cap imposed on Leagues One and Two. August’s introduction of a collective £2.5 million cap for League One squads meant that when a promotion-chasing manager in that division recently rang a Championship counterpart about a fringe squad defender, he was informed the 24-year-old is on £16,000 per week. The pursuing manager could offer £2,000 per week, so the player stayed on the edge of a squad, effectively stuck. While financially secure, there are questions about his career path.
Opportunities, moreover, may diminish further. With coronavirus threatening the viability of some League and non-League clubs, lawyer Hovell has already seen an impact. His firm recently assisted the PFA and National League player who had 20 per cent of his wages deducted during COVID-19, without his consent.
“If that happens once, then a disputes panel is unlikely to say the player can terminate his contract,” Hovell explains, “but if it’s persistent, say three months in a row, that’s different. This was for four months and the player hadn’t agreed. The club said it was because of COVID, and it might have been, but he didn’t agree to it. He gave notice under his contract to say it was a persistent breach of his contract. The club had an opportunity to remedy the breach by paying the player the money it had withheld, but it failed to do so.”
At an independent tribunal, the player won his case. “He’s now a free agent.”
Cases like this reinforce the idea of player power — even if there was a contract breach. Non-payment, partial payment and late payment are problems the international players’ union, FIFpro, see regularly. The union is still in contact with Bosman and is still fighting restrictive practices and contractual abuses — in 2016, a FIFpro survey of 14,000 players in 54 countries found that 29 per cent had been forced to move by clubs.
“The worst case I had was at CAS in dispute with a Russian club, where an overseas player was ushered into a windowless room at the stadium by the chairman and introduced to his ‘new agent’,” Hovell says. “The player said, ‘I’ve got an agent, thanks’, but the chairman closed the door and the new agent, basically a local mafia guy, pulled out a gun and said, ‘You’ll sign these two agreements or I’ll shoot you dead’. He was basically left with no choice other than to sign what the agent and the club needed to end his employment contract.”
It is easier being a footballer in some countries than others. But even in established soccer cultures, says a FIFpro spokesman, “There is a pressure point in the last year of a contract when some clubs try to extend the contract so they can get a fee. That’s when a player can be classed in their eyes as an asset. Outside the big leagues, there are so many cases where players are used as pawns, where players are tied to clubs. Then there are buy-out clauses which stipulate where a player can’t go or the buy-out is unreasonably high.”
FIFpro’s activities concern the poorest professionals in Africa but also Lionel Messi, whose €700 million buy-out clause at Barcelona might be considered “unreasonably high”.
There is a philosophical argument — at the moment — that this could be a restraint of trade. But it would take time. Time that Messi, 33, does not have for him to join the three significant football cases since Bosman — Andy Webster at Hearts in 2008, the Brazilian Matuzalem at Real Zaragoza in 2009 and Morgan De Sanctis at Udinese in 2011.
The Webster ruling solidified the Bosman interpretation of players’ rights but Roy Vermeer, FIFpro’s legal director, argues: “Matuzalem and De Sanctis definitely put the power back to the clubs after Webster.”
Disaffected players, he says, “will be reluctant to terminate” contracts as compensation is variable, not fixed and “without this legal certainty, no player will risk to terminate the contract before its expiry because the compensation can be millions.”
Certainty is rare in professional football but one certainty is that a playing career is short. It remains the most obvious difference between regular employees and footballers. As an agent says: “There’s short-termism in the market, the last-day madness. But there’s the short-termism of a footballer’s career. A player’s career generally ends around 34. The rest of us have maybe 30 years’ work after that. It’s still the biggest difference when comparing players to other employees.”
Personal terms, WhatsApp offers, medicals – transfer details you didn’t know
By Dominic Fifield, Tom Worville and more Sep 30, 2020
36
(Other contributors: Phillip Buckingham, Adam Crafton and Oliver Kay)
Club A accepted an offer for Player X but the move fell through because he failed to agree personal terms.
Club B faxed a transfer bid to Club C in the closing hours of the transfer window.
No, no, no. That’s just not how it works — not any more anyway. Our writers attempt to go beyond the headlines and explain what really happens in a medical, how transfers are agreed between clubs, at what stage personal terms are negotiated, how modern scouting works, and just how much agents earn from transfers…
Medicals: Not just pass or fail
Medicals vary from club to club, and can drag across two days if time permits, with the thorough nature of the testing reflective of the multi-million pound investments at stake. If issues are exposed they are included in the medical team’s report. It might not be the case that a problem kyboshes the transfer. However, it may lead to a referral to a consultant who would offer a prognosis to the buying club – on how long the player may take to recover, or if the issue might prove problematic in future – so a decision can be made as to whether they should proceed.
The task of establishing a player’s medical history falls upon the club doctor, who will assess both data supplied by the recruitment department and medical information provided by the selling club, then examine and speak with the player. In the case of international transfers, where the language barrier might be a complication when it comes to exploring family history and hereditary conditions, the presence of an interpreter might be required. Clubs tend to book slots at private hospitals.
The subjective examination is pursued by a thorough physical assessment, overseen by the doctor, physiotherapists and the club’s medical staff, which would cover basics such as height and weight, lung capacity, pulse rate and blood pressure. Clubs may use bioelectrical impedance analysis technology, or fat callipers, to measure the target’s body fat, which is usually around 10 per cent for footballers. Hearing, vision and dental checks may also be undertaken, as well as a standard concussion screening.
They check musculoskeletal stability and scrutinise traditional weak spots such as the lower back and pelvis, the source of so many hamstring and adductor issues. Any defects in function or tightness can be pinpointed by simple squat, hop and lunge tests, while particular attention is paid to shoulders, elbows, wrists and hands for goalkeepers. There are isokinetic checks on muscular and joint strength, imbalances or weaknesses, which might indicate a predisposition to injury or any issue that has developed post-injury, and knee flexion and extension drills to ascertain the player’s range of motion.
Cardiac screening is conducted via an ECG, echo monitor, a heart health history questionnaire and blood tests to check for any irregularities. There can be ergometric sprint tests and VO2 max testing to ascertain how “match ready” a player might be, while the doctor may request a urine test to detect proteins or ketones that might indicate underlying health issues such as diabetes. An MRI screen or ultrasound might be initiated to assess how well previous injuries, such as knee ligament issues, have healed.
All the information is summarised in a report which is delivered to the chairman, sporting director and manager. The assessment will usually list injury histories and any X-ray or scan results and, if there have been any abnormal findings, details on any future management plan should the transfer go ahead. Only once the report has been digested is the final call made on whether the club proceeds with the deal. Any bypassing of elements of the assessment due to time constraints as the deadline approaches — Alex Iwobi was on holiday in Dubai when Everton and Arsenal struck a deal for his services on deadline day last summer, and ended up signing from afar without conducting a full medical — inevitably constitutes a risk.
Dom Fifield
Making a bid: Negotiations on WhatsApp
“The first thing to say is there are no hard and fast way to do a transfer,” explains one former Premier League chief executive. In bygone days, clubs may have faxed over a formal bid to a rival club when attempting to sign a player, but in 2020, the bid is more often only sent after the terms of the agreement have been set out between the two clubs. Fax machines are now out of the picture.
Usually, a club will make contact early in the process with a player’s agent or representative to ascertain their level of interest in joining their club. If they receive encouragement, a sporting director, chief executive or a club’s lead negotiator will then seek to begin discussions with the selling party. On occasions, this will be direct with their counterpart but often a bid or a proposal will be suggested via an intermediary. The negotiations may take place in hotel lobbies, over the phone, on Zoom or, increasingly, via WhatsApp. In many cases, it is only when the deal is close to agreement that a bid may be formalised in writing.
As one sporting director at a German club explains: “I have lots of WhatsApps to negotiate, with only written offers being made when the terms are then expected to be accepted.”
Officially, clubs only have permission to speak to a prospective signing once terms are agreed with his current club but the outrage over tapping up only rarely bubbles to the surface. “I would say 95 per cent of transfers involve tapping up,” explains a Premier League sporting director. “You make contact with an agent, establish the interest, all but agree personal terms. Then you go club-to-club. Otherwise, you would look like an idiot if you start making offers. The same when a player wants to concoct a move from the club. They go public when the club has told them clearly they cannot go.”
The former Premier League chief executive continues: “If you are dealing with Peterborough’s director of football Barry Fry, he just does everything on the phone. There are times, though, that you can get a bid without any telephone contact. You may just receive an offer on email out of the blue. But the most common way is that you get to hear of interest from a club via an agent. You pick up the phone to a counterpart, discuss whether the player is for sale and negotiate over a valuation. If they say, ‘No, we don’t want to sell’, you then try and get info from elsewhere and maybe put a teasing bid in via email. If you then get a rejection, you will have another conversation to force the issue. Those more unusual offers you sometimes get from China, the Middle East or South America are always agent-led, so you will hear about those first from intermediaries.”
Wages, too, are agreed most often on WhatsApp between players and representatives of clubs, although initial proposals from agents to club decision-makers will, according to one Football League sporting director, arrive via text message, email or even LinkedIn. This particular sporting director was anxious to reply in some cases to agents he did not know, as he feared it may be a scam or a hoax. “Would they take a screenshot of my reply and publish it on Twitter?” he worried.
On deadline day in particular, the pressure is on executive and administration staff. One Premier League manager orders in pizza for all his office staff to arrive in the evening as they work through the night. The Premier League sporting director says that the actual bids will be sent by the club secretary, who is often not permitted to take annual leave in the final few weeks of a transfer window.
The chief executive concludes: “As a CEO, there’s a lot of waiting around on deadline day. You may have done the deal the day before or on the morning. You have negotiated the personal terms and are finishing up with the agent during the player’s medical. But the club secretary is the real hero as so many forms need to be processed: the player’s contract, the club agreement, the insurance, the agent forms, and they don’t have much time to do it all. You do need a really good club secretary.”
Adam Crafton
Personal terms: Agreed early, not late
“Everyone knows how it’s meant to work,” a long-established agent says. “Club A identifies a player. Club A speaks to Club B. They haggle. They eventually agree a fee. Club B tells the player he has permission to talk to Club A. ‘Oh really?’ says the player. ‘So you’re selling me?’ The player calls his agent. We then sit down and discuss personal terms.
“Now I’m not saying that doesn’t happen because sometimes that’s exactly what happens. But with the majority of transfers these days, it happens the other way around.”
These days you rarely hear of transfer deals collapsing because, after agreeing a transfer fee, a club cannot agree personal terms with a potential signing. It still happens of course, particularly when time is short in the final days or hours of the transfer window, but most deals involve a long run-up and personal terms — or at least the basics, such as wages and length of contract — are often one of the first hurdles to be cleared.
If personal terms do scupper the deal, it is often to do with a disagreement with the selling club over money owed. Another agent mentions a case where one of his players, out of favour, was keen to find a new club. “We could have waited for an offer to come in, but that’s not really how things work,” he says.
“It usually falls to the agent to try to drum up interest, so I spoke to four or five other clubs and told them what kind of money he was on and what we would be looking for. One of the clubs wanted to take it further, so, as the agent, I went back to the other club, told them we might have a deal and asked what kind of price they would be willing to take.
“By the time the two clubs spoke direct, I had already done the hard bit. When they were both happy — which means the payment schedule, any other clauses and so on — that was when I was free to start working on the finer details of the contract. But the wages, the signing-on fee and the length of the contract were agreed at the start. Otherwise, there probably wouldn’t have been a deal in the first place. Realistically, that’s the way it usually works. Otherwise, you would have clubs wasting their time putting offers in for players who are never going to sign for them. Everyone accepts it.”
Well, not everyone. Or at least not everyone in every case. There are times when clubs are desperate to keep hold of their assets and where suspicions of clandestine talks provoke outrage. A case in point would be Southampton’s decision to report Liverpool to the Premier League for an alleged illegal approach to Virgil van Dijk in the summer of 2017. That ended with Liverpool backing away, issuing a public apology for a “misunderstanding” and withdrawing their interest for the remainder of that transfer window. When the two clubs agreed a £75 million fee just before the transfer window reopened the following January, there was certainly no danger that personal terms were going to scupper the deal at the last moment.
Oliver Kay
Agent fees: Now as low as three per cent in Championship
No sooner has a player held a scarf above his head and starred in another wacky social-media post confirming his arrival, their grinning agent heads to stage left with a giant novelty cheque. Lots of noughts and a job well done.
At the heart of football’s biggest transfers are the player’s representative. They talk the numbers and draw up the best possible deal for their client. Seldom are they the toast of a boardroom but they are very much here to stay.
Agents make the players go round and the best earn a very good crust. It has been widely reported that Mino Raiola stands to make £41 million from Paul Pogba’s move from Juventus to Manchester United should the France international see out his initial five-year contract at Old Trafford. Just as a player’s wages are up for discussion, so is the agent’s fee.
There are no set guidelines in place but an agent primarily commands a percentage of their client’s contract value. And the more that contract is worth, the higher that sum can typically creep up. Figures published by the Football Association say Premier League clubs paid out a total of £263 million to agents in a 12-month period running to the end of the January transfer window, with Liverpool’s business accounting for £30 million of that.
Any agent has several cards to play when it comes to bumping up their own fee. The more desperate a club is to buy and the greater the demand for their client, the higher the yield. An agent is only entitled to a cut of either their players’ deal or the signing-on fee, rather than the transfer outlay between clubs. That is paid over the course of the contract by the buying club and usually comes incrementally. So, for example, a 10 per cent cut of a new centre-forward earning £100,000 a week will see the agent paid £10,000 a week or just over £500,000 a year. There is also scope for that 10 per cent to be divvied up should there be more than one agent involved in the transaction.
In the Championship and below, however, cash is not nearly as plentiful. A typical deal below the Premier League will see an agent earning five per cent of their client contract but it is understood two Championship clubs this summer have told the representatives of players they will go no higher than three per cent.
Some, of course, are reluctant to pay agents fees at all. Bolton Wanderers signed a flood of players last season without paying out a penny in fees ahead of their relegation to League One and there are plenty more aiming to follow their lead in these financially-straitened times.
Below the super agents, such as Raiola, Jorge Mendes and Jonathan Barnett, it is said to be a flooded market. An agent’s licence costs just £500 and is renewed every year for a further £300 but the potential rewards are clearly vast. Their role in big transfers can make them millions.
Phillip Buckingham
Scouting: No ‘radars’, just a lot of data and spreadsheets
The task of a scouting department is to find players for the club to sign, with the tangible output of their work being a list of names and detailed dossiers of targets, often presented to the manager and/or the director of football. It’s then in the hands of those higher powers to agree to the signing of a player, and to get the deal done.
Often the scouts work one to two windows ahead of time, although with the scrappy and hectic nature of the transfer window they are often required to aid decisions on players in a more reactive fashion too.
Focusing on that one-to-two window lead time, the process starts with a very simple question, usually along the lines of, “We need a new first-team left-back, who should we sign?”
The potential answers here are plentiful. Narrowing down that list of names is what the tools are for. The order in which scouts will filter that list differs club to club, but it often goes something like this…
First, the department meets with the manager to properly understand his style of play, and what he wants per position. There’s little point looking for an attacking left-back, if getting forward is not going to be in that player’s remit. Scouting departments want to reduce redundancy — the signing of players who possess skills that are high value but won’t be fully utilised in the current set-up — as much as possible.
Next, clubs perform a basic filter to remove players that definitely don’t fit the criteria. Players are removed from the list based on age (not too young or old), the league they play in (Premier League clubs won’t be shopping in the Algerian Ligue 1) and also at times due to their physical attributes (think Tony Pulis’ 6ft-plus full-backs). Believe it or not, many teams will look to take this information from the site Transfermarkt.
At this point, clubs turn the manager’s positional requirements into something objective and measurable, using data to find players who fit that specific profile from the remaining list of names.
Scouts use a combination of platforms such as the likes of smarterscout or Analytics FC and use pre-built metrics to filter down players for these attributes, and/or create their own using raw event data (e.g. passes, shots, tackles, etc.) from the likes of Opta or StatsBomb.
So if the manager wants a defensive full-back, he may be looking for someone who’s solid in their duels, conservative in possession and positionally aware.
In data-speak, “solid in their duels” translates to a high true tackle win rate and also winning a high proportion of their aerial duels too. “Conservative in possession” can be cut numerous ways, from looking at basic pass completion or ball-retention rate to looking at the sorts of passers a player makes and who they are similar to.
Positional awareness isn’t something that naturally lends itself (yet) to being measured through data, and this is where video scouting tools such as Wyscout or InStat come in handy. Teams will watch clips or full games and focus just on the player of interest in situations that will test his positional awareness.
If the player survives all this, he’ll be continually monitored for a while along with other potential targets. Scouts will look to gather more qualitative information on his background, temperament, personality and the like. Notes are kept on reporting platforms such as Scout7’s ISF or SAP’s Sports One, although many clubs are starting to build their own platforms to manage their scouting “pipeline”. Some have teams of developers to build custom software for this task, others run it using a spreadsheet that’s updated daily.
By Dominic Fifield, Tom Worville and more Sep 30, 2020
(Other contributors: Phillip Buckingham, Adam Crafton and Oliver Kay)
Club A accepted an offer for Player X but the move fell through because he failed to agree personal terms.
Club B faxed a transfer bid to Club C in the closing hours of the transfer window.
No, no, no. That’s just not how it works — not any more anyway. Our writers attempt to go beyond the headlines and explain what really happens in a medical, how transfers are agreed between clubs, at what stage personal terms are negotiated, how modern scouting works, and just how much agents earn from transfers…
Medicals: Not just pass or fail
Medicals vary from club to club, and can drag across two days if time permits, with the thorough nature of the testing reflective of the multi-million pound investments at stake. If issues are exposed they are included in the medical team’s report. It might not be the case that a problem kyboshes the transfer. However, it may lead to a referral to a consultant who would offer a prognosis to the buying club – on how long the player may take to recover, or if the issue might prove problematic in future – so a decision can be made as to whether they should proceed.
The task of establishing a player’s medical history falls upon the club doctor, who will assess both data supplied by the recruitment department and medical information provided by the selling club, then examine and speak with the player. In the case of international transfers, where the language barrier might be a complication when it comes to exploring family history and hereditary conditions, the presence of an interpreter might be required. Clubs tend to book slots at private hospitals.
The subjective examination is pursued by a thorough physical assessment, overseen by the doctor, physiotherapists and the club’s medical staff, which would cover basics such as height and weight, lung capacity, pulse rate and blood pressure. Clubs may use bioelectrical impedance analysis technology, or fat callipers, to measure the target’s body fat, which is usually around 10 per cent for footballers. Hearing, vision and dental checks may also be undertaken, as well as a standard concussion screening.
They check musculoskeletal stability and scrutinise traditional weak spots such as the lower back and pelvis, the source of so many hamstring and adductor issues. Any defects in function or tightness can be pinpointed by simple squat, hop and lunge tests, while particular attention is paid to shoulders, elbows, wrists and hands for goalkeepers. There are isokinetic checks on muscular and joint strength, imbalances or weaknesses, which might indicate a predisposition to injury or any issue that has developed post-injury, and knee flexion and extension drills to ascertain the player’s range of motion.
Cardiac screening is conducted via an ECG, echo monitor, a heart health history questionnaire and blood tests to check for any irregularities. There can be ergometric sprint tests and VO2 max testing to ascertain how “match ready” a player might be, while the doctor may request a urine test to detect proteins or ketones that might indicate underlying health issues such as diabetes. An MRI screen or ultrasound might be initiated to assess how well previous injuries, such as knee ligament issues, have healed.
All the information is summarised in a report which is delivered to the chairman, sporting director and manager. The assessment will usually list injury histories and any X-ray or scan results and, if there have been any abnormal findings, details on any future management plan should the transfer go ahead. Only once the report has been digested is the final call made on whether the club proceeds with the deal. Any bypassing of elements of the assessment due to time constraints as the deadline approaches — Alex Iwobi was on holiday in Dubai when Everton and Arsenal struck a deal for his services on deadline day last summer, and ended up signing from afar without conducting a full medical — inevitably constitutes a risk.
Dom Fifield
Making a bid: Negotiations on WhatsApp
“The first thing to say is there are no hard and fast way to do a transfer,” explains one former Premier League chief executive. In bygone days, clubs may have faxed over a formal bid to a rival club when attempting to sign a player, but in 2020, the bid is more often only sent after the terms of the agreement have been set out between the two clubs. Fax machines are now out of the picture.
Usually, a club will make contact early in the process with a player’s agent or representative to ascertain their level of interest in joining their club. If they receive encouragement, a sporting director, chief executive or a club’s lead negotiator will then seek to begin discussions with the selling party. On occasions, this will be direct with their counterpart but often a bid or a proposal will be suggested via an intermediary. The negotiations may take place in hotel lobbies, over the phone, on Zoom or, increasingly, via WhatsApp. In many cases, it is only when the deal is close to agreement that a bid may be formalised in writing.
As one sporting director at a German club explains: “I have lots of WhatsApps to negotiate, with only written offers being made when the terms are then expected to be accepted.”
Officially, clubs only have permission to speak to a prospective signing once terms are agreed with his current club but the outrage over tapping up only rarely bubbles to the surface. “I would say 95 per cent of transfers involve tapping up,” explains a Premier League sporting director. “You make contact with an agent, establish the interest, all but agree personal terms. Then you go club-to-club. Otherwise, you would look like an idiot if you start making offers. The same when a player wants to concoct a move from the club. They go public when the club has told them clearly they cannot go.”
The former Premier League chief executive continues: “If you are dealing with Peterborough’s director of football Barry Fry, he just does everything on the phone. There are times, though, that you can get a bid without any telephone contact. You may just receive an offer on email out of the blue. But the most common way is that you get to hear of interest from a club via an agent. You pick up the phone to a counterpart, discuss whether the player is for sale and negotiate over a valuation. If they say, ‘No, we don’t want to sell’, you then try and get info from elsewhere and maybe put a teasing bid in via email. If you then get a rejection, you will have another conversation to force the issue. Those more unusual offers you sometimes get from China, the Middle East or South America are always agent-led, so you will hear about those first from intermediaries.”
Wages, too, are agreed most often on WhatsApp between players and representatives of clubs, although initial proposals from agents to club decision-makers will, according to one Football League sporting director, arrive via text message, email or even LinkedIn. This particular sporting director was anxious to reply in some cases to agents he did not know, as he feared it may be a scam or a hoax. “Would they take a screenshot of my reply and publish it on Twitter?” he worried.
On deadline day in particular, the pressure is on executive and administration staff. One Premier League manager orders in pizza for all his office staff to arrive in the evening as they work through the night. The Premier League sporting director says that the actual bids will be sent by the club secretary, who is often not permitted to take annual leave in the final few weeks of a transfer window.
The chief executive concludes: “As a CEO, there’s a lot of waiting around on deadline day. You may have done the deal the day before or on the morning. You have negotiated the personal terms and are finishing up with the agent during the player’s medical. But the club secretary is the real hero as so many forms need to be processed: the player’s contract, the club agreement, the insurance, the agent forms, and they don’t have much time to do it all. You do need a really good club secretary.”
Adam Crafton
Personal terms: Agreed early, not late
“Everyone knows how it’s meant to work,” a long-established agent says. “Club A identifies a player. Club A speaks to Club B. They haggle. They eventually agree a fee. Club B tells the player he has permission to talk to Club A. ‘Oh really?’ says the player. ‘So you’re selling me?’ The player calls his agent. We then sit down and discuss personal terms.
“Now I’m not saying that doesn’t happen because sometimes that’s exactly what happens. But with the majority of transfers these days, it happens the other way around.”
These days you rarely hear of transfer deals collapsing because, after agreeing a transfer fee, a club cannot agree personal terms with a potential signing. It still happens of course, particularly when time is short in the final days or hours of the transfer window, but most deals involve a long run-up and personal terms — or at least the basics, such as wages and length of contract — are often one of the first hurdles to be cleared.
If personal terms do scupper the deal, it is often to do with a disagreement with the selling club over money owed. Another agent mentions a case where one of his players, out of favour, was keen to find a new club. “We could have waited for an offer to come in, but that’s not really how things work,” he says.
“It usually falls to the agent to try to drum up interest, so I spoke to four or five other clubs and told them what kind of money he was on and what we would be looking for. One of the clubs wanted to take it further, so, as the agent, I went back to the other club, told them we might have a deal and asked what kind of price they would be willing to take.
“By the time the two clubs spoke direct, I had already done the hard bit. When they were both happy — which means the payment schedule, any other clauses and so on — that was when I was free to start working on the finer details of the contract. But the wages, the signing-on fee and the length of the contract were agreed at the start. Otherwise, there probably wouldn’t have been a deal in the first place. Realistically, that’s the way it usually works. Otherwise, you would have clubs wasting their time putting offers in for players who are never going to sign for them. Everyone accepts it.”
Well, not everyone. Or at least not everyone in every case. There are times when clubs are desperate to keep hold of their assets and where suspicions of clandestine talks provoke outrage. A case in point would be Southampton’s decision to report Liverpool to the Premier League for an alleged illegal approach to Virgil van Dijk in the summer of 2017. That ended with Liverpool backing away, issuing a public apology for a “misunderstanding” and withdrawing their interest for the remainder of that transfer window. When the two clubs agreed a £75 million fee just before the transfer window reopened the following January, there was certainly no danger that personal terms were going to scupper the deal at the last moment.
Oliver Kay
Agent fees: Now as low as three per cent in Championship
No sooner has a player held a scarf above his head and starred in another wacky social-media post confirming his arrival, their grinning agent heads to stage left with a giant novelty cheque. Lots of noughts and a job well done.
At the heart of football’s biggest transfers are the player’s representative. They talk the numbers and draw up the best possible deal for their client. Seldom are they the toast of a boardroom but they are very much here to stay.
Agents make the players go round and the best earn a very good crust. It has been widely reported that Mino Raiola stands to make £41 million from Paul Pogba’s move from Juventus to Manchester United should the France international see out his initial five-year contract at Old Trafford. Just as a player’s wages are up for discussion, so is the agent’s fee.
There are no set guidelines in place but an agent primarily commands a percentage of their client’s contract value. And the more that contract is worth, the higher that sum can typically creep up. Figures published by the Football Association say Premier League clubs paid out a total of £263 million to agents in a 12-month period running to the end of the January transfer window, with Liverpool’s business accounting for £30 million of that.
Any agent has several cards to play when it comes to bumping up their own fee. The more desperate a club is to buy and the greater the demand for their client, the higher the yield. An agent is only entitled to a cut of either their players’ deal or the signing-on fee, rather than the transfer outlay between clubs. That is paid over the course of the contract by the buying club and usually comes incrementally. So, for example, a 10 per cent cut of a new centre-forward earning £100,000 a week will see the agent paid £10,000 a week or just over £500,000 a year. There is also scope for that 10 per cent to be divvied up should there be more than one agent involved in the transaction.
In the Championship and below, however, cash is not nearly as plentiful. A typical deal below the Premier League will see an agent earning five per cent of their client contract but it is understood two Championship clubs this summer have told the representatives of players they will go no higher than three per cent.
Some, of course, are reluctant to pay agents fees at all. Bolton Wanderers signed a flood of players last season without paying out a penny in fees ahead of their relegation to League One and there are plenty more aiming to follow their lead in these financially-straitened times.
Below the super agents, such as Raiola, Jorge Mendes and Jonathan Barnett, it is said to be a flooded market. An agent’s licence costs just £500 and is renewed every year for a further £300 but the potential rewards are clearly vast. Their role in big transfers can make them millions.
Phillip Buckingham
Scouting: No ‘radars’, just a lot of data and spreadsheets
The task of a scouting department is to find players for the club to sign, with the tangible output of their work being a list of names and detailed dossiers of targets, often presented to the manager and/or the director of football. It’s then in the hands of those higher powers to agree to the signing of a player, and to get the deal done.
Often the scouts work one to two windows ahead of time, although with the scrappy and hectic nature of the transfer window they are often required to aid decisions on players in a more reactive fashion too.
Focusing on that one-to-two window lead time, the process starts with a very simple question, usually along the lines of, “We need a new first-team left-back, who should we sign?”
The potential answers here are plentiful. Narrowing down that list of names is what the tools are for. The order in which scouts will filter that list differs club to club, but it often goes something like this…
First, the department meets with the manager to properly understand his style of play, and what he wants per position. There’s little point looking for an attacking left-back, if getting forward is not going to be in that player’s remit. Scouting departments want to reduce redundancy — the signing of players who possess skills that are high value but won’t be fully utilised in the current set-up — as much as possible.
Next, clubs perform a basic filter to remove players that definitely don’t fit the criteria. Players are removed from the list based on age (not too young or old), the league they play in (Premier League clubs won’t be shopping in the Algerian Ligue 1) and also at times due to their physical attributes (think Tony Pulis’ 6ft-plus full-backs). Believe it or not, many teams will look to take this information from the site Transfermarkt.
At this point, clubs turn the manager’s positional requirements into something objective and measurable, using data to find players who fit that specific profile from the remaining list of names.
Scouts use a combination of platforms such as the likes of smarterscout or Analytics FC and use pre-built metrics to filter down players for these attributes, and/or create their own using raw event data (e.g. passes, shots, tackles, etc.) from the likes of Opta or StatsBomb.
So if the manager wants a defensive full-back, he may be looking for someone who’s solid in their duels, conservative in possession and positionally aware.
In data-speak, “solid in their duels” translates to a high true tackle win rate and also winning a high proportion of their aerial duels too. “Conservative in possession” can be cut numerous ways, from looking at basic pass completion or ball-retention rate to looking at the sorts of passers a player makes and who they are similar to.
Positional awareness isn’t something that naturally lends itself (yet) to being measured through data, and this is where video scouting tools such as Wyscout or InStat come in handy. Teams will watch clips or full games and focus just on the player of interest in situations that will test his positional awareness.
If the player survives all this, he’ll be continually monitored for a while along with other potential targets. Scouts will look to gather more qualitative information on his background, temperament, personality and the like. Notes are kept on reporting platforms such as Scout7’s ISF or SAP’s Sports One, although many clubs are starting to build their own platforms to manage their scouting “pipeline”. Some have teams of developers to build custom software for this task, others run it using a spreadsheet that’s updated daily.
Winners, losers and what to expect: our writers’ Champions League draw verdict
By The Athletic UK Staff Oct 1, 2020
43
Six weeks after Bayern Munich were crowned champions of Europe for a sixth time with victory against Paris Saint-Germain in Lisbon, the Champions League is back.
The group stage begins on Tuesday, October 20, and finishes just over a month later, on Wednesday, December 9. The final is scheduled for Istanbul on Saturday, May 29.
What excites you most about the draw?
Jack Pitt-Brooke: The best tie in the group stage to me looks like Group A’s Bayern against Atletico, who will be more desperate than ever to finally win this. Luis Suarez and Joao Felix up against Bayern’s high line could be a thriller.
Carl Anka: The headline match-up from this Champions League draw will be Juventus v Barcelona, allowing us two more chapters of the Cristiano Ronaldo-Lionel Messi rivalry, while also letting us see how Arthur and Miralem Pjanic are getting on after swapping clubs, and whether Matthijs de Ligt and Frenkie de Jong regret leaving Ajax.
Jack Lang: The prospect of two games between Liverpool and Atalanta. The latter no longer have the surprise factor, but there’s little sign of them slowing down. Those matches especially could be thrillers.
James Horncastle: Group D: Liverpool, Ajax, Atalanta, Midtjylland. You could argue it’s a collection of the smartest teams on the continent. You’ve got the perfect blend of total football, shrewd recruitment, youth development, analytics, and goals, goals, goals.
Oliver Kay: A very predictable, very mainstream response, but it has to be the matches between Barcelona and Juventus, which of course means a contest between Messi and Ronaldo. I’m sure it will be hyped in some quarters into something it isn’t — this is not going to “settle who’s the greatest, ONCE AND FOR ALL” — but, if we can look beyond that, it’s two more chances to watch two of the greatest players of all time on the same pitch. And at this stage of their careers, every such opportunity is to be cherished.
Raphael Honigstein: There seem to be an incredible amount of big games with huge storylines and/or interesting match-ups. Ronaldo vs Messi. Ciro Immobile going back to Dortmund with Lazio. The Edouard Mendy derby (Chelsea vs Rennes). Real Madrid might not make it out of their group. And those Liverpool-Ajax and Liverpool-Atalanta ties… Wow.
Dermot Corrigan: Excitement might be pushing it a bit but the draw was an excellent one from a La Liga point of view — lots of potential storylines but very little fear of any of Real Madrid, Barcelona or Atletico Madrid being endangered in the group stage, while Sevilla also have a more than decent chance of going through.
Will Manchester United get out of their group?
Pitt-Brooke: No. PSG are stronger than they are and I think Leipzig will be better than them too, better coached and smarter. They just need to put last year’s disappointments out of their minds.
Anka: United have a chance at sneaking out of their group, but a lot relies on goal difference in Turkey and scabbing a draw against PSG. Is it churlish to say this is something that will not be decided by their own efforts?
Lang: Touch and go. PSG usually make light work of the group stage, but they’re not unbeatable. Leipzig are still strong and Istanbul Basaksehir could cause the odd problem. I think United may just sneak through.
Horncastle: Ole Gunnar Solskjaer won the job on a permanent basis by eliminating PSG and I don’t think we should scoff at him taking United to a Europa League semi-final either. PSG have more talent and Leipzig have the group’s most innovative coach. Whether Solskjaer advances could come down to how well a fellow Norwegian striker replaces Timo Werner at Leipzig. That’s right, Alexander Sorloth. We’re watching you.
Kay: (Cautiously) yes. Well… maybe not if they don’t get their act together before Monday’s transfer deadline, but, despite my regard for both PSG and Leipzig — and a certain fascination with Istanbul Basaksehir, with their assortment of minor Premier League cult heroes of seven or eight years ago (Demba Ba, Nacer Chadli, Rafael and Martin Skrtel) — I do think United should be capable of finishing in the top two of that group. If they don’t, Solskjaer is going to come under severe pressure.
Honigstein: Leipzig are very good but I think United’s qualities on the break will work for them in the Champions League. They should just about sneak through ahead of Julian Nagelsmann’s men, who won’t be quite the same proposition without Werner.
Corrigan: Looking through the groups, United do look like the “seeds” most in danger of an upset. The view from Spain would be that their squad contains far too much talent to be in trouble. So if they are, fingers would be pointed at the manager.
Are any other English clubs in danger of an early exit?
Pitt-Brooke: I wouldn’t be confident about Chelsea’s chances in a harder draw, but having Krasnodar and Rennes gives Group E a distinctly Europa League feel. Liverpool and Manchester City should be fine.
Anka: The other English teams should be topping their groups. Chelsea have enough firepower to blow past their opponents and Manchester City’s true battle will be getting neutral fans to watch their group games (make them available for free!!). Liverpool will have fun duels with Ajax and Atalanta that will be nervy for an hour before Jurgen Klopp makes that face as if there’s a corn kernel stuck by one of his back teeth, and his team will go supernova.
Lang: It’s quite a nice draw for most of them. I’d keep an eye on Group E, however. Sevilla will be confident of progressing and Rennes have been making waves in Ligue 1. If Chelsea aren’t vigilant, things could get tricky.
Horncastle: Chelsea’s group is similar to the one they came through last season, with Valencia, Ajax and Lille, and Frank Lampard has a much stronger squad to choose from now. But look out: it’s a trap. Sevilla are always awkward to play against and Rennes are flying in France. They could make a run for second spot.
Kay: I normally make gloomy predictions at this stage, warning against complacency, but I actually think the draw has been very kind to the other three Premier League teams. Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester City should be fine with those groups. Unless they drop a few points early on, there shouldn’t be much drama.
Honigstein: The three other English teams should qualify for the last 16. Their groups are tricky but don’t contain any of the superclubs from Italy, France, Spain or Germany. Chelsea’s attacking power will make up for defensive flaws. Manchester City, one of the favourites of the competition, won’t face too many problems. Liverpool’s group is much more awkward to navigate but then again, they are one of the best three teams in Europe right now. They will be fine.
Corrigan: This season’s Sevilla are a lot better than last season’s Valencia, who finished above Chelsea in their group, and Julen Lopetegui’s well-organised side could come out ahead of Lampard’s mixed bunch. But they still should go through.
Are any big teams going to struggle?
Pitt-Brooke: I don’t know whether Inter count as a “big team”, but Antonio Conte hasn’t looked especially happy there and they could be under threat in a very evenly-matched Group B with Real Madrid, Shakhtar Donetsk and Borussia Monchengladbach.
Anka: Porto were in Pot One, so by that definition they’re my pick for a big team who will struggle. Call it a hunch, but Marseille and Manchester City will squeeze them out.
Lang: Maybe Real Madrid, if Shakhtar turn up.
Horncastle: There were no upsets last year until Ajax keeled over and missed out on the last 16. Still, I expect Salzburg, Rennes and Leipzig to have Atletico, Chelsea and Manchester United looking nervously over their shoulders.
Kay: The whole European football landscape seems to have been reshaped in a way which means that’s unlikely. Last season was fairly unusual with the make-up of the semi-finalists, but I would say it would take something fairly cataclysmic to stop Barcelona, Real Madrid, Juventus and Bayern getting through the group stage.
Honigstein: Bayern could be in for a more difficult season than many anticipate. Salzburg are one of the worst Pot Three draws for them and will pose a threat to their high line. But the big team most in trouble, potentially, are Real Madrid. No real investment into the squad and a tricky draw with Inter, and two other very decent sides in Gladbach and Donetsk could well spell an early exit.
Corrigan: I really don’t think so — each year, the mechanics of the draw seem to make it less likely that any big gun will fall before the knockout phase. Even the way the TV pairings worked this time around looked to ensure no surprises early.
Which player are you most looking forward to seeing in the competition?
Pitt-Brooke: Maybe it’s obvious but this could be Messi’s last season at Barcelona and his last chance to win a Champions League there. It could be yet another year of pain for them — or the perfect goodbye.
Anka: The player I’m most excited to see in the Champions League is (slowly looks to camera) Jadon Sancho.
Lang: Eduardo Camavinga (Rennes), Marcus Thuram (Monchengladbach), Jude Bellingham (Dortmund). Oh, and Dimitri Payet (Marseille). Always Dimitri Payet.
Horncastle: Erling Haaland took the group stage by storm with Salzburg last season and moved to Dortmund on the back of it. As excited as I am to watch him again, I’ll be paying attention to Camavinga, the teenage sensation at the heart of Rennes’ midfield. I’m curious to see how he takes the biggest stage.
Kay: Again this is terribly predictable, but… how can you ever look forward to seeing a player more than Messi? Maybe this season it comes with a twist, though. Is he still in a strop with Barcelona? Or could that simmering resentment — along with the realisation that, at 33, he’s running out of time — inspire him to produce something truly special? Either way, there’s still no player more watchable in world football. Unless of course, you take his brilliance for granted.
Honigstein: The 17-year-old Camavinga is the most-hyped teenager in Europe right now. I’m really looking forward to seeing what a player who is already a full France international can do at this level, even if Rennes are unlikely to get very far.
Corrigan: Leipzig’s Spanish playmaker Dani Olmo showed flashes in the knockout rounds last season. If he can keep improving and do damage to Manchester United and PSG, he’ll be close to making the Spain squad for next summer’s European Championship.
This season’s Champions League would be better if…
Pitt-Brooke: Everyone will say this but it’s true: fans are there. European football needs big crowds and atmospheres. We made it through the knockouts without in August but I’d love to see them back for this season’s final stages.
Anka: We made more of an effort to have games on free television? If fans can’t yet return, smarter broadcasters and clubs need to find ways to get games to more people.
Lang: This season wasn’t destined to end with pretty much every player being injured or colossally knackered, or both.
Horncastle: It binned off VAR, took a lenient approach to handball and… just kidding. Am I? Gotcha. Well, errr… In all seriousness and to state the bleeding obvious crowds, crowds and crowds. I want to see the Yellow Wall full, the flags in the Kops, San Siro bouncing and the Bernabeu pulling out the old handkerchiefs as Madrid go behind to Gladbach and then win the damn thing nine months later.
Kay: Quite obviously, if the stadiums were packed. The best Champions League nights are the ones — whether it’s at Anfield, Celtic Park, the Westfalenstadion, Stadio San Paolo, the old Ali Sami Yen or anywhere else — that are full of colour and noise. I enjoyed the novelty of the condensed knockout stage in Lisbon, and there were still some great games, but the lack of fans was a real passion-killer. I long for a return to normality.
Honigstein: This group stage would be better if the Ronaldo vs Messi shoot-out would have a bit more riding on it for their clubs. Barcelona and Juventus will qualify regardless, which takes away some of the excitement. Full stadiums and easy travelling would be much better, too, obviously.
Corrigan: They ditched the idea that TV companies get to decide that — for instance — Real Madrid and Barcelona cannot play on the same night. Which basically means that few people in Spain watch any Atletico or Sevilla games during the competition. And also rigs the draw, at least a little.
Who is going to win it?
Pitt-Brooke: I said PSG last year and they got closer than many expected. They even had chances in the final to win it. This year I expect Neymar and Kylian Mbappe to go all the way.
Anka: This year’s Champions League will be won by whoever still has fit players after the January churn of games? (Looks at spreadsheet) This means Liverpool.
Lang: PSG. Resistance is futile.
Horncastle: Atala…. Liverpool. Because Thiago.
Kay: It’s going to be a strange season, with so much football squeezed into a tighter schedule, so I think freshness and squad depth in the knockout stages will be an important factor. Some of the usual suspects seem a little more fragile than in previous years, but Liverpool and Bayern look strong. I’ll say Bayern.
Honigstein: Manchester City. Because Pep will learn how to relax.
Corrigan: Recent years have often seen a new coach win the competition in his first year, and the closest to a Zinedine Zidane this time around would be Andrea Pirlo at Juventus.
By The Athletic UK Staff Oct 1, 2020
Six weeks after Bayern Munich were crowned champions of Europe for a sixth time with victory against Paris Saint-Germain in Lisbon, the Champions League is back.
The group stage begins on Tuesday, October 20, and finishes just over a month later, on Wednesday, December 9. The final is scheduled for Istanbul on Saturday, May 29.
- Group A: Bayern Munich, Atletico Madrid, Red Bull Salzburg, Lokomotiv Moscow
- Group B: Real Madrid, Shakhtar Donetsk, Inter Milan, Borussia Monchengladbach
- Group C: Porto, Manchester City, Olympiakos, Marseille
- Group D: Liverpool, Ajax, Atalanta, Midtjylland
- Group E: Sevilla, Chelsea, Krasnodar, Rennes
- Group F: Zenit St Petersburg, Borussia Dortmund, Lazio, Club Bruges
- Group G: Juventus, Barcelona, Dynamo Kyiv, Ferencvaros
- Group H: Paris Saint-Germain, Manchester United, RB Leipzig, Istanbul Basaksehir
What excites you most about the draw?
Jack Pitt-Brooke: The best tie in the group stage to me looks like Group A’s Bayern against Atletico, who will be more desperate than ever to finally win this. Luis Suarez and Joao Felix up against Bayern’s high line could be a thriller.
Carl Anka: The headline match-up from this Champions League draw will be Juventus v Barcelona, allowing us two more chapters of the Cristiano Ronaldo-Lionel Messi rivalry, while also letting us see how Arthur and Miralem Pjanic are getting on after swapping clubs, and whether Matthijs de Ligt and Frenkie de Jong regret leaving Ajax.
Jack Lang: The prospect of two games between Liverpool and Atalanta. The latter no longer have the surprise factor, but there’s little sign of them slowing down. Those matches especially could be thrillers.
James Horncastle: Group D: Liverpool, Ajax, Atalanta, Midtjylland. You could argue it’s a collection of the smartest teams on the continent. You’ve got the perfect blend of total football, shrewd recruitment, youth development, analytics, and goals, goals, goals.
Oliver Kay: A very predictable, very mainstream response, but it has to be the matches between Barcelona and Juventus, which of course means a contest between Messi and Ronaldo. I’m sure it will be hyped in some quarters into something it isn’t — this is not going to “settle who’s the greatest, ONCE AND FOR ALL” — but, if we can look beyond that, it’s two more chances to watch two of the greatest players of all time on the same pitch. And at this stage of their careers, every such opportunity is to be cherished.
Raphael Honigstein: There seem to be an incredible amount of big games with huge storylines and/or interesting match-ups. Ronaldo vs Messi. Ciro Immobile going back to Dortmund with Lazio. The Edouard Mendy derby (Chelsea vs Rennes). Real Madrid might not make it out of their group. And those Liverpool-Ajax and Liverpool-Atalanta ties… Wow.
Dermot Corrigan: Excitement might be pushing it a bit but the draw was an excellent one from a La Liga point of view — lots of potential storylines but very little fear of any of Real Madrid, Barcelona or Atletico Madrid being endangered in the group stage, while Sevilla also have a more than decent chance of going through.
Will Manchester United get out of their group?
Pitt-Brooke: No. PSG are stronger than they are and I think Leipzig will be better than them too, better coached and smarter. They just need to put last year’s disappointments out of their minds.
Anka: United have a chance at sneaking out of their group, but a lot relies on goal difference in Turkey and scabbing a draw against PSG. Is it churlish to say this is something that will not be decided by their own efforts?
Lang: Touch and go. PSG usually make light work of the group stage, but they’re not unbeatable. Leipzig are still strong and Istanbul Basaksehir could cause the odd problem. I think United may just sneak through.
Horncastle: Ole Gunnar Solskjaer won the job on a permanent basis by eliminating PSG and I don’t think we should scoff at him taking United to a Europa League semi-final either. PSG have more talent and Leipzig have the group’s most innovative coach. Whether Solskjaer advances could come down to how well a fellow Norwegian striker replaces Timo Werner at Leipzig. That’s right, Alexander Sorloth. We’re watching you.
Kay: (Cautiously) yes. Well… maybe not if they don’t get their act together before Monday’s transfer deadline, but, despite my regard for both PSG and Leipzig — and a certain fascination with Istanbul Basaksehir, with their assortment of minor Premier League cult heroes of seven or eight years ago (Demba Ba, Nacer Chadli, Rafael and Martin Skrtel) — I do think United should be capable of finishing in the top two of that group. If they don’t, Solskjaer is going to come under severe pressure.
Honigstein: Leipzig are very good but I think United’s qualities on the break will work for them in the Champions League. They should just about sneak through ahead of Julian Nagelsmann’s men, who won’t be quite the same proposition without Werner.
Corrigan: Looking through the groups, United do look like the “seeds” most in danger of an upset. The view from Spain would be that their squad contains far too much talent to be in trouble. So if they are, fingers would be pointed at the manager.
Are any other English clubs in danger of an early exit?
Pitt-Brooke: I wouldn’t be confident about Chelsea’s chances in a harder draw, but having Krasnodar and Rennes gives Group E a distinctly Europa League feel. Liverpool and Manchester City should be fine.
Anka: The other English teams should be topping their groups. Chelsea have enough firepower to blow past their opponents and Manchester City’s true battle will be getting neutral fans to watch their group games (make them available for free!!). Liverpool will have fun duels with Ajax and Atalanta that will be nervy for an hour before Jurgen Klopp makes that face as if there’s a corn kernel stuck by one of his back teeth, and his team will go supernova.
Lang: It’s quite a nice draw for most of them. I’d keep an eye on Group E, however. Sevilla will be confident of progressing and Rennes have been making waves in Ligue 1. If Chelsea aren’t vigilant, things could get tricky.
Horncastle: Chelsea’s group is similar to the one they came through last season, with Valencia, Ajax and Lille, and Frank Lampard has a much stronger squad to choose from now. But look out: it’s a trap. Sevilla are always awkward to play against and Rennes are flying in France. They could make a run for second spot.
Kay: I normally make gloomy predictions at this stage, warning against complacency, but I actually think the draw has been very kind to the other three Premier League teams. Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester City should be fine with those groups. Unless they drop a few points early on, there shouldn’t be much drama.
Honigstein: The three other English teams should qualify for the last 16. Their groups are tricky but don’t contain any of the superclubs from Italy, France, Spain or Germany. Chelsea’s attacking power will make up for defensive flaws. Manchester City, one of the favourites of the competition, won’t face too many problems. Liverpool’s group is much more awkward to navigate but then again, they are one of the best three teams in Europe right now. They will be fine.
Corrigan: This season’s Sevilla are a lot better than last season’s Valencia, who finished above Chelsea in their group, and Julen Lopetegui’s well-organised side could come out ahead of Lampard’s mixed bunch. But they still should go through.
Are any big teams going to struggle?
Pitt-Brooke: I don’t know whether Inter count as a “big team”, but Antonio Conte hasn’t looked especially happy there and they could be under threat in a very evenly-matched Group B with Real Madrid, Shakhtar Donetsk and Borussia Monchengladbach.
Anka: Porto were in Pot One, so by that definition they’re my pick for a big team who will struggle. Call it a hunch, but Marseille and Manchester City will squeeze them out.
Lang: Maybe Real Madrid, if Shakhtar turn up.
Horncastle: There were no upsets last year until Ajax keeled over and missed out on the last 16. Still, I expect Salzburg, Rennes and Leipzig to have Atletico, Chelsea and Manchester United looking nervously over their shoulders.
Kay: The whole European football landscape seems to have been reshaped in a way which means that’s unlikely. Last season was fairly unusual with the make-up of the semi-finalists, but I would say it would take something fairly cataclysmic to stop Barcelona, Real Madrid, Juventus and Bayern getting through the group stage.
Honigstein: Bayern could be in for a more difficult season than many anticipate. Salzburg are one of the worst Pot Three draws for them and will pose a threat to their high line. But the big team most in trouble, potentially, are Real Madrid. No real investment into the squad and a tricky draw with Inter, and two other very decent sides in Gladbach and Donetsk could well spell an early exit.
Corrigan: I really don’t think so — each year, the mechanics of the draw seem to make it less likely that any big gun will fall before the knockout phase. Even the way the TV pairings worked this time around looked to ensure no surprises early.
Which player are you most looking forward to seeing in the competition?
Pitt-Brooke: Maybe it’s obvious but this could be Messi’s last season at Barcelona and his last chance to win a Champions League there. It could be yet another year of pain for them — or the perfect goodbye.
Anka: The player I’m most excited to see in the Champions League is (slowly looks to camera) Jadon Sancho.
Lang: Eduardo Camavinga (Rennes), Marcus Thuram (Monchengladbach), Jude Bellingham (Dortmund). Oh, and Dimitri Payet (Marseille). Always Dimitri Payet.
Horncastle: Erling Haaland took the group stage by storm with Salzburg last season and moved to Dortmund on the back of it. As excited as I am to watch him again, I’ll be paying attention to Camavinga, the teenage sensation at the heart of Rennes’ midfield. I’m curious to see how he takes the biggest stage.
Kay: Again this is terribly predictable, but… how can you ever look forward to seeing a player more than Messi? Maybe this season it comes with a twist, though. Is he still in a strop with Barcelona? Or could that simmering resentment — along with the realisation that, at 33, he’s running out of time — inspire him to produce something truly special? Either way, there’s still no player more watchable in world football. Unless of course, you take his brilliance for granted.
Honigstein: The 17-year-old Camavinga is the most-hyped teenager in Europe right now. I’m really looking forward to seeing what a player who is already a full France international can do at this level, even if Rennes are unlikely to get very far.
Corrigan: Leipzig’s Spanish playmaker Dani Olmo showed flashes in the knockout rounds last season. If he can keep improving and do damage to Manchester United and PSG, he’ll be close to making the Spain squad for next summer’s European Championship.
This season’s Champions League would be better if…
Pitt-Brooke: Everyone will say this but it’s true: fans are there. European football needs big crowds and atmospheres. We made it through the knockouts without in August but I’d love to see them back for this season’s final stages.
Anka: We made more of an effort to have games on free television? If fans can’t yet return, smarter broadcasters and clubs need to find ways to get games to more people.
Lang: This season wasn’t destined to end with pretty much every player being injured or colossally knackered, or both.
Horncastle: It binned off VAR, took a lenient approach to handball and… just kidding. Am I? Gotcha. Well, errr… In all seriousness and to state the bleeding obvious crowds, crowds and crowds. I want to see the Yellow Wall full, the flags in the Kops, San Siro bouncing and the Bernabeu pulling out the old handkerchiefs as Madrid go behind to Gladbach and then win the damn thing nine months later.
Kay: Quite obviously, if the stadiums were packed. The best Champions League nights are the ones — whether it’s at Anfield, Celtic Park, the Westfalenstadion, Stadio San Paolo, the old Ali Sami Yen or anywhere else — that are full of colour and noise. I enjoyed the novelty of the condensed knockout stage in Lisbon, and there were still some great games, but the lack of fans was a real passion-killer. I long for a return to normality.
Honigstein: This group stage would be better if the Ronaldo vs Messi shoot-out would have a bit more riding on it for their clubs. Barcelona and Juventus will qualify regardless, which takes away some of the excitement. Full stadiums and easy travelling would be much better, too, obviously.
Corrigan: They ditched the idea that TV companies get to decide that — for instance — Real Madrid and Barcelona cannot play on the same night. Which basically means that few people in Spain watch any Atletico or Sevilla games during the competition. And also rigs the draw, at least a little.
Who is going to win it?
Pitt-Brooke: I said PSG last year and they got closer than many expected. They even had chances in the final to win it. This year I expect Neymar and Kylian Mbappe to go all the way.
Anka: This year’s Champions League will be won by whoever still has fit players after the January churn of games? (Looks at spreadsheet) This means Liverpool.
Lang: PSG. Resistance is futile.
Horncastle: Atala…. Liverpool. Because Thiago.
Kay: It’s going to be a strange season, with so much football squeezed into a tighter schedule, so I think freshness and squad depth in the knockout stages will be an important factor. Some of the usual suspects seem a little more fragile than in previous years, but Liverpool and Bayern look strong. I’ll say Bayern.
Honigstein: Manchester City. Because Pep will learn how to relax.
Corrigan: Recent years have often seen a new coach win the competition in his first year, and the closest to a Zinedine Zidane this time around would be Andrea Pirlo at Juventus.
How player tracking is helping identify potential injuries and tailor workloads
By Rob Tanner Oct 1, 2020
At the start of last season, Brendan Rodgers set out six pre-season goals for his Leicester City side. The first five, while ambitious, were targets to be achieved by the players on the pitch — qualify for Europe, reach the Carabao Cup final, reach the FA Cup final, score more goals than in the previous season and also record more points than in 2018-19.
They were all end-goals, but the sixth target was designed to help them arrive at their final destination — to have more players available consistently. It is an aim that has never been more important than this season, as Leicester compete in a reduced and dramatically more hectic campaign.
Leicester have had a good record of player availability over the past few years and a large part of that has to do with the level of investment into their sports science and medical departments — the team behind the team — and the embracing of new developments and techniques.
Data provided by Premier Injuries shows Leicester had 90 per cent player availability pre-lockdown last season and 91 per cent after the restart, the fourth-best record in the Premier League behind Sheffield United, Wolverhampton Wanderers and Southampton, and it was a similar record in terms of the number of games players missed, with Leicester’s total at 94 — 77 pre-lockdown and 17 following the restart. In comparison, Bournemouth had the most with 230 combined games missed by their players.
In total, Leicester had 21 injuries of varying nature which cost players to miss 693 days. Again, only Sheffield United and Wolves had lower numbers of injuries, but in terms of specific soft-tissue muscle injuries, of the calf, thigh and groin, Leicester had the lowest number of time-loss injuries (those which resulted in a player missing at least one domestic league fixture and/or spending 10 or more days on the sidelines), and their average return to play for injured players was 16 days, demonstrating their ability to get players back onto the pitch. The highest average return to play was 59 days, at Manchester United.
Muscle injury return to play (2019-20)
[xtable]
{thead}
{tr}
{th}TEAM{/th}
{th}AVERAGE DAYS OUT{/th}
{/tr}
{/thead}
{tbody}
{tr}
{td}
Manchester United{/td}
{td}59{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
West Ham United{/td}
{td}48{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Everton{/td}
{td}44{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Norwich City{/td}
{td}39{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Tottenham{/td}
{td}37{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Liverpool{/td}
{td}36{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Watford{/td}
{td}36{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Bournemouth{/td}
{td}35{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Newcastle United{/td}
{td}34{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Crystal Palace{/td}
{td}33{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Chelsea{/td}
{td}33{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Burnley{/td}
{td}32{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Brighton & Hove Albion{/td}
{td}27{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Aston Villa{/td}
{td}26{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Arsenal{/td}
{td}25{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Southampton{/td}
{td}25{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Manchester City{/td}
{td}24{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Sheffield United{/td}
{td}23{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Wolverhampton Wanderers{/td}
{td}20{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Leicester City{/td}
{td}16{/td}
{/tr}
{/tbody}
[/xtable]
It is a good record that could have been even better, with injuries mounting towards the end of the fixture-congested campaign. The absences of James Maddison, Ben Chilwell and Christian Fuchs, coupled with Ricardo Pereira’s ACL surgery, impacted on their push for the Champions League.
Not all injuries are preventable, but the importance of identifying the potential risks of injury during training and games to mitigate avoidable problems has never been more crucial, and clubs continue to look to sports science for initiatives that can help keep key players on the pitch for longer periods.
Paul Balsom is the club’s head of performance innovation and has been working with Leicester since 2008.
He has teamed up with sports technology firm Catapult to help pilot a new player tracking system called Movement Profile, which can help identify and mitigate potential soft-tissue injuries. The system classifies every movement a player makes on the pitch to help coaches measure explosiveness, identify injury risk and personalise players’ training programmes.
There are three main areas of activity; low and very low intensity, where players can often be walking or making slow movements, running, at high and mid-range intensity, and then dynamic, where players make high and mid-intensity turns and changes in direction (shown in the video below).
“A large part of the game is spent at a low intensity,” Balsom explains to The Athletic. “Then there are these very short periods of high intensity that often determine the outcome of the game and are intricate parts of playing football.
“It is easier to think of it as three elements.
“We have put low and very low together — where you are basically not doing anything of any metabolical loading. Depending on the game, it is 65-85 per cent that a player spends in a game at low or very low intensity.
“It is the other two that are really interesting. It is a case of getting a better balance between the dynamic and running work during training to correspond with what the players do in a game. For example, in a small-sided game or five-a-side, we are going to have a lot of high-intensity dynamic work but we are not going to get much of the running work.
“It is another tool to refine our training drills to make sure we are not overloading any of the high-intensity work: dynamic and running.”
Catapult’s Vector system of player movement tracking can collect 25 million pieces of individual data from each player in a training session; information that is then provided to each club’s sports science and medical staff for analysis.
How they adjust the loading on players in training can be changed to mitigate injury.
For example, a winger known for his explosiveness is looking sluggish on the pitch after a shortened gap between seasons and a heavy number of games to start the season. Instead of simply saying that he looks sluggish, Movement Profile will allow the staff to compare his movements to those of previous sessions and his historical performance loads.
Maybe it was just an off game or two, and a few days of rest will have him back on track. Maybe the player has been overtraining certain muscle groups, and the training regime needs to shift accordingly. Or maybe there’s something more serious at play. The system is designed to identify the stress that specific movements are putting on the player’s body.
Ultimately, by quantifying the path to fatigue and the dynamic movements, teams can identify soft-tissue injuries before they happen.
Leicester have been trialling the system with the club’s Thai Academy at Belvoir Drive, while it has also been used at their Belgian sister club OH Leuven. Others using Movement Profile are Aston Villa, Celtic, Rangers, Melbourne Victory, Rosenborg, Stromsgodset, and the Swedish FA — who Balsom also advises.
“We feel it is a really important tool in terms of returning players to the rehabilitation process,” Balsom adds. “When we do unfortunately get a player who is injured, it is about returning that player to training and ensuring the balance between the running and the dynamic is such they can they cope with the demands of a game.”
Sports science has been embraced by Leicester since Nigel Pearson first came to the club 12 years ago and would raise his eyebrows when their good injury record was put down to luck. The departments have grown since then.
“At Leicester, with Brendan bringing in Glen Driscoll (first-team fitness coach), we are over double figures in terms of sports science and medicine staff,” Balsom says. “It is not just about the quantity but the quality, and the communication with the manager and how he and the coaching staff buy into it. When everyone is working together, that is when it is most powerful.
“I think the Premier League is leading the way in the whole of the world at the moment in terms of investment in this area, but it is tools like this that make it very easy for the coaches and players to understand. The role of Catapult as a provider and myself as a practitioner is to break it down into simple take-home messages for the coaches and the players. It is one tool of many tools, but we think this will be a powerful tool because of its simplicity.”
New innovations and technology wouldn’t be anywhere near as effective if the players themselves and coaching staff didn’t embrace them and buy in. Balsom says current players understand how it can benefit them by helping keep them fitter, stronger and, more importantly, available for selection at a time when the physical demands on footballers have never been greater.
“I spoke to an ex-player about the intensity of today’s game, and we all know that has changed,” says Balsom. “If you look at the body shapes of the players now – I have been at Leicester 12 years and in my time I have seen all different shapes and sizes, but if you look at the playing staff today, it is a lifestyle now. It isn’t just about when they come to us, it is before they come to us, their preparation when they leave us, how they sleep. There are very few hiding places.
“I think one of the strengths we have built up at Leicester is embracing the players and giving them the responsibility. It has become more natural. It is not us dictating to them, it is them being interested in, ‘What do I need to do to keep myself fit and available for selection? To keep myself in the team or knocking on the door?’
“That is the big thing that, in my experience, has changed and is continuing to change — the empowerment given to the players and how much they buy into it.”
Embracing science and technology while also understanding the organic nature of football has been a big part of the Leicester City story over the past decade and will continue to be so as they prepare to move to their new training ground in the north of the county.
In sports science, the club is also looking into artificial intelligence and how that can be applied to help improve performance, while on the medicinal side there has been a change as stalwart club head physio Dave Rennie has left after over 20 years’ service. The club are looking to reshape the department with a full-time doctor and head of medicine.
“It has been a strength of what Leicester have stood for, even from the very first day I arrived and all the way through to now,” Balsom says of the club’s approach to sports science. “If you think there is a lot of detail going into everything, you can probably double that. Meetings after meetings to discuss individual details and then with the players.
“It is not just about rest or not rest, or more or less; with two games a week, you have players you need to top up to keep ready, you have players who may need to rest, some players playing on the borderline of breaking down. It is a continual game.
“One of the keys now is that managers bring with them expertise in these areas, people they can trust. It is not a one-man show, so the manager doesn’t have to know everything. The hierarchy has changed, and they bring in very competent people beside them who take care of this part of the big puzzle.”
For Rodgers, it has become an important part of his overall plan. Leicester aspire to push the elite of English football but don’t possess the strength and depth of squad that their rivals for trophies and European qualification have, making it even more important to keep their key players fit.
It’s impossible to avoid injuries altogether and Rodgers has just lost key midfielder Wilfred Ndidi for 12 weeks with an abductor muscle issue that has required surgery, while Dennis Praet and Jonny Evans will be assessed ahead of this weekend’s visit of West Ham United after limping out of Sunday’s 5-2 win at Manchester City with a twisted knee and tight calf respectively.
“There are lots of measures that we will take care of within the training, a periodisation about our programme,” Rodgers says. “If you look at the likes of Jonny Evans, for example, last season was probably the first full season he’s had in his career, getting through the games, getting to the intensity of the games.
“I’d like to think that sort of bridge that we build between the medicine and sports science, it’s very much a football methodology, but there’s clearly a physical, physiological periodised programme that joins that as well.
“Sometimes you’re going to be unfortunate when you pick up injuries in games, but we do everything from that sort of sport science perspective to ensure the players are covered as much as they can.
“But there’s no doubt, I think you’ll see in all Premier League teams now, with how close and compact the games are together, there’s going to be a real challenge for you to have players available for every single game, but that is obviously our plan in order to (help Leicester) do that.”
By Rob Tanner Oct 1, 2020
At the start of last season, Brendan Rodgers set out six pre-season goals for his Leicester City side. The first five, while ambitious, were targets to be achieved by the players on the pitch — qualify for Europe, reach the Carabao Cup final, reach the FA Cup final, score more goals than in the previous season and also record more points than in 2018-19.
They were all end-goals, but the sixth target was designed to help them arrive at their final destination — to have more players available consistently. It is an aim that has never been more important than this season, as Leicester compete in a reduced and dramatically more hectic campaign.
Leicester have had a good record of player availability over the past few years and a large part of that has to do with the level of investment into their sports science and medical departments — the team behind the team — and the embracing of new developments and techniques.
Data provided by Premier Injuries shows Leicester had 90 per cent player availability pre-lockdown last season and 91 per cent after the restart, the fourth-best record in the Premier League behind Sheffield United, Wolverhampton Wanderers and Southampton, and it was a similar record in terms of the number of games players missed, with Leicester’s total at 94 — 77 pre-lockdown and 17 following the restart. In comparison, Bournemouth had the most with 230 combined games missed by their players.
In total, Leicester had 21 injuries of varying nature which cost players to miss 693 days. Again, only Sheffield United and Wolves had lower numbers of injuries, but in terms of specific soft-tissue muscle injuries, of the calf, thigh and groin, Leicester had the lowest number of time-loss injuries (those which resulted in a player missing at least one domestic league fixture and/or spending 10 or more days on the sidelines), and their average return to play for injured players was 16 days, demonstrating their ability to get players back onto the pitch. The highest average return to play was 59 days, at Manchester United.
Muscle injury return to play (2019-20)
[xtable]
{thead}
{tr}
{th}TEAM{/th}
{th}AVERAGE DAYS OUT{/th}
{/tr}
{/thead}
{tbody}
{tr}
{td}
Manchester United{/td}
{td}59{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
West Ham United{/td}
{td}48{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Everton{/td}
{td}44{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Norwich City{/td}
{td}39{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Tottenham{/td}
{td}37{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Liverpool{/td}
{td}36{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Watford{/td}
{td}36{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Bournemouth{/td}
{td}35{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Newcastle United{/td}
{td}34{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Crystal Palace{/td}
{td}33{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Chelsea{/td}
{td}33{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Burnley{/td}
{td}32{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Brighton & Hove Albion{/td}
{td}27{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Aston Villa{/td}
{td}26{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Arsenal{/td}
{td}25{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Southampton{/td}
{td}25{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Manchester City{/td}
{td}24{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Sheffield United{/td}
{td}23{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Wolverhampton Wanderers{/td}
{td}20{/td}
{/tr}
{tr}
{td}
Leicester City{/td}
{td}16{/td}
{/tr}
{/tbody}
[/xtable]
It is a good record that could have been even better, with injuries mounting towards the end of the fixture-congested campaign. The absences of James Maddison, Ben Chilwell and Christian Fuchs, coupled with Ricardo Pereira’s ACL surgery, impacted on their push for the Champions League.
Not all injuries are preventable, but the importance of identifying the potential risks of injury during training and games to mitigate avoidable problems has never been more crucial, and clubs continue to look to sports science for initiatives that can help keep key players on the pitch for longer periods.
Paul Balsom is the club’s head of performance innovation and has been working with Leicester since 2008.
He has teamed up with sports technology firm Catapult to help pilot a new player tracking system called Movement Profile, which can help identify and mitigate potential soft-tissue injuries. The system classifies every movement a player makes on the pitch to help coaches measure explosiveness, identify injury risk and personalise players’ training programmes.
There are three main areas of activity; low and very low intensity, where players can often be walking or making slow movements, running, at high and mid-range intensity, and then dynamic, where players make high and mid-intensity turns and changes in direction (shown in the video below).
“A large part of the game is spent at a low intensity,” Balsom explains to The Athletic. “Then there are these very short periods of high intensity that often determine the outcome of the game and are intricate parts of playing football.
“It is easier to think of it as three elements.
“We have put low and very low together — where you are basically not doing anything of any metabolical loading. Depending on the game, it is 65-85 per cent that a player spends in a game at low or very low intensity.
“It is the other two that are really interesting. It is a case of getting a better balance between the dynamic and running work during training to correspond with what the players do in a game. For example, in a small-sided game or five-a-side, we are going to have a lot of high-intensity dynamic work but we are not going to get much of the running work.
“It is another tool to refine our training drills to make sure we are not overloading any of the high-intensity work: dynamic and running.”
Catapult’s Vector system of player movement tracking can collect 25 million pieces of individual data from each player in a training session; information that is then provided to each club’s sports science and medical staff for analysis.
How they adjust the loading on players in training can be changed to mitigate injury.
For example, a winger known for his explosiveness is looking sluggish on the pitch after a shortened gap between seasons and a heavy number of games to start the season. Instead of simply saying that he looks sluggish, Movement Profile will allow the staff to compare his movements to those of previous sessions and his historical performance loads.
Maybe it was just an off game or two, and a few days of rest will have him back on track. Maybe the player has been overtraining certain muscle groups, and the training regime needs to shift accordingly. Or maybe there’s something more serious at play. The system is designed to identify the stress that specific movements are putting on the player’s body.
Ultimately, by quantifying the path to fatigue and the dynamic movements, teams can identify soft-tissue injuries before they happen.
Leicester have been trialling the system with the club’s Thai Academy at Belvoir Drive, while it has also been used at their Belgian sister club OH Leuven. Others using Movement Profile are Aston Villa, Celtic, Rangers, Melbourne Victory, Rosenborg, Stromsgodset, and the Swedish FA — who Balsom also advises.
“We feel it is a really important tool in terms of returning players to the rehabilitation process,” Balsom adds. “When we do unfortunately get a player who is injured, it is about returning that player to training and ensuring the balance between the running and the dynamic is such they can they cope with the demands of a game.”
Sports science has been embraced by Leicester since Nigel Pearson first came to the club 12 years ago and would raise his eyebrows when their good injury record was put down to luck. The departments have grown since then.
“At Leicester, with Brendan bringing in Glen Driscoll (first-team fitness coach), we are over double figures in terms of sports science and medicine staff,” Balsom says. “It is not just about the quantity but the quality, and the communication with the manager and how he and the coaching staff buy into it. When everyone is working together, that is when it is most powerful.
“I think the Premier League is leading the way in the whole of the world at the moment in terms of investment in this area, but it is tools like this that make it very easy for the coaches and players to understand. The role of Catapult as a provider and myself as a practitioner is to break it down into simple take-home messages for the coaches and the players. It is one tool of many tools, but we think this will be a powerful tool because of its simplicity.”
New innovations and technology wouldn’t be anywhere near as effective if the players themselves and coaching staff didn’t embrace them and buy in. Balsom says current players understand how it can benefit them by helping keep them fitter, stronger and, more importantly, available for selection at a time when the physical demands on footballers have never been greater.
“I spoke to an ex-player about the intensity of today’s game, and we all know that has changed,” says Balsom. “If you look at the body shapes of the players now – I have been at Leicester 12 years and in my time I have seen all different shapes and sizes, but if you look at the playing staff today, it is a lifestyle now. It isn’t just about when they come to us, it is before they come to us, their preparation when they leave us, how they sleep. There are very few hiding places.
“I think one of the strengths we have built up at Leicester is embracing the players and giving them the responsibility. It has become more natural. It is not us dictating to them, it is them being interested in, ‘What do I need to do to keep myself fit and available for selection? To keep myself in the team or knocking on the door?’
“That is the big thing that, in my experience, has changed and is continuing to change — the empowerment given to the players and how much they buy into it.”
Embracing science and technology while also understanding the organic nature of football has been a big part of the Leicester City story over the past decade and will continue to be so as they prepare to move to their new training ground in the north of the county.
In sports science, the club is also looking into artificial intelligence and how that can be applied to help improve performance, while on the medicinal side there has been a change as stalwart club head physio Dave Rennie has left after over 20 years’ service. The club are looking to reshape the department with a full-time doctor and head of medicine.
“It has been a strength of what Leicester have stood for, even from the very first day I arrived and all the way through to now,” Balsom says of the club’s approach to sports science. “If you think there is a lot of detail going into everything, you can probably double that. Meetings after meetings to discuss individual details and then with the players.
“It is not just about rest or not rest, or more or less; with two games a week, you have players you need to top up to keep ready, you have players who may need to rest, some players playing on the borderline of breaking down. It is a continual game.
“One of the keys now is that managers bring with them expertise in these areas, people they can trust. It is not a one-man show, so the manager doesn’t have to know everything. The hierarchy has changed, and they bring in very competent people beside them who take care of this part of the big puzzle.”
For Rodgers, it has become an important part of his overall plan. Leicester aspire to push the elite of English football but don’t possess the strength and depth of squad that their rivals for trophies and European qualification have, making it even more important to keep their key players fit.
It’s impossible to avoid injuries altogether and Rodgers has just lost key midfielder Wilfred Ndidi for 12 weeks with an abductor muscle issue that has required surgery, while Dennis Praet and Jonny Evans will be assessed ahead of this weekend’s visit of West Ham United after limping out of Sunday’s 5-2 win at Manchester City with a twisted knee and tight calf respectively.
“There are lots of measures that we will take care of within the training, a periodisation about our programme,” Rodgers says. “If you look at the likes of Jonny Evans, for example, last season was probably the first full season he’s had in his career, getting through the games, getting to the intensity of the games.
“I’d like to think that sort of bridge that we build between the medicine and sports science, it’s very much a football methodology, but there’s clearly a physical, physiological periodised programme that joins that as well.
“Sometimes you’re going to be unfortunate when you pick up injuries in games, but we do everything from that sort of sport science perspective to ensure the players are covered as much as they can.
“But there’s no doubt, I think you’ll see in all Premier League teams now, with how close and compact the games are together, there’s going to be a real challenge for you to have players available for every single game, but that is obviously our plan in order to (help Leicester) do that.”
Ice cream, hips and envelopes help explain Kane’s prolific penalty-scoring rate
By Kevin Coulson and Carl Anka 4h ago
11
Her name was Doris.
She’d watch from behind the posts as Jonny Wilkinson practised his place kicks. Often she’d read a paper or eat an ice cream, sometimes she would have a can of Coke. But she was always there, supporting him when he needed it, a crutch on which Wilkinson leaned to kick England to the 2003 Rugby World Cup.
Yet she was, in fact, a fantasy.
“I invented her,” Dave Alred, Wilkinson’s kicking coach at the time, tells The Athletic. “To knock the newspaper out of Doris’ hand, I’ve actually now got such a small, specific target — we all know the saying ‘aim small, miss small’, then it transports you somewhere else.
“By not kicking the goal, the outcome is — being obscure about it — knocking the book out of Doris’ hands, trying to hit the piece of chocolate, the 99 Flake, without moving the ice cream.”
So with Wilkinson being so incredibly precise, if he slightly missed the flake, then the ball would still go sailing through the posts?
“Absolutely.”
Hip service
Place the ball. Pull up left sock. Pull up right sock. Seven steps back. Deep breath. Slight crouch over. Pump the legs, One, two, three paces, strike the ball. Score.
This is Harry Kane’s penalty routine, nearly 90 per cent of the time in the Premier League.
The Tottenham striker, like Wilkinson, is a freak of fastidiousness. Where Wilkinson practised on Christmas Day and would often not leave training until he’d kicked six successful penalties in a row, Kane will take up to 50 after training.
After converting four penalties in the 2018 World Cup, including after he was made to wait nearly four minutes against Colombia, England manager Gareth Southgate said: “He reset himself again. Much like you see Jonny Wilkinson. He’s of that sort of mentality and calibre, I think.”
But, as in place-kicking in rugby, such mental strength is nothing if it is not melded to a finely tuned technique — simple, repeatable and durable under pressure. It is this combination that makes Kane one of the best penalty takers on the planet.
His style has evolved, from the first spot kick he took for Tottenham, with a long straight run-up, against Hearts in 2011, to what it is now — consistent, powerful, and incredibly hard to stop, with a little hunch of the back at the start of the run-up that is not dissimilar to that of the former England fly-half.
“The combination of pace and accuracy, there’s very, very few players in the world who can kind of consistently hit it that way,” explains The Athletic’s goalkeeping expert Matt Pyzdrowski.
The former Chicago Fire and Helsingborgs goalkeeper says the angle of Kane’s run-up — at 25-30 degrees allows him to swing his hips through the ball and place it to the goalkeeper’s right. The same run-up also allows the Tottenham striker to slot the ball to the keeper’s left if needed, with minimal change in technique.
“One of the things that I liked to watch, when I did play, were the shooter’s hips because they tell the truth. It’s very hard for a player to disguise (where the ball will eventually go),” adds Pyzdrowski.
“The biggest thing from the goalkeeper’s perspective is you want to go early but you have to be patient. I think that’s why Kane is so deadly because he is so efficient, so particular with where he puts the ball that even if the keeper guesses correctly, it’s going to be a goal more times than not.”
It means the technique is identical each time until a last-minute swivel of the hips, leaving goalkeepers trying to save a forceful shot to either side, usually hit into one of the extremes of the goal.
The lack of a “tell”, with the direction in which his standing foot also consistently not pointing at either corner, means Kane has sent the keeper the wrong way 15 out of 21 times since the start of the last World Cup.
Kane has never given many details of his practice routines or technique but has admitted he “picks a spot” — meaning he is not trying to outwit the goalkeeper or send him the wrong way. He is not reliant on bluffing, he makes up his mind and tries to kick the ball there regardless.
Even when there is so much resting on penalties at the business end of tournaments, often it is up to the individual to make sure they practice, with Kane insisting he leaves it up to his “gut” to decide how many he should take in each session. Ben Lyttleton, author of the book Twelve Yards, and penalty consultant to some Premier League clubs, says: “What I have found with the clubs that I speak to is often they let the players practise that element of the game as they wish. Almost at their own discretion.
“And so no club or coach tends to say to their star striker, ‘right, you can do 20 penalties now because that’s how we do it’. It’s up to that player to take responsibility and do it themselves. And the same is true of what their strategy is. It is unlikely that a club will say, ‘we feel that this is the best strategy for you and therefore this is how you should approach it’, whether it’s the goalkeeper-dependent or goalkeeper-independent method, which are the two main ways of doing it.”
Yet some of the best penalty takers seem to now focus on the latter technique — pick your spot instead of waiting for the keeper to show his hand — with many at the 2018 World Cup having short, controlled run-ups — for example Australia’s Mile Jedinak (who is remarkably similar in style to Kane and has never missed a spot kick), and the France and Barcelona forward Antoine Griezmann.
This also means that practising becomes easier because it means penalty takers, as long as they have the ability to place the ball in opposing corners of the goal, will not have to analyse opposition goalkeepers and their diving tendencies or even have one present in practice. “Some do, some don’t (watch footage of opposition keepers),” says Lyttleton. “In my experience, most don’t because they feel that too much information about the goalkeeper gets in the way of what they are focusing on.”
As for having a goalkeeper help them in training, that’s also not entirely necessary either. “If it’s the goalkeeper-independent (method), it doesn’t matter,” says Lyttleton. “He’s backing himself every time… he could do it in his back garden.”
This is in total contrast to some of the more extravagant techniques in recent times; Christian Cueva’s penalty for Peru against Denmark in the World Cup, where he skipped around to his left, paused, then continued his run, was way off target; or Simone Zaza’s much-derided effort for Italy against Germany in 2016.
Then there is Paul Pogba. Although the Frenchman has not missed any spot kicks on the scale of the above two, he once took 26 steps in his run-up — inspiring memes about what you can do in the time it takes him to get to the ball — and has one of the worst records in the Premier League of current takers, with just a 63.6 per cent success rate. The aim of his technique — the polar opposite of Kane, with his head up, looking at the goal, and a slow run — is, in his own words, to “destabilise the keeper”, and wait for them to make the first move.
But, after missing against Southampton in March last year, he swapped to a shorter approach. When asked why, he told BT Sport: “In the end, the most important thing is to put the ball inside the goal.”
The reward was enough on its own, without the risk of trying to embarrass the keeper. It seems he has switched to a goalkeeper-independent technique, chaos for control…
Pushing the ‘envelope’
Ahead of Euro 2016, a betting company asked Dr Ken Bray, visiting lecturer at the University of Bath, to shoot a video on how to score the perfect penalty.
To demonstrate, they enlisted the help of Matt Le Tissier, who only missed a single spot kick from 47 throughout his career. As the cameras rolled he struck the ball perfectly into the top-right hand corner of the goal with his first kick. It was no surprise.
“I never liked hitting the ball that low as a penalty. I tend to think if you kick it that low, it’s almost along the ground. I think it gives the goalkeeper much more chance,” the former Southampton playmaker tells The Athletic.
Le Tissier explains he would always kick to the top-right corner unless he saw the keeper’s legs move in his peripheral vision.
“I did sometimes hit them along the ground in (the left) corner but that was only when I’d seen the goalkeeper dive (the other way) first so I didn’t have to take the risk of hitting it high because I knew the goalkeeper had gone the wrong way and I just had to roll it in the other side.”
Placing the ball to the top-right corner (for a right-footed player), as the first option, then allows an easier switch to the other side at the last minute at the body and hip position is not closed. Trying to do it the other way round would be physically impossible without a pelvis made from plasticine.
Le Tissier’s preferred placement is backed up by Bray’s research which found that there is an “unsaveable” zone (see video below) which is out of the goalkeeper’s reach — assuming he starts in the centre and the ball is hit with enough pace. He found this represents 28 per cent of the goal.
Bray, a theoretical physicist who wrote How to Score: Science and the Beautiful Game, even devised an equation to show where the optimum placement of the ball would be, outside of the diving envelope — effectively the top two corners but equidistant from the post, crossbar and reach of the keeper.
In other words, players can maximise their chances by striking to a specific spot in the goal — pretty much exactly where Kane put his efforts against Panama in the 2018 World Cup (his first effort is below).
By Kevin Coulson and Carl Anka 4h ago
Her name was Doris.
She’d watch from behind the posts as Jonny Wilkinson practised his place kicks. Often she’d read a paper or eat an ice cream, sometimes she would have a can of Coke. But she was always there, supporting him when he needed it, a crutch on which Wilkinson leaned to kick England to the 2003 Rugby World Cup.
Yet she was, in fact, a fantasy.
“I invented her,” Dave Alred, Wilkinson’s kicking coach at the time, tells The Athletic. “To knock the newspaper out of Doris’ hand, I’ve actually now got such a small, specific target — we all know the saying ‘aim small, miss small’, then it transports you somewhere else.
“By not kicking the goal, the outcome is — being obscure about it — knocking the book out of Doris’ hands, trying to hit the piece of chocolate, the 99 Flake, without moving the ice cream.”
So with Wilkinson being so incredibly precise, if he slightly missed the flake, then the ball would still go sailing through the posts?
“Absolutely.”
Hip service
Place the ball. Pull up left sock. Pull up right sock. Seven steps back. Deep breath. Slight crouch over. Pump the legs, One, two, three paces, strike the ball. Score.
This is Harry Kane’s penalty routine, nearly 90 per cent of the time in the Premier League.
The Tottenham striker, like Wilkinson, is a freak of fastidiousness. Where Wilkinson practised on Christmas Day and would often not leave training until he’d kicked six successful penalties in a row, Kane will take up to 50 after training.
After converting four penalties in the 2018 World Cup, including after he was made to wait nearly four minutes against Colombia, England manager Gareth Southgate said: “He reset himself again. Much like you see Jonny Wilkinson. He’s of that sort of mentality and calibre, I think.”
But, as in place-kicking in rugby, such mental strength is nothing if it is not melded to a finely tuned technique — simple, repeatable and durable under pressure. It is this combination that makes Kane one of the best penalty takers on the planet.
His style has evolved, from the first spot kick he took for Tottenham, with a long straight run-up, against Hearts in 2011, to what it is now — consistent, powerful, and incredibly hard to stop, with a little hunch of the back at the start of the run-up that is not dissimilar to that of the former England fly-half.
“The combination of pace and accuracy, there’s very, very few players in the world who can kind of consistently hit it that way,” explains The Athletic’s goalkeeping expert Matt Pyzdrowski.
The former Chicago Fire and Helsingborgs goalkeeper says the angle of Kane’s run-up — at 25-30 degrees allows him to swing his hips through the ball and place it to the goalkeeper’s right. The same run-up also allows the Tottenham striker to slot the ball to the keeper’s left if needed, with minimal change in technique.
“One of the things that I liked to watch, when I did play, were the shooter’s hips because they tell the truth. It’s very hard for a player to disguise (where the ball will eventually go),” adds Pyzdrowski.
“The biggest thing from the goalkeeper’s perspective is you want to go early but you have to be patient. I think that’s why Kane is so deadly because he is so efficient, so particular with where he puts the ball that even if the keeper guesses correctly, it’s going to be a goal more times than not.”
It means the technique is identical each time until a last-minute swivel of the hips, leaving goalkeepers trying to save a forceful shot to either side, usually hit into one of the extremes of the goal.
The lack of a “tell”, with the direction in which his standing foot also consistently not pointing at either corner, means Kane has sent the keeper the wrong way 15 out of 21 times since the start of the last World Cup.
Kane has never given many details of his practice routines or technique but has admitted he “picks a spot” — meaning he is not trying to outwit the goalkeeper or send him the wrong way. He is not reliant on bluffing, he makes up his mind and tries to kick the ball there regardless.
Even when there is so much resting on penalties at the business end of tournaments, often it is up to the individual to make sure they practice, with Kane insisting he leaves it up to his “gut” to decide how many he should take in each session. Ben Lyttleton, author of the book Twelve Yards, and penalty consultant to some Premier League clubs, says: “What I have found with the clubs that I speak to is often they let the players practise that element of the game as they wish. Almost at their own discretion.
“And so no club or coach tends to say to their star striker, ‘right, you can do 20 penalties now because that’s how we do it’. It’s up to that player to take responsibility and do it themselves. And the same is true of what their strategy is. It is unlikely that a club will say, ‘we feel that this is the best strategy for you and therefore this is how you should approach it’, whether it’s the goalkeeper-dependent or goalkeeper-independent method, which are the two main ways of doing it.”
Yet some of the best penalty takers seem to now focus on the latter technique — pick your spot instead of waiting for the keeper to show his hand — with many at the 2018 World Cup having short, controlled run-ups — for example Australia’s Mile Jedinak (who is remarkably similar in style to Kane and has never missed a spot kick), and the France and Barcelona forward Antoine Griezmann.
This also means that practising becomes easier because it means penalty takers, as long as they have the ability to place the ball in opposing corners of the goal, will not have to analyse opposition goalkeepers and their diving tendencies or even have one present in practice. “Some do, some don’t (watch footage of opposition keepers),” says Lyttleton. “In my experience, most don’t because they feel that too much information about the goalkeeper gets in the way of what they are focusing on.”
As for having a goalkeeper help them in training, that’s also not entirely necessary either. “If it’s the goalkeeper-independent (method), it doesn’t matter,” says Lyttleton. “He’s backing himself every time… he could do it in his back garden.”
This is in total contrast to some of the more extravagant techniques in recent times; Christian Cueva’s penalty for Peru against Denmark in the World Cup, where he skipped around to his left, paused, then continued his run, was way off target; or Simone Zaza’s much-derided effort for Italy against Germany in 2016.
Then there is Paul Pogba. Although the Frenchman has not missed any spot kicks on the scale of the above two, he once took 26 steps in his run-up — inspiring memes about what you can do in the time it takes him to get to the ball — and has one of the worst records in the Premier League of current takers, with just a 63.6 per cent success rate. The aim of his technique — the polar opposite of Kane, with his head up, looking at the goal, and a slow run — is, in his own words, to “destabilise the keeper”, and wait for them to make the first move.
But, after missing against Southampton in March last year, he swapped to a shorter approach. When asked why, he told BT Sport: “In the end, the most important thing is to put the ball inside the goal.”
The reward was enough on its own, without the risk of trying to embarrass the keeper. It seems he has switched to a goalkeeper-independent technique, chaos for control…
Pushing the ‘envelope’
Ahead of Euro 2016, a betting company asked Dr Ken Bray, visiting lecturer at the University of Bath, to shoot a video on how to score the perfect penalty.
To demonstrate, they enlisted the help of Matt Le Tissier, who only missed a single spot kick from 47 throughout his career. As the cameras rolled he struck the ball perfectly into the top-right hand corner of the goal with his first kick. It was no surprise.
“I never liked hitting the ball that low as a penalty. I tend to think if you kick it that low, it’s almost along the ground. I think it gives the goalkeeper much more chance,” the former Southampton playmaker tells The Athletic.
Le Tissier explains he would always kick to the top-right corner unless he saw the keeper’s legs move in his peripheral vision.
“I did sometimes hit them along the ground in (the left) corner but that was only when I’d seen the goalkeeper dive (the other way) first so I didn’t have to take the risk of hitting it high because I knew the goalkeeper had gone the wrong way and I just had to roll it in the other side.”
Placing the ball to the top-right corner (for a right-footed player), as the first option, then allows an easier switch to the other side at the last minute at the body and hip position is not closed. Trying to do it the other way round would be physically impossible without a pelvis made from plasticine.
Le Tissier’s preferred placement is backed up by Bray’s research which found that there is an “unsaveable” zone (see video below) which is out of the goalkeeper’s reach — assuming he starts in the centre and the ball is hit with enough pace. He found this represents 28 per cent of the goal.
Bray, a theoretical physicist who wrote How to Score: Science and the Beautiful Game, even devised an equation to show where the optimum placement of the ball would be, outside of the diving envelope — effectively the top two corners but equidistant from the post, crossbar and reach of the keeper.
In other words, players can maximise their chances by striking to a specific spot in the goal — pretty much exactly where Kane put his efforts against Panama in the 2018 World Cup (his first effort is below).
Part 2
When discussing placement in this top corner, Le Tissier is unequivocal saying players with “the right technique… can do that consistently”.
Kane has missed three penalties in the Premier League. Though one of these was down to a piece of turf at St Mary’s stadium, which caused the ball to pop up when the striker placed his standing foot. The fact they later replaced the turf after Harry Arter missed a spot kick for Bournemouth in similar fashion (below) is more than just minor mitigation. In fact, if it wasn’t for the shonky spot, Kane would likely have 22 from 24 conversions — at 91.7 per cent success rate — in the Premier League, just behind human metronome James Milner.
The Tottenham striker also missed when electing to strike the ball to the bottom left corner against West Ham in 2015 when Adrian saved well. This was similar to a recent miss while on England duty — where the striker has missed two from 11 — against Kosovo in a Euro 2020 qualifier in September. Although marginally too high, it was also saved well by Arijanet Muric who, standing at 6ft 5in, guessed the right way and took an early step to the right to enable him to reach beyond the envelope that Bray mentions. It broke a run of 14 successful conversions for Kane.
But there is a single Premier League penalty that Bray would not approve of — when Liverpool’s Loris Karius saved Kane’s effort that was struck straight down the middle in February of 2018 during Tottenham’s 2-2 draw with Liverpool.
This is because, unlike Kane’s usual efforts to the corners of the goal, it fits with the “goalkeeper-dependent” method — it relies on him moving out of the way.
Middling results
Antonin Panenka was a revolutionary in football terms. Like Kevin Pietersen’s switch-hit in cricket, Nick Kyrgios’ underarm serve in tennis, or Wilkinson winning the World Cup using a drop-kick from his “wrong” foot, the Czech’s effort in the 1976 European Championship final broadened the boundaries of the game.
He invented a new way to be successful. For penalty takers it was not just left or right anymore, Panenka (and Johan Neeskens’, albeit mishit, penalty in the 1974 World Cup final) presented a third option to score — in the middle of the goal.
There have been many brilliant Panenkas since — notably from Zinedine Zidane, Francesco Totti and Andrea Pirlo — and few players have the audacity to try this style in global competitions, such would be the fallout should the ball lob benignly into the waiting goalkeeper’s arms.
But Kane does not seem to have this in his repertoire. The Tottenham striker can come unstuck when attempting to score down the middle. The beauty of the Panenka is not only the brazenness of the ball travelling so slowly, but also that this lack of speed aids its effectiveness — it allows more time for the goalkeeper to dive out of the way, so there is less chance of a trailing leg saving the ball.
Kane, however, is not able to strike the ball as softly when he shoots centrally, his technique would be compromised too much and broadcast his intentions to the goalkeeper. Instead, in the Karius save, his shot was struck at a nice height, with enough pace for the goalkeeper to block the ball before vacating the centre of the goal.
So, why, knowing he has the ability to hit the “unsaveable” zone, does Kane still go down the middle (he also missed a similar effort against Pulpo Romero of AEL Limassol in 2014 during a Europa League qualifying match)? Although he succeeded with this placement for his penalty in normal time against Colombia at the World Cup, why risk more saves?
Even top-level goalkeepers admit if a penalty taker puts the ball where they intended, they have no chance. It is why, in a shootout, the goalkeeper can never really be blamed — howlers aside — because they are the underdog.
“If you tell the keeper to wait until the last minute to dive, even if he goes the right way he will not get there if the kick is well taken,” says Gianluigi Buffon in Lyttleton’s book. This experience — from one of the greatest goalkeepers to grace the game — tallies with Bray’s results.
It could be that Kane is keeping the goalkeeper “honest”. If they have seen him score down the middle before, it puts doubt in their mind, they cannot commit too early to either side. Yet Dr Jamie Barker, a senior lecturer in sports psychology at Loughborough University who has worked with teams in the professional game and Paralympic football, believes there might be another simple explanation.
“Sometimes we will see players go safe down the middle of the goal, or they would tend to just smash it,” he tells The Athletic. “That is a little bit of an avoidance behaviour. The approach we often want is where people are really skilled in the penalty kick i.e. Harry Kane… is where they try and bend it in the side netting. They kind of go ‘Look, if I rehearse that so many times, it doesn’t matter how good the keeper is, nine times out of 10 the ball’s gonna hit the side netting and the keeper’s going to be unable to get it’.”
Mind the gap
When England beat Colombia in the 2018 shootout, they had already imagined scoring all of their goals many times.
Dr Pippa Grange had worked with the squad, teaching them how to visualise scoring and by giving them a penalty framework to deal with the pressure.
Imagining what you want to do can actually help you do it.
“There is this idea that when we rehearse mentally what we’re about to do; if you’re a surgeon undertaking complex brain surgery or a firefighter just about to go up a ladder or Special Forces about to going on an operation you can almost visualise what that’s going to be like,” says Barker.
“When you visualise that it does stimulate parts of the brain, which are then connected or related to particular muscle movements.
“There is this idea that it does strengthen the connection between the mind and those particular muscles. For any highly skilled or complex movement, reinforcing that kind of pathway is really useful. We also find imagery really useful in stroke patients as well, who have kind of lost some of that movement.”
“What the evidence generally suggests is, mental rehearsal alone is better than nothing. But mental rehearsal plus physical rehearsal, is kind of like the panacea, your best recipe.”
Having a simple, repeatable technique is also important as it takes the mental pressure off. “You want a penalty kicker to have a routine to be able to do that without really thinking about it,” adds Barker. “Because otherwise that thought will get in the way of executing the task at hand. The brain is only so clever — it can only think of one thing at one moment in time.
Players can help visualise by “feel”, too, something Alred worked on with Wilkinson.
When the fly-half was lining up his kicks, sometimes he would tap his foot on the ground before running up to strike the ball. “What he does is he presses his toe into the ground so that it activates his quad,” adds Alred. “So the quad knows what it’s going to feel like.”
It’s also very important to have a specific target at the front of their thoughts.
“You often see goalkickers (in rugby) looking up in the air, then coming back to the ball, looking up and coming back to the ball,” says the kicking guru. “What they are doing is superimposing their own target in that gap.”
This is something you can see very obviously with Owen Farrell, as he draws a line from the ball to a spot between the posts with his eyes before every effort, though Alred has not worked with him specifically.
He continues: “Certainly with Wilkinson, it’s fix the target and when the target’s in your mind’s eye — and that’s such a crucial thing, and I use it massively in golf — unless the target is in your mind’s eye, you must not kick the ball or swing the golf club.
“The crazy thing is — it is in your mind’s eye but your eyes are on the ball. So in a way you can’t see the target but your head is down.”
Kane might be imagining a specific spot in the net — “top left” or a “feel”, perhaps what it’s like to perfectly connect with the ball. And if he finds his target, the chances of a keeper saving it are minimal.
“It’s the same as a golf shot,” says Alred, who since working with Wilkinson helped Luke Donald become world No 1 and is coaching Francesco Molinari, who won The Open in 2018. “One shot, one opportunity. (The player should be thinking) ‘I’ve done it 100 times before, I know what it feels like, I know I want to match my intention — exactly where the ball is going to go and I just do it.’
“But it only works if I’ve practised and worked hard.”
Kane has a mental instruction manual, whereas an elaborate technique, or worse, changing it every time is anathema to Alred. The goal does not change shape or size and it will always be 12 yards away, unlike in rugby, where the distance varies. The only truly uncontrollable aspect of the situation is the goalkeeper. But as we have seen, perfect placement should always result in a goal. It’s why goalkeepers will try anything to get into the minds of their opponents in the moments leading up to the spot kick.
Colombia — as well as making Kane wait for three minutes — scuffed the spot, argued with the referee and muttered things to the striker. Another salient recent example of players trying to psyche out opponents was, ironically, against a Kane-less Tottenham when Tim Krul was the hero — saving from Gedson Fernandes and Troy Parrott as Norwich reached the quarter-finals of the FA Cup in March. Krul made his opponents wait for as long as he could in between penalties and often checked his bottle — with the preferred direction of the take clearly written on them.
Which is why a routine method is needed. For Kane it starts when he places the ball on the spot, which is why he will walk around clutching it until any delaying tactics have died down.
There’s good reason for this. “The brain under pressure tends to narrow its peripheral vision,” adds Alred. “However we are, under pressure, usually much more alert to distractions.”
For Pogba, using his old technique, this was not good news. Research has shown that taking too much time (or too little) once in the process of taking the penalty garners less chance of success.
Geir Jordet, director of psychology at the Norwegian Centre of Football (soccer) Excellence, found players who rushed their kicks or take too long — usually around five seconds or more after the whistle has blown — tend to have a lower success rate. Players were either not thinking enough, or thinking too much. He recommended that players should take an extra breath at the end of their run-up before commencing — something which Kane now does.
Pogba’s 26-step marathon, however, was too complicated.
“I suppose my view when I sit there and watch Pogba miss a couple at Old Trafford (using his old technique) is you’ve just taken too long,” says Barker, a United fan. “There’s too much time to let clutter and indecision get in the way whereas you don’t want to do what Jamie Carragher did in 2006 World Cup where he literally put the ball down, turned his back on it and then went before the referee had even blown the whistle.”
The metronome’s strike?
Perhaps penalty technique says a lot about the individual.
Kane, the striker who has reached the pinnacle of the game through sheer bloody-mindedness, practice and gradual improvements; Pogba, the outstanding natural talent, who relies on spur of the moment skill.
Yet even with the Frenchman, the ultimate showman, switching technique, the “goalkeeper-dependent” method is perhaps on the wane. There are still some survivors of the bluff, with Mario Balotelli’s stutter technique still successful and Le Tissier’s hybrid routine perhaps an option for the highly skilled. Pogba has also been replaced by Bruno Fernandes as Manchester United’s penalty taker and, although the Portuguese has a shorter run, it fluctuates between a full hop, skip and jump and just a slight stutter. Unlike Kane, there is a deviation in the technique and reliance on highly trained goalkeepers making the first move, giving a clue as to which way they will dive. So far, for Fernandes it has worked in the Premier League, with five scored. However, Chelsea’s Jorginho — who has a similar “hop” technique — has come unstuck against Alisson of Liverpool, who saved the most recent of his six league penalties.
For neutrals who crave artists not automatons, though, the lack of individuality in technique has the potential to make penalties — and particularly shootouts — less of a duel between keeper and player and more an internalised battle of the shooter. Can they put the ball exactly where they want it? If they can, it should be a goal.
But with science scuppering spontaneity — and with data analysts giving goalkeepers knowledge of every penalty taker’s preference — and the rewards for success, not to mention pressure, ever increasing, perhaps it is no surprise players are trying to refine their techniques, maximise their chances and take goalkeepers out of the equation.
And, when they practise, Doris can be their friend too.
When discussing placement in this top corner, Le Tissier is unequivocal saying players with “the right technique… can do that consistently”.
Kane has missed three penalties in the Premier League. Though one of these was down to a piece of turf at St Mary’s stadium, which caused the ball to pop up when the striker placed his standing foot. The fact they later replaced the turf after Harry Arter missed a spot kick for Bournemouth in similar fashion (below) is more than just minor mitigation. In fact, if it wasn’t for the shonky spot, Kane would likely have 22 from 24 conversions — at 91.7 per cent success rate — in the Premier League, just behind human metronome James Milner.
The Tottenham striker also missed when electing to strike the ball to the bottom left corner against West Ham in 2015 when Adrian saved well. This was similar to a recent miss while on England duty — where the striker has missed two from 11 — against Kosovo in a Euro 2020 qualifier in September. Although marginally too high, it was also saved well by Arijanet Muric who, standing at 6ft 5in, guessed the right way and took an early step to the right to enable him to reach beyond the envelope that Bray mentions. It broke a run of 14 successful conversions for Kane.
But there is a single Premier League penalty that Bray would not approve of — when Liverpool’s Loris Karius saved Kane’s effort that was struck straight down the middle in February of 2018 during Tottenham’s 2-2 draw with Liverpool.
This is because, unlike Kane’s usual efforts to the corners of the goal, it fits with the “goalkeeper-dependent” method — it relies on him moving out of the way.
Middling results
Antonin Panenka was a revolutionary in football terms. Like Kevin Pietersen’s switch-hit in cricket, Nick Kyrgios’ underarm serve in tennis, or Wilkinson winning the World Cup using a drop-kick from his “wrong” foot, the Czech’s effort in the 1976 European Championship final broadened the boundaries of the game.
He invented a new way to be successful. For penalty takers it was not just left or right anymore, Panenka (and Johan Neeskens’, albeit mishit, penalty in the 1974 World Cup final) presented a third option to score — in the middle of the goal.
There have been many brilliant Panenkas since — notably from Zinedine Zidane, Francesco Totti and Andrea Pirlo — and few players have the audacity to try this style in global competitions, such would be the fallout should the ball lob benignly into the waiting goalkeeper’s arms.
But Kane does not seem to have this in his repertoire. The Tottenham striker can come unstuck when attempting to score down the middle. The beauty of the Panenka is not only the brazenness of the ball travelling so slowly, but also that this lack of speed aids its effectiveness — it allows more time for the goalkeeper to dive out of the way, so there is less chance of a trailing leg saving the ball.
Kane, however, is not able to strike the ball as softly when he shoots centrally, his technique would be compromised too much and broadcast his intentions to the goalkeeper. Instead, in the Karius save, his shot was struck at a nice height, with enough pace for the goalkeeper to block the ball before vacating the centre of the goal.
So, why, knowing he has the ability to hit the “unsaveable” zone, does Kane still go down the middle (he also missed a similar effort against Pulpo Romero of AEL Limassol in 2014 during a Europa League qualifying match)? Although he succeeded with this placement for his penalty in normal time against Colombia at the World Cup, why risk more saves?
Even top-level goalkeepers admit if a penalty taker puts the ball where they intended, they have no chance. It is why, in a shootout, the goalkeeper can never really be blamed — howlers aside — because they are the underdog.
“If you tell the keeper to wait until the last minute to dive, even if he goes the right way he will not get there if the kick is well taken,” says Gianluigi Buffon in Lyttleton’s book. This experience — from one of the greatest goalkeepers to grace the game — tallies with Bray’s results.
It could be that Kane is keeping the goalkeeper “honest”. If they have seen him score down the middle before, it puts doubt in their mind, they cannot commit too early to either side. Yet Dr Jamie Barker, a senior lecturer in sports psychology at Loughborough University who has worked with teams in the professional game and Paralympic football, believes there might be another simple explanation.
“Sometimes we will see players go safe down the middle of the goal, or they would tend to just smash it,” he tells The Athletic. “That is a little bit of an avoidance behaviour. The approach we often want is where people are really skilled in the penalty kick i.e. Harry Kane… is where they try and bend it in the side netting. They kind of go ‘Look, if I rehearse that so many times, it doesn’t matter how good the keeper is, nine times out of 10 the ball’s gonna hit the side netting and the keeper’s going to be unable to get it’.”
Mind the gap
When England beat Colombia in the 2018 shootout, they had already imagined scoring all of their goals many times.
Dr Pippa Grange had worked with the squad, teaching them how to visualise scoring and by giving them a penalty framework to deal with the pressure.
Imagining what you want to do can actually help you do it.
“There is this idea that when we rehearse mentally what we’re about to do; if you’re a surgeon undertaking complex brain surgery or a firefighter just about to go up a ladder or Special Forces about to going on an operation you can almost visualise what that’s going to be like,” says Barker.
“When you visualise that it does stimulate parts of the brain, which are then connected or related to particular muscle movements.
“There is this idea that it does strengthen the connection between the mind and those particular muscles. For any highly skilled or complex movement, reinforcing that kind of pathway is really useful. We also find imagery really useful in stroke patients as well, who have kind of lost some of that movement.”
“What the evidence generally suggests is, mental rehearsal alone is better than nothing. But mental rehearsal plus physical rehearsal, is kind of like the panacea, your best recipe.”
Having a simple, repeatable technique is also important as it takes the mental pressure off. “You want a penalty kicker to have a routine to be able to do that without really thinking about it,” adds Barker. “Because otherwise that thought will get in the way of executing the task at hand. The brain is only so clever — it can only think of one thing at one moment in time.
Players can help visualise by “feel”, too, something Alred worked on with Wilkinson.
When the fly-half was lining up his kicks, sometimes he would tap his foot on the ground before running up to strike the ball. “What he does is he presses his toe into the ground so that it activates his quad,” adds Alred. “So the quad knows what it’s going to feel like.”
It’s also very important to have a specific target at the front of their thoughts.
“You often see goalkickers (in rugby) looking up in the air, then coming back to the ball, looking up and coming back to the ball,” says the kicking guru. “What they are doing is superimposing their own target in that gap.”
This is something you can see very obviously with Owen Farrell, as he draws a line from the ball to a spot between the posts with his eyes before every effort, though Alred has not worked with him specifically.
He continues: “Certainly with Wilkinson, it’s fix the target and when the target’s in your mind’s eye — and that’s such a crucial thing, and I use it massively in golf — unless the target is in your mind’s eye, you must not kick the ball or swing the golf club.
“The crazy thing is — it is in your mind’s eye but your eyes are on the ball. So in a way you can’t see the target but your head is down.”
Kane might be imagining a specific spot in the net — “top left” or a “feel”, perhaps what it’s like to perfectly connect with the ball. And if he finds his target, the chances of a keeper saving it are minimal.
“It’s the same as a golf shot,” says Alred, who since working with Wilkinson helped Luke Donald become world No 1 and is coaching Francesco Molinari, who won The Open in 2018. “One shot, one opportunity. (The player should be thinking) ‘I’ve done it 100 times before, I know what it feels like, I know I want to match my intention — exactly where the ball is going to go and I just do it.’
“But it only works if I’ve practised and worked hard.”
Kane has a mental instruction manual, whereas an elaborate technique, or worse, changing it every time is anathema to Alred. The goal does not change shape or size and it will always be 12 yards away, unlike in rugby, where the distance varies. The only truly uncontrollable aspect of the situation is the goalkeeper. But as we have seen, perfect placement should always result in a goal. It’s why goalkeepers will try anything to get into the minds of their opponents in the moments leading up to the spot kick.
Colombia — as well as making Kane wait for three minutes — scuffed the spot, argued with the referee and muttered things to the striker. Another salient recent example of players trying to psyche out opponents was, ironically, against a Kane-less Tottenham when Tim Krul was the hero — saving from Gedson Fernandes and Troy Parrott as Norwich reached the quarter-finals of the FA Cup in March. Krul made his opponents wait for as long as he could in between penalties and often checked his bottle — with the preferred direction of the take clearly written on them.
Which is why a routine method is needed. For Kane it starts when he places the ball on the spot, which is why he will walk around clutching it until any delaying tactics have died down.
There’s good reason for this. “The brain under pressure tends to narrow its peripheral vision,” adds Alred. “However we are, under pressure, usually much more alert to distractions.”
For Pogba, using his old technique, this was not good news. Research has shown that taking too much time (or too little) once in the process of taking the penalty garners less chance of success.
Geir Jordet, director of psychology at the Norwegian Centre of Football (soccer) Excellence, found players who rushed their kicks or take too long — usually around five seconds or more after the whistle has blown — tend to have a lower success rate. Players were either not thinking enough, or thinking too much. He recommended that players should take an extra breath at the end of their run-up before commencing — something which Kane now does.
Pogba’s 26-step marathon, however, was too complicated.
“I suppose my view when I sit there and watch Pogba miss a couple at Old Trafford (using his old technique) is you’ve just taken too long,” says Barker, a United fan. “There’s too much time to let clutter and indecision get in the way whereas you don’t want to do what Jamie Carragher did in 2006 World Cup where he literally put the ball down, turned his back on it and then went before the referee had even blown the whistle.”
The metronome’s strike?
Perhaps penalty technique says a lot about the individual.
Kane, the striker who has reached the pinnacle of the game through sheer bloody-mindedness, practice and gradual improvements; Pogba, the outstanding natural talent, who relies on spur of the moment skill.
Yet even with the Frenchman, the ultimate showman, switching technique, the “goalkeeper-dependent” method is perhaps on the wane. There are still some survivors of the bluff, with Mario Balotelli’s stutter technique still successful and Le Tissier’s hybrid routine perhaps an option for the highly skilled. Pogba has also been replaced by Bruno Fernandes as Manchester United’s penalty taker and, although the Portuguese has a shorter run, it fluctuates between a full hop, skip and jump and just a slight stutter. Unlike Kane, there is a deviation in the technique and reliance on highly trained goalkeepers making the first move, giving a clue as to which way they will dive. So far, for Fernandes it has worked in the Premier League, with five scored. However, Chelsea’s Jorginho — who has a similar “hop” technique — has come unstuck against Alisson of Liverpool, who saved the most recent of his six league penalties.
For neutrals who crave artists not automatons, though, the lack of individuality in technique has the potential to make penalties — and particularly shootouts — less of a duel between keeper and player and more an internalised battle of the shooter. Can they put the ball exactly where they want it? If they can, it should be a goal.
But with science scuppering spontaneity — and with data analysts giving goalkeepers knowledge of every penalty taker’s preference — and the rewards for success, not to mention pressure, ever increasing, perhaps it is no surprise players are trying to refine their techniques, maximise their chances and take goalkeepers out of the equation.
And, when they practise, Doris can be their friend too.
How do I get started being an agent? 😛
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