More Than A Spectacle
These people deserve more respect
“Antoine Semenyo is terrifying”. Liverpool are 0-2 up at The Vitality Stadium. There is less than half an hour to play and I have texted this to a mate of mine after Bournemouth’s Ghanaian powerhouse just beat three players and lashed one just-wide from 25 yards.
Signed for £10 million from Bristol City in January 2023, Semenyo is among a group of shrewd, technically, tactically and physically transformative signings made by Liverpool’s now-own Richard Hughes and harnessed by Hughes’ farewell gift to The Cherries, Andoni Iraola – The world’s best young manager.
It is under Iraola’s philosophy of Relationism that allows players like Semenyo to attack space, commit defenders and scare me half to death when shooting with either foot. In the previous game away at Stamford Bridge, Semenyo rattled one in at the near post with his Left-foot. I was going to pre-fix “Left-foot” with “weaker” but you watch him and tell me he even has a “weak” foot.
In his piece titled ‘Never mind the quality, feel the money: central flaw of football’s ‘greatest show on earth’ Barney Ronay ponders the meaning behind football. You would think someone who has been writing about the sport for decades would have gotten ‘round to that by now… One of the many questions Ronay asks is, "Who is reinventing the tactical blueprint?"
“I think when you play too positionally… you sometimes lose the initiative from the players to just take their man on and attack the spaces.” – Andoni Iraola
Over the past 8 & ½ years or so, Pep Guardiola has had the most profound of impacts on the way football is played in England, and not just the Premier League. His style of play centres around Positionism – the act of progressing play by using the position of your players to create space, normally through one or two-touch passes. Pep has this season admitted that a tide has shifted, and Andoni Iraola is the gravitational pull.
Bournemouth (at the time of writing) are 3 points off Champions League football with 11 games to play but there is no “Jeopardy” in their standing. For Ronay, this amounts to little more than a resounding numbness. There is no spectacle here, no fireworks, no final-day melodrama to serve for an exciting highlights package. In his eyes, Bournemouth are amongst a “raft of preppy, well-run clubs”.
Bournemouth will have European football of some kind next season and be happy for it regardless of the level. There will be no tears. There will however be a season that their fans watched the most exciting, radical football the Premier League or any League for that matter has had to offer, week-in week-out. There is also the very real expectation that the club can go from strength to strength, season after season.
This football club has been built by the right people making the right decisions at all levels. A club of their size shouldn’t be here. I hope someone, whether it be fans or those within the club are documenting this. It is a modern-day footballing romance.
“Who is Good Here?”
Despite what our eyes tell us on a weekly basis, Ronay somehow manages to not see the answers before him, and it strikes at the core of this Premier League season. If you want to know why Arsenal and City are not in a title race with 10 games to go and also why the bottom three will remain that way, look no further than the teams placed between 12th and 3rd.
We all know my feelings on Bournemouth now but look also to Brentford, Brighton and Fulham. Clubs who are currently run the right way, play great attacking football and all deserving of European football, overperforming well beyond what should be expected given their respective sizes. Go through as many players as you want:
Eze’s market value must be in the region of £70 million, he plays for the current 12th best side
Brighton (currently 8th) reportedly turned down a bid for Kaoru Mitoma of around £90m in the January window just-gone
Aston Villa (currently 10th) are looking at a Champions League quarter-final draw if they (as we expect) beat Club Brugge, and just sold Jhon Durán for £64.5m
Matheus Cunha is 17th in the Premier League with Wolves and being touted for the best clubs around the world.
Mohammed Kudus signed for West Ham at the start of last season from Ajax, who despite a massive spiralling in the past 3 or so years finished 3rd in the Eredivisie 22/23 and won the league in 21/22 with Kudus up top in both seasons. West Ham are currently 16th in the Premier League. Among Kudus, they have Jarrod Bowen and Lucas Paquetá. All three have been linked with moves to Liverpool, City and Arsenal respectively in the past couple of seasons and not without warrant either. Again – they are the Premier Leagues 16th best side.
You cannot say this about mid-table teams and their players in any other league around the world. You couldn’t even say it about this league 3/4 years ago. 5th place will get Champions League football this season with Liverpool spearheading the Premier League’s standing at the top of UEFA’s coefficient having finished top of the Champions League. Between (at the time of writing) - 10th (Aston Villa) and 5th (Chelsea) lays a small blanket of 4 points.
To put it simply – When everyone is good, it can be hard to tell if anyone really is.
"No real sense of excellence"
Liverpool are currently on track for a 91 point season – the same total that won the league last season. They are averaging 2.39 points per game. Prior to Pep’s City, only 2 teams performed better over the course of a 38-game season. The best an Alex Ferguson side managed was exactly 91 points on one occasion. I doubt even the biggest of cranks would dismiss the notion that at least one of his sides amounted to a real sense of excellence.
The reason why
"What is a good team in professional sport? Something built out of hard choices, struggle, time, chemistry. Make one of these and you will naturally make money too. It becomes a virtuous cycle. But there is a sense in the league right now that nobody really remembers how to do this, or has the time; or even that it no longer really matters, such are the benefits of just being grandly so-so”
This is Ronay’s big shrug of the shoulders at everything. Apparently, the reason why City, Arsenal, Chelsea and United aren’t as good as they should be this season is because their owners are one or more of; incompetent, making money (and don’t care about the football) or, trying to cut corners on a quick fix.
The reality is that these clubs have recently, or, are in the process of hierarchical transition and also figuring out how to run their respective clubs amidst ongoing regulatory changes.
Txiki Begiristain will leave as director of football at Manchester City this summer and until recently, the club did not know what the result would be of the 115 charges levied by the Premier League in February 2023. This lead to a few windows of little and outright bad recruitment. Considering their gross (icky) spending in January and the recent ruling by an independent panel that have informed clubs that Associated Party Transaction (APT) rules are void and unenforceable, it looks as though City are back to bending the flimsiest of rules to their will.
Arsenal have had two seasons of injury-free football with less fixture congestion than City & Liverpool and gotten away with all manner of shithousery under Arteta. This season, the PGMOL’s Eye of Sauron has penetrated the shithouse with a spate of red cards, and key players e.g. Saka and their 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th choice left backs have all fallen apart given the milking manager Mikel has gotten out of them until now. Upstairs, Arsenal are currently looking at appointing their new sporting director in March after the shock departure of Edu in November. Last summer, cashflow did seem to be tight at The Emirates a year on from Declan Rice’s £100m move. They have regressed slightly.
INEOS are finding new and impressive ways of making Manchester United worse both on and off the pitch having spent more time recruiting Dan Ashworth as Sporting Director than he actually spent in the job itself. Pair this with the hiring of a manager more interested in team-shape rather than basic principles, and cutting hundreds of staff members since acquiring 27.7% of the club only 12 months ago and you’re left with a cocktail without the tail.
Todd Boehly’s contract extravaganza is a box I refuse to open but you understand what I’m getting at – These four clubs are all in-transitions of sorts and all of them are in different states and phases of their respective projects.
The compounding of; the smaller-budget clubs making smart decisions in the market, aided by great recruitment via data and scouting, leading to sound managerial appointments, a clear playstyle and finding valuable players to fit that playstyle has compressed the quality of the league in a way we just haven’t seen before.
Liverpool have simply benefitted from going back to what works – getting the nerds and scouting team back to making smart recruitment choices e.g. Arne Slot – a Head Coach keeping the core footballing principles whilst making pragmatic tweaks here and there to already world class footballers. It isn’t the show-stopper some want it to be, but it is sustainable. And in an ever-increasingly dystopic footballing landscape, sustainability is now somewhat of a radical approach.
There aren’t any big spectacles this season, no jeopardy for the voyeuristic casual or neutral to get stuck into. There are however, many wonderful stories being told at a lot of Premier League clubs – Forest and their love-affair with Europe, Bournemouth being the hottest ticket in town, Moyes’ return to the blues in the last season at Goodison - to name a few. A feast for footballing purists with an appetite for romance, data and tactics.
There is a line from one of my favourite games – Red Dead Redemption 2 where John Marston will not stand to have his gang be compared with their rival gang - ‘The O’Driscoll’s’.
Kieran (a former O’Driscoll gang member) mumbles out: “you all ain’t that different from the O’Driscoll’s… you’re out to survive… fightin’ the law… nature… you’re in it for yourselves…”
John retorts: “you’re out to survive, we’re out to live.”
Kieran: “From where I been, you just look the same is all…”
John: “Then you looked, but you ain’t seen.”
Take care