Vesper

yes, that too, as there is no correct position to play him at in Lampard's 4 3 3

what I REALLY want is our original colourway for an option http://patrickbaty.co.uk/2014/08/04/chelsea-football-club/ It appears that Chelsea Football Club originally opted for the jersey colour Eton blue with white shorts and black socks with stripes around the top. The club’s first President was Earl Cadogan, an old Etonian, and he already used Eton blue as his horseracing colours. According to Weatherbys Ltd, the company who provides British horse racing with its central administration, the racing colours of the 6th Earl Cadogan were Eton blue and have been registered to the family since at least the 1890s. As a result the unofficial name Cadogan Blue has been given to Earl Cadogan’s racing silks. In the only work on the subject we are told that: “The origins of the colour Eton Blue, are enshrouded in the depths of time. No one knows for sure whence it came. Probably before 1625, when Matthew Say, Eton College Waterman, was provided with “a coat of blew azure” as mentioned in the College accounts.”2 In the Dictionary of Colours for Interior Decoration the following notes are given under Cambridge Blue: “This ‘Light Blue’ of the English University has from time to time caused some controversy. Cambridge Blue is supposed to be the same as Eton Blue, the latter dating from the fifteenth century, and being adopted by Cambridge in 1836. The story goes that an old Etonian of the Cambridge crew in the boat race of 1836 supplied the distinguishing colour which was carried by the cox, and the colour was adopted as a permanent colour for the University Boat Club. Probably some surprise will be occasioned by the colour here featured as Cambridge Blue (shown above), but it is matched to the coloured material supplied by the University outfitters and the Secretary of the Cambridge Boat Club, 1934, as supplied to and worn by rowing ‘Blues’.” So it appears that Cadogan Blue, Eton Blue and Cambridge Blue were the same colour and that this was the colour of the Chelsea shirt until the 1907-08 season when Royal Blue was adopted.

Barcelona boss Quique Setien makes U-turn over Philippe Coutinho’s future amid Chelsea interest https://metro.co.uk/2020/04/16/barcelona-boss-quique-setien-makes-u-turn-philippe-coutinhos-future-amid-chelsea-interest-12563291/?ITO=squid&ito=newsnow-feed Barcelona boss Quique Setien says Philippe Coutinho still has a future at the club despite persistent rumours linking him with a move, while he has made it clear that any suitors will need to pay a premium. The Brazilian struggled to live up to his mammoth price tag after arriving at Camp Nou from Liverpool and was sent out on loan to Bayern Munich this past season – though the German side will not take up their option to make the deal permanent. A return to the Premier League appears most likely, with Chelsea believed to be at the front of the queue to sign the Brazilian though Arsenal, Tottenham, Manchester United and even former club Liverpool have all been linked. But Setien, who took over in January, has moved to quell speculation that Coutinho could leave and says the 27-year-old will be welcomed back into the squad unless a mammoth offer is made. Asked about Coutinho’s future, Setien told RAC1 on Wednesday evening: ‘I think Coutinho is a great player, I really like him. ‘He is still a Barcelona player. You have to pay the clause or pay a sum to Barca. ‘I think he can be here at the beginning of next season. I have to talk to him to ask him.’ snip

Merson: World-class Willian could play for Manchester City tomorrow https://www.si.com/soccer/chelsea/news/paul-merson-slams-chelsea-in-willian-contract-saga Sky Sports pundit Paul Merson believes Chelsea have 'dropped one' for failing to agree a contract extension with Brazilian winger Willian. The 31-year-old is set to become a free agent as he heads into the final months of his contract at Stamford Bridge which expires this summer. A deal to remain in west London is becoming increasingly unlikely after Willian admitted the two parties' wishes are far apart. "I think it's unlikely that I'll renew because Chelsea offered me a two-year deal, I asked for three and it ended there." But Sky Sports' Paul Merson has hailed Willian's qualities and believes he could walk into Manchester City's team. "Willian is world class, and Chelsea haven’t got a lot of world-class players. Willian has been outstanding, he could play for Manchester City tomorrow. There will be teams queuing around the block to sign him," Merson said on Sky Sports. "He’s a special player and for me, Chelsea have dropped one by letting it get to this situation." snip

LATEST UPDATES Sports news LIVE: Newcastle United takeover DONE, no full football stadiums for 18 months, SPFL announce end to Scottish Championship, League One and League Two season https://talksport.com/football/680697/sports-news-football-newcastle-takeover-football-stadiums-spfl/ Headlines: Newcastle United’s £300m takeover ‘very close’ and just waiting on Premier League approval, says talkSPORT’s Jim White Premier League stadiums may not be back to full capacity for another 18 months, medical expert claims Jurgen Klopp and Jordan Henderson deliver tributes to 96 Liverpool fans who tragically died at Hillsborough on 31st anniversary Dana White says UFC APEX could host fights by May Jimmy Greaves: Tottenham and England legend returns home after a week in hospital with ill health Bournemouth become latest Premier League club to reverse decision to furlough staff after ‘listening to supporters’ Graeme Souness tells Paul Pogba to ‘put his medals on the table’ after Manchester United ace said he ‘didn’t even know who he was

The game (per the podcast above) that saved us from selling players before Roman took over. Jesper Grønkjær's goal was one of the biggest in team history, and deffo his most important. Classic match: Chelsea 2-1 Liverpool Jesper Gronkjaer was the Blues' hero in a final-day battle for fourth place and Champions League football in 2002/03 https://www.premierleague.com/video/single/861392

The massive problem is he is NOT played at his natural position. He is middling as a RMF in Lampard's 4 3 3, and the team's results with him there attest to this. Square peg, round hole and all that.

The Athletic Bilbao story — and why it could be about to get even better https://theathletic.com/1738239/2020/04/15/athletic-bilbao-la-liga-basque-copa-del-rey/ “What makes Athletic Club different is our philosophy,” says Joseba Etxeberria. “Maybe on the sporting level we do not stand out the most. But all the players come from here [in the Basque Country], so the distance between the fans and the players is much smaller. That feeling of belonging makes it like a family. “When you play for Athletic you feel very supported, as the relationship goes much further than the professional. We have more than 100 years with the same philosophy and that makes you more authentic.” Etxeberria made 514 appearances and scored 104 goals as a guileful deep attacker in Athletic Club de Bilbao’s first team. Now aged 42, he coaches the club’s youth side in the Spanish third tier. So he gets it. “I was 15 years as a player and have had all kinds of experiences,” he tells The Athletic. “Very good ones, like our centenary year in 1998, when we finished second and qualified for the Champions League. There were also difficult moments when we were near the bottom of the table, battling against relegation. That is when you really realise the feelings the fans have for the club. When the team is going well, it is easy to cheer. But when the team really needs that support from the stands, in these games which are so dramatic and necessary, the stadium is full every Sunday and that only happens in Bilbao.” This union between fans and players has been key to Athletic’s success through the decades, building an institution of which many fans in Bilbao and further afield are proud due to its policy of only using Basque players, while also producing what is historically Spanish football’s third most successful team by trophies won. Most important to all of this has been the consistent production of top class players, and the continuing validity of Johan Cruyff’s words that he “always wanted at least one Basque player in my team”. That was true as Javi Martinez and Fernando Llorente won the World Cup 2010 with Spain, and were then taken away by Bayern Munich and Juventus. Premier League clubs have more recently paid the release clauses to get Ander Herrera, Aymeric Laporte and Kepa Arrizabalaga. Meanwhile, a seemingly never-ending production line of technically and physically ready replacements has ensured that the team remain competitive in La Liga’s top half, making the Champions League in 2014-15, and reaching the Copa del Rey final this season — where they will meet Basque neighbours and rivals Real Sociedad. There remains something startlingly romantic about such a local team competing at the top level, especially in the ever more globalised and commodified world of modern football. Many of Bilbao’s 350,000 inhabitants, and those in the surrounding area, know someone involved in the club. Even if they are not one of the club’s 43,555 official members, perhaps their uncle was a youth player for a few years, or their niece works in the club shop at their San Mames stadium. “Everyone here is an Athletic fan,” says Etxeberria. “There are people who might not understand the offside rule, but they know how the Athletic game went last weekend. That does not happen in other places. That all the players and the staff are all from here means that the relationship with the fans is much closer. When you experience it first hand you realise that Athletic is much more than a football team, it is a way of life.” Few youth systems worldwide are as central to the club’s sense of itself, and the team’s success on the pitch, as Athletic’s academy at Lezama. The centre of its ‘cantera’ (quarry) is a 13-hectare campus in the hills above Bilbao, which also contains a residence for youngsters recruited from other parts of the Basque Country. The feeling of growing up together is an integral part of what makes Athletic special, says Aitor Karanka, who joined the club’s youth system in August 1989 and went on to make 201 first-team appearances for them over two spells. “When you enter Lezama at 15, you realise that you are joining a family, with that feeling of belonging,” Karanka says. “When I joined, Howard Kendall was first team coach, and the ‘mister’ lived there in Lezama too, so you would pass him in the corridors. And it was all so natural, living amidst players of the first team, who slept there too the nights before games, hoping that one day you would be one of them. You learned the values of working as a team, fighting for each other, always being together, both during and outside the games.” Being part of such a family makes it difficult to leave. Etxeberria had lucrative opportunities to join Real Madrid, where he would likely have won La Liga titles and Champions Leagues, but he does not regret staying. “Players at Athletic, or any other club, want to be happy,” he says. “In the end it is true that money can help with that, and playing European competitions, but everyone has to think about their own futures. I can speak from my experience — twice I had the chance to leave and I decided to stay both times. It is a decade now since I retired, and if I am proud of anything it is that I belonged to Athletic for 15 years.” Of course some players are tempted away, both in modern times and throughout the club’s history. But making such a decision is never easy, says Karanka, who thought long and hard before being reunited with his San Mames mentor Jupp Heynckes at the Bernabeu in 1997. “It was very difficult, as I was being called by a manager who I was very close to,” Karanka says. “And Real Madrid were building a squad with signings like Roberto Carlos, Bodo Illgner, Seedorf, Mijatovic, Panucci, aiming to win the European Cup for the first time in 32 years. But on the other side you were leaving behind the family you had created there, team-mates you had been with for a decade, like Julen Guerrero or Joseba Etxeberria. It might seem easy to sign for Real Madrid, but it was really tough, as I was leaving behind a lot too.” Another Lezama graduate is Andoni Ayarza, who scored the winning goal in Athletic’s 1984 Spanish Youth Cup final victory over Real Madrid and played 46 La Liga games for the senior team. Ayarza returned to the club in December 2018, as deputy to new sporting director Rafa Alkorta. His remit now is the long-term planning of squads from the youngest kids to the senior team, with all the challenges that involves. “We know that it is getting more difficult all the time, as we are talking about a small population in the Basque Country of a little more than three million people,” Ayarza says. “And at the moment there are five Basque teams in La Liga [Alaves, Eibar and Osasuna joining Athletic and Sociedad]. That gives us the determination to make the fewest mistakes possible and try to always have the best squads we can. During our year and a bit here at the club that has been where we have made the biggest effort. “It is a fragile ecosystem, but it also has some very big strengths. It is no coincidence that the club has never been relegated from La Liga. Our model gives us tremendous strength.” That is all true, although there has always been a certain amount of myth-making in this self-image of Athletic Club de Bilbao. A hint is in the English spelling of the club’s name, which dates from when it was founded by Basque engineering students who had studied in the United Kingdom. The team’s red and white striped shirts date from 1910, when club member Juan Elorduy returned from a visit to England with 50 Southampton jerseys, which matched the city’s official colours. Around 100 Englishmen played for Athletic Club before the Federacion Espanola de Futbol banned foreigners in the Copa del Rey in 1911. Such early links helped Athletic be the most successful club during the early years of organised Spanish football. Their first professional coach was a Mr Shepherd, while Wolverhampton-born Fred Pentland picked the team which won the second ever La Liga title in 1930. Players from other parts of Spain also featured from time to time, although the star men were generally locally born, including the team’s all-time leading scorer Telmo Zarra and the tragic figure of Rafael ‘Pichichi’ Moreno Aranzadi, who died aged 29 in 1922 from typhus. The all-Basque idea really solidified following the Spanish Civil War, during a time of political repression and financial difficulties. “Athletic was ruined, it had no money to sign anyone,” local historian Josu Turuzeta has written. “A story was constructed, circumstances were ritualised, and that was incorporated into the identity of the club.” The 1958 Copa del Generalisimo final victory over Real Madrid, in front of the watching General Francisco Franco, was a key moment in this narrative. An Athletic XI who had all come through the Lezama academy defeated a team led by Alfredo Di Stefano, who were in the midst of winning five successive European Cups. “Eleven villagers were all we needed to beat them,” said then-club president Enrique Guzman, in a phrase which became woven into the club’s identity. Guzman saw no contradiction that the coach who had organised those 11 local villagers was Ferdinand Daucik, from modern-day Slovakia. Dating from the very beginning, there has been an acceptance that Basque football could learn from abroad. So the club has actively looked to recruit the best tactical and technical thinkers possible from all over the world — from Pentland through Kendall to Argentinean Marcelo Bielsa’s two rollercoaster seasons. That remained the ideal as Athletic competed with even Madrid and Barcelona, winning 24 Copas del Rey and eight La Liga trophies, and reaching the final of the 1976-77 UEFA Cup. As the decades passed however it became more and more difficult to compete. The most recent of the club’s major trophies was a Liga and Copa double in 1983-84. The Bosman ruling of 1995 contributed to a massive globalisation of the game which saw Real Madrid and Barcelona fill their squads with the best talents from all over the world. It also meant that rich clubs outside Spain started to see the value of that Cruyff maxim of always wanting at least one Basque in his team. Keeping pace has meant that Athletic’s selection policy has also evolved over the years. At first broadening out from Bilbao’s Vizcaya to the other six Basque provinces, along with the contested territory of Navarre (Osasuna) and Iparralde across the border in France. At times they have looked even further — most recently with Aymeric Laporte, who had Basque lineage but was born outside the relevant territory in the French city of Agen. Players who are born outside the Basque region but undergo their entire football education there have also been welcomed, including Ernesto Valverde, who was born in Caceres near the border with Portugal. Signing players from other Basque clubs who have already turned professional has also become much more common. Ayarza maintains the club policy has remained coherent and constant through the years and that his only priority has to be to ensure fielding the best possible team made up of eligible Basque players. “Athletic has always looked throughout Basque football,” he says. “Maybe the initial focus was here in Vizcaya, but in the end if you look at the history of the club, the philosophy of the club, and it is clear. We have looked to all the seven territories that make up the Basque Country. We are looking at all players, constantly alert to see who might be interesting to bring into the club. Not just now, but for a long time.” But that does not mean that all the neighbours have always been happy. When Vitoria-born Karanka moved to Athletic from hometown club Alaves in 1988, everyone was content with the arrangement. “At that moment Alaves were going through a difficult financial time and Athletic had paid them some money for the right to sign young players,” Karanka says. “The relationship between the clubs was good.” The situation was very different in 1995, when Etxeberria was the biggest rising star in Spanish football, just 17 years old but earlier that summer the top scorer at the Under-20 World Cup in Qatar. Etxeberria was born in Guipuzcoa province, close to Real Sociedad’s home city of San Sebastian. He was invited to Lezama for a trial aged 12, but was not picked up despite (legend has it) scoring four times in a practice game. So he joined his local side Sociedad instead and had debuted for their first team before Athletic offered to pay his 550 million peseta release clause (a record for a Spanish player at the time). “It was a risky call to make but I had no doubts and time has shown it was the right decision,” Etxeberria recalls. “There was controversy back then, of course, but if there is a release clause then both sides have agreed to it, the player and the club. Then it is true that people talk a lot, and you have to sell a lot of newspapers.” The headlines in San Sebastian screamed outrage but in Bilbao it was just normal business. These days, Athletic continue to make attractive offers to any talented prospect they contact. Basque kids know their best chance of making a career in the game is to move to Lezama, no matter which part of the region they were born in or who they or their families support. Every year, 20 boys enter the Lezama cantera aged 10. On average, two will go on to play for the first team, a much higher rate than any other top-flight professional club pretty much anywhere. Other clubs are not always so happy to see their best youngsters tempted away, especially as they find it difficult to compete with the offers made by Athletic in terms of opportunities and facilities. Ayarza sees nothing wrong with his club using their unique model to attract local talents. “The relationships with the other Basque clubs are very correct,” he says. “Logically, we each have our own priorities and objectives. Although we all defend our own interests, there are no significant problems. What is clear is that, in this way of competing, we are different. Every club, even the other Basque clubs, when they have an urgent necessity they can look to a different market than us. We always look at home. Even if the player we are losing is a star or our top scorer. No other club, anywhere in the world, has this model to compete. And we are proud of that.” While Athletic might look first to their youth system, they are also not afraid of using their muscle in the transfer market. Of coach Gaizka Garitano’s current first team squad, only half have not been on the books of at least one other professional club. Key starters such as Raul Garcia, Inigo Martinez (below) and Dani Garcia came to Athletic fully formed as experienced La Liga players in their mid or late 20s. Others, including Yuri Berchiche and Aritz Aduriz, left Lezama as teenagers but returned to become important Athletic players later in their careers. In recent times, Oscar de Marcos left Alaves as a youngster to move to Lezama. While just last summer Dani Garcia and Ander Capa allowed their Eibar contracts to run down, then moved to Athletic on free transfers. Osasuna, based in the Navarre province’s capital Pamplona, have suffered especially with their best local youngsters leaving. Through recent years these have included Fernando Llorente, Javi Martinez, Iker Muniain and current emerging star Inaki Williams, who was born in Bilbao but grew up in Pamplona and did not formally join Athletic until he was aged 18. Kike Linero coached Llorente and Muniain during 19 years working at Lezama, where his most recent role involved overseeing the scouting of young talents from throughout the Basque Country. “It is more difficult all the time, with five Basque clubs in the Primera Division,” Linero says. “Barca and Madrid, and clubs like Villarreal and Valencia, have scouts here too. But it should not be so difficult [to convince local youngsters to join Athletic], if it is managed well. Maybe in Guipuzcoa there might be a pull towards Real Sociedad, but if the player has the contractual freedom, there are normally not great problems in convincing them. The best is to look for the players when they are very young, and try and make the right decisions, not just in the footballer but in the person.” The pecking order was reinforced in January 2018, when Manchester City paid Laporte’s €65 million release clause and Athletic immediately took Real Sociedad’s defensive pillar Inigo Martinez by paying the €32 million to release him from his contract. However, Sociedad have recently begun seriously rivalling Athletic in developing the best Basque talents and also hired some scouts and coaches with Lezama pasts. And they have also beaten Athletic in four of the last five La Liga derbies with a young local core to their team. A particularly painful case for those at Lezama has been Pamplona-born midfielder Mikel Merino, who Athletic missed out on as a youngster when he was at Osasuna. Then, last summer when the 23-year-old returned to La Liga via spells with Borussia Dortmund and then Newcastle United, he chose to move to the San Sebastian club. Concerns that Athletic’s position was slipping led to a shake-up behind the scenes at Lezama in January 2019, soon after the election of new club president Aitor Elizegi. This brought the departure of long serving and much respected academy director Jose Maria Amorrortu, while Linero also moved on. He admits that Athletic need to be ruthless in the way they compete for players with their neighbours. “What has been lacking in the last years has been more aggression when going for young players,” Linero says. “Here in the Basque Country there is rivalry, but there is also an awareness that we are all in this together. But if Athletic is my club, I will do everything possible to get a player who will improve our team, without worrying that other people might get angry. “The idea would not be to annoy La Real, but to strengthen Athletic. The same as when Chelsea came for Kepa [Arrizabalaga].” However it has been tweaked over the years, Athletic’s unique model leaves them pretty well placed at the moment. Not only have this season’s team reached the Copa del Rey final, they are also by many measures the financially healthiest club in La Liga. The current coronavirus induced lockdown has seen Barcelona, despite being the richest club in the world by revenues, relying on their players to pay staff wages. Most other La Liga clubs, including Madrid duo Real and Atletico, have also introduced pay-cuts for players. Athletic have not felt the need to take such measures, with their most recent accounts showing cash reserves of €188 million. This comes mostly from transfer income over the last decade as Europe’s biggest clubs — from Bayern Munich to Manchester United — have taken their players. Not that they have deliberately embraced a Sevilla or Porto-style business model of developing talents to sell on, as Athletic’s first teamers generally only leave if their release clause gets paid. “We are not working with the idea that another club will come and take one of our players,” says Ayarza. “While he wants to be at the club, and we want him too, he will stay. But we know that sometimes it will happen.” A 2019/20 budget of €133 million helps Athletic’s current first team stars like Muniain and Williams earn significantly higher salaries than the best paid players at second tier Spanish clubs like Sevilla or Valencia. They also know that grass is not always greener elsewhere, having seen former team-mate Kepa’s recent troubles at Chelsea. “We remain firm in our ideas and our principles,” Ayarza says. “Other players step up and become just as important, or even more. Kepa is a great goalkeeper and Chelsea came for him and paid his clause. Then behind there was Unai Simon, who is now established in the first team and doing really well. That is the history of Athletic, when a player leaves, for whatever reason, there is always someone who is proud to take the jersey. And often does even better than the one that left.” Athletic’s cash rich position even opens up the possibility that they might look to snap up Basque players at clubs currently suffering serious financial problems. The record transfer fee paid at San Mames is the €32 million paid for Inigo Martinez, and they have only twice spent more than €12m on a player. But some in Bilbao would pay the €75 million release clause of Real Sociedad’s 23 year old captain Mikel Oyarzabal, who has already scored four times against Athletic and whose style recalls that of Etxeberria. “If we had Oyarzabal in attack, we would be near the top of the table, no doubt, as all the team is missing is goals,” Liñero says. “But paying such money is difficult, especially when I know well that there were reports at Lezama on this player, when he was still at Eibar, and he could have come practically for free. Then you could spend all the money you have in the bank and he gets an injury or something else happens. So I prefer the idea of investing less money and trying to bring through those players who are impressing at the club already.” A further tweaking of the club’s recruitment policy could also make the team even more competitive, especially at a moment when many of their peers are likely to be consolidating or even needing to sell players to survive. For instance Marco Asensio’s father Gilberto was born in Bilbao, and even played at San Mames in his youth. Marco visited Lezama when a teenager coming through at RCD Mallorca, but it was decided he was not eligible as his football education had taken place on the Balearic Island where he was born and lived all his life until joining Real Madrid in 2017. Asensio’s case has caused a debate among fans in Bilbao, and current Athletic sporting director Rafa Alkorta even joked in a Basque TV media interview about asking Madrid if they could take the talented winger on loan. But there have been no serious signs of the club hierarchy making the necessary changes to their philosophy. Especially as the current feeling at Lezama is also that the next crops of youngsters are especially promising. Etxeberria’s Bilbao Athletic youth side currently sit joint second in their Segunda B section. The club’s third team Basconia are fourth in their regional Tercera division, also in a play-off place. The current feeling at Lezama is also that the next crops of youngsters are especially promising. Etxeberria’s Bilbao Athletic youth side currently sit joint second in their Segunda B section. The club’s third team Basconia are fourth in their regional Tercera division, also in a play-off place. Meanwhile, investment continues in other areas of the club, with a more long term focus. New facilities and coaches are being added at Lezama, while the spectacularly redeveloped San Mames stadium was chosen to host Spain’s group games at Euro 2020. “The fact that we have more reserves than other clubs, is down not just to the current board, but to those who were here before,” says Ayarza, when asked whether Athletic might look to take advantage of their relatively strong financial position. “We are all passing through here, and others will come in the future. We might be able to take on these current circumstances better than others, but we want to look after the club’s patrimony, and improve on it.” An aversion to taking short-term gambles fits with Athletic’s core ethos. There is of course some myth-making involved, and their philosophy can be bent to fit modern realities. But nobody wants to put at risk a model which has served the club and its family well for over a century. Especially with Garitano’s first team having reached this season’s Copa final. A million supporters flooded the streets of Bilbao when the team last celebrated lifting a major trophy in 1984 by taking an open-top barge ride down the Nervion river that runs through the city. Similar scenes can be expected should they end the long wait for another such success, especially if it comes by beating their biggest local rivals. “Institutionally, the club is doing well,” former Middlesbrough and Nottingham Forest manager Karanka says. “They have a very healthy financial situation, with the sales that have happened. And on a sporting level, the final of the Copa del Rey is the game dreamed of by the Athletic fans and the players. That shows that the team is going well, and we hope it is played, with fans, and that it is won. “Winning a first Copa after so many years would make this a great season. But whatever happens, the club looks very well prepared for the future.”

Football remodelled: Why transfers, scouting and coaching are drenched in data https://theathletic.com/1742037/2020/04/15/the-data-explosion-depay-arsenal-torreira-kante-agents/ In the final throes of Memphis Depay’s ill-fated period at Manchester United, his agent Kees Ploegsma took a radical step to reignite the Dutchman’s career. Signed by Louis van Gaal, Depay fell out of favour under new manager Jose Mourinho at Old Trafford. In the first half of the 2016-17 campaign, the Dutchman did not start a Premier League game. His form and confidence hit rock bottom. It was then that Ploegsma turned away from the wheeling-and-dealing stereotypes of agents and turned to data science. The agent organised several meetings with SciSports, the analytics company. The company’s founder and chief innovation officer, Giels Brouwer, tells The Athletic: “Kees asked me to go to Manchester to talk to Memphis. We went to his home and watched Real Madrid play Borussia Dortmund in the Champions League on his couch. We needed to understand why he was not fitting the playing style of Manchester United. He explained it in his own words. He said he needed confidence and to be important for the team. Then he said, ‘I need to play with freedom’.” SciSports, founded in 2013, performs several functions. The first is to act as an online scouting service for clubs through a database that covers 90,000 players and more than 3,600 clubs. This is available to clubs as a monthly subscription service, but also to those who represent footballers. Besides the database, SciSports also offers specialised reports for clubs and agents. In the case of Depay, the question was simple: can you analyse the data and tell me where I should go to salvage my career? Brouwer continues: “We analysed his previous games at PSV and with the Holland national team. We could see how, at United, he was asked to do a lot more on the defensive side of the game. He was not able to use his attacking freedom. Then there were other aspects he outlined: ‘I want to be able to dribble in from the left, I want a fast-paced game, I want space in front of me.’ We put that into the algorithm and developed a model. We found five clubs we felt were suited to him and also specific coaches where he would fit. Lyon was the club that came out on top.” Ploegsma approached Lyon with the report, explaining how the data demonstrated Depay’s suitability to the team, while the business of the deal became feasible due to his drop in valuation amid his poor form at United. Depay had approaches from Everton, Fenerbahce, plus leading teams in Germany, Italy and Spain, but the data convinced all parties that Lyon would be the perfect fit. Depay has since scored 43 goals and registered 32 assists in 102 Ligue 1 appearances for the French club, while also returning to prominence with the Dutch national team. Such collaborations between agents and data analysts are increasingly commonplace. Take, for example, the case of a young Manchester United player whose agent requested a personalised report from an independent data scientist, comparing his current level and his potential, then set against similar players in Europe, before taking the case study along to aid negotiations in a lucrative contract deal. SciSports alone works with 10 separate agencies, including the Belgian A-Group that represent Jan Vertonghen and Mousa Dembele, the Dutch SEG agency that manage Depay and previously Robin van Persie, and Stirr Associates, who work with Toby Alderweireld and Dries Mertens. Brouwer explains: “We help agencies in several ways: to scout the right players for their portfolio, allowing agents to use those reports to convince those players they have done proper research. The secondary relationship is to find the right club for those players. An agency may also use us if they expand. For example, if they are opening an office in Slovakia and want to know the 10 biggest young talents in Slovakia, we can develop a specialised algorithm for their needs.” SciSports is not alone. In England, Analytics FC offer a rival platform. The founder Jeremy Steele explains that his close relationship with the First Access Sports agency led him to provide personalised analytics to support contract negotiations for Chelsea’s Callum Hudson-Odoi, while Steele has previously performed the same service for Jeremie Boga and Yannick Bolasie. Some conversations with agents become more complicated. What if the data analysis suggests the agent, or indeed his client, is deluded over the player’s true worth? Steele says: “We need a fine line, as we don’t want to go back and say he’s a terrible player. But we cannot lie. Numbers cannot lie. If you ask for a projection against the best young players in Europe and he does not stack up, then I am sorry but it is best not to use that data in this particular case.” SciSports Brouwer agrees: “We had a player recently and we simply said, ‘We can’t find a club for you.’ If you pretend and present five clubs, but none are interested, the agent won’t buy another report from you. Sometimes I just say to the agents, ‘Don’t go for a report because you won’t like the outcome.’ Some don’t like it, but you have two types of agent: one is a big money-maker in it for a short run; the other one wants to get the most out of a career for the player. It is also hard to manage some players because they all think they are the best. The agents can use our data-driven reports to bring home that a step is needed before Real Madrid, or maybe go to Atalanta before you go to Juventus. It helps present in an objective way the best career planning.” In truth, agents are simply now catching up with the rest of the sport. The rise of data analysis has been swift and exponential over the past two decades. It is essential to every aspect of football — player performance, player conditioning, tactics, set-plays and player recruitment. The success of Liverpool, perceived as market leaders, reinforces the growth. The club’s sporting director Michael Edwards is backed up by data scientists including Dr Ian Graham, who has a doctorate in theoretical physics from the University of Cambridge, and Will Spearman, a former Harvard graduate student who spent time working for CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. Football is, at long last, in thrall to data. But this has not always been the case. Here is the story of football’s data explosion. In the social media era, the battleground has taken shape. “Think of it this way,” one top-four Premier League scout explains. “There are two schools of working and two schools of scouting in football. Is it best summed up by two films. Do you want to be Clint Eastwood in the ‘Trouble with the Curve’? Or Brad Pitt in ‘Moneyball’?” For the uninitiated, Eastwood’s character, Gus Lobel, is the archetypal ageing scout, set in his ways, the lone man on the park playing fields, defiantly resisting the soulless number-crunching of modern life. Then there is Pitt, playing Billy Beane, applying a sharp statistical model to recruit undervalued players on the cheap. For a long time, there has, undoubtedly, been tension between these two schools of thought as data analysts sought to disrupt football. At the turn of the Millennium, the first movers and shakers made their presence felt. Prozone launched in 1996 and Steve McClaren, as assistant manager at Derby County, was the first coach to take the player-tracking software truly seriously. Prozone introduced eight cameras around the Derby pitch, which would cumulatively collect different angles and the potential for data. When McClaren joined Alex Ferguson as Manchester United’s assistant manager, the club became the first paying customer, committing to a £50,000 fee if United won a trophy in the 1998-99 season (United lifted their famous treble). By late 2000, six more Premier League clubs signed up. Elsewhere, a different form of data emerged. The statistics firm Opta took off. Aidan Cooney, the founder of Opta, recently talked about the early days on the “Unofficial Partner”: “It was quite a slow burn. Most media companies were not ready for performance data. I felt that if you educate people as to what happens on the pitch and give them quantitative analysis, you bring them closer to the game and grow the audience.” When he presented to the “Daily Mirror”, Cooney was accused of “Americanising” sport. He said: “The word Americanisation… it referred to this perception that we were trying to shamelessly create the bus timetable — i.e. count lots of stuff and put it out on tables. That is how some people think American sports present themselves. Our clever bit was to disguise that we were delivering statistics. We started referring to the water-cooler moments — that thing you have read or heard about at the water cooler that could really hit home. We wanted to visualise data by telling the story. When ‘Moneyball’ (the 2003 book by Michael Lewis) came out, I bought 20 copies and sent one to every Premier League manager and said we would love to chat. I got a fairly significant doughnut in terms of a response. This was the early phase. There was hyperbole around video analysis, as opposed to using data more effectively.” The sell was not obvious. Cooney said: “Remember, football is low-scoring, high on luck and a lot of things happen. In other sports, there are stronger correlations and the cut-through is easier. Baseball and cricket are examples of those. In those early days, there were a few outliers. Daniel Finkelstein, with the Fink Tank column in The Times, saw value in it. There were other editors who saw the value but were not prepared to pay what we believed it was worth.” Towards the start of the 2002 World Cup, Finkelstein, a politics columnist with The Times, tuned into the radio, and he heard Dr Henry Stott explaining an academic model he had developed to predict outcomes of football matches. Finkelstein tells The Athletic: “I listened back and thought, ‘Of course this is how you would work out the outcome of a football match, of course you would use runs of data and create models.’ I brought it into The Times the next day and said we should use some of his data in our World Cup supplement. While everyone thought it was an impossible outcome, we used a piece of his data and had it down as a 25 per cent chance of Senegal beating the World Cup holders France. They did it, 1-0. If that hadn’t happened, possibly nobody would have been interested in our data after that. It turned into a column.” As most broadcasters, journalists and many clubs held back from data analysis, the Fink Tank became a weekly staple. Finkelstein continues: “This sounds really pompous, but I felt we were involved in a pioneering bit of sports journalism. The only person in football we encountered early on who understood the concept of an average was Arsene Wenger. He would say, ‘I am not interested in winning my next game.’ You should be interested in winning a run of games. Along with our predictions, I wrote a column about some football quirk or myth. My favourite was, ‘Is the worst time to concede just before half-time?’ To which the answer is no, statistically. I remember a fantastic conversation with Ian Wright, when he said, ‘No, conceding before half-time was the worst time because George Graham would shout at us in the dressing room.’ Sam Allardyce was interested, too. Some people would blank you and Sam would say, “Ooh, it is the Fink Tank!” “It was regarded by many as an amusing, eccentric thing. There would be an element for bet makers. Somebody did a paper for the University of Lancaster’s economics department and they showed how we had defeated the bookies during a period. The paper ran our probabilities for every Premier League, Champions League or major international game. But we actually had a model that produced probabilities for every game in Europe. At its steely core, we absolutely believed in it. I am a Chelsea fan and I remember going to see Chelsea win the Premier League at Bolton in 2005. I said to my friend there’s a 63 per cent chance we win the game that day, so we should go to Bolton. I didn’t have any other view than that. I grew to understand football through data. You would not analyse anything else without data, so why not for football, too?” Finkelstein also posed hypotheses for the mathematicians to investigate. Stott, previously a director at Oliver Wyman, hired Dr Ian Graham for his company Decision Technology, which carried out the investigations. Graham is now Liverpool’s director of research. According to the New York Times, Graham won the trust of Liverpool head coach Jurgen Klopp during the German’s third week in the job. Graham arrived in his office with printouts from a match Klopp’s former side Borussia Dortmund had lost 2-0 against Mainz the previous year. Graham, who holds a Cambridge doctorate in theoretical physics, had not seen the game himself. Yet his mathematical model showed how, by many metrics — plays into the opposition area and chances created in particular — Klopp’s side had deserved to win the game. Originally, Graham’s algorithms had been requested by Liverpool’s owners to help make a decision on whom to appoint as manager. He demonstrated how, through data analysis of Dortmund’s performances, Klopp’s team ought to have finished second in the Bundesliga, rather than their actual position of seventh. There was a time when clubs shuddered at the thought of pinning their hopes on individuals who do not watch the action, yet it is increasingly the norm. One Liverpool source explains Graham’s work: “He and his team process these algorithms to identify trends and find players to fit into the system. This is presented to senior scouts, and Klopp has the final say. These guys are phenomenal. I wouldn’t like to play chess against them. One of the impressive things: they can work out the speed at which the opponent moves and controls the ball. From there, we can identify pressing ‘victims’ and tell our players to apply pressure to specific opponents.” Finkelstein recalls his time collaborating with Liverpool’s Graham: “Ian became the driver of much of our work at the Fink Tank. Ian, Henry and I took it very seriously. We were using a language to talk about football that was profoundly important for football itself, and understanding things the game did not understand. We understood rapidly that goalkeepers were undervalued financially and it is no surprise to me to see £60 million goalkeepers now. Or, for example, how corners were overvalued when you see their low success rate. Passing was actually undervalued. “Clubs started to catch on. Ian and Henry got a contract with Spurs to help them recruit players and they were one of the reasons why Spurs bought Rafael van der Vaart. Ian then came to work with Liverpool and this was a remarkable story. Ian is a Liverpool fan. When John W Henry of Fenway Sports bought Liverpool, he came to the offices of Decision Technology. These were the people who do the Fink Tank. John wanted to hire Decision Technology for Liverpool, partly because he had read the Fink Tank in The Times. He could not do that as they had a contract with Tottenham. Ian, as a fan of Liverpool, took the job himself with everyone’s blessing. Ian had been working on modelling for 10 years before he joined Liverpool and they secured an amazing talent.” Ben Stevens is Crystal Palace’s head of performance and recruitment analysis, one of many admiring Liverpool’s work since then. He says: “When Liverpool hired a data scientist, there was a backlash. But some clubs realised that they could do this in-house. We use the platforms, of course, but we have a data scientist, Bobby Shojai, who is a top graduate from the London School of Economics. He is so intelligent. He won’t watch any videos or analyse football itself. He is purely on the data. Bobby’s background is finance and there was no football in that. These roles did not exist, but Bobby blows my mind every day.” There is, to be clear, a distinction between data science and data analysis. The data scientist incorporates artificial intelligence, computer science and predictive outcomes to extract insights before the data analyst, in tandem with a video analyst, seeks to study and present the data. As such, the scientist might create the mathematical model, but the analyst will then translate this to a sporting director or coaching staff. In recent times, analysts have risen to more senior roles. Crystal Palace’s Stevens explains: “Michael Edwards was an old-school analyst with Portsmouth a decade ago. He has done brilliantly and he is now Liverpool’s sporting director. Andy Scoulding (former analyst at Fulham) is now leading recruitment at Rangers. Lawrence Stewart, from a performance analysis background, is now Red Bull’s head of recruitment. I have moved into recruitment at Palace. There has been a shift. Chris Davies, Brendan Rodgers’ assistant at Leicester, was Swansea’s analyst when I first met him.” What was it like, in the early days as an analyst? Stevens smiles: “All those old analysts had to endure some hardship. It is not that I want those days back, but it was a rite of passage. To be questioned, ‘Why are you talking to me? What do you know about football?’ It was a good learning curve for students who came out of university and thought they knew football. It killed a number of analysts because they had neither the mentality nor the backbone. Now you join the club and you are are part of the department. It can be a cushy role. When certain analysts pipe up, I wonder about the old days. “It was a daunting task for me. I did it straight from uni. I worked as an intern at Southampton’s academy and then went up to the first team in 2008-09. It has changed hugely. We still had VHS tapes when I started. You would go to an away game and they’d give you a tape. I had to recapture it to get it onto a DVD. We had these things called Scuzzy (SCSI) drives. At the end of the game, you had to get these drives, wait for a courier on a moped, who would drive it up to Prozone in Leeds. Then they would sort it out and send it back within 24 hours. It was not an instant world then. There were some terrible times at away games when the courier wouldn’t be there. Everyone, all the players, were on the coach, waiting for you. “I was part of a two-man band at Southampton. If the computer breaks, it is your fault. If the stats are wrong, it is your fault. Now all of a sudden we have teams of people and analysts. We have all the angles, everything is live. We can send our info down to the bench during games.” The sight of analysts wearing headsets to communicate with coaching staff is now common. Stevens recalls: “I used to be mic’d up to Sam Allardyce. It used to be hilarious. I had my earpiece in, sat quite happily watching the game, then all of a sudden the gaffer’s annoyed and he’d just shout down your ear. Then I’m thinking, ‘The manager has just said something to me, but I haven’t got a fucking clue what he has said.’ Then you politely ask: “Gaffer, what did you say?” He then shouts the order again and that’s it. I have to write something down. He has clearly been annoyed by something!” It is easy to play up the age-old tension between evidence and instinct, but the consensus offered by many interviewees suggests relations have thawed. At Liverpool, for example, there may be a Harvard nuclear physicist beavering away, but there are also plenty of more traditional scouts putting in the hard yards around the world. These are people whose job it is to develop relationships, connect with agents and ensure they are tipped off before rival clubs. While Liverpool’s data analysts and scientists will cut clips and create models, in-person scouting remains prevalent. Liverpool, for example, have a scout who is tasked with watching an upcoming opponent up to 23 times to prepare the basis of a report, which is then fed into the analytics. It was the naked eye, rather than an algorithm, that first spotted Brighton’s tendency to always jump at a direct free-kick. This information moved down the chain to Philippe Coutinho, who stroked a free-kick under the wall and into the goal during a victory in December 2017. Increasingly, the clubs that perform best are those that marry up their departments harmoniously. Nobody interviewed for this report suggested data science alone should be used for recruitment. Simon Banoub, Opta’s former head of marketing, told the “Unofficial Partner”: “It is not like it used to be when there was a big brick wall between the two rivals: laptop nerds versus ‘real’ football men.” He joked: “I still have a slight inkling everything leads back to telling people not to shoot from miles out. But it is an artificial row now. The top analysts are brilliant translators. They don’t go heavy on algorithms when talking to coaches: they pull out the insight and take it to the coach or head of recruitment and translate it up the chain. I don’t think there is a cultural problem anymore. Before you had multi-million-pound deals done on an agent’s say-so or instinct, but this adds due diligence to that process. Data analysis and traditional scouting go hand-in-hand.” There are basic reasons for this. Clubs have realised they can save money by minimising scouting expenditure (the world is simply too big for the majority of clubs to cover the globe), and they can reduce risk through sustained analysis. Manchester United are one of the more extreme cases, with scouts positioned in more than 30 countries and 45 extra scouts on the payroll since Sir Alex Ferguson retired in 2013. Yet most clubs need to think differently. They subscribe to a series of websites and applications that specialise in video analysis: Wyscout, Scout7 and InStat are examples of platforms clubs can use to access footage from over 200,000 games across the world. Clubs may then tap into analytics software, such as SciSports or Analytics FC. These two companies are rivals, yet they also regularly speak to share ideas. Analytics FC provide services for clubs competing in the Champions League (who cannot be revealed for confidentiality reasons) in addition to Leeds United, West Ham United and West Bromwich Albion. Analytics FC founder Steele put a call into Leeds’ sporting director Victor Orta before the 2019 January transfer window. He had identified the “star player of the Championship”. Steele recalls: “The best example for us was Daniel James. It was not successful for Leeds as it fell through at the last minute, but he has gone on to star for Manchester United. We recommended him after eight or nine games in the Championship and said he is a player Leeds had to sign immediately. Victor came back to us and was like, ‘Fucking hell, are you sure?’ and we said ‘Yes, 100 per cent’. They moved on it very quickly. Victor trusts data science.” What is it, exactly, that the algorithm had seen? The call came to Leeds before James had terrified Manchester City’s defence during an FA Cup tie for Swansea. Steele says: “Our platform is about predictive analytics. I explain it to CEOs in this way: statistics are historical. They tell you what happened in the past. We want to predict which players will perform well in the future. Our algorithms show information that says if this player continues to do X, the probabilistic outcome is Y. Our algorithm is actually very similar to Liverpool. We have an overarching framework that takes into account every single action. The data could show, ‘A player has the ball on the half-way line, he has a 0.0001% chance of scoring. He plays a long pass into the penalty area and the striker controls the ball. The team has gone from 0.0001 per cent chance to 2 per cent’. Whatever the difference is between the start point chance of scoring and the end point, that will be attributed as an increase in probability to score. Every action within a game will have a positive or negative effect on the chance of scoring.” Steele’s personal background is curious. He started out as a coach at Chelsea, where he trained Mason Mount and Tammy Abraham as teenagers. He later became a scout at Brentford before founding his own data company. On the recommendation of Leeds’ Orta, Steele was appointed as sporting director of three clubs under the same ownership last summer, and he now works for Pafos FC, Riga FC and Rodina Moscow. Thanks to a past in coaching, he is able to blend intuition for the game with numerical modelling. Steele says: “Data is not a silver bullet. It is not suddenly that you take on board analytics and you sign top players every time. But it allows you to gain a competitive advantage by reducing risk. Most clubs use the service as a first filter. With TransferLab on Analytics FC, you can, using one software package, analyse 90 leagues and filter down to whatever criteria you want on the platform. It is one of those where you say: could I do that with a scouting team? Probably not. This gives you worldwide coverage. But, to be clear, this does not mean we should dismiss our knowledge of players and contacts just because we have the potential to scout as many leagues as we want.” In Christoph Biermann’s book “Football Hackers”, he describes the success of Sven Mislintat as a chief scout at Borussia Dortmund, where he was instrumental in the recruitment of Robert Lewandowski, Shinji Kagawa and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang. Dortmund had only 10 scouts, a far smaller pool than most regular Champions League quarter-finalists, yet he regularly recruited more effectively. His success was such that Arsenal paid more than £1 million to secure him as head of recruitment in 2017. Biermann writes that Dortmund tend to be offered 2,500 players per season and as such, there is a need to filter rapidly. Some leading clubs develop their own data banks and algorithms, but many turn to Analytics FC or SciSports. In a hotel lobby in Madrid, a young, mid-twenties German is loitering. He is highly engaging, holds several Masters degrees in economics and management, and is, to put it bluntly, a bloody good seller. He is SciSports’ country manager for Austria, Germany and Switzerland. He is hovering outside an event organised by Transfer Room, an online tool that allows clubs to negotiate transfers directly and minimise the involvement of agents. Aware that more than 150 club representatives are present, Simon Rodder is catching them, one by one, to pitch his own company to some of Europe’s biggest names. We sit down and the laptop comes out. He demonstrates the software; this is “Football Manager” made real. Rodder explains: “We work with more than 50 teams, including Lyon, Ajax and the Belgian national team. I personally work with Basel, Frankfurt, Wolfsburg and Paderborn. “The general manager of Paderborn said a significant proportion of their success is down to SciSports. They hired us in the third league, they barely have a budget, but it is how they outsmarted competitors (they are now in the top flight). Look at their business and there’s a lot of signings from unusual countries. They have a small scouting department and would never be able to identify talent from those places usually.” So, how does it work? “We pool data from, for example, the first six leagues in England, the first four in Germany, the first four in Brazil. We follow every player in a league that is data-tracked. The overarching, simple algorithm is to track the impact of a player’s performance on his team, when he is on the pitch. We work with WyScout to take the video. We process the data to simplify the process for a club. Say, for example, If you want to find a player like Robert Lewandowski, but you are a second-division German team. Our algorithm offers an indicator for current quality but also predictive maximum capability, and a track for the development over the previous six months. “Think of it as a pre-screening of the world to your desk. Then you can visually scout the players who are interesting, rather than flying aimlessly from game to game. Let’s outsmart people using data.” As a trial, I ask him to find some players on his algorithm with a similar profile to Lewandowski. The search is fast and we could have inputted more specific criteria, but the results are intriguing. “Arkadiusz Milik, Kasper Dolberg, Olivier Giroud and Callum Wilson all offer up similar characteristics,” he says, pointing to the screen. Wilson is particularly noticeable. Some in England are surprised that the Bournemouth forward is often linked with Chelsea and Manchester United, but the analytics show him to share skillsets with a rarefied pool of talent. If the idea is to search a database, why would a club not simply use the game Football Manager? SciSport founder Brouwer says some clubs do still use the game. Brewer explains: “A lot of clubs already do this. But the Football Manager and FIFA input comes from amateur scouts filling in what the numbers are. There is also bias because the local scout loves local players too much. We only use objective data.” Rodder adds: “On the game itself, how they do the values, it is not based on real-time data. They have a task force for each league, and then they decide ratings. We have artificial intelligence. We have all information on video recorded at games worldwide. The algorithm has seen it 1,000 times. It means the algorithm learns the situation and inputs fair numerical values.” The similarity model is used at elite level, too. For example, Arsenal signed Lucas Torreira from Sampdoria after searching for players who shared N’Golo Kante’s attributes. Arsenal have their own internal statistics system after they spent £2.1 million on the American data firm StatDNA in December 2012. Biermann explains in his book: “The deal was shrouded in extraordinary secrecy. The firm’s name wasn’t even mentioned in the club’s annual accounts. It only appeared as an acronym: AOH-USA LLC.” Soon, Hendrik Almstadt, officially working in the club’s “football operations”, rose to prominence. He had studied at the London School of Economics, spent three years in investment banking for Goldman Sachs and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School. He told the club’s CEO Ivan Gazidis to “look at a squad like a portfolio, containing 30 assets with different profiles”. Almstadt’s job was to make transfer and wage costs more efficient. He demonstrated how StatDNA would have prevented Arsenal from making costly mistakes on renowned flops Marouane Chamakh and Park Chu-young. Biermann writes: “The numbers showed that Chamakh had a low expected goals rating at Bordeaux, as he had been taking shots from improbable positions. The system’s evaluation also suggested serious technical limitations which led to him not contributing much in open play.” Wenger was persuaded and sanctioned the buyout of StatDNA. At the top level, therefore, we should expect more clubs to develop their in-house modelling. SciSport’s Rodder explains: “There are clubs trying to do it themselves. If you have your own algorithms, it can fit your actual needs. We can define a typical left-back, but RB Leipzig has a very clear idea of what their left-back must do. The really big clubs may say no to us because the amount of players interesting to them is so small, so they just use their eyes. I met with Juventus at this conference in Madrid, and while they invited us to go there, they raised scepticism as to whether it is necessary. They buy players who are ready.” At every level now, clubs appear to be merging instinct with insight. Brouwer says: “Data has proved it can save people money. It is true, also, that computer scientists in the past have maybe enforced an us-against-them mentality. You never win that way. Now we have people building cool projects together, rather than sitting in the basement building great stuff that nobody uses. It needs to be a two-sided game.” Steele is a little more defensive. He says: “Data is still not the lead voice in every recruitment department. It is always funny, at conferences, how one guy always stands up and says the most important thing about data analysis is communication. It happens every time. He will say analysts need to be able to communicate with the football people at the club, whether it is sporting director, manager or CEO. Strangely, that is never flipped on its head. Nobody ever says, ‘Football people need to learn about data and learn quickly’.” The reality of life in football, however, is that those who work with footballers and coaches must adapt to their whims. The job of video analysts is to translate the numerical conclusion of data scientists into language that is accessible to the front of house football team. Stevens explains: “Performance analysts are chameleons. We are the civil servants of football. Everything we do changes based on what a manager wants. Palace go from Sam Allardyce to Frank De Boer to Roy Hodgson, but we remain. “We work in visual aids. We want to show everything as a presentation. Sometimes new managers ask for 80 written pages printed out, but I ask, ‘Why? Will you read it?’ We do some written work, as that is due diligence. But our booklet for the manager pre-game is 13 pages. One is a front cover. Then 12 pages: predicted team line-up and squad information, a page of written information on what the team does in possession, a page on what the team does out of possession, a page of set-pieces, game-management statistics (such as how they respond to going a goal down), a paragraph on every player. That sort of thing.” In the case of Roy Hodgson, the emphasis is on identifying solutions for his players. Stevens continues: “What the gaffer is very good at, is when we say they do X in possession, he will say this is fine, but it needs the story of ‘They do X but we are going to do Y’. Otherwise it is pointless. Similarly, it is easy to identify a weakness, but then you need to show how to exploit the weakness. How will we defend when the ball is with the opponent’s goalkeeper? If we play 4-3-3, are we pressing with the front three high, or are we dropping off? They’ve got a deep midfielder. OK, so is it the No 9’s job to drop in or does a No 8 push up? We will make those recommendations.” If managers are mostly receptive, how do players respond to analysis becoming more prominent? At Arsenal, few players enjoyed Unai Emery’s rigorous video sessions. At Manchester United, players complained during Van Gaal’s reign of drawn-out, often blistering feedback sessions which stripped players of their confidence. Individual players received emails highlighting faults. Towards the end, some players simply deleted the emails without reading. When Van Gaal inserted a technological tracker to see whether players had opened them, the team clocked on, leaving the file open for a period of time while getting on with other things. It is clear, therefore, that any analytic approach also requires good man-management skills. Some Premier League clubs used an app called Pushfor, which is mostly used in legal circles, that includes a feature that could tell the sender whether the client (in this case, the player) had read every page. Allardyce also encouraged his analysis teams at several clubs to show material to players, which was perceived as good fun for the video analysts but could become awkward when players bounced back with their own opinions. Stevens says: “You don’t want players sitting there going, ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’. You want them to say ‘I don’t agree with that’, ‘I don’t understand’, or ‘What happens if I go there?’ You don’t want zombies. If they come back at you, though, it puts analysts in a tough position, because you don’t want to speak out of turn. “We use the Hudl platform now. Everything is online and on the players’ phones. Everything is there pre-match, post-match, their own clips, clips on prospective direct opponents, goalkeepers, set-plays, penalties. We get a record of what players are watching and how long they are watching for. But I don’t think you can force-feed players the information. You know which players want to know more. For others, it is information overload. Some won’t be effective participants in a team meeting, so it might be better to have unit meetings, or an individual meeting. We must adapt to enhance their performance.” As clubs engage in a turf war for the most innovative analysts and scientists, the many annual conferences devoted to analytics focus on the next revelation. “Tracking” data is the buzz phrase on the analytics scene and it refers to the movement of players and monitoring of off-the-ball events. Platforms such as Opta, Statsbomb and Wyscout do an excellent job in telling analysts what happened in possession. This is known as “event” data — events that happen on the ball. Tracking data completes the picture on player movement. Yet what it does not do is provide context of the types of actions to which a player is reacting. As a real-life example, imagine Chelsea midfielder Jorginho is on the ball. We can measure his pass-completion rate or key passes, while we can also measure things such as distance covered and the number of sprints by his team-mates. However, the game-changing challenge is to create a model that shows, in real-time, whether Jorginho missed out on better passing options when he moved the ball on. It may be that a different player is playing a number of line-breaking passes against a high-pressing team that progresses his team up the pitch. Yet currently we cannot distinguish between this pass and a similar pass of length and distance against a team that sits back in a low block (which makes the pass easier to complete) compared to an opponent that presses ferociously. The challenge is to merge the event data and the tracking data and provide new coaches with new models by which to judge their players or potential recruits. Opta’s former marketing man Banoub said: “This is a big wave coming: tracking data introduces filters for things such as decision making, options on the ball and the opportunity cost of decisions. Issues such as bravery on the ball will be editorialised and make its way into the mainstream. As soon as people connect tracking data to event data, that’s when you see the next thing.” This season, the Premier League has provided top-flight clubs with this information, but it is yet to go across Europe and has not been perfect in England. Industry insiders expect that Liverpool’s in-house model and Arsenal’s StatDNA algorithms are developing their own formulas. The combination of data will also provide a greater reflection of a defender’s value. Until recently, we have often heard defenders lauded for the number of tackles they made in a game, yet many within football dismiss this. In his book, Biermann quotes an interview with the former midfielder Xabi Alonso. “If I have to make a tackle, I have already made a mistake,” Alonso said. “At Liverpool I used to read the match-day programme and you’d read an interview with a lad from the youth team. They’d ask: age, heroes, strong points. He’d reply: ‘Shooting and tackling’. I can’t get into my head that football development would educate tackling as a quality, something to learn, to teach, a characteristic of your play. How can that be a way of seeing the game? Tackling is a last resort, and you will need it, but it isn’t a quality to aspire to.” Palace’s Stevens explains: “Defending is not what you do, it is what you don’t do. If I make a tackle, is that good? The old coaching method was always, ‘Don’t make a tackle, stay on your feet and intercept.’ If my positioning is perfect, and that means they never pass to the striker because your positioning is so good it blocks supply to him, that defending is never given any weight or any ‘well done’. This is where tracking data comes in.” Efforts are afoot to bring a product to the mass market. Sportlogiq are said to be closest but there have been examples elsewhere of snake oil approaches, whereby platforms offer services beyond their capabilities. The Athletic previously revealed, for example, that one club wrote off a six-figure sum they had paid to a performance data firm that they discovered, through an independent investigation, to be riddled with errors. At Analytics FC, they offer one way around the issue of analysing defenders, although it remains imperfect. Steele says: “Our model can use tracking data but not across 90 leagues. For a scouting proposition, when we give algorithms to clubs, it is more useful to have consistent breadth across the world. We can incorporate tracking data when it becomes more readily available across more leagues. Our algorithm does measure defending to an extent, whereas 99.9 per cent of models do not. In this sense, we flip the models. For all those times when you are showing the probability of scoring from position X at that time, if the defender makes a block in that situation, then the risk or probability of conceding is attributed to that block. If a defender is tackling or intercepting in high value areas, it shows in his metrics. It is not the number of tackles, it is the probability the opposition had of scoring and how he is preventing them from doing it.” As mathematicians and economists struggle for supremacy, there is a sense that clubs are now financially buying into data science. The COVID-19 pandemic offers a financial threat to data platforms, while some clubs have already put recruitment staff on furlough. Brouwer, the CIO of SciSports, explains: “We signed three new clubs up in the past week, but three other clubs are refusing to pay us. There is no football being played and we help with opponent analysis, so that will decrease for now. The European Championships have been postponed and that is a tough moment for the analytics companies. Everyone will have been building new models to launch during the Euros. We expect to still launch but without the exposure, while the money you get from national teams is substantial. So, yes, there will be a knock-on effect.” Yet the financial outlook for data scientists is optimistic. While some top-flight clubs still offer less than £30,000 as an annual salary, the higher end of the scale is now challenging investment banks and the Big Four consulting firms. Steele says: “Now most clubs are looking for data scientists. It is very similar to the sports science revolution from 15 years ago. We used to have badly paid sports science graduates from Loughborough or Bath University. They would come in, do some gym work and on-pitch stuff and be ignored by coaches. People would say, ‘He’s not doing any harm, so let him get on with it.’ “Now football clubs have 10 members of staff in the sports science department. They have people solely there to put GPS data on players and analyse the results. That has blown up. I am sure the same thing will happen with data science. Most clubs already have a video analyst and many have a guy they put on data. A lot of those are not from a data science background: they are not mathematicians, economists or scientists. But the elite clubs now want physicists, computer engineers and data engineers. High-level people cost money because they would walk into jobs in banking. Look at Will Spearman at Liverpool, a Harvard nuclear physicist, he could ask for whatever he wants because how many people have his qualifications?” Could we see clubs going into leading universities and placing scientists on graduate schemes? Steele says: “It is a fair point. In other departments, they are only in competition with other sporting institutions. Here they are in direct competition with high-level data modelling companies, the government, the Big Four. One thing will always be true: clubs can get those people on a slightly lower wage because it is football. People like to feel involved.” Finkelstein believes his bold outlook from 17 years ago has been vindicated. He concludes: “I had a recent correspondence with Ian at Liverpool and he feels strongly that the work with Henry on Fink Tank was very basic to the growth of analytics in the game. I will take that, thank you very much!”

I miss our adidas kits although these were genius fucking proper Chels

He struggles, and the club struggles, when he plays right-sided MF in the 4 3 3 Lampardesque system, plus he is now looking like he is becoming very injury-prone. That said, I must say, 70m euros (reported selling price, see above posts by others) is shit low, that is only £61m at current FOREX rates. Fucking COVID-19 is going to fuck us on sales (hopefully made up by far cheaper buys)

great news!

Straight Outta Cobham Abramovich To Pounce in Transfer Market + A Tribute To Peter 'The Cat' Bonetti This week, our Chelsea panel are flanked by former winger Clive Walker, as they pay tribute to legendary goalkeeper Peter Bonetti. And Liam reveals why the transfer window (whenever it actually opens) may allow the club to really flex their financial muscles again. https://theathletic.com/podcast/139-straight-outta-cobham/?episode=22

Shevchenko, Chelsea and a dream that turned into a nightmare https://theathletic.com/1741974/2020/04/15/sheva-shevchenko-andriy-chelsea-roman-abramovich/ All these years later and John Obi Mikel still can’t understand it. He has just been asked to reflect on what it was like to play with Andriy Shevchenko, one of the greatest strikers to ever play the game, at Chelsea. “Andriy was a really quiet guy, you couldn’t get a word out of him,” he tells The Athletic. “He was probably the quietest player I have ever played with. His CV was unbelievable at AC Milan. I grew up watching him, so when he joined I was like ‘wow, it’s Sheva!’ We just couldn’t understand why after he arrived, he wasn’t speaking — not on the pitch, not at the training ground or outside of it. It was strange.” There have been many words used to describe Shevchenko’s Chelsea career and few of them are very complimentary. Go to any website that has compiled a list of the worst signings in the club’s history and his name will be somewhere near the top. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When Chelsea broke the British transfer record to buy the Ukrainian for £30.8 million in 2006, it was regarded as a real statement of intent by a side that had won back-to-back Premier League titles. Not only were they looking to continue their dominance of English football, but his arrival would be the final piece required to capture the hitherto elusive Champions League. Instead, Shevchenko’s presence brought a lot of negative scrutiny on the club and was seen as a major factor in the deteriorating relationship between owner Roman Abramovich and Jose Mourinho first time around. This is the story behind one of the most fascinating transfers in English football history. Not for the first time, Mourinho wasn’t happy. His Chelsea side were coasting to a second successive title — they had led the table from the third game of the 2005-06 season — but things weren’t going as well as he would like on the pitch. Barcelona outplayed his men over both legs to knock them out of the Champions League at the last-16 stage. The pursuit of the League Cup and FA Cup had also been ended by Charlton (third round) and Liverpool (semi-final) respectively. He was already thinking of a slight change in style for 2006-07, to use a tactic which he had only used on a few occasions over the two campaigns he’d been at the helm. He wanted another forward to play alongside the growing force that was Didier Drogba. As far as he was concerned, it couldn’t be solved by the options available at the club. Hernan Crespo was still in favour — the Argentine scored 13 goals that year — but he was unsettled and wanted a move back to Serie A. Eidur Gudjohnsen had been a fine contributor since 2000, but the relationship between coach and forward was not what it was. He was sold to Barcelona at the end of the season, while academy graduate Carlton Cole was also deemed surplus to requirements and offloaded to West Ham. So Mourinho prepared a list of possible targets. “There were five names,” a Chelsea insider from the time explains to The Athletic. “There were big names on there. Barcelona’s Samuel Eto’o was one of them. “The last on the list was Shevchenko. Was he on it for political reasons? I believe so, yes. He knew that of all the players Abramovich wanted to bring to Chelsea, Shevchenko was the one he wanted most.” On May 31, 2006, the news was confirmed that Shevchenko had signed a four-year contract worth £115,000-a-week. Publicly at least, Mourinho couldn’t have sounded more thrilled. “Today is a day when the dream became reality,” he said. “Andriy has always been my first choice for Chelsea since I arrived. He has great qualities, ambition, discipline and tactical awareness. And, of course, he is a great goalscorer.” But instead of finding the solution to his problems, Mourinho’s problems were only just beginning. Out of all the global megastars, there was one man Abramovich craved from the moment he bought Chelsea in 2003. Having scored AC Milan’s decisive penalty to beat Juventus in the 2003 Champions League final, Shevchenko was the talk of Europe. That summer, Abramovich travelled to Milan, supposedly to talk with Inter Milan about the possibility of signing some of their talent. Coincidentally, a meeting set up at the luxurious Four Seasons Hotel to discuss such matters was the same venue Shevchenko had arranged to see an associate of his own. On spotting the striker, Abramovich didn’t hesitate to make the most of the opportunity. “I happened to have an appointment there at the same time with another person, who introduced me to Roman,” Shevchenko told The Guardian. “Straight away he asked me whether I’d like to come to Chelsea, but I told him absolutely not, because I was happy at AC Milan. We’d just won the Champions League. I spoke to him for another five minutes and that was it.” If Shevchenko thought that was the end of the matter, he severely underestimated Chelsea’s new wealthy benefactor. In May the following year, Abramovich and chief executive Peter Kenyon held discussions with AC Milan’s vice-president Adriano Galliani. As much as the two parties tried to dismiss the significance of the encounter, it was pretty obvious what the subject had been. However, Shevchenko, who helped his side win Serie A with an impressive 24 goals in 32 matches in 2004 — a feat which was acknowledged with the Ballon d’Or — once again stayed put. There had already been suggestions that Abramovich and Shevchenko were on friendly terms and conversing on a regular basis by the time Milan were preparing for another Champions League final in 2005. Shevchenko certainly wasn’t afraid to talk positively about a man whose wealth was perceived in many corridors of power as having a negative impact on the game. Speaking before the match against Liverpool — which would turn into a nightmare for Shevchenko, as he failed to score the final penalty in a shootout defeat — he said: “I really appreciate everything about Roman: his seriousness, his hard work, what he’s trying to create at Chelsea, and his way of going about it. He has earned an enormous amount of my respect. Although I wouldn’t presume to call us good friends, we talk quite a bit. There has been too much talk about Roman, his money and what he’s going to do with it. He’s too smart to toss the whole team out the window every summer to buy new players.” A few months later, they were spotted talking together on the pitch ahead of Chelsea’s pre-season friendly against AC Milan in Boston in 2005. A transfer seemed only a matter of when, not if, despite AC Milan’s efforts to keep him. It still took a third party to make the difference. Shevchenko had a contract at the San Siro lasting until 2009 and would take a lot of convincing to leave a club he had come to adore since joining from Dynamo Kiev in 1999. Step forward Kristen Pazik, his wife. She was forming a bond with Abramovich’s then-wife Irina and went shopping with her in London just before Christmas. Perhaps more significantly, Shevchenko and Pazik were thinking about taking a new step for their family. Jordan, their son, was still an infant and a second child, Christian, was on the way. They wanted their children to grow up speaking English, and London provided easy gateways to the couple’s respective homelands — Ukraine for Shevchenko, America for Pazik. As one source put it: “The decision was a social and personal one rather than a football one.” Chelsea were prepared to match the wage package Milan were paying him and, despite the desperate attempts of Galliani to change his mind, Shevchenko made it clear he wanted a switch to west London. That just left the thorny issue of a transfer fee. AC Milan made Chelsea pay the sixth-highest fee in the history of the game, a consolation of sorts given Shevchenko’s 30th birthday was approaching. Yet it still hurt. “It’s a victory of the English language over the Italian language,” Galliani said. “I tried to persuade him to stay, right up until the last minute. It is certainly the most painful separation during my time at Milan.” The Italian club’s president Silvio Berlusconi took the news even worse. Seven months after the departure, Berlusconi hit out furiously at Shevchenko and his wife. “A true Milanista and a real man would not have behaved like this,” he said. “At my home, I’m in charge and decide what happens. Shevchenko instead, when his wife shouts, runs under the bed like a lap dog. His wife ordered him to London with their children where the fog will do their lungs the world of good. That’s how it finished.” So just how involved had Mourinho, who replaced Claudio Ranieri as head coach in 2004, been in the targeting and recruitment of this very lucrative acquisition? It was a question put to Kenyon during an appearance on BBC Radio 5 Live in January 2007. He replied nervously: “Er, it was, er, the discussion first took place, er, even before he’d (Mourinho) joined us in terms of when we were looking at the squad. And those conversations took place each year until last season when we managed to get him.” Pressed on whether it was an idea from Mourinho or Abramovich, he added: “It was an idea about, er, you know, we need a striker. Who are the best strikers in the world? And if I asked you, you would have put Shevchenko’s name on there as well.” However, within two years, few clubs would have Shevchenko on their wish list. Little did Abramovich or Mourinho know, but Shevchenko’s Chelsea career was probably doomed to failure before he’d even put pen to paper on his Chelsea deal. Just over three weeks earlier, he suffered a painful knee injury during a Serie A game against Parma. There would be no chance to spend the summer making a full recovery: as Ukraine captain, he had the pressure of leading them into their very first World Cup. He found the net twice (the third in a 4-0 win over Saudi Arabia and a penalty against Tunisia), but struggled to meet his usual high standards, despite Ukraine’s impressive run to the quarter-finals. That lack of sharpness was obvious from the outset at Chelsea, although a debut goal in the Community Shield against Liverpool showed his ability to make clever runs off the ball and finish clinically was still there. Another goal soon followed in a 2-1 Premier League defeat at Middlesbrough, but it would take another two months before he troubled the scoresheet again. This was a far cry from the man who had found the net 173 times in 296 matches for AC Milan. Abramovich couldn’t have made him feel more welcome, organising accommodation in London while the family looked for a permanent home. He was a guest at the Cocoon restaurant in Mayfair to celebrate Shevchenko’s 30th birthday, with team-mates, including John Terry, Frank Lampard and Michael Ballack, also in attendance. But this would prove to be a rare night out with members of the squad. “We enjoyed ourselves at Chelsea,” Mikel reveals to The Athletic. “We worked so hard, we were winning games and trophies, so we would make the most of it socially, too. Not that the press could always see it… “I don’t remember seeing Sheva at too many of our get-togethers, though. He didn’t go out with the players too much. Family appeared to be the priority. I don’t know whether he didn’t mix too much at first because he couldn’t speak English, but he just didn’t say a word.” Player liaison officer Gary Staker can count as one of his closest friends thanks to a shared ability to speak Italian. Back-up keeper Carlo Cudicini was another. Later on, Branislav Ivanovic would be another, since they both spoke Russian. A run of three goals in as many outings, all as part of a strike duo with Drogba, provided some encouragement. A partnership seemed to be forming, especially during a 4-0 home win over Watford when the Ivory Coast international celebrated a hat-trick and played in Shevchenko for the other. By January 2007, though, their rapport was in decline. Drogba wasn’t happy with what he was seeing: “On Shevchenko’s side I don’t see any desire to collaborate,” he said. “I think that, as a big signing, he believes he is obliged to justify his transfer fee with goals at any cost. I love to share but, when I give, I appreciate it when I get something back. Everyone would have something to gain if we really worked together. I have tried to understand his position and get an explanation. I’ve never been afraid of competition and do not see him as a threat. I understand it is a really difficult situation for him to handle. But you have to think of the team first.” In some ways, Drogba was part of the problem, according to Mikel. He explains: “Didier always loved the challenge, the bigger the game or the harder the competition for a place became, he liked to prove himself. That’s what happened when Sheva arrived, he tried to take his performance to another level to make sure he was the main man. “But I saw him in training trying to help Sheva. When training was done, they’d do shooting practice together. Lampard too. They always encouraged people to join them.” With one tremendous swipe of his left foot, Shevchenko silenced the home supporters at White Hart Lane and gave a reminder of the quality for which he had been renowned. Many Chelsea fans who attended the 2-1 FA Cup quarter-final replay win in March 2007 would go away thinking that goal alone was worth the sizeable transfer fee. Those in the Chelsea dressing room were excited, too. “We all thought that this is the Shevchenko we were expecting all along,” Mikel continues. “It was an amazing shot. We thought it was the start of something, that he’d kick on from there. This will be the turnaround, he is coming back. But it never really happened. It was not the career he had at AC Milan. “It’s not like he didn’t score goals. Chelsea tried to bring his explosiveness back. Everyone tried to help him. But I just think he didn’t come at the right time. He was just about to turn 30, which as we all know, you start to lose a little bit at that age.” Reports in the English media were rife about how Shevchenko’s failure to perform was putting Mourinho and Abramovich at loggerheads. Chelsea’s manager wasn’t afraid to leave the front man out on a regular basis and significantly didn’t name him at a press conference as one of eight “untouchables” in the first XI. As if the bad performances weren’t enough, one source describes the Portuguese as always being “unnerved by players having a close relationship with Abramovich”. Not that Mikel witnessed anything untoward. “Yes, there were stories, but I never saw anything myself,” he says. “Sometimes Mourinho and Shevchenko were speaking and on good terms. I didn’t see much to suggest there were bad times between them. Maybe they did it privately. I didn’t see them having any beef. What we could see at training was Mourinho trying to help him to be better and Sheva was a good listener. “He was such a disciplined guy. He got his head down and worked hard. Obviously coming from AC Milan, his work ethic was tremendous. He’d be early for training, trained hard. Never complained, never said anything bad to anybody, didn’t gossip about another player. “He wasn’t miserable or grumpy. If he didn’t play at the weekend, he’d come in the next day and train really well. He was a great professional. Watching how he coped was a great lesson for me at a young age. When you’re 20 years old and see those big players — they all have massive egos — you have to choose who is your role model. Most of them were really professional, they understood the team wasn’t just about one person. I learnt a lot from them, Sheva included.” After starting the League Cup final win over Arsenal, injury denied Shevchenko the chance to play in the first FA Cup final to be staged at the newly refurbished Wembley, where Drogba’s neat touch provided victory over Manchester United. He also sat out the second leg of the Champions League semi-final loss to Liverpool and the title run-in, which saw Manchester United take Chelsea’s crown. The summer briefly brought suggestions of a thawing of tension between Mourinho and Abramovich, even though the former had wanted a bigger name than free signing Claudio Pizarro to improve the attack and put more pressure on Shevchenko. But it didn’t last. Former British Olympic sprinter Darren Campbell was brought in to work with Shevchenko to improve his sharpness. Abramovich was prepared to try anything to help him succeed, although it clearly wasn’t an appointment Mourinho felt was necessary. Shevchenko was still not mingling with the group that often. Having moved to Wentworth in Surrey, where his house backed onto the famous golf course, another sport was competing for his affections. “He had his golf clothes on every day,” midfielder Steve Sidwell tells The Athletic. “By the time I’d come in from training, he’d already have his golf gear on and was ready to play at Wentworth. “I’m not saying Sheva was an absolute loner. It wasn’t like Chelsea was second to his family or golf, either. When he trained, he trained hard. When I was in his company, he always had time for me and was really good.” Mourinho was sacked following a 1-1 draw at home to Rosenborg a month into the new season — Shevchenko coincidentally scoring Chelsea’s goal — and Campbell was employed a lot more regularly. Sidwell saw it as a sign of Shevchenko’s determination to come good. At the time, Campbell said: “Under the Mourinho regime, Shevchenko was not allowed to do things that he was allowed to do when he was at Milan — he had a sprint coach there and he worked with him. I aim to condition him and it seems to be working. It is all about those first 30 yards, sprinting more efficiently. He has told me he feels fitter and sharper.” But the rest of that second season was more of the same, even with Abramovich’s close confidant Avram Grant now in charge. Again, there were flashes, but even a fine brace against Aston Villa in December was diminished when he suffered a painful back injury in the same game. He struggled for months to recover. An operation was required on a hernia, too. By the summer of 2008, he was telling Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that his level of fitness was “40 per cent, at most”. As far as he was concerned, enough was enough and he wanted out of Chelsea. The club had already begun to move on by buying Nicolas Anelka from Bolton for £15 million at the start of the year, and his rapport with Drogba was far more effective. Such was Shevchenko’s demise there was little interest, especially with his salary to cover. AC Milan came to the rescue, but only on loan and Chelsea had to pay a portion of his wages. A year later, he was allowed to join Dynamo Kiev for nothing. It will not come as a surprise to learn who made such a smooth escape possible. “Abramovich got it immediately,” Shevchenko said. “I explained my reasons clearly to him. He understood it had nothing to do with the club, my team-mates or the coach, and that the only way for me to get back to a certain level was at Milan.” Instead of making the difference at Chelsea as planned, Shevchenko left with a record of just 22 goals in 77 appearances. The League Cup final in 2007 was the only final he played. Despite everything, Shevchenko’s current connection with Chelsea is as strong as it ever has been. Far from being horrified at the sight of Stamford Bridge, he has continued to attend games on a fairly regular basis. The friendship with Abramovich endures: when he hasn’t been sitting as a guest in the owner’s box at the stadium, he has been spotted in the one Chelsea director Marina Granovskaia occupies. He is now forging a reputation as a fine coach. Ukraine have employed Shevchenko as their manager since 2016 and he has earned a lot of plaudits for leading them to the European Championship, which will now take place in 2021. But the 43-year-old still counts Wentworth as his home and confirmed last December that his second son Kristian, now 13, is a member of Chelsea’s academy. Clearly there are no hard feelings to his old employers and he is far more confident speaking English. In fact, such is the strength of connection, an insider feels he could be a contender to become manager of Chelsea one day. Earlier this month, the match analyst for the Ukraine side, Andrea Maldera, claimed Shevchenko will be looking to manage in Serie A or the Premier League in the future. Shevchenko may not have made his mark as a player at Chelsea, but perhaps a happier chapter in the tale is still to be written.

Major problem with this. I rate Declan Rice as being (down the road, hopefully sooner than later) moving back to CB for both his club and also for England. I think he has a brilliant future there, was already a Chels lad at one point, and can play both DMF and CB. Ampadu is till massively unproven at either position. I think Rice has the potential to be a player similar to John Terry (NOT saying he will be THAT good, no one has been in EPL history with the possible exception at times of Rio Ferdinand, and I still would take Terry over Rio). My dream CB combo in 2 or so years would be Rice and then Çağlar Söyüncü or Dayot Upamecano or Ibrahima Konaté or possibly Gabriel Magalhães

Only pen he ever missed (49 career attempts) a bit late with the post, lolol

Steve Sidwell: ‘Mourinho told me I’d wear No 9 – I wasn’t sure if he was joking’ https://theathletic.com/1732297/2020/04/14/steve-sidwell-mourinho-chelsea/ Steve Sidwell had just climbed into his car after finishing training at Reading when he received a call from his then agent Eric Walters. “Are you sitting down?” asked Walters. “You need to be for this.” For a terrifying moment, Sidwell thought he was about to hear some awful news about a family member or friend. Those fears quickly gave way to pure disbelief. “I’ve had Peter Kenyon on the phone — Chelsea are asking about signing you,” Walters added. The midfielder thought it was too good to be true. “I was a Chelsea fan, my family were all Chelsea fans and we lived in the area. I thought he was taking the piss,” Sidwell tells The Athletic. It was just the start of a year Sidwell will never forget. The year is 2007 and Sidwell is coming to the end of his contract at Reading, who were on course to finish a remarkable eighth in the club’s first ever season in the top flight. He’d already decided to leave for pastures new on a free transfer and every side in the Premier League bar Manchester United, Tottenham Hotspur and Liverpool had declared an interest at one stage or another. West Ham United offered considerably more than Chelsea’s £50,000-a-week package, as did Reading when they made a late bid to retain the former Arsenal academy player. But once Sidwell realised a switch to Stamford Bridge was a genuine possibility, there was only one place he wanted to be. To say the move took the football world by surprise is an understatement. Chelsea had developed a reputation for spending fortunes on some of the game’s biggest names, while one of the greatest managers, Jose Mourinho, was at the wheel and in his pomp. Competition for places was fierce. Mourinho already had Frank Lampard, Claude Makelele, Mikel John Obi, Michael Essien and Michael Ballack to choose from in midfield, although the latter missed a chunk of 2007 with an ankle injury. An initial telephone conversation, followed by a clandestine meeting at Mourinho’s house, eased any doubts. “I was taken into his living room and just sat there for 15-20 minutes,” Sidwell reveals. “Nobody came in. I could hear his wife cooking in the kitchen and his kids were playing somewhere. His little dog was running in and out. I didn’t know what to do, I wasn’t sure if they knew I was there. I didn’t want to scare anyone. He then came down the stairs in slippers, jeans and a casual t-shirt. I could hear him saying to someone, ‘WHAT? He’s here already?!’ “He came into the room and was all apologetic. We ended up talking football for hours. He gave me a book and it had Chelsea 2007-08 on the cover — you have to remember this was at the back end of the previous season. It literally had a plan of what was going to happen day-to-day regarding training, recovery days and so on, all mapped out for the following campaign. “Jose said I would get game time. He had watched me a lot and liked what I’d been doing for Reading. He wanted to add to the British core and felt I would respond well to the competition. “He asked me, ‘What do you want from football?’ And I explained medals first and foremost, but also for my family to be secure. He said, ‘Well you must sign for Chelsea because if you play you will win stuff and if you don’t, you can get a pay-off and go somewhere else. It’s a win-win situation.’ So I signed.” Sidwell didn’t have too long to wait before Mourinho shocked him again. On the very first day, as the team headed to the airport to depart on a pre-season tour of the USA, the manager made an announcement as he boarded the coach. He explains: “Mourinho was sitting there at the front and he says, ‘Steve, you’re going to wear No 9 this year.’ “Every player who joins a new club looks at the numbers available and I’d seen the numbers 9, 14 and others that went upwards from there. I just assumed I may get the No 14 at a push. “I didn’t know whether he was just testing me. If I said, ‘No thanks’ it would look like I had a weakness in my mentality. If I say ‘Yes’, it may have been that he was only joking. But I thought at least I’d then show him I had the balls to wear it. So I said ‘Yes’ and it turned out he was being serious. “When I told people, my mates and family, everyone was just laughing. Obviously the number has a lot of history relating to top centre-forwards and that wasn’t me. I went on to score one goal for Chelsea. Sidwell celebrates his only Chelsea goal – away at Hull (Photo: Anna Gowthorpe via Getty Images) “Looking back on why he may have made that decision now, I think he was sending a statement upstairs, to the board. That summer he had wanted more money to spend on transfers — but he’s brought in me, Tal Ben Haim and Claudio Pizarro on free transfers. The only big buy was Florent Malouda. Why didn’t he give Pizarro — a striker — the No 9? I reckon he was making a point by giving it to a free transfer from Reading.” There were other things on Sidwell’s mind though as the squad departed for America. Seeing so many of the men he had idolised on a professional and personal basis meant he had to be careful when deciding who to sit next to on the long flight to Los Angeles. “I was so nervous,” he admits. “They were superstars in my eyes — what was I going to say to them for the next 10-11 hours? So I decided to sit next to the kitman.” Training was an instant reality check, too. “It was like a computer game,” Sidwell adds. “The passing was so crisp, on the floor, first time, ping, ping, ping. It was like someone was playing FIFA. It struck me how this was the elite and I needed to buck my ideas up.” While his new team-mates made an effort to make Sidwell feel welcome, there was one topic of conversation which dominated their opening exchanges. Just nine months earlier, Sidwell had played for Reading against Chelsea in what proved a very controversial fixture. Petr Cech suffered a fractured skull following a challenge from Stephen Hunt and the goalkeeper’s replacement, Carlo Cudicini, was himself knocked out after colliding with Ibrahima Sonko. “It was still fresh in everyone’s minds,” Sidwell recalls. “They were asking, ‘Did Hunt mean it? He could have jumped over his head.’ “But I just told them about the way Stephen was as a player, the way he acted afterwards and so on. It was an accident in my opinion. Whether or not they believed me, I don’t know. “Petr asked me about it too. He was a clever and nice guy, he accepted it was just one of those things. He felt Stephen could have got out of the way, but concluded, ‘If he says he didn’t mean it, I believe him.’ That’s the kind of guy he is. “A lot of them actually said the one with Carlo was worse — but that was just a freak accident too as far as I was concerned.” It wasn’t long before Sidwell got to experience Mourinho’s man-management skills first hand. He made a point of giving Sidwell 10 days’ notice before his first start at Stamford Bridge against Blackburn Rovers to help him prepare and as a reward for training well. There were other examples too. He continues: “During the summer holidays, Mourinho said, ‘Tomorrow we train as normal but I want you to bring all your kids in so your partner can have a break.’ So the staff that helped players with various things were put in charge of around 30-40 kids and they had a great time. We could hear them laughing as we trained. It was a special touch but also showed how clever Jose was because it got the wives and partners onside too.” However, on September 20, 2007, Mourinho and Chelsea parted ways. This was a much bigger story than the second sacking around eight years later when the team were sitting just one point above the relegation zone a week before Christmas. There had been rumblings of discontent between Mourinho and the hierarchy since the start of the year and a dour 1-1 draw with Champions League minnows Rosenborg meant they had gone three games without a win. Yet this was a man who had delivered five major trophies since taking over in 2004 and Chelsea were sitting in fifth in the Premier League, just a couple of points behind leaders Arsenal. Sidwell didn’t see it coming. “I never felt that tension or thought he was in trouble,” he says. “There were a few games before, you could see things in the press and it really bubbled up. But you didn’t feel it on the inside. The players were all united, no one was turning against him, he hadn’t lost the dressing room. “The day he went, I was driving my wife to the airport and the news came on the radio. I just thought, ‘Shit, he’s gone. What’s going to happen?’ We were then all called into a meeting at Cobham. “It was awkward when Jose came to say his goodbyes. You could have heard a pin drop. It felt like someone had died. When you see strong characters like Didier Drogba, Frank Lampard and John Terry either crying on the floor or certainly welling up… I got upset as well. It was really weird. “I called him later in the day to thank him for bringing me to Chelsea and to express regret that we didn’t work together for longer. He told me he had no doubts I would go on to have a great career, which was nice of him. Every time I’ve seen him since then, through football or socially, he’s been top drawer.” Avram Grant, who had joined as director of football that summer, was named the new head coach, yet Sidwell claims it was the senior players, along with assistant coach Steve Clarke, who ensured the squad were in a position to still compete for major trophies. Avoiding the ire of owner Roman Abramovich was another incentive. “I saw Roman a number of times,” says Sidwell. “He used to come into the dressing room a lot after home games. He would come into the training ground too but that was usually not on good terms. He was a very shy and timid character, very humble. But after Jose you knew he pulled no punches when it came to big decisions. “I remember after one game he came down to Cobham and said, ‘This is unacceptable. The run of form, the players we have, is not good enough for Chelsea. We are here to win things and if this carries on, we won’t.’ He said it in a calm voice, but when you looked into his eyes, you knew he meant business.” As Chelsea’s challenge for major silverware stepped up in the latter months, Sidwell was no longer selected. The last of his 25 appearances — he was never on the losing side for the club — came in a February FA Cup tie against Huddersfield Town. It meant he had to sit and watch as Chelsea lost the League Cup final to Tottenham, were knocked out of the FA Cup away to Championship side Barnsley, and fell short by just two points in a title race with Manchester United. Of course Chelsea had a chance to avenge that last disappointment a couple of weeks later when they faced United in the Champions League final. Sidwell travelled to Moscow with the group even though he was no longer eligible to play — Chelsea had removed his name from the squad registered with UEFA in February, a fit-again Ballack taking his place for the knockout phase. Chelsea booked out the top floor of their Moscow hotel for a possible post-match party. But Terry’s infamous slip in the penalty shootout ended hopes of that, although it is often forgotten that Nicolas Anelka’s effort being saved by Edwin van der Sar was the moment when the trophy was actually lost. “I remember watching United celebrate in the pouring rain while wearing a suit, it was gutting,” Sidwell says. “Due to my circumstances, I was there more as a fan, really. “Everyone had gone up to John after the match and in the dressing room to console him. John was gutted. You could see it in his eyes. Everyone had said their piece earlier and there wasn’t much more you could say to him that night. “Obviously there was no dancing. There were just people in their own little groups and people just dwindled off to bed. It was a relatively early night. The flight home was really quiet, it was horrible.” That was Sidwell’s last outing of any kind with the club he adored. Luiz Felipe Scolari took over from Grant that summer and soon signed another midfielder in Deco. Aston Villa came calling for Sidwell and a £5 million transfer was agreed. Despite not making the impact he would have wanted, he still reflects fondly on his spell at Stamford Bridge. “I grew up as a person, and learned to be even more professional,” he concludes. “On the wall in my office I have the shirt I wore on my Chelsea debut in the Community Shield, signed by all the players. No one can take that away from me. Did I get the pay-off Mourinho talked about a year earlier? It was enough to pay the bills!”

Pirlo's SIX major years after we refused to sign him The first 2 are with AC Milan 48 assists as well, the majority with Juve, including 25 in 2 seasons (2011-2013) Honours in that period Juventus Serie A: 2011–12, 2012–13, 2013–14, 2014–15 Coppa Italia: 2014–15 Supercoppa Italiana: 2012, 2013 Italy UEFA European Championship runner-up: 2012 FIFA Confederations Cup third place: 2013 Individual FFHS World's Best Playmaker: 4th place 2012, 3rd place 2013, 3rd place 2015 FIFA FIFPro World XI 3rd team: 2013, 2014 Ballon d'Or: 2012 (7th place) ESM Team of the Year: 2011–12 Pallone d'Argento: 2011–12 Pallone Azzurro: 2012 Guerin d'Oro: 2012 UEFA European Championship Teams of the Tournament: 2012 UEFA Best Player in Europe Award: 2012 (4th place), 2015 (7th place) UEFA Team of the Year: 2012 2011–12 Serie A Top Assist Provider Serie A Team of the Year: 2011–12, 2012–13, 2013–14,2014–15 Serie A Midfielder of the Year: 2012 Serie A Footballer of the Year: 2012, 2013, 2014 Premio Nazionale Carriera Esemplare "Gaetano Scirea": 2013 FIFA Confederations Cup Team of the Tournament: 2013 FIFA Confederations Cup Castrol Index Top XI: 2013 UEFA Europa League Team of the Season: 2013–14 UEFA Champions League Team of the Season: 2014–15

CIES Football Observatory n°291 - 13/04/2020 Demography Best stepping-stone clubs: Ajax ahead of Benfica https://football-observatory.com/IMG/sites/b5wp/2019/wp291/en/ The 291st Weekly Post of the CIES Football Observatory highlights the main clubs from where current big-5 league players departed to reach the five major European leagues. At the top of the stepping-stone club rankings are three regular European Cup participants: AFC Ajax (22 players currently in the big-5 were recruited there), SL Benfica (21) and RB Salzburg (20). In the top 15 positions also are three Belgian teams (KRC Genk, RSC Anderlecht and Club Brugge KV), two further Portuguese clubs (Sporting Clube de Portugal and FC Porto), an additional Dutch one (PSV Eindhoven), as well Swiss (FC Basel), Croatian (Dinamo Zagreb) and Danish (FC København) sides. The B-teams of Real Madrid (4th) and FC Barcelona (11th) also figure high in the rankings. The first non-European team is Boca Juniors (15th). The 54th edition of the CIES Football Observatory Monthly Report broadens the analysis by revealing that recruitment from a non-big-5 league team is the most common way of entering the five major European leagues (48%), followed by advancement from the youth academy or the B-team of a big-5 league club (39%, up to 50% for players who made their debut in the Spanish Liga) and the promotion from a second division of the club of belonging (13%). Stepping-stone clubs ranking Big-5 league players, March 2020 snip

‘13 years down the drain. Just like that’ — The Premier League’s forgotten kids https://theathletic.com/1721538/2020/04/12/premier-league-manchester-united-city-academy-released/ (Main photo: the United U18 squad in July 2014. Back row (L-R): Scott McTominay, James Dunne, Cameron Borthwick-Jackson, Devonte Redmond, Charlie Scott. Middle row (L-R): Marcus Rashford, Ruairi Croskery, George Dorrington, Dean Henderson, Oliver Byrne, Jordan Thompson, Tyler Reid. Front row (L-R): Travis Johnson, Oliver Rathbone, Demitri Mitchell, Axel Tuanzebe, Joe Riley, Tosin Kehinde. Photo: John Peters/Manchester United via Getty Images) Devonte Redmond will never forget the day he found out he was no longer a Manchester United player. He was on holiday. It was the summer of 2018, Jose Mourinho’s final year at the club, and Redmond had headed to the beach on the Greek island of Kos. “I looked at my phone,” he tells The Athletic. “All of a sudden I’d got loads of notifications on Twitter. ‘All the best’ — lots of messages like that. It was really strange. But then I saw the reason why all these messages were being sent. There was a list of all the lads that United had let go. It had been posted on Twitter and it was the official ‘retained and released’ list. And that was how I found out.” How do you even begin to understand the shattering effects that had on a young footballer who had known virtually nothing but the United system? Redmond was eight when he joined United’s junior ranks. He stayed with the club until the age of 21 and, though he has had nearly two years to come to terms with the rejection, there are still times when it is unmistakable sadness in his voice. Even now, with a sense of order returning to his life, it is a difficult subject. All those dreams, all those aspirations. “Thirteen years,” he says at one point, “all down the drain, just like that.” It certainly hasn’t been easy to adjust since that day in the Mediterranean sunshine when Redmond found out United had submitted their released list to the Premier League. “I tried not to panic at first,” he says. “I rang my dad and it was the first he had heard about it, too. ‘It’s obviously not been done in the right way,’ he said. ‘Try to keep your head.’ He’s quite a calming person, so I listened to him. I don’t think it sunk in straight away. It was later, probably after a couple of weeks, that I started to panic.” It helped that his father, Paul Edwards, was an ex-pro who knew and understood the sport. Edwards made nearly 350 career appearances, including spells at Wrexham, Blackpool, Oldham Athletic and Port Vale, and could pass on his knowledge from nearly 20 years in the game. But it still did not prepare Redmond for what it was like, mentally, to cope with the rejection and the long months when life felt empty and directionless. Redmond was in the same youth team as Marcus Rashford and regarded as one of the more talented players from a crop that included Scott McTominay, Timothy Fosu-Mensah and Axel Tuanzebe. Only one, however, had found out via Twitter that he was being cut free and Redmond was so wounded by the experience that, to begin with, it was an ordeal even to watch United games on TV. The United team before a UEFA Youth League match against Wolfsburg in 2015. Back row L-R: Ro-Shaun Williams, Devonte Redmond, Matthew Willock, Marcus Rashford, George Dorrington, Ethan Hamilton, Timothy Fosu-Mensah. Front row L-R: Tyrell Warren, Callum Gribbin, Tosin Kehinde, Axel Tuanzebe (Photo: John Peters/Manchester United via Getty Images) He can remember feeling lost without the daily routine of training, the camaraderie of the dressing room and the emotions of a match-day. Then there was the sudden realisation that he had no real life experience other than being inside “the bubble” of a Premier League club. “I’d come from a background where football was everything,” he says. “It was everything to me when I was growing up. I was always the most enthusiastic player. I loved it. And then I was no longer part of it. “It would always hit me when United were on television. I found it hard to watch, especially because a few of the lads from my age group were starting to break through. There was a period at the start when I used to think that could have been me, or maybe that should have been me. I was hurt.” On some days, even the people who were closest to him found it difficult to find the right words. “Every day I was trying to stay fit, doing runs and playing football with friends. Then I’d go home. Everyone always asked how training was, but you could feel they were a bit edgy around me. They didn’t really know what to say to make it any better.” He, in turn, did not want to show his family how much it had affected him. So he told them he was OK and that he was sure everything would work out. He did not always know if that was true, but he said it anyway. But the longer it went, the harder it became. The weeks turned into months. Christmas came and went. “I remember going out in my car one day,” he says. “I said to my mum I was going for a drive. ‘I don’t know where,’ I said. I just wanted to drive. I set off and, all of a sudden, I found myself crying. “It was one of the first times I’d had an outpouring of emotion like that for years. I’d been bottling everything up for so long. I’d been trying to put a brave face on everything because I’d never been in a situation like that before. I’d always been looked upon as being one of the better players in my age group. So it was hard. James Weir, Devonte Redmond and their United team-mates, including Dean Henderson, back row centre, celebrate with the Under-21 Premier League trophy before the Premier League home match against Bournemouth in 2016 (Photo: Alex Livesey/Getty Images) “Then there comes a point when you haven’t had a team for a few months and you have to think, ‘Right, what do I do now? What’s my purpose in life now?’ And that’s when you start thinking negative things. ‘I’ve got no purpose now. Are my family still proud of me?’ “When it gets to Saturday, it hits you again. You say, ‘Good luck for the match’ to your friends. But then it hits you: ‘I’m not playing, I’m not doing anything.’ My mum would always tell me that something would happen. But the phone wasn’t ringing. There was nothing going on. I had thought the transition would be easy. My dad kept telling me, ‘Don’t think it will be easy.’ But in my head, I thought it would be easy. Then after a while I started to realise, ‘Wow, this is hard.’” What he realises now is that it hit him harder than he ever let on. Redmond spent his first post-United pre-season at third-tier Shrewsbury Town. He trained with Dijon of Ligue 1. He knows what it is like to go on trial and be seen as ‘The lad from United who didn’t make it.’ He came to realise how, in terms of perception, that wasn’t always a good thing. He would also find out that the skills he developed on United’s training pitches did not necessarily suit lower-league football. “If you have come through the academies at United, Man City or Liverpool, you are trained a certain way. It isn’t about long balls, or being a battering-ram up front, or running the channels. I’m not saying you can’t adapt. But a lot of managers lower down don’t have time for academy players.” This was around the time in autumn 2018 when McTominay was establishing himself in United’s midfield. Redmond had played alongside McTominay for years and was once considered the better prospect. Now, though, they were heading in completely opposite directions. As McTominay became a Mourinho favourite, Redmond was straying dangerously close to becoming another of football’s statistics — chewed up and spat out, with nowhere left to go. “I had to start thinking if there was anything else I could do,” he says. “I knew that if it got past January I might be struggling because if you go a year out of the game, how do you get back in? “I’d done business studies at college. Maybe I could have been a personal trainer or something to do with sport. I didn’t really know what I was going to do.” It is a hard industry sometimes. When Manchester United sent their list including Redmond to the Premier League, showing the eight players who had been released from Old Trafford, it also included Charlie Scott, one of their young midfielders. Scott had established himself as a regular in United’s under-23s and, according to his profile on the club’s website, was “commanding but composed in possession” with the “attributes to become a valuable asset”. Redmond was the year above and thought his younger colleague had a long career ahead of him. Scott, he says, was a “really good player technically”. Yet there is a misconception sometimes that when a player is dropped by an elite club there will always be another one, not too far down, who will break their fall. Scott is 22 now and has moved home to Staffordshire. He plays for Newcastle Town, who were fourth-bottom of the Northern Premier League’s south-east division when their season was aborted after the coronavirus pandemic forced football to hit the pause button. Otherwise, he has been working on building sites in and around Stoke-on-Trent. “He does a bit of coaching, too, and we’re very happy to have him,” Ray Tatton, Newcastle’s club secretary, tells The Athletic. “We’re his local club. He lives so close he can walk to games.” Michael Carrick was also on that United released list from June 2018, at the end of his 19-year playing career. The others, however, were aged 19 to 21 and they have all found it a long way down. Theo Richardson is now at eighth-tier Cleethorpes Town. Ilias Moutha-Sebtaoui plays in Luxembourg. Max Johnstone is third-choice goalkeeper for St Johnstone. Joe Riley, who was given a first-team debut by Louis van Gaal, has had two difficult years at Bradford City. Jake Kenyon, once a promising left-back, drifted out of the game. Redmond might have gone the same way if he had not been put in touch with Paul Mitten and, together, formed an action plan to reignite his career. Mitten is another one-time United starlet and if his surname rings a bell it is because his grandfather, Charlie, played for the club in their 1948 FA Cup final win and made over 150 other appearances. His father, Charlie Jr, was on United’s books too. Football follows in the family and Paul, now 44, is a fitness coach and mentor for modern-day players who have been left, in the parlance of the sport, on the scrapheap. His first impression of Redmond was that he was “completely lost, his world has come to an end. No direction, no focus, expecting the phone to ring but it doesn’t. It’s a horrible, horrible, lonely place. I know because that was me 20-odd years ago.” Mitten speaks from experience after finding out, the hard way, what Alex Ferguson meant about United being a bus that waits for nobody. Mitten was 18 when he was released from Old Trafford and, by his own admission, he was not prepared for the mental devastation. “The gaffer called me into the office,” he says. “There were two queues. One was the queue where you got a contract, the other was for the lads who didn’t. It was five minutes with the boss. He just said, ‘We don’t think you’re good enough.’ There’s no answer to that, is there? So you accept it, you pick up your boots and off you go. And you don’t get another phone call. That was the last time I heard from the club.” As harsh as it is, Mitten can understand why football clubs are programmed this way. “I don’t blame them,” he says. “Football is brutal — one out of the door, the next one in. But they are leaving a trail of destruction behind them: broken young men, dreams shattered, weaker characters turning to gambling, booze, drugs. Then that becomes some mess.” In his case, Mitten was a striker, or a No 10, in the team a year behind the famed Class of ’92. But he suffered a grievous setback in the form of ruptured knee ligaments — and the standard at Old Trafford was frighteningly high. “I’d cry myself to sleep,” he says. “I felt like I’d let my parents down after they had spent years of their lives taking me everywhere. I was embarrassed. I knew old school associates would be laughing at me, I was an outcast, I didn’t belong. I was a mess.” Mitten eventually found a way back, signing an 18-month contract at Coventry City, but his knee gave way again, six games in. It was during the long hard slog of rehabilitation that the club signed Darren Huckerby and Noel Whelan, both of whom played the same position as him. He was placed on a month-to-month contract and two incidents in particular linger in his mind. “They put a list of all the pros on the wall,” he says. “It was pinned up on a piece of A4 paper, numbers one to 40. It went all the way down, player by player, to 27. Then it stopped. There was a gap. And then it was me, number 40. Take that, at 20 years old.” Later that day, the players were asked to try on their club suits. “I went in and the message was, ‘Sorry, we’ve not got one for you.’ I was still a kid. I’d never grown up because — forget the real world — all I’ve done is go from football club to football club. Those two little things probably ruined me, mentally, more than anything else. “You’re out of football. You get a black bag, get your boots. I went to my digs, picked up my little portable television. I drove up the M6, crying my eyes out. I turned up at home and my mum and dad didn’t know why I was there. ‘I’ve been released’ — and then I’m bawling, at 20 years of age, on their sofa.” A fortnight later, Mitten signed up with an employment agency and landed his first job out of football. “It was cutting grass at the hospital. I had a lawnmower, going up and down, and there was someone bollocking me because I hadn’t done the hedges. That was two weeks after being a professional footballer at a Premiership club.” How long does it take to get over that kind of ordeal? “Honestly,” he says. “I don’t think I ever did.” What is it like, as a teenager, to train alongside Sergio Aguero, Kevin De Bruyne and Raheem Sterling? Sam Tattum joined Manchester City as a 10-year-old in the year before Abu Dhabi took ownership of the club. He signed as a first-year professional eight years later — the season that would eventually lead to Pep Guardiola replacing Manuel Pellegrini as manager — and harboured his own dreams of starring in the Premier League. “People ask me sometimes if I wish I had started from the bottom and worked my way up,” he says. “But I can’t say yes because some people will never experience what I did, being on that training ground, training with those players, in the transition of City going from being a big local club to a massive club worldwide. I’m proud of what I achieved to get a professional contract at a club that size.” Unfortunately for Tattum, he also knows what it is like to be told, after nearly a decade in the system, that City were letting him go. “It hits you in the stomach,” he says. The difference, perhaps, is that City handled a difficult situation with care. Tattum has always been grateful to Simon Davies, their then academy coach, and Mark Allen, who headed the department at the time, for cushioning the blow. “When you hear it, you still think, ‘Oh shit. Fucking hell,’ but they were just being honest. They were straight-talking and I have a lot of respect for them,” Tattum, who had won caps for Wales’ under-17 and under-19 teams, says. “People ask me sometimes, ‘Did it break you?’ But I had to be positive. I had to think, ‘OK, it’s time to press on and maybe it’s my time to shine somewhere else.’ I wanted to prove them wrong. I expected I would find a league club and I was thinking it would be a decent level.” A trial was arranged at Leeds United but, short of match fitness, Tattum accepted an offer to play for non-League Stalybridge Celtic at Droylsden. A bad tackle came in. His leg was broken, the ankle dislocated. “Then I was in the back of an ambulance on my way to hospital and, in the space of three months, I’d gone from Manchester City, where they had the best facilities and the best care possible, to lying in a hospital bed, still in my kit, without a club. It’s then you realise you’re on your own.” Tattum plays now for Brattvag, in the third tier of Norwegian football, but there have been other spells at FC United of Manchester, Marine and Altrincham. And for the best part of 18 months, trying to get back to fitness, his career in football was a whirl of uncertainty. There were trials at Macclesfield and Gateshead when, by his own admission, he came up short. “I’d never played men’s football before,” he says. “I was coming back from 12 months on a sofa and trying to play men’s football for the first time. Physically, I was nowhere near.” As Guardiola set about turning City into record-breaking Premier League champions, Tattum had to reassess his life. He started looking for other bits of work. He did some football coaching for kids of primary school age and, for a while, he thought about getting an office job. But it was a scary thought. “I knew as soon as I did that, nine to five, Monday to Friday, that would have been it for me and football. And I wasn’t ready to give football up.” Instead, he teamed up with Mitten to build his fitness. Then he left his home in Salford and, at the age of 23, relocated to Scandinavia in the hope that he can still make a career in the sport that has shaped his life. Mentally, he has had to be strong. First, he spent 10 days at Ostersunds in Sweden. After that, it was Hodd in Norway. But now he is in Brattvag, a seaside village of 2,400 people in the Alesund municipality, 350 miles north-west of Oslo. Their league season was supposed to begin on Monday but it has been put back because of the coronavirus crisis. And, though the air is fresh and the mountain views spectacular, it is not where Tattum saw himself when he was measuring up against Aguero, De Bruyne and the rest of City’s A-listers. “It’s quite sad because there is no real support network,” Devonte Redmond says. “A lot of lads can go astray.” Older, wiser, Redmond has learned a lot about himself, and the football industry as a whole, in the last two years. Salford City, then of the National League, offered him the first route back, seven months after his release from Old Trafford. He started 11 league games last season and played the full 90 minutes as they beat Fylde at Wembley to win promotion to the Football League. “It has made me realise there are other pathways,” he says. “It wasn’t meant to be at United. I gave my all. Then I worked to get out of that hole and I got back in.” Redmond signed for Wrexham, again in the National League, in the summer and, to be absolutely clear, he holds no grudge against United. His social-media feeds are filled with positive messages about the club where he spent 13 years. They are still his club, as a United fan, and he knows they would not usually release a player without breaking the news personally. “At the time, they were going through a transition,” Redmond says. “It’s better now. They have a better loan system, they have a loan manager who can help the lads. There is more communication. It just felt, at that time, like there was no communication. It was always: who do you go to? There was no one person who made a decision. It was a bit all over the place. “Until then, it was really enjoyable. It was like a family club. But it changed when Jose Mourinho came in. It went from being a family club to something else. Suddenly it was the first team, the reserve players and the academy. All separate. It wasn’t as integrated. It was structured more in a way that the first team were always by themselves.” Redmond has also had to be mentally tough. “He never once missed a session with me,” Paul Mitten says of their fitness regime. “He never kept anything back. Eyeballs out when I asked him to dig in and see what it’s like in that dark place. What a kid. We put a plan together: get fit to do yourself justice, get mentally ready, get an opportunity, grasp it.” But what about all the other young footballers who have gone all the way through academies only to have their dreams snatched away? Mitten’s organisation, Revive Player Care, is supported by Karl Brown, who was part of the Class of ’92 but torpedoed from the team of David Beckham, Paul Scholes, Nicky Butt, Gary Neville and brother Phil because of a series of major injuries that led to him being released and sinking into depression. He, too, can remember what it was like to feel “lost and isolated” and so damaged psychologically that for a long time he could not even watch football. “I was in a team with some of the most successful players of the last 30 years,” Brown says. “Leaving was the hardest thing I have ever done. The club was my home. I was left with no job, no real life skills and no sporting career. I also lost most of my friends. They were off, soaring to success and I felt left behind. My life, as I had known it through all of my teenage years, had ended.” Brown returned to football after 18 years out of the game to go into coaching. He was taken on by United in 2014 and has worked in their academy ever since. “I felt I could offer players first-hand advice and support, along with developing them as footballers,” he says. “I never wanted another player to feel the way I had felt.” Mitten has helped Callum Gribbin, once one of United’s more highly-rated youngsters, to refocus after being released last year. Gribbin is now at Sheffield United and, at the age of 21, still has time to turn his career around. Further down the football pyramid, another example comes in the form of Max McGreal, formerly of Rochdale’s academy. McGreal is one of hundreds of youngsters, thousands even, who are let go every year. He, like many, felt he was treated badly. He started to drift and go out drinking when ordinarily he would be preparing for games. Now, though, he has knuckled down under Mitten’s guidance. McGreal has started playing for 10th tier Stockport Town and says he is enjoying football again. But it is still a drop in the ocean when, as Brown says, there are footballers being “discarded daily”. For many, the added problem is they have been so fixated on the idea of becoming footballers they have not taken their education as seriously as they should. Mentally, it is harder than ever to cope when many have been attached to clubs from the ages of six or seven — not 14 to 16, as it used to be — and it is all they really know. And, though nobody wants to be too alarmist, there are qualified people who genuinely fear that football needs to wake up to this problem, belatedly, and remember the tragedy of Josh Lyons at Tottenham Hotspur. Lyons was released from Tottenham’s youth system, aged 16, and spiralled into depression before committing suicide ten years later. At the 2013 inquest, the coroner, Dr Karen Henderson, criticised the sport for not doing more to support young footballers. “It is very difficult to build up the hopes of a young man only then to have them dashed at a young age,” she said. “It is very cruel. I find there was an absence and lack of support in football.” Many in the sport still do not think the authorities — the Premier League, the EFL, the Professional Footballers’ Association — do enough on this front. One suggestion is that clubs should provide parachute payments to any academy graduate who is released or that, as part of their contracts, a top-up fund should go into a pool that can be used, if necessary, as player-care packages for education and fitness programmes. But then again, there still appears to be an attitude among some clubs that, once that player is gone, it is somebody else’s problem. “Too many amazing players are ignored and just disappear,” Mitten says. He, after all, knows what it is like to be sold the dream then churned out with no aftercare or direction. “It took years to pick myself back up after so many people had forgotten me,” he says. “Did I get any support? Zero. And guess what? Twenty years later nothing has changed.”

“The ref said: ‘what the hell are you wearing?’” – the weirdest boots ever made https://theathletic.com/1740304/2020/04/13/football-boots-serafino-4th-edge-toe-poke/ “What the fuck are those?” January 2016. A casual afternoon game of five-a-side in central London grinds to a momentary halt when something catches an immediately sceptical eye. I am wearing the collective brainchild of an octogenarian fashion designer, a macadamia nut millionaire, a former Chelsea academy player and Harry Redknapp. I am wearing quite possibly the most ridiculous football boots of all time. I am wearing the Serafino 4th Edge. “Well, I am a very unlikely fellow…” Mel Braham’s journey to the outer limits of the billion-pound football boot market had been a long one, from making his fortune with a nut plantation in Dunoon, New South Wales — “the macadamia capital of Australia” — to London, where he built a cosmetic surgery empire. “I met John Serafino in Sydney,” Braham tells The Athletic. “We’ve been friends for 50 years now. John was a very well-known couturier and fashion designer in Sydney, so he was a very well-known character in Australia.” Among Serafino’s alternative ideas was the first ever drip-dry suit, made entirely from polyester, which he himself demonstrated for local TV news cameras by jumping fully-clothed into Sydney’s Darling Harbour. Braham had moved to London to open the Harley Medical Group but would make regular visits home over the next 30 years. “During one trip back to Australia (in 2013),” he recalls, “John told me about this boot project and invited me to a park in Sydney and said, ‘I’d like to show you this boot. I’ve got the captain of the Australian Socceroos and two Brazilian internationals.’ The players were demonstrating Serafino’s early prototype of what would become the 4th Edge, a regular-looking football boot but with one fundamental twist: a flat-fronted, snout-like extension at the front, made of rubber. Resembling an unholy alliance between a winklepicker and a police truncheon, its promise was three-fold: improved kicking accuracy, enhanced shooting power and greater protection. “They kicked it back and forth to each other and thought the concept was fantastic but it was very uncomfortable. John asked me, ‘Would you please step in here and help? (The project) is too big for me.’ “He kept on nagging at me. So I said to him, in the end, ‘If I take this on, I want 51 per cent. I have to have control’ and he agreed to that.” https://cdn.theathletic.com/app/uploads/2020/04/11210908/Serafino-launch-les-murray-3.mp4?_=1 The Serafino boot had encountered the first of its many obstacles. The footballing stigma of toe-poking is not a universal one — what has been dismissed for decades in British school playgrounds as rudimentary inelegance has been historically embraced as goalscoring opportunism in Brazil — but it was clear that this boot had the challenge of bridging a sizeable cultural gap. “It goes like a rocket,” claimed Les Murray, Australia’s most well-known football commentator and once a member of FIFA’s Ethics Committee, who decided to invest in Serafino’s project. “John is a designer and he actually conceived and then initially tried the toe-end to stick on the end of a traditional pair of boots,” reveals Brian Hardie, who in 2015, took up the role as project director for the Serafino’s UK operation, Boot Technologies. “It was a functional solution to a problem. As a product designer, he identified a problem and came up with a potential solution which, after multiple iterations, then led to something that was really interesting. “The feeling was, the feedback was, if you were a young kid who’d never kicked a ball in your life, you’d normally kick a ball as you might kick a stone, the first time you kick anything, with the tip of your shoe.” A browse of Google’s database of football boot patents, a superhighway of shattered dreams stretching back nearly a century, reveals a number of attempts to make use of the underexploited potential of the toe punt. As early as 1926, German inventor Eugen Stahl submitted a patent application for a “Football Boot or the like” which featured a rubber toe-cap sewn on top of the leather. Fifty years later, Zdenko Riederer proposed a boot with a slightly concave toe portion, featuring “closely packed burrs or knobs which are directed slightly inwards”. In the UK, inventor Norman Buckley drew up plans for an entirely flat-topped boot in 1980, the point at which things were clearly starting to get out of hand. “Patents were taken out at different stages,” Hardie confirms, “and the validity and protection ability of those patents was called into question — a boot is a boot is a boot — but actually, his toe-end was something that could be protected. They were pending by the time the boot came to launch. A basic design patent was submitted in 2008, followed three years later by a more developed blueprint, which clarified its most revolutionary feature: “a concave portion (with) a radius of around 11cm, which substantially corresponds to that of a standard football/soccer ball.” With Braham on board, the project began to gather pace. “John selected a manufacturer in China, who made seven or eight prototypes with a view to making the boot more comfortable,” Braham says. “They gave up on us and said they couldn’t keep making more prototypes, so I had to go to China and find a reliable manufacturer — but I couldn’t get any of them to sign a non-disclosure agreement. “Eventually, we started to produce more, and it took us more than 30 prototypes to find the perfect boot. I ended up sending someone who worked for me at Harley Medical Group, who was an ex-footballer himself and had played for the Chelsea academy when he was a young fellow.” That man was Daniel Johns, who took on the role of “sports advisor” with Boot Technologies and whose nascent football career had been ended by a serious ankle injury while playing for Millwall’s youth team. “I noticed this boot and said to Mel, ‘What’s this?’ I’d never seen anything like it in my life,” Johns tells The Athletic. “I went out to China and I thought, ‘While I’m here, why don’t I come up with something that’s going to save a lot of people’s metatarsals?” Braham had observed that “boots today have become lighter and lighter” and, with Johns’ guidance, incorporated triple padding into the top of the boot to offer protection against an injury that had somehow become almost fashionable during the 2000s, afflicting David Beckham, Steven Gerrard and Wayne Rooney all in the months leading up to major international tournaments. By the mid-2010s, Johns was playing non-League football and began to wear one of the prototype designs in matches but the boot didn’t go unnoticed there. “A ref stopped me and basically said, ‘What the bloody hell are you wearing?’ Braham, noting the official’s concerns over the concave toe-end, arranged a meeting to check if the boot was even legal within the Laws of the Game. “I went to see the president of the Referees’ Association. He banged the boot against his hand and said, ‘You might hurt a player with this.’ Product testing company Intertek was swiftly commissioned to conduct some laboratory analysis of the boot’s primary feature, the USP upon which the whole concept was founded, and Braham was worried about the possible results — particularly since some previous consumer testing had yielded some promising early feedback. “I commissioned, in the summer of 2015, a study by Leeds University sports scientists that looked into the power and accuracy versus competitors’ boots,” says Hardie. “In the end, anecdotally, the players trialling the boots did state they got more power and accuracy when kicking the ball with that part of the boot than they could possibly get with a standard boot. But the study was inconclusive from a verifiable and statistical perspective to support that claim.” Braham waited patiently for the outcome of the industrial testing. “Two and a half weeks went by,” he recalls. “This chap rang me and said, ‘Hi, we’ve conducted the tests. Mel… are you sitting down?’ “I thought ‘Oh god’, you know, ‘all these years of hard work are going to go up in smoke.’” The testing consisted of the toe section of the Serafino boot — and two high-end branded boots — being cut off and attached to a mechanism, which was dropped on to a flat plate that recorded the transmitted force of the impact. The average impact force of the size-9 Serafino boots was recorded as 5.19 kilonewtons. “Then he said, ‘Well, we’ve tested your boot against the others and your boot was 249 per cent safer.’ The rival boots had transmitted an impact force of 13.27 kilonewtons. Braham’s relief was understandable. “The whole development of this boot had taken so long. I’d spent a huge amount of money on it. The other two boots I had chosen for them to test were Adidas and Nike. I’ve never, ever made that public.” Already convinced they were on to something, and now emboldened by proof of at least one advantage over the established competition, Braham — with Hardie’s consultation — began to establish the marketing game plan. “The 4th Edge was a brand name I devised,” Hardie reveals. “It gave you the edge but it gave you the fourth edge. You could kick the ball with your instep, the laces, with the outside of your foot and now, also, the toe as well.” https://cdn.theathletic.com/app/uploads/2020/04/11205727/serafino-4th-edge.mp4?_=2 A crowdfunding drive to generate nearly £100,000 towards the rising costs of delivering the boot to the market failed to get out of the blocks, despite one vox-pop sales pitch of “if you took those boots off me now, I’d say: ‘give them back’”. Undeterred, the Serafino team began to ramp up the marketing rhetoric. In a corner of the football industry where near-nonsensical pseudoscience has increasingly become the lingua franca between manufacturers and customers, though, their assertions felt quaintly unaggressive. “This unique patented device gives the player a 33 per cent advantage in terms of the number of kicking zones,” Hardie declares in one promotional video, a roundabout way of saying that three viable ways to kick a ball had become four. The Serafino 4th Edge was becoming more and more about its standout feature, given the sheer impossibility of being able to compete with Nike and Adidas in the long term. The landscape-shuddering Adidas Predator was first advertised as being “100% Legal, 0% Fair” while the 4th Edge was simply given the tagline “Conventionally Radical”. “We had a couple of conversations with football boot designers,” says Hardie, “and they were intrigued but equally aware that the major manufacturers would not tolerate an upstart coming in like this. They were very sceptical about the ability of anybody to make a substantial impact, even on a niche basis, because the cost of entry was way above and beyond what Mel was willing or able to do. In the absence of a limitless marketing budget, let alone the experience of launching a football boot into a stiflingly crowded market, Boot Technologies chipped away at getting the public’s attention, led by Hardie’s efforts. “We had loads of people mobilised, involved and committed to help make this concept, this boot, into a reality. “Ex-pros were lending their presence, if not necessarily their name to the whole process. We also created a YouTube video which ended up, thanks to some amazing media coverage, getting about 100,000 views. We realised that the media interest and potential demand was something we could not, at that time, fulfil because we had about 10,000 pairs of boots coming from China and we couldn’t get them in the country fast enough.” Hardie presided over a launch night at Planet Hollywood in London. “We got (veteran football journalist) Harry Harris involved and then, all of a sudden, he opened his black book of contacts and got a whole load of ex-pros excited. “We had a back room with a goal set up. The pros had a penalty competition. We had a big lunch where we all got pissed… absolutely pissed, 30 of them. “In retrospect, we should have deferred the Planet Hollywood event until we had boots in the country. The boots didn’t arrive until six weeks later but things had got into a head of steam and we probably lost control of the media coverage.” Jem Maidment, a former Sky News journalist, was brought on board to handle the press side and had to set aside his own early scepticism about the boot. “I thought it was nuts. I thought, ‘God, this is gonna get slaughtered!’” he tells The Athletic. “But I would say the majority of media reporting on it was neutral at worst and, actually, there was a significant amount of positive coverage and not really anything negative. That really surprised me. I had one very, very, very, very well-known guy, who was a manager, who came up to me and said, ‘Do you know what, between you and me, I’d have worn them’. I said, ‘Really!?’. ‘Well, it’s the most comfortable boot I’ve ever worn’.” Braham began to make some bolder claims. “I believe it has the opportunity to be even bigger than the Predator,” he told Australian news agency AAP. “I think it will change the game permanently.” The 4th Edge now had some heavyweight promotional backing, although the enthusiasm levels of Harry Redknapp and Glenn Hoddle could politely be described as “businesslike”. Redknapp managed to avoid using the brand name completely as he ‘Arry-ed through the motions in one interview, while Hoddle just about kept the lid on his excitement. The sum total of all this effort, from John Serafino having a kickabout with some Brazilians in a Sydney park to Ray Parlour getting the complimentary pints in at Planet Hollywood? “We sold about a thousand in the end,” says Hardie (Braham says it is nearer to 1,200, and the boot is still available to buy, at a price of £130). “The investment required to really establish an alternative, innovative, unique football boot was a lot more than Mel was prepared to make.” Braham sighs. “Basically, we ran out of money. I’ve invested well west of £250,000. I was very optimistic because I didn’t know enough about football, the traditions, ‘You must not kick with the toe’ — but I didn’t know it was so entrenched. “I didn’t foresee how sceptical the UK market would be. If you open a new restaurant in the UK, nobody wants to be the first person to go into that restaurant. Open a new restaurant in America, you get absolutely flooded on the first night. They like new things, they like to try new technology.” Curiosity, though, would only get the 4th Edge so far. Endorsement from current players — or, rather, the lack of it — proved to be a nail in its coffin. As Johns sagely points out, “If Ronaldo puts them on, you’ll be one of the biggest brands tomorrow morning.” “Budgets were tight,” Maidment confirms, “but we had to try because a lot of money had already gone into it. One thing I really was keen on was getting a player to wear it in a game. The closest we got was Eastleigh’s second-choice goalkeeper putting them on for an FA Cup game (against Bolton in January 2016)… but he didn’t come on.” If Lewis Noice’s career never amounts to anything, he can always rest assured that he is — probably — the most famous active player ever to wear the Serafino 4th Edge. “Nobody gave Brian or Mel the chance to really talk about the other aspects of it,” says Johns. “It was, ‘This is the ugliest boot, it’s never going to take off’ or it’s in ‘the top 10 craziest boots in the world’ or whatever. Braham is asked by The Athletic if, given the overwhelming challenge of breaking into this impenetrable market all over again, he would do anything differently. “If I had my time all over again, I would have started off with a boot for young children, taking it into academies and schools. Once you wear this boot, you don’t want to wear anything else. Seriously, once you’ve got used to wearing this boot and having this fourth option, you don’t want to go backwards.” While there’s stock left in the warehouse, the evangelising apparently won’t stop. In its inner circle, at least, the cult of the Serafino 4th Edge is still going strong.

Kante is 29, wasted in Chelsea’s 4-3-3 and their best-paid player. What’s next? https://theathletic.com/1739690/2020/04/13/kante-chelsea-best-role-future-lampard/ Asked at his unveiling as Chelsea head coach last summer if he knew where he would deploy N’Golo Kante, Frank Lampard simply laughed and said he did. His conclusion, clear for all to see on the pitch this season, was strikingly similar to the one Maurizio Sarri reached in 2018-19: that the tireless Frenchman is best maximised shuttling up and down on the right of a midfield three, with instruction to dart into the opposition penalty area whenever the opportunity presents itself. Kante’s 2019-20 campaign has been too disrupted by injury for his role to become a constant source of debate but his effectiveness in Lampard’s system will be one of the most important questions for Chelsea to consider when football resumes, both for the rest of this season and beyond. The most interesting thing about the conclusion that Sarri and Lampard reached is that it is something of a departure from the role that powered Kante’s rise to global renown. He won a World Cup with France and back-to-back Premier League titles with Leicester City and Chelsea operating as part of a double pivot in midfield. Chelsea under Sarri — and now Lampard — have performed best in a 4-3-3 formation, though the latter’s version has been given a more youthful flavour by this season’s vibrant wave of Cobham academy graduates. Kante’s change of role within it may seem a subtle one but it has required considerable adjustment and there is evidence to suggest that it has blunted his impact at both ends of the pitch. Having turned 29 last month, suffered from injuries more persistently than ever before, and with three years left to run on a contract that makes him comfortably the highest earner in the squad, Kante has reached a key moment in his Chelsea career. Both player and club need to find a way to maximise one another — or part on terms that are mutually beneficial. Here, The Athletic asks: how do you solve a problem like N’Golo? Lampard has lined Chelsea up in a 4-3-3 formation in 15 out of 29 games in the Premier League this season. In the others, he’s employed a two-man midfield in either a 4-2-3-1 or a 3-4-2-1. Kante has appeared in 18 league games for Chelsea this season — nine as part of a 4-3-3 and nine in a double pivot in one of the two aforementioned formations. That gives us a reasonable sample in which to put some numbers against how fans and the media perceive his performances in each. Kante’s ability without the ball is what he’s best known for, so that’s where we’ll start. Considering how many tackles, interceptions and recoveries he makes per 1,000 opponent touches gives a decent indicator of how active he’s being defensively. All of the defensive metrics used in the table below have been possession adjusted (poss. adj.), counting how often each happens in every 1,000 opponent touches. This helps to try and reduce the impact of teams defending at different rates due to possessing high or low amounts of the ball. We can see that when he’s deployed in a midfield of two players, he’s far busier. One fewer man in the middle of the pitch means more work for everyone else. This perhaps isn’t the most surprising result in itself but in the context of how Matteo Kovacic and Jorginho perform when also in a three-man midfield, Chelsea might have enough defensive effort without Kante in midfield. What we see here is that Kante actually makes the least number of tackles of the three, with Jorginho hoovering up the most recoveries per 1,000 opponent touches. Looking at where these defensive actions take place does tell a bit of a different story though: Kante ventures into the opponent’s half slightly more on the right-hand side when playing in a two and covers the left side of the pitch too when playing in a three. Three bodies in midfield is plenty to stifle the opposition supplying their attackers and the inclusion of someone as physically capable as Kante feels like overkill. Under Lampard, Chelsea average 57.4 per cent possession on average, so although the midfield are required to shield the defence, supporting the attack is the primary function of whichever unit takes to the field. For that reason, retaining and progressing the ball and, sometimes, scoring, are the most valuable contributions required in Lampard’s system. Lampard’s midfield options are relatively light in terms of goal threat. Jorginho (four, three from penalties), Kante (three) and Kovacic (one) have all chipped in with goals in the Premier League but the goal threat they carry is too few and far between. Ross Barkley has put up good underlying numbers in limited minutes with 0.33 xG per 90 minutes played, the highest of the team’s midfielders and just ahead of Mason Mount. Mount’s first season with Chelsea’s first team has seen him score six goals while splitting his time between the wing and in midfield, and when playing in a 4-3-3, he’s threatened more than the main trio. Goals may be in short supply from Chelsea’s midfield but, in recent seasons, few teams that play a 4-3-3 get many goals from that area of the pitch anyway. The reason for setting up in the formation in the first place is to attack with three players in the final third, burdening them with the goalscoring needs of the team. Liverpool’s prolific trident of Sadio Mane, Roberto Firmino and Mohamed Salah in recent seasons are the perfect example. Of teams to have played 4-3-3 for 10 or more games in the last three seasons, Chelsea, under Lampard, sit fifth in terms of xG per 90 from midfield. Above them are all three of Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City teams and Manchester United’s 2017-18 side (think “Marouane Fellaini”). Chelsea aren’t an overly poor side at creating chances from midfield but they are undoubtedly squeezing the most out of the pieces that they have. Perhaps, therefore, the finger-pointing should not be at Kante and Chelsea’s midfield in the search for more goals but rather how they can better boost their options in the final third. Willian has never been a prolific goalscorer and turns 32 in the summer. Christian Pulisic had a hugely promising first season at Stamford Bridge but struggled to stay fit. Fresh faces are due in the coming transfer window with Hakim Ziyech having already signed from Ajax, and with Olivier Giroud and Pedro coming to the end of their contracts. Further investment will be required. Accepting that Chelsea’s main goal threat primarily needs to come from their attacking trident, the final piece of the puzzle is how Lampard’s midfield progresses the ball forward to the players tasked with doing the damage. In this area again, Kante’s numbers take a hit when he plays in a three-man midfield instead of in his more natural double pivot. Part of the reason for this drop-off is simply due to there being more bodies in midfield; Kante gets fewer touches, dropping to 64 per 90 minutes from 88 per 90 when playing in a double pivot. Likely due to tactical instructions from his manager to stay to his channel, Kante’s touch map when split between his games in a two-man vs three-man midfield show him covering less ground in a midfield trio, with his touches more concentrated on the right hand side. Again, though, Kovacic and Jorginho seem to be able to handle the passing load themselves, with the table below showing their superior ball-progression abilities. These numbers may also help bust for good the myth that Jorginho is nothing more than a sideways passing merchant. With both Kovacic and Jorginho, Chelsea have two very able passers and more than enough ball progression in the team when playing with at least one of them in a three-man midfield. In a three-man midfield alongside Kovacic and Jorginho, it seems pretty clear that Kante’s opportunities to display his peerless destructive qualities are reduced. At the same time, expecting him to significantly ramp up his production in terms of scoring and ball progression from a more advanced role looks overly optimistic. So what are the solutions? The most obvious possibility is that if Lampard is not going to build his system around Kante, then there’s evidence to suggest that he’s actually surplus to requirements in his system. Chelsea are well stocked in midfield and competition for places will grow further when Ruben Loftus-Cheek — who counts goals and ball progression among his biggest strengths — makes his long-awaited return. No one knows what the transfer window that follows the COVID-19 pandemic will look like, though many are expecting it to be a buyer’s market. If lobbying from major clubs and leagues results in UEFA relaxing or even suspending Financial Fair Play rules for a period, the select few who can count on super-rich benefactors — including Chelsea — could have a valuable edge. But regardless of the position they find themselves in, Chelsea selling Kante at this juncture could make logical sense. Injury limited him to appearing in just 22 of his club’s 42 matches across all competitions prior to the football shutdown and, at 29, it is reasonable to wonder whether we have already watched his peak years. Yet his talent and achievements should ensure these concerns do not put off potential suitors who regard themselves as one world-class piece away from winning the Champions League. The Athletic reported back in September that Real Madrid had expressed interest in Kante, while Paris Saint-Germain have admired him for several years. Chelsea are unlikely to desperately need the cash but any vast transfer fee would give Lampard much greater flexibility in rebuilding this team around a dynamic young core. Liverpool have employed a similar strategy to spectacular effect over the past two years, using the windfall from Barcelona’s misguided mega-move for Phillipe Coutinho in January 2018 to take their own team to the next level. A more left-field solution would be a change of position. Kante previously played right-back earlier in his career and a move there could accommodate a switch to the left for Cesar Azpilicueta, a more sound defensive option over Marcos Alonso and Emerson. That said, Chelsea’s long-standing interest in signing a new left-back makes such a switch potentially redundant and also blocks minutes for the highly-rated Reece James. Sometimes, squad management is like trying to make a bed with a sheet that’s too small — you can’t cover all corners. Lastly, although Lampard has settled on 4-3-3 as his formation of choice, we’ve seen this year that Chelsea have switched things up based on player availability, form and opposition tactics. With the brief very much to compete on four fronts next season, perhaps Kante is happy to stick around and take the opportunities in his favoured two-man midfield as and when they arise, while Chelsea invest in a more traditional holding No 6 to partner him with. There are plenty of routes that Lampard, Chelsea and Kante can take. The best will be one that helps the club compete at the top of the transfer market even if FFP regulations remain in place, making the most of the quality academy players they have coming through and maximising what they need from their midfield trio. Finding an optimum balance is the key to successfully managing any squad. If that means all parties would be best served by Kante leaving Stamford Bridge, then it is a conversation that Lampard and Chelsea’s other key transfer decision-makers need to have.

for sure top 10

‘I had him worried at one time’ – When Jimmy Greaves interviewed Mike Tyson and took a punch in the ribs https://talksport.com/football/671835/jimmy-greaves-interviewed-mike-tyson/ It’s not very often two titans from two completely different sports square off against each other. But, back in 1988, football legend Jimmy Greaves faced up to Mike Tyson in the ring. The Chelsea, Tottenham and England legend travelled to Catskill, New York just to get some time with The Baddest Man on the Planet who, at that point, had just won his 34th consecutive fight and was plotting a rumble with British star Frank Bruno. After knocking out Tony Tubbs in Tokyo, Japan, to retain his WBA, WBC, and IBF heavyweight titles, Greaves was perhaps an unlikely opponent for Tyson. Nevertheless, the greatest English striker ever – who turns 80 today – visited NYC to take on the 21-year-old boxing wonderkid as part of ITV’s fantastic coverage of the 1988 FA Cup final between Liverpool and Wimbledon. And it’s a piece of TV gold as Greaves takes on The Champ – Jimmy even takes a few digs in the ribs too! Check it out below…