The European Leagues & Competitions Thread V2

Fernando · April 3, 2020

If you do the season in July and August then I think that's doable.

But you have to let the clubs have a pre season in June, you can't put them to restart the season right away.

Jase · April 3, 2020

20 hours ago, NikkiCFC said:

Like Jason said, depends. In Belgium everything is clear.

With City ban, 5th place get you CL place. Sheffield is two points behind Utd with one game in hand... Who gets CL?

Actually, I was wrong about the Belgian league. Totally forgot that they have the playoff system for the title thing. But the larger point still stands nonetheless.

Jase · April 3, 2020

Hamilton · April 3, 2020

5 hours ago, Jason said:

Actually, I was wrong about the Belgian league. Totally forgot that they have the playoff system for the title thing. But the larger point still stands nonetheless.

Yeah indeed, we were 1 game untill play offs. But Bruges were 15 pts clear, would be 8 at start play offs.

I think for title most clubs agree that it goes to Bruges, for european spots 4 or 5 clubs won’t agree atm

Hamilton · April 3, 2020

5 hours ago, Fernando said:

If you do the season in July and August then I think that's doable.

But you have to let the clubs have a pre season in June, you can't put them to restart the season right away.

And when would you start new season? Or no summer break then..

Imo seasons should end 30th june everywhere..

NikkiCFC · April 4, 2020

17 hours ago, Hamilton said:

And when would you start new season? Or no summer break then..

Imo seasons should end 30th june everywhere..

With break that we have now for a couple of months and no EURO there should not be a summer break at all!

Hamilton · April 4, 2020

5 hours ago, NikkiCFC said:

With break that we have now for a couple of months and no EURO there should not be a summer break at all!

That should be the case yeah, let’s see how this all turns out..

Vesper · April 6, 2020

FIFA to extend 2019-20 football season indefinitely

https://theathletic.com/1724322/2020/04/06/fifa-football-coronavirus-season-indefinitely/

FIFA is to confirm an indefinite extension to the 2019-20 season across the globe, allowing each country’s football authority to determine when campaigns can finish.

The game’s world governing body will also alter the dates of the summer transfer window and permit contract extensions for players whose deals run out on June 30.

The plans, which are likely to be revealed in the next 48 hours, will afford maximum flexibility with FIFA appreciating the spread of coronavirus is different in each country. This comes after UEFA last week committed to finishing the current season and was moved to deny a report that its own president, Aleksander Ceferin, had set a deadline of August 3 to complete all outstanding games.

While the decision from the highest authority in football does not take null and void off the table, it considerably reduces the chances of seasons being cancelled altogether. The planned announcement was greeted by one Premier League club as “really sensible”, with it removing the pressure to conclude the season at a time when the world is dealing with a pandemic.

The Athletic understands timeframes were not discussed at great length in Friday’s meeting between Premier League clubs. There are significant fears that the 20 sides may yet need to repay £762 million to broadcasters should the season not be completed, with The Athletic revealing last week that the determination to finish the campaign even led to one idea of taking games to China.

Insiders at a number of clubs say a reality seems to have finally dawned over the past week that, while ideas can be formulated for different scenarios around scheduling, until the outbreak passes over the top of the curve nobody will really be able to plan with confidence.

While some Premier League clubs accept that there might be no option other than to resume seasons behind closed doors or even at neutral grounds in other “safe” countries, other clubs believe football should only return when fans are able to enter stadiums.

It is on this battleground that the next debate in England is likely to be had, especially as some Football League clubs are concerned about extending contracts if there is no clear date for a return to football, knowing that they will have to carry out paying money with no signs of standard streams of income in that period.

The situation with football contracts is a complex one, as The Athletic’s Matt Slater explained. One manager of an EFL club told The Athletic over the weekend that he has 13 players out of contract in June and 10 of those contracts are unlikely to be renewed.

Some of his concerns related to the focus of his team and therefore the integrity of the league, considering he would have to ask a number of players to perform for him when they know they might not have jobs in the near future.

He was also worried about the length of the next transfer window, questioning whether it would be long enough for him to sign enough players to be able to register a squad for the 2020-21 season.

The Premier League summer transfer window is due to end on September 1 at 5pm and the EFL announced in February an “agreement in principle” to return to a traditional deadline day at the end of August.

The Athletic also revealed how the Premier League’s hopes of striking a deal to secure 30 per cent wage deductions or deferrals from players were in peril on Saturday night as footballers became increasingly concerned that agreements may benefit club ownerships more than non-playing staff or the emergency services. Discussions are expected to resume this week.

NikkiCFC · April 7, 2020

“It is still better to play the game behind closed doors and have it on TV, which is what the people need and want because it brings positive energy to their homes [...] and it will be July or August. We can’t play it out in September or October.”

-Aleksander Ceferin; source: ZDF via Guardian

Vesper · April 8, 2020

World-class with and without the ball – when will Germany learn to love Thiago?

https://theathletic.com/1725980/2020/04/06/thiago-bayern-munich/

Pep Guardiola famously vowed that it would be “Thiago or nothing” when the then-Bayern Munich coach underlined his intention to sign the midfielder from Barcelona in the summer of 2013. Despite this full-hearted endorsement, however, the 28-year-old has never won universal recognition in the Bavarian capital.

Talk to local journalists or to any number of fans: it won’t take long to find one who describes the Spain international as a luxury player, the sort who can’t be trusted to turn up in the big games and and put in a solid defensive shift. Even at the club’s HQ, they didn’t seem that sold on him earlier this year. Whispers from Saebener Strasse, Bayern’s HQ, suggest that the club might be prepared to sell him this summer to make room — on the balance sheet and in the starting XI — for the arrival of Bayer Leverkusen’s Kai Havertz. The club say they have offered to extend Thiago’s existing deal, which expires in 2021.

Anyone who saw the deep-lying playmaker bully Chelsea’s Jorginho into submission at Stamford Bridge might be puzzled by this domestic under-appreciation but there are plenty of explanations for it. Some are cultural, some structural. Some might be personal, too.

First, there’s still a natural tendency in the Bundesliga to overlook the importance of central midfielders who don’t dominate games by making thundering runs and diving into tackles but who orchestrate proceedings with a hundred delicate touches per game instead. When they are winning, their metronomic brilliance is often ignored in favour of “difference makers” further up the pitch. When they are losing, they are dismissed as lacking presence.

It’s notable that the criticism of Thiago closely echoes the accusations that were routinely directed at fellow passing-machine Toni Kroos during his Bayern days. The Germany international’s true importance for Bayern’s ball circulation only became apparent once he had left for Real Madrid in 2014.

In addition, Thiago’s career arc has mostly not run in harmony with the team’s tactical development. Earmarked to become the linchpin of Guardiola’s high-possession game, he missed the bulk of the Catalan’s first two seasons with injury and only established himself as a regular in 2015-16, when Bayern narrowly missed out on reaching the Champions League final. Having played Diego Simeone’s Atletico Madrid off the pitch in the second leg of the semi-final, Bayern went out on away goals.

During the “wild west” years under Carlo Ancelotti and Niko Kovac, the adoption of a more reactive stance saw Bayern progressively lose their shape and identity as a passing side. The difference makers in attack were far too potent to stop the club winning domestic honours, but two early eliminations in the Champions League — against Real Madrid in 2017 and Liverpool in 2019 — spoke to the team’s collective demise. More than others, Thiago was lost in the chaos. He was an architect tasked with building a skyscraper on shifting sands.

Tellingly, his best game came during a brief return to form and function when Jupp Heynckes had taken the reigns for a fourth spell in 2018. Thiago was superb as a sole holding midfielder in Bayern’s 2-2 draw with Real Madrid in the second leg of the Champions League semi-final, putting in one of those big, commanding performances that sadly tend to get forgotten when the team falls short.

But his relatively low public standing is also partly self-inflicted. Thiago is a deep thinker and an excellent interviewee in a variety of languages — when’s he in the mood. On other days, though, he can give off a certain “I don’t give a fuck” vibe that mirrors his haughty elegance on the pitch. Bayern officials were aghast to see him turn up in his underwear, a towel wrapped round his waist, for a TV interview with a US broadcaster a couple of years ago.

There’s a suspicion that some Munich-based journalists who never fully bought into Guardiola’s “Spanish” ideas consider Thiago a superfluous remnant of that regime, which could at least explain the otherwise baffling decision of “Kicker” magazine to omit him from their “best of” rankings in January.

The grand old dame of football publishing in Germany found no space for him on a “defensive midfield” list that featured, in descending order of excellence, Joshua Kimmich (Bayern), Charles Aranguiz (Leverkusen), Laimer (RB Leipzig), Suat Serdar (Schalke 04), Denis Zakaria (Borussia Monchengladbach), Omar Mascarell (Schalke 04), Axel Witsel (Borussia Dortmund), Diego Demme (RB Leipzig), Sebastian Rode (Eintracht Frankfurt), Thomas Delaney (Dortmund), Maximilian Arnold (VfL Wolfsburg), Robert Andrich (Union Berlin), Daniel Baier (FC Augsburg), Julian Brandt (Dortmund), Florian Grillitsch (TSG Hoffenheim), Josuha Guilavogui (Wolfsburg), Jonas Hector (1.FC Koln), Nicolas Hoefler (SC Freiburg) and Christoph Kramer (Monchengladbach). Just in case you’re wondering, Thiago wasn’t ranked as one of top attacking midfielders, either.

“Kicker” thinking that there are no “world-class” defensive or attacking midfielders in the Bundesliga at all is tough enough to understand as it is. But Thiago not featuring in either categories is indefensible in light of his performance data. Given his double role as a regista for Bayern, he should certainly be in the conversation in the former, and almost definitely be filed under “world class” for the latter.

Here’s why. One myth that needs to be dispelled with Thiago is that he doesn’t do enough defensive work. This season, he ranks 9th of all Bundesliga players for tackles and interceptions per 90 minutes played (of those with 900+ minutes played). A remarkable figure, given he plays in a Bayern team that averages 63 per cent of possession per game. And of the players who are more defensively active than him, six are full-backs and the other two, Laimer and Koln’s Ellyes Skhiri, play much more orthodox defensive midfield roles. These stats should usually be adjusted for the amount of possession that a side has (and therefore the amount of time they need to defend), but in this scenario that would just elevate Thiago’s figures further.

There’s also what he does with the ball, which is what he’s best known for, that separates him so much from others. While he’s not directly creating a ton of chances himself, he’s feeding the ball into the attacking third for Bayern’s players to wreak havoc — he does this more than any other player in the Bundesliga not named David Alaba.

Furthermore, Thiago is also extremely “pressing-resistant” — as the kids like to say — thanks to his superlative technique and dribbling skills. This means that even when he is put under pressure by opposition players, he rarely gives the ball away — an invaluable skill for any side looking to build from the back. His ability to wriggle in tight spaces is borne out in the numbers too — turning the ball over in just 11 per cent of his touches. While there are several midfielders who are even safer with the ball, their passing is of the much safer type, too.

By collating his ratings at certain skills — as opposed to just counting how much of each he’s done — we get a more well-rounded and accurate picture of how Thiago stacks up against others in his position. Smarterscout rates the Spaniard 90/99 for ball retention, which matches with what we see from the rate at which he loses possession, with only Axel Witsel (Dortmund) and Rodri (Manchester City) in Europe’s top leagues having higher scores.

He also ranks in the top-15 defensive midfielders for his rating when tackling, with those above him rarely offering anything in possession. It’s not just that he’s an active defender, but a solid one too. Thiago’s importance to Bayern, therefore, is evident in his completeness. He combines a very unique skill set of defending, keeping the ball and progressing it forward at nearly unmatched rates. Notably, according to Smarterscout there are just three players in the top five European leagues this season that are similar to Thiago: Milan’s Ismael Bennacer, and Real Sociedad pair Ander Guevara and Igor Zubeldia. The length of that shortlist shows how rare his mix of skills are.

Those skills are certainly appreciated by his peers. One Bundesliga newbie told The Athletic one of the things he enjoyed most about featuring at this level was the opportunity to watch Thiago’s mind-boggling ball-juggling skills in the warm-up from close quarters. Inside the Bayern team, there’s a wide-held belief that he’s “the best footballer in the squad”, one dressing-room source reveals, even if “he could perhaps do more on the pitch, considering all his talent”.

Luckily for both him and the club, Hansi Flick’s renewed commitment to a well-structured possession game and its aggressive pressing have brought Thiago’s significance into sharper focus in recent months. He has especially thrived alongside Kimmich, who has provided added defensive cover for the back four as well as energy in the centre. They make for a formidable partnership.

Thiago will turn 29 on April 11 but the situation hasn’t really changed much from when Guardiola pushed for the club to sign him seven years ago. There aren’t many who can do what he can for a team like Bayern. And they know it, too. The club have at last made him “an extremely fair, serious offer, without any corona discount” to renew his contract, as executive chairman Karl-Heinz Rummenigge revealed.

As much as Bayern would like to freshen things up for next season, holding on to a player capable of knitting it all together is absolutely essential if Flick’s plans are to succeed in the long run. Signing the difference makers further up the pitch will have to wait.

Vesper · April 8, 2020

Barcelona: the richest club in the world struggling to make ends meet

https://theathletic.com/1725827/2020/04/07/barcelona-messi-bartomeu-xavi-iniesta-neymar-barca/

“Barca is the top sporting brand in the world,” Barcelona president Josep Maria Bartomeu proudly told a group of distinguished Catalan politicians and businessmen on February 12. “We’ve had our difficult moments. But this year our revenues will pass the €1 billion mark. Great work has been done by all.”

Six weeks later, on March 26, the world’s wealthiest sporting institution humbly applied to use a Spanish government scheme for enforcing emergency pay-cuts and lay-offs, after all sporting and business activities ceased due to the coronavirus pandemic.

This shocked the club’s roughly 1,500 “ordinary” employees, from youth coaches, scouts and physios, through to staff at the club’s museum, restaurants and retail outlets.

But few expected the angriest reaction to come from Barca’s best-paid staff member, with first-team captain Lionel Messi issuing an angry statement via his own Instagram account criticising not the measure itself, but the way it had been sold through the local media.

Upset that Catalan sports papers had been claiming Barca’s “captains” had been selfishly rejecting any pay-cuts, Messi voiced his “surprise that inside the club there would be people who want to pressure us into doing something we were always clear we wanted to do”.

The kicker was that Messi said he and his team-mates were going to dip into their own pockets to ensure “that all the club’s employees can earn 100% of their salaries for as long as this situation lasts”.

That effectively reversed the board’s decision to enforce pay-cuts and removed control of the club’s policies from Bartomeu and his board in this most difficult moment.

So how did the richest team in football get to the point where its own players were bailing out the directors?

Answering that question requires a trip back through the often complex finances and relationship between the Camp Nou’s boardroom and dressing room.

Back in summer 2008, around the time Messi was just beginning to establish himself as world class, Barca was a very different club. A fourth contract renewal in three years saw the forward replace departing team-mate Ronaldinho as the team’s best-paid member, a few weeks after his 21st birthday. Annual club revenues totalled £279 million, with player wages totalling £160 million, far healthier than the 70% ratio used by many within the game as a yardstick for sustainability.

Two years later, Messi was world football’s biggest earner on £9.2 million a year, before bonuses, while bumper contracts also persuaded peers including Xavi Hernandez and Andres Iniesta to stay at home as Pep Guardiola’s team swept all before them, including an historic treble of Champions League, La Liga and Copa del Rey trophies.

Barca had been spending outside their means, however, and when Joan Laporta left as president in 2010, the club’s net debts were revealed as £379 million. Successor Sandro Rosell loudly made sorting out the finances a key objective. New economic vice-president Javier Faus, a very successful private equity investor by trade, led an “austerity” project. One cost-cutting measure was banning colour photocopying at all Camp Nou offices.

As you can see below, revenues rose sharply, helped by innovations such as the controversial sponsorship agreement with Qatar. Total expenditure levelled off for a couple of years, as did spending on player salaries, even after new high-earner Neymar arrived from Santos in 2013.

“When we took control, the president mandated that we professionalise the club,” Faus said in October 2013. New measures included adding a club statute (Article 67) mandating that the leadership must resign if debts were twice EBITDA (earnings before taxes, interest, depreciation and amortisation) in two successive years.

Words like “austerity” and “sustainability” impressed readers of the annual club accounts. But the players began to chafe against what they saw as unfair restraints on their pay. A petty legal case taken by Rosell and then vice-president Bartomeu against their previous colleague Laporta also damaged their relationships with Guardiola, Xavi and Messi, who had remained close to their former boss.

A storm was coming and it broke in December 2013. Amid familiar local media stories of Jorge Messi requesting another significant pay-bump for his son, Faus complained in a radio interview that there was no need to offer pay-rises to their No 10 “every six months”.

Messi did not often speak in public at that point, but he responded almost immediately: “Mister Faus knows nothing about football and wants to run Barca like a business, which it is not. Barca is the best team in the world and deserves the best directors.”

Faus’ faux-pas signalled his end at the club and, the following June, Messi agreed a new deal roughly doubling his wages to £39.5 million gross per season.

Messi surely felt he was worth the money, especially as nemesis Cristiano Ronaldo was earning something similar at Real Madrid. And the Argentine’s fame and exploits also clearly helped Barca’s revenues rise dramatically year after year. A problem, though, was that his rocketing annual wage provided an elevated ceiling up to which everyone else could negotiate.

Summer 2014 also saw Luis Suarez join Messi and Neymar in attack. The next season saw the team win another treble. That year’s accounts included payments to players and staff rising by over £88 million and the club’s debts increasing for the first time since Laporta left.

“The money is out on the pitch,” Faus’ replacement Susana Monje explained at the club’s AGM in October 2015.

When Monje left citing personal reasons the following year, Bartomeu took on the economic VP’s duties as well. The trope “Bartomeu takes the reins” became a favourite of local headline writers, especially for stories around new contracts or transfers. Some saw this as strong leadership from the top, others as the players being allowed to bypass the club’s various levels of negotiating expertise.

A rotating door of different sporting and technical directors, especially after Andoni Zubizarreta was fired in January 2015, also cleared a direct path from the dressing room to the president’s door.

Sergio Busquets spent much of 2016 hinting publicly that he might join Guardiola at City if Bartomeu broke a promise to significantly raise his salary. “I hope the president keeps his word,” Busquets said that February. Talks dragged on before the midfielder eventually signed a new deal that September, worth a reported £12.3 million a year.

Contract talks with Iniesta, now coming towards the end of his career, dragged through 2017. In June, the midfielder, usually exceedingly polite, emphatically denied a claim by Bartomeu that an agreement had already been reached. That October he did sign a new deal, but senior players had learned that publicly confronting Bartomeu could secure a salary “update”, and Gerard Pique and Jordi Alba were among others to follow suit.

It also became public knowledge that the players had jokingly nicknamed the president “Nobita”, after a bespectacled 10-year-old character in Japanese children’s show “Doraemon”. Bartomeu took it in good humour, telling Barca TV that “I suppose I look rather like him”. The president also added, “At Barca, we have a Doraemon in Messi, who can resolve all our difficult situations. And if there’s a Doraemon, there must be a Nobita, too.”

Amid all the fun and games, Barca’s 2017-18 accounts saw football salaries rise from £342 million to £457 million. The announcement came just as Messi leveraged new apparent interest from Guardiola’s City into a deal worth more than £70 million per year, helping him become the world’s best-paid athlete.

All this saw Barca also become the highest-paying team in any global sport, with each player making an average of over £10.4 million per season, per Sporting Intelligence’s 2018 Global Sports Salaries Survey. They still have that No 1 ranking, although the average amount dipped slightly last year to £9,827,644, with Madrid second on £8.9m, Juventus third, followed mostly by NBA teams until the first Premier League side — Manchester City (13th, at £7 million).

Many Barca fans and pundits thought this just made sense as they had the world’s best player in their squad. Bartomeu and his fellow directors were unruffled as the club’s revenues continued to rocket, too. Net debts were also slowly falling, even after the 2018 confirmation of a £572 million remodelling of the Camp Nou.

Last January, the club’s website happily headlined a story “Barca tops Deloitte’s Football Money League for the first time”. Soon afterwards, Bartomeu boasted of the €1 billion turnover to the Catalan industrialists. That seems a long time ago now.

Last week, Bartomeu had to deny that Barca would have been in danger of declaring bankruptcy within three months if the emergency pay-cuts had not been implemented.

“Up to February we had a faster pace of income than expected, the fastest in history,” he told Radio Catalunya. “Now it has all just stopped, which is why we are making these cuts. If we had done nothing before June, we would not have gone bankrupt. But there would have been losses.”

The tone was much more sober than before, understandably. Some sympathy is possible as nobody could have foreseen all football and most of society shutting down so abruptly. Also, while Barca were the first La Liga club to publicly announce pay-cuts, on Friday the league itself asked all Spain’s professional teams to follow suit.

But it is not as if there were no previous signs of financial stresses at the Camp Nou. While revenues and costs have raced each other towards the historic billion mark, the board have been scrambling each season to make ends meet. Last summer they had to borrow the entire £105 million to pay Antoine Griezmann’s release clause, while failed attempts to offload high earners like Ivan Rakitic further ruffled dressing-room feathers.

Barca’s 2019-20 budget needs £109 million income from player trading to balance the books. Should this summer’s transfer window not open as planned, there will be a huge hole in this year’s accounts. Which brings back Faus’ famous Article 67, and the threat of the entire board having to resign should debts mount too far.

Meanwhile the current crisis hit just after Messi’s Instagram dressing-down of sporting director Eric Abidal, who had publicly blamed the players for January’s decision to fire Ernesto Valverde as coach. A phrase from that post — “I think everyone has to take responsibility for their own duties and the decisions they take” — was clearly not just aimed at Abidal.

All this has led to a situation where the club has little money and its players have lots. Bartomeu and his fellow directors have lost control. Messi is now all-powerful at the Camp Nou. Even the kitman and security guards directly count on his generosity for their monthly pay-cheques.

We are also approaching the usual time when Messi’s contract needs an “update”. And everyone at the Camp Nou knows that his current deal includes a clause allowing him to unilaterally leave this June, when he turns 33. This has led to fears, not just among fans, that he could really move on, considering how sour everything has turned through recent months.

However, it is impossible to imagine that Messi, having taken the whole club on his shoulders, could now just up and leave. More likely is that Barca’s senior players try to use their current leverage to bring about deep structural changes in how the club is run.

Which brings us back to that famous 2013 argument. Faus’ view of Barca as a business which must follow the usual accounting rules has not survived these current extraordinary circumstances. Messi’s response that Barca deserves the best directors remains truer than ever.

NikkiCFC · April 8, 2020

Dutch FA plans to resume Eredivisie on June 19

The KNVB revealed its plans to restart the league during a video conference with professional clubs and other major stakeholders.

Vesper · April 9, 2020

Is it time to talk seriously about cancelling the 2022 World Cup?

https://theathletic.com/1730410/2020/04/08/fifa-world-cup-coronavirus-football-soccer-cancel/

Dana White looks more like a Bond villain’s henchman than he does the mastermind, with his gleaming dome the only vaguely Blofeldian thing about him.

That isn’t to say there wasn’t any cackling (muahahaha!) as the UFC president revealed his hair-brained scheme to host their latest jamboree of physical punishment on a private island to avoid coronavirus social distancing restrictions.

Will White succeed in his plan to fly in a bunch of angry, violent men to duke it out in front the cameras and palm trees? Who knows? Who cares?

One of the things about sport that has been such a turn-off in this period has been those leagues and governing bodies that are hell-bent on crow-barring the doors open again as soon as the first microbe bites the dust.

It’s not so much a fear that the ball stops rolling; more that the cashier’s tills stop ringing and curiously, it has been a league whose season is over — the NFL, fresh from this weekend’s announcement of their fully virtual draft in a fortnight’s time — who have ploughed on with the most flagrant disregard to the ongoing global situation.

Once we eventually emerge from this cursed period, the clamour to be first to reopen the turnstiles to consumer cash is going to be chaotic. Every sport faces a different challenge and they all have to find their own solution but it seems there isn’t a league out there that hasn’t considered erecting a plastic screen and playing without fans if it’ll make them an extra buck or two.

For sports like baseball and cricket, so dependent on the weather, it is increasingly difficult to see how the lost revenues of a partially-destroyed summer can possibly be recouped. Think also of the businesses that depend on their local ballpark to survive, those dozens of bars and restaurants and merchandise outlets around Wrigley Field in Chicago or Coors Field in Denver, which don’t even open in the winter. Their revenue stream was supposed to be a raging torrent right now. Instead it’s not even a babbling brook.

Every sport is desperate to get back to normal but baseball appears to be the most keen to make up for lost time. Alert to the fragility of its ecosystem and already facing doubts over its future-proofing, America’s favourite pastime could even begin its 2020 season with all 30 teams playing in the desert according to a report by ESPN’s Jeff Passan on Monday.

Major League Baseball didn’t deny the report, instead noting that they were “actively considering numerous contingency plans”. And with that tacit acknowledgement, the countdown to soulless bubble sports played out without fans began.

There is almost no proposition less attractive than sterile games being put on under an anonymous baking sun without spectators. Even as a televisual product, it lacks any great appeal.

But for football fans, that countdown timer has been ticking for some years without a second thought. We can, however, stop that clock. And it’s now probably time to think about it, at least.

Those who were part of the Australia 2022 World Cup bid team still remember their reaction to being pipped to the honour of hosting the competition by the Qatari bid: “Christ! They really fucking did it!”

Navigating their way through years of FIFA’s arduous, sleazy bid process, they had heard chatter when trying to schmooze the relevant executives that Qatar’s wealth of petrodollars were being used to buy votes but few believed a tournament in the Middle Eastern state — which had never even qualified for a major tournament in the sport — could ever actually happen.

Nearly a decade later, we are still not that much closer to fully unearthing all the details of how Qatar — and Russia, in 2018 — secured the necessary votes to secure the right to host the World Cup.

For the first time, though, the US Department of Justice has laid out allegations in black and white that got us a little closer, alleging Qatar’s bid team of bribed FIFA executive committee members for votes. It may have been buried beyond page 29 of the documents unsealed on Monday afternoon but once you get past the fresh indictments of some media executives at Fox TV and dig a little deeper, the DoJ makes an allegation, which Qatar denies, that the bid was won by corrupt means.

None of which will be much of a surprise to those who have paid attention for the last 10 years or so.

The ensuing circus of self-justification and hard-drive destruction has done little to restore faith in the game and as those absurdly-gilded South American executives enjoyed house arrest and favourable parole conditions with a Mai Tai in their hand, it was up to FIFA to contort itself into whatever shape possible to make sure that the $5 billion dollar (or £4.1 million) show must indeed go on.

The result? A winter World Cup that would require three seasons of club football across the globe be realigned in order to accommodate it.

So, a World Cup allegedly won by corrupt means taking place at a time that suits nobody in a country where workers die to finish the stadiums that still have a long way to go under weather conditions that are inhumane, though Qatar disputes that they are.

Now add in the ongoing pandemic and ask: do we really need it?

The football schedule was already at saturation point, with the mega-rich intent on getting even more mega-rich and FIFA’s precious World Cup necessitating the calendar be reworked. With the 2019-20 season awaiting a satisfactory conclusion, time needed for an adequate pre-season and then a new campaign, it is hard to see how domestic leagues can cram the amount of games needed into such a tight window along with domestic knockout and continental competitions.

Perhaps this means we have two or three years of pretty much every club playing Saturday-Tuesday-Sunday-Wednesday on a loop like Manchester City, Liverpool and Real Madrid are already used to. It would at least bring back the gate receipts clubs are missing so dearly.

Or we could erase Qatar 2022 from the schedule and allow everyone time to breathe.

If you are like me, this absence of football has made you think a little harder about what it is you truly love about the game.

Everyone has a very personal relationship with football and I realised that my connection to the sport is strongly experiential. I fell in love with playing the game as a kid, obviously, but the moment that I was truly hooked and wanted my life to revolve around football was when I went to my first game.

It was the 1996 Third Division play-off final between Plymouth Argyle and Darlington at the old Wembley. An accident; a spare ticket that nobody wanted, except the football-mad nephew who didn’t live far from London. Not the most spectacular of fixtures, admittedly, but to a six-year-old boy, no place on earth could match it. Mainly, it was the chanting, the songs that everyone would sing at the same time, and wasn’t it clever that they knew the words and isn’t it funny when they all sing that the other team’s goalkeeper is shit?

Obviously, the hot dogs and the balloons and the flags and being in the Plymouth end when they scored (they won, 1-0) all played their part but the atmosphere and the crowd are what first emotionally welded me to the game and it’s that I miss most.

When football eventually returns, I can’t wait to experience that half-second silence between a ball hitting the back of the net, the crowd inhaling collectively, and a joyous wall of sound being unleashed.

Missing that experience, that noise, has really clarified to me that I have a very emotional connection with football and never has that felt so strong as when covering a World Cup.

The World Cup is so spectacular that it barely needs introduction.

You grow up watching it in glorious technicolour but to be sat in Row L is to watch football history being etched on the page, and it provokes a reaction in you. At the first World Cup game I attended, Brazil took the lead and neighbourhoods around the stadium sent up fireworks. I cried a little, just so happy to be there. I welled up at Argentina vs Iceland, a fairly inconsequential group game at Russia 2018, because the two huge groups of travelling fans reminded me again why I love football. Then, during the knockout phase, I remember standing in the sweaty heat of Kazan ahead of France vs Argentina, looking out at the vivid green expanse and simply thinking “This is why we do it.”

So, cancelling a World Cup is not a step that any part of me would want to take on a football fan level — but the benefits seem obvious.

With nearly eight weeks returned to the global football calendar, cancelling 2022 would give the sport room to work its way back into its normal rhythm. While FIFA would lose an estimated $9 billion in revenue (Russia 2018, the last World Cup that will have a 32-team format, made just over $5 billion) it could potentially claw back some of the reputational damage from the flawed bid process for Russia and Qatar, where over half of the executive committee have now been accused of, or proven to have committed impropriety, including former president Sepp Blatter and former secretary general Jerome Valcke.

It is fair to point out that such measures might be seen as a punishment for players. Imagine you are Gareth Bale or David Alaba — this could be your final chance at playing on international football’s biggest stage. That isn’t something to be sniffed at, and is a far more compelling counter-argument than lost revenues, even in a sport likely to feel the economic impact of COVID-19 for many years.

Perhaps simply postponing until 2023 is the answer, giving the schedule-makers some room to manoeuvre and potentially moving the tournament to somewhere that isn’t facing allegations of multi-million-dollar bribes and human rights abuses.

Of course, this is all just a thought exercise. FIFA are more likely to sign up to play a tournament on Dana White’s private island than they are to choose not to milk their most gushing of cash cows at a time of financial need, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask questions.

At a time when the very essence of what sport means to us is coming into personal focus, it is my feeling that those pushing the idea of playing any sport in a bubble might be best served by stepping outside it.

NikkiCFC · April 12, 2020

Vesper · April 14, 2020

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

Vesper · April 15, 2020

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!”

Vesper · April 15, 2020

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.”

NikkiCFC · April 16, 2020

I guess we wont go to any raves till autumn

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