The English Football Thread

[MoroccanBlue 5,381]

Always felt Rodri came back too soon

[Special Juan 28,141]

If I could send a voice note through here 

Hahhahahahhahahahahhahah Liverpool Fuck right off

[NikkiCFC 8,318]

3 minutes ago, Special Juan said:

If I could send a voice note through here 

Hahhahahahhahahahahhahah Liverpool Fuck right off

Going to Spain in good mood 😎 ⛱️ 

[Special Juan 28,141]

4 minutes ago, NikkiCFC said:

Going to Spain in good mood 😎 ⛱️ 

Mate, honestly, buzzing. Family happy and Chelsea win

[nyikolajevics 2,697]

Crystal Palace lost the appeal, it's official now they will play in Conference Leage instead of EL.

Feel sorry for them, they really earned their spot by winning FA-Cup. Hard to understand how two Red Bull team can play in the CL but Palace is disqualified due to multi-club ownership.

[Vesper 30,164]

The House of Glass and Iron

Buoyed by historic victory, Crystal Palace must move forward without the architect of their success: Dougie Freedman. Billy Carpenter investigates how the renowned talent-spotter transformed South London's pride

https://scoutedftbl.com/the-house-of-glass-and-iron/

 

The original Crystal Palace, quite literally “the biggest thing in London,” was built with over 293,000 panes of glass and 4,000 tons of iron. The sprawling complex stood as a crown jewel of Victorian engineering. First constructed for the Great Exhibition of 1851, it was later relocated to Sydenham Hill, where it stretched over a thousand feet across the ridge. Walt Whitman waxed poetic in the Song of the Exposition:

Around a palace, loftier, fairer, ampler than any yet,
Earth's modern wonder, history’s seven outstripping,
High rising tier on tier with glass and iron façades,
Gladdening the sun and sky…

But the elements that made it a marvel also made it vulnerable. On a windy November night in 1936, a small explosion in a cloakroom ignited, and over 100,000 people came to watch the Palace burn into nothing. Among the sad onlookers was Sir Henry Buckland, the property manager, who was holding hands with his little daughter. He’d named her Crystal.

The most beautiful things are often the most fragile.

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Triumph and fragility sit at the heart of the club which has the burned ruin's name.

From an outsider’s perspective, Crystal Palace F.C. have successfully become the Premier League’s most watchable overachievers, now entering a thirteenth straight season in the top flight and never finishing above 10th or below 15th. But real stability, or the lasting feeling of it at least, can prove evasive.

In mid-May, they enjoyed the greatest day in club history, an uproarious FA Cup final win over Manchester City. For the club that has flown a tifo that reads, “YOU GOT THE MONEY, WE GOT THE SOUL,” victory felt especially sweet.

Eberechi Eze seals history against Manchester City.

That trophy lift propelled them back to Wembley again, and yesterday they prevailed over the heavy-spending Liverpool. The difference in the club's respective Transfermarkt pages could hardly be more stark. Liverpool have spent nearly €300m on the likes of Wirtz, Ekitiké, Kerkez, and Frimpong. They’re not done, either: Isak links still float, as well as the potential signing of Palace’s own Marc Guéhi.

Palace’s total spend so far this summer? €2.30m. They prevailed nonetheless. But beneath the laurel wreaths, things still feel precarious.

A hunt-and-peck UEFA have banned Palace from the Europa League, citing John Textor’s stake in the club as a breach of multi-club ownership rules. Their spot is to be taken by Nottingham Forest, who would never, ever, ever, ever be involved in multi-club shenanigans, not ever. Textor has since sold his shares, but the club's appeal was today rejected.

It’s not the only complication Palace face. Wealthier clubs encircle their top talent with lavish offers, key transfers are again left late, and their prized manager, Oliver Glasner, has expressed frustrations with the club’s “passive” window, saying he was “promised that we would be more active and bring in the new players earlier this year.”

Woven through it all is the loss of one of their most valuable assets: today’s subject, club legend and renowned recruitment architect, Dougie Freedman.

Freedman has left one palace for the kind of money that could buy him his own.

After links to Manchester United and Newcastle, he accepted a surprising role at Al-Diriyah, a club recently promoted to the Saudi second-tier and owned by Diriyah Company, a firm backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF).

Freedman’s reign with The Eagles carried many hallmarks of his treasured club: shoestring thriftiness, underdog mentality, flair, a true believer’s dedication to the unique culture surrounding Selhurst Park, and frequent brushes with the dramatic.

Palace began the final day of the 2000-01 season in 21st place, and essentially needed a win to avoid relegation from Division One. Leaving it to the 86th minute, Freedman delivered perhaps the most important goal in club history until that point.

Dougie Freedman: "Heartache, heartbreak, heart-make!"

Jonathan Pearce bellowed on Capital Gold Radio.

“Palace have taken the lead at Stockport County, they’re heading for safety in the dying seconds! Goodness me, what drama! The club that has cut it so close to the wire, so many times. Relegation, promotion and Wembley. Heartache, heartbreak, heart-make!”

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A decade later, the threat wasn’t exclusion from this league or that cup. It was extinction. In 2010, Palace entered administration, were docked ten points (again raising the spectre of relegation from the Championship), and faced a 24-hour deadline before liquidation. In a last-ditch move, lifelong fan and advertising executive Steve Parish posted a 500-word message on a fan forum, outlining his plan to buy the club. The response was immediate.

“Within about five minutes of it reaching the fans' forum, it was on Sky Sports News, on the ticker at the top,” he recounted. “I thought: 'Wow. That's the power of football and the media.’”

3,000 supporters gathered outside Lloyds Bank on Gresham Street the next morning, as was documented in Where Eagles Dare, the wonderful docuseries on the club’s turnaround. Through tense, complicated talks, Parish’s consortium, CPFC 2010, secured the future of the club and stadium.

The outfit had other divine inheritances. The first was what Parish called “our number one piece of fortune”: local boy and future club legend Wilfried Zaha. Born in the Ivory Coast and raised in Croydon, Zaha joined Palace’s academy at age 8 and had just begun breaking into the first team at 17. His debut came in March 2010, at the tail end of the club’s administration-hit season. Within months, he’d become their brightest hope and, later, their most valuable asset.

Another inheritance? Freedman. The Scot, now the sixth-highest scoring player in club history, had already taken up a reserve-team coaching role while still suiting up. By March 2010, fully retired as a player, he was named assistant manager under Paul Hart during a desperate push to avoid relegation from the Championship. The brief was brutally simple: stay up. It came down to the final day of the season, and Palace clawed their way to a 2–2 draw that kept them up by a single point and sent Wednesday down.

Survival, again. And for Freedman, it was the start of a long and winding journey at the heart of Palace’s technical and strategic build.

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Freedman was kept on as assistant manager under George Burley the following season, but after an unremarkable year, it was clear a longer-term reset was needed. Parish made his big swing, targeting Eddie Howe for a fresh start. It looked like he’d found his manager. He got a reality check instead.

“I agreed everything with Eddie,” Parish recalled. “Then I woke up the next morning and he’d gone to Burnley. Obviously another little lesson about football.”

There was a silver lining.

“That really galvanised Dougie, who hadn’t really made representations up to that point. I remember, he demanded, ‘I need to see you. I know South London. I know these kids. I know how this place ticks. What we’re gonna try and do is difficult to impossible, but I think we can. And I think I can.’”

A flair player in his day, Freedman brought a mix of expressive instinct and technocratic pragmatism to his new role. Alongside Parish, he began shaping a club ethos around developing young players, bargain-hunting, and prioritising cultural fit. His first campaign as manager in 2011/12 was stable but forgettable. His second was anything but.

The 2012/13 side just clicked. Freedman found a core: Zaha’s young brilliance meshed with other club icons like Julian Speroni, Mile Jedinak, and Joel Ward, not to mention the throwback nine’ing of Glenn Murray, the unpredictability of Yannick Bolasie, and the pure solidity of so many others. For once, it was about more than survival.

Then came the inevitable twist. Midway through the season, with the team flying, Freedman took the Bolton job. To say it stunned the fanbase would be an understatement. Looking back, he doesn’t hide his regret.

“My circle of influence was wrong at the time. I was too impatient and I didn’t know what I had,” he said in an interview for the documentary. “I knew I made the wrong decision very quickly into my Bolton career. But it was a decision I made. And regrettably, it was the wrong decision.”

Under Ian Holloway, there were early successes, but eventually, a cold period took root as Holloway tried to impose a more expansive brand of football. Pivoting back to more Freedman-esque tactics, the team rebounded and made the play-off.

Zaha, the other great Parish inheritance, had already signed for Manchester United, and was desperate to provide a parting gift. In the playoff semifinal against Brighton, he scored twice in the second half to carry Palace to Wembley.

Wilfried Zaha scores to send Palace to Wembley.

In the final, Zaha won the penalty that sent them to the Premier League.

He wouldn’t be gone from the club long, and in truth, his influence still saturates everything.

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It would be a longer period, five long years, before Freedman and Palace crossed paths again.

Bygones firmly bygones, he returned as Sporting Director in August 2017.

“Looking back, of course I wouldn’t have went,” he said. “I would have stayed here, and we would have had promotion [together]. And it’s probably one of the things that drives me on now: to make up for that disappointing decision I made.”

In this fourth act, Freedman would rebuild his reputation, not just as a club figure, but as one of the most discerning talent evaluators in the game. And he did it in some unique, frugal ways that made him the envy of many clubs across Europe.

So what did define Palace’s recruitment model under Freedman? What made it different? And where does it go from here?

The Freedman playbook

It’s tempting to reduce Freedman to “the guy who buys well from the Championship.” And sure, that has a lot of truth to it. But the reality is more interesting.

Above all else, every successful football operation starts with a sense of coherent identity and vision. To use a business school-type quote (kill me) that is often attributed to Michael Eisner, but I can’t find good sourcing on:

“A brand is a living entity; it is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures.”

We tend to think of an entity’s “brand” as a logo or a marketing campaign. But it isn’t what you say it is; it’s what others say it is. And from a recruitment point of view, it’s reflected in the leagues you scout, how you negotiate, how you treat your players, your relationships writ large, your pathways, your play-style, and a million quiet decisions that add up to form a prevailing impression in the market. That identity starts with the reputation of ownership, and gets reinforced by the day-in, day-out choices of the sporting operation.

“Everything at Palace’s training ground goes back to [Freedman],” one source told The Athletic in a wonderful piece by Matt Woosnam. “From the security to the canteen staff, sports science, everyone, he has full control of everyone in the building. It all goes through him. It’s almost like Alex Ferguson — I think that is probably his mentor.” Freedman built a modern football department in his own image: streamlined, data-literate, and obsessively hands-on.

That does seem to imply that this is a sizable void to fill.

That report details how, since his return in 2017, one of the most important structural changes has been the unification of recruitment and analytics. The staff has doubled by last count; academic backgrounds are preferred; emotion is deliberately stripped out of the early evaluation stages.

All of this culminates in a recruitment year like this, one of the more impressive in recent memory:

What principles underpin this kind of success? And what can we learn from it?

Looking through the transfer record, not to mention every article and interview I could find, I tried to group patterns and reverse-engineer the strategy from there.

Here are seven pillars of Freedman-style recruitment.

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1. Take quality shots (and avoid stupidity)

It’s an analogy. Bear with me.

As you probably know, one of the most reliable indicators of a result is the difference in the shot quality of the respective teams. See this, from Soccerment:

Per that research:

The correlation goes up to R² values of 0.56 and 0.55 for xGD and xPoints, respectively. This result is quite remarkable, implying that more than half of the variation in team performance can be explained with their shot quality relative to their opponents.

You’ll see the impact of this in leagues worldwide. Almost everywhere, teams are passing up higher-quantity, more spurious chances for better-worked shots. It’s worth repeating: half of team performance can be explained by that statistic.

Quality, not quantity.

When we covered Palace’s hated rivals Brighton back in 2023, we talked about their frequent, yet considered bets in the market, a Goldilocks model of squad size that was neither too big nor too small, but just right. I thought they worked these levers perfectly, and contrasted nicely to some of the bloat that existed with clubs like Forest back then.

Especially with loan rules changing, I’ve since argued that Brighton have now shifted too closely to a “spray and pray” model, in which they’re still signing great talents, but are having more trouble ensuring stable pathways and minutes for each of them. To me, this threatens their central selling proposition: “Come here, you will play the right amount of minutes to grow, it will be in a modern style of football, and you will get the jump you crave.” There’s context for all, but players from Gruda to Wieffer to Kadıoğlu to Ferguson didn’t necessarily get that experience last year. Any player offered this summer has to have a glimmer of doubt.

I wouldn’t doubt their ability to readjust, but inefficiency has crept in.

In that piece, we quoted some of the famed investor Charlie Munger’s “elementary, worldly wisdom,” including this nugget:

“The idea that very smart people with investment skills should have hugely diversified portfolios is madness. It’s a very conventional madness. And it’s taught in all the business schools. But they’re wrong.”

This is where we get closer to the Palace model:

“I think part of the popularity of Berkshire Hathaway is that we look like people who have found a trick,” Munger said in 2010. “It's not brilliance. It's just avoiding stupidity.”

And so:

• Avoid dumb stuff.
• Remember that shot quality, more than quantity, wins.

Freedman has instilled these virtues at Crystal Palace.

In the period since Freedman had his first full summer in charge (2018/19), up until his last window, Crystal Palace have made the fewest total moves of all teams who have appeared in the Premier League, equal with Liverpool (133).

Palace have the 23rd-most arrivals of all teams in this list, and the fewest total departures.

This is not a model built on churn.

The spending reflects it. Since Freedman returned as Sporting Director, Palace have spent €333.77 million, good for 19th in the league. That’s less than half of what Brighton have shelled out. It’s behind Leeds, Fulham, Forest, Southampton. And unlike those clubs, Palace have stayed up every season.

Their total outgoing sales over that period add up to €181.88 million, good for 23rd in the division, and behind the likes of Norwich and Watford.

When they do spend, they pick their moments. The most expensive signing in club history technically remains Christian Benteke at €31.2 million, before Freedman was involved.

The right model for one club is not the right model for every club. Brighton have found success by spreading their bets, working quickly across a diverse network, knowing they’ll actively sell, and acknowledging the impossibility of achieving “certainty” with something as complex as young football players. But for Palace, this patience, frugality, and simple lack of ‘panic buys’ then turns into a series of their own compounding advantages.

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2. Screen for Crystal Palace DNA

Freedman wasn’t only concerned with “Is he good?” He was just as concerned with “Is he one of ours?” Freedman knows what “one of ours” looks like because he’s done almost everything at Palace. As one source said:

“He has the ability to visualise a Palace player rather than a good player who is not necessarily good for Palace.”

The sentiment was echoed by Patrick Vieira:

“This is one of the strengths of the football club: the Sporting Director who played at a high level, who understands the game, who understands the club and understands the demands of the fans.”

That knowledge is baked into the process, and the culture is weaponised in negotiations. The Athletic reported that when recruiting wingers, staff may show clips of Wayne Routledge and Yannick Bolasie, and show how the faithful rewarded their expressiveness and flair.

Above all else, Freedman seems to have a humility filter. “Dougie is not only big on talent, but on mentality and attitude,” said one agent. “He extensively checks out the people he’s going to sign beforehand. He tends to avoid players he might think are a big-time Charlie.”

You can see the pattern. Eberechi Eze was released by both Arsenal and Millwall. Michael Olise had several failed auditions; it didn’t ultimately work out with Arsenal, Manchester City, or Chelsea. Both are internally motivated players. Marc Guéhi captained England’s under-21s. Joachim Andersen and Cheick Doucouré had mature qualities coming in.

Palace supporter Mark Silverstein summed it up in 2021. “Clearly there are exceptions but many of Dougie’s recruits have had a character that is both steely but also human and relatable as people at the same time … When I think of our more recent recruitment: Eze, Guehi, Gallagher, Andersen and even going back to Kouyate and Guaita, each have that same mixture of decency and determination.”

The lesson, as I see it, is to be as specific as possible about what makes your club’s culture different from others. When describing the players you want, it’s easy to turn it into a list of universal traits: all the good characteristics, none of the bad ones. Genius! But that’s not decisive enough. You have to identify your priorities, be honest about what you’re willing to sacrifice in pursuit of them, and clearly articulate why those choices fit your operation in particular. This creates self-perpetuating benefits because players can more readily understand why they should choose your club, without even talking to you.

For Palace, that appears to be players who are a) humble, b) physical, and c) expressive on the pitch.

A slight chip on the shoulder doesn’t hurt.

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3. Run a consistent methodology

In Mind Games, we explored the psychological traps that lead to poor talent evaluation, ranging from projection to bias to noise. To find solutions, one of the fields we borrowed from was behavioural economics. Max Bazerman, a long-time researcher in the space, developed a six-step framework for better decisions; though originally for business, it maps neatly onto scouting.

• Define the Problem: Identify the problem to be solved by a specific player search, and how the search will align with the longer-term vision.
• Identify the Criteria: Establish simple, yet precisely-worded criteria for assessment, which may encompass simple data, proprietary methods, and/or “intuitive” measures.
• Weigh the Criteria: From there, the relative importance to each criterion can be weighed based on its agreed-upon relevance.
• Generate Alternatives: Undertake the widest search possible for analysis – through means both technological (software) and human (reading, networking, travel) – and develop a system for “flagging” or “shortlisting” players for the deepest analysis.
• Rate Each Alternative on Each Criterion: Based on clear definitions, assign ratings to each criterion, and agree on how respective data and scouting metrics should be tallied.
• Compute the Overall Score: Aggregate the rankings.

This is where data is so useful, and especially efficient at earlier stages when conducting wide searches. The simple reason is that there are so many fucking players, more than you can imagine, and you could be looking past them for any number of questionable reasons.

“Data analysis is 1,000 percent more efficient than traditional scouting, where you’ve got to drive somewhere or catch a plane, to see someone play for 90 minutes… and then they might not even play, or they’ll play in a different position or formation to what you’re looking for,” said former Burnley technical director Mike Rigg, who is now the academy manager at Birmingham. “And then you might see their best ever game, or their worst.”

To counteract this, Freedman empowered the nerds. From that Athletic article:

Academic backgrounds are prized, unsurprisingly given Freedman’s preference for the initial recruitment process to be entirely data led, with emotion removed from the process.

In Mind Games, we covered how having a deliberate set of questions, a gut-check list if you will, is important for eliminating the silly biases that cloud our judgements.

A comprehensive approach to scouting demands asking critical questions: Are we aware of the right players? Are we inadvertently favouring certain groups? Are we giving fair consideration to a player's circumstances and background? Does our evaluation account for individualism? Are we misunderstanding the player due to their age or body? Are we being swayed by simple, pointy visual cues? And so on.

Freedman and Palace have taken that a step further: they methodically go through 29 data-led questions for every possible signing, leading to their shortlist.

From there…

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4. Eyeballs make the call

Freedman trusts his own eyes. The Times notes that he “watches about 150 matches a year around the world” and, predictably, made personal scouting trips to Blackburn Rovers specifically to evaluate Adam Wharton before pushing to sign him for £18 million in January 2024; before signing Marc Guéhi, he watched him 15 to 20 times. Data has its place, but the eye test isn’t outsourced, or considered outdated. It takes the decision across the finish line.

In-person viewing adds layers that numbers can’t. You can better see body language under pressure, how a player anticipates space, how their intensity changes late in games. You also catch social cues, interactions with teammates and staff, even how they carry themselves around the club.

This groundwork was laid with Wharton. Now one of the most sought-after midfielders in the world and an English international, Freedman spotted him early.

“Funnily enough, it was after my first Championship start which would have been late August, early September of 2022,” Wharton remembers. “Dougie [Freedman] was actually at that game, my manager told me. There was interest but I was never going to move at that time or anything.”

This focus on in-person scouting carries that added bonus: it shows a player how much you care.

“[It’s] like an incentive for me that I was a player that they were invested in, in a way,” he continued. “They were spending all that time interested. It wasn’t just a little impulse. So that was a factor that I took in to sort of help me make my decision.”

Welcome to the Wharton age

Introducing Adam Wharton: the low-socked Blackburn prodigy on growing up, his developing England career, and how Busquets and Frenkie shape his game.

This process takes time, but it raises the certainty of the final call. By watching more and being around the player more, you fill in the gaps. You reduce the risk of personal or behavioural issues that can derail a signing.

The tradeoff is that it’s manual and slow. Sometimes a deal falls apart while you're waiting for one more look. Palace have been willing to live with that.

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5. Narrow markets = compounding benefits

As we’ve covered, data can get a player in the door, but the eye test gets them a contract offer. The problem with the eye test is that it’s not as scalable as analytics. So if you value it, but you have finite time, staff, and budget, you must narrow the aperture.

Romain Esse is a recent example. I got really intrigued with him at Millwall; his skill and work-rate impressed me. As I sang his praises, I wrote “TL;DR: I will be a little jealous on the inevitable Palace swoop.” You’ll never believe what happened next. (You will: he signed with Palace.) That’s what we call a strong brand.

It’s easy to see how a deal came together. Young talent from that level knows what Palace are cooking: they had a track record of integration, clear role models, and a structure that didn’t chew you up.

This also factored with Wharton. He has some of the deft touches, spray passes, and feel for the game that the top clubs in the world crave; the only question now is whether they can afford him. Here’s the thing, though: these qualities were always apparent, and he was always sought after. But aside from the time Freedman put in, he also went to Palace because Eze, Olise, and Guehi had already shown him the way: a clear path to stable minutes from the Championship. The fee of £18 million (potentially rising to £22 million) hardly feels sufficient now.

The long game also paid off with Olise. Celebrating the attacker as the first signing in his managerial reign, Patrick Vieira talked about this recurring theme.

“We’ve known him quite well because he’s a player the football club have been following for a long time,” said Vieira. “There were some big challenges, and to sign him, I think, is credit to Dougie [Freedman] and his staff.”

Becoming an expert in certain markets has, I’ll say it again, compounding benefits. Freedman and his team got to know the Championship inside out, dating back to his time as a player. That meant not just identifying standout talents, but better understanding their roles, maturity, personality, and system fit. It meant knowing which clubs coached and scaled well, the tactical permutations and heritage of them, the little bits of context that only experts can know. You can also “double up” your scouting trips, more easily checking out multiple players at once. Palace could avoid obvious traps, and often lay groundwork before the rest of the market caught up.

There is particular expertise in players who find themselves in that English Pyramid Limbo and are looking for stability. Freedman routinely looked for young players who had been stuck in deeper squads, like Guéhi, Conor Gallagher, Trevoh Chalobah, and recently Ben Chilwell from Chelsea. Lurking around Cobham is always a winning strategy. But it also applies to the likes of Will Hughes from Watford and Sam Johnstone from West Brom. The clarity of the performance data and the local expertise make them more knowable qualities than you can find elsewhere.

France has rounded this picture out.

Cheick Doucouré and Joachim Andersen (who came from Lyon, via Fulham) fit the model: well-schooled, physically ready, tactically teachable. Patrick Vieira himself qualifies, of course.

Maxence Lacroix, the 25-year-old defensive fulcrum from France, came with a glowing character reference.

Lacroix was 21 when he was made captain at Wolfsburg by Glasner, who was adamant he was the ideal replacement in the middle of Palace’s back three after the sale of Joachim Andersen to Fulham last summer. It has proved to be a shrewd move because Lacroix’s ability on the ball and recovery speed have complemented the attributes of Guéhi and Richards.

The objective isn’t to find the most talented player, period. It’s to find the best player for your unique, well-defined environment. Whenever you have an information asymmetry on your opponents (through data, scouting, or in-depth knowledge of a region), you reap the rewards.

If you can’t go wider, go deeper.

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6. Be intense about intensity

The Premier League’s intensity levels continue to spike year-on-year.

This SkillCorner graph we shared last year shows how the demands stack up to the others.

This has contributed to a more end-to-end style of play, with the smallest time spent in the middle third of any of the top-five leagues.

Players are now performing more high-intensity actions and hitting higher peak sprint speeds than ever before. The baseline for physical output is getting astronomically taxing. That helps explain the types of players clubs are targeting, and Palace have been no different.

According to Opta, Palace had the fourth-lowest possession (42.8%), the fourth-highest direct speed, and the second-quickest sequences in the league.

Palace also ranked 3rd in the league last season for percentage of distance covered at high intensity, according to Hudl.

The last window helped this considerably.

One standout is Daniel Muñoz. The Colombian right-back joined from Genk in Belgium, seemingly an unlikely source for Palace recruitment. But he had that pluckiness and undervalued-ness that Freedman craves, as a cheap, 27-year-old late bloomer. He also, fittingly, had a character reference as Jefferson Lerma’s teammate on the national team. Lerma remarked that “Croydon is Colombia.”

He had something else: an extreme engine. He was in the highest tier for high-intensity actions and direct runs among full-backs last season:

That’s backed by what we’ve seen: a relentless hunger, smart timing, and consistent threat down the flank. His ability to repeat sprints and disrupt shape is core to Palace’s wide-overload patterns, and fits perfectly with a league trending toward chaos and transition. It also helped lead to Palace’s best moment.

“Every session he’s the guy running the most, sprinting the most,” Glasner said earlier this season. “Every game, he plays with the most intensity. It’s the wish of every manager to have such a player.”

Lacroix, meanwhile, is one of the faster centre-backs in Europe, routinely hitting speeds over 35 km/h at Wolfsburg. Palace signed him in part to defend in space, recover in transition, and drive forward with the ball.

Then there’s the case of Ismaïla Sarr, who factored into both goals in the Community Shield. It’s another tale about how playing the long game, and knowing regions on a deep level, can pay dividends.

The Guardian recently outlined the long tail of interest, tracing it all the way back to Freedman clocking him as a teenager just breaking through at Metz. Sarr had just arrived from Génération Foot, and clearly left an early impression. Consistently described as quiet and humble, he was priced out of a potential move to Palace by Watford, then endured a difficult spell at Marseille, where he reportedly didn’t enjoy his time much at all. Freedman and his staff stayed on the case. Once Michael Olise’s move to Bayern was confirmed, Sarr instantly became target number one.

What’s striking in The Guardian’s account is how few clubs were seriously in for him, despite the versatile, hard-working profile that fits the current Premier League meta. At only €15m, that gap in the market became Palace’s gain. Sarr took over Olise’s No. 7 shirt, and despite a quiet opening stretch, became one of the most valuable wingers for his team in the league. Internally, he was described as “an absolute warrior,” one of those players who’s always sore but never misses a session. Glasner said it plainly: “He has great physicality like a sprinter combined with technical ability. This always helps to score goals.”

So the data paints a clear picture. Teams like Palace are making sharper bets on physical profiles that can survive and thrive in the most physically demanding league in the world. High-intensity runners like Muñoz, fast recovery defenders like Lacroix, and speedy wingers like Sarr are helping usher in a period of scary intensity.

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7. Patience is only worth anything when it’s hard

Patience always gets lip service in peacetime. But when form dips, fans are calling for signings, the manager is frustrated, and the window’s closing, the chips are on the table. After some hard-won lessons on this front, Palace have held the line as a matter of course.

Freedman returned during a turbulent stretch. Frank de Boer had been hired a little earlier, with players like Jaïro Riedewald being signed specifically for him. What followed was near-calamity: a few weeks in, Palace were 19th, with no wins and no goals. De Boer lasted 77 days. Everything at that time, from tactics to recruitment, felt disarmingly short-term. Even Alexander Sørloth, Freedman’s marquee signing that January, got a fairly quick hook. He made all of four league starts for the club.

Palace learned from that. Their methodical pace now can feel like true laboriousness. Just ask Glasner. They don’t buy to flip, they don’t have a particularly impressive sales record, and they don’t cycle players to fund the next wave. They wait, and they avoid big mistakes.

There’s a cost. As The Times reported:

“The club’s recent head coaches Tony Pulis, Roy Hodgson and Oliver Glasner have all been frustrated that signings were done at the end of transfer windows as Parish wanted to cut better deals.”

But it’s all by design.

Jean-Philippe Mateta is a good example. He joined on loan in January 2021, scored a flicked goal at Brighton a month later, but didn’t lock down a starting role for two years. His permanent move wasn’t confirmed until January 2022, and even in the 2022–23 season, he made just six league starts. He went nearly a year without a league goal.

Palace waited. In April 2023, he came off the bench to score a last-minute winner against Leicester, ending both the club’s 13-match winless run and his own 28-game drought. The next season, he was Player of the Year. Then came the FA Cup win. His hold-up play was crucial to the decisive goal.

You see the same arc with others. Michael Olise didn’t start right away. Joachim Andersen took time to play his best. Odsonne Édouard got a long look. Even Riedewald, that player who signed to reunite with De Boer, stayed around for seven seasons.

Next up? Eddie Nketiah, who had a modest first season with Palace, thanks in no small part to Mateta’s star turn. It wouldn’t surprise anybody if he had a delayed breakout.

That slower pace sends a message: if we’re not moving on quickly from you, we expect you to stay and fight. For incoming players, it means they’re not signing up to be churned through a system. There’s a real shot to grow, to prove it, and to belong. In a league (and world) built on immediacy, Palace play the long game.

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…but it’s not all sunshine and rainbows

It absolutely, positively doesn’t always work out. Footballers are too complex, and variables pop up too frequently. While the risk profile is generally low, Freedman still has his share of misses, and a few help tell that wider story.

Alexander Sørloth came from a lesser league, had good numbers, passed the eye test, and has banged since (go look up his per-90 numbers from last year if you’re bored). But he may have arrived at the wrong time, too early, and not ready to use that big body of his; or he may have been a cautionary tale about the risks of impatience and unclear pathways for a young player like him. I imagine if Freedman signed Sørloth later in his tenure, he’d have ensured a wider berth like Mateta got.

Later, Odsonne Édouard got plenty of time after a similarly exciting move, having racked up goals for Celtic, but never reached that next level Palace craved.

More recently, Matheus França felt like a surprising Palace transfer. Hailing from Brazil, he wasn’t in one of the core markets and arrived for a big fee by Palace standards, especially for a 19-year-old: €20 million. It even had a €5m add-on if França is nominated for the Ballon d’Or (remember, all add-ons are not created the same).

Freedman apparently scouted him for some time and pushed for the deal, but it hasn’t been a rousing success just yet. It may be a simple case of injuries; it may just be a reminder to not judge too soon. But it may also be a case of jumping for a player with too much uncertainty attached: particularly a less-assured league transition, and limited time against senior players.

Another was Naouirou Ahamada. A product of Juventus Next Gen, Ahamada is a good athlete, is French, showed flashes in Germany for Stuttgart, and was likely data-flagged. But he hasn’t asserted himself in a crowded midfield. My estimation (more of a guess, really) is that this move was a little too clever, trying to get ahead of a player before they blow up. But he just hasn’t had enough game time to generate certainty, and has still only played about 2,000 senior minutes.

Despite some of the outward-facing stability elsewhere, the technical area has been a place of tumult at times. After the De Boer era, Hodgson brought stability and survival, but things got a little static. Vieira came in to play more progressively, but the second season turned cautious and toothless, going 12 games without a win. Then Hodgson came back, and many fans saw it as a step backward, with the poor man dealing with health issues to boot. The attacking stats were woeful, and some of the players weren’t developing.

It led to more tifos:

• “Wasted potential on and off the pitch. Weak decisions taking us backwards,”
• “No shared vision. No structured plan. Parish out. Yanks out.”

It all changed under Glasner, when the tactics and recruitment finally started to rhyme.

Mistakes are the price of doing business. Palace’s success rate seems lower when there’s less clarity, whether due to inexperience, unfamiliar markets, or when the usual model (based on patience) can’t be followed through. The misses are also disproportionately impactful compared to other teams, because the quantity of total signings is so low. But when they stick to their process, including narrow markets, clear identity filters, long-term bets, and deep research, the hit rate stays high.

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Life after Dougie

The cup run was monumental. The Community Shield was a cherry on top.

These were rousing validations of the Palace project. It was the hungry, carefully-scouted players who delivered the club’s first major trophy: Eberechi Eze scored the final’s only goal, Dean Henderson saved a penalty, and quintessential Palace signings like Jean-Philippe Mateta, Ismaïla Sarr, and Daniel Muñoz played starring roles.

Glasner earned credit for transforming the team’s playing identity, but he also acknowledged what he inherited. It echoed what Patrick Vieira had said years earlier, crediting a recruitment team that knew what kind of player would fit the club. That shared vision, the alignment between recruitment and coaching, is the secret ingredient of any successful club. It is especially true at Palace.

That brings us to the present, and the void left by Dougie Freedman. For all his understated style, Freedman built something unique: a recruitment model that was smart, thrifty, patient, and distinct to the club and fanbase. He’d saved the club from relegation on the final day as a player, pulled the club out of the bottom of the Championship in a promotion campaign, and has now helped engineer the first major trophy in club history. His status as a club legend gave him the credibility to see a vision through, even when resources were limited and things felt weird and slow. The tactics and the transfers began to strengthen one another. Players arrived from narrow pools of trusted markets. Pathways were usually clear. The team slowly built value without blowing the budget.

Look around, and the difficulty of that job comes into focus. West Ham cycled through expensive forwards, and scattergun recruitment, with little to show. Countless others have struggled to stay in the top-flight. Even a club like Brighton, whose model is widely admired, has its trade-offs: constant churn, a feeling of everything being temporary, and a need to sell that sometimes clashes with fan ambitions.

Vast uncertainty awaits. Success is not assured.

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What’s next?

A few things come to mind as Palace step into the post-Freedman beyond.

• Keep the markets (and the signings) fairly narrow. Palace gain an edge by identifying fewer players from fewer regions, which helps maintain their identity and keeps pathways clear. The Championship, France, and maybe one or two South American markets should be the sweet spots.
• Taking over Freedman’s early, in-person eye-testing role, and building those relationships along the way, feels like the toughest job to replace. It’s hard to overstate how many of these stories include an early, meaningful Freedman scouting trip. Filling that gap will take real work.
• Increasingly target athletic robustness. Players like Sarr, Muñoz, and Lacroix settled in quickly for a reason. If need be, they’ll also attract interest from bigger clubs for that same reason.
• Keep mining Chelsea’s development castoffs, where value still exists.
• Never lose the flair. Zaha, Eze, and Freedman himself represent a through-line in the club’s identity. The right kind of player will want to carry that forward.
• Marginally speed up sales. As it stands, the speed often goes past “methodical” to just plain slow. Quicker decisions and more proactive exits can come without becoming a stepping-stone club.
• Palace have probably had too much turnover in the technical area over the years. That kind of instability leads to inefficiency: players bought for managers who’ve since left, inconsistent game models across the academy, and so on. Regardless of how long Glasner stays, I’d commit to his approach more broadly: lower possession, higher physicality, transitions, flair, and maybe even loosely committing to the 3-4-3 shape (where you can find value). When the playing style has bounces around a bit from manager to manager, the recruitment becomes less durable. This play-style fits with the wider heritage.
• And lastly: the academy. I don’t have the best visibility here. Players like Tyrick Mitchell got real chances, but it also feels a bit slow at the moment. If Palace can graduate one or two players every couple years, they’ll reduce transfer pressure and reinforce the club’s culture from within. That might be the biggest untapped advantage left.

Freedman’s gone again, but the imprint remains. Same with Zaha and a long list of others. We can credit what they built without reducing it to a tidy “great man” fable; so many have contributed to what exists today.

This is a club that, for all its recent success, still feels human-sized. Its victories have come from discipline, clarity, oft-beautiful play, and a stubborn defiance. It’s a place where even the triumphant moments feel fragile, threats still linger around the bend, but where a dogged persistence has carried them through.

Glass and iron. This Crystal Palace is still standing.

[Vesper 30,164]

Sheffield Wednesday in crisis: Protests, anger and uncertainty about what comes next

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6545418/2025/08/11/sheffield-wednesday-crisis-fans-leicester/

It is 4.30pm and as a new season begins inside the King Power Stadium, more than 2,000 Sheffield Wednesday fans can be found making a stand on the other side of locked turnstiles.

“I don’t care about Dejphon (Chansiri),” they sing. “He don’t care about me. All I care about is Sheffield Wednesday.”

A sold-out end is almost empty at kick-off and remains so until the opening five minutes have been played. Some do not make it inside to see Nathaniel Chalobah give the visitors an unexpected lead against Leicester City in the 26th minute, such is the backlog to gain entry.

Not that it mattered. At the end of a chaotic summer, a draining close season of late wages, upheaval and anxiety, a protest against club owner Chansiri illustrated the growing desperation for change.

“The whole protest movement, it’s something that goes against what you’re about as a fan,” says Otto Brookes, a Wednesday supporter handing out leaflets calling for Chansiri to sell up.

“You want to support your team and the players to feel supported, especially in these circumstances. But there comes a point where you have to say if you keep funding the person in charge of the club, there’s not going to be anything left.”

And that was the nagging concern on a day when Wednesday fans chose to draw a line in the sand. There had been low-scale protests against Chansiri last season but supporters have spent the summer mobilising against the Thai businessman.

What You Should Read Next

How Sheffield Wednesday descended into chaos under Dejphon Chansiri’s ownership

Unpaid wages, a highly regarded manager on way out and very real fears for the future. A once proud club is on the brink

The Sheffield Wednesday Supporters’ Trust has urged fans to boycott official merchandise and stay out of their seats for the opening of the new Championship season at Leicester City.

The vast majority obliged and, with concourses at full capacity, turnstiles were closed down by stewards 50 minutes before kick-off. That left the bulk of a 3,500 away support making their feelings abundantly clear.

“Dejphon Chansiri, get out of our club,” was sung on repeat and a loud cheer greeted the arrival of a plane trailing a banner that read, “Dejphon Chansiri out” in the clear blue skies above the King Power.

One banner depicted Chansiri as Derek ‘Del Boy’ Trotter from the sitcom Only Fools and Horses. “This time next year, we’ll be bankrupt,” it said. Another had United States President Donald Trump wearing a “Make Wednesday Great Again” baseball cap.

The mood was defiant as fans queued to gain entry long into the first half but it did not mask another unedifying chapter of Chansiri’s reign.

“It’s hard to enjoy anything,” says Neil Atkinson, a lifelong supporter among those to see Wednesday’s season begin from outside Leicester’s home.

 

Neil Atkinson was among the fans protesting on Sunday (Phil Buckingham/The Athletic)

“How can you when your club is falling apart? The club means a lot to people. Most of the things I do in life are based around football. There are old people here and it’s all they know. Football is what gets them through, regardless of results. We’ve all known hard times before but this is ridiculous. This is way past hard times.”

And his feelings towards Chansiri, the man who has owned Wednesday since 2015? “They get worse every day,” he says. “The guy came in and spent a lot of money but he’s never learned from his mistakes. Do the right thing and go.”

---

“It’s been a summer of chaos, hasn’t it?” says Brookes, summing up Wednesday’s preparations for the new campaign. “It’s gone so far past worrying about what players we’re signing or what the starting XI is going to be, because it’s now about the survival of the club.”

Few teams have known a pre-season anything like the one that drew to its close at the weekend. Catastrophic would be too kind.

Hillsborough has been where hope has withered ever since a stripped-back squad reported back at the end of June.

Renovated pitches at the club’s training ground at Middlewood Road were initially not ready and the players who remained, with the bulk in salary arrears, were forced to train on artificial surfaces until beginning a week-long training camp at England’s St George’s Park base.

Adding to the farce was the absence of a senior coaching team. Danny Rohl, head coach for the previous 18 months, had already signalled his intention to leave and only briefly returned in order to agree his eventual exit on July 29.

A decision to name his one-time assistant, Henrik Pedersen, as his successor was announced two days later but by then, more key personnel had moved on. Attacking figureheads Josh Windass and Michael Smith were allowed to leave as free agents in a summer exodus that has also seen Pol Valentin, Callum Paterson and Akin Famewo depart. The July sale of Djeidi Gassama, who joined Rangers for £2.2million ($3m), was a rare case of transfer money being recouped in Chansiri’s reign.

Captain Barry Bannan’s decision to commit his future to the club he joined in 2015 offered a glimmer of hope to supporters but that confirmation arrived on a day players had chosen to boycott a proposed friendly at Burnley.

Wednesday, who did not play a single pre-season friendly in public and visibly tired in the closing stages of their season opener, had been scheduled to visit the Premier League side’s training ground eight days before the Leicester match but the collective decision was made not to fulfil the fixture.

That prompted a statement from the players, who have seen salaries arrive late in four of the past five months. Full settlements only came on Friday, 48 hours before the Leicester game.

“We stand together in support with all our colleagues employed by the club who have been affected,” read the statement. “Players and staff are now feeling real, practical impacts in their professional and personal lives and we are extremely concerned at the lack of clarity regarding what is happening and when this will be resolved.”

That invited a temporary question mark over the Leicester game going ahead but dialogue between the club, Professional Footballers’ Association and EFL last week soon allayed those fears. Players stressed there would be “no downing of tools”, despite just 15 senior professionals remaining.

The EFL has kept a close eye on Wednesday this summer but has limited powers. It stresses that Chansiri has not met the threshold for disqualification under its owners and directors test, though pressure was placed upon the club to settle debts before the season got underway.

 

Sheffield Wednesday fans make their feelings known (Phil Buckingham/The Athletic)

Both the Premier League’s solidarity payment (£2.7m) and the monthly EFL basic payment (£460,000) were handed to Championship clubs last week, enabling Wednesday to pay all outstanding salaries to players and staff, as well as a small number of transfer payments to other clubs.

That lifted the EFL embargo that Wednesday have spent the summer working under but restrictions remain. No fees, for either loans or permanent transfers, can be paid by Wednesday until the summer of 2027 after surpassing 30 days of late payments since July 1.

The EFL has made it clear that the crisis must be curtailed. It outlined a wish to see a “strong, stable and competitive Sheffield Wednesday” in a statement issued 48 hours before the Championship season began, either through Chansiri addressing funding problems or “make good on his commitment to sell to a well-funded party, for fair market value”.

Those final words were telling. A statement from Chansiri on June 26, his only communication to fans all summer, revealed that a £40m basic offer for his shareholding from a U.S.-based consortium had been rejected since the end of last season.

The EFL has since been given no indication that Chansiri is close to selling but there is growing anger towards the governing body over the possibility it might yet make Wednesday’s challenge all the harder. A points deduction is among the punishments available for the late payment of wages, a step that could bring another deficit to overcome.

“F*** the EFL,” was the blunt chant from the away fans in the closing stages, once Bannan had been dismissed for a second yellow card.

 

Barry Bannan leaves the field following his red card (Malcolm Couzens/Getty Images)

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Even in a 2-1 loss, the trip to Leicester amounted to an afternoon of escapism for Wednesday’s supporters. There was sympathetic ovation from Leicester fans once the protest ended after five minutes and stoic defending was eventually undone by second-half goals from Leicester defenders Jannik Vestergaard and Wout Faes.

It was enough to feel pride in their club, but it only provided a pause to the worry.

Saturday brings a first game of the season to Hillsborough when Stoke City visit but it remains unclear how many supporters will get to see it after Sheffield City Council closed the North Stand, which bears Chansiri’s name in the seating pattern, last month.

Concerns around the stand’s structural integrity must be addressed in the coming days or there will be a need to rehouse thousands of season ticket holders. The North Stand accounts for roughly 9,000 of Hillsborough’s 39,000 seats and Atkinson is among those who cannot say if he will be able to attend Stoke’s visit.

“I have a season ticket in that stand and I’ve had no email or confirmation about where I’ll be sitting next week,” he says. “It’s six days from now and we still don’t know. It’s the lack of communication and transparency that’s really poor. If you’re in hard times, at least communicate with people.”

Pedersen is at least trying that. The Dane is a likeable, calming figure leading Wednesday through their prolonged crisis. Sunday’s bench included seven players aged 21 or under but it was not until the 87th minute that a threadbare Wednesday team went under against an opponent relegated from the Premier League last season.

Pedersen admitted afterwards that “five or six” Wednesday players had travelled separately from the main squad on the eve of the game, staying in a nearby hotel to aid preparations. He did not know if those players had been left to foot the bill themselves. The majority had made the one-hour coach journey to Leicester on the morning of the game to save costs.

“I am sitting here with a very proud feeling,” Pedersen told reporters in his post-match press conference. “It has been some tough, tough weeks.”

And every indication is that there will be many more to come for Wednesday until Chansiri finally grants the wishes of a beleaguered fanbase.

[Fulham Broadway 17,311]

Good to see the FA enforcing the Fit and Proper Persons test, and not the ''We'll sell to the Highest bidder even though you're obviously a crook''.

All 92 English professional clubs that make up the PL (20 clubs) and EFL (the remaining 72 clubs) are registered as private or public limited companies and their officers are therefore subject to Companies Act compliance and general fiduciary responsibilities.

Over the past 25 years all have undergone changes in ownership and/or directorship, often on multiple occasions.  More recently this has been in favour of individuals or corporate entities, foreign or domestic, with little shared passion, understanding of the history of the clubs whose stewardship they've assumed or even with experience let alone proven know-how of running a football club. Whereas this has brought about real improvements for some clubs (Chelsea, Man City & Wolves) it has more often than not created significant problems for most others.

The combined attraction of financial gain, brand enhancement or exposure, “sportswashing” and/or self-aggrandizement has continued to fuel the desire to acquire or invest in English clubs especially those in the PL or those otherwise with tradition and an established fan-base that might provide the means by which a prospective owner can justify his/her/its ends.

[Vesper 30,164]

Premier League tactical trends to watch in 2025-26: Flying full-backs, counter-attacks, and the ‘Lavolpiana’

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6542301/2025/08/12/premier-league-tactical-trends-2025-26/

Tactically, the Premier League is in a real state of flux.

After four consecutive title-winning years with a distinct, possession and territory-based style, Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City were reduced to a third-place finish on 71 points in 2024-25 — their worst since Guardiola’s debut campaign of 2016-17.

Meanwhile Liverpool cruised to the title in their first season post-Jurgen Klopp, with Arne Slot’s side developing a reputation for their flexibility and adaptability. They had 25 wins and only lost twice across the first 34 matches, by which point the trophy was theirs.

Nottingham Forest showed European football can be earned with a throwback, defend-first and counter-attack strategy, while for the second season running all three promoted teams were relegated.

So what might we expect from 2025-26?

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Flying full-backs, not inverted ones

Last season, the chasing pack of European clubs seemed to realise, en masse, that they did not need to copy City, Chelsea, and Arsenal by rolling a full-back into midfield. In fact, those clubs had even more success with flying full-backs running beyond a winger.

Per SkillCorner, Milos Kerkez was the only player in the division to make 100+ overlaps and 100+ underlaps, which suited the directness of Bournemouth’s in-possession approach — and with him joining Liverpool this summer, makes him a younger iteration of Andy Robertson.

“He’s a player that, because of his physical condition, arrives so many times to the last third with the ball under control to put good crosses,” said Bournemouth head coach Andoni Iraola of Kerkez last season.

Likewise, the arrival of Jeremie Frimpong from Bayer Leverkusen, a wing-back in their Bundesliga-winning team of 2023-24, means Slot can deploy maximal width and beyond-the-ball full-backs on both sides.

 

(Carl Recine/Getty Images)

Newcastle United’s full-back pairing of Lewis Hall and Tino Livramento were particularly frequent underlappers; Antonee Robinson put up 10 assists for Fulham last year, completing the most crosses of any player in the division, consistently running beyond from left-back.

Other honourable mentions include Daniel Munoz (Crystal Palace), Aaron Wan-Bissaka (West Ham United), Michael Kayode (Brentford) and Lucas Digne (Aston Villa).

As per SkillCorner, the frequency of full-backs overlapping has decreased in recent seasons, down nearly 14 per cent in 2024-25 compared to the 2018-19 campaign. Meanwhile, underlaps are on the rise — up by more than a third over the same period.

This might seem strange considering the prevalence of inverted wingers, who play on the opposite side to their dominant foot, and like to cut inside, which would suit a supporting overlap.

However, many coaches want their wingers to start with high and wide positions regardless, and by enticing opposition full-backs out one-v-one, an underlap can often unlock a defence.

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The ‘Lavolpiana’ — dropping a pivot in

Premier League midfield battles are changing. We see that at goal kicks, when teams will often build-up with six players close to their own goal and position four up on halfway, leaving a hole in central midfield because opponents press man-to-man so often.

In settled possession, 4-4-2 mid-blocks are increasingly common, to man-mark in central midfield. Consequently, short passing routes through the centre of the pitch have a lot more risk than reward (unless a team has a pivot with the press resistance of Rodri or Ryan Gravenberch).

As per Footovision, an advanced data provider, the proportion of line-breaking passes played centrally during build-up dropped by five percentage points from 2023-24 to 2024-25 in the Premier League.

Expect to see more of the Lavolpiana tactic, named after Argentine coach Ricardo La Volpe. This is where a central midfielder drops deeper, playing between the two centre-backs, and breaks lines with longer-range passes.

Here is Newcastle’s Sandro Tonali playing that role, allowing right-back Kieran Trippier to push forward and create a two-v-one against Ipswich Town’s left-back.

If any midfielder was made for the role, it is Youri Tielemans at Aston Villa. He ranked ninth in Europe’s top-five leagues last season for through balls (24).

With Rodri injured for most of last season, Bernardo Silva used the tactic on an as-needed basis against particularly stubborn mid-blocks. Mateo Kovacic has operated similarly for Guardiola, with this being a consistent feature of his sides.

And here is Carlos Baleba doing that in the build-up for Brighton & Hove Albion’s opener away at Manchester United.

“We had a good balance between defence and controlling the game in possession,” Brighton head coach Fabian Hurzeler said afterwards.

Coaches tend to value this build-up tweak not just for the way it opens passing lanes — as opponents are reluctant to commit a player too high to press the midfielder — but also because it provides extra cover as rest defence versus counter-attacks.

What You Should Read Next

What last season’s Premier League data can tell us about 2025-26

Outfielders taking goal kicks, long throws and rising to the rhythm – just some of the growing trends in England's top flight

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Back to basics set pieces

There is an irony that even as clubs focus on and invest ever more deeply in set pieces, the tactics are trending towards yesteryear.

Last term, 60 per cent of all corners were inswingers, up from 41 per cent in 2018-19. Short corners have remained pretty consistent (roughly one in five) while outswingers have really fallen out of fashion.

Teams largely copied the approaches of Arsenal and Aston Villa, two of the earlier Premier League clubs to hire formal set-piece coaches, who tended to pack the six-yard box and drop inswingers onto the opposition goalkeeper. Everton, too, consistently caused teams problems with these delivery types under Sean Dyche.

“It is special in the Premier League because you can block, push, foul and there is no whistle,” Crystal Palace head coach Oliver Glasner said of corners last season, indirectly offering an explanation of why more teams are prioritising inswingers — because they are allowed to.

“This gives you more opportunities in attacking set plays but it causes more trouble when defending set plays”.

 

Premier League corners: a reliably busy scene (Stu Forster/Getty Images)

Likewise, teams are increasingly launching the ball upfield from kick-off, and long throws have been on a steady rise across the past four years too: there were 279 throws into the penalty area in 2020-21 (and only three goals from throw-ins that season). Last season, it was 501 and 20 goals from throw-ins.

Thomas Frank’s Brentford were — as in previous seasons — league leaders here, with 103 penalty-box throws and six goals from throw-ins. Frank, now being Tottenham Hotspur head coach, might give the tactic more popularity if his new side continue to use it.

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The potential re-rise of the 3-4-2-1

Chelsea in 2016-17 were the last team to win the Premier League playing a variation of a 3-4-3. City morphed into this shape plenty in attacking during 2022-23 (when John Stones would move from centre-back into midfield), but generally there has been a homogeneity of 4-3-3 among the league’s best.

However, the 3-4-2-1 is starting to creep its way back in. It is the first-choice shape of Ruben Amorim at Manchester United, and Glasner at Crystal Palace — the pair having success with it at their respective former clubs Sporting CP and Eintracht Frankfurt.

 

Amorim and Glasner, 3-4-2-1 enthusiasts both (Michael Regan/Getty Images)

Here is how it looked for United and Palace in settled possession, able to commit a wing-back onto the last line and with dual No 10s that can pin opposition full-backs, while playing close to their No 9.

It was a similar story with Wolverhampton Wanderers and Vitor Pereira. When he arrived in December 2024, the club were 19th on nine points after 16 matches.

His predecessor Gary O’Neil had switched between a back three and four, but Pereira went purely with a 3-4-2-1 for the rest of the season and Wolves took 33 points from their remaining 22 games. They survived comfortably, finishing 16th.

It might be a blueprint for more teams, particularly promoted sides needing a solid defensive foundation. With so many teams defending in a back four, a wing-back system can be a relatively straightforward way of overloading opponents and creating a front five.

In total, there were 120 instances of the 3-4-2-1 or 3-2-4-1 (different ways of labelling the same thing) in 2024-25, with its frequency trending upwards since 2019-20, where it was only 25 times.

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A focus on attacking transitions

The Premier League took the German Bundesliga’s crown last season: England’s top tier is, statistically, the most counter-attacking among Europe’s major leagues.

Fast break shots have been on a five-year rise, as has the expected goals (xG, or chance quality) from those scenarios.

After 54 fast break goals in 2021-22, the past three campaigns have seen 87, 83, and, most recently, 112 goals.

More teams trying to play expansively, and in the opposition half, are increasing counter-attacking opportunities. Add to this that there is a particularly high frequency of strikers and wingers with the physical and technical capacity to exploit disjointed and underloaded defences.

Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal were the top teams at scoring from fast breaks last season — it is no longer an underdog tactic — while Brighton, Tottenham, Leicester City, Nottingham Forest and Brentford were a quintet of clubs who conceded at least eight goals from those scenarios.

“Everyone is talking about what we’re doing with the ball, scoring goals, but when you look at our counter-press, how we win the ball back, it’s so hard for opponents,” Arsenal captain Martin Odegaard said in March 2024.

“I’ve been on the other side before. Trying to defend deep and escaping that when you are being pressed is so difficult.”

Expect to see even more aggressive counter-pressing next season, perhaps more tactical fouls, and coaches with a focus on rest defence — the positioning of players and spacing between them when a team has possession, ready to counter-press should a turnover occur.

[Vesper 30,164]

Sunderland are back and buoyant with bold signings, intense demand for seats and 100,000 shirts sold

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6545745/2025/08/12/sunderland-premier-league-return/

On the corridor wall outside David Bruce’s office in Black Cat House, there is a framed piece of paper that has fundamentally changed Sunderland’s world.

It is their Premier League share certificate, awarded to the club’s owner Kyril Louis-Dreyfus at the AGM dinner in early June, displayed for all to see. Sunderland’s, if you were wondering, was the 128th certificate issued.

“You need to look at that,” an enthusiastic Bruce, Sunderland’s chief business officer and lifelong supporter, tells The Athletic. “It shows what we’re all part of. My job is to help keep it on that wall.”

Not since 2017, when meekly surrendering to relegation from the Premier League under David Moyes, have Sunderland held a ticket to the party that begins again with the visit of West Ham United this weekend. “I’ve never experienced a buzz like this,” adds Bruce. “It’s palpable.”

Tickets for Saturday’s opening game all went within a day of going on sale. Season cards, too, are long gone. Kit sales have never been higher and the club shop, two floors below that share certificate, has a snaking queue of supporters wishing to add Premier League badges to the sleeves of new shirts.

Eight years were spent awaiting this moment. There was the ignominy of falling into League One and then the long, arduous road back that climaxed with promotion via the Championship play-off final in May. Those dramatic victories over Coventry City and Sheffield United are already the stuff of Wearside legend.

There is the very real danger of the Premier League’s formidable strength quickly putting an end to Sunderland’s rise in the coming months but this is a very different club to the one that parted with English football’s elite.

The ambition now is to be sustainable and strategic after a string of wasteful, aimless years began a ruinous slide captured on the Netflix documentary Sunderland Til I Die. Even with this summer’s spending — £121m ($163m) and counting — it is stressed there will be no deviation from the plans that have brought them this far.

“Kyril has a very clear vision,” says Bruce. “It’s been, ‘How do we build a football club that’s sustainable?’. Doing the right things on and off the pitch, building a club that people can really buy into.

“A lot has been written about what’s been done on the pitch, young talent and creating a platform for them, but a big part of what Kyril has pushed on the business side is to understand how we build a club that reconnects with the people.”

It has been no small task.

“The feelings the fans had towards the club and the players that played here (in 2016-17) would suggest there was a real separation,” he adds. “For this part of the world to have that is really quite upsetting. What you’ve got now is something that fans recognise as being theirs.”

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West Ham’s visit on Saturday promises to be a spectacle but it will not beat the delirium felt when the Stadium of Light last hosted a competitive match. Dan Ballard’s extra-time header to sink Coventry in the Championship play-off semi-final second leg was the cue for feral celebrations and the platform for more of the same as Sheffield United were then beaten at Wembley.

That stroked finish from Tommy Watson, now a Brighton & Hove Albion player, was as big as any in Sunderland’s modern history; cathartic and the sudden catalyst for what could be transformative change.

Returning to the Premier League was always Louis-Dreyfus’ stated aim when taking a controlling stake in Sunderland from Stewart Donald in February 2021. The son of Robert Louis-Dreyfus, the late former owner of Marseille, made it clear at the start of 2021-22 that a five-year plan could guide Sunderland from the backwaters of League One and up to the Premier League. It took just four.

There were missteps along the way, like defeat by Lincoln City in the League One play-offs and the disastrous appointment of Michael Beale, but Louis-Dreyfus, still only 27, has turned Sunderland into a club feeling good about itself once more.

“Kyril is a very progressive young guy,” says Bruce, who was convinced to step down from his position as chief marketing officer at Major League Soccer to return to his home city last year.

 

David Bruce will play a key role in driving Sunderland’s off-field growth (Sunderland AFC)

“He sees the world differently to many owners, who probably grew up consuming sports on radio and in newspapers. Kyril has grown up with the mobile phone and social media.

“He’s very thoughtful, he’s very thorough. There’s a lot of noise around this club with a lot of scale but he’s good at hearing the feeling and staying resolute towards good plans.

“In football it’s very easy to get drawn into the emotions and move away from plans because things happen in real time to move you off course. You have to listen to some of that but you also have to stay the course with plans you believe in. For such a young person to have that steadiness is a real quality.”

Sunderland’s methods in coming this far have barely altered in the past four years, even when irritating a string of head coaches.

New arrivals have typically been under 23 with the potential to develop into assets. Jobe Bellingham went from being a £1.5m signing from Birmingham City to a £32m player sold to Borussia Dortmund this summer. The year before it was Jack Clarke, sold to Ipswich Town for £15m and the year before that, Ross Stewart, who Southampton paid £9m to sign.

Reinvestment has regularly been smart, such as moves for Ballard, Dennis Cirkin, Romaine Mundle and Eliezer Mayenda, which have complemented the emergence of academy graduates that include Anthony Patterson, Chris Rigg, Dan Neil and Watson.

Wages have been controlled along the way. Figures from the 2023-24 season, the last available club accounts, showed salary costs to be 81 per cent of turnover, way below the Championship average.

Sustainability has always been the buzzword and it stretches to the business outlook of a club that was the ninth-best supported in England last season, with an average home crowd of just under 40,000.

“For us to be successful, a modern football club at the highest level, it’s the ability to take advantage of the scale and reach you have,” says Bruce. “You have to build your revenue streams. If you sit here and you don’t grow revenue streams, then your football club stagnates. It does not grow and others go past you very quickly. You can’t become the club your fans want you to be, and from the business side we’re very cognisant of that.”

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Sunderland, inevitably, will enjoy record revenues in this coming season. There is a guarantee to earn at least £110m from the Premier League pot (almost three times the club’s turnover in 2023-24), as well as matchday and commercial income climbing to new highs.

Kit sales, in particular, have seen enormous growth. A partnership with Hummel, the Danish manufacturer that formerly supplied the club’s kits between 1988 and 1994, led to output trebling last season.

“We’ve moved from about 33,000, 34,000 shirts two seasons ago (when with Nike) to circa 100,000 shirts in our first season with Hummel,” says Bruce. “That puts you top 10 in the country. What we’re seeing is unprecedented here. There were 500 people here when we launched our home shirt last month, before the store even opened.”

There has also been increased demand for tickets. North of 30,000 season cards were sold before the Wembley victory and the limits were reached within 48 hours of being placed on sale in June. With corporate hospitality offerings taking season-ticket holders to 41,000 and Michelin star chef Tommy Banks now overseeing high-end food on site, it is the first time since the capacity of the Stadium of Light was increased in 2000 that supply cannot meet demand.

The summer weeks have only served to heighten the anticipation.

Former West Ham defender Arthur Masuaku became Sunderland’s 10th signing over the weekend, with the capture of Switzerland international Granit Xhaka underlining ambitions to buck a trend that has seen the last six promoted clubs all suffer relegation inside a year. Twice the club transfer record was broken, first to turn Enzo Le Fee’s loan from Roma into a £19m deal and then when signing Habib Diarra from Strasbourg for £30m.

 

Granit Xhaka was a Bundesliga winner with Bayer Leverkusen in May 2024 (Daniela Porcelli/Sunderland AFC via Getty Images)

Sunderland’s net spend, offset by the exits of Bellingham and Watson, currently stands in the region of £85m, with an expectation for further signings to arrive before the transfer deadline.

“There’s headroom based on how the club has been run in the last few years,” explains Bruce. “We’ve been sensible with how we’ve spent based on the revenue afforded to us as a football club and we’ll always have that in mind. We can’t spend beyond our means and we haven’t since Kyril took over. We make X, we spend Y. It’s as simple as that, so if we can build revenues, that gives us greater opportunity to spend on the football side.”

Sunderland will be disadvantaged when only allowed to lose £61m over their next three-year assessment period but the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules, says Bruce, are not a concern.

“Our approach in the window has been well measured,” he says. “We spent a lot of time as an executive team on what our revenues are going to look like and where we’ve come from in the last couple of years.

“What can we spend? What’s the anchor point on wages and what’s the money we can spend in the market? We’re doing it with a view to being a sustainable football club but with every chance of staying in the league. We feel confident. Like what happened in the last parts of last season, where people came together, the feeling around the club can give us a very good chance.”

Sunderland have hope again.

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The thing we’ll all be saying in May is…

Kay: What next for Marcus Rashford/Jack Grealish/Raheem Sterling as he heads back to Manchester United/Manchester City/Chelsea after his loan spell?

Crafton: The tickets for the World Cup are HOW MUCH?

Spiers: Will Manchester City’s 115 charges case be resolved this week?

Miller: I wish I hadn’t fallen for the Arsenal thing, again…

Hughes: Time to put your feet up, Pep.

James: Fair play to you, Ange Postecoglou, for keeping Leeds up.

Akinwolere: Chelsea have got their eye on another 10 players to bolster the squad ahead of next season, with more outgoings still to come.

Jones: With Premier League Golden Boot winner Harry Maguire up front, nothing can stop England. It’s coming home.