The future of data-driven recruitment and tactical meta

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Wear your passion your way and be your own boss at boss. com or at your nearest boss store No matter what pitch you play on, a big win feels the same. electric It's that moment when you read the play before the trend even starts. Beat the clock on a campaign with a little help from AI And connect with customers in real time, like you've trained for it your whole career. That's contontentful. World class digital experiences, built fast, built beautifully. Create and launch personalized content in an instant across every channel your customers are watching. No chaos, no limits, just open themes. Take your shot at contentful. com Welcome to the TFO Football podcast. I'm Joe Deivine and today I'm delighted to be joined by John Mcenzie. Hello Joe. You're wearing a lovely brown t shirt today. Doid you like it? Not really? Yeah I have a few of these t shirts and you often say that you don't like them. I've never said that before, but and you have.ne of them is a blue and you said, oh, that just doesn't suit I just I've been looking at your t shirt for the last hour or so thinking, whyy would anyone buy a t shirt that color? Well, I bought a set of five because Chris Hamill ground me down because Chris Hamill doesn't like t shirts, which have anything on them.r Chris Hamillel is your manager here.. And so when you're filming, he insists that you have plain t shirts. Yeah he doesn't trust our audience to be able to distinguish between anything written on the t shirt and the subtitles, John Mcenzie,' the kind of man who would buy a multip pack of plain t shirts just to get my manager on eitherith either a multi packer plain t shirt or some incredibly Niche J Lague Merch is Kawasaki frontal. Kwasaki nothing on way training top. there we go. There is it's Jack Pitbroke. Hey Jon. How's again?, youre right? John I'm good. Hey Jack. How are you? Heads gone. There are a lot of J names studio. Too many. I would say, one or two, too many, maybe. becausecause of course we're also joined And this is a TFo podcast debut for the former editor of the Guardian Longres and one of the founders of the new magazine Equator Hello. Equuator. Can I sayor? Equuator? It's Jonathan Shaynan. Hello Everybody how's it going? Oh We need to do Dbut clap, yeah. Am I gonna get a squad like a number like the, you know, nine hundred eighty one or something like? Iish see how the comments receive you. I think you might be the oldest debut top we've had. Oo,'s your age What's your decade? Surely it's not fifties. No, no. I's gonna just just double check you. My parents were born in the fifties. No fif. I'm not fifty No. I was bn I was born in nineteen seventy eight. How about that? I'll let them do the math there. Okay, they can do the math. Yeah they got it. Anyway, it was like, oh yeah, so I was going say I saved this for the intro of this podcast. Your deb could have come a lot sooner, you know, because I met you at a wedding two years ago. Indeed. And I sent you a Twitter DM that you've just ignored forever Yeah, but that hurts that hurts. just ignored it for that hurts. It it was prodroducer Nathan It was prodroducer Dutoth yeah. By the way, not the first time that you stumbled over No Yeahah. it was delightful every time. Wow. It's very confusing speaking English. Anyway, what did we talk about on today's, Steve Hanky's here aw. I've been here the whole time. Well yeah, notot quite the whole time. What did we talk about on today's podcast? Well, we examine the executive failure at Tottenham Hotspur following their near relegation miss this season. John starts talking about how to manage a good tea party. know I always had to hold myself back so much I' interrupting you. I couldt you. li's in the middle of good analogy, but I really want to ask about the tea party And it's not as easy as you think, that's the tea part. and you better not panic. I don't remember the panic element But it was within the metaphor. It was in the metaphor. Okay, great. We play a Rndo that was exciting. was actually it wasn't that exciting. It was more educational shall we say? I'm not sure the non football Rndeo was really a hit. We've got to try everything once, haven't we? Absolutely That's right Maybe in some cases, try it three or four times. Now, who will nick the crown that Kaya stole himself last time out? Well, stick around to find out. After the Rndao, we continue our conversation about the C suite in modern football clubs What do they actually do Who know, I still don't know. And after another break, Crystal Palace have won the conference Leag. We talk about that was exciting why actually we don't really talk about that. We will talk about Crystal Palace's actual victory when Ruben returns. Instead here, we touch on that more broadly around the burgeoning dominance of English clubs in European competitions and we end by discussing a little bit of Calcio, yes, very exciting with clelean deeck and Ay Milan and newew horizons for FC Coma. Plus Jonathan says West Ham in a way that I enjoyed. That was very nice. And that was the show, wasn't it? Did I miss anything You haven't let him do his I do. Yes, of course. Did you think I was just skating over the pro? I did. What do I setet it again go, you host No no. So no said outc come on said I' gone Hello and welcome to the TFo foootball podcast. He guys this is good ye. I'm Joe Devine. Andrew Yes. And I'm the heart, the beating heart. the TFoot podcast. None of it would exist without me. I am the leader and ruler of all things. TifFo. Now John's incredible level of jesting and trolling here is in reference to the fact that we actually thought it'd be useful for people to understand who Jonathan Shinnon is and what he does? What do you do, Jon Shannon. Shann, didid I call you shining? Yeah? I sorry, Wh's okay? must not now. That was my revenge the other b. That' what I was noticed. Nice to N nice to have your vowel sound ripped to pieces by other people, is it What do I do? Should I say what I do? Yeah, please do. Yeah. Okaykay. So I'm one of the people who runs a new magazine called Equator But you can find online. That's a great nameiter. org. That' a really good. Wh didid you come up with the name I was part of the team that came up with the name, but I did buy the URL from a man in New Hampshire, Re who had owned it for like thirty years and had never done anything with it. And it turned out he had been a peeace Corps volunteer in Kenya in like the nineteen nineties. He'd owned this internet domain since like nineteen ninety three or something And he said, I always thought after I retired, I would use it to set up a charity And I said, well, what if I gave you five thousand pounds? Wow. And he said, Ohh yes. anyyway, so you can find us online at equator. org. Equator is a magazine about global politics and culture and art, which was started by kind of collective of writers and editors India and Pakistan and Sudan and Iran and an Iranian American, I suppose. and we are all about sort of telling new stories about the world from what we like to call a post American perspective Yeah. And I what does that mean Well, I think the idea there would be that like the world has been changing a few years ago, you know, it became clear the world was changing very rapidly and that the kind of traditional publications that we all read. We're very good at reporting The sort of facts of these changes struggled, maybe to kind of come up with a sort of new intellectual framework for thinking about a world that doesn't revolve around the US or around the US in Europe and thinking about a world where you set aside maybe the assumption that all societies are going to evolve to look like America.. know, somethinghing that maybe fits in with our sort of discussion about the financialization of football We are at Equator, I'm obliged to say,ting on we do among other things, we do online articles. We're about to put out our first print issue, which you can sign up and subscribe and we'll mail it to you. That's going to come out next month. But starting this weekend, we're putting on a four week onnline seminar with the wonderful football historian, David Goldblatt, the fabulous Goldblat on the politics of World Cup. Yeah Which I mean, for anyone, I mean, I'm sure all of us have maybe spent at least an hour king to listening to David Goblach. Absolutely legend. He's an incredible guy be well worth it anyyway. So yeah check it out, equator dot org dot Well, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. Be here. I hope I get invited back. I'm just going to say that out loud because I think it's pretty clear.' desperate. As soon as you leave, we've got to gather the executives together and make a decision based on what your data team says. Yeah, we have to call the sixty person data team just see how the YouTube moments My data says someone born in the nineteen fifties too's the's What's the podcasting age curve? I think that's a pretty good question. Who's the oldest person we've had on I don't know. I think it'd probably be a guest, right? Yeah. You've had David Goldbert on in the past Yeah,'s She's definitely old. He's like a hundred I feel very comfortable saying that. Yeah for sure Has he done a podcast? He must? Yeah, he's done. It must be him. There we are. Good. Let'ser. I think we David Attenborough. let's try and find the oldest person we can. was He was the James Milmer of TifFo Pancast is David Atenburough is a footballan No, No. I don't think so Villa. I bet he supports Villa. Yeah everyone' do, don't they? How about that? there you go? Anyway thank you so much for joining us, Thank you. We had a very interesting conversation. so I hope you stick around and enjoy. A couple of things before we go. justust to let you know, we have a ring for analysis episode coming out on Saturday morning. That's part two of our Arsenal deep dive. Hope you enjoy that We will be live on Saturday late afternoon, early evening. We're doing a watch a long watch party for the Champions League final. ahead of the Wor Cup' sort of working out how to do that. So if you want to watch the game with us, then you can do so. join our YouTube channel or you can listen to the podcast afterwards that we will record and publish that as well Nxt week I'm away for Tuesday show. Rub' is going to host that one. So that's going to be exciting. I guess you guys will talk about the Crystal Palace Victory there. You can hear about that And that's all. H enjoy the I hope you like it Where else to begin, of course, than with Spurth's executive failure. I've I've been waiting to say that all the season. How exciting. Now, of course you'll recall Spurs narrowly avoided relegation, didn't they on the final day of the season, finishing seventeenth for the second season in a row. That's kind of correct. Last year's seventeenth was bad But it didn't feel as bad as this year's seventeenth, did it? Well, the amazing thing So when at the last game of the season at that Everton game. At the end, there were obviously these huge celebrations And everybody was on the pitch hugging, all the fans were singing. It was like incredibly good vibes, given the vibes have been like unmeasurably bad over the course of this season But then because everybody was celebrating having a great time and I thought for a second But they've just come seventeenth and everyone' so happy. And then I thought, hold on. this is exactly what happened last year. This is we've had all this like bizarre stuff has happened at Burs this season. You know, Daniel Levy sacked Frank, Tudor, all the rest of it. It's unprecedented. It's unpcedented except for the fact that it's prerecedented. They've ended up in exactly the same exactly the same place at the end of the season. seventeenth place, everyone's happy, everyone loves the player, everyone loves the manager. and I've just thought What is the point in any of this? Why have we gone through this season to end up in the same place again? Jack Pitbroke there has finally discovered the football news cycle. It's like nothing ever happens. It's like nothing ever happens theory of time. The big difference. There are two big differences. Obviously the most everyone knows is the Europa League U, But also too, I think the sense that like, you know, they tanked the Premier League to win the Eurppa League But also last year, I don't remember the details, but there was no sense of hazard No like no chance likeike I went to the last game of the season. they lost to Bright in for one. Yeah and everyone was just having a great time, right? So there was no sense of like we we're no risk of relegation. Yeah, but one year's seventeenth is a very different next year's seventeenth. I mean, which probably stop by saying Jonathan, you're a sppurs fan We've spent a lot of this season trying to understand what has happened, to try to dissect what the problems were. What do you think they were from your perspective? What was the most key issue? Well, I've spent a lot of time trying to like in my head compile a sort of ranked list of like how did we end up here? Yeah. Americans lar power rankings. I don't about American. And I think you have to think about the Proximity to the event, so to the relegation risk, but then also the significance of the bad decision or the error, right? So I think sacking Levy precipitously early in the season strikes me as the kind of thing that if that hadn't happened, I don't think you would have been facing this relegation risk because I think Levy would have sacked Thomas Frank a month or two earlier So I think keeping Frank for too long I think I feel like hiring Igor Tudor actually is a sort of small thing because at that point you'd already kept Thomas Frank in post for too long. And then you're sort of scrambling to replace him. There's not many people on the market Um So I would say that's it really, you know, Do does it ring true to you J Yeah. I mean, I think ultimately like the essay question of this season is too what extent was Tottenham's badness caused by the dismissal of Levy? And you can certainly argue that becausecause they Because Levy was, you know, Levy was so powerful as Spurs that He was kind he was the glue that held the whole thing together. And if you removing him in September means basically rebuilding the club from scratch during the course of the season. who's actually there making these decisions beyond that in Yeah Vinneretchion, the CEO who obviously joined underneath Levy and now kind of runs the whole thing. He came from Arsenal as well,t? Not directly, but he did work there in the past.. Peter Charrington, who is now the non execut chairman, obviously the Lewis family who basically let Levy run it for twenty four years and have now or in September last year took back control. So I think you can definitely argue that Make Sacking Lvi made things worse. I think that's true At the same time, the argument that we've seen a lot from the toptam hierarchy this week, not least from the chairman Peter Charingon is that the situation in September was so bad because of the issues that The issues with how Daniel Levy had been running the club for a long time, right? Like I don't think, I don't think anybody could argue that Tottenham were actually in a great position in september fourth. L they had quQuite a bad squad. they had huge susceptibility to injuries. They had the wrong manager. Like the last manager that Daniel Lee appointed Thomas Frank was I think probably his worst appointment over the course of twenty four years. So I think that this argument about to what extent do you ascribe blame to Levy or to the Lewis family or to you, anyone else like the players or the managers, whatever I think I think people will be having this argument forever, but I think I'm a bit skeptical any of any theory which is either like pro leevy or too anti Levy. Yeah, okay. I mean, we were describing this in our conversations ahead as well massive executives. failure What do you think should be the response to this, right? Because I think it's hard to look at spurs this season or indeed last season and think that the club has been managed well in any way from from any level. And yet, you know, beyond the appointment of Roberta Deerbi moving into next season, it all appears to be the rest of the structure seems to be staying the same. Yeah, I think it's hard to know how to think about it actually, because at one level you want to say, okay, they've got a manager in place now in Deserby who seems to be the right manager or you know, certainly has has got the team looking much better So I think the temptation and what a lot of fans are saying is o now we need to back him properly And we need to stick with him instead of know chopping and changing all the time Although then you could say, well, hang on wait sticking with Thomas Frank is part of what landed you in this problem to begin with. I mean, I think the My feeling as the club we're kind of hurtling toward relegation U bit was like Okay. If we get relegated and we are, I think that, you know, the ninth richest club in the world or whatever is a figure that was bandied about a lot It's hard to bandy about I think about that Yeah. It was club in the world club in the. I also now West Ham, the twentieth richest club in the world gone. You can I think you can bandy at twenty. you can't band think. Well, I think it's interesting because I think the way that West Ham. I mean, it was so interesting the day after the last day of the season, reading I think really fascinating reading all of the long articles in the athletic First and foremost, about West Ham and Arsenal. And the West Ham articles are like, well, this is what you would have written about Sport W rightright. So whoever wrote the West Ham pieces, you, Jack would have been otherwise having to write, well, how did how did how did the SpurRs executivees screw this up? Yeah. Meanwhile, the arsenal articles peing back the curtain on the itorial p. just changed the headline.ity. Yeah, so I guess I think it's confusing because obviously as a fan You want the club to be better run. I think it's very strange how invested we are in the executive class and the way in which you know, is Vaneva Katesum doing a bad job I suppose at one level he must be doing a bad job because the team is finished seventeenth. sureure. And I suppose we're meant to think that it was his decision to keep Thomas Frank around. I guess And there. I don't know if Jack has there been reporting on this. Everyone has said, oh, well, they wanted to do for Thomas Frank, what Arsenal did with Arteetta But I don't know whether that's just hearsay or whether there is some kind of Yeah, I definitely think they were I think they kind of over indexed on their own their own sense of like, we are going to be so patient. We're going to be so strategic. And the patient strategic thing is to keep the manager in charge because we've seen it work at Arsenal. I think there was I think there was an insufficient under there was an insufficient realization that This is not working, the football is terrible. The fans hate it, the players don't like it. And the only person who actually realized that is Faboparrathigy who obviously who decided, I think as quickly as the fans did in like November actuallyctually we that Thomas Frank is not a good fit for Tottenham. Let's get him out What are the ingredients though? Because I sometimes Ive well Often I feel very bad for the people that work in football because it's so easy for us to retrospectively decide well, it was a shit idea to keep him around for soon. And I'm not saying it wasn't and I'm not saying that people who are employed at football team shouldn't shouldn't be in a position to understand the differences I do sometimes think there's and I'm not accusing you of doing this, but sometimes there's a lot of revisionism. Oh lot of caveat. There's of It's because I feel like I'm saying like could you know, But like, you know, what if it had what if it had if it had worked, then we'd all be sitting here saying like, oh, Spurs in the executive classroom incredibly with their foresight. Yeah, I mean, I think that from in our position Judging how good an executive, whether that's like a CEO type person or a technical sport and director is so hard. Judging how good they are is so hard. Like with a player, you can kind of see if they're good or bad withith a coach, you can kind of figure it out. It's a bit harder. with an executive. It's like two steps removed from what happens on the pitch. And so you know, how on earth can somebody who's outside an organization reallyally judge. o no, this person's good at driving cultural change. This person's good at hiring and finding the right people. This person's good at like this person's got a really good algorithm for finding players. L there's so many different skills involved in being a CEO, technical director, sping director. Like this person's good at kind of getting all the players on board It's like it's so, so hard unless you have a huge amount of inside information which generally people don't have It's so hard to assess whether or not execsive football are good at their jobs or not. And the only thing you can do is look at what happens on the pitch and then kind of reverse engineer from that, well, the executives must be good. Even though the gap between what the executives are doing and what happens on the pitch is huge, because there's so many like intermediaries, not least the coaches. Yeah You ob always going to say that you end up with a situation where You judge the executive on overperformance or underperformance by reference to the wage bill value of the club. The the You know, you're basically, which I think, in a funny way is what brought Thomas Frank to Spurs was a sense that he had overperformed at Brentford against the wage bill And so there was a sense here of well, he's going to make a step up to this big club I think with watching the team this season, it was funny like after he was fired If you look back at the results There's not an you know, I think they could have fired him a month or two earlier. There's not an obvious skid in the results where like, okay, they kept going. But I think if you think back to kind of after the first sort of eight or nine guy B after the first eight or nine games of the season I think you could tell by watching The football was really turgid. Yeah. you know, John can speak more about this. There was a sense of like, okay, the only thing we do is move the ball up the up the sideline or up the flanks. You give the ball the Pedroporo. He tries to play it up the sideline I think that like you could tell that the football was quite bad.. And I think even they wereking out results, there was a sense in which like, okay, this is a manager Who seems to have a kind of aversion to building up through the center of the pitch. So it's kind of everything we have to do is risk minimization Even though he famously said, you know, when you do not What is it when you don't take a risk? you also take a risk. Straight line I think it's important to like to bed that in the context of the time though, which was that he was replacing Ange Posokaglu Who took a hundred risks every every second. and you know, that was the however true these things are, the narrative around him and his dismissal was that he refused to play any other way, that he wasn't pragmatic as a coach, that he wasn't suited to the Premier League as result of that So obviously, Totam coff swung very far in the opposite direction, but it makes a degree of sense to me that they brought in a coach who was was, you know very pragmatic who was kind of characterized by being there. Kind of. I mean, I think I think it only makes sense on I think that that the decision to replace Ange with Thomas Frank only makes sense on are really kind of like surface level understanding in the sense that Daniel Levy obviously thought, well, Brentford have got like a really good culture. so we can bring that culture to Tottenham by bringing in the head coach and some of his assistant coaches. That obviously didn't work. And the idea that like Brentford are really good like they're really solid and organized and good at set pieces and they're hard to beat. and we need to be more hard to beat. So if we just bring those guys in here will be hard to beat too. and that means and that if we do that, we won't be seventeenth this year. Yeah. And I think it just ignores the fact that A, difference between managing club like Brentford and C club Autotom is huge like Brentford is so strategic Everyone's pulling the same direction. everyverybody knows what the club is trying to do. The job being like being the head coach there is a lot easier. There's a lot less public pressure, media pressure, fan pressure You don't have to do politics. you don't really have to talk in public and defend the club and project whatever your narrative is to the world.. And I think I think Daniel Levy kind of completely missed that aspect of it I also think the other aspect I think he missed is that Safety first football isn't safety first when you lose the kind of binding element, which is the manager's ideas. L the fact is that for all his faults, Tan players loved Andge. they loved the way that he talked. They loveved the football they were asked to play, even though they didn't play a lot of it in the second season And that was the kind of one thing and it also chimed the fans as well And And's football was basically the Kind of the one thing holding the whole football club together really. And then as soon as you take that out and you replace it with like incredibly like incredibly efficient like best practice Thomas Frankball I think a lot of people think, well what's this? Like this is like they like the fans it's a huge success really for the eye tests, right? Like fans and players really early on this season thought W it this isn'tough And so I think that there was like quite a few like big strategic or big like big mistakes in thinking or strategic mistakes from Daniel Levy and going for Thomas Frank. Well I think an interesting thing that you saw at the end of the season is that you bring in Derbi who is I mean, again get, I think one of the things you could say about Daniel Levy, even th I have argued a few minutes ago that you know his firing was kind of the main cause of the relegation scrap obviously, there's a terrible track record. Starting with the first domino in that kind of meme, you know of the domino, the big domino is firing Poino. Yeah. Or maybe the first domino was failing to buy any players in Yeah. I think I think that I think the first domino is failing to back Poatino in like twenty seventeen eighteen. But Levy goes from Poatino to Marino U, which is a real heartbreaking moment for for Tottenham fans. Yeah. and there's a sense in which, okay, well, we had a manager who was all about sort of buildilding building a tradition or building a culture in the club, but now we're going to get a win now guy. We're a big club now Yeah. We're going get we're going to get someone who can win now. W there was that kind of misunderstanding at the time, wasn't it? that all that was needed was just, you know, a guy takeake the step. takeake the And two we got we got Harry Kaine We we got Son Jon, where're you know, at the moment. And then Mino You have a kind of Igor Tutorish character in Nuno, of course, and then you're like, okay, now we get Cantte Cante is the new Morino He's like Marino, but better. He's Marino for twenty twenty one or whatever. And then you go totally in the other direction with Ange and then again in the other direction to Thomas Frank starting to sound a little bit like Manchester Unitedited. Well, and I think what you have, I mean, it's interesting, I think with Levy, I think either Jack or John said this earlier If in twenty nineteen, the sense was, oh we're a big club now. We've got this big stadium. We've been to the Champions League final. We finished second and third a few times in a row. Now we're a big club. We get Marino. six late, five, six years later it's now, oh, now we're a smart club. We're going to do what the smart clubs do and the smart clubs hire a manager like Thomas Frank, they bed in this culture. And I think when Jack was talking about that, it reminded me of this idea that well, you could bring Brighton to Chelsea by hiring Graham Potter. But like that's not how it works. Exactly Bus But what I think is interesting with Deserby is that you bring in this attacking coach and you're letting in many fewer goals, your're sort of G against or whatever, I think is gone down because you're defending by controlling the ball in a way that the safety first Thomas Frank Ball that maybe worked at Brentford, where you can play a sort of low block encounter. doesn't work if you're a big club or you're playing at home in a big stadium and people are not you know, going to be happy if you're not attacking. I mean, I think the low point of the Thomas Frank Rign actually, I can't remember whether it was the home match or the U away match was the Neil Nil at against Brentford That is that that was so bad. I remember that was the that was I think the first time that he got massively He got massively booed by the away end. And the thing is like a few days before then Tot him had been to sell herur part And they won one nal, which actually ended up being there They didn't win for like four months after that. And that one nill at Sell Has Park was a terrible game. The ball was it was just like center back swooping the ball in the air. The ball was in the air the whole time. No chances were created really. The only thing that happened was Archie Gray like bundling in a corner in the second half which one spurs the game one now. I came away from that game thinking I don't think I'm going to see another game that bad all season. And then like four days later, go to Brentford For this nil nail which is like genuinely the worst game of football I've ever seen at any level. It made it made the one nil win at Sellhurst Park look like a twenty twenty two World Cup final. And I still feel like for all the All the kind of ups and downs of this first season, the badness and the kind of emptiness of that game willve live with me forever Isn't the thing that they're talking about here though, with the executive function that they are operating with like a really naive concept of causality, like Jack brought it up before, where it's where they have this idea and as Jonathan says, what they're doing is they're five years behind the cycle. Yes, so they're always like peking at the wrong time, but also they just have this idea of how you make things work that just it's almost like when when kids play tea parties or something with you and they give you like an empty cup and stuff and they cook you food and there's nothing in And they think that that's what constitutes, you know, almost having a having food. It's just I don't about the hard work. Yeah You don't know what you don't know what's involved in the actual cooking process and stuff. They just think you just stir a few things around and then give someone food Obviously it's a really tongue in cheek analogy, but that that almost strikes me as a lot of the time what happens in these clubs where they're like this team has done something good. So all you need to do is is go through the motions of producing the same kind of infrastructure, and then everything will come out of that. That's absolutely not how it works, right? And it's almost as though that realization sort of there for spurs meant that they were like, well, we're going to be smart and rather than when it goes wrong immmediately We're not going we're just not going to panic. We're going to keep going, right? The smart thing is to not panic rather than to make sure that all of the little things that you need to do in that process are in place. And I thinks that's the problem that I have a lot of the time with these at the executive level at these big clubs is that they they don they don't have the understanding of as you say, the hard work, the difficulty, the things you actually have to have in place below the infrastructure in order for the infrastructure itself to work. You can't just paste this over the top and hope things will emerge. You've got to almost do it the other way aroundound. It should be bottom up and the infrastructure should emerge out of the little decisions you're making at the bottom. I think that's the big I think that what you've identified there is probably the biggest constant strategic failing of football clubs And I think and what I think what I think makes it so bad is there is actually There is a successful example of that being done well, right? whichich is when The Manchesity ownership decided to basically buy effectively buy Barceloner in se twenty eleven, twenty twelve, when they got in Sorry Arno, Chek Brigeran and then eventually Pepp Guadolo and they built you know the best football team of the modern era in doing that. But since then so many teams have tried to do that who don't have the minimal wealth of Abu Dhby behind them. And they just can't nail it. And like how many like Jonathan mentioned earlier, how many people in the last ten years have said, Oh, Brighton are clever. Let's be more like Brighton. h let's get some Brighton players or Brighton coaches or Brrighton executes. I mean that's Chelsea.'s literally Chelsea If you don't have the Brighton IP What's the point? And it's the same with, you know, I mean, it's kind of the same with Toter appointing Thomas Frank And even Tten them in the last few years I remember when they were trying to be eventous. I remember when they were trying to be like a CFG team. and like CFG CFG execs are kind of dotted across football, right because everyone thinks o they've got the management secrets of C football group. And they can they can help us turn into CFG. whereas in reality, it's not completely random of course. I don't want to like deauthorize people who do a good job. But always you know what defines a good culture at a workplace is a combination of people who are good at their jobs and then use initiative And also a good system in place. If you don't have both of those things, it doesn't work Most of the time The people there aren't really in charge of the system anyway,? It Either happens or it doesn't. Again, I'm not trying to say that the people that have built Brighten over time haven't done a good job or haven't tried to do something intentionally. There'll be loads of clubs where people tried all the same things, it didn't work. and then afterwards we said, o, they're fucking rubb, aren't they? versus the people of Brighton who've built one of the coolest infrastructures of all time. Well I think if you look at Brighton and Brntford and Bournemouth, what you see there is they' begin with B. Yeah B cl. Exactly, exactly. Well, I think what you see is that as an overperforming club or as a club that has a smaller wage bill, a smaller stadium, whatever else It's easier to do But to do this at Manchester United, to do it at Spurs, to do it at Chelsea is much harder maybe because the expectation is results immediately. Eiciency doesn't doesn't equal that in the same way, right? Like, you know, the the people that run Brighton, Brentford, Bornworth, like as you say, their thing is to is to over deliver on the small budget, right And they do that through finding efficiencies in the transfer market and having really smart people. When I started working here I came I came from TFA. We had no money I didn't ever have any money to buy anything. Everything that we had, our microphones, our computers, they were the cheapest thing we could find. It took me I mean, it's still learning to spend money now, a company that has some money to spend. I'm terrible at it. I understand found John Mackenzie on a Danish television podcast. He wasn't even a thing. I made him for nothing. I could have gone out and got an actual real person, but I found an online troll instead and turned him into something valuable. My point being like it's really it's a very different thing to spend money And I remember we talked to a friend of ours about this a while ago who I always remember he was talking about Manchester United and he compared the running of Manchester United to the running of a tech company, not like a finance company, right? Well the aim isn't to come away with the most efficient bottom line. The aim is to spend more money than the other tech companies to make the cooler stuff to try to get the bigger market share. It's a completely different thing. And so of course it it makes sense that sometimes porting someone from one system onto another, I still haven't spent my full budget ever. I'm a Brighton guy, you know, I'm not a man united guy. I've got some measure of the idea spend some of that money, if you want to spend some None of it's for you, Steve. It's all in a different way It' in it's in a different box there Steve's like the veteran who wants three hundred thousand pounds a week. He's going to bring leadership to the dressing room. Yeah. Steve is hugely over paid already. J to be qu. J to be qu Is it Is it worth talking as well about the way that fans view executives versus So it is after after a break after a break and they And A Ronda. Ronda. That's Ronda. Okay, we'll be back after this advertisement break. Enjoy the adverts Hey, Pablo Torere here. As a sports journalist, I've covered gllobal sports for many years now. And there is one thing that I can promise you Nothing compares to the World Cup. 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Today, we'll attempt a feat once thought impossible, overcoming high interest credit card debt. It requires merely one thing A SopFI personal loan. With it, you could save big on interest charges by consolidating into one low fixed rate monthly payment. Defy high interest debt withith a SFI personersal loan. Visit soopFI dot com slash stuck to learn more. Loans originated by Sopi Bank NA member FDIC. Terms and conditions apppply NL six nine six eight nine one We're back from the adverse. Welcome back, everybody. Now, Steve, I feel it's only fair that you set up this rondeu given that it exists as a result of your incapabilities. Yes, the limitations of my education has become apparent to me. Despite Steve wearing a hat at primary school, he didn't know iron is an element and not an alloy. Oh no. called Iron an alloy the other day. None of us picked it up. None of that John and I felt guilty about that. Yeah, it washed over me a little bit. Yeah. We let Steve be exposed to the horrors of the interternet Yeah where many people informed you that Iron is not an alloy. I remember maybe saying it and then and just hearing it and just being like, ye, whatever he said it was such a I really He said it was such an air of authority, Steve. I think that I just let it be. I was like ye, whatever Yeah, that's education for you. If you I learned two things this week.. Nber one, iron is an element. Yes. and number two, we have a shocking number of metallurgists and material scientists listening to the podcast. So would anyone here like to guess what the Rndo is if you know that there are one hundred eighteen correct I'm afraid it's going to be the periodic table ofle It is going to be the periodic table of elements. So here's how the Rndo works And by the way, quick shout out to the person in comments section. This really made me laugh on Monday who pointed out the fact that I explain how the Rndo works every week and yet they've been listening all year and I've never explained points aboutack. whichich is actually confusing. It is confusing. Steve still doesn't understand the rules of points aboutack. No, I double checked his maths the other day, by the way, just to check I was the winner id you know, one points bad, John? I did. yeah. that was a fantastic time for me. It really was. It wasantast. Anyway, what do we do? We're playing the Rndoa. Here's the Rndo works. I ask these guys a question that has multiple correct answers. one hundred eighteen of them.. Let's see how far we get. And we go round in a circle. I collect correct answers. If you give me an incorrect answer, you are immediately ejected from the Rndo. If you take too long Dilly Dy, I will object you myself and the final person standing will be named Rondo Del Ray and yes, I know it's wrong. I know it's wrong. Okay, now, here we go. The question of course is can you name elements from the periodic table And by the way, it can take me a little longer than normal to just Double check. I've got in alphabetical order. get yeah, we willll get their numbers when we. You won't because I've got them in enoughical so I can find them Right. Yeahah, unfortunately. it would be cool to have their numbers. But no Jonathan, we're going to start with you. Okay. I'm gonna say Oie Watkins. You are immediately he No. Go on.. I'm gonna to say helium. Helium is of course on the list. John. Hydrogen. Hydrogen's on the list as well Oxygen. Oxygen Yeahah that's on list isn't it I'm going to say carbon, carbon. Uh ye. Yeah I would have thought so. yeah o John Um Neil Neon Oh, it is yeah. Is that what they put in neon science? No, is that an element? a noble gas? Really I did not know that. That's amazing Zinc. Zinc? Yeahah, that's easy for me to find. thank you. Jonathan. I just didn't think I'd ever get so much enjoyment from Jack Pit Brooks saying the word zinc. And still with the say only did it was intended to for me. Yeah, I'm gonna to say copper Copper. Yeahah, the copper is in there, isn't it? Yeah U yeah calcium. Calcium. okay. I wonder how long this will goingone for? This is why I feared yeah Led Led Uh yeah, led by Donkeys, you know what I'm saying? I'm going to say tungsten. Tungsten. It is, Wow, what the hell's Tungsten? It's in light bulbs. Is it It used to be? Probably not anymore. All these things about lights, I didn't know. Potassium. Potassium. Potatoes You don't need to check potium. Yeah, it's on that. I've got a check ch. I't I don't know. Silver. Silver? Yeahep Oh, I'm gonna to say gold. Oh, gold's a good one. I like gold, yeah. Titanium. Titanium, let me just get that. I think we're going to set a record for this one, Steve. Are we going have to move on to alloys if we I don't think surely we won't clear one hundred nineteen Lithium Thisi L how seriously you take this. It really makes me laugh. Yeahes Jonathan I'm gonna to say Argon. Argon, Oh, I love a bit of Argon. That's good. yeah. I'm gonna say another noble gas. Radon. Radon Isn't Argon the gas that they keep talking about in that really cheap sci fi film? What's the time travel film they made? I don't know. Hot tub time machine. No. It' two thousand. I watched re watchatched it the other day.'s one that they made for like seven thousand dollars It was very good. What did you say Radon. Radon Let me yeep, that's in there, great Not to be confused with Radox, which is what killed the alien in That film Good Which was that kill they killed them with shampoo, didn't they Which one's that evolution? is it is that? Evolution ye, that's one. yeah C on Osmum? Osmium. Now we're really going for it. Oh what's Osmium It It's the densest element of all. Wow. How about that? So everyone knows nothing If you want to be mean about someone, you can describe them as being denser than Osmium.ot that I would ever mean about anyone. I think Jack might have worn a hat to school as well. Jonathan, I'm gonna say uranium. Uranium. Okay, yeah, I'll take that. I'm gonna to say it terbium, which is spelt with a Y just to help you out. Thank you. Oh yeah, what's a tbium Okay funny one, isn't it ble. We've gathered many smart people to play this g. I'm not smart anymore. It it was me and Jan Jay we would it would have been over five years ago. it isn' the wrong epode didn't? Yeah But although he's struggling now Jack, wouldould it help if I told you that there are still over a hundred correct answers I am out. I pass. No, come on, you don't pass. You can do it. What have they put in the swimming pool? Chlorine. Yeah. Chlorine. goodood job. I knew that one. Okay, Jonathan. Sodium. Sodium, I'm sure you can include that. All right. now it's down to the Guardian Long Reads guy versus the fucking I was at university for twelve years. John. I'm gonna go with tenin Tin? ye, O on a hot can roof, hot can roof Jonathan Californum. Yeah, Californium's is that named after California? I believe so, yeah. How about that? Einsteinium. Oh man, that was gonna to be my next one. Einstein has his own element. What does it do is really smart Is it that hair gel that you use? Jonathan U Bronze? Bronze? No is That's an alloy. An alloy That's an alloy. Oh no. Or is bronze is like what do they call it this not an alloy, but is alloy. Oh God, that's so embarrassing thing they say. when you bond two together, you put two together. That's an alloy, ye. There's another word. There's another word for it. Amalgam. can't wr anyway there you go, Okay, well, you've got to get one right. I say Cesium Cesium. He's done it. Yeah.. He's done it. He's only gone and done. I just keep going. To be honest, if I thought about it, I could probably go a bit longer but Really? You're reaching your end. Reaching yeah, I mean, there's still quite a few we've not done that are really obvious. What's the most famous one we haven't done. Aluminiums I was going to say aluminium before. There's Asenic Of course, I'm not reading all of them said That doesn't make sense, right? because it's poison. Chromium Kobalt is on there of course. U D d d d doo o flluorine Yeah. No, no fans of flluorine. No we don't like that one. You could have had iodine of course. Farmers will know about that. Iron. No, no one said iron. Nitrogen. Stid already named that one, andro Yeah Mercury as well. feeling I this is really a shame. Nickel. I spent too much time studying who played the most minutes under Muci or Patina. Silicon? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah and Vritongen And I think o there's mostly quite quite hard, you know, Zzirconium the last in the alphabeticame. It depressing to realize that I was relying on stuff from my Chemistry GCSE, which I did in two thousand four. Oh wow. So it was sad for you in two ways A loser and an old loser. inccredible. I got an A star, but who cares about that now? I can last in the R. Well, you were able to' You boed about it very well. I genuinely think this is the only possible Rondo I could beat Jack in. Yeah. did you how many Ace stars did you get? nine And this was before grade inflation. Yeah, was happened as soon as I left school When we were young. you was hard about now. Oh yeah, it's incredible,ving br. Jugen, that someone told me now their numbers now Oh yeah, but not even letters anymore. Utter woke nonsense. Utterwoke nonsense. Anyway, speaking of woke nonsense, West Ham United What I was going to ask you is go back to talk about what we were talking about before. but you made a comment to me a couple of days ago, there's some comparison between you think the executives at Tottenham and the executives at West Hown? Well, no, I just think that the is that not what you said? Yeah. I think that ing to ask you the question in a different way. The story of you tell me what to say Whisper whisper the story of how you get relegated or the story of how you get almost relegated when you are not a newly promoted club or you're not, you know, a club that's been toiling at the bottom of the league table, is that is that your executivive screw up in some severe way. And I think what we can see from the long conversation we had about Spurs is that it's like, you don' screw up in just one way you screw up in a kind of multiple ways that compound one another. I don't know if you're familiar with the term polycrisis. Compound is the word I was looking for, which is another word alloy, isn't it? Compound is two elements you put together Yeah. Yeah, but that's different because they're chemically bonded. whereereas an alloy you're just you're not, I don't think you're changing the chemical All are you just putting things together? I think it's the way around, is't A compound they join chemically, right Whereas with an alloy, it's just you met metals together. So I don't know what they cannot wait for the discord after this orization. But Tonham has had a real polycisis over the season That's time happen. Yeah. That' polycrisis, know, the idea here is that like you know, you've got in the global economy lots of different things going wrong all at once And there's no one lever that you can pull to kind of fix things So I think that in these stories of executive failure, You know, what struck me was that the Spurrs story and the West Ham story were almost interchangeable. I think West Ham not just because they have ended up being relegated. seem to have been worse run. sureure. But I think, you know, in this discussion we were having about Daniel Levy, I think there is an interesting dynamic. One of the things that has come out now in the past few days, right? So Jack mentioned, there was a statement mayaybe the day after the last day of the season from Peter Charrington, who is the ur as non executive chairman, I'm not exactly sure what that job entails. Al I did all the stuff that's non executive. I did see someone speculating or claiming maybe this was even in a piece that that when he joined in this role, he didn't know how many players were on a football team. But I don't know if that's a slanderous allegation or not. Allegedly. Yeah allegedly. S cut just to be safe.. So So Peter Charrington puts out a letter to the fans saying, you know, we're really sorry, you know, this isn't good enough et cetera, etcetera. And then a day later, or two days later, maybe Jack The Lewis family, who are the ultimate owners of the club, put out their own letter. Both of these letters seem to suggest There was a bit the Peter Charrington vibe Petang did letter, and I guess also Vinee Van Katesim did an interview with the BBC Um, It reminds me of the sort of message from like Kir Starmer and Rachel Reeves when they joined the government. likeike, oh, well, we knew the Tories were doing a bad job, but now we've looked at the books and know, So there's a sense here of like, okay, we thought Daniel Levy had all of this stuff under control And you know, it turns out,, you know, this place is an absolute disaster. An anythingthing el goes wrong the next Yeah. I think I think that's a really good comparison. That's often how I have felt hearing the Tottenham hierarchy talk over the course this year. It's exactly as if they just won an election But there's nonsense because Daniel Levy worked for them. Yeah. Daniel Levy was literally an employee. He was an ye, like you' sure he and to take in the club, but he was an employee and they could have fired him at any time. They just chose to fire him in September last year. And so the idea that The Lewis family have like inherited this, I don't know, we've inherited this terrible situation. Like who could have like if only we had a way to stop this from happening? It's just we're still trying to find the guy who did this. Yeah he did stand up. And I think you have a sense you're going back to the big cllub smallm club thing that Daniel Levy, whatever his failings was across all of this stuff and probably doing a better job than, you know, I don't know, David Sullivan or whoever the equivalent West Ham figure might have been. U Although Levy, I think allegedly did explore moving to the Olympic stadium at some point. wasas that not on the cards before they built the stadium Um so So you have this dilemma, I think, and this is what I think is going to play out over the summer and into next season, which is like, okay, we've taken out this guy who was who was holding the whole thing together for better or for worse Now we're trying to put in A Brighten born myth Brentford style, a new corporate culture, a new way of doing these things. But in the meantime, you've lost the person who seems to know how to run the whole football side of things Um I think the correlation here as well as with Chelsea, right? where they did the same thing Danel Finkelstein com out saying, we've done all of the research and the numbers show that managers don't make a difference. Now they've won eighteen backtracked on this and been like, o, we realize that you know there's more to there's more to it than that and we're going to go for a coach like Jaabi Alonzso. And I feel like there's almost the same thing happens at Spurs, right where they they do the Thomas Frank thing to be like, oh, we're a smart club. now we're going to do what a smart club does. and then they actually we've realized that what the most important thing you can do here is just get a good coac in and that will turn things around. I think a lot of those teams, by which I mean like teams with resources who are underperforming in the Premier League. they will look at the examples who I amar in a Villa anyhow in Newcastle. I think actually, we can't We don't we don't really have the bandwidth to be Bournouth or Brentford or Brighton What what we can do is get a good manager and back him And in both those I know that Newcastle haven't had a great season, but in both those in both the cases of Newcastle and Villa by finding a good managment backing him. they have totally seen off the threat of relegation. They both qualified for Championship multiple times. They both won a trophy And so my guess at the moment, I'm not sure this is how Tottenam would describe it themselves, but my guess, is that is probably what the Tottenham strategy from here will look like basically. It's you you kind of you have a basically you have a manager then you almost like work the strategy after you've appointed the manager. And the strategy is basically give the good manager what he wants, keep him happy and you will be quite good. And that's interesting, right? Inasfar as, it's almost like an acceptance that we tried to do the football club running bit and it didn't really work out So let's give it to someone who we can almost defer that too. And I think that's kind of interesting, right? Because then we're going back on what we said before about this idea that they think all you have to do is pretend football clubs and good things will happen. actually, you need to have that expertise further in the in the in the cycle. So you bring in some like Deserbi who has worked at many football clubs at lots of different levels and had success and he can do that for you. He can do the things that you can't actually do. I think the thing I think John you were saying before the break . you know, about about the the playing the pretend football clubs. I think this idea of The idea that the manager doesn't matter that like we've looked at the data. Yeah strikes me as like such a perfect I don't know, kind of example of problem with this I don't know, we call it financialization or like, you know, the neoliberal model of like thinking about football and being a football fan in that like, it just made me think of like this idea that like, you might look at data that shows that you know, o, it's important that you know, kids grow up with a dad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that from my perspective, it's actually quite important that I'm the dad to my children. Not that someone else is the dad to my children. know the idea that like, o all we need to do is to kind of you know, we can look at this huge data set. Have we tried kill all the poor? Yeah You look at the huge data set and you're like, okay, well, across this huge data set All that matters is you know having the right structure, having the right data, having the right recruitment team And of course, it's like, well, yeah, in the aggregate, that is true. It's very depersonalized. Well it's like but you know I think almost all of our experiences are that it's people that do work I think the thing with Derbi is an interesting case study here because it looks like in their desperation to get him in the executive class at Spurs have given him a greater degree of control then is seen to be best practice, which mirrors what's happening at Chelsea in the modern Premier League. Yeah. And I think some fans will say, I mean, even Pacatino, who is this sainted figure in the Ss fan base in spite of his Chelsea betrayal. Uh never mind, never mind his yank defection. even Pacciatino, I think, smart fans We're in the habit of saying, well, the problem with Pacino is that he wants too much control over transfers. He doesn't want to work in a director of football structure, which again, I think is a bit of a sad of being a fan, although I can see that it's a rational and understandable one, right? I was going to ask you about that anyway, because I mean you know, something that strikes me about this conversation is that there's there's an America, a North American influence to the conversation. it to me, it mirrors how I hear basketball and football American football fans speaking about their teams, tal about the front office, talk about the GM You know, I remember watching Money Ball for the first time and thinking hang on, whoo's the coach? Like does how does this work? you know? It feels as though been that's had a real influence on how Premier League fans at least speak about it. And maybe the same with Barcelon and Real Madrid, although they have more of a history of talking about their presidents and having their elections. But I don't remember it being like this fifteen years ago. It was very focused on the manager and now we talk about you know talk about Vino Venach ten times this year. I think it's really interesting because I think we do still care about managers, but we care about managers when teams wit So when a team wins or does well. you're like the manager has been incredible here. Aet is the hero. If a team does badly, it's like, oh the the executive have done badly here. Ands I think that's really interesting. You never really get situations where people say, actually the executive has done pretty good job here. I think Leeds is a good example of that. I think Daniel Faler is getting a lot of the credit right now. you know, he's done a good job this season. but think That good job wouldn't have been done if the recruitment department and the executives overseeing that recruitment department and the analysts who've been working on very specific problems are targeted towards the question of how do you survive relegation in the Premier League If they haven't done their job, that isn't possible to do. And again, obviously everything that we're talking about boils down to this idea that actually things are way more complicated than just it's just. know, I'm noticing this in my personal life as well because I'm finding that when people criticize the podcast for us not talking enough about teams outside of the Big six, they tend to say it's because of like a conspiratorial enforcement from the owners of the athletic, as opposed to it being my fault I brought up on the podcast, which I'm fine with, by the way, it's not true. But it's nice for the criticism to go elsewhere. Yeah. And I guess the vice versa thing here is that like why don't we talk about recruitment departments when when they do a good job, right? Because we don't know their names Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to imagine John writing a book about Premier League executive who really changed the game, you know, like the specter of Michael Edwards specter of Chickkey Pickery. I think the amount I mean it is interesting. It's particularly interesting, I think as a contrast because in America You don't have promotion in relegation And so American sporting leagues are these kind of funny cartels of owners and the funny cartel of owners I thinks that it's good for the product as a whole for there to be a degree of parity. So you have things like the draft and you have salary caps and you have So like in some ways, European football is like a much more capitalistic system. But in another way, the American system is much more of a kind of crony capitalism, kind of rentier No one else is allowed in But I guess you have a, yeah, that this sense of kind of maximizing the efficiency of what you've got to work with. I mean, I was sharing with John, you know, an American an American football podcast where they were doing a sort of year in review, ranking the top ten coaches and the top five general managers from last season's NFL and thinking, well, that's like a bit a bit funny, you know Can I pick up on your point? you know, I've been thinking about this the cultural difference between American sports and British sports a lot because European rest of World sports, I should say. It's Kya, who's not here today, Kya and I have been we've written a few video scripts for TFo sports videos over the last six months that are kind of focused on this cultural difference And the instinct is always to think when you start reading about American sports, you go Oh, yeah, they do, they seem weirdly more socialist in a sense because you know there is that element of parity, as you say, they have drafts. There are often some of them are harder and some of them are softer, but there are like salary caps, or you knows in some cases, there's luxury taxes that you can pay to spend a little bit more money. And when you compare it As you know apples and apples with European football or global football, you think, o yeah it does seem more socialist. And then you remember that it's a closed league system. And the actual true definition of capitalism is that for a small group of people to enjoy themselves in one place, a lot of other people have to suffer elsewhere. And in the case of, you know, NFL, NBA, whatever, there are the reason that there are no established you know very very well established or successful sports leagues in those sports elsewhere in the world is because of the centralization of it all happening in one place. So when you look at it that way, it's far more capitalist than What's about protecting It's about protecting the investment of the owners. Exactly. So the owners have come in And they are saying, look, we're not going to let anyone else in. I mean, I thing that I think it's fascinating in American sports. And when you're a child, I think you don't quite clock what's going on here is the phenomenon of the expansion team. right. So sometimes the owners who have the league say Look, it would be better for us if we had a franchise in Arizona because that's a fast growing part of the country. That's a big media market. Yeah. And in some sports, I think baseball and hockey may be foremost among them. This happened in American football, I think in the fifties and sixties more often. You just pick up a team and you move them, right? You do a Milton Keeenes Wimbledon kind of thing. Yeah Stan Crke did that Yeah, what with the Rams or something They moved into LA. from Staint Louis, right? Uh so so I think that the but the idea there like the franchise, the expansion team. you buy in, right? So you're like, okay, we're putting out a bid. And if if you pay us two billion dollars or whatever, you can buy this new franchise that we're going to create. Part of our big time share. Yeah. Exactly. It does That model does mean that there is an incredible sense of I guess for want a better word, like kind of class solidarity amongst the owners Yeah in a way that just doesn't exist in Premier League and European football. Like if you look at, you know, if you look at the current case between Manchester and the Premier League or If you look at the issues around the Chelsea ownership or whatever, like there are certain points where sometimes the owners will work together like you know well like the Super League. sureure, which is in part driven by American owners and Premier League team But there's never been Like you can't get that same that same sense of unity of solidarity and working together amongst the ownership class in in the European system because there are no They're just not brought together in the same way, right? And there's no protections on kind of who comes in and who leaves. This is something we talked about with Mureine actually because we were making the point that actually what's super interesting about this season is you've got West Ham, the twentieth richest team in the world and Spurs, the ninth richest club in the world. battling for relegation. And when you I think we made the point at that time in that episode where actuallyctually if there is this sort of weird evolution happening at the level of the tactical, which means that like possession control is now much more questionable and the teams at the top don't have the sort of dominance that they had impacts the likelihood of other people wanting to invest in the Premier League precisely because you've started losing the the, you know, you could buy a team in the top o they're probably going to stay around there as long as we don't do anything terrible. Whereas now you can even make the argument that like West Hammond and Spurs probably haven't done anything that much different to what they were doing before. What's actually changed is the landscape within which they're operating and suddenly the things that were sort of inaliable rights to them before are no longer there. And so you get this shifting tactical landscape, which then makes the league so much harder to invest in a as an external candidate coming in. Maybe we should see this as a deterrent to American investors coming in and buying up more football teams. I mean, it occurs to me think about this that it's not an accident that money ball begins in majoraguease you know Moneyball is a story of major League baseball, among the American sports major Lague bl, bl, blah Let me tell you're about to say that Medjor League bees booo baseball is the is the most unequal Yeah or the least cartel kind of where the clubs that are in small markets, every baseball team has their own little local TV deal. So in those days, the Oakland Athletics, you know had one tenth the payroll or whatever of the New York Yankees. Yeah, whichich you can't have yards of shit and which you can't have in basketball or in American football. And so the sense in which goal or the target of Money Ball is to overperform your kind of small club status It doesn't quite work the same. You know, O of course, in American basketball, people have tried to apply these U tactics, I think most famously with the Golden State Warriors. I'm sure similar stuff now happens in American football But I think it's I don't know, it's indicative somehow that this sense in which overperforming your financial level starts in baseball and not in these other sports. Let's have an advert break What if a marginal gain unlocked greater performance. What if an insight in data change everything at A RAMco Our focus on detail helps us deliver reliable energy to millions across the world because margins aren't marginal They' where we can truly push the limits of what's possible A RAMco. an integrated energy and chemicals company. Learn more at arramcoo. com Hey, Pablo Torere here. As a sports journalist, I've covered global sports for many years now. 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After all, you listen to this show. See terms at discover d. com slash credit card Yeah,' the experience of the fan being just kind of ruined, I guess. For a fan, it really matters who the manner And we're back to the adade. Look, it's real. listeners sometimes they always stage you, we We don't care about football. we don't talk about football they wouldn't Shut the fuck up. During the ad break. Even Steve triing to stop them. he doesn't have the het. From the other room. What are you gonna do about that? Anyway, Crystal Palace They were they' Europeanampions, aren't they? I'm reading now from what Steve's written. Crystal Palers are the twenty twenty six UAF conference League Champions. The Eagles soars. new European heights with a one nill victory over Ry Vcano in the German city of Leipzig on Wednesday evening. The final brought a close to Oliver Glasner's reign as Crystal Palace's coach, with an FAu and a community shield to add to the trophy hall under the Austrian, This is an unprecedented time to be a fan of of those eagles writes Steve. Also, we've checked in with Ruben Pinder who is in Germany at the time of recording. off course, he went to Leipzig to watch the game. and we wanted to check about his post troph enjoyment levels and I quote through the fucking roof, he said. There you go. He was a little He was a little nervous in the first half. I think we heard from him, didn't we? But there we go. A real achievement, and I think when Ruben comes back, we can talk about the actual football. So that will happen at some point. Chrystal Palace fans, please don't be upset with me for instead using this as a segue to discuss the the Premier League's dominance in Europe. Our friend Colin Miller tweeted something yesterday, John, didn't hear about the number of different matchoffs? twentywenty one matchups, I think, between English teams with non English teams and all twenty one won by the English in two leg timesg since is that the last year I think it's the last two years or something.ow. So every single one of those times has been won by the English teams. Yeah. And in the conference League it's now three out of five winners have been from England. And the two years where the English teams didn't win, it was Leicester Lost to Rome. I think they were the original the eventual winners of that tournament. Yeah. and then Villa lost Olympia Arcos as well, but Yeah, it's starting to look as though it feels kind of cooked a little bit. Would you What do you think about this idea that English teams should be banned from the confference League? too leave the conference League free for clubs who don't have the same revenues unity. Look, it's a complicated topic, I think. and again, as Joe's already said, I don't want to come in here just straighta awayay. like Crystal Palace have won the tournent. it's an incredible achievement for them and I understand why, you know, Ruben is my friend and I like to see him happy And I understand why fans of clubs like Palace who haven't previously had huge amounts of opportunity to win clubs Wh they love the opportunity to win the conference League. I felt the same way with my West Ham friends. I felt the same way with with my villa friends when they won less so with Chelsea when they want it. Sure that a different story altogether. But the point being that I understand that you know, trophies are a rare commodity for most fans of football team. So it's nice to see smaller English club fans winning enjoy No, Palace have got too many now. the FA cup last year, they don't need another. But I think the issue is more that when you consider the wider European balling it sort pyramid the like, you know the the What's the word that I'm looking for? not micro the ecosystem. ecosystem. Well do you need I mean, do you need to bring in a kind of weight class where you know the conference Lague is only open to teams that have a wage bill under one hundred million or something. And that's the reality is That would be cool if you had to go down the system until so you could even go into the championship to find the team that had the wage bill. Yeah. that's kind of fun. The reality is is that Pallace's wage bill is close to one hundred fifty million R of Icanotes. and this is figures from aple maybe a year ago, a couple of years ago. yout remember's the most up to date ones we have Ari Iican is just thirty million. So we're talking like a X in terms of financial wages which is which is massive. And you know, same happened in for Freyberg and Villa in the in the Europa League Actually the things are reversed a little bit in the Champions League because I just want to say if it was one hundred and fifty if it was one hundred and fifty and thirty, then it's just five X not eight. I don't want to YouTube comments to slay you for that.. I do think you I think it does make me feel as a Spos fan that we the Spacy Rubber League victory is an honest because we beat Manchester Unite. Yes, Yeah the hardest team in the world. We not Yeah we did we did I think we did play Bodo glimp, I think in the semif. I think so maybe that's maybe that's not fair. That was definitely a watershed moment as well, right? Because it was two teams who just couldn't buy a win in the league. Yeah for eight fifteenth and sixteh placeers or somewhere at the time of' sort of batting with regation, but then they got through to the final sort relatively That was. The weird thing about that, I think, is that And particularly given that Chelsea won the confonerence League that season as well is that at the time you watch and you think, Oh, wow, isn isn't this strange? These two English teams, who I know are bad because I watch them everyic every week are Ohh w like they're competing toin the Europa League strange thing to happen And then it's only like I think over the course of this season, people have realized actually this is that's this is a kind of feature that wasn't a bug. likeike this is just whatng this is what European Club competition is going to be like now, which is English teams who we know are not that good because we do watch them in the Premier League every week. But they do have stacked squads, really good managers, tons of good players, like more good players than they need kind of able to steamroll basically anyone. Could you say the same thing about Spain for many years though? because I feel as though No because Spanish teams had a great record in the Euran Lague, Real Madrid bustin I don't I don't think it was I don't think that was underpinned by financial dominance in the same way.ure. I mean, they did have lots of good teams and managers and coaches and stuff But I didn't think They weren't like an absolute magnet for the talent everywhere else in Europe, whichich is basically what Premier League is You have well, you have a situation too though now, don't you that the only in each country there's like one team now or maybe two teams in the case of Spain, maybe three, right? The PSG, you know still have a larger wage bill and arrsenal iron, presumably have a larger wage bill than most of the English clubs So you you don't have you don't have any sort of depth in the other European leeague. So you don't have the same kind of depth. And that's been the story in the in the Champions League this season, right? is that the fact, you know, and this is kind of borne out by by the revenue report. so there's It' basically like four and a half maybe depending on how you see Athletic in Madrid, like four or five huge European teams who can compete with with the best in the Premier League, but then like almost literally everybody else like U underneath Athletic Game Mageraid, including Everyone in Italy now Everyone in Germany apart from Bay and everyone in France apart from PSG cannot compete the Premier League with the Preier League teams And that that more than anything else, I think is the biggest story in European Club football if you take a step back and look over the last five years. Yeah, agreed. I mean, I don't think there's any scenario where English teams could be though right It wouldn't be good for European leagues wouldn't want that Of course they wouldn't. But I do quite like the idea of having the having the weight class, having having aight. I think that is true to like what is meant what I think is meant to be the moral purpose of conference League, which is to give other leagues a chance, like give other give smaller leagues a chance and give smaller teams in like medium sized leagues a chance as well. bigagues big leagues would like it as well, rightight? you always you always find this strange situation towards the end of the season in the Premier League now where one of the big six is actually Cr acc count prefer to avoid the conference league, right? I mean in some cases, okay, you can play your entire second eleven and it's good for rotation. But a lot of the time it's in Man United are a perfect example of that this season. You don't play any European football at all. you have a great domestic campaign. by mini tanking if a big team were able to say, well, I'll you know, just to keep their wage bill or whatever over the maximum. So even if they finished in the seventh, they couldn't qualify for your Europe conferencecesag anyway, that would suit me. wouldould that not suit everyone involved? Are we ag Gree? I think so. Yeah. So can I read the tweet? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah please. you shared a very funny tweet with us yesterday. This is off the back of the Crystal Palace Victory. O the back of the Crystal Palace Victory., I had retweeted a friend of mine who said I didn't get into supporting Crystal Palace for anything as vulgar as winning trophies. I started supporting them because my girlfriend did. Still, the vulgar trophies are nice. And someone replied to him copying me and said, My eleven year old palace mad nephew was torn about whether he wanted to win the conference leeague because quote, I'm worried about squad depath if we're in Europe again. That puts a finer point on the executive class conversation, doesn't it What a shame, the things that children have to worry about these days, you know. Of course, they live inner cities, there's a crime, drugs and a squad depth issue quality of the recruitment department. That's it. there you go. How about that? Now of course, another team that will be worrying about the quality of the recruitment department, John. is actually Milan or just Melan as I'm suppos. Steve've got some corrections in here for me but I'm sorry would you like to read Steve needs to give some corrections the other way because I said both of these teams lost in semifine at the se station what you're referring to for the audience here is this is correct. Steve has highlighted it in yellow in bold yellow, a few corrections for J jump He says Olympia Acos beat Forentina in the twenty twenty four confonference League final not Aastam Villa Would you like jump the other on? Villa in the semif final. Oh and Lester lost for romance. Oh, Steve. Okay it' for clarity rather than corrage go just to make sure the audience with us all the way. was he was late today as well. He wasn't here at the beginning he didn't have a Sou city. I can't believe he thinks that Leicester City is an alloy. He said He said Iron was an alloy It's been a long season It's a hot day. Now here we go. Milan this' a very interesting story broke this week about Milan that they're clearing the decks, John off the pitch, we should say after a second successive season without Champions League football was confirmed at the weekend. Milan were second with just eight matches of the season to go. In fact, the last time I looked at the Serar table, Milan was second Oh, that's a nice improvement. But they fell down to fifth by the final day into Napoli, Roma and Como will be Italy's representatives in the Champions League next season. So Messima Allegri, who was a coach, of course, who won the Scadtetta with Milan back in twenty eleven will now depart alongside all of these people, sporting director, the chief executive and the technical director in a radical shape up of the top of the club. and that's all according to reporting from James Horncastle on the athletic. The other thing that we heard about Milan in the week, although the story is kind of evolving and moving this morning as well, was that there was some interest in and Donny Ariola. So there was the possibility that that could happen next week, although we are also hearing that there's interest from other teams as well. So don't know what's going to happen there. what do you make of that shakeup? Be it's quite significant to do that all in one game. You don't normally hear that. Yeah. And I think, you know, the The background against which this is interesting is you mentioned Como there as one of the teams that took their place. Now that taking of taking switching of places happened on the final day of the season. So Komo B Cremanzi for one on the final day of the season and Milan lost two one to calary and therefore the positions were switched. That's interesting for me because It's coming back to everything we've talked about today, right? whichich is you've got Milan, who are a sort of grandy of on the European stage, bringing in back a manager like Max Allegri, with whom they you, who's had a lot of success in Italian football, being ousted by a smart club that was only promoted in twenty twenty four that's owned by billionaires you know, found a way clearly to invest money in a successful sporting promotion bid with Como. They got Cess Fabgas, a young up and coming manager playing modern football and obviously has the fame around his name. And I think that's kind of interesting, right, with Milan, I think it's very clear. Maybe for a lot of other teams in Sera out right now, there's something needs to change. You can't just rely on being a big club anymore. You are going to have to be smart in some way. I think Como really interesting from that point of view because I think they hire something like sixty people to work in their data team, which is like an incredibly largeomo at Como Yeah crazy So they're obviously, they're obviously G They worked with Billy Bean, who is who is the money Ball guy, but also Jamestown analytics and Luda Nortic Stats Bomb. Let should just hire doctor Mark Cery because you only need one. is true. But I think it's a really nice juxtaposition, right? where that again, it's the same things that we're talking about that there's a realization now that you can't just take for granted your position in in hierarchy. I think that the lesson of Como's success as compared to Sy Milan It's something that we see a lot in the Premier League, particularly know, we were talking about Brighton and Bntford and Bournouth earlier which is that it's easier if you're a small club. I think, if you're a small club, you can be streamlined, you can be strategic you can patient and rebuild and think about, you know, where we're trying to get to, what's the best way. We don't have to so you don't have to make short term decisions Theres there's less media pressure, there's less fan pressure, there's no like X pros going on podcasts telling you, well, this is this isn't the como where you should be doing it this way instead And it's just like life is so much easier. And I think that The hardest thing in football is to turn around a really big club You know I think live Liverpool and now Arsenal are probably the only two examples of it in recent years. You can see Barcelona seems to be floundering bit Manester United permanently flndering. Manay United twenty twenty seven. It's coming. But to turn around a small club, Yeah, and I don't mean that I hope that doesn't sound dismissive to Brighton, Brentford, Bournemouth, Como, whoever. you see lots of examples in Germany as well. I guess I'll be Lipzig was an example of this a few years ago too It's much's just's the best way to go from down here to up there as quickly as possible. It's just a different thing, right? Yeah totally. I mean, like obviously we could talk about it in terms of what's easier, what's harder, but I think the job is not easer Rassively becausecause you've got a blank slate. got a blank slate and you can think what does a well run club look like? What is a good what is a good strategy for this club How can we how can we pursue that in the most kind of ruthless and focused way as possible without having to worry about like what do the X pros on podcasts think? I think the paradox here though, the thing that's intriguing to me is the sense in which when you talk about let's say Como in this case know dethrones the kind of arrogant European giant by bringing in the recruitment department with sixty data analysts On the face of it, that's a kind of happy story of, you know, overperformance, of you know, the scrappy underdog, But then pretty soon everybody else says, okay, now we're going to hire the same sixty data analysts and you have this kind of uniform everyone is everyone is efficiency maximizing and then it just gets to be kind of a ull, I guess. It's also worth mentioning that Komo do have some of the richest owners as right? Ind Indonesian billionaires? Yeah. Not Yanks I just like saying Yanks niceah. Yeah yeah. But again, and I think what will happen is that Sry How is clearly ripe for that modernization process, right? That's the reason why Milan have cleared out their decks as it were. They're obviously going to go through that process themselves as well. And there'll probably be an argument to be made that if Como weren't doing what they were doing, it would be much harder for Milan to be like, lookook at this team who have come up in twenty twenty four and they've already overtaken us, we need to change our processes I think that's definitely on the card. But I also think it's like what Jack saying Clubs are institutions and institutions are just they're just like edififices, right? There's so many things that just happen and they always have happened. and Man have been around for years and they've had lots of success for years. And the hardest thing to do, I think, is that historical process where you are actually able to deconstruct your institution take it aart and then rebuild it from the bottom up. Whereas these clubs that we're talking about, like Como, they're starting in a division below. like who cares? No one's really thinking about it. They can build the team as they go, the structure as they go. and it just makes it so much easier to get on that wave upwards. Whereas these teams at the top, it's so much harder to actually take apart what they're doing and rebuild them Yeah, that's true. I guess like the you know, to go back to what you were saying, Jonathan, the that maybe you get these kind of identate approaches to creating football clubs. We've talked about this before, and my thought with that is just This is just a very long transitional period from a time when no one used any data to a time where everyone uses all the data. And during that transitional period, there'll be some winners, there'll be some losers. there' some who are faster to adopt it, some who do it badly, some who do it well But eventually youll and you'll get to a situation where provided that you have the funds available, all teams will be as good as each other. They won't be, you know, we'll go back to life trying to find those marginal games, maybe or we return to a time where It's back to the human difference again, or there's a new technology that we try to use. That's exactly what I think because I think that surely the more teams that use data, the margins will be outside of the data, right? It won't be So exam people Exactly. So the example I was thinking of earlier when we were talking about this is like who is the most overachieving team in Europe in the last few years? Bodo glimpsse Yeah Now what do most teams in Europe do all the time? It's they scout around the world to find unsigned diamonds. We're going to go and find like the best young player we can find in the Bolivian League or in the Estonian League or whatever And like if you can do that better than anyone else, that is your route to being successful. Bonag Glimp don't do that at all. They barely recruit all of their players are from Northern Norway pololar opposite of what all the of what we kind of assume best practice in the marketplace is And yet that has allowed them to not only build like to build a really good un unified team with a really good ethos and culture, which keeps winning the Norwegian Lague, which routinely embarrasses like much bigger and better resource teams in the European competition, which had a great run and you know got the Opa League semies last year and a great run in the Champions League this year. and they don't recruit. And I think that just goes to show that you know, when everybody in football zigs, you've got to zag, but you have to, you have to find your cutting edge somehow And the extent to which your cutting edgees Data Those I mean, we're probably like coming to the l, I imagine that we' already probably past peak data right now, like because every everybody's jumped on booard the bandwager. the Jami Alonzso appointment a couple of weeks ago. I think it's hugely important as a milestone here. And you mentioned this with Roberto Derbi already. I don't wish to retread old ground, but those are two examples of big teams hiring hiring managers or giving more responsibility to people where the trend has been the other direction for quite a lot. I was just thinking Joe that arere we going to have a situation where in the same way that John would say that, you know, okay, PP comes in demonstrates what you can do with positional player or whatever I don't want to get it wrong U Who do you I hear he's not it's not all about positional play is what I hear. I hear Johns written a book about this. you know, will we get to a point where we start talking about like the tactical meta for like front office executives, right? That like, okay, well, we went through a period where the edge came from, you know, Michael Edwards and Richard Hugh and whoever else, these people whose names I don't really know. Now they're using Gaggan press with their star. Yeah, you know Exactly. And that you start having this thing like Jack is saying, Okaykay, well