Hello and welcome back to the Transfer Flow podcast and on today's episode we talk about Brentford's early goals. Have they managed to solve football? Then playing out from the back, why have there been so many high turnover goals in the Premier League this season? Before we turn to Bayern, did we call this pot early on their defence? And maybe we'll have time for Spurs or City or anything else as well.
But stay tuned. Okay, so we're back for another episode. I'm Patrick Van Starten, you know me by now and I'm joined by...
ted knutson good to see you ted hello uh you're seeing even more of me quite the light and maybe some glare but who knows i'm seeing you in a conversation about makeup before we get started here um we promise that we go faster to start for youtube so for those of you who are there hold on to your attention span just a little bit longer oh god okay right well let's get straight into it so so just to let you know we're not going to recap every premier league game every week okay if you'd like to get the transfer flow perspective on all the week's action, then sign up for the newsletter because there you'll get a roundup. Ted's been beavering away all weekend, so he'll give you his take on all the Premier League matches. But there are several very interesting stories from the weekend that we thought we could dig into here in a bit more detail. So firstly, Ted, there's a story here that sits at the exact nexus of all your expertise, I think. Brentford's early goals.
It's almost like they're approaching kickoff as a kind of set piece, or at least as a structured play. Right. So... I'm going to go through a bit of a story because I think that we have a lot of new people on the podcast who are not necessarily familiar with my history and in particular not familiar with like what we've done in the area of set pieces. So bear with me for a moment but the way that you should think of set pieces is you should re-term them as restarts.
If you re-term them as restarts you will start to understand the breadth of what is possible from these particular moments. It's the moments when football starts over again. And this is true for men's football and women's football. You have the men throw-ins, which are sort of the lowliest of the restarts.
You have them on, you know, any sort of free kick that we start. But really, kickoffs are also a free kick. Goal kicks can potentially be one of those, but those are really far away from your own goal.
So, like, not usually much of a chance to get started. Potential shots or goals or anything like that. And what it looks like is Brentford have solved the first minute of football. I don't know if that's a possible thing.
I don't know if it's a thing that is maintainable. But I think at four of their seven matches so far, they've had a goal effectively in like the first 120 seconds or something like that. Thomas Frank said that they've been practicing all week to win the coin toss.
And failing that, it took them a little bit longer against Wolves to actually score. Thomas is funny, very dry. Danish sense of humor.
So the idea behind this is it came from Gianni Vio really for on my side originally. And Gianni Vio now is the coach of set pieces for the United States national team. Prior to that, he was at Spurs.
When he came to my attention, he was the guy who helped Fiorentina and Vincenzo Montella's team score 26 goals across the 38 game Serie A season. And I think Horncastle had a story about sort of the set piece mastermind. The incredible thing is like Johnny had been coaching for ages at that point, but he'd been kind of flying his trade as a head coach down in Syria D and stuff like that. So like way down in the leagues.
Lovely man. And he found the thing that he knew was advantageous and valuable that nobody had been paying that much attention to. Obviously, it wasn't the first time this had been talked about.
I think even Charles Reap had discussions around restarts and stuff like that back in the sort of 80s and 90s. So These are things that have gone through football as everything has. One of the things Robbie says on different pods is that we've seen everything in 120 years of football.
It's just like, what's in fashion now? I think it's bell-bottoms if I walk down the street, but no. No? No.
Okay. Yeah, so football bell-bottoms. That's what we're looking at very soon. In 2014, I was hired by Matthew Benham, who's the owner of Brentford, to come in. And it was really a stats basis to be able to...
start working on better player recruitment because they knew that they couldn't put scouts all over the world so like how do we find better players if we're little at brentford um but the first thing they had me work on was a total detour in my life and he's like hey i want you to take four to six weeks i want you to look at all the set pieces we've got a bunch of video here uh and an archive of teams that are good we got this book in italian from this italian guy named johnny vio we're gonna get translated and i want you to figure out like how to do this better i'm just like you what Matt, I know you got a lot of money, but I'm a stats nerd. I'm a gambler. I don't have any idea what you're talking about.
He's like, no, I think you could do this. Go ahead and crack it. It's the most insane thing that anybody's told me to do in a very, very long time.
So yeah, did that in 2014. And basically what I produced at that point was a set piece playbook. And it wasn't a playbook per se. It was a series of routines. along with a series of philosophies to allow people to better break down teams from wide free kicks and partly from deeper free kicks and certainly from corners. And then eventually we instituted long throws, particularly at Michelin.
So all these things add up to one very important, crucial concept. If we can create a couple more goals in a season without having to spend a ton more money. It has a massive amount of value for our one club, our two clubs, or our 10 clubs, wherever you're at.
So that was what we were looking at from there. And then at some point along the way, we saw the Red Bull teams, who are notorious for really liking to hide press aggressively, start to do kind of long kicks. And what they did then was they, you know, they basically seed the ball and position of the ball for territory.
They would go in, have a throw in, and the opponent's own third. And then they would press that aggressively, hopefully win it back, and then go on from there. What it looks like Brentford have done is taken some of that concept and some of the concept that we do, and actually England have done in past World Cups, which is go from kick, know that you have this one moment where you are going to be able to script something.
Like it's not a real script, but script something. And then... See if you can pull off an overload in a space that the opponent isn't necessarily expecting, and then turn that into a good chance. And since you know where you want to put the ball, you have an information advantage versus your opponent.
Since you know, probably, who you think has the height mismatches, like Christopher Iger has a height in jumping mismatches against most people, but you can create this in the opposition anyway. Since you know those two things, where do we want to play the ball? Who has a mismatch?
Then we can create a situation where we have a pressing situation. We close it down quickly. Either we win the first ball from Iyer and he passes it to one of our guys. We win the second ball off of a press because we know where the ball is going to go.
So we know how to contain it. And then we quickly break towards the goal. Not all of their, in fact, most of their goals have not been, you know, off of an obvious element of that.
But they're getting at teams very quickly. They're making sure that they put attacking pressure on. And then the moment the ball goes out, they... sort of revert back to a normal shape and a normal structure until the opportunity rises again. This isn't the first time this has happened, but it's certainly the first time that I've seen it where it has been a consistent form of goal scoring and teams are aware of it and they're still not able to stop it.
Yeah, so it feels like roughly they've been getting kind of about four guys in the box for this first cross that they get. And then somebody drops off towards the penalty spot. And you know, if you've got four guys in the box, then chances of an overload are pretty high right um and then you get stuff like nathan collins scoring from open play in the first what was it it was like a minute 16 seconds or something um waymo has two side volleyed goals off of this which again yeah i'm not sure how repeatable it is but they're perfect left-footed side volleyed goals that go in the top corner yeah that's the thing we're like i want to praise them for being able to do this but at the same time i was kind of like if this results in mbermo having to score an unbelievable volley i i mean i I don't know. That does seem like something that could kind of fall apart over time.
How sustainable do you think this sort of thing is? Because with other kinds of set pieces, right, you can constantly change your approach. With this, I don't know why I feel this way, but intuitively it feels like this should be something that teams can adapt to more successfully than just a free kick from wide of the box. I think that, obviously, if you don't know what's coming, it's difficult.
we've actually seen in the Champions League over the last couple of years, teams like Real Madrid, PSG, and maybe even City, take some of these concepts and run with it a little bit, but then they seem to forget it. And the reality is when you have a really good team and you think that you've got like one or two mismatches that you can create these situations, that's literally what you're looking for in an entire match, right? And so if you know that you get at least one kickoff and possibly two per game, because maybe you're giving up one goal on average, you should do it. it's not a regular situation, but there also might be other spots where you can create this, like any sort of foul, like at the midway point or in and around the midway point, like you can push your goalkeeper up, you can get a long kick in. The teams used to do this, like you get knocked down.
It's like, it's not, it's not original. It's just, are you able to take advantage of that? And that's, that's something that, you know, Brentford are currently, most teams probably can, if they want to put in some training time around it.
They just don't. Yeah, I remember seeing a rudimentary version of this from like, do you remember Zdenek Zeman years ago? Yes, yes, Zeman seems to have. Yeah, he would love everybody sprinting off the halfway line. And it was kamikaze stuff.
I kind of loved it. He was actually in gambling when you were trading games. If he got hired, he was the most important person to know where they went from offseason to offseason. Because his team, especially in Italy, would go from like a 2.25 or a 2.5 goal expectation to like a 3.25 in their matches.
Like you just knew that you were going to get like 0.75 or even a whole goal added to the total. wherever he was coaching at because they would just be insane he was he was happy to play high tempo high pace and when he had better players his teams wouldn't end up scoring more goals and then when he had worse players then they would ship a lot of goals that would be a bad thing but that was his philosophy yeah yeah okay so so what do you think other teams can learn from this okay obviously the attitude to to restarts but but what parts of this do you think are kind of replicable from club to club here's the most insane thing to me Most teams spend five to 10 minutes at most per training session, but sometimes it's 15 minutes per week on set pieces and restarts, right? Set pieces and restarts are something like 40%, 50% of the game if you include the throw-ins. Most of them are not necessarily relevant, but if you can figure out how to make them more relevant or to make them repeatable, to find a little bit of misbatch, to make them a little bit of a part of a pattern of your play, like maybe you can get.
5% better as a football team. 5% better as a football team is something you will pay a million pounds for a year. We will pay a player that is 5% better. You do it all the time at the Premier League level or at the very highest levels. Teams just don't do this, and they should be.
You have to be a little bit obsessive about it because it is that level of design and attention to detail. But restarts more broadly can be done better across the whole league. From my personal experience... When you're a good set piece coach, like somebody who's able to get on the grass, do analysis and pick out the mismatches and teach the players the things that they need to know, you can actually make mid six figures in a salary because like a coach is part of a Premier League staff is making that. But the way to think about it and the way that is often not phrased right, but gets lost is what would we pay for a player like a forward that scored 10 more goals a season, 10 more goals a season?
Well, on average, a goal in the Premier League is worth about 2.5 million pounds. So you'd be willing to pay something like 25 million, if not more, for that type of player. And actually, somebody that scores 10 more versus your average is going to have a multiple on top of them because they're the outliers. They're the ones that are most valuable in the whole market.
Sure. You can bring that back to a coach that makes sort of, say, 300 to 600, 700,000. That's an awesome piece of arbitrage that doesn't get paid attention to. Then you get sort of the skilled people who like, can I create people that do long throws?
There was this awesome thing from our course. We have this video of Andy Gray and Rob Green and Richard Keyes. And I called it like the Flintstones talk about throw-ins. What a meeting of minds. So Andy Gray, basically Thomas Gronermark was announced as a coach for Liverpool.
And Andy Gray is like... I can't wrap my head around this. It's a throw-in coach. Maybe I should go and be a throw-in coach.
Step one, pick the ball up in your hands. Step two, throw it to a teammate. That's it.
That's all that you need to learn. I can't believe that top-level coaches don't know how to do this. Now, that last part may be a little bit true, but the rest part of it is actually not true at all because, first of all, the long throw concept is difficult to execute. You have to have special technique training to be able to do it.
do it but then there's a whole bunch of things where like what's the biggest difference between a corner where arsenal have tons and tons of success and a long throw from basically the same position on the pitch uh they can deliver the ball at higher speed to the area they want it to go i assume they get to have their head up you can see what's happening on the pitch which you cannot do when you have to look down at the ball in order to strike it correctly. And most players still have to be able to do that. So when you have a long throw, you can go more like NFL quarterback where you can see who's open.
And if you start to run plays and routines based off of that, you throw to the open man. Wow, we don't have that ability as a corner because everybody has to run a preset set of runs in order to make a delivery into a space where we hope we got it right. Unless you screw up your long throw, your delivery is going to be pretty close within a yarder. or two.
Your corner delivery could be like five to 10 out. That's like a pretty... So that's number one.
The second one is the most insane thing and it breaks the game. And I swear to God, if people did the stuff that we... instruct teams to do on throws like fifa would change the rules on it but what is the most important difference in throws versus free kicks but that's what i thought i was saying before i think i would have said the speed of delivery you cannot be offside yeah you cannot be offside i don't think i'm gonna make it as a as a set piece coach now all you have to do is open up people's minds to this and suddenly they're like oh my god now what happens if you have fast players and you have somebody that can actually get the ball and throw it say you know 25 30 meters even if it's skidding off the ground you have fast players who cannot be offside and you can put them into space immediately with your head up so you've got two players making runs which one looks like he's beaten his man that breaks the game completely breaks it well i so i mean there's a couple of concepts that are really high ev that people don't really like us talking about but the reality is the set pieces one takes a lot of willpower.
It takes a lot of expertise and it takes somebody to get that implemented to the pitch. And most directors of football and head coaches just like, nah, I'm not going to do that. And we have advised them over and over again. I've seen it multiple times where you're like, look, you don't score enough goals to meet what the team has as their goal for the year. And coach, like, I think you're a great coach, but your style of attack is not great at generating stuff.
You don't have good enough players to generate. goals on your own you have to have a little bit of a cheat code and your cheat code is going to be set pieces if we score an extra 10 goals from set pieces especially if you get to play in the lead more often like then it'll be great for you and then so many times it just falls flat we're good enough we don't need any help and then they get fired because they didn't score enough goals and you're like look i didn't want to be the harbinger of doom but unfortunately it just ended up ended up being true well it's really fascinating for brentford to be doing this given that you know we've talked about a bit of a talent drain there in recent seasons and now they're starting a load of games essentially with a plus one game state that should be hugely advantageous for to them right as the season goes on but it's it's letting them pilot their way through an injury period too like they've had real struggles in in midfield and and yon wissa um has been out to nor guard is hugely important for them like he's probably one of the most important players for any team in the premier league right now he played in this match wolves were terrible but These concepts around Bedford's set pieces aren't really new, right? Like they've been doing it and being a difficult bastard team to face, at least from a restarts perspective, the entire time they've been in the Premier League. It's the only advantage they've had. Yeah, that's true.
Actually, when you think about their very first game in the Premier League, it was the Arsenal game, right? Where they won 2-0. They crowded the keeper, set piece goals, worked well for them.
I wonder if what it's going to take for the whole league to wake up is for... you know if arsenal were to win the league this season with an absolute shit ton of set piece goals again then maybe that's what everyone will need to wake up to it because you know it it obviously didn't change anything when um you know when you accidentally destroyed danish football um by introducing set i i deserve like only a tiny bit of credit there like the destruction is mostly other people's work i just helped plot it but i mean look you know as a as a man of a scandinavian descent to go back to scandinavia and wreak such uh devastation you know it's a real real act the name the name son like you know viking name meaning chief son like maybe i've got some some vengeance that needed to be wreaked upon someone's ancestors to be enacted um well okay just before we move on from this we've talked a bit about it from the kind of the club side but set pieces are an area where i think there are more kind of like nonsense truisms bandied around by casual fans than almost anywhere else. I love these. These are part of my favorite things in football.
Tell me more nonsense truisms. Oh, well, it's just that everybody has this attitude where they're like, look, if somebody were to hit the first man on a corner and I was the coach, they would be immediately dropped. And I always kind of felt like the difference between your perfect corner that just zips over the head of the first man really flat, you know, that Van Persie one. and the one that hits the first man like it's it's it's a fraction of an inch so i'm kind of okay with that rather than just the hopeful lofted ball but is there something what would you say the average fan could benefit from thinking about when they watch set pieces is there any kind of principle that they could have in mind there's a couple of clues um one is are they doing anything a little weird uh before the corner is actually taken that is like almost immediately a clue that like somebody has something going on And our perspective on these was always either I want them to think they know what's going to happen and do something entirely different, or I want them to have no idea what's going to happen and have to make all these decisions on the fly as to how to defend it.
Like those situations, even for professional players, are really, really difficult to handle. So that was our perspective from it. So if you're a fan and you're watching Arsenal set pieces in particular, they're the most obvious about it right now. But there are other teams in the league that are good and that spend time on this. In fact, one of the things that Liverpool did was they worked really well on set pieces.
They had lots of goals from it in the times when they were getting into the 90 plus point space. Even the season that they had the slip. Like they had a ton of set piece goals that year. And so they were good at that too.
But if you see people standing up in weird spots or if they're clustered together in funny ways, you're like, hmm, that's interesting. I'm going to pay attention to that. Beyond that, like it's a little bit about like how much space are you running into?
Like you want to create overloads and underloads. The whole of football is about overloads and underloads. This just happens to be from a restart. And so you want to create overloads and underloads. key plays that you do that is by creating space, right?
The absence of space or the crowding of space is, is the concept that you're working with here all the time. And so that's another bit, like if, if your team is often creating a huge vacuum of space, watch that space for what happens, because usually it's sleight of hand that things are going over here, but we're creating the absence of space to be able to execute. And those, those corners that Arsenal do where they've got runners from the backside.
they're running to the near post. What that does is it forces a lot of attention to that near post. But where they're taking advantage of it is either from a central run or a far post run. And now they've got one of their best headers in the team that has a 1v1 isolation, potentially a 0v1 isolation, and he's just free. That's the other thing you're trying to create, too.
Can we create free headers in the box or free kicks with feet in the box? Because some short corner routines are really to create. the absence of space where someone runs into that space and then gets a shot like those those are the really big things that you're you're looking for that's really interesting something else has just occurred to me i said that would be the last question but when you're talking here about about the way we're kind of interpreting space and also when you were mentioning before red bull kind of kicking getting throws and then pressing really aggressively is this an area where football has been most influenced by other sports do you think because that to me is kicking kicking for territory in that way that sounds to me like rugby And when we talk about the way space can be manipulated on the field, obviously in the past, we've heard Pep talk about this and, you know, he's got his water polo guys and everything.
Is this something that's going on? Yeah, I think that it is. And I think that this is the biggest area where like the NBA is able to, or sorry, the NFL is able to help.
So I think of these spaces as American sports in my brain. And so NFL style routines are. key.
Like these are the players, these are the routes that they run. And in American football center or cornerbacks, CBs in my brain, cornerbacks are trained their whole lives to be able to cover wide receivers wherever they go. And they're, they're small and they're incredibly agile or they're medium-sized. They're going to be agile. They're really, really fast.
And even when they've trained their whole lives to be able to do this, it's still really hard and wide receivers get open all the time. Now this is in that sport. What if we did similar things over in this sport and the reality is like nobody even knows how to defend this yet and we're very early in this in this era and if you did throw-ins more uh in in sort of a higher ev way or a way that's more likely to get players open all the time then you create real problems that teams will have to study more and adapt to uh corners are a little bit easier to defend because there's only so much space but if you're working in basically from the the middle uh third into the final third like that's a lot of space to be able to defend and it's hard to figure out how to do that uh correctly you when everything's in motion. So that's kind of the way.
The next thing that I always looked at, so set pieces of restarts are NFL based, but then it feels like final third attacking is NBA based. And NBA teams walk down the pitch. They have the moment where they've got the ball and that player is sort of like in space and not immediately aggressively pressed or things like that.
It feels like you can run routines off of that in the final third. Even if it's just one or two options for the player to look at, if neither of those is open, then recycle possession and try and set up again. If one of those is open, then execute that, like hopefully vertically into the box and then create a good shot or a good chance from that space. But those are kind of the two ways that I feel other sports, at least on the American side, really apply to football and is very nascent in how teams are still executing. But it's still available to them to sort of have first mover advantage.
Well, I... I'd be really intrigued to see how this develops kind of over the next few years. Every now and then one of these stories comes out about a manager who's gone and spoken to a rugby coach or whoever it might be or an ice hockey coach or something. So I wonder what else we'll see over the next 10 years.
Shall we move on from Brentford? Shall we move on from restarts? Because I found a tweet, some clown on Twitter said, we're approaching short goal kick equilibrium in the Premier League where enough teams are good at pressing that there's real risk reward involved in playing out the back.
Are you about to defend this person, Ted? It was me, so probably. It was you. But it's certainly something that's happening right now.
So tons of goals this season off high turnovers. Feels like teams are getting caught. constantly sometimes multiple times in different ways in the same game chelsea brighton i'm thinking of particularly here um what do you think is going on here so we're gonna bring basketball back into this and i apologize for the name drop but there's a guy named daryl morey uh who used to spend a lot more time on twitter and he likes football and he would see like all these short goal kicks and stuff and this is like way back in like 17 18 he's like Like, this is insane. This can't make any sense. And why are teams keep passing backwards?
Like, this is nonsense. Don't pass backwards. Like, you've got territorial advantage.
Like, what are you trying to even do? And we had to try and talk to him. And like, Daryl, well, you know, you're trying to create the right amount of space and you're trying to create overloads.
And it's a lot bigger than a basketball pitch or field and court. And so, you know, you're trying to move teams around so that you can then move them forward. And he's like, it feels like nonsense.
If they just press them more aggressively. Like you'd be able to get stuff off of these passes back to the goalkeeper and potentially score more goals. And then the short goal kick happened.
And we really got this like beautiful experimental space to see whether teams were going to start to aggressively press off of short restarts effectively, which is what a goal kick in a dangerous area of territory. Now, what we will see, and this is like, it's like two sides fighting for bias here in that. One side will show you the teams that play out beautifully and they bypass like six guys on the way to go towards the other end. And then there's some beautiful team goal that took 22 passes across the entirety of the pitch. And you're like, oh, that's football at its finest.
And then you see the other people are like, yeah, except for what happened with Chelsea, where like, you know, they blew them up twice and they got three goals effectively. And you're like, that to me is football. That's rock and roll style football.
And I love rock and roll football. That's sort of where I really started to enjoy stuff. So we saw short goal kicks happen.
We saw positive expectation from short goal kicks consistently, where it's better to start the ball short so you maintain possession and you're able to move the ball up the pitch. Because really, on a long goal kick, you only have about a 55%, maybe 60% chance of retaining the ball. So like, yeah, this is useful.
Having the ball versus not having the ball, it's useful to give up some territoriality. Until... until the whole system moves towards you.
And now you have no great places to go short. So either you have to go long up over the top where they're likely to get the ball back, or if you make a mistake, then they feast. And the feasting, oh, it's so delicious.
I love a feast. A feast off of a short goal kick where you press everybody. And we have seen it more and more where it's a very difficult thing to do.
These Premier League players are so fast. And they are so good at seeing the pressing triggers that this year it finally feels like they are making teams pay across the board if you're ready to do the short goal kick. Now, part of that may be the fact that lots of teams do it. So now that lots of teams do it, like you will prepare for it and you will know how to react and you will set that system in play.
It's a bit like when it was only Big Sam and Tony Pulis playing set pieces. Teams didn't really have to adapt as much. because like you didn't have to face these giants all the time and it was just you know four times a year you'd have to play them once you got four teams that were really aggressively loading the boxes with giant men that were going to try and hammer the ball down and stuff like that then arsenal had to do things like literally play four center backs across the back in order to to sort of stop that and protect against what felt like easy goals now arsenal happened to be the team doing that and people and psg are the ones who like this is unfair like our players are normal size like what happened here um So that's my take on what's happened.
And it is this fascinating experimental space where you see teams that are able to press, you see it happening all the time now. And finally, they're taking advantage of it and blowing stuff up. So just to put some numbers on it as well, you know, like if you look three years ago, like the median passes per defensive action for Premier League teams, it was about 12.5. Now it's 11. So pressing a bit more aggressively. median tackles in the final third three years ago was about it was about two two point one a game for a premier league side and now it's like 2.7 so we're looking at kind of a 30 percent increase so that's a that's a huge difference over a relatively short time right Do we expect the pendulum to swing back?
Are big guys going to come back into vogue? You know, obviously Arsenal, like maybe Arsenal are ahead of the curve. Maybe it's by coincidence, maybe it's by design. But, you know, now you've got Mourinho and Havertz, you could just knock it over the pressing line and you're through.
It's exactly right. Chris Wood, Nottingham Forest goal this weekend and also came off. So that was a set-piece goal. It came off of hitting it to, I think, Milinkovic. who's another giant.
And so like giant to giant sort of set up on mismatches. But yes, we had talked for quite a while of having kind of a big man that, or two big men. Sometimes it's a leaper that is going to be a mismatch out wide. But those were your options for being able to play forward out of the back on the long ball.
And there is like an ebb and flow and equilibrium of cycles that go through this where... teams want fast small guys well that's also pretty good as long as somebody can knock the ball to them and get the ball through right and so we'll actually talk about this in in our german discussion in just a minute about player who we saw it with adama this weekend as well like triori was just on the races and had two 1v1s with ederson where he hit right at him which is sort of the amazing adama triori experience but he got 1v1 they knew that he was going to be isolated. In one case, it was against, was it Rico?
And the other one was... Yes, him. I wrote about him and then I forgot his name.
Both of these things are options. The big man play is probably the more reliable one, especially if you think that they have options off of them. Like, you know, that you've got midfield options or you're playing in a space where you've got your wide forward option there and then a quick drop to the DM or the fullback on the side.
You have to create new options. And the more optionality you have in football, the more different ways you can play, the harder it is for teams to shut you down in plan A or plan B. If you only have plan A and they lock you down, it's just an awful experience.
And it reflects some of the terrible games that we see in the Premier League. Although I feel like we're seeing more fast break games than we have in recent times. Just seeing a lot of transition goals.
Yeah, yeah. Does this mean then, and I think it was maybe James York. who said this on Twitter, that there is an advantage to be gained from teams who adjust to this earlier than others.
So, well, whether it's Chris Wood or something, or even, you know, West Ham could bring in Suchek, I guess, if they wanted, like that sort of thing. Is there, do you think that the teams that kind of adapt to this faster could maybe get some points before people adjust? Yeah. I think that that's part of it. I think every season is some adjustment.
I think especially when you're in the meaty part of the early season, like games are coming pretty fast. Like the big teams have had all these midweeks. The other team should be trying to figure out like, what do we do to throw them off? Right.
Cause they don't really have time to scout as well. So can we create one additional wrinkle in our game plan that is hard for them to handle? Yeah.
And, and, you know, preparation is always a complaint that you hear from coaches all the time. especially teams that are in Europe and now you've got the Conference League where they still have to play. Chelsea magically get to just put 11 other players out there. But most of the teams have to have some level of subs and some rotation.
So maybe in combination with the congested schedule, this might be an area where we see some of the quote-unquote smaller teams getting an edge over the bigger ones. And actually, that does kind of lead on to our German discussion. as he was saying so Bayern Munich coming off an extremely funny 1-0 defeat to Aston Villa with a really horrible fixture away game at Frankfurt and Frankfurt for those who don't know and now coached by Dino Topmüller who was an assistant to Nagelsmann at Bayern and at Leipzig and last season they were kind of about even xg and xg against but they really really kicked on this year their xg difference puts them in that top pack of I think it's about five at the moment you bayern leverkusen stuttgart and and freiburg which is which is kind of fun notable absentees dortmund and leipzig um and in this game they were heavily outshot but they gave 24 to 6 24 to 6 but the six shots that they got ted i would say good shots to get it also helps when one of your players is doing their tierion re-impression which i feel like omar marmouch actually is you doing a pretty accurate representation there. Do you remember the summer?
I don't know how much you're paying attention to it, but the transfer market had a very interesting, well-sourced rumor that Marmouch was going to go to Spurs. And one of the sources of that rumor was Mito, like ex-Spurs, ex-Mittlesboro. And when it comes to Egyptian players, Mito is definitely in the know. Like Mito knows everybody.
Everybody knows Mito, whatever. So I was pretty sure that he was going to move. Spurs probably kicking themselves if they didn't get that done because that price is way higher than it would have been.
But, you know, you couldn't have predicted that he would be doing what he is right now. So he's in the 98th percentile of expected goals, 0.61 per game right now. And he's in the 99th percentile of expected goals assisted. So he's also like fully willing to create for his teammates. And he's so fast.
He's so fast. We saw him winning races and like catching up and passing players on players that he should not. It doesn't feel like he should be that fast.
And he was just whooshing right past. So this is another one of those cases where you have a highline team, which is Bayern and Vincent Company. And they are controlling so much of the game. But there is that fragility, that counterpunch's fragility against the highline team if you have pace. The best player in the world for about five seasons at breaking this, former Arsenal player, also played in Germany, wore a Spider-Man mask occasionally.
Yeah, so Aubameyang was just unbelievable at people playing him in the space. And he had scalps that he took off of Bayern when they were playing this style too. Now it's Barmush that's able to do it. Frankfurt.
I always feel like they should be a bit bigger and a bit better. To me, I feel like this is a team that is a really huge city. Obviously, it's one of the hotbeds of German football in general.
And they have had some pretty good coaches over the years. Adi Huter, I think, was there for a bit too. But yeah, Marmush was incredible.
And Bayern felt like they had control of this a couple of different times. It felt like they were just really done. Elisa was like a total handful on the right-hand side.
But yeah, these breakdowns in Marmush's jets just made this game way more even than it was. Three goals off of six shots is a pretty good return on a day. Yeah, but when I looked at the game, I was just like, okay, six shots, fine.
But 0.25 XG on average per shot. I mean, when you go to watch the highlights, you will see exactly what you expect to see. That is 72 point font saying the defense got broken. What's weird is what is...
Yeah, what you're saying, which is that Bayern were 3-2 up in the 52nd minute. The first half had been insanity. And you'd have thought that Bayern would just kind of adopt their kind of smothering approach that's worked pretty well for them this season. They play a bit more conservatively, drop a little bit more. But they didn't, Bayern didn't really do anything after they scored.
Whereas Frankfurt, in the last 10 minutes, got two huge chances against a defence that was incredibly high up. Does this make you revise down your opinion of Bayern's defence at all? Because also the Villa game, I've got to say, there were times in the Villa game where somebody got into space between the midfield line and the defensive line.
And fortunately for Bayern, it was mostly Ross Barkley, who for some reason had put on his clown shoes and just couldn't pick a pass that night. I thought he was horrible when he came on. But he was in space where they would be worried to see him, right? So Vincent Company is still new.
And this is something that I feel Pep solved that people in Pep style may not solve. How much fun are city matches to watch after they go 2-0 up against anybody that they're slightly scared of? It's the worst experience in the world. What happens is they're going to pass it 400 times. One or two of those is going to be slightly dangerous.
If the opponent gets the ball and tries to break. There's certainly a tactical foul. And in fact, I think we saw multiple yellows at the end of the recent City game from tactical fouling, delays, whatever. You talk about dark arts.
Tactical fouling is the best, most consistent dark art that there is. And actually, teams have been doing this for 20 some odd years. Like Mourinho used to coach all of his forwards to rotate tactical fouls amongst themselves.
And you've got a yellow over here. Well, don't get another one. unless you absolutely must, but make sure that you break up every possible counterattack.
City fans are used to this. I think company has not gotten bit enough, and his team is a little bit arrogant in their dominance, but they need to figure out how to really just bleed all of the air out of the games when they're leading with this style because it's still just that little bit fragile. And so unless you take real efforts in order to kill it, Like, you can get bit like this. And they got bit multiple times off of the exact same problems.
And I think that what you saw against Aston Villa was still, it's like the early reps of a manager that has a great style and a great set of personnel, but hasn't quite figured out the game-managing, the tactics side. How hard would it be, though, for company to learn that, given that there are relatively few teams that are going to have the horses to kind of trouble them in this way? You should just never allow good chances after you're 2-0 up, right? I mean, Arsenal do this a bit too. The only thing that saves Arsenal is they're willing to do really good set pieces at the back end of games.
But they just don't let teams do anything dangerous to them at 2-0. And they mid-block more, I think, than most teams of this particular style. I think when you see them push way up, and the German guys love this, right?
They grew up in this style. This style is now almost officially the German team style. Nagelsmann, to a lesser extent, coached more of a possession-based style, and I think he is better at being able to generate attacks a little more practical in some of his approaches to stuff.
But I think overall, it will take time. he'll probably do some research talk about it like they'll figure it out before the end of the season but we're still pretty early like 24 shots to six against the second or best yeah third best team in germany at home is still super dominant yeah yeah i think it was 2.8 to 1.5 xg something like that as well i don't know i mean when you've when you've got a pamacano in your back line and people are running at him that is a recipe for entertainment um I don't know, maybe we see Alphonso Davies turning into the next kind of, the Kyle Walker shutdown, as you were talking before about cornerbacks, like that kind of player. That might be kind of interesting.
Okay, so shall we leave Bayern there? And we've got a bit more time. I'm going to offer you a choice, Ted.
Would you rather talk about Spurs? Very funny. Or talk about Manchester City? Interesting question marks. Maybe we should talk, and I know that you and Rob are going to talk about a bunch of this, but we've talked about Real Madrid and their summers and how they've been kind of like pulling the transfer market behind them towards them a little bit.
That is going to change in the same way that City went very light in this most recent transfer market, and they're going to have to spend in January too. So Carvajal went down with ACL, renewed him in sort of a goodwill gesture of faith. They were going to do it anyway, but they pushed that through. after he went down and blew his ACL.
Fullbacks are a big deal right now. And they're a big deal for teams that want to be able to, you want bigger ones that can do exactly what you talk about with Kyle Walker, which is still be able to clean things up from the back. Maybe they're a third center back out wide.
You can push them. They're really comfortable in possession most of the time. So you can invert them if you need to.
But as needed, you can also kind of also make them wingbacks in situations where you need to be high up. Maybe you're chasing the game. They're... often one of the more talented crossing groups that you have not perfect but you know they still are able to get to the byline they've learned that with city with these groups like they weren't spending and now they've had injuries where they have to and we've seen january be quite a quiet transfer month for for a long time but i think the other thing around which i've realized is that they are missing a cruise and so on wednesday on the newsletter i'm gonna dig into cruise likes you And what was interesting is early in the summer, I dug into the data and looked for Kimmich likes. And the kid that sort of had the most interesting comps that I had never, ever heard of, and actually no one had talked about him.
He didn't even have a highlight reel, was Petar Sukic from Dino Zagreb, who happened to score in the Champions League just this past week. So that was good timing. And they had just signed him up. to a long term i think in april and i was like oh people miss people miss the the boat on that one because he's going to be a lot more expensive than he was so we're going to look at cruise likes in the newsletter coming up um the other thing that we kind of talk about compilations somebody out there i think it was like kim ofc and oh man it's so frustrating with the the premier league and their highlight packages like in other sports in america fans share everything all the time and you get to live off the back of it and you get to see all the cool highlights and stuff like that There was an amazing comp of Spurs centerbacks and Udogi, and particularly Van de Ven, who just had the worst second half that I can remember of players that seemed to be in pretty good control in the first half. And it's not that this is unusual for Spurs, but when you're just a step slow the entire time against somebody else's defense or somebody else's attack, it just feels like bad things are going to happen.
Did you watch that game and watch all the bad things? I did watch that game. I did watch all the bad things.
with phantom fan i guess it was one of those things where i was kind of thinking is this a guy who can rely on his incredible athleticism or is this just a bad day like it's kind of it's kind of hard to work that out but the way that he was kind of shaken off or the way that he would over commit to challenges um it was quite alarming to see because Spurs should have been out of sight in that game it's another one where you're up two nil like the best teams put that one to bed and Spurs did nothing you to put that baby to bed. The baby was awake. It was crying.
Like, you couldn't get it to go to sleep. It was scoring at the far post off of misclearances. It was barging your two center backs off of the ball into each other so that you could get an open shot in the middle of the box. It's not to just pick on Van de Ven, though. Calafiori had a couple times where he got burnt this weekend.
Arsenal fans are in love with Calafiori, partly when your center back slash fullback scores goals. You're... oh, he's beautiful. I remember this with Thomas Vermaelen.
You remember this with Jan Vertonghen. It's just got this extra love affair. But part of playing in the Premier League now is this razor's edge of commitment.
And if you are overcommitting against explosive players, they will just light the whole pitch on fire as they burn away from you. And Van de Ven, who is very fast, but maybe needs to be a little more cautious in how he's playing. Maybe that's part of an instruction.
Maybe it's more high press so that they don't get opportunity to be on the ball. But Brighton's ballplayers, especially with a little bit of spacing adjustment in that second half, they had tons of time and space. And man, Hitoma had such beautiful passes in and around the box in that game. And they know that he's dangerous, but he's good enough that it doesn't matter. Oh my God, I love him.
To me, he's a very similar player to Bukayo Saka, in my opinion. Just on the other side, he could do that progressive carrying. But... he has the pass selection um that you would just expect from a from a much more from a central player i guess like obviously that's that's a type that we've seen grow but um he was really running that game in the second half i mean it still took the win still took i do think we have to talk about this that the welbeck winner the tackle cross is so unbelievable that i i beg anyone who hasn't seen it to go and look it up There were two assists this weekend that you must watch if you like football at all.
Oh my god, Jimenez. This was one of them, and Jimenez was the other one. I just got all the hairs on my arms because that was unbelievable.
Yeah, it's bananas. It's like Berbatov-esque. It's incredible. Actually, Noah, you likened it to Gooty, didn't you? Yeah, it's a backheel in the box, except for against Depor on the break, which was the Gooty one.
He's out here on the corner against Manchester City. and it's just like you just this amazing lofted one but to go back to yours one like rooters is just as good and possibly a higher degree of difficulty on the finish much higher actually i i genuinely cannot believe it and i'm really delighted as well that um that danny welbeck is is kind of in phenomenal form right now uh like a player that we've talked about before player i've always loved super intelligent guy um an underrated passer as well you know like he's he's a good passer for a set of four he's not going to like split defenses but he's a good kind of retention player and just he was beloved by his teammates too like when he'd come back to visit arsenal like arsenal had to let him go because he's injured and and to some extent like manchester united let him go because he couldn't couldn't maintain a run of form so when this type of player who is smart and you've kind of rooted for is actually having that run of form and you know it'll end eventually because like these things don't last It's just like, yeah, just appreciate it. And that was what this weekend really was.
There were so many elements across so many different games that you could appreciate. It was great to be a fan. It was nice to have an Arsenal win on top of that. I'm sure Spurs are feeling a little less great to be a fan.
But the only thing that wasn't great this weekend, I think, was the horrible Aston Villa versus Manchester United game. That game was awful. We're not even going to talk about it other than to say it was horrible.
And yeah, don't even bother watching the highlights of that. Yeah, but then even look, yeah. obviously don't watch that one why would you do that to yourself but even you know chelsea forest 1-1 doesn't look like it would be a barn burner everyone should check that out too if you're a fan of goalkeeping it's like 15 saves in that game yeah those those kind of it's yeah 15 saves you're right it was like 17 shots on target 9-8 is is what it was and then only a 1-1 game and yeah those guys like grew extra arms uh it was just and they like cole palmer had a double chance there that, you know, it feels like 90% of the time that kid just finishes it and it's done.
And this. moment like just double save there there's also brawl yeah you're not appreciate a brawl and and people then like focused on on palmer's like response where he just sort of like sat down waited for everybody else to get done with the pushing and the shoving but that's actually the right choice for him he's like no i'm not gonna die there's no reason for me to get involved in this i'm just gonna hang out back here stay out of trouble it's important for me to be on the pitch chelsea's defense is worrying yeah their attack worries everybody else but they're in fourth and yeah Unai Emery's producing games that are horrific to watch even against Manchester United who everybody has run through the entire time so they they feel like their favorites for fourth right now I'm not sure if that's true but it's it's not far off I mean it is it does defy logic though that the the nil-nil game this weekend was a game in which the two midfields were Mainu Eriksen and Barkley Telemans like genuinely zero defensive presence across the two and somehow it ended no no incredible taking another beating taking another beating ted i lost lost the half bet on that one i i got i got pushed into it because of the models i had a winning weekend this weekend so that was nice but um yeah that that sucked uh look it's it's been a really good period um i'm not sure what we'll talk about next week maybe we'll we'll figure that out but i think that This has been one of the more fun Premier League seasons out of the gate that I have seen. We have three contenders who all have their own minor fragilities, but who also are right there.
So yeah, really good. Yeah. Well, thank you very much to everybody who's watching or listening for joining us this week.
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