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cross-posted from: https://mastodon.online/users/hallenbeck/statuses/111211305966961876

> [The Athletic] Premier League verdicts: Top five predictions, first sacking, unpopular opinions, composite XIs of season so far > > Oliver Kay, Carl Anka, Caoimhe O’Neill, Stuart James, and Nick Miller give their top-five predictions, most and least impressive managers, and composite XIs of the season so far. > > Impressive showings for Maddison, Udogie, and Van de Ven in the combined XIs. > > https://theathletic.com/4945036/2023/10/10/premier-league-predictions-sacking-transfer/ > > Unpaywalled: https://archive.ph/U8hyq

cross-posted from: https://mastodon.online/users/hallenbeck/statuses/111211016834683288

> [The Athletic] Socceroos manager Graham Arnold interview: Messi ‘mind games’ and kicking the s\\\* out of Postecoglou > > Interesting to read some stories about Ange from an old friend and competitor. > > Ange's hard-won skills in coaching players could be the (in part, at least) secret to his success. > > https://theathletic.com/4945124/2023/10/10/graham-arnold-australia-postecoglou-messi/ > > Unpaywalled: https://archive.ph/D7ynJ

[The Athletic] What do Premier League managers think about the Liverpool VAR controversy?

https://theathletic.com/4937106/2023/10/06/premier-league-var-liverpool/

Alt link: https://archive.today/20231006163224/https://theathletic.com/4937106/2023/10/06/premier-league-var-liverpool/

Some interesting comments from managers here.

@football

\#COYS #LFC #EPL #MastodonFC #TOTLIV

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/5891370

> Alternative link: http://archive.today/X9UYl > > Here is a summary of the key points from the article: > > - The article analyzes how Premier League teams are pressing opponents in the early part of the 2022-23 season, looking at the percentage of pressures in the defensive, middle, and attacking thirds. > - Man City, Arsenal, Man United, Newcastle, Liverpool, and Brighton have been most aggressive pressing high up the pitch. > - Chelsea's pressing under new manager Pochettino has been intense but largely out of necessity as they've been chasing games. > - Spurs' pressing approach under Postecoglou has dramatically shifted from passive under Conte to highly aggressive now. > - Everton press high under Dyche but are direct in playing long balls up to strikers to regain possession. > - Bournemouth have become much more aggressive pressing under new manager Iraola, shifting their pressing higher up the pitch. > - Pressing data shows stylistic intent but doesn't necessarily equal success, as seen with West Ham's counter-attacking approach. > - How teams maintain their pressing approaches over the full season remains to be seen. > > !

> Explaining UEFA's new rules on European qualification and how the Premier League could have 11 teams in European action next season

Archive.today: https://archive.today/pTw1A

• For the first time, five Premier League teams will qualify for the Champions League through their league position. More could join them by winning a UEFA competition.

• There will be 36 teams in the Champions League from 2024-25, an increase of four. The tournament structure is changing to a 'Swiss model' league.

• The two best performing countries in Europe get extra Champions League spots. England has a good chance of earning a fifth spot.

• Eight Premier League teams are playing in Europe this season, which could help England's coefficient ranking.

• Theoretically seven Premier League teams could reach the Champions League. Five qualify through league position, plus the Champions League and Europa League winners if they finish outside the top five.

• Up to 11 English teams could play in Europe overall next season - seven in the Champions League, three in the Europa League, one in the Europa Conference League.

Here is a theoretical possibility:

!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/4987007

Hi - Just testing the cross-posting feature. Has anyone got any advice/guidance on what is appropriate to cross-post and what is not? I chose this post because it could be of interest to Azzurri fans as well as Spurs fans. :)

> Archive.today link: https://archive.ph/Mg17z > > Summary: Hugo Lloris' time as Tottenham's number one goalkeeper has passed, with 26-year-old summer signing Guglielmo Vicario establishing himself as the new first choice. Early statistics and the eye test suggest Vicario is an upgrade on the aging Lloris, with his shot-stopping, distribution, communication skills and bravery on the ball suiting coach Ange Postecoglou's style. If Vicario maintains this form, he could soon displace Gianluigi Donnarumma as Italy's first choice keeper ahead of Euro 2024.

The sun has set on Cristiano Ronaldo’s first six months in Saudi Arabia and he appears optimistic about the future of football there.

The now 38-year-old scored 14 goals in 16 appearances for Al Nassr, the club he joined last December on an initial two-and-a-half-year deal worth around £177million ($224m) per year, though it wasn’t enough for them to pip Al Ittihad to the 2022-23 Saudi Pro League (SPL) title in May.

The disappointment of not winning the championship — likely cushioned by the enormous salary he is being paid — did not stop Ronaldo from pointing to an optimistic future in the Gulf nation.

“In my opinion, if they continue to do the work that they want to do here for the next five years, I think the Saudi league can be a top-five league in the world,” Ronaldo said at the beginning of June. “The league is very good but I think we have many opportunities to still grow.”

The SPL’s website says it wants to be in “the top 10 best leagues in the world, technically, commercially, financially and media”. Currently, it is widely considered that the biggest five domestic leagues in the sport are England’s Premier League, Spain’s La Liga, Italy’s Serie A, Germany’s Bundesliga and France’s Ligue 1.

Research carried out in January by the sports intelligence agency, Twenty First Group, ranked the SPL as the 58th-best domestic league in the world. The SPL is now up to 54th thanks to performances in the 2022-23 Asian Champions League, where Al Hilal got to the final and two other Saudi sides qualified for the round of 16. But with an influx of big-name players from European clubs in recent weeks, including Karim Benzema, N’Golo Kante and Ruben Neves, the SPL’s rise seems to be accelerating.

Saad Al-Lazeez, the SPL’s interim chief executive officer, has been holed up in a west London hotel coordinating all this summer spending. He replaced Garry Cook, who formerly was CEO at a post-takeover Manchester City, who The Athletic revealed is taking a job at Championship club Birmingham City.

The SPL’s board now includes Al-Lazeez, chairman Abdulaziz Al Afaleq and Carlo Nohra, among others. But apart from splashing the cash on players some may argue are past or close to the end of their peak years (besides Ronaldo, Benzema turns 36 this year and Kante is 32), how do the Saudis plan on catching up to the world’s elite domestic leagues?

The Athletic has talked to well-placed sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their position and relationships, and the overriding sense is that this summer is merely the beginning.

There is acceptance within the SPL that becoming one of the world’s best leagues will not happen overnight, but a plan is in place — supported by enormous financial capital — to accelerate development over the next five to seven years.

The motivation for this level of investment in the domestic league is subject to speculation.

One view outside Saudi Arabia’s borders is that it is the country’s latest attempt to sportswash its reputation, which has been tarnished by the criminalisation of homosexuality and restrictions on freedom of speech and women’s rights there, and the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Those close to the SPL do not view it as a drive to curry favour abroad or enhance the country’s global standing, but understand why it could be looked upon that way. Instead, they speak of it as a domestic project, with Mohammed bin Salman, the nation’s crown prince and prime minister, wanting to make a largely young population proud to be Saudi. Another reason for investing in sport in the kingdom was raised publicly by the Saudi government: it wants to drastically improve public health, with around 60 per cent of the population said to be either overweight or obese.

Aside from speculating about why Saudi is investing so much in SPL, the other guessing game this summer has been wondering which players will be recruited next.

The number of players being signed by the SPL has caught many by surprise, but it also raised the question of whether the league has gone about its business slightly back to front. Instead of ensuring quality infrastructure and state-of-the-art training grounds are in place to welcome some of the game’s biggest names, they have signed the players first.

There is an awareness inside the SPL that there is a need to invest in these areas, and that it can’t purely be about hoovering up footballers. A plan is said to be in place to begin rolling out new infrastructure, but the horse has already bolted in that regard.

When it comes to media, The Athletic revealed the SPL has instructed top sports-marketing firm IMG to secure international broadcast deals for its matches ahead of the 2023-24 season kicking off next month. IMG worked with the SPL earlier this year after Ronaldo joined Al Nassr and completed short-term TV deals, including in the United Kingdom, China, Turkey and Brazil, that saw the Saudi league televised in around 45 countries.

The value in such TV deals, however, can really be found closer to home.

Saudi Sports Company (SSC), which is state-controlled, acquired the domestic rights to the SPL for three years from 2022-23 to 2024-25 and the deal’s value is 10 times the amount the league generates from international rights. It is unlikely that equation changes over the next couple of years, which is why the SPL will focus on domestic revenue when it comes to broadcasting matches.

One figure close to the SPL believes that getting players with large social-media followings — Ronaldo, for example, has 594 million Instagram followers and 109 million on Twitter — to post positive messages about Saudi Arabia and its league is far more powerful than getting people in other countries to watch their games live.

Signings with big presences on social media are also expected to be the league’s route to achieving its desired speed of growth. “The players can accelerate things,” said one well-placed source.

Another way the SPL hopes to establish itself as one of world football’s major domestic leagues over the next decade or so is through investment at grassroots level. The country’s Ministry of Sport has coordinated a national football strategy in conjunction with the Saudi Arabian Football Federation (SAFF), the SPL and other stakeholders. There is an emphasis on grassroots football and announcements in that area are expected to be rolled out in the coming months. Key to the SPL’s growth plan is developing homegrown players to go alongside the big-name signings and investing in the pyramid to make the domestic game sustainable.

On the theme of sustainability, sources point to this being a major motive behind Saudi’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) acquiring the SPL’s four biggest clubs: Al Nassr, Al Hilal (both based in Riyadh, the capital), Al Ittihad and Al Ahli (both from Jeddah, the country’s second-biggest-city).

The idea is to build up the brands of those clubs, then bring in private investors to buy them. If that plan proves successful, there could be a scenario in which the PIF then takes control of the nation’s next four biggest sides, and tries to repeat the process. By doing that, the league could change from being 18 state-owned clubs to 18 privately-owned ones, which, in turn, means they would not have to rely on the government for funding. “Think about how much money you could generate by selling Al Nassr to private investors, particularly ones who want to do more work with the oil industry and curry favour within the territory,” a source said.

There are natural comparisons to be drawn between the recent rise and fall of the Chinese Super League and what’s now going on in the SPL, but those close to the Saudi league point to the country’s long history of football, qualifying for six of the past eight men’s World Cups and beating eventual champions Argentina in the most recent one (in contrast, China have only ever made it once, losing all three games while failing to score a goal in 2002), and the fact its government — unlike China’s — do not see this investment as a flash in the pan.

This summer is likely to only be the beginning of an aggressive growth plan which will last years, and there is no denying Saudi Arabia has the financial capital to turn the SPL into one of the top domestic competitions in world football.

A football team’s chances of success are determined by many things: summer recruitment, squad harmony, collective tactical understanding, oh, and who’s best at keeping their players out of the treatment room.

That last factor often gets lost in the end-of-season post-mortems.

Premier Injuries, a website run by Ben Dinnery, records every injury that occurs across the 20 sides in the English game’s top division, forensically tracking incidence, diagnosis and recovery, and its findings show how costly a player’s lack of availability can be.

According to the site’s data for the 2022-23 season, Fulham and Bournemouth suffered the fewest individual injuries (19 each) and Chelsea had the most (48).

When it comes to injuries per 1,000 minutes, it was West Ham United, who played 57 games across four competitions due to their triumphant Europa Conference League run, who had the least with just 4.6 injuries per 1,000 minutes played. Fulham and Wolverhampton Wanderers were tied for next best (4.8) with Arsenal (5.0) and Manchester City (5.2) completing the top five.

At the other end of the spectrum, Chelsea suffered 10.7 injuries per 1,000 minutes. The next-most-afflicted teams were Newcastle (9.4) and Nottingham Forest (9.1).

The number of injuries does not always correlate with player availability, though.

Brentford, for example, suffered the joint-sixth-fewest injuries, yet recorded the sixth-most days and games missed. This is because they had several long-term casualties rather than the sort of knocks that go away quickly. Aaron Hickey missed 93 days (ankle), Kristoffer Ajer 65 (knee), Shandon Baptiste 111 (hip), Pontus Jansson 150 (thigh and hamstring), Christian Norgaard 73 (Achilles) and Frank Onyeka 70 (hamstring), while Keane Lewis-Potter was a spectator for the final 100 days of the season following knee surgery.

Fortunately for them, not many of their key players were out at the exact same time and they were able to finish in the top half of the table.

The teams who play the most games are usually at the most risk of suffering injuries due to short recovery periods.

Manchester City’s hectic schedule at home and in Europe (reaching the FA Cup and Champions League finals) meant they played the second-highest number of minutes — 5,220 across four competitions, compared to Aston Villa and Everton at the opposite end of the spectrum who played just 3,690 after just one FA Cup tie each and two in the Carabao Cup.

Despite this, treble-winners City recorded the fewest days missed (447) and fewest games missed (62) through injury.

Only Manchester United, who got to both domestic cup finals and the Europa League quarter-finals, played more games than City last season (62 to 61) but their numbers were much worse, with their players missing 1,031 days and 133 games — over double the numbers of City in both categories.

City’s availability numbers can be seen in the fact only Kalvin Phillips (shoulder, 68 days), Kyle Walker (hernia, 50), Ruben Dias (hamstring, 40) and Nathan Ake (36, hamstring[s]) were missing for longer than a month. No City player was out for more than a two-month period.

The resources City put into maximising player availability is perhaps not appreciated but they will hope to maintain those 2022-23 numbers, if not better them, with their new Athlete Management System, which is being rolled out for use across the club’s teams next season. It is a way to standardise data capture and The Athletic understands it has been tested by other sides in the City Football Group stable, starting with Lommel of Belgium’s second division in November.

That degree of availability is the benchmark for other teams and Arsenal were not far off it, given Mikel Arteta used only 22 unique starting XIs in the 38 Premier League matches, the fewest in the division. Arsenal were without Emile Smith Rowe and Mohamed Elneny for four months each due to groin and knee injuries, while Reiss Nelson was out for almost two months from August (thigh), but these lengthiest absences did not affect their major players.

Even when Arsenal lost Gabriel Jesus for 100 days after surgery on a knee problem sustained playing for Brazil at the World Cup, Eddie Nketiah was able to step up. But then defenders William Saliba and Takehiro Tomiyasu suffered injuries in a Europa League last-16 game against Sporting Lisbon on March 16 which kept them out for the rest of the season, and their absences proved to be factors in the long-time league leaders’ costly slump in form on the run-in.

As the table above shows, Chelsea’s horrendous numbers put them at the wrong end of the table on every single count.

Chelsea players missed a combined 1,836 days and 216 games, comfortably the most in the league on both counts. An influx of 17 new players across the season’s two transfer windows plus three different managers having spells in charge plus a squad ravaged with long-term injuries and constant muscle problems equalled a recipe for disaster.

According to statistical analysis website FiveThirtyEight.com, Chelsea had by far the least consistent starting line-up of all 20 clubs, coming out at just 67.9 per cent in their STABLE metric (Similarity of Teams And Balance of Lineups across Every match). Manchester City were next-lowest, but in their case it was because manager Pep Guardiola was able to rotate so much due to having most of his squad fit and available.

Chelsea used 38 different line-ups in the 38 games, and a large part of that was due to N’Golo Kante (hamstring, 216 days), Armando Broja (knee, 169), Wesley Fofana (knee, 133), Reece James (knee, 115), Ben Chilwell (hamstring, 93), Mason Mount (pelvis, 77), Ruben Loftus-Cheek (calf, 64), Christian Pulisic (knee, 61), Cesar Azpilicueta (concussion, 53) and Thiago Silva (knee, 45) all being out for lengthy periods.

A lot of these were because of various knee issues, which are hard to guard against in football and can be categorised as bad luck. Chelsea had 14 of them in total with Everton a distant second with seven, ahead of several teams who were on four each.

In the modern game, though, with its forensic level of data tracking and injury prevention technology, muscle injuries should be a rare occurrence.

Hamstrings are the most common muscle to be damaged in football due to the high-intensity sprinting involved, and Chelsea came out the worst on this measure, too. Their players suffered 13 hamstring injuries last season, with Leicester City (11), Liverpool and Newcastle United (both 10) the other teams to have had the most.

Newcastle were top for quadriceps (front of the thigh) injuries with four and joint-top with Crystal Palace for calf problems (seven) yet had the second-highest STABLE score behind Arsenal.

They suffered plenty of injuries over the season but crucially kept the defensive base of their team together for more than three-quarters of the fixtures as the long-term absences of Emil Krafth (ACL, 278 days) and Paul Dummett (calf, 94) did not impact the first-choice players.

Further forward, Callum Wilson was out for 40 days in August and September with a hamstring injury, Allan Saint-Maximin for 58 days in September and October with the same issue and Alexander Isak missed 78 days with a damaged quadriceps and then another 31 with a calf problem before Christmas. After coming through that difficult spell, though, Newcastle’s longest injury lay-offs were for fringe players such as Matt Ritchie, Matt Targett, Ryan Fraser, Harrison Ashby, Jamaal Lascelles and Karl Darlow.

Injuries can’t make your season, but they can certainly break it.

Chelsea were a dysfunctional club in just about every way possible last season but the number of their players who had to miss games made it almost impossible to find any sort of fluidity amid the chaos.

Manchester City, however, showed us how valuable having a fully-fit squad can be and how that allows a manager to shuffle his pack to avoid overworking individual players. Without such a clean bill of health, their treble bid would likely have been derailed somewhere along a road that ended in glory in Istanbul.