Newcastle shouldn't have been pissing about with the ball but that is just laughable. Maddison and Vardy are among the very worst in world football.
The more I watch Tielemans the more pissed off I get with Poch that he genuinely picked Ndombele over him. Pain… pure pain.
Half the price, and likely would've kept Poch in his job There's times to choose a hill to die on, and that wasn't one of them
This isn't entirely accurate. We couldn't get Ndombele, so he chose literally nobody over Tielemans. Great decision.
Dier Hard's post inspired me to dig up some data pertaining to penalties and big team favoritism...that and having to fill up the two hours per weekend Spurs usually waste. I decided to look at club popularity, penalties given and conceded, and average league rank from 2014-15 through 2020-21. The idea was to see if penalty favoritism correlated better with league rank (and, arguably, merit) or popularity, in order to get some data regarding the presence or absence of big team bias in awarding penalties. Here are the three lists: A. Penalty favoritism; net difference between pens awarded and pens conceded (from Transfermarkt) 1. Man U 29 2. (tie) Man City 23 3. Chelsea 23 4. Liverpool 14 5. Spurs 3 7. Arsenal 1 B. Popularity (from https://www.stadium-maps.com/facts/epl_facebook_table.html) 1. Manchester United 73,209,297 2. Chelsea 49,017,967 3. Manchester City 40,103,333 4. Arsenal 37,758,903 5. Liverpool 37,485,389 6. Tottenham Hotspur 22,109,552 C. Average league position 1. Man City (2) 2. (three way tie) Chelsea (4) 3. LIverpool (4) 4. Man U (4) 5. Spurs (4 2/7) 6. Arsenal (6 1/7) As you can see, the stronger correlation is between penalty favoritism and club popularity. The correspondence would be perfect if Arsenal were two places lower. A satisfying if logically irrelevant explanation is that Arsenal have been crap.
I would also add the following dimensions to the data ETL process : 1. venue type (home/away) 2. venue attendance The rationale being that crowd hostility to a penalty event (as a function of size) , might influence the officials decision making process. Correspondingly we also now have a small data set from the VAR era to look at.
Add to them Mount, James, Chalobah and Hudson-Odoi and they are annoyingly well-stocked in home grown talent for years to come. Someone in their academy and recruitment team is doing a good job, painful as it is to admit it.
Huge futures - but not sure it will be at Chelsea. They'll be buying them back for £100M in 5 years time.
And that’s on top of producing two players that they sold for about £30m each in the summer. I hate praising them but their academy is one of the very best in Europe right now. The ****ers.
Messi vs Ronaldo in the Champions League as PSG get Man Utd. Looking forward to it, may be the last two times they grace the same pitch. Feel quite lucky to have been around during their era, seen them both play live too (Ronaldo a lot more than Messi for obvious reasons), hard to imagine we'll see anyone better again when considering the numbers these two have put out.
I'm sure all of the academy players' parents have wonderful houses... They've run it very well, but it's another bent enterprise, just like City's academy. We'd do well to emulate the above board stuff, though.
Atlas FC win their first league title in Mexico for 70 years and that's their reaction! You know exactly what they mean, too.
