Decoding and demystifying football

Mark Thompson

The value of 'certainty'

Welcome to the Get Goalside! football analysis newsletter, glad to have you aboard. There’s big money being spent in the transfer window. It doesn’t feel like too long since £130m would get you half a team; now, Manchester United look set to spend it on Aaron Wan-Bissaka and

Is Matthijs de Ligt too bulky?

Hello, and welcome to the Get Goalside! football analysis newsletter. Glad to have you aboard. Ajax getting to the semi-finals of last season’s Champions League was surprising. Their star youngsters immediately being preyed upon by Europe’s mega-clubs was less so. Frenkie de Jong’s move to Barcelona felt

How to sound smart about your new 17-year-old centre-back

Hello everyone. Thanks for joining if you’re new and welcome back if you’re not, I appreciate the bump in subscribers over the past couple of days and the nice words people have said about the newsletter. On with the show. Liverpool’s reputation as a buying club has

Learning from Van Dijk's move to Liverpool

I know that this isn’t the usual Tuesday scheduling, but this thought spun out from this week’s regular newsletter and was too interesting to delay spending time on. To set the scene: Virgil van Dijk moved from Southampton to Liverpool in January 2018 for £75m, a record for

Hmmm-ing about Maguire for £80m

A brief note of the very good stuff over on StatsBomb which I’ve been editing during the World Cup: last week I wrote about what we’d learnt about the contenders for the trophy over the first couple of games, Anushree Nande wrote about some of the stars of

Why I changed my mind on handball calls

Hello, hello to one and to all. Unless, that is, you happen to be someone in charge of implementing rule changes into football. In which case my greeting to you will be frosty. Yes, a combination of VAR and new rules/interpretations has made this summer’s Women’s World

World Cup fever

Hello, and happy World Cup to one and to all. As I mentioned last week, I’m editing StatsBomb’s World Cup content this summer. I’m writing this as the national anthems of Canada and Cameroon are playing in the background. World Cups are great. In the lead-up to