What is midfield for?
Can we get a step closer to quantifying what makes a midfielder good by thinking through the theory? We'll see.
Nature of Football
Ball control, space control, and why good teams play Pep-ball
Manchester City in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Barcelona and Spain straddling 2010. Sacchi's Milan. The Dutch of the 1970s. Hungary in the '50s. Scotland, in the late 19th century*. Every generation has its iconic teams characterised by their possession of the ball.
*(From 'Inverting
Pointing, shouting, scanning
There's a version of this newsletter that I could write in about three paragraphs. I'll try that, and it'll save you a lot of time.
The tl;dr
Pointing and shouting are skills - or 'skills' - that are often treated like
The Theory of Everything (in football)
There was a point in time where people didn't write books on story structure. Nobody knew what an 'act' was, or what pathos was, or that a punchline goes at the end of a list of three. They just told stories, and a lot of those
What's in the way of analytics solving football?
Sometimes newsletters are timeless, sometimes they age faster than the popularity of sea shanties. The intro to this one will make it a time capsule.
The nerds are ruining Wordle. Not just the tech sharks trying to monetise a game designed to be free, the coders algorithming up a guaranteed
Do we know football well enough to have good defensive stats?
Some problems
There's a fact I've always had trouble fully believing. The one about the ancient Greeks not having a word for the colour blue.
Ancient Greek texts had a curious absence of references to the colour. Sky was even referred to as 'wine-coloured'
Why diving is bad
I must be old.
The kids today, or the ones on my twitter feed, keep going on about this thing they love. It’s ‘diving’. I’d only just learnt why people like TikTok.
I suspect that there’s some kickback against older generations in their appreciation of it. The