Hello, and welcome to The Double Pivot, the world's most agreeable soccer analysis podcast. I am Michael Keeley. We are back, and we were talking before the podcast, what are we going to talk about? What are the topics?
What are the issues? And I was like, look, man, I know that Spurs and United are the big thing, and they're both in really low place in the table, but come on, we've kind of done that. And Michael is like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's like, well, we just don't talk about it.
And I was like, yeah, yeah, still could. So we're going to talk about that. One thing I wanted to mention before we get into it is that both of them lost this weekend. That's why this becomes a thing.
United got beaten pretty badly by Brighton. Spurs got beaten, in the end not that badly, but for a time very, very badly by Everton. And I did not watch these games. I was too busy having the norovirus.
So my one piece of advice to you out there is do not get the norovirus. If you have a child, just don't let them see their friends for a while. It's simple things you can do to prevent this for yourself. It's no good.
It's no fun. The one upside is I missed the Spurs-Everton match. I'm joined by Mike Goodman. We're going to talk about these teams.
Let's do it. The music here on the way as well is please download, subscribe, Make us happy. Spotcasters, patreon.com slash doublepivot. Come hang out in the Discord.
Lots of fun stuff going on in the Discord, as always. Analytics channel's been hopping recently. Cool, interesting stuff going on there. But yeah.
So here's the thing about Manchester United and Tottenham. They're both kind of a mess. They're both much lower in the table than you might anticipate they would have been, perhaps than they should be, certainly than they could be. But also, there's like nothing pressing right now.
They are not close to relegation. They are not close to Europe. They are just sort of hanging out in mediocrity. And when you hit that stage, it's like, what are you supposed to do now?
So the thing I want to, like, sort of drill down on is, oftentimes you change a manager just because it's the thing you do. You sort of, like, recognize, maybe it's not really the manager's fault, but you can't change the players, and things are not going as well as you'd like. And oftentimes, this happens when you're somewhat, I don't want to say unlucky, you're somewhat below XG. And, like, usually, the times when you were running below your expected goals, on both sides of the ball, are the times when you're performing at your worst.
And so the manager gets fired. Those are also not sustainable outcomes, and a new manager comes in, eventually luck evens out, or XG performance evens out, you start getting closer to your XG. Voila, success. This chicken and egg problem there, right?
Like, there's a real, like, was there something the stats weren't picking up that then got rectified? Or does, like, you know, the old guy was getting unlucky, so he got axed, so obviously the new guy's doing better. Like, there's a little bit of both. It's hard to distinguish, but that's sort of the dynamic at play.
But what it leads to is, when there is an imperative for some reason that you want a short-term change in performance levels, there is an argument to be made for changing the manager. Like, yes, we understand the sustainability and the long-term of the project, but, like, we need a few points or we're going to get relegated. We got to do something. Or, like, we need a few points to sneak into the European spots.
We got to do something. Or whatever the case may be, you can make an argument for it. That part of the equation, that second part of the equation, just doesn't exist for Spurs and Manchester United right now, which is what I think makes the conversation a little bit interesting. Yeah, and the other part of this is that you can be run in a way where your manager is just sort of a functionary in the way that things work.
Like, Nottingham Forest last season. You know, they fired Cooper when things were pretty bad. They brought in Nuno, and things have happened to work out really well with Nuno, and now they're running hot. But, like, that firing was just a really straightforward thing.
We're like, look, this manager isn't that important. We'll get another manager. We'll see how it goes. And West Ham bringing in Potter.
Like, West Ham are, they were close enough to relegation that they could be a little bit scared given their performance level, but they were pretty much fine. And so they're going to try out Potter and see how it goes. And if things are going badly in a year, like, they can just sack Potter. They don't have a project.
An interesting version of this, I think, is Maresca at Chelsea, which is working out really well. But Chelsea showed very clearly with Pochettino that they don't really seem to care that much. They are going to go and get the best value players, and they're going to have a manager who puts the best value players into a reasonably coherent system, and they have enough money to get managers who have coherent systems and can do some interesting stuff. But, like, you don't see anything here that suggests that there's, like, a Chelsea way of football and, like, they are going to be the Maresca team for the next five years.
Maybe that'll change, but for now, what they look like is a team where the manager is a functionary of the system that collects players. And then, if you're that kind of team, and you don't really believe in the manager that much, you could do that. The problem is that Spurs and United are not at that point in the process either. I think what exactly the point of the process Tottenham are at is a really interesting question.
It does not seem to... Ange Postakoglu has an extremely distinctive style of play. It does not seem to me that Tottenham are, like, gung-ho about getting Ange specific players or player profiles or player types that he wants. And it doesn't really seem to me like that's what Postakoglu wants.
It seems to be, like, sort of collectively and cohesively, the thing is, like, we bring in players and you instill your Ange-ness in them. And they perform and everybody is happy. Or, this season, nobody does and everybody is not. But that's a weird dynamic to a certain degree.
Because it is both, you get the distinctiveness of a manager-led sort of ethos. But, like, I don't get the sense that, structurally, Spurs would be set back if they fired him tomorrow. At the same time, I don't feel like the stuff above Ange is particularly... I mean, I know.
It's not well... It has not been thoroughly implemented yet. They're in the process, still, of implementing it. So, like, firing Ange does it further that part of building Tottenham either.
Right. The issue with Spurs is it's not clear on a number of levels what they actually all want to do together. Because Ange only came in partway through last season. We don't even really have clarity on how much he was in charge of the January window last season.
And he has proceeded, still over the course of this season, to hire a lead data engineer, not a lead data scientist, but a researcher. Anyway, they're still hiring. They just, this last summer, put someone in charge of sports science at the club. And all of this suggests that this team is, like, trying to build something.
And that doesn't mean that what they're trying to build is good. That doesn't mean that what they've been doing so far is highly effective. That doesn't mean that Ange is the right person for that system. But it kind of just means that it's all a big question mark at this point.
Like, my impression is it wouldn't be that hard to fire Ange. I don't know. I don't think it necessarily really makes the team better because the reason that Spurs are bad is, like, ridiculous luck in close games and injuries. Like, that's the whole ballgame for Tottenham this year.
I don't think there's, like, a ton of evidence right now that Postacoglu is making them, like, a lot better than their talent level. And I think what we've seen is as the talent level has eroded because of injury, the performances have eroded. Which is what you'd expect. But there's not, like, a thing there that's like, hey, look, we can, like, point at Postacoglu's record here at Tottenham and be like, look at how well he is doing despite the injuries.
Therefore, we must keep him. On the other hand, like, there's not a real argument for firing him either. Right. Like, if they fire him and they bring in a new manager and they finish 9th instead of 11th.
Right. So? Like, so? And if they fire him, they bring in a new manager and they win a cup.
Great. But, like, that's just a bunch of coin flips. Like, that's not something the new manager did. And if he did it by, like...
If Ange can get this team up to playing 10th-place football, the new manager gets this team up to playing 7th-place football. That would give them, like, a slightly better weighted coin in the cups. But, like, that's a lot to put this on. Like, I don't know that, hey, They have all this money.
They have to actually execute on that, whether it's this winter or next summer. Like, the timeline is getting short for building a team that can compete at the top the way that I assume that they want to do. All of which is to say, like, there's a lot of stuff that Spurs need to get ironed out, independent of whether it is Postecoglou who is leading the group or somebody else. It is, despite, like, the centralness of Ange to everything that is talked about about Tottenham, he's sort of the least interesting part of the equation there, because whether he stays or he goes, the challenge is basically the same.
And that's, to me, diametrically opposed to what's going on at Manchester United right now. Yeah, so United lost to Brighton. And they've now dropped points in four of their last five, lost three of their last five. They're in 13th and Tottenham are in 15th.
And so people, like, joke about relegation, but they're 10 points up on the bottom, and Tottenham are 8 points up. Like, there's a really big gap, even if there isn't a gap in the places by, like, ordinal numbers. They're not close to relegation. But under Amorim, they have been a little bit worse than they were.
And we talked about this, like, at the beginning of the season. We put United at the bottom of the top group, rather than in the next group. And well, that's what we got into. We put United at the bottom of the second group, rather than in the third group.
And basically, that was us regressing to payroll. There's enough value here, and they also did go and sign defenders. So, like, the really big, huge problem in the team squad, they did fix. They did get a couple of good defenders who've been pretty good this season.
And then they were pretty bad to start the season under Ten Hag. And so they sacked him and they went and got Amorim. And you would be hard pressed to find in their numbers a clear demarcation point between Ten Hag and Amorim. Other than, like, a formations, you'd be really hard pressed to find clear distinctions in style and quality of play before and after.
The thing about Manchester United is that, unlike Tottenham, Manchester United just keep bouncing from manager-led setup to manager-led setup to manager-led setup. We hire the manager. We bring in the players the manager wants. The manager manages the players he wanted.
Things don't go well. We fire the manager. We hire a new manager. We bring in the players for the manager.
The manager... Over and over and over and over and over again. And so, unlike with Ange, with United, you really have to make an evaluation of whether or not you want to be changing the squad for Ruben Amorim at this point. And is that there?
Probably not. Right? It is just like... I was talking about this with Ben at work.
Because he made the point that United look like they're doing a rebuild. And isn't that what a smart team who was rich but bad would do? Don't worry about winning. Go out.
Sell the players. Buy the new crop of players that you want, the good players. And give the manager time to mold them into what they want to be. And I was like, well, in a vacuum, sure.
But by definition, you can't do a smart rebuild if you're rebuilding every 18 months. And are you going to rebuild United for Amorim? Or was Amorim supposed to be the person that came in and led the rebuild that was already underway? And it seems like the choice is either the first thing or nothing.
And that's insane. I mean, the other issue here, we talked about this when Ashworth was fired, is that with Tottenham, I have a lot of questions about how good all of this is going to be. But it is very clear that they are trying to follow a relatively standard modern structure of a rationalized team that is going to... And that should lead to better signings.
It has to actually happen, but it does make sense. United's signings have just always been all over the place. And they've been mostly young. But they spent a whole lot of money on Joshua Zerkzee, who has performed about...
Give it some time. But Zerkzee is ranging toward, like, analytics I told you so, at this point. It's interesting. I think he's performing a little bit better than I would have expected.
But what we expected was so much lower than what the popular perception of a Joshua Zerkzee signing was that, like, us being slightly too pessimistic still puts us way on the right side of analyzing the Joshua Zerkzee move. And then they got... I think getting DeLigt, it's a huge amount of money, but they're United and he's a 25-year-old center back who's good. Like, sure.
And they got Uarte, who I like as a pure defensive midfielder. He will run around. He'll kick people a lot. He'll stop the ball.
He'll pass sideways. And that is a role that exists in many, many systems. But that's a really hard role to fit into a truly doctrinaire 3-4-2-1. Like, you're playing a truly doctrinaire 3-4-2-1.
You cannot have... If you have a central midfielder whose whole thing is stopping the ball, you're going to need some kind of crazy stuff going on with one of those wide center backs moving the ball forward to balance it out. This is not impossible, but this is the question I come back to then with Amorim, right? Which is like, is this a guy who can work with the tools he has at his disposal?
Or is this a guy that needs a really well-crafted roster that has a massive talent advantage? And, like, you can be a very good manager whose thing is... Pep Guardiola. I take really, really talented rosters and mold them into something that gets the very most out of the talent advantage in a way that nobody else could.
That is not what Manchester United need, though. And this goes to what is the most distinct thing about Ruben Amorim that we can see in his teams so far, which is that he plays a system. He is a system manager. He wants to play a specific kind of 3-4-2-1, where you have two inside forwards supporting the central forward.
And one of them can be somewhat more winger-y, but they really should be playing in those half spaces. And you have wingbacks overlapping, creating the width. And that's how you get, like, you know, five different options to pass to across the top. And that seems to be a pretty bad fit for this United talent.
They have no wingbacks. They have relatively limited passing in the back five. Very limited passing in the back five. Like, I don't know how it's all supposed to work.
They've worked out Bruno in one of those inside forward roles pretty well. But that means no one's passing it forward to Bruno. And maybe you can get this team better by buying a bunch of specific talent for Amorim. But that gets to be quite concerning when you are a team that's in the middle of a rebuild.
Because this is what we're saying. If you are simply rebuilding by buying a bunch of the best talent, and your manager that you got in can't use Uarte, but you're just gonna, like, look, your job is to use Uarte. Figure this out. But if your manager can't use, like, Mazraoui either, because he's a fullback and a very good one.
And then your manager can't really use the fact that you have two center forwards, because the system only has one center forward. And your manager can't really use your wingers because they're wingers and they're supposed to be inside forwards. That gets really concerning really fast. And the bottom line is, what ends up happening is, like, it makes the stakes of the managerial decision significantly higher.
If you can't have Garnacho if you have Amorim. Amorim has to, you have to be really, really, really confident that Amorim's gonna work. If you... And that's just not, like, that's just not the case with Tottenham.
Right? It's just not. For as distinctive as Ange is, there are not guys who are like, we're not gonna use you because of the way our system works. And that means that you have to, like, right now, be having a discussion about Amorim.
Because it matters. Because it is upstream of what you do with player personnel. And I think this is a, like, I wanna be clear. I think this is a very bad way to run a club.
I think Manchester United's decisions, first on Ten Hag and now on Amorim, where it seems like, again, under, it seems under the new regime of Jim Radcliffe's ownership, that has not changed. And that was the one thing that had to change. Like, that was the one thing Manchester United had to change. And so, what you see here now is, like, Amorim's bad.
It doesn't really matter when you look at the table. Like, why would you bother thinking about whether or not you should fire him? You just hired him. And the answer is because you're about to rebuild for him.
You're about to buy a bunch of players and, crucially, sell a bunch of players for him. So he better be worth it. And, like, I have not seen a lot that suggests to me that he is worth it. I think it's kind of a fool's errand trying to make that decision now, which is why it's a bad way to run a club.
But if you're gonna run a club that way, you've got to make that decision now. That's win-win for them. Right. And if that was all that was happening, like you could kind of like, okay, well, this will all work for everyone.
But Garnacho really appears to be on, on the block there. Napoli are making apparently a very reasonable offer for him. Chelsea are hanging around. No one ever said that that was that serious or not, but sometimes it is like they're really looking to sell Garnacho.
Yeah, it's insane. It's absolutely insane. It's just a Manchester United experience. And I think, you know, even if they sort of blind squirrel their way out of it with this one with Amarine and somehow like it works.
There's just zero, zero faith here that this is turning into anything resembling like a well-run organization or even an improved organization in the way it is run in any capacity. I mean, I think what we've seen is that Ratcliffe came in and like his idea of modernizing the club was firing a bunch of people and running this like, you know, a hedge fund, a modern hedge fund manager might run something or like, you know, uh, not like, let us build a modern sporting operation that looks like other modern sporting operations. It's not clear that he knows what a modern sporting operation is. Correct.
Yeah, there's, there's no evidence that he does certainly. People who follow cycling have occasionally like mentioned to me that this doesn't look that unlike the way that his current cycling team is run. I, I can't speak to that. I have not done a deep dive on cycling, but apparently like, you know, management of a team that at one time 20 years ago would have seemed relatively modern and still likes to call itself modern, but is not building a rational structure that is accountable in any way because it still has to be one guy's plaything.
That seems about right. And Garnacho is not like a perfect player. Garnacho is 20. Garnacho is a not a very good passer at all, but he's also 20 and passing is a skill that improves over the course of your entire career.
And he's able to get a bunch of shots off and get touches in the penalty area all the time. And he's a solid ball carrier. And there's more than enough there that like that projects to get better over the next five to 10 years. You're Manchester United.
You have him locked in. You can pay him new contracts without adding transfer fees. And probably this isn't like the superstar that you're building around, but this is one of the best pieces you have to build around. Yeah, I don't, I don't get it at all.
At all. I do get it. I get, I get that like Manchester United are not a well-run club, but this is, this is, this does not trend well. I mean, this trends to Manchester United continuing in mediocrity and not beginning to climb their way up.
Even if Emery is like a good manager, is the thing. And if he's a bad manager, we're going to be right back here in nine months. The solution for United is to do a better job signing good players. That's it.
Up and down. That's it. Like the problem had always been the squad. We have been here for a very long time saying the problem is the squad and the manager is a relatively marginal real, but like not like you can't put the manager on one side of the scale and the squad on the other side of the scale and think they balance at all.
Right. And what United has tried to do for 15 years at this point, ever since Alex Ferguson left, maybe ever since David Moyes after Alex Ferguson, depending on how you want to weigh these things is our squad is not good enough. So we will hire a manager and then give the players that the manager wants. And you just can't do that.
You just have to reverse it. You have to. If you are ever going to be Manchester United again and have the sort of results that mirror your financial strength, you just have to reverse it. That's the bottom line.
You have to reverse it and say, we will get the player and then we will get the manager subject to our talented players. And like, that's just what you got to do. And if that's not what they're doing again, it's not gonna work again. Yeah.
And what they have done. And like, also when you do that reversal, then you have to, the thing that that forces you to do is say, okay, what are our criteria for getting players? Right. And then you have to build a whole scouting analytics system that does that and produces the criteria that you want.
And you have a vision of what your team is going to be and what you're building. And that then informs the players that you get. You know, it's funny, right? Because there are examples of like doing a bad job of getting good players.
Right. But it's very, it's a specifically different version of bad than what United are doing where they are consistently just getting managers, you know, getting players as prescribed by the manager over and over and over and over again. I mean, there are plenty of teams that have gone periods of time where they like go and get bad players and it, you know, sort of like fizzles on the field. I mean, that's what like Chelsea did at the start of the Chelsea regime.
Right. It was just like, we're gonna go out and get players, but the players were like too much ready for him. Sterling, like we got Luke who was not good. Like, like, you know, Arsenal at the very beginning of Arteta when they went out and bought Pepe, for example, we're doing this.
Um, now Arsenal are the rare example of a team that had succeeded by picking the manager and getting players that the manager wants. I just like, you should not emulate that. Yep. Do you want to touch on Arsenal here before we, you know, I actually want to touch on old Arsenal for a second.
I like that. There is a third option sometimes with managers. Uh, you know, when you find the team kind of struggling, they're not really at a break point. Why would we fire the manager?
Why wouldn't we fire the manager? And you know, the break point is like, oh, you're gonna miss him when he's gone, which is that the team is performing at a level that is actually higher than their talent, even if it's below expectations. And you will get worse if you get rid of the manager. And I think that was Arsene Wenger for a bit at the end of his time at Arsenal.
That was Luis Enrique at Barcelona at the end of Luis Enrique's time at Barcelona. You had these moments where like firing the manager is analytically, when you look at it, like an obvious mistake. Don't do it. That's not the case with, I think there's like a section of Tottenham fandom that wants Inge very much to be that thing.
But there's like, there's no evidence that Inge is that thing. There's also no evidence that Emery is that thing, that like Emery is such a tactical mastermind that you must keep him in place at all costs and like get it. Like there's none of that. And, and like, I feel like I'm a big proponent of the shut up and don't fire the manager.
He's doing a good job, even though you silly fans think your team is better than it is. And I'm just saying like, that's not going on in either of these cases. And to the extent it's going on anywhere right now, it's a little bit with the frustrations with Arteta at Arsenal. Yeah.
Yeah. They have been excellent. They're going to easily finish in the top five and make the Champions League. They are not out of the title race.
Like they were almost in the title race. We've got a couple of bounces and then they got a couple of bounces the other way and then they weren't in the title race. Like that could just happen again, like coin flips twice your way instead of once your way and once against you. And they're still one of the best teams in the Champions League and they're somewhat worse than they were in the first half because they've got a bunch of injuries and they'll probably be somewhat worse over the course of the second half because those injuries won't sort themselves out for a while.
But like whatever. Yeah, exactly. Like that's the example of like the, you guys are nuts. The manager's doing a good job.
What are you talking about? Situation. Like that's where you get into the, the manager's doing a really, really good job. You can't reasonably expect anything better from this.
And maybe you need that manager and that team to put up a 90th percentile season sometime to get the end result that you want. You need them to like have gotten more attacking depth instead of getting Mikel Marino. You need them to have focused on maybe some fullbacks who are like fullbacks rather than really big, tall guys who defend and hit set pieces. Maybe some of those things would have at the margin helped this team.
And those are not unreasonable critiques. Maybe like, you know, in order to win titles, a lot of things need to go right. Maybe you need to set yourself up a few more things better than you did. But none of those are cases against Arteta and the Arsenal hierarchy.
They're just like, you guys had a 60th percentile season. We really need to have a 90th. Yeah, no, I mean, I think that is right. I just, there are a lot of times you get into a situation where things are working and like yanking the manager risks making things significantly worse.
Um, I would not feel good about Arsenal not getting worse if you got rid of Arteta. I think that's like, I'm trying to think back to recent years with examples of like when teams persevered with a manager, even though things were going badly and then they got