Hello and welcome to the Double Pivot, the world's most agreeable soccer outlets podcast. I am Michael Kayley. We are back and as I said last time around that we were doing these podcasts, yes, there are still games to play. Might have a little bit on the remaining games to play, but like it's like one soccer game.
We can talk about the tactics, but if we really want to be doing analytics at this point in the season, it may be May 20, the transfer window may be closed, but the analytics transfer window is wide open. And so we are going to get started on our summer. I'm joined by Mike Goodman. Need to play about our summer.
Let's do it. The music here in the way as well as please down subscribe. Thanks. Happy [email protected] doublepivot it's like so part of the reason that the summer is starting for us is the summer is starting for us because we don't have a lot of interesting stuff to talk about this week.
But another reason that the summer is starting earlier for us is that the summer is starting earlier for the soccer world because there is an extra early transfer period opening up because of the Club World Cup. So your young Madrid's, your Liverpools, your whoevers can actually bring in players like immediately after the Champions League final in order to get them in the door before the Club World cup and you know, start training them regardless of whether it's not limited, it's not just for teams going to the Club World cup, it's an extra little mini transfer window for world soccer because the Club World cup exists. And what this generally means is Trent's going to go to Real Madrid, we assume, and we talked about Real Madrid in relation to that. But now Liverpool are going to replace Trent.
And so let's talk about Liverpool and what they've got in store for themselves as we get this summer started. Yeah, now what we started doing last summer, we continue to do our normal player profile mooses, but we also started doing sort of team profiles and we'd check in on teams periodically, sometimes that they were particularly interesting, where we would discuss the work that they're doing right now, what it tells us about what they're doing and some of our ideas for what they should do. Yeah, I suspect this summer we're probably going to hit some of these teams a couple of times. You know, once near the beginning of the summer when we talk about what they should do and then probably again maybe in like early to mid August when we talk about what they have done or maybe even after the season has started the window closes or whatever because there's like a bunch of teams that need to do a bunch of stuff.
It's an interesting summer and also contractually there are a bunch of big players who are in theory gettable. So there's like a lot of movement I would expect this summer. So we are going to start with this on the free side [email protected] DoublePivot is where a lot of this is going to live for subscribers. This is the kind of stuff that we're doing on the subscriber side.
So time to talk about Liverpool. They were easily the best team in the Premier League this season and they are for a team that was easily the best team in the Premier League this season and very rich. They just have a lot to do and they've done some of it. They have decided to give contract extensions to Mo Salah and Virgil Van Dijk.
Virgil Vende and Mosala have accepted contract extensions and that obviously sort of sets the near term of the team team in place. But it just raises even more questions. Yeah, I think that the place to start with extending those two guys, I think both of the extensions seem to be reasonable. Right.
They're like a year to two years max for document for a lot of money. But still you're extending guys at a very high level and you're not committing yourself to long term monetary commitments. So like totally reasonable decisions. But when you do that you are not rebuilding.
What it means is everything else that you do continues to be maximizing the chances of winning titles while these guys are still on your team. Now you can refresh, you can get younger, you can player in, player out, do all this stuff. But there is none of this like our big signing this summer is a 19 year old guy who we expect to be okay now good in two years in great five. Can't do that, can't do that.
So they're not doing that. But by all appearances they're looking to bring in talent now. But the talents can make a team different I think. Yeah.
And when you are Liverpool, when you are one of the three to five most economically powerful teams in the world, you have a fair amount of freedom to go to try to do both when teams just one more level down, try to do both, try to refresh the team while competing at the top end those are almost always going to be it's an impossible bounce, they're going to come short because you need to commit more to one or the other. And I Think that like Liverpool's first signing of the season. We've got Here we go from Fabrizio Romano. Jerry Frimpong is like captures what you can do when you are Liverpool.
Jerry Frimpong is in his early 20s. He has been very, very productive and he happened to have a very affordable release clause in his contract with Bayer Robert Hessen and so many teams would have wanted to trip that release clause. But Liverpool are going to win that battle most of the time. That's really funny.
It's a very binary thing. They're going to win that battle against all but like four teams in the world, maybe five. But they're always going to lose that battle to those five teams. We saw them try to win that battle for Cheapellia and it didn't work out.
Yeah, like there's very little, like there's very little specifically with Liverpool this like, like maybe they will, maybe they won't. They're decidedly behind like the absolute top tier of richest clubs and they're kind of ahead of everybody else. There's a lot of privilege in being Liverpool. It's not perfect.
It's not like Frimpong is a great example of it working the way it sort of materially should. You've got a 24 year old with a cheap release clause and he plays more or less at a position of great need. Okay, let's talk about this. Has that that more or less?
Yep. Because the first question I'm going to ask you about Jeremy Frimpong is is he a right back? So if you were to ask this question of Jeremy Frimpong he'd say yes, right. I would grab a right back.
He would say I'm a right back. I came up as a right back. I these are things I know how to do. This is how I was trained.
He has not played right back in his 20s. Maybe you look back, I guess you could look back at like 21, 22 Leverkusen a little bit like he is getting in the box. A lot less for Leverkusen in his age 20 season but he still wasn't doing that much like ball winning, ball stopping. And once Xavi Alonso gets there it is like full steam ahead.
Anybody don't have touch the ball in the back of the catch anymore. Like his touches in the defensive third that first season at Leverkusen he's got 20 touches per 90 in the defensive third. He has relatively normal football build up responsibilities and then it just goes away down to 11 the next season and 6 and 5 per 90 the next two seasons. He just does not touch the ball deep and his touches in the penalty area it was at 8 last season per 90 which is like striker kind of numbers but it stayed over four.
His touches are all in the attacking third. All he does in attack in possession is attack the penalty. That's it. That's his job.
He's very very good at it. He also has like winger level progressive passes received and so if you compare his numbers to a fullback he looks like a stupendous attacking force. If you compare his numbers to a winger he looks pretty mediocre. He's a wing back.
Is he going to play as a wing back at Liverpool or is he going to play a fullback? Right. We presume he's going to play in a back four. We presume that's yes and we should like I guess here we can lump in the other bit of business that Liverpool seem close to completing.
Yep. They are looking to sign Milos Kaerkas of Bournemouth who is a fullback. So he's got that going for him like he's attacking fullback. He's up and down attacking fullback.
In a Bournemouth system that depends on their fullbacks to do tons of playing up and down the pitch now he has a much more normal distribution of punches for an attacking fullback. Yep. You can rely on him to do like ball possession, moving stuff in his own half and then also get into the attacking third. He's a very good well rounded attacking fullback.
What he's not is a guy who would be a quasi third center back while your right back was a secondary winger. Okay, what does this mean for Liverpool? These two acquisitions are both really upgrades but they're upgrades especially on the left side. But also they're not necessarily what you would consider primary positions of need necessarily.
They're very much like these are very good players and we're gonna go and get these very good players. I think that's the first place that's the place to start here because it very much fits like what Liverpool did with Arne Slot when he came in which was they did not bring in a manager and say well we're going to. Since we're playing Arneslock football this season we're going to get in the players that make Arneslock football work. And his Feyenoord had been an extremely fullbacks tuck in and do ball progression.
That ain't going to be what this team is. He had Trent Alexander, Arnold and he had Andy Robertson and so Robertson tucked in somewhat more than he had before played as a third center back Ish and Trent while he was less free to fly all around the places is he definitely still played in the Trent zone half tucking in playing the ball forward a lot and Slaata had to make two and he figured out that Ryan Brownbach could be a six in his system if he was covered by a quasi center back in Robertson as well as by a running around everywhere eight in McAllister and it worked out really really well and it worked out perfectly because they could just give Salah the ball all the time and depend on Salah much more heavily than they had in the past. That allowed them to defend elsewhere and so slot adapted to the talent and I think that's the way of looking at this. It is not that it may work out that Karkez and Frimpong simply can do the roles that existed last season.
I don't think that's the idea. I don't think this is being done because there is secret analytics and secret scouting inside Liverpool that actually Kirkes can replace more of what Robertson did than expect and actually Frimpong can replace more of what Trent theater. Actually Frimpong is more of a traditional right back. I think it's just these are good players, we have a good manager, we will sign more good players and they will work it out.
I think the question then becomes what does working it out look like here? Right. And I think it's hard. I think.
I think when I look at this team now, I think the primary thing that you really need to ask is okay, where's ball question from? How is this team planning to move the ball up the field? Do they think Gravenberch and or McAllister can take on more creative passing responsibility in midfield? I am kind of skeptical of that idea.
Maybe, maybe I'm wrong, but it does. Like I've been wrong about like every step of McAllister's development, I suppose. So like I might just be wrong about this one, but it doesn't seem to me like you're getting strides forward in ball progression from either of those two guys. And the whole thing here is like what we're saying is you ask the guys to do what they're good at and then you put guys on the field in such a way that they all get to do what they're good at and then we just end up with this question of who are you going to put on the field that's good at ball progression.
What has worked has been that Mac Allister does A good amount of ball progression wherever you put him on the pitch, wherever he's been. He's been a solid secondary tertiary passer. That's right. And what he did for Liverpool was show that he could be a solid secondary tertiary passer at the sixth, which was wild.
And he showed that if you make him a secondary church passer at the 8, he's going to be able to give you a lot more shot production from the eight than you expect for a guy who gives you as much deep defending and as much like again, secondary Trisha ball progression worked out great. He was incredibly productive this season. He's given them like a crucial thing about McAllister is like the simplest thing in the world which is that he's been absolutely deeper on the pitches. He's given him five in five postseasons.
Yep. Like that makes. That creates so much value if he's the primary ball progressor. One thing is there's no way he can be the primary ball progressor and give you five in five.
Like that's no that. I mean like I don't know, but I can't imagine that's the addition. Robin Barrett worked out really well this season as the tertiary quaternary ball progressor while staying in midfield. Look, I think everything that made literally Liverpool really legitimately very good this season was we can put this set of midfielders together in the middle of the pitch and not lose anything specifically because we have the magic of Trent Alexander Arnold ball progression.
And the thing about losing Trent is that I think it is analogous to losing large chunks of statistical contribution elsewhere on the field in that like everybody wants to say, you know, everybody wants to be Brad Pitt in Moneyball, you know, we'll make it up in the aggregate. But as it turns out in soccer when you have one outsized performer, it's actually really, really hard to make up their contributions in the aggregate. And I think, I think we all understand this when it comes to shots, we all understand when it comes to shots that making it up in the aggregate when you lose a shot monster is like way easier said than done. But like what this Liverpool plan seems to be to presuppose is that that is not the case of ball progression.
That when you lose a ball progression machine in Trent you can make it up in the aggregate. And I'm just not sure that is true. There's not a lot on the transfer market that looks like well, there's our ball progression machine that we can work with. Well, there is one guy, there's Florida Burt Honestly, like he's not the guy I'm thinking of here.
Like I just think they should go get Angela Stiller from from shootout. That's like the positional fit that is a little bit more gamble because he's got to take step up in sort of expectation. It'll be very traditional liberal side, right? Yeah.
Like the guy that fits the statistical profile and then we believe will slot in pun originally not intended and then very much intended to fill our need perfectly and thus be able to take a step up in competition level without like missing a P. Like very much the ball progression equivalent of taking your Sadio Mane and your Mo Salah and your Diego Jota transfers an attack Stiller is not a nailed on this will definitely work guy like and no matter what you're doing, you're almost certainly like you're getting Steeler. He's somewhat defensively light and you're gonna have to work around that. Like what getting stellar to me would be would be saying Granimbersch is now our backup rotation deep center back and MacAllister is going to run around a ton and we're going to have up and down fullbacks.
Carcass has shown he can do this. Bradley can probably mostly do this. We hope Frimpong can do this. And like if you've got a great passing center, central midfield with Stiller probably is certainly worth a shot.
You've got a great passing center back in Virgil and you've got flying fullback. That's a vision. That's a team or less fits together. It is a team that is a lot less fly guys Y which would be interesting to see.
Yes, very much so. It would be interesting to think about exactly how that would balance out tactically in my head and very interesting to see how that would balance out actually in Arneslot's head. But like and I think this go. This is like a.
It's another short blanket problem which is that if you go and get someone who is purely built to fill the ball progression hole, you are almost. You are probably not then going to be able to balance it defensively in the same way you balance things defensively last season. Yeah, I don't like I know we focus on the attacking side in some reason. I think for very hard reasons.
This kind of makes sense, right. That like you're losing all the ball protection from Trent so you focus on the attacking side when you do it and like Trent was a fine but not great defender and like you can start making argument that's what you're getting from Hong. So it's not all that different. But what Trent let you do is have fairly conventionally, conservatively positioned midfielders because you didn't need to do ball progression.
And Trent for his contributions was not wildly up the field all the time in order to contribute, which from Hong does have to be. And so you have a more vulnerable structure while also needing more attacking contribution out of your midfield while also relying on vertical attack who while great, is becoming more, not less limited. And this is where I think like what is Dominik Szoboszlai? Yeah, which has been one of my questions all season that I'm still very confused about.
Like well this season he has played much more as a 10 for slot whereas he really played a very 8ish role for Klopp. He's one of the guys where his job has become shots this season much more than it was the previous season. And so he ends up giving you over 0.5x gnxa per 90. Has a little bit of slow finishing season, but you can't really complain when you're getting 0.5x GNXA per 90 from a 10.
But it's also like it's a little light on everything else. Right. And then if you're adding in Frip hop then you think about how having a much more attacking winger refillback than a like attacking midfielder refillback impacts things like Frimpong wants. If you are playing him, you want him getting XG and xa.
Yeah. You want him getting touches in very advanced box type positions. You want Salah coming inside and getting lots of touches. Obviously you don't need if that's what you're adding and Kirk is to a certain degree on the other side.
You don't need a 10 who is getting a lot of that. Right. If you're going to move him and say okay, go back to being more 8ish, you don't just, you don't need an 8 who's giving you lots of attacking contribution when you're getting tons of full back attacking final third attacking contribution. Yeah.
And so the question I think is if you're going with more attacking fullbacks, what Szoboszlai has shown he can give you last season for Klopp is a lot more 8ish. Like come to the ball, get on the ball, touch the ball, move the ball. But for Klopp, he wasn't doing tons of ball progression. Like is the progression of Szoboszlai's career that he starts to take on more and more like drop in deep, receive from the center backs, move the ball forward.
Like that's where another place this could start to balance. That's changing what Szoboszai's done. But in two seasons he's had two different jobs, both of which he's been more than good enough to be a starter on a great team, but also not a linchpin piece on those teams. You're basically deciding, can Silberslight be a primary ball progressor as an 8?
As an 8 is tennis guy or is Silberslight a guy who will be a great rotation piece for us? So we have to go to ball progressor and I think much more than MacAllister or Grabenberge. The question is like sort of centers around Silberslai. I am pretty skeptical that is a good idea for Liverpool to just stick with McAllister, Grombert and Szoboszsai and believe that all of them, especially Silo, Sly, but all of them can significantly level up their ball progression to make out for Trent.
Like that's we can replace him in the aggregate without replacing him in the aggregate. That's like not saying we can replace Jason Gianni in the aggregate. That's saying Miguel Tejada and Eric Chavez have already replaced Jason Giamdi by like hitting better. Like these soccer is different.
There's. It's more of a team game. You can like that's leaning a lot on hope. This was the reality of Ronaldo problem, right?
Yep. Where they said, well, he's not getting shots, other people get shots. And like that's not how it works yet it is 100% not how it works with shots. I don't think it's how it works with Ballardicia, to be honest.
Yeah. I mean the concept is that Szoboszlai is the one whose role really changes because he's going back and receiving from the center backs a lot and his touches go up like 50%. Like that's weird. Like that's the like Kareem Benza is getting on the end of moves instead of having to get the ball and move the ball forward as much.
But that can work with Karim Benzova and like if anything Kurumenzeva. I just don't feel like you should plan on working with anisex. And the thing is, if you get a good ball progressing midfielder and then you basically like supersize a rotation piece and so you have Gravenberg, McAllister and whoever your ball progressor is, now all of a sudden you've got a midfield that is quite defensively robust which you probably need if you're really going to like release from Pong and characters as two like marauding winners. Yeah.
And I just don't see a way where if you're asking Silver Slide to be that guy, you're going to get defensive robustness as well. I just don't see what you're doing signing Jeremy Frimpong unless you are planning on him being the penalty area a whole lot. That's the thing. Like unless you're planning on him.
Like I also like I'm not entirely sure how Frimpong and Salah are supposed to both work. I'm sure like I think they will but like if we spent like a lot of time talking about Vinian and Babe, I'd say I assume it'll work and it never ever really quite did. Like it's not clear to me that Frimpong and Salah don't have the same sort of dynamic problem. One thing that Frimpong really does do which doesn't put him in Mo's space is he really does get the byline across.
Yes. If you're getting Frimpong you're saying, well gets us the crosses. Like it just doesn't really make sense to me given the other production he can give you because he is exceptionally good at coming in. If the ball moves down the left side he can be getting to sort of penalties.
Spot penalty is by extended to the right for a shot or he can actually get the progressive pass into the penalty and make the next pass. I think the expected assists are a big part of his game and that's really him moving straight into Mozilles. Yeah. And like if you're only getting half of Frimpong you're not getting a great player.
Like if Frim can give you up and down fullback and defend more and what you've got is something like another character's. It's a good price for an unquestionably uniquely talented player and there are absolutely really good arguments about that. Makes it worth it and we figure it out from here. Yeah.
And I'm not saying they should do this. I think both of these moves are imminently defensible. Right. I am simply like, I want to like emphasize that what this does is create a very difficult team building exercise for Liverpool over the next few months and we're not done.
Right. Because what made this team work this season is that Mo Salah shouldered an incredible amount of the load. Like I honestly think it's fun doing analytics to fight about awards. I think that people doing analytics should be more annoying than fighting about awards.
I think it totally is worth another sport so we should do it here and Mo Salah has been as productive perdidingly as usual Dembele as a tough schedule while playing 70% more minutes. He's obviously the Ballon d' or winner. Come on. I think I shall fight about this and be annoying about it, but I do not think that next season Liverpool should play on getting Ballon d' or level production from Mo Salah.
Mo Salah will probably go back to being Mo Salah level and there's a fairly good chance that 33 year old Mo Salah will go to being like 85, 90% old Mo Salah level. And then are you just really leaning on Luis Diaz more? Like this frontline gets weird if Mo Salah isn't playing Ballon d' or level. There's a lot of pretty good players.
Yep. But like there are a lot of pretty good players who I don't feel great leaning on to be more I think Jonah could have a great year but he's got to be healthy. I don't feel comfortable leaning on him to be healthy. I don't feel comfortable leaning on Luis Diaz to be consistent.
I don't feel comfortable leaving on Darwin Nunez to be anything even while I still think he's tremendously talented. And Cody Gakkawi worked out better than we expected. No question about it. Better than we expected.
But it's again it's the same thing that Klopp figured out him last year slot went with this season which is you don't let him touch the ball. If he is on very very low touches and he's mostly either finishing moves or getting in position making one killer pass or cross that's great. But he works because Mo Salah is on the other wing for the most part and if you have less Mo Salah on the other wing it's very unlikely it's going to be leaning on Gakpo at Texas. Right.
In fact when you start getting less Mo Salah it becomes harder to get the most out of Gakpo as opposed to the other way around. The question to me is how good is Luis Diaz? How good can Luis Diaz be? I don't feel like you want to be going into a season depending on the answer to that question in particular because the weird thing that makes Luis Diaz great and I feel this is such a, such a great win for like Scouting the stats.
What popped with Diaz immediately in the Portuguese League is ball retention. Like you don't. It's not his vibe personally that he's super safe on the ball. It doesn't like he is.
And if you watch him and you watch the ball get out to that when you can progress the ball to the left wing through Luis Diaz. And Luis Diaz is going to make a good safe neck pass or tries to make aggressive like a shot, but he's really going to be safe with the ball and that again makes him such a good balance for Salah. But are you going to ask him to be more aggressive making the next pass? Because like then you're kind of like going against again what he's really good at.
He can be a volume winger, unlike Gakpo, but he's really good because he's a safe, volume winger who gets shots. Yeah, it's a tricky thing. I think the thing that's a little bit under misinterpreted about Luis Diaz's game is when you watch him, it's not that he doesn't do low expectation things. Right.
He will come in and take low expectation shots, like probably a little bit more than I would necessarily be comfortable with. But you know what he doesn't do? He doesn't get stripped on the way to taking that low expectation shot. Yep.
And that really does matter. But it matters more when you have other people who get high expectation shots. There is a version of this team that is just going to be really cross heavy without attackers in the middle. I don't know, maybe.
Kobe Jackpot has an unbelievable year. As currently constituted, this team seems to be trending towards two incredibly aggressive traditional fullbacks and not a lot of other ball progression. And what that seems to suggest to me is the ball ends up in wide areas at the feet of the fullbacks a lot. Putting the ball into the middle.
So are we saying. I think this is going to be a theme this summer. Are we saying Team X needs to sign Viktor Acemen? Would work.
I mean, I get it. I get where that works. Yeah. Like what if you just had a guy who was fantastic at finishing stuff in the penalty area and you dominated the wings?
Consider me interested. This is my answer. That is a great. That is a great note to enter our Liverpool podcast, I think.
Yeah. We'll be back later this week with more podcasts. Cheers. Cheers, y'.
All.