Welcome to the double pivot the world's most agreeable soccer analytics podcast I am Michael Kaylee We are back and one of the things about doing a podcast on a regular schedule week to week knock out a couple pods every week Find stuff to talk about is that sometimes the story of the week is also the story of last week So we sat up here and goodness like some of the pap right I was like well We just did a podcast on tap like it's kind of the same story It's interesting that they drew with palace and they lost to you that is but it's still kind of the same story now I did do an expecting goals newsletter We are gonna do a little something with that and as I thought of that But I wanted to sort of do some other stories that are also happening and we had an idea for trying to fit together talking about United Who have not been terribly successful under Amareem so far and Spurs who are now in their traditional December slump And I think there's some interesting connections and disconnections between those two teams and the way they're talking about and what's going wrong So that's what we're gonna do. I am joined by Mike Goodman. How are you doing man? Do it all right the music on the way in as well as please Donald subscribing is happy It's patreon.com slash double pivot come hang out on discord all that jazz lots of good stuff going on There's like a deconstruction of all the Jack feature books going on in the books in the books down on the discord.
It's good stuff There's such great books. I'm actually my wife is with a number of them I have not read the feature books. I suppose I will do it at some point because you've just got so much joy in front of you They're they're so readable I am sure I do anyway Yeah, united and Tottenham are where we're gonna park ourselves today As I thought out and get back into normal life from being a black land for several days being very cold Yeah, any story from Lapland before we get started Yes, if you have a child who is very into Santa Claus, you might want to do some gear muffs for a second year I had a delightful time in Lapland We went there because you go and there's like Santa Claus village. It's right on the Arctic circle You take the kids they go they need Santa.
You do other stuff. I cannot recommend dog study enough to anybody I've recommended this number of times over the years. I've been to like trumps of Northern Norway before with my wife before kids We don't sit there. It was wonderful.
We took the kids this time. They loved it. We loved it. It's cold but great The Santa visit was somewhat more contentious is my seven-year-old lost her mind because she is seven and that's where she believes in Santa anymore And because she is seven had a fairly difficult time verbalizing this Although she did at one point as she was collecting herself from her meltdown as she was vacillating between believing and not believing in Santa Claus I mean daddy What are the Jewish kids?
The Santa know if the Jewish kids have been naughty or nice? And I have to say I was deeply flummoxed by that question I did not have a good answer in that moment as we were standing next to a snowbook Snowbank with a crying seven-year-old freaking out over Santa That is very much like her kind of making trouble with her new semi knowledge Correct and really like the main point that I drove home with the seven-year-old was So you can believe as much as you do or do not want to believe in Santa as real as you believe him to be And now I'm gonna curse and I looked at her and I said I swear to God if you ruin this for your sister There will be so many fucking consequences And her hearing me curse laughed Said okay, I get it and then we went on about a very very nice trip and that was that was our time in Lapland All right, so I have not come up with a segue from Laplandian to either at Manchester United or Tottenham I will say both bitches are United and Tottenham for quite cold at the moment just like Lapland quite cold not clear When the Sun is going to come up So yeah, let's start with you because there was like some very specific reporting about Manchester United There is a little bit more of a news book here. It's a really funny one too. It's really good I don't know what to make of this I think anybody who sort of worked in bigger corporations from time to time has had the experience of a new person coming in Looking around being like oh boy This was not what I signed up for and being out the door six months later like right like this There's like kind of like a difference in there's like a qualitative difference between somebody who either gets fired or laid off or quits After being at a company for years and years and years and and somebody who like shows up looks around and was like oops And it is gone fairly quickly and quite clearly that was the Dinesh story here Yeah, and so we got a whole big piece in the athletic from Adam Crafton at all and One of the big things that I took away from this is that like he left because there were lots of people doing his job The big story that we got out of this was this apparent meeting where Ratcliffe brought a bunch of his people into a room and asked them who the manager should be and Ashworth got in trouble for saying we need an elix department to evaluate managerial candidates before we make a quick move So I'm gonna say there were lots of people doing his job depends on what you define his job as There were lots of people doing the job of saying who should and shouldn't we be hiring what players?
Should we and shouldn't we be bringing in like doing the job of sort of directing football operations? There appears to be nobody doing the job of directing football operations. Well Like it is not like Dean Ashworth got fired because there were seven other people bringing Analytically not like analytics analytics just like rigorous analysis of decision-making to the table He got fired because there are seven other people bringing their own opinions and decisions and ideas to the table so like you know that the The impression I get was Ashworth was brought in and nothing was ever streamlined under Ashworth in any capacity in any way They perform which seems like a problem given the fact that the reason he was brought in is that all the existing people there were not good at their jobs Right like he was brought in as sporting director you can imagine why he thought that he was coming in to run everything there and then he clearly wasn't in particular it looks like Barata who they brought in from Man City as a sort of executive operations guy Then was the person to oversee the amarema hire and like what all of this suggests I think that that story of Ashworth saying we need analytics and being told uh-oh I thought you were in charge of doing this and like what he said was you bring a consulting company? What basically I took that to mean from this story and I'm doing some like there's a lot of extrapolating going on here But I think it's a very well reported story that like is built to extrapolate from is That he does not think that they currently have in-house resources to do this work And so if they're going to prioritize hiring a manager mid-season they need to bring in consultants who can do this quickly and well and then over time he Dan Ashworth will oversee the building of this operation and he was told by Radcliffe you were supposed to be on top of that you're supposed to already know how to do that he's like he's not himself in the analytics department and like there's just building systems is hard and it takes time and The optimistic case for Manchester United was that Jim Radcliffe was going to come in and modernize things and put in a Modern front office and hire people to make good decisions and that that was like what his modus operandi was and how he was going to be driven to operate and that is just the Opposite of the impression you get from the entire tanhag saga through Ashworth leaving this is a story of a club that still is not Forget the finished article is not working towards having a finish article It's operating under the assumption that you hire one guy and that one guy is the guy who makes good decisions And now you hire the guy that makes good decisions So you make good decisions and everything's done and what it seems like modernizing in heavy air quotes meant Into Jim Radcliffe world was laying off lots of people running us like a modern company meeting We fire lots of people for the bottom line for the purposes of improving the bottom line Yeah, I was on vacation.
I just finished Dan Davies is the unaccountability machine another another Discord book channel favorite discard book channel favorite the middle part is very technical I got bogged down for a while but the idea of a balance sheet and particularly very specific financial balance sheet not like the normal Sort of every corporation like Manchester Lots of different parts of it will have their own books and they have accountants who are keeping those books and managing them And but then there's an overall like you know Plus is in minus balance sheet and if you can remove labor costs from that you can make the balance sheet look better Does it lead to longer-term success? Who knows and it was actually important in this piece that another problem that Ashworth had was that he was not laying off people At the speed that he was supposed to while being told he was also supposed to have at least a part already I think every false dawn at Manchester United Comes with this idea That this new group of people will be the sailors and it comes with more or less degrees of sophistication, right? Like there's an extremely Unsophisticated version of it which is like all these are the wheels right which is all it comes in They have like two months of good results and everything is fixed there's a more sophisticated version of this argument which is the Ashworth version which is like new ownership higher Ashworth everything is will be fixed and It is at least possible for ownership and a director of football to do the hard work of creating systems to run a giant business well and see that running it well reflected on the field, but you have to do it you have to do the work and the work is long and hard and Like it just seems obviously when you walk when you go through the managerial process You know I go through over the last six months that work has not been done But then when you see Ashworth getting fired that work is not being done pretty clearly and it's not so much That Ashworth as a person is so valuable as to be a replaceable It's not so much that like you need that guy in that role or nothing will work but the saga of Ashworth that Manchester United is indicative of a club that is still looking for a magic guy to hire to fix everything and Not a reworking of how the entity this morning entity is wrong, right? If it's not Ashworth at any moment would be a good moment for Manchester United to start building a rationalized football operations model And they could do that with not Dan Ashworth that would be totally fine but as far as I can tell this sacking arises from them choosing not to build such a model because that is not what they imagine a well-run system looks like that Radcliffe has some sort of you know He is the genius and he is working with the gurus and they sit around and they make their decisions and Eep, and so I think that's sort of a good place to move into Nanchetia the football club the team that lost to Arsenal quite badly and that then lost to the name forest and again It was a little bit funkier than that and exactly what we've learned about Ruben Arim so far I don't know that we've learned a ton.
I think He is not doing anything particularly revolutionary with this squad at the moment despite running them out in a back three He is putting an extremely attacking possession oriented collection of 11 players on the field and Clearly wants to have the ball in attack, but is not like there is not anything Interesting about how they're really going about it with the ball yet Yet and the yet is like really important here I don't know like the order of things might end up being really interesting like going first to attacking groups of personnel We're playing like a lot of the type of advantage in a midfield to with the defense of midfielder Which is just a very attacking alignment, which is fine But going to that while not really showing yet any signs of wanting to use that in a very distinctive way Is an interesting ordering of things and it is not one that is like leading to any immediate success But it's also if you listen to Emerim talk like he's coming in fully bought into the idea that like we're gonna stick for a While I'm gonna tell you we're gonna stick for a while, which is I think a smart approach in terms of like handling expectations in the media I have felt to me I have been pleasantly surprised by the savviness of Emerim With all of the off field that being a Manchester United Boston town, and it's a lot of stuff. I have like My early returns there are like oh, you're better than I expected I've got confidence in you in that arena more so than on the field where I'm like reserving judgment But to date what we've seen is basically play a bunch of attacking dudes Relatively straightforwardly. Yeah, I mean our aim system and there were reports that when Liverpool were interested in him It was his His great fixation on a particular system and formation that that made him drop down their list And this seems to be very confirmed by him immediately coming to united and playing the same system in every single match It's not just that he plays a back three is that he plays a back three with something of a box midfield with two central midfielders Who lie deep but one of them so often get forward and then ahead of them It has a sort of three four two one shape where you could have like a winger or a ten in that sort of half-space role They may interpret more as a winger the way that our nacho does or more as a ten the way that Bruno does But they really are playing especially in the half spaces so that the wing backs are in charge of the entire wing and Tons of the ball progression is meant to be with either that half-space ten or one of the midfielders working with combining with the wing back It's very very wing back heavy stuff Reminds me a lot of Antonio Conte's pre-planned stuff Which again the way you build out of the back it depends on the width is provided by the wing back And so that's what I'm seeing but like it may take time for us to see if this is any good But it's very clear what's supposed to be I think yeah, I agree with that. I mean my impression is that the people that really like a marine think that whatever it is is a lot more unique than what you are describing and And there's a little bit of I mean I forgot the comparison to the counter here There's a little bit of a misnomer about Conte, which is that there is something Complicated about how his teams build up and there is not at least not the everything every time after Juventus where he had pillar to rely on What can't they systems relied upon was extremely high levels of execution of routinized patterns?
Yeah, it is not my impression that people think that of Emery Yes, and so what does it look like if the mayor and how you want to build is both the same but more Extemporised I think in The from nearly where everybody's just for an athletic as hell you have a lot less time and space to execute those build-ups and That cuts both ways right like if you want to do it in a writtenized manner other teams can jump that stuff And you just have to have better physical talents to out execute them at the points of contestation and you know Conte had that which I'll see didn't have it first basically Especially with the sports TV inherited. I mean what can imagine a different collection of talent as far as that might have worked out what? If it's more extemporised it's more extemporaneous You need guys who are really really good in those spaces and like athletic and Really smart is such a loaded word when it comes to sports but they need to have the skill of good fast decision-making and And that's a hard skill come on one of my takeaways here This isn't really a takeaway This was something I came into it with and that I am happy to right now feel like it is validated is that Manchester United's problem. It's not that Eric ten hog was a great manager that needed to stay on But Manchester United's problems did not start or end with ten hog right bringing in another manager who has a peculiar system That has a bunch of peculiar needs whatever it was or bring in a manager who's gonna like all try to get these pieces together These are not pieces that fit together well in any sense and so our marine system I think fits this talent a little bit worse than average in particular because it is a very wingback heavy system as far as I can tell and they don't actually have any wingbacks what they're doing right now is they're using a full back Diego Dallow do doll on one wing and a winger Ahmed on the other wing and like both of them are okay but neither of them is a specialized talent for this system and it's just not clear like what exactly the Midfielders are supposed to do but the like big split in United's talent between just defensive midfielders in our day and costume You're oh and guys who move the ball forward really fast either carrying or passing in Bruno and menu It's it's a weird fit and that isn't working just yet And like I think that if they're committing our ring it's going to mean significant overhauls of this talent both to fit it to Amoream and because this talent coming in was not actually like ready to compete for top four Well, I mean this is the issue with the matter when this gets back to the issue that we went off talking about with United Which is that like whoever you bring it however you do this you need a system to elevate the general talent level at Manchester United By making a lot of money on top and talent you can spend a lot of money on a lot of different bets in mid-level talent However, you want to do it But you need to do good execution of raising the talent level You can't keep spinning your wheels on Casamero's forever And if you do keep spinning your wheels by going out and getting 28 year olds to plug gaps because you know just just one more 28 year olds just one more 28 year olds.
You're not gonna get anywhere and you're gonna keep not getting anywhere No matter who the managers, you know, they're just like whatever managerial approach they have. Yeah, and Yeah, I think that we will learn more about what this system is going to be From what happens in this next window and certainly the window after that Like are they going to try to bring in one or two pieces that are that make Amoream system work? And like this goes to what a big bet Amoream is as a very much formation system guy Which is that you need to have a plan to be committed to doing Amoream stuff for a little while Because you're going to be signing guys to fit that system because that's what you have to do when you've got a system manager And you have to be committed to that and you have to have a whole club that is organized toward a commitment to that to then You could not do that. You could just go buy lots of talented players regardless and then fire Amoream in 15 months.
I mean look as much as we have lambasted Chelsea's approach for good reason And as risky as Chelsea's approach has been and it now appears they're gonna make the changes like this year and more or less You can't have the other side of it you can't say they didn't replenish and elevate the talent level at Chelsea in 18 months man. Yep, and Overspent on a bunch of those players they created weird roster issues all of it. No doubt But what they did is they sent them seed them out of money in a way that might have crippled the club long term But they unquestionably elevated the talent level at that club now in the process They then fired to go hired potter fired potter hired pajatino let pajatino go before ending now on the rescue, right? And I sort of think like if you find yourself for Manchester United are and you're prioritizing it How do we get to the other end of this you really should not let yourself be limited by what Amoream wants It needs but in order to not let yourself be limited by what Amoream wants or needs You need to have people above him in a structure saying regardless of what he wants or means This is what the club needs and there is nobody there doing that competent That's a really good point about Chelsea that the really defining thing of the sorting director era of Chelsea So let's toss out the the tide boldly the summer of Todd signings the summer of Todd baby tremendously fun but once when Stanley and the other guy took over they were focused on value they were purely focused on value who are players that we can sign that are better than the money that it would cost to acquire them and These signings were all over the board I think that the question of Chelsea's business plan going forward is really interesting one like you know They can't like go spend it with a title at that that's out.
I assume but they did actually land value They landed massive value in Palmer. They had massive value in Jackson They landed value in Kiseido in appears and a number of these Muquielle has hit as a value sign it and if you make enough value signings in the like 20 to 40 million bracket a Value signing in that bracket is crazy valuable. Yeah, but I say always not Kiseo is not Kiseo You got to hit those and like that's why Enzo is an issue I mean, it's not like it's not like from a business perspective It's not clear that this makes sense right because like the missus whether Enzo ends up being a big miss You know the mudrics which we knew were gonna be a big miss and then like that the whole over is from the summer of Todd like are really Mitigating against the profitability argument here of the science and you lose Gallagher for basically nothing because you have to make You know cuz you can have to you to make a piece of requirements. So but you did just like Reinvent the squad with tons of talent and elevate the town floor that you and now and that is a path that was open Chelsea That shouldn't they choose to go down it would be a path that is open to Manchester United I think it's not a path open to the other team you want to talk about and that's time because Tottenham as you can sort of tell in their their spending Our self-constrate basically and when that's the case you have to build differently Yeah And so I think that that is a good place to take a little cut here and move on to talking about Tottenham on another podcast That will be available at patreon.com