Hello, and welcome back to Deep Blue Sum Dash Thing, where Thing is also crossed out, the Internet's favorite and also only Deridian Everton podcast. I am Michael Caley, I am joined by my fellow Toffee Mike Goodman, and we're here to talk about Hontology. You see, Everton is haunted. As Derina, of course, introduced in his essay on the Spectre of Marks, haunting refers the way that contradictions exist within discursive productions from the moment of their creation.
And it is these contradictions, these tensions, not some inherent unity, which organizes their future actions which predicts their future use. They are haunted by these organizing contradictions like ghosts, but these ghosts are also the best indicators of what they truly are. They're being, they're ontology, thus, hauntology. And he indicates this is also true of political formations, and most likely also of club football teams.
So, Everton are a modern club, driven by a contradiction. They built themselves into contenders in the early 2000s, during the first great period of growth in inflation in club football in England, by managing their money carefully, identifying bargain British talent, generally acting like a classically well-run version of a pre-inflation era club. But at the same time, they never really reached the heights that they always wished, and the belief was that how do you get there with investment, with money, with backing the manager? And so here we are.
They have a new ownership. That ownership backs the manager. They buy players. But they are still running themselves in the classic old-time way.
They have not, at least two things, don't mesh. And so the desire to become a big club, the desire to spend more, is constantly undermined by the sort of classic British approach of finding bargain talent, buying veterans who know what they're doing. Perhaps we have this managerial search going on, where they are apparently going after Moise and if they can't get him, it's going to be Nuno. And like, nothing really changes because of that original haunting.
Joined by Mike Goodman, I'm sure he's got a lot to say about Derrida as well. This is the second worst piece of news I've had this week. It would be the worst piece of news if I had not seen the trailer for the new Paw Patrol movie. It's been a great week over here.
The music of the Waynes Le Weilers, Max is not with us on the other side of the virtual glass. Please download, subscribe, make us happy as my guest or subscribe. I think this is a Patreon podcast. I don't even know.
I don't know what city I'm in. I don't know what time it is. I don't know if you know that Everton are going to make me sad. Do I have to talk about this?
I don't know. I asked for questions earlier this week. Some of them are on the Euro, so we're probably going to come back around to those. We do a big Euro preview and get some of your questions.
We did though have a question from our good friend and friend of the pod, Sam and Dachel are asking, can we Mike Mike talk about Everton? I think it kind of did. I don't know. All right.
All right. So the state of Everton is not good. I mean, it's not like Carlo and Choladi did a great job before leaving to rearmatulate. He did like an okay job.
The thing that I frequently say about Everton is that they have only nine good players, but like four of them are very good. And so when they're all healthy, it's a reasonable team. When they're not all healthy, they're just not very good. And like you put all that together in 10th place.
That seems pretty right. But it's not like this team is going to get better when you look at the big ticket purchases from the last year, right? Hamas Rodriguez, Alain, like the Corre. None of these guys are guys that you're going to look over the next three, four years and say, oh, yes, these guys are going to be better in the future than they are now.
And so you're going to have another manager come in and you're going to have to spend more on whoever they want given how they run these things, which is what you were talking about. And like there are, you have an opportunity here to make an interesting managerial decision. You know, Grand Potter is right there. It's not all that different than what they did with Roberto Martinez when they hired to burn on our team as from a relegated wing inside.
And while that wasn't like the most amazing move ever, he was three years of entertaining football that ended somewhat worse than it started, but it was like, they were fine. They were good. It was an interesting. So you have him right there.
You know, they've been rumored and linked to Stephen Gerard of all people, which would be insane, mind you. But Stephen Gerard kind of seems like a good manager. Certainly a manager who should be looking at taking a mid table from your side as he burgers his career. Raffa Benitez loves being in the city of Liverpool is out there.
All of these are to some degree or another interesting thoughts for a manager. And instead, for whatever reason, Everton seem, at least initially, to have narrowed their big list down to David Moyes again. And you know. Neither of whom suggests to me in any capacity anything exciting or interesting or different happening to what is just sort of in effect a mid table club that given how much they spend underperforms the amount of money that they spent, right?
Like given how much they spend, this should be a team competing for your obelique at the minimum if not sort of regularly in your obelique. And they're not. Like the difference between Everton and Leicester City is getting run well. Like if you gave Leicester City Everton's budget over the last five years, they would have a lot better players.
And you know, this is not been a team that spends well, but they do spend. And that's not good. That's not the opposite of what you want. So do I have to stop now, please?
I think you're good. You can do you want to hit me with a question about Spurs not getting Antonio Conte in revenge here. So I think the question we have is not actually right about Spurs not getting Antonio Conte. Well, we have a couple, right?
I guess one is here just like, which club is Conte suited to most out of Spurs, Madrid, PhD, Everton and Barca, which is a weird sort of list? Back around to Everton. Obviously Everton. They're not spent.
They're not the manager in. Give them money. I don't know. The kind of interesting thing about this question is that, and I think we'll circle back around to the big Spanish teams in a bit.
But like- That was from Monty, by the way. I don't want to change Monty. Thanks, Monty. It's that like the big Spanish teams have decided on Anjaladi and Sticking with Coumen.
And so like- I don't think I don't think that's necessarily settled at Barcelona yet. But yes, right now the two big Spanish clubs are riding with their ex Everton managers. So this just continues to be an Everton pod. I think that the main thing I would take from that is that these clubs don't want somebody who's going to demand money for themselves or for buying players.
And that's what you get with the player. Anjaladi specifically has said as he came in that he thinks that they've got lots of great talent on loan and they can bring back in and make work. Like that, that, that's just- It depends not wrong. Exactly.
It's not a crazy approach to say that, you know, you've got Sabayos, you've got Odegard, you've got Major Algic. There's guys in Ovech. Yeah, Ovech. So, which I think leads us to Spurs, where Tottenham are the current status of this and this can obviously change the current status of this.
It's hard to read exactly what, how large the problems are. The reports are that Kante is negotiating for more money for himself, more control over staffing, more promises over transfers, more. And all of those are reasonable things to ask for. Kante has a long history of being quite demanding of more from his employers.
And it's very unclear. It's kind of unknowable to what degree the more he's asking for is something that Daniel Levy could or should greet him. It is possible that this is just like the last sort of pieces of making a negotiation. It's possible that he is asking for Harry Kane to stay and also 200 million to work with the mind of players.
And like it was a bad idea to begin with. And so I think that's kind of where we are. The way Kante fits at Spurs, regardless of that, is a kind of interesting question because I think that the Spurs team is in a weird place where they attempted to rebuild the team or at least retool the team with new central peak age talent. You know, build the team around Delhi and Los Elso and in Dombale while getting the most out of the ends of Kane's and son's peaks.
And they didn't pull that off. They didn't manage to retool the back line. They didn't manage to get themselves to a place where that squad is really competing. But they did enough of it.
They have enough of a sort of core of peak talent that it wouldn't really make sense to tear it down again. They kind of like have to try. The best bet to me is you have to try to win with the guys that you've gotten. Something that they're not with like old players that you're going to be stuck having to retool in two years.
But supplement them with winning talent. I don't think it's crazy for Tottenham to be trying to bring in someone like Kante who is going to try to win. I think that part fits. I mean, I think that that's right.
Although what try to win means can be a little up in the air in these circumstances. Just try to win where we're going all out for top four. That seems reasonable. Try to win at the title.
No, that doesn't seem reasonable in the slightest. And then the other thing about it is just like there's two like vastly different scenarios whether or not they sell Kane. And I just don't know what it means. I don't know how to evaluate it because I don't know whether they're going to sell Kane.
The initial flurry seems to have died down but it seems like we're probably just in like a staring contest with Manchester City. If Manchester City cough up the money, then I would be surprised if they didn't sell. And that also strikes me if they're bringing in Kante as a potential massive conflict right off the bat. If like City do come in 150 and Kante says no, you said he was my guy.
Well, on the other hand, like maybe you just turn around and buy the Taramartini's with that money. And then Kante's happy. So, like there's just so many unknowns here. I think what I would sort of say the bottom line though is like Spurs have a lot of talented pieces.
Like we know they have a lot of talented pieces. And Kante is really good at like taking a lot of talented pieces and making a team that like scores more than they're about into one way or the other. And it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that like that's what Spurs should be aiming for right now given what the roster looks like. And you know to some degree I just sort of feel like all the talk of like styles and time horizons and squad building and all of the stuff that is rumored to be like what Daniel would be saying is like it's stuff you say when you don't have enough talent to make top four.
And like maybe it's stuff you're saying when like you have to sell like the fact that you're selling Harry Kane I guess. But you need to be run well. Being run well is not synonymous with long term time horizons right. Like if you have a bunch of guys that are 25, 26, 27 years old like being run well he's trying to win.
And so like yes to me like to me what you need is a guy who looks at Dali and looks at Giovanni also and looks at him and says okay how can we get the most out of all of these guys. Like son and Kane are not on the list because Kane is not necessarily going to be there and son we know how to get the most out of. But you have this enigmatic but talented group of midfielders. And like to me like the central challenge of Spurs is just like how do we win using those guys and like mitigating the problems of the defensive line as much as we can.
And like okay like that that to me is content. Now does content want to do that? Like does content look at that talent and say well well just that's enough for me to win whatever by definition of winning is I don't know. Like on the other hand where else is content going to go right now?
It's kind of going to wait a year and then go somewhere else maybe but it seems to me that like this is the place you know. This is the last string leaving the station for him this season. Right there isn't going to be more money out there from some other club. But one other club that Monty asked about is PSG who appeared to have like just sort of forced Puchitino's hand.
Yeah. Which I think is a really interesting dynamic honestly. Like it is quite something to just tell a manager who wants to leave that they can't. I think that's something not so unlike that happened with with Brendan Rogers at the end of this season.
Maybe that like you know obviously he's got quite a bit of money at last year and good thing going. It's not it's not a bad place to be. But he was very very clear that he was planning to stay at last year and he's under contract for some more seasons and they can like say like we don't really want to let you go. And I think that there has been something of a trend especially I think that a noglesman actually you know RB life is getting a fee for noglesman points to a trend in football of treating managers manager contracts somewhat more like player contracts where there is value in having a manager under contract for some time and a club can demand something.
There is obviously a structural issue here that managers unlike players the kind of emotional commitment that they need to be able to project to their players is different than what a player needs to be able to play. And you're taking a real risk here. I think that with Puchitino there is also what appears to be a conflict Leonardo he may like manage to win a power play where he gets more power and more money out of this and then you know then you've got kind of a classic again kind of classic situation with a player sort of demanding more but I think that might be one of it. But if it turns out that Leonardo stays and Puchit just like has to stay because he was under contract that will be a striking thing to have happened.
It also doesn't seem to me that like PSG are interested in content like if PSG was like whoo Antonio content then it doesn't seem to me that they would have like strong arm Puchitino to stay. Maybe Zadon is a guy who they'd be like happy to go like get if Zadon was interested but right now it seems like Zadon is the guy who's like I don't really need to I don't need to stress in my life of coaching like I'm fine. Where's Conte is a guy who's like I coach it's what I do and so yeah I do sort of feel like well if it's not spurters it's not going to be anybody. I mean like jokes aside he's not going effort.
So much as I might like that I mean everything does not have the talent I cannot imagine to interest Antonio Conte in that way. And so then yeah like if he doesn't go spurters I guess he takes a gear off and then sees what's other next year but I'm not sure that that's better. I mean one of the major things we have going on here is that like the managerial situations at the top of the Premier League are really freaking settled for the most part. Like Clob and Guardiola are just going to be at their respective clubs like lengthily.
It's just what it is. And Jujul just got extended a Chelsea for obvious reasons. And so like you're hoping that like LA and United fall apart but other than that that takes a lot of major destinations for these big time managers off the board. Yeah and I think this sort of leads us into a couple of our other questions.
Let's start with Peter Goldstein asks Mantis United supporters talk about the progress that the social has made with the team but in tight flat foot while less of a truly elite manager is there such a thing. The vast majority of managers are ordinary. They get their ceiling. We get fired.
The press starts all over again with a new one. Progress would come largely from talent acquisitions and not managerial competence. I think that that is correct ish. I think if you presuppose a competent level of roster building and management that is probably true.
I think the you know we talked about this in relation to Lampard and Puchelsey that when you get weird rosters when you get tricky situations whether I mean sometimes it's going to be a particular player personality. Whatever it is. It doesn't mean you are getting the most out of the in hazard to win a title. For example a player who is excellent but has year to year you are never quite sure how much commitment you are going to get out of him.
Sort of defensively backtracking. Doing all the things that he needs to do on the field in addition to being a fantastic player with the ball. You have these moments where managers can really make a difference. Now what percentage of rosters are open themselves up?
I'm not sure. And I might add there is like oh like qualify as a guy who does that? I don't really think so. It's been fine at United.
But you know to me he is a guy who continues to be sort of comfortable in having a job because the roster is good enough and has increased to some degree talent level especially with Bruno. And then like he hasn't hit an extended run of bad results. Mostly because like he hasn't like flipped tails six times in a row which happens eventually. And like when you are a manager like oh hey who isn't bringing something extraordinary to the table.
You sort of like you know you cruise control the ship. You make sure things don't go wrong. And that is fine. That's not a knock.
That's like something a manager has to do. But then oftentimes when you're that guy like the first stretch of extended bed luck you have that's kind of it. Yeah. I think that like this goes on the show for which is the value of managers in football.
And it is my hypothesis and there's some pretty good studies from the NBA showing quite significant coach value that like coaching up a highly dynamic sport is a way to get a lot of value out of players. So this is this is very different from baseball a highly non dynamic sport where what managers can do mostly is like manage workloads and manage a bullpen rather than really structure the way the team is going to play. And structure the way the team is going to play can produce wins top top NBA coach to produce a lot of wins. I think that it is very likely that the same is true in soccer.
I think one thing I'd say here is that it's not just wins that managers can produce it's increasing player value. And when you're talking about us like United that's not necessarily an important consideration because they are not looking to buy players manage them into a point where other people think they are more valuable than they are and sell them. Like you know in a world where you had where you're I'm trying to think of what's a good example. Like if everyone ran themselves differently you could imagine a world where they bought young players had a good manager and then sold those young players up to be like to increase the value of the team to increase the amount of money they had to work with to buy it further players like there are managers that do a good job of doing this.
And this is also something that I think is part of the equation in basketball when you have a salary cap right which is that like can we either get increased value out of the reasonably salary players we have or can we turn them into trade value or like even failing that can we turn them into pieces that other teams overpay for thus hurting their salary cap space. That part of the equation isn't particularly present with United. They're not like targeting like three players they can get at 60,000 a week and then manage them up to be good enough for United. And also like not looking they're also not like looking to capitalize on Greenwood having like an amazing like stretch of 12 games to sell him for more than he's ultimately worth right like that's not what they're going to do.
I think that there are ways in which a top elite manager or a very good manager has in that way slightly less value to United. But at the same time United have enough money that they could just sign content now and he would just make them better by a good amount and like he doesn't make them a real title contender and there's still problems with like acquiring talent but like there's a crack on money there if they wanted to use it. I think that one of the issues here is that it's not merely that Manchester United don't realize that Antonio Conte would make them better. It is also that and I don't want to spend that money and don't want to put themselves like at risk of having Antonio Conte tell the board no I don't like what you're doing.
I don't do that. And all I is perfectly happy to be like part of the Manchester United brand in a way that doesn't rock the boat as long as they're getting enough results. And you know also he is not somebody who is like larger than life that the board can't say now I'm not going to do that right like it's not there's no danger of becoming out of Ferguson who you know is the guy in control. And you know if United were working towards some sort of front office structure that they were implementing like there would be something to be said for that right like there would be something to be said if like okay Edward word is out the door and we need a modern management system and we need to build that in the next three years and like Olay is a steady hand running the ship keeping things on track there isn't a lot of drama we're not really dropping out of the champions like they're already something to be said for that it's just that doesn't appear to be in any classic what United are doing.
This is tangential but one thing I was thinking about in terms of Spurs I think applies here is that one of the weird things that I have sort of realized as Spurs have been lining up apparently pararticchi the the Juventus director of football to be their director of football we know that these directors of football exist at most continental clubs and we know that Fabio Particchi has been at Juventus for a while you can have every club down the line you can name a director of football you can go on their website you can find it on a repeat whatever and but nonetheless there is almost nothing written at least English language about what these folks are up to and so if you were a Manchester United fan for instance looking to imagine your club would hire a director of football and then you're looking on the continent for like okay who's the director of football that they could hire I don't know monkey and no one else surely there are many people who are good at it but what are their systems what do they do how do they build a club what is the football operation how do you say this is like stuff that we should be able to know I'm really saying this because if there were a editor of a football publication out there who had reporters who could like find things out about this I don't know might be a fun thing to do I will say there is one team who are fairly dysfunctional in the front office where we have a lot of reporting about what Arsenal's front office does and they just happen to be a club that might my reporter James Benjamin London is it's quite connected with I'm quite connected to so yes this is this is a challenge it's an ongoing challenge for a lot of reasons and part of it is that like because the the director the director of football is much more flexible than the term general manager say in baseball and like it means a lot of different things and because in England the the mode of running a team has moved so dramatically over the past 15 years from manager does everything to like they're being front offices it is hard like sort of overall to be like okay we can talk about like this team develops an analytics department or this team has a you know a long network of a large network of scouts or like for a while it was like the Unanese network was like very plugged into to South America in Chile in particular where they would have like long and deep relationships with lots of clubs and players at lots of clubs so that they could bring them the positive and we could bring them over reliably like things like that like discrete approaches are not like embodied necessarily in a personal approach to the job but in the clubs hiring people to execute them and where the sort of approaches are situated and how long they take to get situated at new clubs is a real challenge to figure out it's greatly a black box I think even though it surely isn't a black box to the people who work in it so like I think I just I think a lot of it even at that level is personal connections and you're hiring somebody from some other club to come into your club and have the personal connections for you that they had for somebody else and those personal connections can take the form of like scouting they can like take the form of analytics in some ways they can you know they can take the form of like financial smarts right but but they are sort of like personal connection based they're not like strategies in some ways yeah so that's the Manchester United part of this puzzle like Manchester United could you know spend some more money they could target a top manager like content to make them better they could build a structure that allows them to sign better players and they'll they're just not going to until soldier hits tail six times in a row he's going to be the man there and then when he doesn't like that is a job that a hypothetically unemployed content or is it on might be a four I don't know what's going to happen there but like it's not going to happen it's not going to happen immediately it's not going to happen this summer if someone is waiting on that job they'll have to wait on it and it's not at all obvious that social will be out mid-season next season maybe he'll you know have another solid second third-place season really fine I don't know it does sort of feel to me that like and if he has the same season next season but it's like a borderline fourth season he's going to be in trouble but also like you know I might just go by Sancho you know you might just make themselves better enough that they can be fourth but solidly fourth and if they lock into a seat that I think the thing that might hurt them is they could lock into a season where the big three clubs are better than them and don't have a bad run of lock and one of the teams behind them has a good run of lock and suddenly you have like a relatively high points total fourth place race that they're stuck in speaking of the teams above them Jason Stahl asks with three titles in four years and five in the past ten how close do you think Man City is to becoming an apex predator in the Premier League akin to Bayern UVA and PSG I'm specifically curious about their ability like those other teams have to acquire the best players of their closest competitors yeah so I think on the first part I think that like if you look at the underlying numbers over the past like six seven years for the most part what has happened to Man City is that they have run cold a couple of times and they've had a competitor who ran hot much more than that they got clearly beaten by a better team for the title and I think that what's going on here is compared to Bayern and Juventus that their opponents are just baseline better and richer and richer and so their opponents were just at the level of like you know the apex better side of just in the league season you're going to more often hey if you've got three four clubs that are rich that are good only one of them needs to flip heads a bunch of times and suddenly you could be in trouble and whereas in in Italy and Germany there are fewer teams that are particularly close to that level to be able to really challenge you and I think that sort of goes to the other problem but like hunting players from their opponents because for the most part they don't yeah and I think I think that's the major difference here and that's not like a city thing I don't think it's not like city but decided as a strategy we're not going to buy players from and there's very very very little player movement between the big clubs overall at all these days when you look at it and to the extent that there is any it has been from the other clubs to Manchester City whether that's kind of Walker whether that's where he's sterling that's kind of it right like I don't think I'm forgetting anybody but that's because the other teams are rich like that's because the other teams don't have to sell up and and you know it's because specifically city can offer a lot of wages but so can these other clubs so it's not like the players are super incentivized to move from these other teams to city and when you look at what Bayern does and UVA does and PSG does specifically those routines I mean part of their dominance a significant part of their dominance is they just take the best players from their competitors and and and you know part of what happened to you that is they stopped being able to do that and if you look at wage bills the dominance of the Bayern UVA and PSG wage bills over their leagues is of a completely categorically different order from cities now one thing city could do is start doing that they you know right now it depends on how they deal with financial fair play I don't know anything like city could on a certain level just ignore financial fair play and just start offering more wages to everyone and then they could do that but they have chosen not to they have chosen not to throw that money away this is you know means running the team at a loss which we can get to with some of these other teams and it would mean taking on UEFA in a way that city might not really feel like right now to make the wrong bet on the super league but like so long as they are not utterly dominating the rest of the league in wages they will not be able to predate the rest of the league for their best players they can still be great without doing that is the thing if they spend I mean but like part of it is they spend smart like you know Harry Kane if they go on by Kane it's going to be a major departure for them from what they've done in other you know in other arenas they don't buy like they buy young players good young players they don't buy like players in their peak or like slightly past peak they don't you know they've been smarter than that they find and even when they think the biggest one is where he's Sterling for buying from England that was also a wage story in which Liverpool thought they could get away with underpaying Sterling that's because of his youth and so city came in and were like we will pay you a lot of money if you get yourself here so I mean you know we just don't cover wages enough broadly speaking but like that is that is the difference it's possible that city will just be great anyway but it just won't be in the same capacity like in the same manner yeah they've still won three of the last five titles and been at least arguably as good as the team that beat them the years that they didn't win the title so like yeah the thing about city is it's hard to see them having like a non-lock driven down here right like that's like last season where I guess two seasons ago now when Liverpool went nuts it was Liverpool going nuts and city were still pretty good and ran cold and like you know I think we sort of said the whole year well if Liverpool don't run this hot city don't run this cold they're actually pretty close this is from Will he asks what the heck are you Vaymedriden Barca doing yes I want to know more about the ESL insert grimacing emoji here sorry this is a audio medium it's even worse when I'm reading it out verbally and specific the money side of it which still doesn't add up in my opinion how are these things are money compared to purses made in the chances each season are you a fit just really bad at selling their big ticket matches there's kind of two questions here to me yeah let's take a second part first I think the second part is just I'll explain it they could make more money than the Champions League they can make more money for two primary well there are actually three primary reasons the first reason is that none of the money has to go out to the other leagues champions League money is to a limited degree distributed throughout the leagues from which the teams come that's part one part two is the idea of a super league is more marquee match ups between two superstar teams you don't have them all the matches which are like you know events against mold mold it or whatever or you know FC Copenhagen getting two match ups against Real Madrid or whatever those matches are you just take those off the table now to a certain degree the Champions League is already moving in that direction and it's planned to do that as they you know reconstitute and restructure their tournament in 2324 is the first season but that's that's the driving theory behind that as well which is that we need to monetize good teams for good teams more and these matches where it's like a good team versus the you know the winner of the check league are not doing any good and financially and so the super league wants to just entirely eliminate those and so that again does lead to more money so those are the two things those are the two ways in which these teams could get basically a bigger TV contract from the super league than from the Champions League there's also a third thing which is that part of the establishment of a super league was the alone an upfront loan of a bunch of money financed by JP Morgan to these clubs in order to bridge the covid gap and that was again money and that was alone against the future TV contract of this league so it was in its founding a way to pull dollars from the future to the present which a number of these teams sure seem to need so those are the three ways that the founding of the super league really was of a short term financial benefit for these clubs we talk about it gets murkier when you go long term because if you do like significant damage to the the fabric of European soccer like well this decreased interest and like people will sort of assert whatever they believe is fact without sort of doing any establishment of it's a hard question but the short term yes the super league really does make these teams one month now you get to the tricky part of the question which is what the heck are Barcelona and you've got this up to I don't know do you know what they have all done is so far with managers they have targeted people who are okay with the team not spending a lot of money who are going to try to fit together pieces they've got Barcelona are have already lined up Sergio Aguero their reports right now that they are getting gazubbed for Georgina with Naldum by PSG which is funny on a bunch of levels but like that goes to the point that they are the Aguero wages are shockingly reasonable like it's he's still getting like five million a season I think which is still a lot of money for an aging striker who is not very good this season but it's not like really problematic money the really problematic money is the rest of their wage bill which is still too large I think the way I put it is it's only problematic because Barcelona are in a position where they need to do deals like this which suggests that doing this deal prevents them from doing something else but like in a vacuum it's not a problem exactly and so what appears to be going on is that the money that they were going to get from this JP Morgan loan was money that they really needed that that's the best my best guess is to what's going on here now I have long believed that it is not like a crazy thing to imagine the way that these clubs have been run for a very long time hasn't made sense either and like money can just show up when you're running a club like this and money can show up right now it really seems like that's not going to happen and if that doesn't come that really opens up a lot of uncertainty in European football broadly yeah and so to put this in the context of like stubbornly sticking to the Super League they just don't want to pay the money that UEFA is demanding I think it's probably the driving motivating factor here and like they'll just fight it in court for a few years and the belief is that like they're not going to keep that at the chance of this year because it'll go to court and there'll be a lengthy court battle and eventually if they take one year suspension they'll fight it and appeal it and try to get it over turn and maybe by the time this all you know maybe by the time we have final rulings from CAS or whatever it's three four years down the line their finances have improved as covid recedes into the back mirror their every mirror and then they can just say okay fine we'll lose we'll pay the fine at this point um but it basically seems to me to be your standard order of litigiousness when you don't want to pay a bill exactly and I think the issue is in terms of the transfer market and the broad economy of European football is that this litigiousness in not wanting to pay a bill is of a piece of not wanting to pay other bills right like right it's not it's not just that they're pissy about this bill it is that their finances are legitimately problematic and they need to wait it out in order to sort of get through the problems in their finances and with somebody's not even clear how well they can wait it out and if that's the case taking a one of the big buyers off of the top of a market that depends on the big buyers at the top to distribute money down down from there changes the structure of European football I think one thing going on this summer is that Liverpool were surely thinking that they were going to sell on one of their forwards to a team like Barcelona yeah I mean I think Real Madrid but yes that that was the idea and then all of a sudden that's the money for your rebuild in the same way they're like now one thing is influenced is it's like it probably makes spurs more likely to take the city money for Kane because the you know we don't want to sell him domestically we only want to sell him overseas only works if there is more than one overseas buyer in PSG and like at this very moment there doesn't seem to be anybody in the global sort of soccer economy other than PSG that is interested in shelling out megabucks or superstars so yeah which could change the answer to our Manchester City question true although I mean it doesn't strike me as obvious that even then like lots of clubs will end up selling up to city like I think Kane is like a pretty specific exception here giving like he wants to go despite like whatever wages like like it's a situation where Spurs can't clearly make him happy with wages it's a situation where his age profile means that it's not a horrible idea to sell him for a lot of money and it's a situation of like spurs and city being at the like very edges of that top like echelon right like it's not united selling across down the city or Liverpool selling to city like spurs selling to cities closer to Leicester selling and Leicester have sold to cities Leicester have sold to Chelsea like it's closer to that right at this very minute right spurs are not close to being competitors with city for what city want to win and city aren't terribly worried about whether they're helping let spurs win what they want to win right the other part of this is that city buying a few more players from a few big clubs in England doesn't remotely make up the gap left open if Madrid and Barca and you think they aren't doing that right that's exactly right and so one wonders what's gonna happen there yeah all right well thank you for your questions you gave us a lot of questions on the euro so we will be getting to in some big euro previewing podcast thank you for that um I've done so I did a little weird pod for our lucid and belly level subscribers what we're gonna do and kind of follow up on this over time over the summer is I'm going to do a soccer analytics study in real-ish time with your input with Goodman's input in a little bit we'll see what results we get out of it you could hear my podcast of patreon.com so I'll pivot on what exactly that study is or where I'm going with it is about transfers and stuff I don't know might find it fun if you're a soccer nerd who listens to a soccer nerd podcast I don't know maybe uh and uh good then we will be back around for the people at some point soon yeah we'll be back next week when I'm not very turned around in whatever city I'm end doing whatever work obligations I'm doing sounds good cheers y'all cheers