You're welcome to The Double Pivot. The world's most real. Soccer out of its podcast. I am Michael Kalie, and we are coming to you.
I am coming to you from the tropics. It is my wife's birthday this week. She thought that for her birthday, she'd like to take a little vacation, go somewhere warm. So happy birthday to me.
I am also on vacation, but I'm just taking a quick pause, left the beach, going out later downtown, and we got to feed the content beast. Got a podcast. I am joined by my good night texting this morning. I was like, what?
Wait, we got a podcast on something. I don't know what. I've got a newsletter coming up. I can't do that again.
He said, Surya. I was like, oh, right. Surya. So I'm joined by my good then, the keeper of the topics.
There we go. The music here on the way in as well. Please download, subscribe, make us happy. Podcasters, patreon.com slash double pivot.
Come hang out in the discord. Lots of talk in the discord about lots of things. You know, sometimes people tell us that we're the same person. They're like, how can you differentiate between the two of you?
You have the same, it's the most agreeable soccer analytics podcast. You have the same opinions about like everything. And if they would like to know how they can differentiate between us, you are going on a nice, warm weather vacation this week. You're going to beaches and sun and sand.
I am also going on vacation next week. I'm going to about the coldest place on earth. We are taking the kids to meet Santa Claus. So like, we will be in Northern Finland.
So that is how you can tell us apart. I think you got the better end of the deal. Yeah, no reindeer here though. Not a one.
Or dog setting. Have you ever been dog setting? Dog setting is an incredibly cool activity. It is on tap for us.
It'll be the second time in my life I've done it. I highly recommend to all of our listeners out there that you do dog setting if you ever have the opportunity. Well, another thing that we really do highly recommend to all of our listeners out there is watching Surya. This is the thing we have done together in person, in a stadium, in real life and stuff.
It's right. We watch the games here at DoubleTet.com. I guess I'll let anyone tell you differently. We attend the games and everything.
Yeah, Surya is wild this year. Like, it is absolutely wild at the top of the table. There's a pack of six teams, basically, and maybe one of the best teams in Surya is not in that pack currently, which is something we will talk about in its own right. But yeah, the Surya table is nuts.
Yeah. So there's two things here. One is that the Surya to race is wide open. Right now, Napoli is in first place with 32 points.
They've got a lot to write behind them at 31, Inter, and Fiorentina, who are behind. They both have a game in hand against each other. We can get into that a little bit. But they're at 28.
And they've got lots of 28, and Juventus at 26 on the same number of matches as Napoli and Atlanta. And you've got Milan at 22 points. So pretty far from any kind of real title contention, but who have been quite excellent this season in Surya. So you have a minimum 5, 6 team title race.
And then on top of that, the other thing I want to say before we get into these teams is that I have really come to enjoy the style of football. They play in Italy. And I do think it's worth discussing how like watching Italian football is just a little bit different than watching English football and the biggest thing to me. And you can see this in some of the pressing numbers, you can see this in some of the past completion numbers.
There's just a lot less pressing, especially in the defensive zone and the defensive half of the middle third. Like teams just, there is, presses happen. Games are capable of pressing, but to a great degree when there's a turnover of possession the ball goes the other way. And there isn't this sort of middle zone of pressing football that we've gotten very used to in English football.
And I think it's just, even when the games are kind of boring, even when there's a ton of shots, it gives the games a kind of back and forth feel, even without lots of event in the penalty area. That's right. I mean, there's a lot of like turnover happens, team moves into the other team's final third, then the contestation starts again, then turnover, you know, incomplete cross, cross block whatever, ball moves at pace sometimes, not at pace other times into the other teams attacking and defending third and contestation happens again. And there's just not nearly, you know, if you think of things along a spectrum, right?
And on the one hand, you still have Bundesliga with mid field or cleared off the line. And then you have Syria on the other end, which is we're not going to win in midfield so that you cannot break through our defensive structure. And then the Premier League is very, actually kind of like both Premier League and La Liga are squarely in the middle in very, very different ways, where England just tries to have it always and kind of can because that's where all the best athletes end up, right? So they can like, they all sort of believe they can contest midfield fully and also recover and they're all like kind of right.
And then what you have in Spain is they contest the midfield because they hold very high lines and they all sort of believe that nobody athletically can beat them in behind. And they're also kind of right, except for Barcelona. And so you have in very different ways, England and Spain sort of sit in the middle, but like Germany and Italy are sort of on the two extremes among top leagues. Another part of this, it really is important to note, is that the best teams in Italy are just a lot worse than the best teams in England.
And they're worse than Barcelona, certainly in Spain. And this means that they don't have quite the incredible possession talent players to absolutely kill a game with possession when they get the ball. Juventus do this to some degree, but they do it at a significant cost to the quality of the team. The perfect both and teams where they're able to not take many risks defensively and keep the ball and get a fair number of sorting chances.
There's more trade-offs in Serie A management, which I think leads to in some ways better games, even if the very top of the league is not going to be like the very best games that are really between the best teams that actually like come off, which they increasingly rarely do, those will be a higher level of competition. But that's a pretty small slice of games that you're giving off. All right, so should we talk about some teams here? Let's talk about some teams.
Let's find our terms. There's a group of five and a half, I think. Yeah. So we've got Napoli, Inter, Uve, Fiorentina, Atalanta, and Half of Lazio, right?
Like you're like one foot in and then in the table and then statistically it's those teams plus AC Milan, who are like pretty clearly and distinctly separate from everybody else. Would you probably go down the table here? Yeah, I think so. So Napoli are in first and, you know, they have been very, very good, there's no question about that.
What I found really interesting about them being very, very good is that they are very, very good in a way that is incredibly recognizable. If you watch Antonio Conte's teams before the most recent period of his career, like they are recognized by a Conte team and the Conte teams have always had certain things in common. They play a back three, he's played this with a back four, but either way, it's this incredibly structured way of moving the ball up the field through the winners with a couple of attackers with three rolls at the very end of those, you know, highly structured, planned routes of moving the ball up the pitch. But when he was at Inter and then at Tottenham, his teams did this and they took a fair number of risks to do it.
They were willing to be open at times defensively in order to really commit themselves to getting those passing lanes up the field and getting those big chances for Kane and Son for Lukaku and Lattara. And this version at Napoli is much more reminiscent of his teams for Italy or Juventus, where they will absolutely, they will grind out zeros and let that happen, rather even if it means that Quiche and Lukaku are relatively service free. Yeah, the interesting thing to me is that Juventus, he had such an obvious, like, talent edge in midfield. Like, I mean, he was running out Pogba, Vidal and Pirlo every week with Marchesio as like the fourth guy.
Like, he could dominate midfield and create these chances without having to take risks because his midfield was so damn good. And it's like one of my favorite sort of analytic periods of soccer, because if you look at those teams, like, it's the same three guys, but you can very clearly see it go from Pirlo's midfield to Vidal's midfield to Pogba's midfield over like three years. And like, but no matter how they did it, it was always like, those three guys were just better than the other midfield. And because of that gravity, you wouldn't have to take risks to get the front, the very mediocre front couple, chances.
That's not really the case in Napoli, it was the case with Italy, y'all. But with Italy, it was literally just like, he's an international manager doing non-standard tactics. That's where the edge came from. A hundred percent of the edge.
And like, Napoli, it's like, I don't know, he's just so sumpatica with Lukaku, that that's what makes the difference. Yeah, so I mean, the midfield, you know, Zambo is a good player. He does all the different things you need a midfielder to do, but he's not like dominating in there. And then they have a mix of, you know, a Tom and A, LaVatka, Gilmore, guys, he can kind of like spot in to do a little bit more of this or a little bit more of that.
But it's a little Alex Friggas city in that he's got a lot of guys that are sort of like good at six out of 10 things and really bad at two out of 10 things, and they're not the same skill sets. And then you just sort of like pick the right ones to start every week and it's an incredibly high degree of difficulty. But like, if you're a really good manager, that's where edge comes from. Yeah, that's and playing very defensively, so those guys don't have to do too much.
Right. But the thing is, is that like despite that, they still get their, like, crafted chances. Yeah, just enough. Like again, this is an ably team that is only somewhat above average in attack and absolutely fantastic in defense, which is the stereotype of a content team.
It is, you know, what, you can't even Chelsea though on the Premier League, we're much closer to this. What he's shown over his career is a capacity to, a tendency to like be able to do content stuff that is more or less defensive. And this is very much the defensive version of it. I definitely wonder to what degree this is a function of having Quiche that he can just like the plan can just be give him the ball.
I mean, one thing that we didn't really talk about much in this context is Chelsea. Yeah. And Chelsea was not really a risk-taking team under content, but they had Hazard and Costa up top. And I think this is similar-ish to that in that way.
I agree. No, they don't have Angola content in midfield. So, you know, like, they probably, they probably could have been riskier and I guess like, they kind of were in the way that they played like fairly attacking wingbacks, you know, who like, you know, really on the right side it was a winger and on the left side it was Marcas Alonso, who was like, you know, the most attacking, full back in the world. So like, in that way, I guess you might argue they took risks, but really like the talented two up top was very much what you saw at Chelsea.
Yeah. So this is a team that easily could win the league. It would not be surprising to see them win the league. It's interesting to see Conte back again doing Conte things, but again, just with a little tweak, a little adjustment to his tail.
That's sort of what keeps him at the top of the game. Man's a good manager. Yeah. Second place.
Second place at Atlanta. Another good manager. I don't really, like, I guess Barini's just hit the weird zone, right? Where like, he's just going to be king at Atlanta forever, like he's not going to really go and leave a big job.
I suspect. But man, what a run they continue to have. I can. So this is, this Atlanta team is by their underlying numbers, by the fact they're second to the table.
The best Atlanta team that we have seen. I don't understand. Like by talent, it does not seem the best to me. Like, what do you mean?
The Taylor Teggie is at almost 1.8 x DNA per 90. He's got another superstar striker on his hands. I mean, you know, to me, right, it was the Papugoma's teams that always seem to me to have the most talent. I don't know how he does it.
Like, he consistently takes good, but not great strikers, in some case, worse than that, and turns them into incredibly potent attackers. I mean, he's got a long standing history. Papugoma, as I just referenced, was great for a long time at Atlanta, but came out of nowhere for when he arrived there. You know, guys, like a long track record of guys like Zappa Costa, who just like show up in our good.
Yeah. And, you know, the other part of this team that really makes them work, and we've talked about gas-free tactics before, yeah, it's like, you know, how you doing, son, got overload the wings, got to overload the wings, like it's just figuring out new ways to overload the wings, and using the midfielders on either side and forward to really combine on that wing, rather than like holding the center. And Ed Ersen is like the guy that's all runs through now. The first generation of this was Deroon and Froyler in midfield, and they got old and then Froyler left, but, you know, they were, I remember when before Rodry was Rodry, and we did a podcast on like, how will City replace Fernandinho running a bunch of numbers?
And Ramma Froyler was the guy that popped up as like, most similar, and he was like 29, 28 at the time, so it's like, it won't be him, but like, like, for a few years, it was like, he's my guy, like, nobody really appreciates Froyler in midfield and all the things he does. And, you know, Ed Ersen is the guy who's just coming and taking that mantle. And then they get a lot of goals out of sort of a, a more midfielder-recreative winner. This is Charles de Queleira, who had a pretty unspectacular season at Milan.
I'm being generous, when I say. He was a big buy from, he was a big buy for them from Belgium, and then was sort of viewed as like, an incredible flop to the point that it was like, damning of Milan that they would have been interested in buying him in the first place. Yeah, and he's a really weird player. I think that retake being this good is just like, I don't know, man, this is just magic.
But De Queleira is this like, big guy who's not really a striker, not really a winger, not really a midfielder. And he can be on the ball more than a winner, but not as much as a midfielder. He can get into the penalty area and he's like, big and strong, and you can do that and you've just, like, he's got this role as a quasi-winger for Atlanta that has really worked the last two seasons. And, like, this isn't, you know, Charles de Queleira, you've got a 23-year-old with these numbers.
It's like, oh, this is something, and it is, but he's a guy where I'm just so skeptical that another manager could get him, get this production out of him. Like, this feels like Gasperini Magic in a explicable way, that he's given a role that really works for this peculiar player, rather than Gasperini Magic at the total inexplicable time, which is that Matteo Retake is just a great striker now. Yeah. Like, I don't think either of us would be remotely surprised if this was the year they won Syria.
By my numbers, they are the best team in the league so far, and they have also been, like, that good in the Champions League. Their Champions League numbers reflect a team that would be that good in Syria. That was the other thing I was going to say. I don't think either of us would be all that surprised if we turn around in April and they're in the semi-finals of the Champions League.
Like, I think quarter-finals would be like the sort of where they stand, like, point you'd expect them to get to, but like, it doesn't take much to then, like, all of a sudden you're in the semi-finals, and then you look around in two times in the last five years, they've been in the semi-finals, and like, I don't know, maybe it's your year. You've been doing that literally since before I had kids, or I guess when I had kids. Yeah, yeah, that was there. We had a guest then on in your place to talk about why they were so good, but yeah, so they're good.
And then after them in the table, we have Itur and Fiorentina. I had a plan to go watch Interplay Fiorentina, and I did go to the scene with like the Fiorentina fan club in New York City. It was really fun. That was about a weird time, man.
Yeah, it was really fun for about 17 minutes, and then it got pretty weird. It was a purentino winger, Eduardo Bove collapsed on the field, the game is suspended, he's rushed off from medical care, the game is suspended. We now know that he had cardiac arrest caused by an epileptic seizure. He's 21, like, that's around the age that epilepsy can be diagnosed.
He is now, well, they say that there's no obvious ill effects, but so that's good for him. Hopefully everything continues to work out. The medical care handles it, right? But the other thing for me is I have no takes from watching Fiorentina against Inter.
Yeah, so I mean, let's take a team by team, I guess. Inter are what they've been, which is very good, but not great. Yes, and just a little bit worse, and mostly just a little bit worse defensively, which was always the question. And I think it's just mostly because they're a little bit older, and especially in midfield, just like the way it's been all together with Octave and Twine is striking just a little bit more in front of that back line.
And since that back three is really not particularly back three-ish, it's like a back three except one of the centerbacks really goes full-backing away consistently. The amount of overlaps that happen in an intergame is just a capital. If you watch an intergame, just track the overlaps of the wing back in the wide centerback. It's amazing.
They just keep overlapping each other to agree that it feels like they should end up off the pitch. It is true. I mean, we need the tactical nerds need to come up with a term for an overlap overlap. Yeah.
I don't really know what I would call it, let's like a, but yeah, and they're very, very good. There were those teams where there's a potential to sleep on them because they are literally no different than they have been either of the last two seasons. And you know, I think that that puts them as among the group of teams that can win Syria, but they are basically no different, maybe slightly worse, and Napoli are significantly better than they were last year. This seems like a better version of Adalanta than we saw last year.
Fiorentina are, I don't have a lot to say about Fiorentina, I suspect they won't be this good for the rest, like over the course of this season. But it has been, you know, they're under a new manager with sort of a new collection of talent. And I'm like, I would be pressed to explain to you why it was working. Yeah.
I mean, the, the, as far as I can tell, the way it is working, and they, they moved to Bincenzo and Italiano, took the Bologna job, they have a more defensive manager, and moist keen is having a huge season. Yeah. I mean, it may just be that like moist keen at 25, 26, not as old as you think, given that he's been around since he was 18, almost being a star for four years, and then totally being an afterthought for four years. It's just having a great year.
And maybe he's just finally having a great year. And that's, that explains it all. Yeah. I mean, he's, he accounts for well over a quarter of the team shots averaging more than four shots per 90s or good shots in good positions, you know, and they've got a bunch of guys who feed in the ball.
They've got, they've got winners, like, Oh, they've got Gosens is one of their full backs. Like, you know, that that's what they do. They feed them all the keen and it looks, and I don't know how long that can really last. They defend well and feed a good striker.
But it's not bad. Right. I mean, it is somewhat interesting that they have looked at moist keen and been like, yeah, he's a good striker and we're going to feed him the ball a lot. Cause like, I think most managers have not done that with him.
Yeah. Also, he hasn't been playing all the time. They do have, you know, green bars, faith, yes, seen oddly in midfield and he is a green bar merchant. Green bar merchant.
You want to move the ball forward off the pitch? Yeah. The ball, yes, he also keep the ball. He's really good.
Good. Good. Clip balls. That's a great top four cups.
Yeah. He has enough shots, creates, can create for other people and moves the ball to feel well and isn't a complete zero defensively. It's a really clear set of skills. I think that because he's not like 100% perfect in possession, he doesn't become like a target.
But yeah, this is again, you know, defensive set up where you sometimes just eat the ball to feel quickly. That's a great set to have. So that's the first of our like, difficult to explain teams and we're now coming to the, well, I guess I'll say, let's take you to the rest of the difficult to explain portion of the program. You talked earlier about how like maybe you've entered so the only team that can kill, kill games off with possession after they go ahead.
And like the secret to you, Ventus' success is that they are killing games off with possession before they go ahead. Like, that is the entirety of what they do. I mean, I think Tia Gomoto would point to their pass completion percentage, Destin Surya. I think meeting the best of the top leagues.
And yeah, what else could they, what else could they need to do? I believe we've talked about this a bit on social media, but it is incredibly fitting to me that he has inherited the mantle of football pervert manager from football pervert Frank Lampard. And yet they are absolutely opposite in what their preferred club meetings are, but could that be more on opposite ends of the spectrum on what their unusual desires for a football team are? I just think that that great desire is unconventional, show me, and then it's the passing map for the ball never goes near the penalty area.
That was benched in a very good job. Yeah, man. Like they just like keep the ball like we were discussing how Syria has this sort of half court feel to it. That isn't defensive necessarily, it's just turn it seems kind of taking turns with possession.
The 1980s ish, 90s ish, stereotypical Syria is that except incredibly defensive. Like you, you can't lose if the other team never gets a possession. And it's like, well, what if we lose the ball, we have to defend deep in our own thirds. So like we can't ever lose the ball because there's no other options.
And like the spirit of that is alive and well into our government played for many years in Italy and that is reflects those traditions. It's miserable to watch it. One reason it's not as bad as it could be just in terms of quality is that in coupe minors, they do have a guy who takes risks on the ball. They've got the one guy, the one guy who's allowed to do that.
And the last of which can kick up all very hard. And what the minors does is it takes that risk because he tries to play a risky pass to the ball. That's a full attack. Sometimes he'll do these or comes he said we'll do that for the weeks.
That's it. Yep. 100% that is all. And now we can go to the like, how do they can't keep getting away with this portion of the program.
Yeah. What the hell is up? You told me you had a lot of theory because I don't. Well, I don't have a theory of how they're doing it.
But what they're doing is they're not like a particularly good shot differential team, but they are an exceptionally good shot quality differential team. And I have no idea how because it is not a roster you look at and you're like, oh, yes, Nunu Tavares is an incredibly creative player who will obviously create only the best of shots for Lazios attackers. But Nunu Tavares leads to the honest, I don't know how they have put this squad together. I don't know if there is some bit of tactical brilliance that I am missing.
But clearly what they do is they take way better shots than you expected them to take giving their overall profile and they concede way less like like way worse shots for the opposite. Like, you know, they are very, very good at giving up only bad shots for the opposition. And I don't really know how to be honest. Yeah.
The one thing that is sort of notable to me is the number of minutes that they get for guys who are quite strikeery. Like Casa iOS is a pure striker, so more or less is Ulejia and the two of them have combined for about 20, 90s in 14 matches. They get two strikers on the pitch a lot. Ulejia as a winger, kind of.
And the shape of his production is striker shaped and but they don't lose anything defensively. And that's confusing to me. Yeah, I don't know. It doesn't like I get that you could create better chances and have a better attack by having two strikers on the pitch and having like a 10 in a winger, like this economy is a quite attacking winger, you know, they're feeding the ball up to them.
And you've got to, like, we know that he's good at running forward and crossing and cutting the ball back. That is what he's good at. But you pay the price for that because he's bad defensively. And one thing about Lazio, and we talked about this when we saw them live, actually.
They have a very old school tactical build up approach where most teams are not doing this anymore, where the center backs split wide and one of the midfielders, often Gen Dusi, but not always, drops between them to sort of captain the build up. And I think that does go some way to like explaining to Barricia success, right? He's very free in that system to get way up fields. But like, the reason teams are not doing that anymore is that it is very exploitable.
And it just seems to me that nobody has exploited it. And so maybe what you've got going on is like Newcastle light from a few years ago, when we were looking at Newcastle and Newcastle's numbers were amazing. And the two of us were sitting here kind of like, I think that when teams start to game plan for Newcastle and don't just sort of like treat Newcastle as a replaceable mid table team, this won't keep working. And I wonder if that's what's going on with Lazio.
And so the other thing with Lazio is that they have played a relatively easy schedule. So this weekend they are at Napoli, the next weekend that they are home to enter, and they also have a match shortly after Christmas home to Atalanta. So like, and so if you are correct, which I find very plausible, they've been doing some tactical stuff that has been working surprisingly well against teams that haven't quite expected it, these are teams that should be in position to exploit it. Like, what would make a lot of sense to me is that if the network that I run the power rankings table in at the end of the month, they will have fallen down out of like, solidly in the top group, but one of the weaker ones.
So that's Lazio. And I said solidly in the top of my power rankings, you know, if you've got Atalanta at the top and you definitely have a tiny little gap down to Lazio and then a tiny little gap down from them to Fiorentina. But in that really good group, along with Napoli and Inter and Juventus is no. Which, if you looked at the table, you wouldn't know it.
If you like looked at the, like, nobody who supports Milan is like, we're a great team that's gotten unlucky. Like, there is nobody who really sees what the numbers see in Milan. I'm like, me too? I don't really see it.
I mean, I think to some degree what's going on is the same thing that is going on with Christian Pulisic, right? Which is like, you look at Pulisic's numbers and they're legit, because he's taking not all that many shots, but only great shots and they're going in the net. And you're like, there's nothing mechanically about that statistical profile that suggests it has to progress, right? It's not like overperforming your XG where you're just like, hey, look, this doesn't keep happening.
This could keep happening. But it is the kind of profile that you look at, and you're like, I don't think this is going to keep happening. And that's sort of where I am with like Milan, and then they've dropped points so that their overall record doesn't really reflect their underlying numbers, but more closely reflects kind of like where I think they're going to end up. Maybe not quite as bad as actually their points total is now, but not like one of the top teams in Syria.
Yeah. And like, I always have a bad finishing season, which then adds to the bad values around him. But he's like, in the aggregate, he's been quite productive. And so, you know, a team that is mostly offensive, like they've got that sort of very Surya thing where they are quite defensive without defensive talent.
Yes. But just everyone is able to willing to, the manager to make them scale it all back a bit defensively, take up more defensive positions when they play. And so it works okay for defending. Right.
And then the thing about them is that they don't really attack a number, so they'll tell Hernandez to get forward from left back. But they're almost always playing a group of four attackers with a lot of flexibility. And like you see this with Pulisic, right, who is like nominally on the right wing, often occasionally on the left wing when they out doesn't play, but it's like free to follow the game and like move into like the 10 spaces and really do a lot of getting on the ball in attack. But they also do it where they like kind of run a two striker system out of it where whether it's Morata sort of what he's healthy playing as a 10 slash striker or Okafor sort of playing as a winger slash striker or the out moving from a wing and staying very, very high as almost a second striker.
They have a lot of flexibility. All right. Well, thank you. You might thank you, everyone, for listening.
That has been our coverage of the Saria title race that is also a top four race that is just a lot of fun. I am going to head to the courtyard and get some sort of frozen drink. If you are on vacation, I recommend you do that. If you are not, you can go to patreon.com slash double pivot where we have done a bunch of player profiles recently and there's more to come.
There is more double pivot out there. Cheers y'all. Cheers y'all.