Hello, and welcome to the Double Pivot, the world's most agreeable, soccer athletics podcast. I am Michael Caley, we are back. I'm just looking at the sorted XG table, looking at it over a couple of seasons, you know, it's how I process the world, it's how I process events in the world. And I'm looking at a Manchester United team that is playing about as well as they usually do.
Actually, if you adjust for a few, for schedule and red cards and stuff, they're playing a little better than they usually do. So I'm just confused here. They apparently fired Eric Tenhogg when they were happy with this level of performance for a couple of years. I don't know, man.
I'm joined by Mike Goodman. He's gonna try to explain this to me in terms that hopefully he'll explain to me. I think it's got something to do with, like, points in the table, and I'm not really sure. Mike, can you help me out here?
Mr. Furtherway as well, or please don't scribe his podcast or patreon.com slash Double Pivot. We are all hanging in there over there. Lots of fun discussion going on the book channel.
Lots of people roasting me over the Yankees and the other sports channel. I'm not happy about this one. Hey, look, teams have come back from three games down to win post-season. Yes, that is precisely how people are roasting me in the Discord channel.
Thank you very much. I still remember exactly where I was when Dave Roberts did that to me. Me, personally, as the protagonist of reality. As to your question, I do have a very simple answer.
Points, no points bad. And look, I think this really gets at the heart of what being analytics aware and somewhat analytics savvy can do for your team, right? I think you need someone in the decision making process to say, okay, you are okay with the performance this year. Here is the range of what the performance could have been.
Here is what the range of the performance of the next 10 games could be. If you hit a bottom, this isn't even like 99th percentile, right? Like 80th percentile, 75th percentile, like a matter is bad, but it's not like unheard of bad for these stats. Like, if you hit that percentile in that range, wait a minute.
And the answer is if 75th percentile bad over a stretch of 10 games is enough that you will fire the manager and you are already considering whether or not you want to make a change. It is insane. It is absolutely insane not to pull the trigger in the office. And I mean, that's just like a pure analytics consulting contribution to this discussion.
What are you going to do as you are sitting here contemplating making a decision if things go somewhat badly in the short term future? They gave him a contract extension? It's insane. This is what we said in the preview podcast that like this is how a few ounces don't go their way.
And they're in a really bad spot with a team that they like over the years, they not just being mostly not being in a house, but nonetheless, as in charge now, that's why that they built for this guy. Let's talk about that a little bit, because I do think that a lot of the discussion in the week of Tenhans firing has been about how they backed too many he felt. And I think that's like true to a pretty large degree in terms of like, which players they brought in were largely dictated by him. What does it mean to back the manager?
Like, one term for backing the manager would be, you know, talking about Liverpool signing Virgil van Dijk when you're in clock clothing, you need a great center back. But they went and got him, you know, they overruled clock to get solid instead of brand these sorts of things. And they spend lots of money. The team is very expensive.
The squad cost is humongous and they win and they back the manager. But that's not usually what people mean by it. Usually what they mean is that the manager has significant say or even gets to make the calls of what they get. And that is what happened at Manchester United.
And so like if you're in clock head struggled with the players that Liverpool had brought in, who were not his picks, they'd be an interesting mix of things to say there. But Eric Tanhag's role with the players that were brought in because they were the players that he wanted. I want to take a couple of specific examples here. And I think that the most specific example of the one that you are talking of the dynamic you were talking about is Antony, which is an absolute utter maximum level failure of a transfer.
That was also utterly predictable. It is perfectly reasonable for Eric Tanhag to come in and say, I need a fast, dribbly, inside-forward-ish attacking winger who can create things on his own, get shots, unsettled defenses, and he needs to be a top-level type player. I need a 90 million euro pound-whatever value player in this position. It is very important.
That's not unreasonable. Maybe Manchester United doesn't. Maybe they don't. But that dynamic is not unreasonable.
It is insane for Manchester United not to have a process where he comes in and says, and that guy's Anthony. And they don't say, okay, now tell me what you really think. But, and see, the point of the Antony transfer is that it has actually, I mean, putting some things aside that are very, very bad on the football field worked out better than I would have expected. He gave him one perfectly acceptable season of football.
As a squad player on Champions League team, I was surprised how well it turned out. That's how bad this signing was. Right, 100%. On the flip side, at this point in time, he's also sort of getting blamed for Cassimiro.
And on that one, I've got the kind of a lot more sympathy for him and a lot less sympathy for Manchester United. They had no midfields, like zero. And you remember the first three games, four games of the Eric Tanhag tenure, where he was trying to play the tactics he went to play. And his midfield was like, I don't know, just like evaporating.
And you're like, he may just be gone in six games. Like they needed a midfield. And they were so talented depleted that like, I think we said at the time, you just kind of got like, you got to understand Cassimiro won't be good in 18 months and still kind of like the bullet and make this purchase. And, you know, what is it?
30 months after that purchase, everybody's like, look up at Cassimiro. It's like, yeah, that's the whole thing. Like you, you spent a massive amount of money to stabilize the team for one season. You did stabilize the team for one season.
And then you're not understanding of what you had done and what needs to be done as the next step once you've done, spending a bit spending too much money to solve a problem, to allow you to take the next step forward. Like you can't make that a pattern, but doing it once you can kind of defend it, especially if you've got Manchester United's money, you can kind of imagine it. But you have to understand that that's what you're doing, that you are sinking a lot of money at negative EV overall. And you are going to have to manage the fallout from it and be ready to solve the problems that arise next.
And they're just, but no planning like that whatsoever from Tanhaga from anyone else at United. I mean, there might have been, I like maybe they just legitimately thought that Mason Mount was the next answer. Yeah, but that's crazy. Like, Mason Mount doesn't, right, right.
I mean, that's crazy. The actual ability to do talent evaluation here has been off the charts bad. And is that 10 hogs fault? Well, it might be if you're going out and hiring 10 hogs because he says, I can do it and I want all that power.
But it's also a bit just to be nice fault for listening to somebody say I could do that I want all that power and then not deciding to hire somebody else. And this is just the pattern we get into over and over and over and over again. And the pattern that you would hope that any of us when they came in was supposed to drag them out of at the ownership level. But then like you see what Last Summer was where like, great.
I understand it's a quick turn out, right? But you still have Delic, Mazzarali, and Xerxes show up and you're like, well, who's making these decisions? And you don't get rid of Tanhaga. And then you do that and you give him a new contract when again, it is just like baseline level, like connection with reality stuff.
Like, who is making these decisions and how are you going to make better ones? Does D natural's gonna make better decisions out? Maybe? I don't know.
If you look at where Manchester United were last summer and you take the most generous line, the most sort of in line with baseline management fan opinion line. And you say the really bad numbers were a function of an injury crisis and having to play players the back line who simply were not good enough. And there's this like, there's this vicious cycle, there's this vicious circle. And you say, there are players on this team whose skills are not turning into outcomes on the pitch at the rate that they should, players like Menu who we can see the value but it's not coming yet.
All of those things, you say all of those things. Well, what you're saying is that you need a new manager. And what you're saying is you really need a new project because you are not getting the value level you need to be getting out of the players that you have. And it's not so it's not just a question of like, bring in a new manager and they will make these players worth these players were brought in to fit together in this Tanhaga transition system with a pretty traditional back four.
And if that's the thing that you are planning to do, you're really limited in what your next coach is. Like the situation this summer should have been an opportunity to start over. And the fact that they didn't take it, the fact that instead they showed up what was wrong for Tanhaga. And now they are now or a couple months into the season, a few bounces didn't go their way.
I bring dubious VAR call didn't go their way. And they're sacking him. Like this team is not built to be rebuilt over the course of the season. This team is what it is.
I it's just like it speaks to such a bad process last summer. Yeah. And I don't know how much benefit of the doubt we should keep the decision makers for. Oh, it was fast.
Because a little fast didn't stop them from making management decisions about how the business side of the club is wrong. It's like shops. They came in, they look the old was wrong, agree or disagree, whatever. I mean, and they were like, hey, we need to make this more cost effective.
What's people you're losing your job? Meanwhile, on this morning side of things, they spent more money than that to give Tanhaga a contract extension when they didn't have to, because they weren't ready to make a decision. And I'm supposed to look at that and think, oh, yeah, these guys are going to make the next call correctly. No, I don't.
Like they didn't make any truly disastrous signing decisions. Like I buy that having Ashford worth and NIOs has some analytics people means they're going to cut off the like really bad left tail of signings. They have to be stuff. What you need is much larger right now than just don't make the dumbest signings.
And the reports of Ruben Orena, we'll talk about on another podcast. But one of the things I was thinking about as I was looking at this squad is how much they are built for the very specific kind of back for front six tactics that Eric Tanhaga likes to run. He likes, he likes two centerbacks who can take a lot of plays. He likes to very traditional fullbacks that mostly stay back to allow the front six to do kind of insane interchanging to get the move the ball into the penalty area.
And this is not a squad that had just to a lot of other things because of how much they were built for this very back for front six approach to football. And like, not only that, but we've been talking since the beginning of Tanhaga's tenure about how they needed a talent refresh and an elevation of the general talent level. And that the argument for stability under Tanhaga was, well, you're not getting back there overnight. So you have a chance to like, okay, yes, you make a kiss mirror signing to stabilize team, but then you bring in a bunch of young talent, don't be super concerned about like positional needs, just go out and get like good young players who you think can get possibly great, but likely pretty good over the next three to four years.
And then you can add in pieces around it. Instead, the exact opposite, what they did was get okay players who could play the way that Tanhaga wants to play. Instead of like, let's not worry about maximizing points. Now, let's make sure we keep our ceiling high for three years, five years, seven years down the line.
What they said was, I am not going to lower the cap down the line to give us the best suited collection of talent right now. And they just weren't remotely good enough to do that. And then you give up on Tanhaga understandably, and you have made very little progress towards an overall general talent refresh. Now, I think there's a couple of saving graces, basically like, go not to a minute, right, who like come up through the system at this point, and to Tanhaga's credit, get pretty aggressively fast-tracked into the, if not the starting 11, at least the senior squad.
And both of them look like very good young players, both of them look like the kind of player I am sitting here saying they should be coming out of mine. And then you have some of these pieces who conceivably fall under that rubric. But man, you have wasted so much time and money on the Antonese and the maps and like the Rashford extension. The Rashford extension is a lot of money.
You know, like, like, and then you're just gonna start over again. Masrawi kind of falls into that category too. He really does. Masrawi is the exact example of spending quite a solid amount of money to fill a hole in Tanhaga's specific squad to be better right now.
Like somewhat better right now. And it just speaks to like not, not thinking about what is the, what are we maximizing for? Are we maximizing for next year, two years from now, three, four years from now? And the answer should have been obviously we have to be maximizing for two to four years from now.
Our best players, our teenagers, and our level is bad. Like, it's, you don't get much more obvious than that. That's right. It's 26.
Good player. And injury prep. 26 and injury prep. Good player.
Good traditional fullback. We can apparently fill in at the 10 in a pinch. But it's exactly the wrong type of player to be targeting. And if you hire a guy with the understanding that like we want you to lead the rebuilding of our club.
And these are the guys that he's targeting. Then you have a major problem with who you've hired, regardless of results on the field. And so it should not take you then 10 games of running kind of bad to be like, you're out. And they obviously weren't able to quickly layer in on top of him people to improve the system dramatically, because they still went out and did this.
But even had they layered those people in, how amenable would somebody like 10, how have been to the alternate approach? Anyway, this is just the opposite of having a system in which everybody is pulling in the same correction, which is what you need. Yeah. And like they did go out and fill holes, you know, and like, it's just a humongous amount of money, but he's young enough that it's not that bad and he's quite good.
It must always useful. We'll see if the next manager uses you, guard taking should be useful. And the team is right now in the table below their performance level. They are much closer to being like, you know, 8th to 10th in the Premier League.
And that is like not bad compared to how good they were last year. We did our preview. We had them seventh with much more downside risk, the upside possibility. And that's not far off from where they are a little bit worse, maybe.
I think it should be better than this. And the next manager can come in and probably get some wins. But it was hard to see how it wasn't a lost season in pre-season, right? Unless, you know, okay, we'll make the Europa League, like, you know, a couple bounces go our way, which usually does tend to happen in Memphis.
You know, we get six, we get the Europa League. Sure. But the, and this has been at the bottom of that range. And so they should be competitive and okay.
But I just sort of think back about like our preview and how we're like, okay, they're bottom of this, bottom of this group of top teams. We've got them in seventh, very well might fall into eighth. And I feel like I'm saying the same thing, but now with a different tone of voice, like they probably aren't the 13th best team in the Premier League. They're saying before the season, they're having enough money and filled some gaps that that like seventh eighth is fair for them.
And I still believe that it's just that that's bad. Right. Like it wouldn't be bad if what you were doing was demonstrating there was growth potential for five and seven years from now. Like it's, Hoyle had hadn't been hurt and was playing all the time and Darnachia was playing all the time and maybe was playing all the time.
Like, and you were saying, like, quite clearly, this team is being groomed to hand over to those guys. Like, okay, you live with it. And if you had a manager who it seems was like thinking down those lines, right? That is manifestly still not the case.
I will say, like, I think we'll talk about, if it ends up being Amorine, we'll talk about sort of how we play is in the style of it and how it fits into all these things. But let me tell you already, following on the heels of the Amorine rumor, it's not from rumors is wrong. Like, they're negotiating is Manchester United's next move must bring in Jocarish. And it's like, the thing that I'm seeing with the decision-making process is that, like, I sort of think that yes, that's what's going to end up walking down that path if they go this way.
Is that they're going to do this? And they're going to think, okay, let's go buy Jocarish. Who's 27? And like, repeat the same as ethics.
Yeah, like, I don't see how this team, after the amount of money that they've spent on Hoyland and Xerxes, both signings I was like, not a big fan of. But now you'll be both of those sightings. And you have so many holes elsewhere in the team, like, you got to stick with those guys. And you can, if those guys aren't good enough after a year or two, you can try to move on.
But if they're giving up on them, that is like a really bad sign. There is a fine line between being priced into a bad gamble and having some, throwing money after some costs. And quickly, I don't know which side of the line they are on on their collection, how forwards? I tend to agree that like, especially with with Xerxes, Xerxes is a guy who was lower cost, lower ceiling, probably competent in a handful of roles alone, you don't play too many minutes.
And like, there's like, whatever, like he can be a contributor, even if you don't end up leaning on him and God, he should end up leaning on him. But quite like, there's a guy who you bought very, very young because he had a massive physical skills. And like, I sort of think you are just sort of like, even as the EV of becoming a star, a star shrinks, you're sort of priced into another season or two hoping for it. But especially as you say, given how many holes there are elsewhere in this team.
If Hoyland is available at the price that he would fetch on the market right now, there are a lot of teams that would be very smart to make that bet. Right, exactly. Which honestly, maybe if you're united, you want to do it. But like, no, I think you owe it to whatever process it was that ended up with Hoyland to like, give him the chance to be good at Manchester United.
He's so very young and he's got massive physical skills. You also have one good young winger. Like, maybe at best, you've got two good young midfielders. Like, you've got, this is what we're saying over the season, over the off season, talking about Xerxes.
That it's just an odd place to focus because the holes are elsewhere. And if they do it again, like, now that they've already got two of them. It's really not good. And there were eras of soccer where you could run your team this way, right?
Where you could bring in a new manager and you had tons of financial so you could, you know, shift out as it goes on and bring in Gareth Bell, right? Or you could, like, all of a sudden, Swab shopping and tons of Antonio Cruz or whatever other like set of like moving the pieces around the chessboard you wanted to do, going from stars to stars. You want, can't do that now because other teams don't want to play that way either and aren't going to just move stars with you because they want to get something more tangibly beneficial out of the process. But also, you're mentioning that you don't have enough talent right now.
And your squad is not good enough to play in that division. You need to up the overall talent on this team. And you need to do that first and foremost before you start worrying about fit, worrying about playstyle, worrying about any of this. It seems like they are looking to hire a new manager.
I kind of assumed when this happened that the plan was rude, that the plan was we're going to save money. The reason we stuck with 10 hog was because we didn't want to, we didn't want to sink a lot of money into a manager over the off season when we weren't fully ready to do it. Like, there would be a case for that. It would be a case against the transfer strategy that they had, but it would be a case for that.
But then if you're going to make a move to a new manager mid-season, the worst time to make a move to a new manager, when you're going to have to sink more money into that, that's odd. And I just kind of assumed that it would be okay. We've got rude, we should need better than this. Maybe the vibe will be good and we'll get something out of it.
It's still early enough. And then we'll figure it out in the next, we'll figure it out next summer. One thing I kind of think is that they don't trust themselves to be able to have a decent stretch under rude and then not extend him as the perfect manager. I mean, that's symptomatic, man.
I know. Look, better teams than them. Better run teams than them have had that problem before. Also, exactly the same team as them before.
But you've seen teams fall into that trap a lot. And I sympathize as to how that happens from the players, our human beings approach. And everybody's playing okay, it's feeling good and running hot. And then you're going to be like, what we're not firing the manager anyway, not rewarding them for good performance.
And the players are like, what the fuck? I'm sympathetic to that. But that's another reason why you don't want to bring the manager back in the summer and then fire him before November. Like, it's one thing if you were really, really confident in your manager and you were really, really confident in town.
And so, I'll stretch the games like this, didn't impact you. And it wasn't going to be until March, if things were going badly, they were going to be like polar record. Because then you can hand it to root for a month and a half, right? Or two and a half.
And sort of like, hey, you've got 10 games, just like Ryan Giggs, just like Michael Carrick, like you're definitely not coming back. Just to see it out. And then we're going to make a decision. But when you hand it to a guy in October, it's a lot tougher.
Which is like, you know, if that was a possibility, you should have known that in the summer. This is the podcast. Right. I mean, just like, the thing I will just, I've said it 10 times, I'm going to keep coming back to it is like, it is a very basic way that being analytics literate and actually having people who are sort of savvy with the math part of things in the decision making process can help you.
When you when you were making a decision, somebody in the room has to say, if we run bad, and this is what running bad looks like, what will we do? And how should that impact? What we do right now. And like, look, look, every organization has done the thing where they're like, hey, yeah, yeah, yeah, if we run bad, we won't be deceived by it.
We won't make a change. And we'll say of course that we believe in it, et cetera, et cetera. And then the time comes and I'm like, jk, jk, bye. But you don't get the sense that that's what happened here.
Like, I don't get the sense that that's what happened here. You know, and it is just so apparent that this eventuality was possible and not considered. This is what you said at the very beginning. Like, if a 75th percentile performance based on your expectations going into the season, what should have been your expectations going to the season leads to a massive shift in approach.
It means you didn't plan in the summer, in the correct way. There we go. I guess we'll have to kick around. All right.
Well, we will be back and talking about talking about the media. I don't we could have done it on the bottom door at some point. I've enjoyed myself the Bellandor story. It's wonderful.
It's delightful. It's everything you want. Really, all I have to say on the Bellandor story is thank you for the traffic. It was it was it was it was a high traffic day on the olcbsports.com slash soccer website.
Thank you based warranty now. Cheers y'all.