Hello and welcome to the Double Pivot, the World's Most Irreable Soccer Analytics Podcast. I am Michael Kalie, we are back, and we are into that stretch of time between like the 10th and 20th, 25th game of the season, where it is still quite early to be talking about like a race, the dynamics of what will come up as the title race, as the relegation race, as the top four or possibly top five race, those will be settled by the matches that happen over the next month or two. At the same time, we have also gotten enough data on all of these teams that we are not sort of looking back and adjusting our evaluations of them as quickly. We are sort of taking in the data and be like, well, that more or less, that's a little bit off, but we're going to mess with it too much.
So what we wanted to do this week, we got a question from the Discord that we'd really like to spend some time on, and I think it's a good question that gets out a lot of interesting stuff. We wanted to take a minute and sort of like assess the things that people are talking about and why I don't think they're particularly worth talking about, and then we'll do the one thing I wanted to do, and yeah, we're going to talk about what we're not talking about, and then talk about what we are. Let's do it. The music on the way is Whalers, please don't subscribe, make us happy.
It's my guest's picture, and I'm going to come and double pivot. Kelly is nodding at me through the computer machine that I did not save the Whalers. Give me one more joke like that, come hang out at our Discord where you can find out all about the backstory of all sorts of weird parts of double pivot life, and why toddlers love our show. Also, Manchester City are fine.
Yeah, they drew three games in a row in the league against good opponents, but also they dominated Spurs. They were solidly better than Liverpool, which is particularly impressive. And sure, they had a close game against Chelsea where things were a bit messy. But like if the other games had followed the structure of the Chelsea match, the reaction might have been, oh, something's weird here, something's wrong here, this is not our Manchester City.
But although the results were all the same, the other two matches did not follow that pattern at all. And I would generally just sort of like chalk that one weird Chelsea match into the average, and you do that, and the average you have is the best team in the Premier League. So, yeah, I mean, I do think there's a little bit of this where we have been on the Manchester City or maybe not like as great as they were down the stretch last season, like creamed for a while, but also we're on the Manchester City may very well figure out a way to do that by the end of the season, as has generally been their pattern in the last several years. So like they are exactly what we thought they were as it goes.
And Chelsea, they're moving up the table somewhat slower than might have been expected, but that's all, that's all normal. Manchester United, I think we get on Manchester United. I believe we get a podcast, how bad are Manchester United before they won four games in a row? I honest to God, the fascinating thing about Manchester United was that they're winning four games in a row, literally convinced nobody.
This is very unusual in Manchester United World, we're generally speaking, like we have seen the cycle of Manchester United, like, nation talking themselves into Ole at the wheel after like very similar sets of circumstances. And they have it this time, which is correct. Yeah, and Arsenal have also, Arsenal started attacking a little bit more, definitely too early to say that it is one thing or the other. But you know, Arsenal take was their attacks should probably be better than this and their defense should be worse than this.
And if that happens, that just maps out into an excellent team. And so a couple of games that does appear to maybe be the case, they're just regressing to the mean, which means both the attack getting better and the defense getting worse, and then being a top level team somewhat short of Man City, but it's football, they can end up beating them anyway. And but not in like an unsustainable way, which is what they sort of seem to be early in the season. You know, it just sort of seems like we have Manchester City and two teams in the realm of football in Manchester City, which is pretty close to what we thought we were going to have this year.
I think this is the top of their range that we expected, but other than that, we're pretty close to where we thought we'd be. Manchester City and I don't know worse than where we thought they'd be. Newcastle are weird, but like, I mean, for the most part, the season has been interesting, but not surprising. And Newcastle are climbing up the table as, you know, projected based on their difficult early season schedule and excellent numbers, even if you take some air out for the red cards and stuff, it still comes out quite good.
They're climbing up the table. So very good chance that like the question of whether the Premier League gets a fifth spot in the Champions League is going to be very important for whether we have, you know, top of the table other than title to talk about as the season goes on. Yeah, because Tottenham, Villa, Manchester United race for fifth seems like it may be very in the cards and that would in fact be quite interesting. Yeah, and all Chelsea need is like one little hot water result and they can be in that as well, which is wild since they're in 10th place.
All right. I mean, I think that's where we're at. This is all right. So let's talk about like big box office topics that'll draw the listens like the manager of Brentford.
So this is a question from a Macker in the discord says podcast idea. I agree, matter. What would Thomas Frank have to achieve to get offered a men's aerial job with a traditional top 16? If he did get such a job, how do you think he would do?
Anyhow, like Frank wasn't thought to be top six caliber, but he's doing fine despite the doubters. So first of all, anyhow was not offered a job at a top 16. Like let's start there. I mean, Newcastle are now one of the six best teams in the Premier League, but the big six did not include Newcastle, why had he how offered that job?
That he how was not offered a job at the top six? I kind of want to attack this from two angles here. Like one is the question asked, which is what would you have to do to get that job, which would be a step next step in his career forward. The other angle that I want to attack this from is like why is I think it's correct, but why is the framing here that the next step is only the Premier League top six?
I mean, Thomas Frank is not English. It's not British. It's Danish. Like there was a time when like getting a job offer from Tottenham for Thomas Frank would have been decidedly worse in a career progress than somewhere between like half a dozen and ten teams around Europe.
And I think we all agree now that that is not the case. And I think that might be where we start here. Yeah. So I think that like if we're looking at who is going to have the money to give a competitive contract to a significant manager, and then on top of that, what other things make a managerial gig highly appealing?
What seems pretty clear from the way that things work in the Premier League right now is that the not only the traditional big six, really big seven with new castles money, if they ever get unhappy with any how, I'm sure they can go and hire a top manager with money because people like that in exchange for their services. I think that then you look a little bit further down the list in the Premier League and like obviously you have Unai Emery at that Aston Villa as a major. You have you have Dessertie going to Brighton as sort of a hot up and coming manager. And I think that you continue to see managers get picked up for jobs at the mid table level in the Premier League when Premier League teams have these open seats and go looking, they spread a wider net for what the manager they're looking for is when they do that, it seems quite clear they can compete with pretty much everyone besides a few teams on the continent.
It's not clear that managerial salaries are that much higher in the Premier League. These are not well publicized and there does seem to be a fair amount of variance between them from what we've got. It would, it seems to me, is that basically if you have a truly open manager search and you end up trying to get someone that you would be competing, maybe that someone that would be interested in an EC Milan job, if you couldn't talk them into this one, you got the other lot of money. And so you get like those managers make a lot of money and you can pay a smaller amount for sort of hanging on to your manager, the latest report of Thomas Frank's salary for instance, it was only a couple of millions that would not be totally out of line with a mid level manager in other leagues.
So those jobs are now at the middle, if a team wants to, they can choose to allocate the money to go for a major talent. And there's just not that many clubs in Europe outside of the very top that are going to compete with the middle of the Premier League. So I think there's a handful of things going on here. One major, major thing is that we have seen over the last five to ten years, English clubs be like, all right, we go by all the players, we can also go get the managers from Europe to come here and coach.
And this is a good idea. This didn't used to be the case, right? You did not used to have managers like when I am really asked Villa and Donnie Ariola at Gornmouth further down the table, who would come from other countries and coach in England? It was weird.
It was different when Chelsea went and brought in managers who were not English. And then for a time you had a period where like the top couple of teams would experiment by having a manager from the continent. Chelsea notably doing this all the time. Obviously, Arsene Wenger comes in and you know, revolutionizes things in Arsenal, but it was not typical.
And then you have Muwino and you have Benitez. And okay, now the top teams in England, right? The top teams will go and get whoever the top managers are in the world. But it is relatively recent that this filters all the way down throughout the Premier League.
And what you expect to happen is eventually there to be some balance where there aren't those jobs for English managers that might go elsewhere. But other countries are not interested in doing this. Just as you said that like it's not necessarily that England are paying their managers more. It's just that they can if they want to to bring in a specific target.
The continent can't do that. And given that it would cost more for an English manager or less likely to do that than to hire domestically. Plus there is a very real imbalance in language in like the amount of people who are not native English speakers who learn English or who are like set up to learn English or who are coming into an English squad with many English and other language speaking players versus the reverse. And we have seen it for a handful of English managers who have gone abroad for all sorts of weird and contingent regions like David Moyzer, like Gary Neville, and Spain.
These managers have struggled. We'll still in France is like the only exception here in like recent memory. So you really do have this glut coming into England. But because of all of these imbalances and this is more of a little bit of a discord, going from Brentford to British adorbing doesn't seem like a clear step up right now.
You know, Carl and Gilaide and Rafa Benitez both left top England jobs and eventually went through Napoli before going to the level of England jobs and elsewhere and re-almodated because that's how the world works. I don't think Thomas Frank is going to Napoli, right? And Napoli haven't gone through their own manager upheavals recently. Like, I heard Ruby Garcia and then settled on Walter Mazzari as an intern of this season.
Like nobody, like they're not reaching for big names. All of the Italian jobs right now, basically, it's Joseph Marino and Italian managers. And so this is just a thing that is developing. And it means that for your like middle class manager in England, there really are very few jobs that are obvious steps up.
That's just what it means. Yeah. And so one thing with Thomas Frank in particular, and why he comes up here, I think it's just really worth emphasizing that Brentford had consistently had wages and revenue well in the bottom half of the Premier League. This is a team that really has been run on a relative shoestring.
And so what Brentford are able to get out of the talent that they can afford, which is consistently like solidly in the Premier League performance, is he is beating that wage bill. And he's now done it for a couple seasons in a row. And that is the sort of performance that obviously gets noticed. That is on a first step objective question.
He's doing the thing you want to see a manager do. He's getting more out of his talent as measured by the amount that is paid for it. Right. And I kind of think he deserves a big shot.
I think he's a really good manager. Look, there are other guys. I thought Grandpa was a good manager. I thought he deserved a shot.
He shot did not go well. Like sometimes shots do not go well. I tweeted this last week or something. I was like, I wonder if Frank could turn down the Manchester United job because it is the only job out there that you think, oh, well, maybe he would have like maybe like the stars would align in that way.
And the other jobs that you could see him getting are of the Baruchadortman vintage. The AC Milan vintage maybe. You know, but like I think it is a real question of what did Thomas Frank leave? Brentford for AC Milan.
I don't know. And that's wild. Yeah. And that's just a total sea change from the way the world used to work.
And one thing that you mentioned that we were talking here before the podcast is that another path for managers that existed for a period of time was the international job path. And those have become just totally secondary gigs that tend to go to sort of, you know, somebody who is part of the national system or a manager who kind of wants to cycle a brick in their career rather than in any way like this is the step you take to then go get the big job that you want. Right. And honestly, to be fair, if you were to say, okay, like make odds on where Thomas Frank will coach after Brentford, then the Danish national team, coachy Denmark might be the top choice here.
It really might. But, you know, I just think that there are everything is narrowed down a lot. And even for guys, even guys taking a break from a managerial career, like Italy cycles through them, Louis and we came to Spain. There are a lot of examples here.
Southgate and DeChamps are career international managers, right? Like they're not, they're not going to get in a high level club job. Germany now is doing that. But like they tried to do that before and it went incredibly badly.
You know, so I just sort of think that the contours of managing really have quietly changed a ton in the last decade. You're getting younger managers. They are more often to be failed players for one reason or another as opposed to retired successful players. They often have failed like in heavy air quotes.
Like it's often it's being injured when you were young for example. But you know, the typical path to the top of having a full career and then going into management is less. If you look at sort of the top echelons right now, like McKellar has the only guy who's that guy. And his path is weird too, because this is for San Josef, which is exceedingly rare for 14.
You know, guys like Pat have been around forever entering their early 50s, which is like the same age as Thomas Frank. It used to be guys the age of 10, both is just a little more common. Yeah, I wonder if this one thing I've been wondering about as we're going through these teams, a big part of this story is that the city and Liverpool jobs have been held by one person for a very long time in managerial terms and they continue to be quite successful. Arteza is now being an Arsenal for a fair while now and it's hard to see exactly what it would take to get him out given what they were willing to sit through at the beginning of it.
When they would have been much more reasonable to be unhappy with him then, like how bad would he be unhappy with him now after what he's achieved. And I do wonder to what degree some of these teams at the top end, which see all of the synergies you get from keeping a coach that you continue to have, like you don't lose out on having to get rid of players that don't fit the new coach. You don't lose out on having to sign the players for the new coach. You don't lose out on having to build the relationship between the coach and the rest of the club back up again.
And if there is a relative tendency, especially at these clubs that are run somewhat more like businesses to really not want to move quickly out on coaches, you get less turnover, you also got the capacity to sign the very best ones as Liverpool and City did. If that's going to have a real effect, they're talking about a very small number of jobs of making fewer of them be available over time. So we have seen this dynamic before in history, right? Arsen Wenger, Alex Ferguson, Raffa Benitez and Chelsea, right?
Like that's what was going on during that time period. Chelsea, part of the reason that Chelsea got their reputation for being especially trigger happy with managers, when they are not and were not more trigger happy than most teams are, is that it was in comparison to long tenures for their primary competitors at the top of the table in Arsenal Manchester United. And Liverpool during the big four stretch of time. Now the thing is, at that time, the rest of Europe was still in it, like had lots of teams that were considered quite elite, that would happily pay money for a manager and that that manager would feel like, oh, my expectations to go try to win the championship, right?
And it's that period of time in which we are cycling through managers quickly, instead of just alternating between two, apparently, you know, that you get inter and AC Milan and Napoli and Juventus, you know, sort of as teams in Italy that are destination jobs. Even as Juventus, like, Conte saves for three years and then Allegri stays for a long time. But you know, this is the period of time where Napoli goes through Raffa and Anshiladi and a number of international managers. You know, this is Josie Mourinho, this Chelsea Real Madrid, and Inter during this period of time.
So there's there's things are somewhat cyclical, but when you put the pieces together right now, what you have is both a fairly insurance group of managers at the top in England and a fairly unappealing group of European jobs. So it's an interesting sort of combination of circumstances. One thing I'm also interested in with specifically Frank and Brentford is we talked about when they first came up, we were somewhat skeptical of Brentford remaining in the Premier League because they had been a good, not great championship team. Like, not so dissimilar from, you know, recently relegated sides such as both.
She actually had not been allocated yet. She actually did the first time. Exactly. Which I know, again, had one impressive season.
Like, teams that come in a solid second in the championship and don't make a lot of changes. And on top of that, they were a team that was pretty open and attacking. They had, they attacked through possession and they were vulnerable to being counter-attacked defensively. And in particular, you know, for the most part, there is a, in general, there is a tendency because of how unbalanced the top and bottom of the Premier League are.
At the very top, you win titles with attack. And at the very bottom, you get relegated because of your defense. Those are the areas where those teams can truly be like elite or the opposite of that. That's where more difference can be made.
There's a limit to how many, how few goals you can score or how few goals you can concede. There is no limit to how many goals you can score and how many goals you can concede. And so that tends to be where there's larger costs or larger gains. And so again, another concern about Brentford.
And instead they came up, changed the way they played, became a very good defensive team that had less of the ball, that was very well protected against counter-attacks and that tended to attack on the break. And I think that because that is now what they have been now for a couple of seasons, I can imagine someone being worried about, okay, how does Thomas Frank's football scale? But this wasn't Thomas Frank's football in the championship. This is what he's chosen to do with this talent.
And the other thing is that this season, we are seeing some changes. He looks like he's trying to get this team to do somewhat more on the ball. I don't want to overstate it, but they have gone from nearly like second, I think second bottom in the Premier League in past completion to 13, 14. And in particular what they are doing, and I think this is quite notable, they have not increased their passing by having lots more touches in the back.
The areas that they have increased their touch volume the most are in the middle of the pitch and to a meaningful degree in the final third of the penalty area. So they have increased the amount they have in the ball, but they've increased about the ball by having it in better areas. And the attack has improved. They are just spending more time doing this all.
They're still quite direct. They are still getting a lot of XG for relatively few penalty area touches, but penalty area touches have gone up from 21 last season per 99 per 90 this season. So they are showing as he has this team for longer, more capacity to expand their playstyle, which I think again along with the shift that he made when they came up the Premier League is a very positive indicator. You know, I just think just gets to one of the ways to start to think about managerial longevity, which is that.
I started to think of it as a threshold that you could get over. We then you start getting these extra gains and returns, like keeping a manager who has been mediocre for a year, for a second year, because you don't want to change things. I don't know that that gets you a lot in and of itself. Year two to year three, I'm not sure.
Like if the manager is not good enough now saying we want to keep them because we think that consistency is good for its own sake, I think in those early stages, I'm not sure I buy that. So that's the point. And again, this may just sort of be like, you know, the managerial version of the plane that flies back with the, you know, with the, the, the blood holes and all the places on the wing and you're like, Oh, right. No, those are the, those are the non vulnerable places.
It may just be that the managers that make it are the ones that then like are good enough to be giving you gains over the long term, but like clearly at a certain point, whether it's Frank at Redford or Arteta at Arsenal or perhaps in this system at Manchester City, like you build a cohesive group that gives you increasing returns to something. And clearly, Redford's ability with Frank to change how they play is in no small part because Frank has been at Redford forever. But I think what we saw when we see like what happened at Chelsea, for example, is that it doesn't necessarily translate. Grand Potter worked well at Brighton, but he didn't work well in the first year.
And it took a couple of years until you really then start to get into that group. I mean, you really did over time see those individual terms, those increased sort of like returns to consistency. But if you're not good enough at the beginning, like you're not good enough to get there to get those returns and you will never get those returns at a new place. So like it's all fine and good for that a team to look at Thomas Frank and be like, well, we see what he's done and we want that for us for like five or 10 years.
But like they're having seen him be successful at another place for five or 10 years does not give you a guarantee that he will be successful at your place for one or two years in the way he needs to be to start getting all of that from five to ten. Unless like Arsenal, you just say, you know, this is our guy. Right. Could have been wrong.
Like that's the thing. Could have been wrong. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
I think that that's a it's an interesting question of what goes into that decision for a club. I would still say that in Arsenal, it was basically an article of faith that our title was that guy. And I think there were reasons, lots of contingent reasons why that faith came to be, including the fact that he had formerly played for the club. But I don't like it wasn't something you could see in the results.
Hey, also one cops. I think that that that makes it a lot easier to manage and have something to celebrate. You get a few breaks in a knockout tournament and it makes it a lot easier to stand by somebody. And the fact that it worked though has definitely made me think more about a the value of just sticking with that faith because you know, are there games to be had from having someone for a while, even if they're not great, even if you weren't right about Arteta, you know, what we're getting.
And the other question I have is what were the indicators looking back that there was something there. The one that I'm sort of like harped on is, and we talked about this with Arteta at the time, was that it was very clear that he got in their Institute of style of play and they played like he trained the players to play in a certain way, develop them develop the relationship between themselves to have this this strange system where they would possess and allow the other team to possess. And I wasn't sure it was good, but it was highly distinctive. And being able to be distinctive, being able to train players into distinctive patterns of play and develop those relationships, that's an important part of a coach's job.
If they can do that, maybe it is easier from there to figure out a, how do I then make this work better and b, who are the players who will make this work better. One of the things with Graham Potter at Chelsea was that like that just wasn't in, there was not a, this is the thing that they're doing, which is like not great, moved around week to week and it didn't stay in place. And I definitely wonder if like that is possibly an indicator in the other direction, but these are all like very broad claims. And as I am working on how do I form studies to look at things in football using analytics, how do I use the now, you know, 13, 14 years of data that we have accumulated in the stats era, that's not nearly enough data to managers.
We are decades from having really good data sets to do stuff about managers in any kind of like valuation. The other thing I would say here, as it relates to Artetta and Thomas Frank and this idea of finding a guy for longevity is that Arsenal was, was Michaela Tedot's first time in charge. So if you were going to a priori say, which managers do you expect to improve over their first three years in a job, you would take the guy that had never managed before, you would take the guy that has had a 10 year career somewhere else. Like the expectation of the guy who was managed 10 years before is he might end up being good, he might end up not, he might end up being good, he might end up not, you know, the way he interacts with the talent we have here, they might work, he might maybe, well, but in terms of his ability as a manager, whatever that is, it is much more fully developed.
He has faced many of the sort of day to day challenges of like being the boss. The new guy is not. So if you're going to invest in sticking with the guy, it's very reasonable that you prioritize the guy whose first job it was, was doing just well enough, instead of even like a grand potter who when he comes to the Premier League obviously has this professional history, but by the time he goes from Brayton to Jesse, has now been a Premier League manager for a while. So, you know, all of these things get tossed in the hopper.
So to bring it all the way back around, I think Thomas Wright deserves a shot at a top level job. For Thomas Frank to get a shot at a top level job, I think he would need to have a fairly expensive definition of what a top level job is that includes a number of clubs that are fairly unlikely to ever go beyond the round of 16 of the Champions League. Does he? I don't know.
Or maybe he'll get shot at a chest of the United States. Yeah, it seems unlikely that Brentford are going to become a team that invests money in losing money on football in the way that Aston Villa and Brighton have to make themselves a into a team that, you know, okay, we're going to be in the Europa League, we're going to be in the conference, we're going to have a puncher's chance at making the Champions League. I, Brentford just seemed to me to be run in a much more careful way that what they're going to do is stay in the Premier League and not spend too much money. And so that's why that becomes a step up for him, even if, you know, it's not like Brentford are like worse than that much worse than Villa this year.
It's not like the event for that much worse than he's getting his team to perform at that level. But those jobs would be a step up, most likely in pay as well as in the reasonable ceiling for the talent that they're going to have. Yeah, I mean, that all seems correct to me. And that's just wildly different from what a man's career would look like 10 to 15 years long, five years long.
All right. Well, thank you for listening. And as always, if you want to get in the Discord and ask us some questions at SetPatreon.com slash double pivot. And we have some podcast coming up.
I am working on my studies. I am working on my project. I'm just trying to think I'm through. So that is what I am going to do with Mike and upcoming podcast.
And we're talking about, you know, more thought that you have more from me. I don't know, maybe something will come up. Boarding with like, we can revisit board with at some point if they have another good game. I kind of like, I kind of want to do that in the context of like getting like what we talked about with the renovation pot about getting a mulligan year to get yourself out of the summer vortex.
Yeah. Board with the team that give you like the vibes that that could happen. They may have done it. It's only like three games in a row, but Mike God did good.
All right. Well, that would be something maybe to talk about in the future as well. And with the nerdy out, Patreon.com. Don't pivot.
Even more of that. Cheers. Here's y'all. Cheers.