“Welcome to the latest instalment of It Is What It Is, the sister column to Adam Hurrey’s Football Cliches podcast, a parallel mission into the heart of the tiny things in football you never thought really mattered… until you were offered a closer look. The dictionary supremos finally open their footballing floodgates. There are some cast-iron guarantees in the annual UK news cycle, the hardy slow-news-day perennials that keep the wheel turning. … See also: some words that will infuriate your parents, let alone your grandparents, have made their way into the Oxford English Dictionary. …”
The Athletic

“ Football today is big business. Not only do the best teams have to be great on the pitch, but they have to be great in the board room too. But what makes a great decision in the football business? And what are the best decisions ever made in football? From player transfers, to sponsorship deals, to club structure, Abhishek Raj writes about some of the best decisions, Philippe Fenner illustrates. ”
YouTube

“Enshrined behind the gates that claimed so many lives at the Kanjuruhan Stadium is a chilling sight. Once they catch your eye, everything changes. The shoes, left by the dead. They sit alongside the twisted, contorted blue iron railings which have been forced from their concrete mountings. Walking in those shoes — the Adidas trainer, the flip-flop, the child’s red Croc — during those final moments came with fear, indescribable pain and, for so many, no way out. …”
The Athletic (Video)

“Julen Lopetegui’s golden era at Sevilla is over. The man who took the club into the Champions League knockout stage and won a Europa League title, beating Manchester United and Inter Milan along the way, has been relieved of his duties. For a brief, wonderful moment, Lopetegui let the Sevilla fans dream of a LaLiga title challenge. His sacking shouldn’t be viewed as a failure though. Sevilla flew too close to the sun under Lopetegui and given their strict economic policy and wage structure, they have to retreat now and think about the longer term future of the club. …”
The Analyst

“Penalties in the Premier League have a 78% chance of being scored. But not all attacking scenarios have the same high chance. Is this an unfair advantage to the attacking side? Should the rules be changed? Jon Mackenzie looks at the stats to find out how and why penalties are overpowered. Illustrated by Marco Bevilacqua.”
YouTube

“David Ginola once described retiring from football as ‘a little death’. For many players, that may not be an overstatement. Stepping away from a job which has defined a huge part of your life is a challenge for most people; but what happens when you are at an age which would be considered relatively young by normal standards? Life after football — in terms of self-esteem, relationships and financial stability — is one of the main themes in The Athletic’s ex-footballer survey, where 111 former professional players have responded to a series of questions about retirement and its impact. …”
The Athletic (Video)

“Trying to capture everything imaginable when watching a football match remains an impossible endeavour. But simultaneously, trying to capture absolutely nothing beyond the first glance won’t necessarily yield great results in your task to remember important information and events. You’ve probably heard it before as professors lamented your lack of note taking in university, but you are far more likely to remember information if you take the time to write it down. Your distracted brain already has a million other things to focus on, and if you don’t take the time to write down your thoughts, the chances of allowing a thought to go from short-term to long-term memory becomes less by the second. …”
The Mastermindsite (Audio)

“For those coming to this article to discover who is the ‘best’ Premier League centre-back statistically, you are going to be disappointed. The truth is, evaluating any defender based on the data will rarely show one is better than another, but will instead give you an indication of a player’s — or team’s — style. We could compare players in high-pressing sides with those in low-pressing ones; we could contrast ball-playing defenders with those who have a more no-nonsense approach; we could even identify centre-back partnerships by cat or dog-like behaviours. On this occasion, we ask: What does the data tell us about active and passive centre-backs in the league? …”
The Athletic (Video)

“LEICESTER CITY’s latest defeat, at Tottenham Hotspur by six goals to two, underlines the crisis that is unfolding at the club. It also highlights the plight of their manager, Brendan Rodgers, who will be only too aware that he has a big hole to quickly dig himself out of. In the Premier League, there is always a ‘crisis club’ and this season, the baton has passed from Manchester United to Liverpool to Chelsea to Leicester City. The moment a club dips into the crisis zone, they are rarely left alone to work themselves out. …”
Game of the People

“Ever since the release of StatsBomb 360, we’ve shown how this new dataset is the ultimate upgrade on traditional event data. 360 allows you to detect deeper insights, such as players who receive the ball in space, the positioning of defenders around each event, whether a pass was line-breaking and how many defenders it bypassed, and plenty more. On top of this, we’ve shown you practical use cases for the data in finding new insights into football and creating bespoke visualisations which display this. …”
Stats Bomb

“Sometimes a foul is worthy of more than a yellow, but not quite a red. What if professional football had sin-bins? What affect would having a player depart the pitch for a period of time? Seb Stafford-Bloor explores the idea of sin-bins in football, and whether it’d work. Illustrated by Craig Silcock”
YouTube

“The transfer window is a weird and wonderful place. … So much that happens during the window, which was officially open for 83 days between June 10 and September 1 in England but in reality is an ongoing conversation throughout the year, can’t always be written down. The majority of the activity involving agents, players, managers, sporting directors, recruitment staff and owners exists in the margins. It’s neither official nor unofficial, but somewhere in between. The task of journalists is to try to pull information from these grey areas, comprehensively source it and ‘stand it up’, to get to the point of being able to press publish. …”
The Athletic

“… It was early August when Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp revealed his concern over the potential impact this winter’s World Cup could have on international players. Fixture congestion is nothing new (nor are managers’ complaints about it) but adding a major tournament into the mix mid-season, with only brief pauses before and after it, certainly is. ‘… Clubs competing in Europe have no free midweek until the turn of the year, so this round of fixtures will likely be added to the list for early 2023, further complicating life for teams who progress in cup competitions domestically and in Europe. …”
The Athletic

“ The Adidas Predator, one of the most iconic football boots in the game. Worn by true legends, Zinedine Zidane, David Beckham, Xavi Hernandez. But before it became popular it was regarded as controversial. This is the story of how an Australian footballer had an idea, stuck some rubber to an old boot, and convinced one of the biggest sportswear brands in the world to make his boot. Written by Seb Stafford-Bloor, illustrated by Craig Silcock.”
YouTube

“Negative tactics, parking the bus, running the game down – genuine ways of playing football, or personal opinion? Certain managers will be synonymous with ‘negative football’, but is it fair to use that term? Jon Mackenzie writes, Henry Cooke.”
YouTube

“Lee Mason has not been selected as a video assistant referee for any Premier League match at the weekend, following a controversial disallowed goal for Newcastle against Crystal Palace on Saturday. Mason, who became a dedicated VAR at the start of last season after retiring as an on-field referee, was in the booth for the match. The on-field referee, Michael Salisbury, initially awarded an own goal by Tyrick Mitchell but was recommended to review the incident by Mason. …”
Guardian

“I was watching old football matches on YouTube the other day, and a striker was standing in front of the opposing goalkeeper and waving his arms. The goalkeeper had calmly taken a pass from a teammate on the halfway line and then carried it around for 20 seconds. I know, of course, that this was allowed in the past, but at first I was irritated. The sight was so unfamiliar. …”
Guardian

“Football clubs have historically been sources of entertainment and symbols of unity in local communities. Today, they are also businesses – and as businesses, they release accounts or financial statements once every year. But financial statements can be hard to read, so we’ll show you how. Written by Abhishek Raj. Illustrated by Henry Cooke.”
YouTube

“It is a strategy as old as it is effective. No longer have use for a first-team player and want to see him leave? Instruct them to train with the under-23s and let the nature of football take its course. The problem, more often than not, will soon resolve itself with a separation. This common practice has been seen across the Premier League and English Football League again this summer. Dozens of faces that no longer fit have been marginalised and demoted to train at a level that ought to be beneath them or, in some cases, all alone. …”
The Athletic

“The genie is well and truly out of the bottle when it comes to data in football, but there is still plenty of scope to maximise its utility. In today’s thought experiment, The Athletic asks… should we adjust all on-ball player metrics? Let’s clarify what that would mean with an example. In a busy summer transfer window, your team’s recruitment staff are looking for a clinical striker who is quick to get a shot away and will score something out of nothing. Using data as a filter, is it more impressive for a striker to score 10 goals for a team battling relegation than a striker scoring 25 goals for the inevitable title winners? When adjusted for opportunity to score, the gap between the players’ output might not be as big as first thought. This is a simple example, but let’s dig deeper. …”
The Athletic

“Newcastle United’s purchase of the Sweden striker Alexander Isak is an exciting signing that will capture the imagination of the Geordies. Eddie Howe needed to get a forward in, and Isak is someone who can play either with Callum Wilson, or instead of him. Isak’s going to have to do both because of Wilson’s current hamstring injury, and he might have to hit the ground running. …”
The Athletic

“In the entire Premier League history, only two Norwegians have managed a team in the English top-flight history, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and Egil Roger Olsen. While Solskjaer was sacked last season as Manchester United manager after a string of poor results, Olsen’s one-season tenure in the league led to Wimbledon’s relegation. Now a third Norwegian manager may be on his way to the league. According to reports, several Premier League clubs are looking to sign Kjetil Knutsen. …”
foottheball (Video)

“It wasn’t  just football in Britain that dramatically changed over the past 30 years, the world also shifted and became a far more uncertain, darker place. People lost faith in trusted institutions such as banks, regulators, law firms and political systems and we started to see the creation of digital society. In Britain, indeed much of the world, some of the truly basic requirements of life; our security, our finances and basic healthcare were all severely tested. No longer could we take anything for granted, but football was still there for us in some shape or form. …”
Game of the People