Manchester Utd have turned an excellent football coach into a blinkered technical director. Erik ten Hag converted a young Ajax team short of great players into a brilliantly organised, top-paced, high-pressing side that in 2019 got within 1 min of Champions League final. But//1 2. He never had to buy players at Ajax. That was done by Marc Overmars, till Overmars was sacked for persistent sexual harassment. Now United are letting Ten Hag make the buying decisions, and he seems not to know the market beyond his old players/Dutch league

Short thread: it's quite right that the UK has sanctioned Roman Abramovich and deprived him of control of Chelsea. English football has suddenly turned against him. But: all this is just hypocrisy as long as the English game doesn't go after far more culpable club owners // 2. Abramovich has a 'no enemies' policy and always made sure he stayed chummy with Putin, doing his bidding whenever asked. But it's wrong to imagine he's still at the heart of the Putinist elite. The oligarchs were pushed aside 20 years ago, replaced by Putin's old KGB pals

1. Last thoughts on Euro 2020, before I switch off. Here's the stand near me at Wembley yesterday. More people than seats, whole gangway filled with standing insurgents. The reason this bothered me: I've written about football security officials and what keeps them awake at night 2. They aren't that worried about hooliganism: a few yobs hitting each other or throwing chairs is spectacular on TV but usually not v dangerous. What terrifies them is the possibility of crushes, stampedes, another Hillsborough. There was a risk of that last night

1. We say in Soccernomics: "Anyone who spends any time inside football soon discovers that just as oil is part of the oil business, stupidity is part of the football business."

https://twitter.com/JNorthcroft/status/1384585705792458759

2. Related to this: a fellow football writer once told me he'd tried and failed to do business with a legendary English football institution. He said, "I can work with crooks, and I can work with stupid people. But I can't work with stupid people who think they are crooks."

Note the clubs that stuck with the Super League longest: Agnelli's Juve, Perez's Real Madrid + the US-owned profit-seeking quartet of Man Utd, Liverpool, Arsenal and Milan; Spurs and Inter also in the profit-seeking group. Oligarch-run Chelsea + Man C don't care about profits I've just finished writing a book about Barça. My sense of their response: their coffers are terrifyingly bare, so they crave the cash. But this is the biggest democracy in sport. What the socis (members) says goes. Any Barça president will put their happiness first, money second

1. Cas is quite right that hundreds of European clubs have gone bankrupt over the decades. But importantly, only a few did so while "trying to catch up with the richer clubs". And almost all of the bankrupt clubs survived bankruptcy

https://twitter.com/CasMudde/status/1384289331225845761?s=20

2. This is from an article I wrote in January, 10 months into football's worst crisis since the war, when I could find onlly two clubs in the whole continent that had folded - and both were already being reborn

It turns out the Iraq war was just practice

https://twitter.com/JoshuaPotash/status/1285863111082283008

But the Trump era has also sometimes brought out the best of America washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07…

1. Quick thoughts on what's happening in France, after I've been out this morning watching gilets jaunes in Paris. Purchasing power has long been a bigger problem in France than in other western countries/ 2. Lots of people are on the national minimum wage (about 14,900 euros a year) and many more cluster around the median wage of about 22,000 gross, with charges to pay. So the French have their health, education and pensions mostly taken care of but have little disposable income