Since you guys like to be reminded

—I was the first to sound the alarms on INEOS with detailed explanation. I remember United tacticos trying to defend them because of hope & big names. My insight goes beyond players.

(a thread) —I announced Arne Slot as a T3 coach in the league via his presence before any game was played and a worthy rival to Mikel Arteta and Pep Guardiola. My insight goes beyond ordinary analysis.

Henry's narrative that Arsenal are trying to not lose the title while Liverpool are attacking it is wrong.

It is a narrative that assumes player quality = manager intentions, which is one of the common fundamental errors of team analysis.

1/ Fans and analysts too often give overwhelming responsibility to the manager for player decisions, quality and luck.

The other argument is that coaches ‘build’ teams and ‘buy’ players so they must yet hold some responsibility for the kind of team they have.

This is old wisdom but if you wanna fix an addiction, you've got to get into a virtuous cycle.

Find something or a few things that capture your mind and fixate on them. As @visakanv would put it, focus on what you want to see more of.

Same advice from the Christian faith. “Conformed” is the Greek word “Suschēmatizō”. It generally means to fashion oneself according to another's pattern or likeness. It means to copy.

The word for “World” there is not “Kosmos” but “Aion”. It means an age and a period.

Oh I don't really care for preservation as proof of authentication. Whatever is preserved could have been wrong from the beginning!

But even if we go along with that, well, there are problems. Perfect preservation is historically untrue.

https://twitter.com/helixafc/status/1835130490019357169

There are too many bad arguments. Perfect preservation when you are relying on documentation by memory is obviously not even possible (unless Allah somehow miraculously made it so).

Then we have various extant manuscripts that doesn't align with the standard Uthman code.

This is all the difference between Pep Guardiola and Mikel Arteta.

Pep adapts his game model to his player's qualities, especially the forwards. Mikel uses Vieira and Martinelli in the same way as Bukayo Saka. Talent maximization is not completely there, yet. Although, there's something to be said about the fact that the only big distances runner Arsenal have is Gabriel Martinelli, so that's a good argument for not tweaking the game model enough to suit him.

However, he's a regular & you're meant to get the best out of your regulars.

Most ‘Game's Gone’ enthusiasts think that street football is about producing tricks & flips for their wet dreams and highlight reels.

But its true benefit is plenty of touches & opportunities to develop problem-solving skills & personality in a small or irregular format. Juego De Posicion is about maximizing effectiveness of possession in relation to the game state, the opposition threat and the fundamentals of the game.

It is, primarily, a tool to maximize possession to win, not really a development tool.

https://twitter.com/nonewthing/status/1557828171126509579?t=ZsaOY0837tbcsgWTb8CP3w&s=19

Watched Liverpool v Arsenal again at Anfield yesterday. And a newer way of thinking of the game came to me. You know how people talk about football as moments? I've long held a different view that it's about flow. Yesterday, I kinda married it together.

/ Football is about moments as causative agents for flow and flow births goals.

When I talk about moments, I'm not talking about magical moments but the mundane that's easy to miss. Duels, control/miscontrol, positioning etc

Think about why duels are so important.

From an individual perspective, the Leny Yoro transfer is great for Manchester United. Potential all-timer talent.

From a squad building perspective, it is the same “in-line” valuation policy that ruined their last two cycles. I've never seen them do an undervalue transfer. Think about why Real Madrid didn't want to do a big deal for Yoro despite his obvious Galatico level talent.

It is because all transfers are inherently risky, elite-level transfers are super expensive and even the best football clubs are always walking a tightrope financially.

Bukayo Saka and Lamine Yamal are executing the same dribble here. But Yamal's looks more aesthetically pleasing & is rated more

Why does Saka's dribble look less aesthetical?

It's because he's more of a stop-and-start athlete than Lamine.

A Master's Thread 🧵/
What is a stop-and-start athlete?

Stop-and-start athletes execute dynamic actions in a series of pictures, like with stop-motion animation, in which you can see each frame and all the timestamps in it.

Islam is problematic because it exists in direct contradistinction to the other main Abrahamic faiths.

Nothing makes it remotely superior. In fact, there is more evidence of it being worse in its history, make-up, claims and theology than the other two.

https://twitter.com/WaqarHu63300657/status/1809573688959803643

A simple test of this is in the dispute about the death of Jesus.

Christianity claims he died, was buried and resurrected. Backs it up with 4 different main historical narrators close to the figure & the period, with great detail and grain of description between the 4 narrators.

Arsenal's POTY contenders.

—William Saliba. 10/10.

Played every single minute for Arsenal this season. MOTM displays at Anfield & Etihad. Arsenal's Mr. Responsibility. T3 CB in Europe & TOTY shoo-in.

Most famous moment: singlehandedly clamping Erling Haaland in transition.





—Declan Rice. 10/10.

What do you say? One of football's most dominant players in every single area of the pitch. Lighthouse, captain, commander. 15 G/A and counting.

Most famous moment: scoring the winner against Manchester United at the Emirates Stadium in the dying minutes.

The first problem people have in life is that they freestyle it. They go ad hoc then complain later about how things turn out.

You have to see life as football, a competitive sport to understand, to play, to enjoy & to win.

This is the first fundamental framing you need. Then you think about the geniuses of the sport. Your Ronaldinhos, your Lionel Messis, your Cristiano Ronaldos.

When did they start at it? Which of them started playing football after university age?

Unless you were born in La Masia, if you start too late, you'll never be elite.

This is a bad stat for Arsenal. But not for obvious reasons. Let me explain why.

All of this is tied to the perspective that pressing, alongside all out-of-possession detail, is the domain of smaller, weaker teams.

https://twitter.com/WhoScored/status/1780988407789011391?t=P3uCh-qMmet4Al9WQOHyRQ&s=19

If you have poorly to averagely talented players, the best way to get the most out of them is to raise the level of the out-of-possession detail.

Things like physical capacity, intensity, compactness, pressing, shapes & blocks.

Luton, Brentford, Barnsley, Toulese, Getafe etc

4 Saka run in-behind opportunities against Villa

—Ode pass forces him to change body shape, sends him outside rather than inside
—Ode pass is too early again, destroys any opportunity of attacking inside, Saka's run/shape/destination changes
—Pass not played
—Pass near perfect





For me, this illustrates how much Odegaard quietly limits Saka's potential without anyone suspecting a thing.

Saka is a magician type. His brain is too quick, too adaptable for opponents. Whatever a situation optimally requires (a run, a pass, a cross, a dribble) Saka is there.

When I talk about using all of the squad, it is for days like this. When I talk about recruiting a LCM and a Saliba alternative it is so we can have squad depth and rotate our most important players for days like this.

Mikel is overly conservative with his squad usage/selection. I understand the place of getting players physically fit and in rhythm and the point of playing your best players, but some games require different players.

Even if these players are not fully in rhythm, they have an opportunity to show something on the pitch.

The first demands for an Arsenal CF is how they can help us dominate

—In the penalty box against lowblocks.

—In transitions against the best sides.

These demands are why Haaland, Osimhen & Nunez qualify as elite, why Toney is so attractive & why Havertz has so much potential. Read through to see the qualities necessary to dominate each requirement.

https://twitter.com/nonewthing/status/1687081441903935489?t=Fa27GreE2wl9GnVXoErRHg&s=19

I'm really annoyed by the stats websites who push “Chances created”, “Key passes”, “Big chances created” as creative metrics to an ignorant Twitter crowd that consume it all.

None of these metrics capture real creativity. They only capture good decision-making in the final 3rd. A side pass for a crowded shot that flies out the stadium is a “key pass” or “chance created”.

Far as I know, there are only two mainstream, public passing metrics that really matter

“Expected xG assisted”
“Progressive passes”

Neither are perfect but they are much better.

When looking at players, you need to be sure that they don't need to totally reinvent themselves as players when they move to a higher level.

Some are talented enough to do it, mind you, but it's a massive risk. Nunez at Liverpool is still mostly the same guy as Nunez at Benfica

Haaland at Salzburg and Dortmund is still mostly the same guy as he is at City right now.

Transfers where a player has to completely reinvent who he is have such large risks of failure. Kalvin Phillips is an example of this.

In this underrated thread, I identified De Zerbi's obsessive focus on a way of playing as potentially problematic without the right material.

His issues would largely disappear in an elite environment where he has access to quality that emphasizes and protects his style.

https://twitter.com/nonewthing/status/1578806331343265792

I don't think De Zerbi is the best coach in the world. But he's an elite coach that's a particular fit for particular environments.

Elite clubs that need elite in-possession models (Liverpool less so, Barcelona more so), maximization of individual talent (Chelsea, Barca)

If only Erik Ten Hag had half the balls De Zerbi does.

People want De Zerbi to be a coward, to compromise on his beliefs for the excuse of “winning”.

His mandate at Brighton is to play good football & develop the young assets the club has. Your expectations don't matter. Show me one game in which Mikel Arteta has compromised the game model he started the season with.

Even when we lost Saliba and had to play City at the Etihad, we still went with a M2M press with our balls out and got badly beaten for it.

Was Mikel Arteta naive?

Billy has a good piece out that covers why Arsenal have struggle with midblocks, why we struggled against Porto and how we might fix this at the Emirates.

It's a really good piece that covers the fundamentals. But one key aspect was missing.

A Thread/

billycarpenter.substack.com/p/how-to-make-… Billy talks about creating and finding little gaps in the middle while referencing Guardiola and the need to play through the middle.

Against compact schemes, like with Arsenal or Porto in this case, it's a bit of a fallacy. The very design of those schemes are to block that.