Really pleased with what we did on the Athletic Week in Football show this week.
Spent some time going super granular on Arsenal looking at what changes when they shift from drawing to winning.
Tactical? Physical? Psychological?
youtu.be/KI12IxcAHaY
I should make more effort to share the thread on BlueSky but I am mortal and liable to fall (it takes too long).
He could have at least @ed me
the bottom side in the premier league is 29th in the deloitte money league
10 years ago today it felt like Tottenham could win the title.
What happened to them?
My piece:
www.nytimes.com/athletic/707...
Back in August, the Bundesliga agreed a deal to make The Overlap and Mark Goldbridge’s That’s Football live rights holders in the UK.
How has it gone since?
@theathleticfc.bsky.social
www.nytimes.com/athletic/707...
The Premier League landscape has changed.
The rise in physicality, duels and man-marking has meant that there are spaces to attack on the transition once you win the ball in midfield.
Arsenal or Man City will be champions with more than just control.
🔗 www.nytimes.com/athletic/707...
It should always be a tension I think. Between the need for concreteness and the recognition that concreteness is always restrictive.
I think a combo of holding yourself back from imposing interpretations and also being willing to accept that teams are in a constant state of flux. Maybe a bit wishywashy - more of an attitude than a set of principles.
I'm a slow learner so no doubt you're all ahead of the curve here so apologies for that. I just wanted to clarify my own thoughts as much to myself as anything.
When analysing a team, it's wrong to view the process as simple allegory. We have to allow teams to be mythic - to extend beyond our expectations for what they are or can be. And if we do that, I think our analysis will be better.
Not only does this prevent me from making snap judgements about a team's approach and allows me space to learn from the games I watch, it also enables me to recognise that I need to allow the teams I'm analysing to develop its own face.
This probably sounds like nonsense but this change of attitude is one that shifts me from trying to moralise about the game and impose my ideas on it, to an attitude where I don't always expect the meaning to break through until I am brought to a place where I am ready.
What I'm trying to do with my own analysis more and more is to allow the game a greater level of strangeness, to allow the game to be 'mythologised'.
By which I mean: as analysts, we don't allow the game to be 'strange' but instead impose simple causality onto our readings and force the game into what we want it to be. Imo there is far too much moralising about the game now to the extent that we're losing sight of things.
What does any of this have to do with football? Well, increasingly over the last few months, I've been becoming frustrated with a sense that my own (and much other) analysis is far too allegorical.
In other words, how can we arrive at a point of enlightenment without having first become prepared for the encounter. TWHF begins with the protagonist claiming she has a complaint for the gods and [SPOILER] ends with her realising the complaint is towards herself.
In TWHF, this phenomenon is represented by the line from which the title is taken (paraphrasing): "How can we come face to face with the gods till we have faces?"
Myth, on the other hand, is somewhat more opaque - there is less a sense that the author is guiding you towards the intended outcome and more a sense that it is your responsibility to arrive at a point of enlightenment - one which may never arrived.
In this sense, although there is some slippage in the telling of an allegory, there is still a largely continuous thread of causality between the story and the intended outcome (moral/spiritual enlightenment).
At the risk of oversimplifying for a Twitter thread, allegory is generally any kind of writing where you can divine a hidden moral or spiritual meaning e.g. where the text is written with a very clear purpose on the part of the author despite its obliqueness.
Interestingly, where the CofN are usually held up as Christian allegory (although I believe Lewis himself would refute this?) the subtitle of TWHF is "A myth retold".
For those of you who don't know, Till We Have Faces is the last novel that Lewis wrote and therefore was written *after* his Chronicles of Narnia.
I've been off this week and have been using the time to recharge which means I've done a lot of reading outside of the world of football. One of the things I've re-read has been CS Lewis's Till We Have Faces and although I've been trying to avoid football, it got me thinking.
Me, listening to the Ring for Analysis episodes on the Tifo pod
Scotland's World Cup '26 fixtures if they were blank cassette designs | Coloured background version | 🏴🇩🇰🇭🇹🇲🇦🇧🇷
As my good pal Carl Anka is apt to remind us all, there is no substitute for getting outside and touching grass
He's missing a trick here imo
"Play him against Spurs"
