City have scored a lot of late goals this season to gain points which makes it all a bit mental that they’ve only just got past the 60 point barrier.
Aston Villa have single handedly made the top 5 more open with their wins over Forest and Newcastle but that could be the dagger for them as their GD is so bad compared to everyone else
Have you run that through AI?
Rumbled
Game's gone.
Obsession with stats is why no player has got any football intelligence anymore. Just the ethos burned into them and they freeze when something doesn't go as expected.
Imagine Okocha not knowing what to do with the ball because the opposition had decided to abandon the high press on him.
This is why I adore Marc Marquez. In such a data driven world he's so unique and good that his data is essentially useless and doesn't make sense to anyone.
Please football be like this. Make it not make sense.
I mean we just had 20 years of Messi and Ronaldo "not making sense", no?
I said football not aliens. These guys are generational exceptions to the rule which absolutely sucks.Originally Posted by randomlegend
Perhaps I'm completely getting the wrong end of the stick here, but I had no idea who Marc Marquez is so I googled and he appears to be a MotoGP rider who is smashing everyone.
Is he not basically to MotoGP what Messi and Ronaldo were to football for the last 20 years?
Yes, that's the right end of the stick.
What I'm saying is DATA is dictating behavior not just of individuals but teams, against intuition, feel etc. And the only way to go against it is to be a once in a generation monster.
That's not right.
What we're missing out on in this era is precisely the Jay Jay Okocha type people who are not the best player in history, and also not in any way optimised footballers, but bring huge joy to everyone.
I can barely think of a single example from the current game. That lad at Newcastle was one (Saint-Maximin) and he got binned off rapidly and is now stinking out Turkey or Saudi Arabia or something, probably within a 'system'.
Eze is probably the highest profile I can think of that has not been forced into playing The System.
Eden Hazard
Cole Palmer has shown signs of being one and his dip in form since Christmas is basically a result of a systems manager wanting him to operate within a system.
Maybe PSG can flip the script if they win the Champions League, although more likely we'll be treated to an Arsenal Inter deathfest final.
Adama before ham strings of ham collapsed.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football...s/cgm843zwj08o
Surely this will be entertaining.
Are Brazil the biggest victims of the systemball era? They appear to have completely lost that thing that made them so unique / good. Imagine remaking the airport ad now.
It'd be 45 minutes of the most efficient way through baggage checks backed up by real-time graphs.
The most hilariously ironic thing is he did it under the guise of the original terrorball king.
That is why Cuauhtemoc Blanco will always be my GOAT. He moved everywhere on the front in a true 'free role,' spraying through balls every ten seconds. Was so good to watch in a way that Haaland or whoever the modern striker is running fast and pressing all day just isn't.
Nowadays he would be told that his through balls only have a 12.1674% success rate and therefore should pass it back to the keeper instead.
Blanco's xG was terrible. Bad bad player.
I think there's definitely a bit of rose tinted revisionism going on, which I fully support.
Football is probably 'objectively' better / more exciting / whatever now than it has ever been, but all that tells you is that objective methods aren't necessarily applicable to fan experience in the same way they are to analytics or whatever it is that drives the modern game.
Zidane always trikes me as the man standing against the modern understanding of football. I bet his 'stats' were shite.
Better? Probably, yes.
More exciting? Fuck, no.
Whilst I agree, you also have to admit that things like Champions League knock out games have become much more likely to be belters than they used to be. Two 5-4s or whatever it was last week, for example.
I think a lot of it, in the league in particular, is a manifestation of what OG stats wankers the Reason England Lose book people said in that people think they want an even playing field but really they crave a rigid hierarchy - a world where everyone beats Man United has lost all meaning for an entire generation of fans.
Definitely rose tinted glasses for me. The late nineties early 2000s Mexican league was mainly terrible games of people barely moving and failing to string three passes together. Yet in that sea of shite, there was a uniqueness to certain players/teams that felt special.
The Champions League knockouts are the best of the best teams, where you're most likely to get a stat buster. Cristiano Ronaldo for instance makes xG look stupid. He scored far more goals than the computer said he should.
Week-to-week Premier League is utterly dull. Goals don't necessarily correlate to excitement. Brentford and Brighton are two teams that leap to my mind when I think of what is making football robotic. Yes, they score goals, but you can see goals at any level. On the other hand you've got Nottingham Forest, who people say are long ball, but they aren't, they just don't commit to every trope that has been born out of data. xG saying they should be bottom half says more about xG as a concept than it does Forest.
I've been watching Brighton for nigh on 20 years now and can assure you that whilst they are now frustrating to watch from time to time, they are considerably better both in terms of results and entertainment provided than they have ever been, which is what makes their hysterical fans chanting that the manager doesn't know what he is doing and that Bloom needs to go all the more lolworthy.
It's much like say Formula 1 in that the cars now are undoubtedly 'better' than the ones in the 90s, but it's worse to watch them race. The interests of business and the interests of fans stand at complete opposites when it comes to sport.
Fans want flawed geniuses, business wants reliable and predictable revenue-generating machines.
This in an absolute nutshell. In fact aren't the CL games the most exciting they've ever been?
I don't think I've ever seen a keeper crash into the outside of the their net attempting a save.
That's really tickled me
Wimmin
The best bit about the last one [aside from obvious match fixing] is that the forward completely shanks it and almost misses.
Unbelievably if you go into the thread there are even more absurd ones.
Real Madrid have gone full tin foil hat ahead of the Copa del Rey final.
They don't like the referee chosen for it and wanted him removed. Yesterday on their official TV channel they showed a video package of all mistakes made by said referee in his career.
Today they're demanding he and the VAR is changed for the final or they wont play it.
Call their bluff please. Football would be better without them.
I swear until relatively recently Madrid had a bit of class about them but over the last few years they've turned into properly pathetic cunts. Am I right, and if so, what's been the catalyst for it?
Uncle Flo.
They discussed this exact point this week on 'Libero' podcast and the answer they came up with was Mourinho.
Real Madrid never had any class about them. They were just thankfully irrelevant for 15 years around the formative years for football.
They are, and always have been, the absolute worst of everything.
There's hardly any mavericks anymore. It's what I used to enjoy about football in the past. Cantona. Baggio. Le Tissier. Gazza. Zola. Maradona. Going further back, George Best, Stan Bowles, Rodney Marsh.
Now it's all data driven and ironically enough everything is more rigid based on that. Overanalysed nonsense. Tika-taka and playing out from the back. If you don't play that way, you get criticised. Even though you lose playing that way like Southampton, who don't have the players to carry it out.
I look at football from 20 years ago and it's unrecognisable to what today's football is. That's why I'm happy with what Forest are doing which is being brave and going against the grain.
Sticking 2 fingers up to the establishment and finding a different way to win.
Al Hilal just beat Gwangju 7-0 in the Champions League quarter final
Sounds like Gwangju need to start playing out from the back.
You jest but I have seen local Sunday league teams doing it as I walk my dog, it is a disease.
I watch a lot of quite poor Sunday League stuff from my balcony, and in these parts at least there is still no answer to the long straight ball. Each team usually has one bloke in the middle who looks like he has played a bit and can knock it about even on the crapper iterations of the pitch, but if you just twat it over his head and have a bent linesman at that end of the pitch then you have nothing to worry about. They probably should have tried that against Xavi, come to think of it.
You guessed it, Maresca refuses to play Reece James yet again and instead opts to play his best midfielder there. I hate this guy
Bet he's delighted his superstar advisers got him that 8 year deal on comparatively shit wages.
Boyhood club init.
Lavia is just a stupidly good player. Shame that like Fofana and James he’s made of cardboard.
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