chinapig

I've long been a fan of Curtis Davies as a player and a person. This interview emphasises the latter. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2023/may/06/curtis-davies-derby-county-interview Would have loved to have had him join us at some point in his career. A true leader.

Wigan have failed to pay their players on time yet again. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2023/may/06/wigan-players-left-unpaid-by-troubled-club-for-fifth-time-this-season

More detail, the key part being the following. A club managed this badly deserves to be relegated. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2023/may/06/everton-sean-dyche-relegation-analysis How ruinous would relegation really be? Potentially catastrophic. Everton’s combined losses over the past three financial years stand at £305.5m and a staggering £417.3m over the past four years. The club is under investigation by the Premier League for an alleged breach of its profit and sustainability rules, owes about £150m to an opaque lender called Rights & Media Funding Limited and needs around £300m to complete the new stadium being built at Bramley Moore dock. For all the talk of fresh investment from private equity firms MSP Sports Capital or 777 Partners, Moshiri has yet to secure the extra stadium funding while Everton are a Premier League club. In the Championship, Everton would suffer a huge reduction in income while having to meet tighter financial constraints than exist in the top flight. The EFL has also shown itself to be far tougher in imposing sanctions for any financial breaches than the Premier League. An immediate fire sale of assets (Jordan Pickford, Amadou Onana, Calvert-Lewin) could be the least of their worries. As Everton’s auditors reported in the accounts in March: “Should the club be relegated, it will require additional financial support from its majority shareholder, who themselves are reliant on support from their majority shareholder, who have indicated they are supportive of the group but the support is not legally or contractually binding. These matters indicate that a material uncertainty exists that may cast significant doubt over on the group’s ability to continue as a going concern.”

Good piece from Nicky Bandini. https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2023/may/04/you-must-never-give-up-underdogs-napoli-reach-the-summit-again-serie-a

I assumed it meant player of the season for the Under 21s rather than the best player who is under 21.

Nigel said in a recent press conference that he wants King to stay. I'm sure a deal will be done.

Maguire said in today's PoF podcast that the most ever paid for a Championship club was £90m for Leeds.

Don't mention the double. I mentioned it once but I think I got away with it.

The irony is he has flourished in a position he didn't much like when he was here, preferring to be seen as a striker. Kudos to him though for building his career the hard way.

If Fabrizio Romano says it's happening (and he does) it's happening. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2023/may/03/real-madrid-jude-bellingham-deal-sign-borussia-dortmund

Or their owner - and it's not entirely clear who that actually is - takes a big chunk for themselves.

For me a more useful comparison is between the probability of clubs with PPs being promoted vs clubs without PPs. I suspect the former would be significantly higher. Steve Parish likes to claim that the average position of PP clubs is 8th but of course the mean can be skewed by an outlier. So if PP clubs finish 1st, 2nd and 24th their average position would be 9th. Completely misleading.

I don't get the impression that money is Joe's primary motivation but time will tell.

2+2=5 basically. As you say there is nothing to suggest he is going anywhere.

An interesting insight into both the good and bad sides of Allardyce: https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2023/may/02/could-sam-allardyce-the-anti-bielsa-cross-philosophical-chasm When Nicolas Anelka played for Sam Allardyce at Bolton the France striker described the training-ground environment as surprisingly reminiscent of Clairefontaine. Although Allardyce lacks the time necessary to transform Leeds’s weekday HQ near Wetherby into a mini-mirror image of the French national football school, Javi Gracia’s old squad should expect the unexpected if – as scheduled – he takes training for the first time on Wednesday. The 68-year-old has plenty of critics but a close examination of the former England coach’s often impressive body of work at, among other clubs, Bolton, Blackburn, Sunderland and Crystal Palace, indicates that Pep Guardiola was not exaggerating that much when he dubbed Allardyce “a genius”. Admittedly Big Sam remains an acquired taste but even the arch-purist Guardiola appreciates Allardyce’s role as a pioneer of elite football’s now routine use of data analysis, sports science and psychology. Given the emergency nature of Allardyce’s anticipated four-game appointment by Leeds, the application of psychology will prove most relevant when he and Guardiola are reunited at Manchester City on Saturday. “Sam’s man-management is second to none,” says his close friend and former Bolton sidekick Phil Brown. “He gets the very best out of players.” The trip to the Etihad Stadium represents the first of a formidable-looking quartet of fixtures also involving a home date with Newcastle, a visit to West Ham and a final-day game against Tottenham at Elland Road. Staying up will surely involve Allardyce persuading Junior Firpo and co to leap through metaphorical hoops of flame. Further spice is added by his status as a former manager of Newcastle and West Ham, coincidentally two of the postings where Allardyce’s pragmatic, sometimes ultra-direct, game plans proved most unpopular with fans. Although his tactics have always been far too nuanced to lend too much credence to José Mourinho’s claim that Allardyce played “19th-century football”, Leeds fans had never been overly taken by a man whose Bolton side sealed Leeds’s relegation to the Championship with a 4-1 win at the Reebok Stadium on 2 May 2004. Who, back then, could have imagined that 19 years to the day after that nadir in West Yorkshire football history Allardyce would be lined up as Leeds’s third official manager of an intensely troubled season? As he establishes the training ground “War Room” which has proved the tactical nerve centre of his previous clubs, Allardyce may need to draw on all the calm engendered by the daily transcendental meditation sessions which helped him secure Sunderland’s Premier League position in 2016. That triumph prefaced an ill-starred, 67-day, one-game tenure in charge of England. Despite Allardyce having broken no rules, his ill-advised entrapment in a well-documented newspaper sting proved thoroughly self-destructive. It also emphasised the brasher, sometimes arrogant, side of a character which, as much as any tactics, helped him acquire as many enemies as admirers and, unforgivably, involved Allardyce mocking Roy Hodgson in front of undercover reporters, dubbing the then outgoing England manager “Woy”. There is a certain irony that 75-year-old Hodgson’s success in steering Crystal Palace clear of relegation waters this spring may well have helped persuade Elland Road executives to hire a fellow veteran. Those directors can at least rest assured that confidence will not be a managerial commodity in short supply. Leeds have been leaking goals at an alarming rate since Hodgson’s Palace put five past them last month so it is probably no bad thing that Allardyce regards rearguard repairs as his specialist subject. The only real stain on his impressive record of relegation avoidance arrived at West Brom in 2021 “Teaching players to defend is my area of expertise,” he said in April 2016. “I can coach in all departments, especially team play, but when it comes to defending you name it and I’ll tell you about it.” Allardyce, who previously worked with Angus Kinnear, the Leeds chief executive, at West Ham, is believed to have lobbied for the Elland Road job before Gracia replaced Jesse Marsch in February. Back then though Victor Orta, whose time as director of football ended on Tuesday, was still fixated on the pressing game introduced at Leeds by Marcelo Bielsa. With Orta having regarded Marsch as Bielsa’s ideological heir apparent, the philosophical chasm between that pair and Allardyce looked too much of a quantum leap. Little more than two month later, though, the Leeds owner, Andrea Radrizzani, has sacked Orta and pinned his trust in Allardyce’s forte for set-piece choreography. The only problem is that there are almost certainly too few hours in the day in which a man who has recently alternated hosting a podcast “No Tippy Tappy Football” with holidaying in his beloved Dubai can properly perfect Leeds’s dead-ball drills. Perhaps significantly, the spring of 2016 involved Allardyce sparring with his old enemy Rafael Benítez as Sunderland and Newcastle vied to survive. He once let it slip that, privately, he rated Benítez extremely highly but suspected the Spaniard had insufficient games to turn things around after Steve McClaren’s sacking. He believed everything hinged on whether Benítez’s tactical mantra would kick in during the fourth or fifth game of his initial 10-match tenure. Allardyce was strangely adamant that a corner would be turned at one of those junctures and, sure enough, after Newcastle collected one point from the Spaniard’s opening four fixtures, they accrued 12 from the subsequent six. For Benítez game No 5 proved a watershed but Allardyce must hit the ground running. Can a hugely polarising coach who, in so many ways, remains the antithesis of everything the still-revered Bielsa stood for, end up protecting the Argentinian’s West Yorkshire legacy? Might Big Sam conjure the unlikeliest of happy endings?

Pep disagrees.? https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/54392207 Bielsa is the most authentic - Guardiola I admire Bielsa "the most in world football" - Guardiola Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola has described Leeds United boss Marcelo Bielsa as "the most authentic manager" before his side's trip to Elland Road. Guardiola, 49, regards Dutchman Johan Cruyff as his coaching inspiration, but hugely admires the Argentine, 65. The Spaniard met Bielsa in Argentina before becoming Barcelona B boss and has adopted many of his philosophies. "He is probably the person I admire the most in world football - as a manager and as a person," said Guardiola. "He is the most authentic manager in terms of how he conducts his teams. He is unique. Nobody can imitate him, it's impossible. "I don't see him quite as much but when I get the pleasure to spend time with him, it's always inspirational." The charge sometimes levelled against Bielsa is that for all the plaudits he receives, he lacks major honours. While Guardiola has won eight league titles, two Champions Leagues and five domestic cups in a glittering career, Bielsa's best achievement has arguably been guiding Argentina to gold at the 2004 Athens Olympics. Until he won the Championship with Leeds last season, his major club feat was leading Athletic Bilbao to the Europa League and Copa del Rey finals in 2012, both of which they lost. However Guardiola, whose side face Bielsa's on Saturday, does not believe the lack of silverware matters. "The value of a manager does not depend on how many titles or prizes you won," said Guardiola. "My teams won more titles than his but in terms of knowledge of the game and many other things, including training sessions, I am still away from him. "It's a good gift to the Premier League to have him here because his teams are always a joy to watch. They are honest, they always want to attack and they produce good football for spectators." Bielsa, in contrast, played down his influence on Guardiola's football philosophy. "I do not feel like a mentor to Guardiola," he said. "It's not just how I feel, it has been evidenced to not being the case. If there's a manager who is independent in his own ideas, that is Guardiola. "It's not just because I say it is, it's because his teams play like no other team. Many believe that [Guardiola's Barcelona team] is the best club team ever created."

And sports science. Wenger wasn't the only one to change English football.

And regards Bielsa as an inspiration.

He was an innovator in his early days at Bolton and rarely gets credit for that it's true. More recently he has become a bit of a parody of a "proper football man". It's been a while since he's gone down well with fans of clubs he's managed certainly. Will be interesting to see what Leeds fans think.

Would have been odd to sack him at that point. They finished 9th in their first season back. The issue with recruitment is down to Victor Orta. He was the man who wanted Marsch and recruited to fit his style. And indeed recruited half the USA team of whom only Tyler Adams has been any good. The Athletic did a very good podcast on Leeds yesterday covering all this and more.

And they are in advanced talks with Allardyce.

Maguire also interviewed a guy from the Albion fans group, who was very clued up. Their fears are not unfounded for sure.

You may be right but this is not an owner who appears to put the interests of the club first, hence him taking money out of the club and not repaying it. He may be unlikely to put the club into administration himself but should they not keep up the payments to MSD they might force the issue for instance. And as I posted before he is said to want £150m for the club, way beyond any sensible value. One way or another though they will be in trouble if they aren't promoted.

You'll have to take that up with Nigel, who has made it pretty clear he is happy with what he has and doesn't want to collect players. He's not a "clubs in the bag" manager thankfully. I would say our issue is not missing chances but not creating enough, our final ball not being consistently good enough.

Nigel's preferred set up is 2 up front with 1 behind. Conway is nailed on, being a natural goalscorer. Which leaves Cornick, Wells, Weimann and Bell as the other options. Cornick we would have signed in the summer but the Semenyo money allowed us to bring it forward. There is no scope for another striker and I don't think Nigel wants one anyway.