The Midweek Maxi #28: Infantino's Arseholes, Muscle-Memory Titles & Muderballers

Our new Liverpool FC weekly compendium: News. Stats. Views. Debate. Links. Data. Insights. Delights.

To read about why we’ve replaced Free Friday with The Midweek Maxi, see the intro to the first edition.

So far the bumper weekly roundup is going down extremely well with paying subscribers:

This week:

• Excerpts and links to the different pieces we've published across the TTT Substack network, prior to the paywall kicking in;

• Then, some of the best comments from the site this past week;

• Next, Daniel Zambartas’ bumper LFC News, Media & Transfer Round-Up

Job done! (Oh, and it’s also a discussion thread for the issues raised.)

Note: the Maxi may exceed the email size limit on Substack, but the whole piece can be read online by paying subscribers.

TTT Network Roundup

Links and excerpts to articles on the various TTT sites, which are run by different people and require separate subscriptions to this, the TTT Main Hub.

The Main Hub

Still plenty to discuss during the international break, especially after Everton had ten points deducted for financial cheating. It also prompted this from Paul… FIFA, or Football and Infantino's Fucking Arseholes, are as honest as the day is long during the peak of an Arctic winter.

In F1, racers feel like clowns paraded in Vegas. The winner of the final race a couple of years back was decided almost for Netflix audiences, as if this is now a talent show. Golf seems to be in a mess. More and more is being crammed in to less and less. World Cups now go to those footballing hotbeds Qatar and Saudi Arabia, within 12 years.

No one seems to hide the flagrant abuse of rules anymore (in any walk of life), perhaps because so many institutions and governments and individual politicians have self-kneecapped by being hyper-hypocritical, beyond normal human, fallible, everyday hypocrisy.

We can all be contradicted and inconsistent, but rules are supposed to be there for everyone. And if people break the rules, the punishment should be the same for everyone, barring any genuine extenuating circumstances (such as speeding, if you have a seriously ill child in the car with you as you race to the hospital, because waiting for an ambulance could now take many hours).

Fairness in Football? Financial Doping, and Sport vs Entertainment

Reading 'Money Go Up' by Zeke Faux, everyone seemed to be admitting to the author by 2021 and 2022 that their crypto currency or exchange was one giant Ponzi scheme.

The modern ethos for everything is: kick the can down the road. I'm not a crypto expert but it always seemed fishy to me. Whether or not crypto can be legit, it was a perfect front to run a Ponzi.

(From the blurb: “But financial crime reporter Zeke Faux cares: even in fraud, there are standards.”)

I like that FSG want to play by FFP, as that's why they bought the club. I like the way Jürgen Klopp wants his teams to play hard but fair, but hate the way the Reds are treated worse by referees as a result; whilst rivals boost their squad sizes and retain elite players with illegal payments, that then make the tiny but massive difference between finishing 1st and finishing 2nd.

Liverpool will not get those titles retrospectively awarded, which makes those seasons a waste of time (beyond the enjoyment along the way, at the cost of sporting integrity.)

Chelsea's new owners raised the Abramovich-era issues. But they also got to escape administration with the wiping out of £1.6bn debt, which was frankly incredible.

That £1.6bn (which doesn't include secret payments) kept them competing for league titles and edged others out of the Champions League spots (which financially harmed those rivals), as did illegal payments, if those are true.

But also, are Chelsea's new owners not just spending wildly, and kicking the can down the road?

Indeed, apart from Spurs’ freakish success rate during 12 games this season, the Reds have had three seasons where they’ve been far better at this tackling lark than anyone else. (Albeit this season is the opposite.) Excluding this all season’s extrapolated figures, Liverpool have three seasons when they’ve had a +4-7% difference in their own tackle success rate and the opposition in each 38 games; over twice as good as Arsenal, the next best full-season team, in 2022/23.

So, I'll let you have a game of pin the tail on the donkey below, by saying that this includes 16 of the 22 teams (73%), within a cluster, and that it only includes Liverpool once. Can you guess where the Reds, occupying three of the top four tackle success rates, rank?

To add context, Spurs are also massive successful outliers, to match their massive tackle success differential.

Most of the teams are generally a bit better or worse at tackling (and warding off tackles), and a bit luckier or unluckier in being given free-kicks, and so mostly there's a total lack of outliers. Hence, the circle. (I assume that all teams in this list also want ‘play-on’ where possible.)

Indeed, within the circle are two of the three most aggressive (pressing-wise) and tackle-heavy teams; one side – playing something dubbed ‘murderball’ – made an astonishing 740 tackles in a season, against the 22-team high possession average of 501 (and were tackled 564 times, against an average of 530).

Man City (A) – Match Preview Thread, and Further Comparisons in Playing Styles vs Officials' Treatment

They pressed at least 10% more than any other team in the five years, with a PPDA (passes per defensive action) of 7.17, where the lower the more intense; the next-best is Spurs’ 7.82 so far this season.

You'd expect the muderballers to be outside the circle, having 176 more tackles and with an exactly equal success/failure rate (to within 0.03%) … but no, Leeds United at peak-Bielsa are within it, in the season when they also had 57% possession.

(Liverpool's best PPDAs rank 4th and 5th out of the 22; then 10th, 13th and 17th – albeit their hardest-pressing data predates 2019, as does that of Man City and some other clubs, who got it down to to around 6.5. The Reds’ PPDA in recent seasons has tended to be between 8.0 and 9.0, whereas City’s has dropped to c.10 and now c.12 with Erling Haaland in the team.)

The Zen Den

How have those 13 years been for you?

How have they been for Liverpool?

How have they been for, say, Everton?

By 2010, Man City were already spending big, and no one had ever spent bigger than Chelsea when adjusted for football inflation; with Man United, managed by Alex Ferguson, pushing them as close as a mega-rich club could, against ultra-mega-rich owners.

But FFP was soon in play, and Henry only wanted to buy into a fair sport, not a financially doped one.

In the previous 20 years, starting from the high of the league title in 1990, there had been a title challenge in 1991 that faltered when Kenny Dalglish resigned, two years after Hillsborough, and three months before the end of the campaign.

Roy Evans properly challenged for the title once, but the Reds finished 4th in what was called a two-horse race. The football was mostly great fun, until it wasn’t. I gained my season ticket in this period, and I loved a lot of the games I went to.

Next up, Gérard Houllier won the wonderful treble of cups in 2001, but never challenged for the title, despite a 2nd-placed finish in 2002. His final two seasons were grim.

Rafa Benítez took the Reds back to top-tier European royalty, winning the Champions League in 2005 (one of the best experiences of my life) and finishing as runners-up in 2007. There was one proper title challenge, in 2009 (1st after 36 games but Man United had games in hand), with what was his best team.

But Gillett and Hicks were already out of money, and the spending on players was cut.

And despite a creditable 63-point season as a “catastrophe”, the Reds finished 7th. Out he went, and in came Hodgson. Even now I awake in the night screaming “Konchesky!”

And when I see myself in the mirror, old and unwell, and unable to do any form of sport, I think of Joe Cole in a Liverpool shirt.

So those were the 20 years. As with various global conflicts, and terrorist acts from decades ago, some younger people may not remember the lessons you learn when living through something. Increasingly, history is confined to what happened earlier today. We study history to remind ourselves; or at least, we used to.

If 1991 was purely muscle-memory of title challenging, then it was just 1997, and 2009. Two Champions League finals, 2005 and 2007.

LFC: Thirteen Years of Good Luck (Or Rather, Good Ownership)

And by mid-October 2010, Liverpool were mired in the shit. I wanted sustainable owners, with smart ideas and realistic goals. Not dreamers and schemers.

Since then we’ve had genuine title challenges, down to the last day, in 2014, 2019, 2020 and 2022, with one won; Man City, facing 115 charges for all kinds of cheating, winning the other three, while a Chelsea team also full of potentially illegally-funded players halted the charge of 2014 in a different way.

Three Champions League finals, with one won; losing twice to Real Madrid in an unfair manner, just as the Reds had to AC Milan in 2007, but conversely, having some good fortune in the successful 2005 and 2019 finals (where the route to the finals was also magical, including remarkable semi-finals, in very different styles).

Dynasty

Now Spurs, once a veritable laughing stock, even in our darker days in the Premier League, have joined the party. We’re looking at a big six that looks like it could be entrenched at the top of the league for years to come.

So can Liverpool win that league title?

Personally I believe that, under Klopp, we can.

The achievements of 2016/17 have in some ways been underestimated because of the lopsided nature of the season. To paraphrase our German manager, we went from doubters to believers to doubters again. The run in was tough, the football uninspiring but it was a massively solid foundation upon which to build; Liverpool attained their goals. Flip the two halves of the season and all Liverpool fans are hugely positive with what we could be capable of going into the new season, not a million miles removed with how many felt in the autumn of 2013. Jamie Carragher, speaking in April of 2017, put it succinctly when he asserted that:

“I think Liverpool have got the sixth best squad in the league so to finish in the top four would be a very good season...you saw the reasons why they fell away in the middle of the season, they didn’t have reinforcements, especially when Sadio Mane was gone to the African Cup of Nations. It’s very difficult; they don’t have the revenue to compete with the others, it will be a building process. It won’t be a case of splashing the cash and going for the league next season. I think that it will be a gradual improvement, similar to when I was playing under Houllier and Benítez, when we built to a title challenge, we never quite pulled it off but we came very close on a number of occasions. If Liverpool can get into the top four for two or three years on the bounce, than that would be a major achievement. You cement your position in there and then maybe think, “Ok, let’s go for the title”’.

In 2016, with the Reds struggling in the league but reigniting European dreams, Paul Tomkins wrote that (some) “Liverpool fans wanted Klopp’s Dortmund when he arrived but not the process that made Klopp’s Dortmund so special: the time it took (over two years) and the development of young players from unheard-ofs into world class stars.”

Part 2 of Part 22! - A Quarter of a Century of Liverpool FC in the Premier League Era, 1992-2017

Some Kopites bemoan (what looks, at the time of writing) the imminent arrival of Álvaro Morata to United, forgetting that the Reds have never signed a bonafide world class star. Perhaps Torres or Suárez came closest but these had been looked at by other clubs and, for different reasons, there was hesitancy from the big-hitters. Moreover, it's not as if paying eye-watering sums of money is a guarantee for success; just look at Shevchenko, Ángel Di María, Verón or, em, Shaun Wright-Phillips.

But as these words are written in June after optimism had reigned for a few weeks following the confirmation of Champions League qualification only to be dashed upon another altar of bemusing decisions by FSG, there is always misgivings. The Virgil Van Dijk fiasco may have been resolved by the time you’re reading this but the whole sorry story has again sullied the club.

TTT Transfer Hub & Deep Dives

Beraldo - 2023 Brazil Série A numbers

In this section, we will take a look at a few data visuals covering basic metrics for a defender and where Beraldo lies amongst the centre-backs in the Brazilian top-flight division in the current season.

Scouting Report: Brazil’s Young Star Defender Lucas Beraldo

Beraldo has been one of the best, if not the best defender in the league in terms of passing. The attempt and success rate is right up there. It shows his comfort in possession and being secure when asked to play out from the back. A modern-day defender must have this quality along with recovery pace and sharpness in defensive reading. The 19-year-old is depicting that alright.

The plot shows that the 19-year-old is not just racking up the passing numbers for the sake of it. He is covering a good progressive distance with it and is able to attempt a lot of those kinds of passes to start off attacks for the team.

The ball recovery rate is at a pretty good level while the aerial duel wins is decent too. He is not the tallest of centre-backs (186cm), but does just enough to win more than 50% of the aerial duels. Can he get better at that? Absolutely. Let’s not forget that he is still only 19 and has time on his side to bulk up physically and get better at winning headers in a straight up duel.