The 'TTT Code of Sanity' – A Pledge For A New Season

If it's no fun, then why bother?

Since moving to Substack last year, after initially starting out as a one-man paywalled WordPress site way back in 2009 (and with my overly-long internet articles dating back to the year 2000), some newer readers may not know what I stand for, and what TTT represents.

It's worth reminding people, with an article that also includes the site rules, ahead of the new season.

As I noted the other day:

Football is clearly getting less fair. The integrity of the game has never been more in doubt, with financial doping, sportswashing and rule-breaking. Legitimately-run clubs are being squeezed out of the higher echelons. What can we get out of the process if we don’t win?

If we cannot enjoy things, why bother?

TTT's Overton Window

Overton Window: "the spectrum of ideas on public policy and social issues considered acceptable by the general public at a given time."

This can be seen as the parameters I set for all debate.

So, if this was a site about cancer treatment, someone saying that a guru told them that sticking a pineapple up their arse is a cure, I'd respect their right to think that, but tell them to move along swiftly.

The site bears my name – I launched it purely for my writing, and it grew from there – and still centres around my work and ideas.

So, I set the TTT Overton Window.

You don’t have to agree with this, in which case this site may not be for you. That's totally fine. There are many, many websites out there where you may feel more at home, and social media allows you to scream into the void if that helps.

So, you have to put up with some of my attitudes towards things, and we can debate the sensible middle ground (where there's lots of finer detail to go over). That way, we do not get lost in the usual internet culture wars of extreme views versus opposing extreme views, which makes online life so toxic, alienating and unhinged.

As such, I try to base my thinking on what's real in life, not how I wish things were; reality as opposed to magical thinking. But we all have differing perceptions of reality, certainly when it comes to sport and expectations.

(However, don't expect me to be 100% rational 100% of the time. I just aspire to do the best I can.)

The main culture war for Liverpool FC is obvious: but like it or not, FSG are the owners.

They bought the club when it was in danger of heading into administration and/or relegation (with a crap manager and a poor squad), and in time, turned it around.

You cannot go around switching owners like Watford sack managers.

While not “pro” FSG to the point of being "supporters", as a site (with various other writers in the ranks), we’ve also spent 13 years analysing and explaining the owners' decisions, whilst criticising mistakes.

On balance, and excluding some fuckups along the way, we think it's the way a football club should be run; but as with any decisions made by any individual or any organisation (or bald, bearded, bespectacled writers), you won't agree with them all.

And it's not easy when other owners are breaking all the rules, and everyone wants success.

The aim is also to support the manager if the manager is world-class (Jürgen Klopp, Rafa Benítez), or to be confused but not overly harsh (Kenny MkII, and Brendan Rodgers until the final few months when the wheels really came off), and only to ask to have a manager driven to outer Mongolia (Hodgson) if he's a walking disaster.

You can criticise decisions, but not the quality or suitability of a manager like Klopp. If that changes, then I'll let people know. Midway through last season I think it was fair to wonder if Klopp was perhaps clouded in his thinking (especially with the team slow and old, in part due to injuries), but the revamping of the side in early 2023 showed yet again that he turns things around.

But generally, I don't obsess about whether an XI is correct or not (I have mere opinions), and I don't think a manager is a genius if he makes a substitution that player scores. I don't tend to predict results, as football is too random; I just try to get a sense of whether a team is good or not, and then, how good.

Equally, if you want new owners, the arguments better be good, and realistic.

This all comes about as someone posted a long 'FSGout' post on the site yesterday, and it's so rare on here, not least because we know how flawed the arguments are.

Such as, to quote the offending text, "They are more focussed on expanding Anfield (for their gain when they come to sell)".

The notion that FSG are fattening the calf only for later profit by doing things like investing in Anfield is a ‘Kafka trap’.

Such shoddy logic is not welcome on this site.

Because, if the owners don't invest in the stadium, they are running it down, as they're skinflints.

So, Kafkaesque in that it doesn't matter what they do, they're doing it wrong. If you can pause and realise the flaw in that thinking, TTT might be for you after all.

Investment in the infrastructure is a good thing. I use the example of an antique classic car that's in terrible shape when purchased. If you spend time and money to fix the car (and generate that money by showing people the work in progress), make it run beautifully, and at any later point, sell that car for whatever it is deemed worth, you have nothing to apologise for.

If you leave it to rust, you are not a good custodian, whether you make a profit because of inflation or make a loss.

And again, there has been investment in the team, but from a sustainable position of balancing the books. I lost count of how many people said that FSG were reckless and negligent and insane for selling Philippe Coutinho for £142m, and that the team was going to collapse.

Indeed.

But also, success has its cycles, and that includes running out of energy at times.

Attributing all success to the brilliant and transformative Jürgen Klopp is a similarly black-and-white idea, when FSG brought the "Moneyball" approach to Liverpool that saw them appoint Damien Comolli, and with Comolli came Dr Ian Graham and Michael Edwards, amongst others.

Comolli proved a bad fit, but it was the right kind of idea; and Graham and Edwards – his analytics guys – were key in Liverpool buying better players, and more vitally, key in the procurement of Klopp, as was FSG's Mike Gordon.

It wasn't an accident, nor was it a foregone conclusion that you can just go out and get Klopp. Manchester United had already failed. Klopp liked Mike Gordon, and Mike Gordon is part of FSG.

FSG's analytics guys also talked Klopp into buying Mo Salah instead of other targets, and Klopp's football helped take Salah to the next level, and vice versa. Ditto some other players, too.

So I will not allow these kinds of illogical arguments on the site.

Sparing Klopp of all criticism is also wrong, albeit he gets things right at a level that makes him one of the best the game has ever known.

You can criticise, but within the framework of knowing that no one else could do better; acknowledge Dunning-Kruger, and carry on.

Yet the transfer cockups last summer were a mixture of issues after the club stumped up £84m for Aurélien Tchouaméni, only to lose him to the sport's apex predator. The money for a midfielder was there, clearly.

(As it was for Jude Bellingham this summer, until the situation changed, with Liverpool finishing 5th, making it less tempting for the player and less affordable for the club; and the overall package for the player growing ever greater in terms of wages and signing-on fees, as, yet again, the apex predator snuck in.)

Klopp got stuff wrong last summer, and earlier in the season, but he's human; as is anyone else connected to any sport. You earn leeway in life.

While also critical of some of their decisions, I was generally defending FSG well before the Reds won the league, the Champions League, all the cups, and had three of the best seasons (points-wise) in the club's history, along with the near-title of 2014 and two more near-Champions League successes, where in the Premier League at least, a club facing financial investigations has been the winner each time Liverpool finished 2nd. (In Europe, it was finishing second to the apex predator, Real Madrid.)

As 'positive' as I can be labelled, I never expected Liverpool to surpass 90 points in the Premier League (let alone do so three times), nor reach three Champions League finals.

But the Reds' two best seasons also came on the back of almost no spending those summers, because the spending was already in the team. People said it was reckless and negligent and insane to not buy players in the summer of 2019 and 2021, when Everton presumably won the transfer windows on the way to possible financial ruin.

Indeed.

I also never expected a title challenge in 2013/14, as someone who was never Brendan Rodgers' biggest fan (I struggled to fully work him out, as hard as I tried).

But I also came to see it as pointless expecting that team to have ended the season playing a totally different style of football to the one that saw it win 18 from 22 games from the December day I attended and saw Luis Suarez but four past Norwich.

It was also one of a few seasons in the FSG era where I attended the final day in my old season ticket seat with a chance of winning the title, albeit each time it wasn't quite enough, and each time it was lost to a club facing charges of financial cheating. It feels like being a cyclist competing against Lance Armstrong at times; asterisks deny glory to those who earned it fairly.

If people want reckless owners, overly ambitious owners, or corrupt sportswashing owners, again, TTT is not the site for you.

We all want owners to spend money, and can have opinions on how much to spend, and on whom. But we also don't know the budgetary constraints.

I've written in detail for 13 years about transfer spending (in books, EU reports and academic papers), and how 'net spend' is a bad argument (better only than gross spend arguments), and how the cost of the team and squad, adjusted for football inflation, correlates with success.

As does wage bill investment, and a mix of the two.

FSG have perhaps invested more in the wage bill (including bonuses that incentivise) than transfers, but transfer fees are generally more visible. The club tends to rank between 3rd-5th on financial metrics, irrespective of what a short period of spending (or not) may indicate.

The wage bill has been managed in a super-smart way, that means not paying new signings excessive amounts and giving pay rises to those who have earned them.

Either way, what comes in goes into transfer fees and wages, and that's how sustainable football should be. Nothing extra pumped in, nothing extra syphoned off.

(Again, I saw what happened to Leeds 20 years ago, and anyone who fails to learn from history is destined to be eaten by a T-Rex.)

As a new reader, you might not know all the debates we've had over this, and what the conclusions have been, after a lot of research and analysis.

You can freely critique FSG's decisions, but a lot of people get them factually wrong when they do; or as noted, ignore the good (the massive on-field success, the new training ground, the impressive redevelopment of Anfield) and only attribute the failures to them.

This is not logically rigorous enough for this site.

As an example, as much as I couldn't quite work out Brendan Rodgers and he wouldn't have been my choice, he'd have deserved all the plaudits going had his side won the league in 2014; not least as it was not really a great team (more a great front six). Equally, he messed things up from there, but that's another story. It's important to give both credit and criticism where it's due, but within the realistic framework of what are fair expectations.

Liverpool, as a club, balance the books. Get used to it. Or if you don't think that's right, look elsewhere for your Reds' content.

As an independent voice, I've been approached over the years by the owners on a few occasions for different reasons (less so recently), as well as managers, directors of football, and people in other key roles at the club.

I've turned down paid advisory roles with the club in order to keep out of internal politics and to have my own detached way of assessing matters (with all my biases checked where possible, but not fully erasable), as I have always told those contacting me.

I've got to know some of these people and gained insights, but equally, not well enough to feel I owe them anything, or have taken anything in return. But I have seen them as human beings, not avatars. I also got sent a picture of my book about Liverpool winning the Champions League in 2019 on a key desk at Melwood, having been in a similar office in 2009 to be the first writer to speak one-on-one there with Rafa Benítez, about whose first season I had decided back in 2004 to write my first book. It's been a wild ride.

I was also put on a blacklist of the club's enemies by the previous owners back in 2010.

At that point I'd been the weekly columnist for the official LFC website for five years (albeit the website was separate to the club, and I freelanced, so the club did not directly employ me), but resigned on the day they sacked Rafa Benítez and the site immediately ran an article running him down. (After I'd always been told not to criticise any ex-managers in my writing, which seemed fair enough for club-based content; plus, once Rafa had gone, I had no reason to keep writing for those steering the club towards oblivion. Again, contrast then and now for a reality check.)

My integrity is in being honest with the readers, and people can take or leave that. My integrity is in how long I've been doing this, and how I learn and develop (in dialogue with subscribers), but don't fundamentally change, and don't pander.

My perceptions of what's true or not may not tally with yours, but I wouldn't have been doing this for nearly 25 years as an independent writer, and also written over a dozen books, if I didn't have something vaguely valuable to add. Yet I also question how long this can remain viable.

As I age I can offer greater wisdom; but may also fall out of step with the way football is consumed. But no, you won't see me on TikTok, trying to pretend I'm half my age.

I also won't shape my opinions to what is popular, but only what I see as fair and true. And I want the site to reflect that, which it mostly does.

The debate on this site is still of a very high quality (especially once people worked out how to find the comments threads and navigate Substack), but we have to agree on the fundamentals.

(As an aside, I also try to keep party politics and general politics off the site –unless there's a good reason not to – as it's hard enough to agree over Liverpool FC without dividing ourselves further.)

I also don't want this to be a site where people get dragged down by a mood of negativity, as negativity is contagious and an overly common reaction (as negativity is a survival mechanism in dangerous situations that creeps into our fears on all issues).

So, don’t piss in the pool. Others are swimming here too.

(Unless an asteroid is heading directly at the pool. Then, urinate to your heart's content.)

As a general rule, I don't mind negative comments during matches – "that was a shit shot" is something I often note, often when Andy Robertson gets inside the area. Maybe the performance was 'shit'.

But things about the team being shit, the manager being shit, the owners being shit, and any players being shit, is just too stark and extreme; too permanent and definitive.

(You don't have to rate all the players, and certainly not rate them equally, but they're probably not shit. If I'm not the biggest fan of a certain player but he does something good, I say so.)

Commenting on this site is a privilege, and I will given lifetime commenting bans to anyone who breaches the site ethos.

The community was disrupted when we had to turn the lights out on the old site last September to move to Substack, given that the software we were tied to since 2009 was no longer supported and subscriptions were increasingly a mess (some people were unable to subscribe, others were not charged).

Substack offered a simple, integrated way of dealing with subscriptions, and a better platform to publish on.

(Of course, Elon Musk has since throttled Substack content on Twitter, so that's made it impossible for anything on TTT to be widely shared on whatever the spaceman is calling the platform today. Much as I find Twitter toxic – hmm, the X suddenly makes sense – and no longer really interact on any social media as it warps minds, including my own, it was a good way to share articles to almost 100,000 followers.)

If you move platforms where payments are cancelled, you tend to lose up to half your customers, as people tend to not want to sign up for something entirely from scratch once more. We did a little bit better than that, but it still proved very costly initially.

We're building numbers back up again, but I have no idea if it's old subscribers returning or new people joining, unless they used the same username or I knew their actual name (and Substack tends to be more actual names).

But there's at least a few newbies.

I don't like banning people or kicking them off, but I don't want TTT to be a big site – just a viable niche site, for those who want to experience football this way. I'd rather lose some money than lose the site altogether.

(We added a couple of additional Substacks to help pay for the work of those contributors, but this is the Main Hub, where debate takes place.)

I also greatly appreciate the support I've had from readers over the years.

I've spoken various times about how I only became a writer by trade once diagnosed with M.E. in 1999, and lost my previous career (which in turn led to losing pretty much everything else I had, including the ability to pay for my season ticket, which was one of the lesser problems; it took until my first book in 2005 to make any money as a writer).

It's never mentioned to elicit sympathy, just understanding. That includes understanding the spirit of this site, and my personal limitations; as well as the pressure of having to run a site to make a living, and over the years, financially support various other writers and editors too.

(EDIT: I first spoke about my illness when people questioned how I could write about Liverpool on the official site in 2005 when, at the time, I no longer went to many games, as if I simply wasn’t a ‘proper fan’; as it stands, I’m able to make it to 3-5 games most seasons, with rest time built in before and after, depending on how my health is at the time. I also like to spread awareness about the condition, but I don’t feel sorry for myself, and have gained experience and knowledge in the face of obstacles. At times it really sucks, admittedly.)

It also makes it even harder to enjoy Liverpool games, when you know that success brings new subscribers (and sells books, when you have a new book out), and failure of the team costs you money. That really does mess with your head, and your emotions. (And that impacts my health, too.)

And trying to be calm and rational about football is not the quickest route to financial security, in the age of outrage.

Anyway, this is designed as a kind of introduction to anyone new to the site, or a reminder to anyone in need of a refresher. Maybe nothing I’ve said here is something I haven’t already said, but it’s handy to have it in one place.

I'll link to it whenever I need to point out the ethos of the site, and what subscribers can expect (and what is expected of them).

I hope we can all enjoy 2023/24, and do our best to stay sane. If it's no fun, then why bother?