Lookie here! Some rando on Twitter says so! Well, a Reuters Miami correspondent:

David Beckham has held talks with MLS over owning a future expansion team – story to follow.

— Simon Evans (@sgevans) May 17, 2013

Beckham ownership of MLS team not just a theoretical ‘option’ – specific locations have been discussed with his advisors

— Simon Evans (@sgevans) May 17, 2013

Talks have taken place since Beckham left Galaxy and will continue. Miami has been discussed as one of the possible locations for a team.

— Simon Evans (@sgevans) May 17, 2013

Perhaps not the most closely guarded secret in Major League Soccer at the moment. I emailed MLS’s vice president of communications Dan Courtemanche for comment on how far this thing has progressed and will get back to you if I hear anything that is remotely interesting.

But from a fantasists perspective, you know a league has arrived when the foreign owners start showing up trying to run the place.

On David Beckham’s retirement, many words have been spoken – a large amount of these have achieved the important mark of being equally as bland as the man himself. But professional opinion-giver Chris Waddle managed the best opinion on Beckham. “You can go down a list of footballers since the Premier League and I don’t think David Beckham would probably be in the first 1000,” was what Chrissy said to the world so that everyone could hear. And he really did say that. I’m not lying. I’ve not taken him out of context here, stripping away valuable, clever thinking to make a sensible man sound silly. That’s what he said and meant.

What I think has happened here is that “Former England midfielder Chris Waddle has trashed the retiring David Beckham” essentially by mistake. Not that he didn’t mean what he was saying; but that he didn’t realise exactly what he meant. Something which regularly afflicts former football players. When Chris formed his opinion-which like all his opinions do have to be formed to happen at some point, they don’t appear from nowhere, despite all the evidence which suggests they do-he didn’t realise quite the implications of that opinion. He didn’t realise that he was essentially calling David Beckham a mid-table player.

You see, it comes down to maths. One thousand better Premier League players in the last 21 seasons: let’s try this out. Say that Top Four Player means Good Player. About 8 players start every single week for Top Four teams; that’s 32 Good Players per season. Multiply that by 21 seasons and you get 672 Good Players, except that number is meaningless because a lot of the Good Players in one season will be the same Good Players in the next season and the 672 figure counts them twice. My guess from this, anyway, is it leaves around four hundred Good Players in the Premier League era. Now, Chris Waddle has not only said Beckham wouldn’t fit into this 400 Top Four players, but he wouldn’t have him in the next 400 either. Or the next 200 after that.

I don’t want to say it, but I feel the question must at least be asked: has Chris Waddle, professional opinion-giver, got his numbers wrong? Because it feels like for someone to say that Beckham – however good exactly you think he is – is not in the best 1000 footballers to play in the Premier League requires one of two things: either 1. An extremely unusual interpretation of what the word ‘best’ means, or 2. A miscalculation, involving a large overestimation of the number of people to have actually played in the Premier League.

Now, far be for me to guess at what precisely Chris Waddle is thinking at any one time, but I think the second option is the most likely – the miscalculation. And if it is yet more Number Two from Chris Waddle, I think it might be, maybe, a little bit, good reason to question why exactly the people with camera lenses, tape-recorders and media jobs to fill keep going to ex-players for their opinions on the football. These are people who don’t realise what their own opinions are. Chris Waddle thinks David Beckham is outside of the top 1000 players to play in the Premier League. I’ve tried to contact him to ask just how many players he believes have played in the Premier League but heard nothing back, so have taken his answer to be “one squillion billion”. Chris Waddle has accidental opinions.

Okay, doubtless People Like Chris have some use. Laughing at them at fun fairs wouldn’t do, so sticking one of them on a panel as one of a few opinion-givers, with a very specific job talking about the ball-kicking bit in football, maybe, might be fine. But the deference to People Like Chris in football coverage should surely stop. Do I want to know how a dressing room works? A group of men coming together to do a job: I think I can guess. Is it interesting to hear an ex-pro’s opinion on how it must have felt so good to score that goal? I do not.

Where is this deference coming from? It’s got to be intellectual laziness from producers, because in terms of ex-player’s opinions, it goes two ways. Either it’s an insight which only they could give, on the dressing room or fame or how to kick a football, in which case we don’t have the exact insight but we have enough information to guess for ourselves or, in fact, it’s just not that interesting. Or it’s an insight which anyone could give, as is the case with Waddle on Beckham – because in terms of Beckham, Waddle is an outsider, just like anyone else. In both cases, we really shouldn’t value Chris Waddle’s.

Yet the people with money to spend on football coverage do. They choose to spend their cash on people who have opinions by mistake. David Beckham outside of the top 1000 Premier League players indeed, Chris. Well, you’re 1001 then, you idiot.

Hey guys, remember when David Beckham played in MLS? Here’s a 47 minute long ESPN documentary on the subject. Cheers to championsleague.ca for putting it all up in my grill.

Hey! It’s the last one of these for the season. I’ve hope they’ve been helpful in some way to you. Next season I will include a running tally of the general success rate, and I’ll get some outside help to see when we’ve hit the magic number of statistical power to pass judgment on our models.

I’ve been noticing that Bloomberg, which is a paid analytics service, is often an outlier, sometimes by ten points on the odds. To be honest I’ve not been keeping track of their success rate closely, but something to keep an eye on for next year as well.

One or two interesting disagreements on odds, as would be expected with the evenly matched ties here. Newcastle vs Arsenal is of note in that regard, so take heed Spurs supporters! Particularly as your low end win estimate is a not too shabby 61% from—guess who!—Bloomberg.

And I may as well crow in a reminder here that you can vote for Counter Attack in a host of different categories over at EPL Talk.   If you like the site, you can vote for it here. If you like me (haha), you can vote here. And if you like the Counter Attack podcast, you can vote for it here.

Chelsea vs Everton

Liverpool vs QPR

Manchester City vs Norwich

Newcastle vs Arsenal

Southampton vs Stoke

Swansea vs Fulham

Tottenham vs Sunderland

West Brom vs Man United

West Ham vs Reading

Wigan vs Aston Villa

Merry Christmas, Twitter!

Chris Waddle, the former footballing semi-great, has opened his gob and the social media machine is now attempting to destroy him with Tweets. Anyway, this is the reason:

“I would say he has been a good player, I wouldn’t put him down as a great,” Waddle, 52, told BBC Radio 5 Live.

“You can go down a list of footballers since the Premier League and I don’t think David Beckham would probably be in the first 1,000.”

Considering there are over 500 players currently registered in the Premier League as of writing, this would put Beckham considerably far down the historical list. I’m quite excited as I’m certain this implies Martin Laursen is better than David Beckham.

Anyway, this would be piss in a bucket save for the fact that Mr. Waddle is employed as a media person by both ESPN and BBC Five Live. Most of us suffer under the naive impression that pundits are meant to help inform the football-liking public about the sport they’re watching.

I think we can all say with confidence that placing Beckham out of the top 1000 best Premier League players of all time isn’t very informative. However, the reason Counter Attack is even clackity-clacking over this is because it’s a good reminder that television pundits aren’t hired to inform, but to aggravate, and thereby draw attention.

You weren’t thinking about Chris Waddle yesterday, were you? Or even most if not all of 2013? And now you are. The end.

The Lead

I’ve been sifting through posts from last August for some measure of prescience for this Premier League season and it seems the more things change, the more things change the same. One of my first 2012-13 posts involved rumours that Rooney wanted a transfer away from Manchester United. Although there is a delicious irony in the CA’s in-house Mancs questioning their manager’s approach: “questions must be asked of Alex Ferguson.” Not any more they don’t.

Still, there was no major development upsetting all expectation. Many smart, reasonable people predicted Manchester United to reclaim their Premier League honours, and here we are. We knew Gareth Bale was a good player. We knew Roberto Di Matteo might have a tough time justifying his European Cup win with a stable Premier League performance. We knew even as early as August that Brendan Rodgers’ Liverpool “project” might not be the dead cert some believed it would be. We knew that Mancini would go if he didn’t build on his title win (although the scorched earth approach to the backroom staff has been nothing short of stunning). I guess if I was to spend some real quality time thinking about it though, I wouldn’t have guessed Paolo Di Canio would be at Sunderland. That was messed up.

Anyway, perhaps not a classic season as far as last year’s incredible finish is concerned, but a fitting epitaph to the Old World Order. Sir Alex is gone. The FA Youth Cup winning class of ’92 is dispersed. Wayne Rooney’s career trajectory hangs in the balance. Newcastle’s reserve keeper Steve Harper is retiring. Gus Poyet is Premier League. Maybe next year the British Petroleum League won’t be as popular. Maybe the Bundesliga will. Good enough reason to start speaking Deutsch. Time will tell. Except if this season was any indication, sometimes it doesn’t tell us much of anything.

On Monday, because it’s a holiday and I have nothing better to do, I’ll do a Premier League by the numbers recap for you, a homage to my amazing former colleague Kristian Jack whose boots I continually fail to fill. For now, enjoy the final Exhibition Sunday.

So Mario Balotelli is on Twitter, which means AC Milan’s social media manager or whomever takes care of these things is now in a mad rush to set up a meeting with the player to discuss best practices, what constitutes online defamation, and why Vine cannot and should not be used by any player, ever.

We also know this is Mario (beyond the obvious fact that he’s taken photos of himself and others in the club have verified it, you party poopers) because there’s currently no avatar, and the Tweets are a disjointed mash of teenage nonsense (he’s only just out of his teens, you know).

Or are they?

While most right thinking people would question whether annotating a player’s Tweets is the best use of one’s time, this wrong-thinking person begs to differ. And so, Balo’s Tweets, annotated.

Cucù!!Io e lucky presenti!! twitter.com/FinallyMario/s…

— Mario balotelli (@FinallyMario) May 16, 2013

Cuckoo! A delicious pun that tells us “what time it is” (Mario time presumably!), and plays on the popular media perception of Mario as crazy. The selfie included features some empty seat behind Mario in his car, inviting us to be a passenger on the adventure Balotelli plans to take us on via his account.

@ducieduceHow do i use this????

— Mario balotelli (@FinallyMario) May 16, 2013

Standard new Twitter user fare. We’re also introduced to Mario’s friend.

twitter.com/FinallyMario/s…

— Mario balotelli (@FinallyMario) May 16, 2013

Mario in his car with an unidentified stranger! Or who is that? I’m probably supposed to know and now seem like a total idiot. Typical.

@swp29 Shaun u ok bro? Miss u !!

— Mario balotelli (@FinallyMario) May 16, 2013

Shout out to Sean Wright-Phillips. Look! SWP in the news again! Balo’s using Twitter to connect. Gathering steam now.

Me and my miss eh eh! twitter.com/FinallyMario/s…

— Mario balotelli (@FinallyMario) May 16, 2013

The dog lover in his element. A banal selfie. This is a bit boring now, isn’t it?

#MB45Tweet

— P Mills (@MrBlackMills) May 16, 2013

An RT for a ludicrous hashtag. This is getting chummy and terrible. Already a typical player account. Dreadful news.

@njr92 Hermanoooo!!! Twitter es loco ahah

— Mario balotelli (@FinallyMario) May 16, 2013

Friends with Neymar. Don’t see much potential there.

@finallymario ballooo … Abrazo amigo !

— Neymar Júnior (@Njr92) May 16, 2013

Thank you brother and best of luck to you. So this has all the potential of being a shit account. My prediction: a lot of deleted Tweets, perhaps some poorly translated insults, or some lame apologies for on-field behaviour. A real disappointment all around. Will need some improvement.

Starring the usual gang, @amhrichardson and @iamthemonkey. I’m sure you’re just as excited to find out who will be relegated as I am!

Ever dreamt of going for coffee and finding Pirlo behind the bar? That’s what happened this morning @trussardinews twitter.com/juventusfc/sta…

— JuventusFC (@juventusfc) May 16, 2013

Cheers to Devang for pressing the Retweet button like an OG.

I had a host of neatly set out appointment posts for the week that were supposed to carry me through to the end of the season. Today was to be on football tactics. That’s all done now, because English football is doing one of those emotional, Doctor Who-esque regenerations in which Tom Baker’s face starts glowing until he wakes up as Peter Davison.

Ten days ago, Sir Alex Ferguson was going to be around for another season at Old Trafford, David Moyes was set to add another year to his impressive and unlikely pile of time at Everton, Rooney was getting ready let to his career arc wane just a little bit more by remaining at Manchester United, Paul Scholes would be there to laugh behind his back in the United dressing room, David Beckham would be lollygagging around Paris with PSG, and Rio Ferdinand might still consider throwing on an England shirt if he felt like answering the increasingly desperate calls.

Even Frank Lampard’s one-year contract at Chelsea is more a goodwill gesture than a serious investment, a sign the player is basking in the warm, lovely twilight of a decent slowdown. All that is left is for Steven Gerrard to get a season-ending injury against Fulham or something and for the Daily Mail to get the scoop that he’s calling it quits.

We don’t necessarily have to mash meaning into a series of coincidental retirements, but there is a sense that the mainstream edifice of the English game is passing away. And I don’t mean the risible, stale joke of the Golden Generation that was supposed to win things for England in the aughts and instead delighted in missing penalty kicks every two years.

Football is saying goodbye to the generation that transformed the Premier League to an interesting, post-Taylor Report stadium improvement project to a massive, multi-billion pound/euro/dollar corporate orgy in which two of the nation’s biggest clubs are owned by Americans and the rest by Russian or Middle East oil investment money. The lines of cause and correlation in this two decade development can be traced directly to Beckham’s face, sitting under an exotic, historical Zoetrope of perfectly audience-tested haircuts. TV needed Beckham for the Premier League to work, and after a short wait, there was David lobbing a ball from the half-way line against Wimbledon.

It’s for this reason that in some ways Beckham’s retirement from football is even more significant than Ferguson’s. Football fans knew about Ferguson. The world knew about Beckham. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t as good as Messi or Ronaldo, that he was a utility player of the highest order, or that his single, most definable skills—free kicks and crosses—were a vital sideshow to the main event, but a sideshow nonetheless. He was like a mini-England. Wealthy, popular on TV, the subject of a lot of off the pitch hysteria. Respected by some big names, equally derided elsewhere. Very, very good, but maybe a bit limited. In his day, demanded the world round.

In any case, that’s all over now. The battle for TV has been won, the chips have fallen where . Despite hints of a European decline, the Eee Pee El still puts asses in the seats across most of the English-speaking world, and much of East Asia (again, take a bow David Beckham). Now it will have to figure out a way to maintain that stranglehold with no Ferguson, no nineties era United, no Golden Generation led by Golden Balls. They’ll be hoping the present mish-mash of money and ever-changing managers will do the trick in its stead.

You’re going to get all the gooey goal memories from the Big Papers today, so I thought I would remember Beckham’s career in the way he would have wanted—via his representation in popular media. Despite being considerably good at the football—HEY REMEMBER THE GOAL HE SCORED AGAINST GREECE THAT WON ENGLAND THE WORLD CUP OR SOMETHING?—the dude was made for TV. He was Pele without all the additional skill, although he certainly looked like himself playing football. And he made a hell of a lot of assists.

He sold smoothies for Burger King!

He sold a clothing line to H&M!

He was in too many goddamn ads to name!

His name appeared in a movie title!

He had a cameo in a very naff movie about football!

He was heavily featured in the sequel which was just as awful!

He did in a touching interview with Zinedine Zidane!

He loved America!

Richard Whittall, Devang Desai, Sean Keay and James Bigg sit down for our Rapid Fire podcast to talk about Monaco’s ambition in Ligue 1, Rooney’s possible adaption to a new footballing role, a possible Mancini: the Movie adaptation, and who would win in a knife fight between a monkey and a bear. Thanks to all who sent in your questions! No animals were harmed in the making of this podcast.

Also, if you like the CA podcast, please rate it in iTunes and/or vote for it to win an award!

You can download it here and subscribe on iTunes here. You can also find the RSS Feed here.

The Daily Mail has “sources in Paris” who say so. But my inner Rob Beal detector says to be wary. Here’s the scoop from the paper:

Despite the offer of an extended one-year deal at Paris Saint-German, sources in Paris have told Sportsmail that the 38-year-old has played his last game, bowing out on a high after helping Carlo Ancelotti’s side win the French title for the first time in 19 years.

When approached for comment by Sportsmail, Beckham’s representative was today unavailable.

If true, it’s hardly a major footballing development. Still, despite George Best’s famous and ultimately kind of accurate quote—”He cannot kick with his left foot, he cannot head a ball, he cannot tackle and he doesn’t score many goals. Apart from that he’s all right”—Beckham has likely done as much if not more to popularize football than Lionel Messi.

Anyway, this is pretty goddamn tenuous so maybe put the hankies away just for now…

UPDATE: Yeah, it’s legit, or at least Rob Harris says it is:

BREAKING: David Beckham says he is retiring. Details now on @ap

— Rob Harris (@RobHarris) May 16, 2013

The Lead

Everyone—myself included, obvs—seems to manically oscillate from wanting managers who did a little worse this season than last (even within basic means regression) to get their asses sacked, and condemning chairman from doing just that.

For example, general consensus holds that Abramovich sacking Carlo Ancelotti in 2011 was bad, but City sacking Mancini at the end of this season was good. Why? Well, ineffable reasons involving the fact that Mancini seemed like he didn’t know what he was doing at times, a conclusion we made entirely based on the tiny little bit we knew of the guy from his press conferences, his substitutions and tactical formations, and his hair. Ancelotti apparently did not have those issues.

In the end it may not matter at all. Chelsea won a European Cup under a now-sacked manager in Roberto Di Matteo (do you see the Italian dots all connected here?), and this season they won the Europa League under a guy who was hauled in last minute to replace him.

Still, one wonders over the Frank Lampard one year extension, whether this was decided on the basis of his long-term performance, his fitness, his injury analytics etc. And maybe it was decided on the fact he scored a record-setting number of goals and helped the club on their way to winning a major European trophy.

The thing is, it probably doesn’t matter. This is Chelsea. The supporting cast could be entirely different next season, and there they’ll be, confounding pundits and long-game advocates on their way to glory.

Okay, so I’ve been doing some social media research and I’ve figured out what you’re supposed to think of this final.

It was a good European final.

Benfica have had a rough week, particularly as they conceded a late, looping header to Branislav Ivanovic, which is a kick in the proverbial nuts following their weekend in which they conceded a late goal against Porto to Kelvin for their first loss of the season in the Portuguese league, which likely means they’ve lost the title. Jorge Jesus!

John Terry is kind of a loser for being so into grabbing the Big Vase in a game in which he didn’t even make the team sheet, following his insistence on being able to hoist the European Cup after he was suspended on a red card. What a jerk, guys, amirite?

Juan Mata basically holds everything at the moment:

Juan Mata: World Cup, European Championship, Champions League, Europa League, FA Cup & Copa del Rey. 25 years old. #Champion

— Juan Mata Stats (@MataStats) May 15, 2013

Hey, isn’t it hilarious that Chelsea fans thought Rafa was terrible and now they have a Giant Football Vase? That’s hilarious! Also, from a serious journalistic standpoint, Rafa Benitez is suddenly a good manager and Guilleme Balague was right this entire time, because he won trophies with Valencia, Liverpool, Inter and Chelsea. Idiots.

Fernando Torres was “composed.” He’s very good because Spain and Chelsea have a lot of trophies at the moment.

Stutter steps in a penalty can lead to injury.

Matic had a good game for Benfica. Transfer rumours.

Gary Cahill? Remember that guy?

Chelsea can sack managers and still win trophies, ergo everybody sack their manager. RIGHT NOW.

That’s it for now. Here’s a GIF of that final header:

CNN releases a teaser of Paolo Pinto’s interview with BFF Balo. In it he declares his reasons for not walking off the pitch despite suffering abuse at Roma, and why the next time he won’t hesitate.

It hasn’t been the best couple of weeks for Toronto FC (or months, or years). With a win-less streak now stretching to eight games, and with just one win in its last 24 MLS games, the Reds are in danger of slipping even further into irrelevancy in the Toronto sports market.

For those that were around in the early years, it’s staggering to see the fall from grace. This was a club that wasn’t just the darling of the Toronto sports scene but for much of MLS for a while at the end of last decade. There wasn’t an empty seat in the stadium for almost three straight years, despite struggles on the pitch.

In fact, what seemed like “struggles” then were only a taste of what was to come. Little did TFC fans realize that those first three years would represent a high water mark for the club. They improved each of the first three seasons, finishing 2009 just one point from a playoff spot.

On the morning of October 24, 2009 Toronto FC was a middling team that was one win away from making its first playoff appearance. Fans had reason to hope.

Then, in a driving rainstorm, Macoumba Kandji scored for the New York Red Bulls just three minutes into the Reds’ final game of the year. New York, a club that was 21 points behind Toronto at kick-off, would go on to score four more goals that night to deny TFC a spot in the playoffs.

The enduring image of the night was interim head coach Chris Cummins standing on the sideline, shoulders slumped with rain pouring off his black trench coats. He didn’t even have the energy to shout instructions to his players any longer; his mind may have been on catching the first flight back to Heathrow.

Cummins remains the most successful of Toronto’s eight managers. The club has lost 52 times since that night, with only 21 wins. Along the way they have been forced to cut season ticket prices to year one levels and watched as a once vibrant and sold-out stadium turn into a cynical, often half-empty shell. What was once fan passion is now mostly anger. That is if the club is lucky. At least if the fans are angry they still care. Increasingly there is less anger.

So, what happened? How did Toronto FC become so very bad? It’s indeed puzzling, as the Reds have the financial resources to compete and ownership has invested in both players and infrastructure. Yet, the team just seems to get worse and worse.

The simple answer – and the answer most want to point to – is that the investor/owners in Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment don’t know what they’re doing. It’s increasingly difficult argument to challenge, even if it appears a tad simplistic. The truth is, there has been one consistent element to the club and that’s ownership.

What’s even more baffling about that is that, in isolation, most of the moves MLSE has made to support their franchise in that time made a lot of sense. In 2006, MLSE recognized that they didn’t know how to run a soccer team and so looked to hire a guy that had the experience they didn’t. In retrospect, hiring Mo Johnston as coach and eventually director of football was a terrible idea, but at the time it was pretty uncontroversial.

When it became clear that Johnston wasn’t the right guy for the job, MLSE reached out (and opened their pocket book) to one of the biggest names in the game in Jürgen Klinsmann to assist them in the search.

Few criticized MLSE’s hiring of Klinsmann. So, when he came back with the name of Aron Winter as the right man to bring TFC back from the dead, most fans were excited. After all, this was a guy that had played at the highest levels and was part of one of Europe’s most storied clubs.

Instead, things got worse. A lot worse. So MLSE listened to the prevailing advice of the day and sought out a “MLS guy” to run the show.

Enter Kevin Payne, an experienced manager from the club that was only associated with success in the league’s earliest days. Again, next to no one questioned the hire.

It’s too early to evaluate Payne, but not to point out his similarities with other MLSE hires. Payne was an attractive candidate; he combined brash talk with a long and impressive resume. When MLSE hires someone it almost always tends to be an industry name. You rarely see the company put its trust in an internal employee, or in allowing a young executive to grow in its role.

With MLSE style seems to matter more than substance. It plays better with fans and media, but, as history tells us, it rarely seems to work.

There is a certain arrogance in the philosophy. It suggests that Toronto is too big a market to be appropriate for an entry-level managerial candidate.

That might point to the biggest problem of all – arrogance. Despite two decades of losing, MLSE continues to believe that it is a major player in North American sports. It continues to make the same errors and it continues to get the same results.

And, all fans can do is hope against hope that they eventually will learn from their mistakes and bring the city a winner, and that hope is running thin. Worse, it’s turning into indifference.

Newcastle is almost certainly where good players go to flourish. Hey, that’s the consensus on Michael Owen (which, sarcasm aside, wasn’t that bad actually—30 goals in 79 appearances in all comps anyone?).

Seriously, the days of the Toon springing for Alan Shearer and Les Ferdinand and Tino Asprilla are slightly behind us now. As in, what, 1996?

Anyway, the ever-reliable news publication Sports Direct (clothing stores have news divisions now?) has done a bit of self-reporting:

SportsDirect News has learned the Magpies have already sounded out Rooney’s agent over a potential move, with United keen to offload the 27-year-old.

A source close to the negotiations told us: “Newcastle see Wayne as their ideal player.

“He’s a strong centre-forward, would relate to the fans and would be a massive boost to the club’s brand name.

“Low-level conversations have already been held between Newcastle and Rooney’s agent, though the two clubs haven’t spoken directly yet.”

Which could of course mean anything from “Wayne’s quite eager, actually” to “Sorry, how did you get this number?”

But it’s one of those moves that’s far better for Newcastle than for Wayne Rooney. A Newcastle with Rooney will finish…maybe in 11th place next season? That’s a guess of course. I guess theoretically with that en francais midfield behind him, which rocked the Premier League as they pole-vaulted Mike Ashley’s stripey-stripes to 13th place and six points over the relegation zone, the world is Rooney’s oyster.

And besides, when Bayern says no, what other option is there, really?

In the pandemonium that followed Juventus’s home win over Palermo earlier this month, supporters twice invaded the pitch. The Bianconeri had just been crowned champions of Italy for the second year running, prompting over-eager fans to rush the field in the hopes of joining their heroes’ celebrations. But by the time they reached their destination, most of Juventus’s players had already fled, sprinting down the tunnel and taking refuge in the changing rooms.

One player, though, did not run. Gigi Buffon stayed on the field as long as the stewards would allow, accepting a T-shirt from one fan—a member of the Viking Juve group of Ultras—and hugs from many more before finally being dragged away by a posse of men in fluorescent orange jackets. It was a telling scene. Few players identify as closely with the fans as Buffon, a man who still considers himself to be one of them.

The only difference is, Buffon does not support Juve. He likes his employers very much, as you might expect for a player who has spent 12 such happy and successful years with a single club, even choosing to stick by them after they were dropped to Serie B as a result of the Calciopoli scandal in 2006. But Buffon’s true love remains Carrarese, the team he supported as a boy.

Growing up in Carrara, a coastal town in northern Tuscany, Buffon quickly became obsessed with his local team. As a child he would watch games from the Curva Nord of the Stadio dei Marmi, a small concrete bowl with space for 5,000 or so people. As he grew older, he began to stand among the Ultras, bare-chested in his preferred game-day attire of blue jeans and an open leather jacket with no shirt underneath.

At times he even fought for his side. Asked during a 1998 interview with La Repubblica if he had ever traded blows with an opposition supporter, Buffon confirmed that he had. “Every now and then, yes,” he said. “After a game between Carrarese and Bologna five years ago, which Bologna won through absolute robbery, we caused a bit of a scene outside with the opposition fans.

“I’m not saying it’s right, but if you limit yourself to fighting with fists then it doesn’t seem that tragic to me either. The tragedy is when someone brings a knife with them from home.”

By the time of that interview, Buffon was already established as Parma’s starting goalkeeper, a fact which made attending Carrarese games altogether less straightforward. He would still get down whenever he could, however, taking advantage of gaps in the schedule to rush home and catch a game.

Even when he wasn’t able to physically follow his team, his enthusiasm never waned. For years, Buffon has worn gloves bearing the acronym: “C.u.i.t”, a nod to the Commando Ultras Indians Trips, the supporters group to which he belonged. In 2006 one of the goalkeeper’s sisters told Corriere della Sera how he still used to practice that group’s chants.

“There’s a little house next to our cottage,” she said. “He likes to close himself in there, where nobody can disturb him, and then do you know what he does next? He starts singing the songs of the Ultras! One time I spied on him through the window; he looked crazed. He was jumping around like a boy.”

Buffon was not going to let a career in football change him, nor the way he felt about his team. But one thing that did alter was his bank balance. By 2010, the combination of sporting income, endorsements and outside business interests had made Buffon a wealthy man. When Carrarese were relegated to the fifth-tier of Italian football, Serie D, that summer, he decided to intervene.

Together with four others, including the journeyman striker Cristiano Lucarelli, Buffon formed a consortium to buy Carrarese in July 2010. Their arrival seemed to herald a bright new dawn. The club’s relegation was reversed after other teams were unable to meet the Lega Pro’s registration requirements for the following season. Carrarese had themselves been struggling economically, but could now invest to strengthen their squad.

Within a year they had been promoted, securing their passage to the Lega Pro’s Prima Divisione—the third tier of Italian football—with a playoff victory over Prato. They followed that up with a solid mid-table finish a year later. Nevertheless, some of the club’s investors were getting restless. Like most other clubs throughout the Italian football pyramid, Carrarese were consistently losing money.

Hence, in July 2012, Buffon bought out the remaining four members of the consortium to take sole ownership of the club. At his press conference to confirm the transaction, Buffon also informed the club’s fans of a number of new appointments. His wife, Alena Seredova, was to serve as an official club ambassador. She would later be elevated to honorary president.

Alena confessed to never having watched Carrarese before, but Buffon declared himself thrilled at her involvement. “It makes me very happy to have Alena here with me,” said Buffon. “Even though she has told me many times that I am crazy to take on all these duties, she has also understood and shared in my decision. She will give us a hand in ‘spreading’ our colours, our name, and our history.”

Buffon had some more tangible plans for improving the club’s fortunes, stating that the region had always produced talented young players but too long allowed them to be signed up by teams from further afield. “This is an outrageous mistake,” he said. “We will try to take advantage of this natural opportunity, focusing strongly on our football school and youth sector.”

He would also use his footballing connections, he said, to secure loans of promising players from a number of top-flight teams. The club’s new manager, Carlo Sabatini, had an impressive contacts book of his own. His brother Walter is the sporting director of Roma.

Speaking at the same event, Sabatini told reporters that his priority was to get the team playing a brand of entertaining football that would bring fans to the stadium. Instead he brought an angry mob right to the changing room door, a group of Carrarese Ultras storming the tunnel at the end of a 3-0 home defeat to Benevento in October, the club’s fifth consecutive loss.

Sabatini promptly resigned, but his successor fared little better. Nello Di Costanzo was fired in February 2013 with Carrarese still bottom of the division. He was replaced by Ivo Iaconi, who scraped together seven points from the next eight games, not enough to peel them off the foot of the table. The team would need a victory over third-placed Latina in its final fixture to have any chance of avoiding relegation.

That game was played on Sunday at the Stadio dei Marmi. Of course, Buffon was in attendance. Less than 24 hours earlier he had joined his Juventus team-mates for their official Scudetto presentation, but now he found himself anxiously watching from the stands as the team that he owns and supports fought for its third-tier survival.

In the 33rd minute Carrarese took the lead, Nicola Corrent converting from the penalty spot. Thereafter, though, they became cautious, inviting the visitors on. With just over a quarter of an hour to go, Tomas Danilevicius, formerly of Arsenal, equalised with the help of a heavy deflection. The hosts poured forward, and in the dying moments enjoyed more than one golden opportunity to restore their advantage. But they failed to take them. The game finished 1-1.

At full-time Buffon followed his Carrarese players over towards the Ultras, a group who showed little sympathy for their plight. The team was jeered and heckled as Buffon looked on gloomily. How could things reach this point? He had tried to intervene much sooner, not only by changing manager but by persuading the former Lazio, Palermo and Chievo striker Stephen Makinwa, a man capped 16 times by Nigeria, to join the club back in November.

Makinwa had chipped in with six goals but could not halt the slide. Carrarese finished with just 21 points from 30 games. Their problem was not so much in attack as defence; they finished with a league-worst 51 goals conceded.

With his club still losing money, and a playing career of his own to worry about, it had been speculated that Buffon might try to sell up. He was quick to nip such talk in the bud. “I will certainly not give up after today,” he said on Sunday. “I am sad, though. I won’t hide the fact that this was a personal defeat for me. I’m the one to blame.”

In the immediate term, Buffon’s plan is to find out whether there is any hope of having the relegation reversed along similar lines to what happened in 2010. The sad reality of football in Italy’s lower divisions is that clubs go bankrupt with shocking regularity. As Buffon was quick to note, “We are up to date on all our payments and balances, which cannot be said for every other team.”

But regardless of what happens with relegation, Buffon promised to do what he could to make the team more competitive next season. As every supporter knows, there are some problems that you simply cannot walk away from.

We need your help in making our Rapid Fire podcast listenable! Please send in your football questions no later than 7:00 PM today! You can leave them in the comments section below, or send them to counterattack@thescore.com, or Tweet them at our faces using the #counterattackquestion hashtag.

Fanks in advance!

The Lead

Rio Ferdinand has announced his retirement as an England international, and one Daily Mail writer is a bit pissed off. In a slightly inadvertent own-goal, Lee Clayton says Ferdinand was “a victim of a lack of foresight and ambition by England’s managers,” a daring thesis in English football circles if there ever was one.

The problem? England was so mired in its obsession with four-four-f*cking-two that it declined the option to attempt a back three with Ferdinand playing sweeper behind two defenders:

Terry Venables had played with three at the back, Hoddle experimented with it… and Ferdinand, fast, stylish and elegant, was made for it.

It didn’t happen and now he has retired to concentrate on extending his life at Manchester United.

If only England had moved Ferdinand in a slightly different defensive role and maintained this stringent formation against any and all opponents with any and all managers, Rio Ferdinand would have showered Albion with untold triumphs from London to Berlin.

Not mentioned here is Ferdinand’s perfectly capable employment at Manchester United in a role not very foreign to what he was tasked with doing on England. Or the fact that England, who in Ferdinand’s time have gone out in major tournaments often on penalty kicks, seemed perfectly capable in defense.

The absurd logic that a versatile player shouldn’t see a drastic decline in form when moved to a role as a central defender from a sweeper position is also never questioned. Neither is England’s obsession with these positional quibbles and relative lack of concern over the general paucity of technically gifted players able to retain possession and not give up a lot of midfield turnovers against elite sides.

No one let Ferdinand down, and Ferdinand didn’t let England down. England perhaps let England down, but even that’s a contentious seeing as we’re discussing a regular major tournament quarterfinalist that has a bad habit of losing on that entirely objective skill correlative known as penalties.

Links

Arsenal and Chelsea could face a special end of season playoff, as they could finish tied on points, goal differential and goals scored [the Guardian].

Malaga set Manuel Pellegrini free to join Manchester City [the Telegraph].

Bayern Munich decline on swooping for Rooney [the Guardian].

Nicholas Rigg says Real Madrid haven’t given up on nabbing Carlo Ancelotti just yet [ESPNFC].

Grant Wahl on Jozy Altidore’s incredible season at AZ, and what might lie ahead for the American [SI].

Toronto FC look to set up affiliate team in the USL Pro. [Red Nation Online].

The statement is short and to the point:

With regret Manchester City announce that David Platt has this afternoon left his role as Assistant Manager at the Club.

David was offered the opportunity to continue his work with us but has declined the invitation. He has decided to leave his role with his close friend Roberto Mancini.

I’d like to think it the announcement of Roberto Mancini’s resignation went down something like this with the backroom coaching staff:

We’ve been hearing a lot about the club kit man lately, thanks to the former Man City kit man Stephen Aziz’s assessment of his former boss on Twitter today. The Independent has gone so far (too far, maybe?) in saluting four of the best kit men in England.

Seattle Sounders’ performance analyst Ravi Ramineni was kind enough to pass on this video of the Sounders kit man Nolan Myer. We learn the job involves a lot of packing, laundry, late night preparation, and Christmas-themed pin up calendars. Enjoy!

The subtitle of Chris Anderson and David Sally’s new book The Numbers Game, which following the inevitable colon that must be attached to all non-fiction titles, is Everything You know About Football Is Wrong. This is obviously a selling tactic.

“Oi, Maggie, this book says everything I know about football is wrong.”

“Does it Frank?”

“Yeah, it does. It can’t be anything more than a game of 11-a-side trying to put a ball in a net, could it?”

“Well, buy it and find out. We have a gift certificate.”

But I kind of wish they’d gone with Everything You Know About Football is Right.

Let me explain.

Yesterday I watched a Tweeter react to the initial excerpt release of the book in the Times yesterday. His basic point made over several 140-character posts was what nothing in the excerpt was particularly revelatory. Of course teams that score a lot of goals and don’t concede a lot of goals do well. Of course possession is important, and of course it matters that team don’t turnover the ball too much. Sure, it’s kind of interesting that corners are by and large a waste of time as a set-piece, but the banal truths on display here is comprehensive proof advanced statistics is a waste of time (this by the way is the corollary to the argument over the alternate approach to football stats, which argues the game is far too complex to analyze and therefore any attempt to learn from it via statistical analysis is also—surprise!—a waste of time).

Perhaps part of the problem was the sense of expectation foisted on readers by the copy-editor. The introduction boldly states that the book presents “a sea change not just in what we think we know about the game, but — as shown here, in this exclusive first extract from the book — how we think we should play it.”

No doubt there will be some eyebrow-raising statistics in here, and some major challenges to our perception of the game. But the key phrase in this excerpt is this:

“We are not concerned with theory. We are concerned with facts.”

In university I was fascinated by the writings of medieval Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas, more for the form than the content. His Summa Theologica was written in a set, repeated format. He poses a question, presents counter-arguments, than makes his argument and addresses the objections in turn. Once he’s done, he moves on as if the argument is settled, and builds upon its implications, constructing his castle in the sky brick by brick.

Of course it’s a massively flawed approach that flatters Aquinas’ faculty of reason to the point of absurdity. That’s because when it comes to matters of fact, naked reason is no substitute for empiricism. And that’s where Aquinas’ approach is instructive.

Despite the old joke about lies, damned lies and statistics, the numbers themselves presented by Sally and Anderson, and others doing interesting work in the football analytics field at the moment, simply are what they are. They are not a journalistic cliche, they’re of no bias or clique, they don’t have an agenda. How they’re interpreted can sometimes be a subject of debate, and that’s certainly where the fun lies. But in of themselves, if the method is sound, the numbers are as close to the fact of the matter in football as one can go. At the moment, they point to some broad truths that seem so obvious in retrospect that one wonders why anyone went to the trouble of finding them.

But the key point is that we need to first establish these seemingly obvious truths as fact and not mere conventional opinion if we are to make any significant progress in the field. This is the core of Simon Gleave’s point that I seem to bang out almost every week—say it with me now!—we need to walk before we can run. Some of these truths are obvious, and some are definitely not (the idea that football’s fundamentals transcend tactical preference is a potentially huge shift in our understanding of their effectiveness: while the means may differ, the end result is the same). But they still need settling before we can properly move on.

I don’t want to keep hammering this, but the best example of what I mean can be found this season in the move from looking at raw Total Shots Ratios to analyzing TSR at 0 game states. One small step for an analyst, potentially one giant leap in understanding how to empirically measure what makes a good team ‘good.’ These little steps are made day by day, week by week, month by month, until they become convention. There’s no guarantee this will all lead to a “eureka” moment in football analytics, but a document like Anderson and Sally’s book could potentially go a long way to popularizing this approach to soccer statistics, and gain more converts to a growing discipline.

Quite literally, apparently:

Local press speculation was it was going to be either Kaka or Ronaldinho. Not both out. Were gasps when final list went up on screen

— tariq panja (@tariqpanja) May 14, 2013

Jack Lang at Snap! Kaka and Pop has the full list here. It’s who’s not on the list that has caused a stir in Brazil and around the football world. No Kaka. No Ronaldinho. No Ramires. No Coutinho. And no Rafael. This might be an expression of depth, but it’s also a sign of different thinking under Felipe Scolari:

Only four players have ever played a World Cup. Nobody can acuse Big Phil of not reshuffling the pack.

— Fernando Duarte (@Fernando_Duarte) May 14, 2013

To that end though, it’s an intriguing list. Lucas Moura made the cut, as did Oscar and Hermanes. There are a lot of defenders too. In the end, it’s the Confederations Cup. Despite the considerable allure, it’s a test run, a friendly tournament. Some intense playing minutes together in 2013 doesn’t set anything in stone for 2014. It strengthens Brazil’s considerable depth. No need to panic.