The Footy Blog

Happy birthday to the Dominion of Canada Football Association! In a week and a half, on May 24, the organization in charge of Canadian soccer marks its one hundredth anniversary. In honour of this momentous occasion, last week the CSA gathered the luminaries of the soccer world, or at least those members of the media who happened to be in Toronto plus a couple Toronto FC guys and Kara Lang, to model glamorous new centennial kits that will appear on the field in two games against the United States; one for the men in Toronto, the other for the women in Sandy, Utah.

That’s a lot of effort for a shirt that’ll be worn twice. I like it; seems more stylish than the regular jerseys in my books. It also gets the Canadian Soccer Association in the newspapers, which can’t help but be a good thing. But all this for the CSA’s centennial? It’s fine if it’s a big deal to those involved, but why should the rest of us care?
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If YOU were going to the Champions League Final this year…what would YOU do? @TomArnold will be at his first UCL Final this Saturday.

— FOX Soccer (@FOXSoccer) May 15, 2012

Booking agent: Tom, it’s Sandra, can we talk?

Tom Arnold: Sandra, I’m doing the Beethoven: Death of a Titan shoot right now, can it wait a little? I’m up to my nips in dog shit here.

Booking agent: Listen, I’ve got Fox Soccer on the other line, they’re pretty desperate. They need some middle America comic relief guy to bump ratings in the Midwest. Something called the League of Champions of Europe, or something.

TA: League of Champions? Sounds like a fucking comic book.

Booking agent: They’re going to fly you out to Munich and film you doing your friendly idiot shtick. Jeff Dunham cancelled because his David Beckham doll broke in half on a long haul flight.

TA: That the city in Switzerland?

Booking agent: Germany.

TA: Right, I was thinking of Vienna. How much?

Booking agent: You get to be on TV for ten minutes. And you’ll have to answer some pointless softballs on Twitter for half an hour.

TA: TEN MINUTES? I’m there.

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Not everybody was caught off guard by Cesare Prandelli’s decision to include an uncapped 20-year-old Serie B midfielder in his provisional Italy squad for Euro 2012. “I’m not surprised: [Marco] Verratti knows how to play football,” declared Zdenek Zeman, the player’s club manager at Pescara. “He has natural talents and significant room for improvement. He must watch and learn from the greats, but he is on the right path.”

If that much is true, then Verratti has Zeman to thank. Although the player’s progress had been sufficient to draw the attention of Italy’s leading clubs long before his manager’s arrival in the summer of 2011, this season has nevertheless represented a turning point. At this time last year Prandelli would not even have considered Verratti as an option in midfield, because up to that point he had typically played in the hole behind the attack.

That changed during Zeman’s very first training session with the club. “Zeman’s 4-3-3 is as tolerant of trequartistas as Mormons are of pre-marital sex,” noted Gazzetta dello Sport’s Jacopo Gerna as he reflected on the immediate decision to convert the player into a deep-lying regista. The manager is famous for his commitment to open, attacking football but he recognised in Verratti a vision which could be best exploited by giving him the space to dictate play.
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Last week in this column, I focused on how the analytics movement in football will follow a slow, evolutionary rather than an overnight revolutionary path in changing how we understand the sport. Part of the reason for this is—as is almost de rigeur to point out in these discussions—soccer is not a bat-and-ball sport. Team interaction is fluid, positional duties on the pitch are not static, and it’s much more difficult to discern meaningful statistical data sets and accompanying algorithms than in is in Major League Baseball.

That, in a nutshell, is the main reason why so little is known in wider soccer circles about soccermetrics, and what—if anything—they can tell us about the game that the general public, i.e. the fans, didn’t know before. It’s expensive to collect the bulk of useful soccer data, and so it’s in the logical interest of companies to sell their data sets at a competitive price to interested clubs, who, at least up until now, have done the bulk of in-depth data analysis ‘in-house’. As performance analysis improves—both in terms of data collection and in the identification of useful metrics—the cost of the information and the importance of maintaining secrecy will increase, leaving the average fan out in the cold.
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Michael Cox joins James and Kristian for a special Champions League Final preview ahead of Saturday’s championship encounter between Bayern Munich and Chelsea.

You can download the video and watch it here.

If you’re not a fan of video you can listen to the audio here

Subscribe directly to the YouTube channel here.

New! Subscribe to the video podcast on iTunes here.

Subscribe to the audio version on iTunes here.

Throughout the year BBC’s Match Of The Day served as the Footy fan’s elixir. In their season recap we relive the euphoric, somber and captivating moments of this past season.

Is it August yet?

The Lead

Whether because it involves a relegated club, or because it rubs up uncomfortably against Britain’s punitive libel laws, most of the English papers have offered scant coverage of the leaked video of Blackburn Rovers manager Steve Kean, secretly filmed while the club was on tour in East Asia.

The video features a possibly intoxicated Kean accusing Sam Allardyce of being a “fucking crook.” The timing of the release, by a site calling itself the BRFC Action Group, is almost certainly to encourage the Venky’s to sack the beleaguered manager (at least the upset Blackburn supporters realized the dubious ethics involved in making a clandestinely filmed video public, and decided to wait until it was certain Kean intended to stay on with Blackburn in the Championship).

One person however who appreciated the video for entirely different reasons was former football agent Peter Harrison. Harrison, you might recall, went on a long Twitter tirade back in March accusing Sam Allardyce, Bolton chairman Phil Gartside and agent Mark Curtis in trading bungs, accusations that have lingered since the 2006 investigation into football corruption spurred by BBC programme Panorama.

Harrison clearly thinks Kean’s remarks are some sort of corroboration for his accusations of corruption, but the fact is while the former agent, who went bankrupt when Allardyce demanded his loan money back on a bad real estate deal, has yet to provide a solid shred of evidence to make his case despite months of random threats. Whether we’ll learn more if and when the media pressure Kean to elaborate on his remarks remains to be seen…
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