Daniel Donovan

[RTÉ Sport @RTEsport]

Roddy Collins returns to football in English sixth tier

"It was either walk the beach in Spain and have a nice swim or stand here."

https://t.co/0X6uSyzbZm

[Daniel Donovan @dan_donovan96]

@Oismur @colmbrogan76 Exactly. They are the kings of our parochial culture and its politics.

[Liam Gallagher @liamgallagher]

I’ve just been diagnosed as being BIBLICAL i fucking knew it

[Daniel Donovan @dan_donovan96]

@FootExtrivia @SkyFootball What does it say about the direction European football is the better question?

[𝔇𝔧𝔦𝔟𝔦𝔫𝔥𝔬 🇨🇷 @DjibinhoPvris_]

Brian Madjo :

[Don @GreezyDon]

Boy these Nkunku type profiles need to be eradicated from the sport. Not an all out striker, not a winger, not really a 10. “He’S A SeCOnD StRiKeR” miss me with any more of these type of guys

[Daniel Donovan @dan_donovan96]

@KingsyAVFC The ‘cartel’ is the entire league because each Premier League club who loses this player will spend between £50-£100million on players to replace them. No other clubs in Europe today can do that besides maybe 10 others.

[Daniel Donovan @dan_donovan96]

@BetterCallAlba Coaching. Simple as that.

[Anton Hofmiller @bnzchr]

Gianni Infantino’s vulgar, grasping, Italian-Swiss corruption really does make one long for the halcyon days of Sepp Blatter and his elegant, refined, German-Swiss corruption.

[Daniel Donovan @dan_donovan96]

@VaughanLewis1 @EliteTigers1 He made a generalised statement which is generally true. This is a positive measure.

[ceern @NotoriousBAG_]

happy bendy water anniversary to all who observe.

[Daniel Donovan @dan_donovan96]

@talkSPORT @Chelsearory He’s spot on.

[Koskoca Mazi @gozumdecanIandi]

2003 yılında oğlunu çeken bir adam, tesadüfen dünyanın en hızlı sivil uçaklarından biri olan Concorde'u da kadraja aldı.

[The Extreme Football Enthusiast @ExtremeFootbal4]

Francesco Totti vs. Leonardo Bonucci

[Daniel Donovan @dan_donovan96]

@p____67 @NotoriousBAG_ Larsson was one of the best paid players in Britain in 2001. For reference, Roy Keane was earning £50k per week at the same time.

[England @England]

Goal. 2-1 Argentina.

[ScunneredBaw @raskinrangers72]

No-cunts messing with us next season I can tell ye that

[Collingwood 🇬🇧 @admcollingwood]

This is sort of funny, and Brazil have definitely got worse, but it misdiagnoses the problem. In fact, this is a story of what has happened to society and with our economies, and the ideology of our ruling elites.

The first point to accept is that *all* football nations have lost their particular style: there has been a flattening of the way in which teams play. I first started watching football as a very young boy in the late eighties, and through until the early 2000s, most of the big nations maintained a distinct way of playing. The Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Brazil and England all spring to mind. But two things have happened -- the first connected to the latter.

First, the Champions League (and later the Europa League) means that the best teams in Europe play each other almost every week during the season. That provides a consistently present interface for an accelerated exchange of ideas, formations, and tactics. But it also acts as a kind of gain of function research for football: there is now an extremely rapid cycle of tactical, transfer policy/player selection, and fitness innovation, response and counter response. The football OODA loop has never been tighter.

Second, and connected to this, there has been an extreme version of the Pareto Principle income inequality that has happened among western societies as a whole. Wealth, partly due to the Champions League, and partly due to the Premier League, has accrued to a smaller and smaller number of teams, even as the size of the pie, due to the massive increase in TV revenue in Europe, has expanded beyond all recognition. This means that all the best players in the world end up in the same handful of clubs. We can name them: Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool, Juventus, Bayern Munich, PSG, Real Madrid and Barcelona. Furthermore, with the advent of global scouting networks and post-Moneyball databases, this means the best players from anywhere in the world, often at young ages. Remember when an unknown player would have a great World Cup and find himself playing for, say, Tottenham or Monaco or wherever? Those days are gone. We know about every player in the most minute detail. There is no mystery. The good players are already in Europe.

The first time I noticed this process of wealth accumulation was with the great Ajax team of 1995. I was only just a teenager, and that team was like a revelation for me in terms of the way football could be played. All of them (bar Danny Blind and Frank Rijkaard, who were an earlier generation) came up through the Ajax academy system and blossomed at the same time. They played in the Ajax/Dutch style (4-3-3, with two wingers that stayed very wide, and a centre back pushing into midfield when they had the ball, holding possession playing in the opponent's final third). But within two seasons, the entire team was broken up: Davids, Seedorf, Klijvert, Ovremars, Rijzeger, Kanu, Litmanen, even Van Gaal, the young manager -- they'd all gone to richer clubs elsewhere. In the 1960s or 70s, they'd have stayed together and won multiple European trophies. In England, we saw a similar thing with Southampton. Newcastle are suffering the same now.

All this means that players don't stay in their home environments and countries, with their clubs, and the process of mimesis breaks down. Add that to the first point, related to the way intra-European football forces a flattening through various mechanisms, and you have what we see now.

A couple of World Cups ago, the Netherlands played a 3-5-2, to my absolute horror. The Netherlands playing without proper wingers! Now we have a Brazilian team that has two Arsenal players, two Man U players, one Newcastle player -- even a Bournemouth player, for goodness sake. And they'll all have had the majority of their careers outside Brazil. Some will have left when they were 15 or 16, scouted by Shaktar Donetsk (famous for bringing in young Brazilian players) or Real Madrid. Why are we therefore surprised that they play like any other European team?

The Netherlands style lives on -- but through Barcelona and therefore the Spain national team (via Cruyff, and thence Guardiola), not in the Netherlands national team. But the Brazil style (a languid slow, slow, slow, punctuated by sudden bursts of incredible skill, raking passes, speed, and crackerjack long shots) is dead. When better Brazilian players emerge in future, and maybe they return to winning World Cups, they'll do so as Europeans would, not Brazilians. The German and Italian styles are also dead. The English style is also pretty much dead, although that was an evolutionary dead end in terms of International Football, so we do not lament it.

This, rather than boozing or religion, is the reason for what we see with the Brazil national team. I find it deeply sad. But no doubt the neoliberal progressives who run our countries will view it as a great success.

@AaronBastani @WilliamClouston @georgegalloway @jj_bull

[𝕏erias @xerias_x]

Only one man can save US Soccer now…