The Double Pivot: Soccer analysis, analytics, and commentary

We've been doing our Champions League match breakdowns for subscribers, and this week it's the free podcast. Pretty good match! Support the Show.

A lot is happening right now in the administration of the game of football. There's a proposal for a Premier League salary cap, and we discuss what exactly this means, why it's so very different from PSR, and whether it stands any chance of succeeding. And there's the government regulator, which we have both become convinced will not happen in the UK government has any sense. And there's referee discourse, which has sufficiently annoyed us that we have to talk about it again. Support the Show.

A big weekend in the title race, Liverpool and then Arsenal lost winnable home matches in succession and it was highly dramatic, but it seems far from obvious to us that we learned much from the drama. Support the Show.

The club is in an odd spot. They're at risk of relegation, and worse, relegation would probably be a death sentence for Everton Football Club as an operation. But they're also pretty good? With some valuable assets to sell? And a good manager? If it weren't for everything else... So we discuss how we would approach the problem of running Everton. Support the Show.

We take questions from the mailbag on how we watch games, on Jeremy Doku and Brennan Johnson, and then we end up building an entire theory of the intersection of player development and modern tactics in the development of really fast guy wingers. Support the Show.

Part Two of our conversation with official Double Pivot Financial Shenanigans Correspondent Skanda Amarnath (@irvingswisher). And while there are a lot of important details, there's a simple takeaway. Chelsea's PSR crunch is significantly worse than has been generally reported. Support the Show.

There has been a lot of news about the Premier League's PSR with the Everton points deduction, reports of violations at Nottingham Forest, and all the stories about how clubs are seeking to get into compliance with these regulations. But we think the actual news here has not been well explained in much football media. So we called in an actual finance expert, the Double Pivot's Financial Shenanigans Correspondent, Skanda Amarnath (@IrvingSwisher) to walk us through what has actually changed -- it's not the rules -- and why a PSR system with teeth is in some crucial ways not only different from North American salary caps but the opposite of a salary cap. Support the Show.

A little check-in on the ol' title race. Support the Show.

We finally have the guest who can help us do the Barcelona finance pod we needed. Jon Sindreu of the Wall Street Journal (@jonsindreu) helps explain the books, the league rules, the levers, and even what the heck Barca Vision is. Plus we talk about the Barcelona football team a little bit even. Support the Show.

Solidly beaten by Leverkusen in the top of the table clash at the weekend and then a shocking loss away to Lazio in the first leg of their Champions League knockout. So what's wrong? And separately, how impressive were Leverkusen? Support the Show.

The Champions League will kick back off in a week, and we take a look through the top teams remaining and whether anything has changed since we last considered them. And at the same time, two of these teams are playing potentially title-deciding six pointers (Bayern against Bayer Leverkusen, Real Madrid against Girona) and we preview those matches as well. Support the Show.

It's another Trivote episode as Grace from the Grace on Football newsletter joins us to discuss Klopp leaving Liverpool, how we expect the search to proceed from here, and why this situation resembles the period leading to Brendan Rodgers' hiring. We've also got Goodman and Grace taking on the question of Thomas Frank. Subscribe for Grace's takes at https://www.graceonfootball.com/ Support the Show.

We take your questions on Andre Onana and Mark Flekken, goalkeeper stats, why financial regulation has come so late to European soccer, and expected goals modeling. And because the questions came from the Double Pivot discord, many of the questions have already been answered so we also discuss some answers. Support the Show.

Jordan Henderson has found his way out of the Saudi Pro League and Karim Benzema is hunkered down in Mauritius searching for his own escape. What's gone wrong with the Saudi Pro League? And how is it implicated in much larger economic and geopolitical dynamics and the broad political outlook of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? Support the Show.

There is not much hopeful that can be said about the present Manchester United side. But the club is still massively wealthy, a nearly unparalleled cash generator, and they have a new part-owner in Jim Ratcliffe who will now control football operations. What do we think is coming next for United? Subscribe to Grace's newsletter: https://www.graceonfootball.com/ Support the Show.

The big bets of Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali on their new and innovative methods of running a football team have been tested by another half-season of Premier League football. Where do they stand? What do we think they should do in the January window? Support the Show.

For the holiday, an unlocked premium episode on the European Court of Justice, the Super League, and the future of the business of European soccer. Support the Show.

City keep dropping points. Liverpool also dropped points against United in one of the most tactically bizarre matches of the season. Arsenal did not drop points. But now they're both ahead of City, and we take a look at the three teams most likely to win the Premier League. Support the Show.

The launch of fbref.com has changed public soccer analytics, and we sat down to interview Sean Forman, the president of Sports Reference, about the website, how it came to be, what he learned about soccer analytics from building it, and about their new Stathead feature (stathead.com). Support the Show.

The Premier League is holding serve so we're talking about a more general subject. Where do you go if you want to progress up the table as a manager? Thomas Frank has done an excellent job at Brentford, but exactly where does he go next and what is likely to be open to him? Why and how has the managerial market changed in the past decade? Support the Show.