The mysterious Ann Winterburne — who has only ever edited John Herdman's Wikipedia page — was back at it again last month, deleting the entire Canada drone spying scandal section while Herdman was in talks with the Indonesian national team

They’ve found a way to offend grammatical sensibilities on both sides of the Atlantic

Feel like pure shit just want him back

Why xG Doesn't Need Fixing (But Our Communication Might)

Oh god oh no I’m a West Ham fan now

Feels right that Ekitike is a palindrome since he's as likely to try a backheel as a forward pass

Enzo Maresca famously titled his coaching thesis "Football and Chess," comparing the board to positional play zones and name-dropping Karpov and Morphy as tactical inspirations. So it changed my whole view of him to learn that he's the kind of guy who opens a game like this

Are y’all seriously posting about the January transfer window right now

Soccer Bluesky is shockingly chill so we’ll go with the time a guy got mad at a Guardian article, googled my name and left a comment on an unrelated Substack post to defend Lionel Messi’s honor in the name of Kiefer Sutherland in 24

It's called football because you throw it with your arms onto three dudes' heads and it bounces off the keeper's chest into somebody's groin and he knees it into a defender's elbow and there's like seven minutes of VAR and then you put the BALL down with your hands and kick it with your FOOT

Advanced case of soccer manager brain

Continuing the tradition, I have compiled an end-of-year overview of the soccer analytics content that I liked the most in 2025. This edition includes pointers to about 200 resources, including research papers, blog posts, news articles, podcasts, and webinars. janvanhaaren.be/posts/soccer...

Is Daniel Farke okay

Welcome new people, here are some soccer analytics and tactics accounts to follow if you're into that

This seems like a good opportunity for England to rename it Football Day and fill it with wall-to-wall boxing matches

I calculated a soccer-specific chess rating for 4,400 online games between ~100 players' accounts Top 10: 1. Marten de Roon 2. Yussuf Poulsen 3. Antonee Robinson 4. Stefan de Vrij 5. Borna Sosa 6. Christian Pulisic 7. Michael Olise 8. Kevin Prince Boateng 9. N'Golo Kante 10. Josip Stanisic

High impact player

this is so stupid

Top of the Bluesky league at Christmas, can’t wait to see how I’ll Arsenal this away

City have been much more reliant on counter-attacks to create chances this season. Their xG from counters per game and share of non-penalty xG have both more than doubled compared to a relatively steady baseline. For the first time, Pep's team rank at or near the top of the PL by these metrics.

AFCON is in session 👀 And what a better way to start the tournament than with an overhead GOLAZO by #Morocco attacker Ayoub El Kaabi 🤩

Whoever improved ESPN’s stream quality so we can actually tell players apart, thank you, it’s all I ever wanted for Christmas

Why didn't Wilfried Nancy kick this ball into the goal? Simply not up to the job

Rayan Cherki can fix the Premier League

Hard to argue with the top ten

There are far too many interesting football analytics papers that I want to read. From the 1980s. And from before that, if they were actually accessible. This is the blog I've rewritten the most, and is still so short of doing the subject justice. www.getgoalsideanalytics.com/analytics-hi...

Briefly thought about joining Transfermarkt values to chess ratings and had to reconsider some things about my life

The most MLS thing of this 2026 MLS draft may have been Colorado using the 6th pick, which they received from Toronto in exchange for an assistant coach and a video analyst, to select a player already in the Colorado Rapids system.

After watching a few minutes of Dundee-Celtic I think it's a real question whether Wilfried Nancy can coach down to this level

Mo Salah's account supports my theory that soccer players' chess ratings are related to their confidence on the pitch

🧵 Thread: I recently looked into the concept of escaping pressure 👇 1️⃣ 3rd player, up-back combos are the most efficient at escaping pressure 🔷 I defined a press-escaping situation as a pass that found a free player (not pressured in 3 seconds), after 2 consecutive ball carriers were pressurized

Love this league

Okay I can see why they were upset about his new profile pic

Welcome to the worst part of the season, when every player who gets hurt for two weeks is "out for the year" and by the time you figure out what that means you've already been tricked into reflecting on your own fleeting mortality, happy holidays

Remember like three weeks ago when everybody was writing deeply concerned "Why does nobody score goals in the Premier League anymore?" takes

Gio Reyna started too many games so Tyler Adams had to go off injured. USMNT energy can be neither created nor destroyed, only transferred

Beeswarms on Sky Sports, the nerds won

Michael Bradley is the next Red Bulls head coach. In an exclusive interview w/ @nypost.com head of sport Julian de Guzman called him a "born winner." Bradley called the job "an honor." #RBNY #RedBullNewYork nypost.com/2025/12/15/s...

The Oxford word of the year is RAGE BAIT. After calming myself down, I tried to work out what the football word of the year would be, 2000-25. www.nytimes.com/athletic/687...

Columbus rehires Nancy

Game's back

A lot of y’all still don’t get it. NWSL owners can use multiple slurp juices on a single player

Look the story of the 2025-26 season is pretty simple, Leverkusen were the gods' favorite team to watch and everyone who took part in their destruction is cursed

Stats tip: Elo ratings are named for Arpad Elo and only have one capital letter. ELO ratings tend to peak between Face the Music and Out of the Blue and fall off sharply after Discovery

She probably doesn’t even have a take on the Mo Salah situation