Fall from grace

And another season in football history has ended. I often try to publish the Team of the Season blogpost the day after the Champions League final. I'm a bit behind schedule this time around, will probably take me about a week to finish it. In the meantime, who would you pick?

In an age where football sometimes feels quite bonkers, I get a perverse kind of pleasure from this minimalism*. (*aka 'very impressive deep-block defending that is far from easy')

Catching up on some recent posts. The best players of the 1954 World Cup: robfielder.substack.com/p/the-best-p...

The first post-war World Cup. Who were the best players of the 1950 edition? Going back to something i looked at with @footballarguments.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/robfielder…

Today's post looks at how we value tournaments. What criteria should we use and how does that change over time? This is the lead in to a series of detailed posts about individual competitions. open.substack.com/pub/robfielder…

Today's newsletter is on the subject of trophies and whether they matter in assessing great players robfielder.substack.com/p/do-trophies-…

Today's newsletter is about the separation between ability and performance in football and the relative importance (or lack of) around completeness and versatility. robfielder.substack.com/p/understandin…

New blogpost: Team of the World Cup 1958 The beginning of the Brazilian empire - and its finest ever player. As always, with massive thanks to @robfielder.bsky.social ! footballarguments.wordpress.com/2026/04/06/t...

Today's loss was completely deserved, but international football needs a strong Italian team. Especially one that taps into some of the not-so-undeserved clichés associated with the Italian way of playing. Any World Cup is much poorer without a good (!) Squadra Azzura.

Sehe ich das richtig, dass es keine Möglichkeit mehr gibt, das Hinspiel Atalanta - Bayern re-live zu sehen? Prime scheint es nicht mehr zu haben, DAZN auch nicht.

Mehr zu meinem Buch:

Second plug for the new blogpost.

New blogpost: Team of the Decade 2015-2025 Featuring the amazing @zonal-marking.bsky.social , @justin-kraft.de and @robfielder.bsky.social footballarguments.wordpress.com/2025/12/23/t...

There finally will be a new Team of the Decade blogpost out in a few hours time. 🙂

I have started to re-watch the available matches from the 1958 World Cup in Sweden. Footballia lists a total of nine of them, which is a quantum leap compared to the last one. Not all of them feature 90 minutes of footage, though.

The great @robfielder.bsky.social and I have come up with a new blogpost: footballarguments.wordpress.com/2025/10/26/t... A few momentous events in football history happened this year: Real & Di Stefano reign surpreme, the rise of Pelé & the Brazilians, and, sadly, the Munich Air Disaster

column on why is the far right is obsessed with dubai www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

My yearly Ballon d'Or take: would have given it to Lamine Yamal, but Ousmane Dembele is not a crazy choice by any means.

I guess Harry Kane carries the Alfredo Di Stefano 'box-to-box forward' act as far as anyone can in modern football. Hugely impressive.

No greater pleasure than any time I'm asked to contribute to this. The entire project is a service to the recording of football (and football fans) with its coverage of eras that have too little and an era now that has too much of low quality.

It took a bit longer than usual, but then again the season ended in an unusual way. But here it is! New blogpost: Team of the Season 2024-2025 With player portraits by the amazing @lgambrose.bsky.social and @robfielder.bsky.social ! footballarguments.wordpress.com/2025/08/01/t...

Yesterday's Club World Cup final concluded (in my book at least) another season in football's history. You know what this means... the new Team of the Season blogpost is still under construction but should arrive in the relatively near future (historically speaking).

Time for a little mini-project: re-watching all the matches from the 1957-58 Season (excluding the World Cup). It really is a small project since there aren't that many.

I usually publish my Team of the Season blogpost shortly after the Champions League final. This season, however, I'm going to wait for the Club World Cup. I may not like it, but it clearly feels like part of this season and not the next one, right?

NEW with @simonkuper.bsky.social: The prevailing narrative around increased injuries and player workload in elite football is wrong. Players don’t play any more football than in the past. What has changed is a sharp rise in intensity of play. Not more minutes, but each minute exerts more load.

I am by and large an eye-test guy, but I occasionally like to look at the great players of the past through the lense of (admittedly pretty basic ) statistics. One question I asked myself was: How did the great goalscorers of football history perform when playing against top-class opposition?

I'm not sure there have been many teams for whom being 0-2 down meant less than for this Barca. But then again, they have plenty of experience with being 0-2 down. Still, crazy entertaining stuff.

Final plug for the new blogpost!

White smoke at footballarguments: New blogpost: Team of the Season 2002-03 Not as infallible, but (hopefully) more backwards-looking footballarguments.wordpress.com/2025/05/08/t...

Flick's Barcelona are by far the most entertaining team around and an amazing one in many senses. I rooted for them to reach the final but in a way it feels kind of right that they came close but did not get there. They are throwing dice all the time. Loaded dice maybe, but there is too much chaos.

In his match report @sidlowe.bsky.social writes that Yamal's performance suggested "not that he might become the best player around, but that he already might be" This is something I come back to, too: even the best 17 year-olds merely hint at future greatness, they are not great already. Yamal is.

You can't win a Champions League by playing in a way that - on average - leads to a 4-3 win, can you?

Going into psychological meltdown mode after conceding the first goal when the opponent has to score 4 is very on-brand Barca, it has to be said. The one player who stood out for me was Pedri, who radiated calm and class when coming on.

Watching the '03 CL semi-final between Inter - Milan: that fake quote about Maldini never tackling is as wrong as can be. The likes of Maldini and Nesta may tackle with purpose and precision, but boy, do they tackle a lot! And not just these Lahm-style bodyless tackles. They inflict real pain.

As always, really enjoyed being able to contribute to this.

New blogpost, once again with the wonderful @robfielder.bsky.social: Team of the Season 1956-57 Di Stefano produces a GOAT season, Argentinians en masse, the last full season of the Busby Babes - a memorable year for reasons both good and bad! footballarguments.wordpress.com/2025/03/23/t...

1. Barcelona (2008-11) Manager: Pep Guardiola La Liga: 2009 🏆, 2010 🏆, 2011 🏆 CL: 2009 🏆, 2011 🏆 The game’s best ever player in the game’s best side. The influence of Guardiola created a super team with Messi the man who set them apart from their rivals. A joy to watch.

The story of Wirtz's game is his late miss, but his first half impressed me greatly. One of these Wirtz performances where he is like: "Of course I do everything right all the time, why do you ask?"

Flick's Barca have a fundamentally different attitude towards chaos and randomness compared to the classic Pep paradigm. Flick: Let's throw slightly loaded dice all the time. Guardiola: Let's not throw dice.

Bayern Munich‘s Südkurve started the Men’s Bundesliga home game vs. Kiel with a choreo remembering the club’s Jewish members murdered by the Germans in the Holocaust. “Never again is now,” the choreo reads.

@alextruica.bsky.social Moin Alex, ich hatte gesehen, dass Du mich auf Twitter angeschrieben hast. Ich bin nur noch hier unterwegs. :-)

Starting a new mini-project (and even that is a big word for it): watching all the matches I can find from the 1956-57 Season. Let's start with:

2002-03 Season: Juventus - FC Barcelona 1-1, Juve pretty comfortable after an early lead but Barca efficient, for a season that lives on in infamy in Barca's collective memory, going toe-to-toe with a CL finalist isn't that bad Best players: Buffon, Kluivert footballia.site/matches/juve...

And a final plug for the latest blogpost!

The travels through ancient football history continue with the next Team of the Season blogpost.

2002-03 Season: Real Madrid - FC Barcelona 1-1, not exactly the most memorable of Clasicos, lots of little nasty moments from both sides, Barcelona denied a clear penalty Best players: Overmars, Makelele, Ronaldo, Raul footballia.site/matches/real...

New blogpost: Team of the Season 1955-56 The first European Cup, the first Ballon d'Or, the end of the Hungarian reign, Fiorentina somehow not conceding a lot... lots to unpack in this historical year! Featuring the great @robfielder.bsky.social! footballarguments.wordpress.com/2025/01/17/t...

Kann ich nur bestätigen. Große Schau-Empfehlung!

I agree with the sporting assessment. He featured almost constantly in my selections since 2016 and made the first XI last season. Not an all-time-great but one of, maybe the best right-back of his era. footballarguments.wordpress.com/2024/06/02/t...