Look sometimes the “word” just doesn’t work very well, and people should accept that.

Touches in the box = down. Dribbling = down. Good passing moves = down. A look at the things that aren't happening now the Premier League is mostly long throws. www.nytimes.com/athletic/678...

just had to type out a mention of (Fulham’s) Kevin for the first time and it just reads weirdly. Can we not call him Kevin Santos?

stunned to learn that Ashley Barnes has played in the Premier League for Burnley this season, it really is an old-school campaign

🔺 The positivity being stoked at Sunderland 🔺 The afternoon he was booed from the field at the Emirates 🔺 The chaos Mikel Arteta confronted at Arsenal Ahead of the visit of his former club Arsenal, Granit Xhaka talks exclusively to @mwalkerfoot.bsky.social. 🔗 www.nytimes.com/athletic/677...

new CL format is probably good if (a) you follow one participating club, as they play a wider range of teams or (b) if you want to red-zone it as there's so much going on. But for the increasingly rare (c) "just want to sit down and watch a good game where you know what's at stake" it's quite dull

notwithstanding the fact the Slavia player also had his foot high, for a second I thought the ref was going to punish Ben White for a high foot (but no contact) in the box which is an INDIRECT FREE-KICK and not a penalty, one of the great niche elements of football

Get Welbeck on the plane (in June) www.nytimes.com/athletic/677...

The use of five substitutes has had no positive impact, and probably some bad impact www.nytimes.com/athletic/676...

Palace v Brentford for me today. Really sums up the Premier League at the moment. Two goals from set-pieces, almost nothing else. Just no hint of any combination play or individual magic. It’s getting a bit boring to be saying this every week but blimey…

Really love these. Meticulously researched and a completely unique idea. Bravo.

An interesting read: bsky.app/profile/john...

Remember that era when people kept getting wound up about footballers having washbags? Funny time, that.

really enjoyed this

Unai Emery on why Villa beat Spurs: “We adapted to everything tactically: in duels, set pieces, throw-ins.” He didn't need to mention the more intricate elements of football. Which was a fair analysis, and somewhat sums up the current Premier League style. www.nytimes.com/athletic/673...

Modric still an extraordinarily good player. The best 40-year-old midfielder I've seen

It's strange enough that Mjällby are about to win the Swedish title considering they come from a fishing village of about 1500 people. It's stranger still that their 'expected goals' numbers are the joint-seventh best in the league. What's happening here? www.nytimes.com/athletic/672...

Wasn't convinced Tomasson would work for Sweden. I'm also not convinced that having Isak and Gyokeres in the same side will ever work. www.nytimes.com/athletic/671...

Football in 2025 doesn’t look how we expected it to in 2000. Here’s a list of eight things I anticipated would happen in that time, that have not happened at all. www.nytimes.com/athletic/670...

Peter Ridsdale praised for financial prudence in terms of player wages, 1999.

imagine telling someone 25 years ago that 8 of the 10 Premier League games would be televised - but that the exceptions would be the Man Utd game and the Arsenal game

Why do people in television not understand how tinpot it looks to put tweets from random people up on the screen during the punditry? Stop it

fair play, this is a bad night of CL fixtures isn’t it?

Atletico 5-2 Real. Loved this game. That said, none of the goals really came from the interesting things about the tactics, which is a shame if you're writing about the tactics. www.nytimes.com/athletic/667...

interesting to see golf regaining its position as the sport with the weirdest fans, after a strong challenge from Formula 1 in recent years

Kayode’s extra long throws partly because of the wind which is basically taking the ball from the near side towards that goal.

200 years today since the world's first passenger railway journey in the north east of England. Here's a look at the history of railways and English football: including the formation of Man Utd, football specials & specially-built stations that were barely used. www.nytimes.com/athletic/665...

you can say what you want in footnotes, no-one is gonna read it

an article on GuardiolAI and ChatGPTeta's latest attempt to remove any hint of human creativity from their meetings www.nytimes.com/athletic/665...

hate all this "oooh you can't tackle any more, remember when this fixture used to be about tackling" stuff from the commentators here. Merseyside derbies used to be crap. Give me goals like this any day (would also argue TV-influenced Sat 12:30 games don't help if you want feisty tackles)

Lots of new signings - not many goals. It's quite tough to get cohesion between new attackers at this stage of the season, and watching some really quite bad Premier League games so far underlines that. www.nytimes.com/athletic/663...

once a year I find an excuse to write about non-league. So here we go: the first FA Cup meeting between Enfield FC versus Enfield Town: a unique rivalry between a club who left town, and a fan-owned breakaway club who are higher in the pyramid...and play in Enfield. www.nytimes.com/athletic/662...

Sweden a shapeless mess but fair play to Kosovo for a momentous win. Blistering counter-attacking in the first half. Their second goal was outstanding.

mailbag episode this week on our tactics pod. Please submit questions below 😀

The four ways to play football in 1956:

in some countries, they refer to generations of players by their birth year. I never have a clue which years key England players were born in. Now I do. Featuring: how the war affected things, how the golden generation dominated, and how 1976 was a washout. www.nytimes.com/athletic/658...

Very concerning to see 'kicking for touch' at kick-offs having a wave of popularity. Let's get this rugby nonsense out of our game. www.nytimes.com/athletic/659...

my deadline day update: just had my walk home interrupted by some "Ted Lasso" filming. More as we get it.

Liverpool 1-0 Arsenal. The first half was about midfielders dropping back between the centre-backs. The second half was about Liverpool's midfielders pushing up and getting between the lines, allowing forward passes and creating chances. www.nytimes.com/athletic/658...

still slightly unsettled by having A CHOICE of televised Sunday 2pm games. Which is obviously the way it should be. But I think it was easier when Sky just decided for me.

still cannot believe the sheer volume of “stadium announcers” at football matches these days. It’s honestly the loudest thing I ever encounter.

the new CL format - and 8 rather than 6 games - means I think opponent difficulty more-or-less evens itself out and it's more about home/away than anything else. Away versus Bodo/Glimt Kairat, Qarabag, Galatasaray, Olympiacos, Pafos is arduous. Home? No bother.

Liverpool have started defending free-kicks Italian-style - really deep inside their own box. It worked well last night. Then they went back to the usual manner, conceded from it, so went back to being 'Italian'. Quite interesting to hear Slot's explanation. www.nytimes.com/athletic/657...

always found this trend funny as they were all the rage when doing 'food technology' (presumably not called this any more) at school, I never really saw them again for years, then suddenly it's how you measure whether Arsenal should sign Giroud or Higuain bsky.app/profile/chri...

as someone who played youth football in-and-around this area, before Chelsea had built a training ground there, the use of 'Cobham' still just makes me think of the middling Combined Counties outfit, it really throws me bsky.app/profile/liam...

struggling to work out what the underlying point here is. Football journalism is not under threat. There is now a level of content produced, both in depth and - if you look in the right places - in quality that would have been unimaginable in the pre-internet age. observer.co.uk/news/sport/a...

Good luck to the women's rugby world cup - it's presumably no worse than the men's equivalent - but this is an astonishingly bleak set of odds, match after match with a complete no-hoper. Ultimately there's not enough global interest in the sport to make this work.

not a massive tennis fan but Errani and Vavassori, an actual partnership, winning this daft new mixed doubles competition ahead of the thrown-together big names is great. What team sport is all about.

It's incredible how much worse podcasts are to listen to when the panelists know they're being filmed. A 45-minute discussion gives way to 45 attempts to go viral. One person says something relatively mundane and the others go 'OH MY GOD NO WAY' with their mouths open. What a waste.

for all the fuss about the MOTD presenter/pundits etc, I reckon I've chatted about MOTD to about 15 people this year, of varying levels of football fandom, and literally every single one has said they fast-forward through the analysis unless it's about their team. People really don't care.