If you're calling your competiton a "cup" then you need to be able to drink out of the trophy, I'm sorry but those are the rules. Vases are vases, plates are plates, shields are shields, cups should be cups.

11 german managers in the bundesliga. a combined zero caps for the german national team between them.

i am so fucking sick of this woman victim blaming her daughter for being murdered by violent transphobes

i don't think this is especially unusual tbh. most of the best modern german managers were either mediocre players or didn't play professionally. i don't think the famous german players from 90s/00s did much better than their english counterparts in management.

esther ghey never says a single word about any of the things that actually killed her daughter.

the greatest mystery about michael carrick's career is not that english football didn't appreciate him. that makes sense. it's that fabio capello didn't play him.

funny to think back in 2012 or so how absolutely *scary* the prospect of mourinho taking over from alex ferguson sounded to me

i say this stuff a bit in jest, but after his entire playing career, it is funny for people to write off michael carrick as just like gerrard or lampard.

i know this means very little, but like half the current top managers were deep-lying passing midfielders who came across as calm and studious. that's michael carrick...

i might just have a soft spot for michael carrick after years of arguing that england needed to play him more often

might have talked myself into michael carrick, permanent man utd manager, based on almost nothing.

ok, what are the odds thomas frank will be managing crystal palace in a few weeks

wait, everyone, i've figured it out. this can be a loose sequel to the newsletter that should come out tonight or tomorrow.

ok, time to dig out michael carrick's autobiography

honestly i think the most reassuring thing michael carrick could say was if he talked about how he was influenced by louis van gaal, who wasn't even good at managing man utd.

Had Benge hit on it a bit enforce the derby www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/...

"how do you break down a low block" has been the main tactical challenge for big clubs in the last decade. i worry that the old solution, "positional structure in moving the ball", is being replaced by the much more blunt instrument: set pieces.

has there been anything good written on michael carrick's tactical approach at middlesbrough?

city very deliberately changed their squad to get younger. only two players in this team 30 or over (ake and b. silva). i feel like that should mean a pep guardiola team is better at pressing than this.

kim is good at the football writing

ok honest answer how do i look, like seriously

well done, he's 20

chelsea planning a centre back pairing of Levi Jacket next season

why do man city employ four senior goalkeepers. what is possibly the benefit there.

how mad should i be at a random banking app that incorrectly labelled a payment to my newsletter as a payment to the app OneFootball, causing a customer to flag it as a fraudulent payment (for which he has apologised, he did nothing wrong).

he didn't get on with ruben amorim, you see

great to see this sort of big game between two english managers

i have no real opinion on whether liam rosenior is good at managing football teams, but it's hard not to like the guy

Sports are a way for these folks to legally define trans women as men so they can apply it to other areas of civil rights law. Sports work because people view sports as entertainment and not having stakes. So when they try to thread this needle it breaks down because of the bigotry!

it is kind of wild how antoine semenyo is a genuine case of coming up through the old fashioned way. born in london, could've played for england or france, but i don't think they even knew much about him until he was a senior ghana international.

steve holland as carrick's assistant at man utd. worked with gareth southgate at england. harry maguire just won the lottery.

if you asked me last week i would've probably guessed Conor Hourihane was still playing

xabi alonso turned down the bayern and liverpool jobs so he could wait for real madrid

xabi alonso should be an even bigger club legend for selflessly doing this

every now and again, real madrid must make a ritual sacrifice to justify their "no tactics, just vibes" approach.

Xabi Alonso turned Real Madrid into a dominant machine for two months and the players were like “fuck no, don’t like this at all!”

Enzo Maresca

I need this to be a reality show. "The Manager"

some actual football as well! www.graceonfootball.com/p/mailbag-ma...

@graceonfootball.com me seeing you put Fire & Ash at your number one spot. Hell yeah.

no one of pep's prodigies is taking a job until we know what's happening with city in the summer

surely they'd be better off ignoring carrick to focus on gerrard and lampard

i need to find a third pep guardiola quote. every single time i just quote that interview with gab marcotti from 2004 or the time when he talked about overloading one side of the pitch in pep confidential. those two explain his entire coaching philosophy.

sherlock holmes over here

he's more british than will still, arguably

alternate timeline where fifa let fabio capello give him a handful of caps and mikel arteta is on course to become the first english manager to win the premier league.

what is the point of kerkez. what is he supposed to be bringing.

i think my number one rule with hiring managers is to assume they're not going to change their ideas about how to play football. i'm sure they all say they can change in the interview, but if they haven't coached a suitable style before, assume they can't.

it was like two or three years ago that @graceonfootball.com said about Thomas Frank, if you haven't shown a demonstrated set of ideas for how to use possession to create scoring chances, no matter how solid your record is otherwise, you're a big risk at any richer team ...Grace knows some football