Andrew Robertson, Liverpool’s left back, has been garnering plenty of plaudits for his performances in the Premier League and the Champions League, including a nomination for player of the week in the latter competition. He’s part of the raft of successful signings by Michael Edwards, the onetime analyst who is now the club’s sporting director. But to some, Robertson’s signing was a bit of a surprise: (By the way, I’d recommend following James on Twitter and reading his always entertaining prose.) Edwards apparently has a team of up to five mathematics and physics PhDs working for him. What did they see in the young Scottish fullback…
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What happened to the Bundesliga?
To quote Duke Ellington, things ain’t what they used to be over in Germany’s top soccer league. For starters, not a single player from last season’s Bundesliga was on the podium at the Ballon d’Ata awards. Okay, maybe that doesn’t seem so important, but also: no Champions League finalists after 2012-13 no Europa League finalists after 2008-09 dropped from second to fourth place in UEFA rankings since 2017-18 sliding Elo ratings may rank the league fourth by the end of 2019-20 mostly Bundesliga-based squad lost twice in 2018 World Cup group stage executives and players of flagship club seem out of touch with social issues These are…
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Searching for Sergio
As Pep Guardiola has just informed us, this weekend Manchester City will play one more time without their talismanic striker Sergio Agüero. As an Independiente fan, I’ve followed Agüero’s career since he was a teenager playing alongside the likes of Gabriel Milito and Daniel Montenegro. He’s 30 years old now and has never been the most durable player, so the question for Manchester City is inevitably how to replace him. Even for a star of his quality, it’s a much harder task than you might expect. It’s easy to say that every player is unique. But Agüero is particularly different from his peers as a…
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