Patreon sampler: The Spectre of Pep, the Premier League and Liverpool, with Jon Mackenzie and Neil Atkinson

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1:35Jon Mackenzie: Hi everyone, welcome back to Stadio. I'm Ryan. No Musa here because we've just got an episode today for everyone listening on the free feed. So yesterday on Patreon we had Neil Atkinson from the Anfield Wrap join Musa and I to talk a little bit about Liverpool's season, Arna Slott's departure and Andoni Iriola's arrival at Liverpool. Last week we had a chat with John McKenzie from TIFO and The Athletic. Also a little bit about Iriola, about Pep, his departure, also some tactical stuff, and also his new book, which you can pre-order now. So we thought that we'd put a section of each of those shows together for you on the free feed to give you a bit of a taster as to what's going on on the Patreon episodes.

2:16Jon Mackenzie: If you want to go and sign up and listen to all of the episodes ad-free and in full, including three episodes a week, ad-free and full through the World Cup. You can go to patreon.com forward slash stadio The support would be much appreciated You can sign up as a podcast member where you just get the podcasts Or you can sign up as a stadio social club member where you get all the podcasts Plus access to the stadio social club discord So we're going to get straight into it And first of all we're going to get into part of our chat with John McKenzie from Tifo and The Athletic We're delighted to welcome to stadio making his debut The one and only John McKenzie from Tifo and The Athletic How are you, mate?

2:55Jon Mackenzie: Hello. How are you? Yeah, good, thanks. He's here. John's joining us. He's too humble to say. He's joining us because he's written a brilliant book, The Spectre of Pep, about Pep Guardiola, and it is currently blowing my mind. And I want to say that to your face, John, because although this is audio, look, we've read a lot of football books between us, Ryan and I. It's a remarkable piece of scholarship. Yeah, I'll start there. I've got more to ask and talk about. caveat that with the stuff we've read so far if there is you're not going to the stadio chapter then yeah he's woke he's talking about catfish catfish has no place in modern football tactics and that's on the book dude thank you how when's it out let's get the plug in now yeah so it's out on august the 20th so still a little bit of time everyone gets to enjoy the world cup first um But yeah, thank you so much for the kind words.

3:50Jon Mackenzie: It's funny, you know, because not many people have read it, really. And I sort of felt as I was writing it, you know, when you read other people's books and they're like, oh, thank you for X, Y, Z, and all of these people who read early drafts and corrected all the problems and made it a great book. I had a great first reader and my friend Grant Gendo. and then I had obviously great editing through Seven Dials, my publisher. But beyond that, not many people have read it. So you guys are in the first single figures of people who've actually read the book. So I'm still in that space of not actually having a clue about if it's any good or not.

4:31Jon Mackenzie: So it's nice to hear that you're enjoying it at least. One place to start today, if you want, should we get to the general question of, because you also wrote a Did You Notice piece on The Athletic about how the Premier League's changed, which is very good and I'd recommend everyone going to read it. What were your general takeaways from the Premier League this season as a fan as well as an analyst? Yeah, I mean, it's impossible to extricate myself from being an analyst when I am a fan, I suppose, which means that I will not give a particularly representative answer, potentially. I was having a conversation with Duncan Alexander, who is my editor at The Athletic, about the piece that we just brought out.

5:11Jon Mackenzie: and he was saying how um how interesting it is hearing me talking about this season as almost like an interregnum um and you know it's been it's been coming it's been coming for the last few seasons um and you know when i actually interestingly enough when we were when i was proposing the book or being proposed a book um two years ago now which is scary to say i i was uh i was adamant that what i wanted to write about wasn't just pep got everything right I wanted to write about the downfall as well or the decline or whatever we want to call it because I still think he managed that decline in an incredibly smart way.

5:52Jon Mackenzie: Yeah, they could have won the league this year. Yeah, right. Yeah. And at that point in time, I mean, that was before the terrible season that City had last year. And I was suggesting, you know, I wanted to talk about the rise and fall potentially of Guardiola. And my editor was like, you sure you want to go that strong on it it seems like a a crazy idea but um at that point already i was seeing it showing up in in the numbers that something was happening something was changing city were becoming less good at defending in transition and i think a big part of their approach and the first third of the book is about the guardiola approach and a big part of that the the sort of tactical gamble that they they adopt is they take a very risky approach to possession in many respects right they want to possess the ball high up the pitch they want to generate a territorial dominance um and that creates really quite difficult defensive conditions to then have to to to sort of deal with and mitigate um and they could do that for many years that's why they were so successful for so long but we started seeing i think yeah i think around 23 24 that that's starting to shift a little bit the the needle shifting on how much dominance you could get from that kind of approach.

7:10Jon Mackenzie: And as we've seen in the last few seasons, it's just eroded and eroded and eroded, this sort of possession control approach to the extent that it is no longer as dominant as it once was. And I've got a section in the book where I talk about the death of dominance. And it's tough to talk about, right? Because as we've just said, Guardiola, still effective, still an incredibly effective coach this season. And if they'd have been able to approach the season with their the final form that they that the season took for them at city then they might have had a chance as you said ryan of winning the league um but i think the point that i wanted to make is that in the past they was just so they were able to just force everyone to play the game they wanted and when they forced everyone into the game they wanted they were the best at it and they could optimize for that approach it was a sort of one size fits all approach which everyone else had to follow and now what we're seeing is an emergence of a diversity of tactical approaches now like you can you don't need to play like uh guardiola to win the league you can you can play like slightly different you can play like for example michael arteta who is very still within that that i guess genetic family as as guardiola but but also there's big differences between them but also you can play like bournemouth and you can get the very cusp of champions league you can play um yeah i guess like villa who in many respects kind to feel yes in again in the same sort of wheelhouse but again quite different and they're getting champions league so i think that's what we're that's where we're ending up it's it's not that guardiola has been and gone it's the it's that the dominance of guardiola has been and gone and he will still challenge for titles i'm sure if he goes on to uh back into the domestic game i'm sure he'll do well in the international game if he chooses to go that way but something has changed now which sort of makes it a bit more of a free-for-all and i think the season off the back of that then to get back to the original question which i have rambled away from quite we're loving it we're loving it go for it go for it this season has been interesting for me precisely for that reason right is that there's a lot of people who especially us tacticians right you get into the headspace of this is what is good this is what is bad and it's usually based around what is effective and that whole question now has shifted incredibly.

9:24Jon Mackenzie: So I found it really enjoyable to try and grasp at some kind of meaning in the midst of the madness that this season has been. I find that quite, I don't know, I find it quite energising to have a different approach and to feel out of my depth, right? That's often how I felt and I'm watching games and I'm thinking, you know, we're not in Kansas anymore, Toto. I feel like that a lot. Yeah, you close with the Kansas bit. Can we talk about this actually? I want to talk to you about Kansas and I want to talk to you about Nico O 'Reilly, a player I love, who's just blown my mind and I'm sure blows yours too.

9:59Jon Mackenzie: How much of the decline of Manchester City is actually just due to the decline of, or the availability of a certain type of player, right? Because if you lose Kevin De Bruyne and Edison and the other players, you will drop off in that margin, I think, because there's so much quality around the Premier League in terms of like recruit. That gap does naturally narrow. and it feels like Nico O 'Reilly is the type of generational player who can return City to something close to some of those peak years. So how much of it is a resource issue and how much of it is just someone like Nico O 'Reilly being a unicorn and please just talk about him as well if you go off on a tangent?

10:33Jon Mackenzie: I think this is a fantastic question, Musa, because it basically follows on from what we've just talked about, right? We've just gone through the last few weeks, obviously these player awards that get brought out by you know the players vote the the journalists vote etc and this season has produced a lot of of discourse a lot of ink has been spilled about the choices right because essentially it boiled down to this decision do you go for Declan Rice or do you go for Bruno Fernandes and I think that's I just think that's the same problem that I've been talking about on a wider tactical frame boiled down to the kind of players that that we're now seeing right and and this shouldn't be surprising right because tactics is nothing but what the players do um yeah and it doesn't even need to be in a it doesn't even need to be in a collective sense really it's it's you know the fact that we're so comfortable talking about collective tactics is because collective tactics have been what have have almost been the cheat code in modern european football but we're moving now to into a very different framework where what was considered a good player in the past has now shifted irrevocably I think yeah so yeah that's why the conversation is around what you know Declan Rice like how do you conceive of Declan Rice's fantastic season within the old framework of who's been the best player in the Premier League and it's you know it's hard to answer those questions because we're we're in the middle of the history as it's happening um so yeah and I think Nick O 'Reilly is a fantastic example of that right Nico O 'Reilly just a very different kind of profile of player to the kind of profile of player that certainly Pep Guardiola has used as a fullback right so you get the inverting fullbacks in the past where it's much more about small space technical players yeah often quite you know quite ephemeral from a from a physical point of view um with the idea being that well you move your Philipp Lahms inside or your Joao Cancelos and they do all of the technical stuff that allows the the other midfielders to push forward into the front line and you get overloads against the opposition's back line um obviously nico o'reilly can do that but he's he he was developed as a number 10 right he's played as a midfielder he can do all of the the small space stuff and has done it this season right he often hangs in that pocket of space um near jeremy doku and when teams double up on doku he's there then to sort of create that tension like how do we cover this other guy?

13:02Jon Mackenzie: But he also has so many other aspects to his game, right? You can play him as a traditional fullback if you want and just have him overlapping down the wide areas, playing cutbacks. He makes that seam run between the opposition centre-back and fullback all the time and hits the byline to make cutbacks. But then there was the game against Chelsea, right? Where Chelsea, I thought, did a really good job in the first half of stopping O 'Reilly from causing problems in that pocket of space. And Guardiola was like, look, we've tried to cause problems to Chelsea on the left-hand side. Let's just move the ball to the right-hand side, get it into the box, and let's use Nico O 'Reilly isolated against Andre Santos.

13:39Jon Mackenzie: Fragile. Physical mismatch. And then what you do is you have basically two players who are effectively, you know, I mean, it's Haaland and O 'Reilly who are effectively like very similar physical profiles at this point. And you're suddenly playing up against two strikers with a physical mismatch. So yeah, that physicality now that's coming into the game is a really interesting topic to talk about. And I think, you know, there's two things to say here. One is that the game is changing and it means that we have to reassess our ideas about what football should be or what it should look like or the kind of profiles that should be there.

14:12Jon Mackenzie: And we're still working through that. We're still working out what that looks like. But at the same time, I think there's temptation for people to think, oh, this is just like a physicality versus technicality thing. Not at all. And it's obviously not that. And I think what's really interesting about that conversation is that I think that it's very easy for clubs now to get into a path of least resistance approach where they kind of think, the game's becoming all about duels. The game is becoming physical. So if we are profiling players in our recruitment that are physical, we know that they're going to have at least some advantage, some kind of upside, right?

14:46Jon Mackenzie: Whereas the other thing might not be true. It might not be the case if you're bringing in super technical profiles that they'll be able to compete in those duels, in which case the easiest thing to do here, the path of least resistance, is to just buy physical profiles. And when I say physical, again, physicality has a wonderfully diverse set of meanings. But for the most part, what we're talking about here is, you know, a sort of imposing physicality, right? As we said, your Nico O 'Reilly's, your Declan Rice's, these are the players that we're talking about now, rather than in the past where we would talk about your David Silvers and your Samir Nasri's as we were talking about.

15:23Jon Mackenzie: Yeah, or Liza Razu, this kind of like, what's this word before Ryan gets in? Because Ryan's got a question, I'm sure. But I look at Nico O 'Reilly, I was talking to Ryan about this, as a kind of like the evolution of like Angel Di Maria, right? Like I think Di Maria, if he was around now, would be playing this same kind of tactically smart, physically imposing, incredible engine. And then you've got like PSG, who kind of play futsal at the moment. I mean, some of the stuff against, I mean, that game blew my mind just because of the types of places PSG were comfortable taking possession. and the pitch looked like twice the size.

15:55Jon Mackenzie: If you're that technical and taking the ball that close with people you've got chemistry with, the pitch just looks huge, right? Yeah, absolutely. I think that we may end up in a point, especially in the Premier League, and I'm glad you brought up PSG and Bayern for that matter because I think we can have a conversation about them. But I think there's going to be a swinging back of the needle. We've probably gone too far in a certain direction in the Premier League because of that path of least resistance, because the hyper-financialisation of the Premier League means anyone can buy anyone, essentially, certainly when it comes to competition with the rest of Europe.

16:28Jon Mackenzie: And so we're seeing a lot of teams just sort of going through that gigantification phase. But I think we'll see the needle swinging back. There will be ways that these coaches now think, okay, we've all arrived at, they'll neutralise, they'll plateau, they'll all hit gigantic squads, and suddenly it'll be like, okay, so where are we going to find the edges? we're going to have to start finding those in the technical spaces as well. And again, that's why I think that you can never make that easy distinction between physicality and technicality. One of the most interesting graphs I remember in the book was the evolution of average Premier League highest and lowest possession rates over the last however long.

17:09Jon Mackenzie: And the fact that it's just narrowing because it is becoming a little more... You flood the league with that much talent and that amount of people have a similar profile and the margins become smaller, like you're saying, like searching for the edges. And one of the things I think that Arsenal don't get enough credit for that they probably foresaw more than anyone else wasn't the physicality aspect of it. It was capitalising on basically putting as many unicorns in your squad as possible. This is why Nico Riley stands out so much from Manchester City because he's essentially like the new John Stones in terms of his position in that squad as a unicorn for Pep, right?

17:46Jon Mackenzie: In the sense that you look at Arsenal, I think one of the things that has been interesting over the last few years, they got bigger, but they also had, the player profile they were getting were bigger and technical. So people who, Arsenal used to get outmatched physically, and then they got outmatched technically. Now they kind of have got, more unicorns in the squad than anyone else in the Premier League, I think. Calafiore's hench. Timber's a big dude, even though he's not as big as the rest. Even Ben White. Ben White I think is kind of wildly technical. The two centre-backs are insanely technical.

18:25Jon Mackenzie: It's not just us if you look at Mickey Van Der Ven. Mickey Van Der Ven as a profile of centre-back would have been very standalone 25, 30 years ago. And there are players like that who we still talk about. Now they're everywhere, right? so I think it's just like it's I think a lot of the stuff in the Premier League this season hasn't maybe been there has been some absolute suffer fests this season in the Premier League for sure but I think people have lent too much into the physical narrative as opposed to being like do you understand how technically unbelievable and tactically switched on you have to be now to even win a game in the Premier League you know like Wolves we talk about this on Stadia quite a lot but like the conversation about Wolves being one of the worst Premier League teams of all time was so hilarious because you could drop Wolves in a Premier League a Premier League 25 years ago and they'd finish top eight probably genuinely yeah yeah I agree Wolves would win a Premier we said this Wolves would win a Premier League of relegated Premier League teams no we no we no we yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah but they would win they would win like I mean it's the least the least desired title of all but I was wondering actually John if you got a chance to speak to Pep if you will get a chance to speak to him would there be a chance of asking him like what's your 11 of teams that you faced in the Premier League I'd love to hear who Pep would have loved to coach and what he'd have done with them because I'm sure he would have turned someone like Saliba into a midfielder like or you know what I mean like I think players like that with that kind of profile and I'm sure Pep you know that Pep's got a squad you know what I mean John I'm sure he does Nathan Redmond would have been straight in he's literally going to say Nathan Redmond just people who has got us to and like Pickford he was he'd be in there Pickford would be in goal yeah actually John can I ask you about how you watch football because I know look look reading this book I mean my first thought I actually wrote to Ryan yesterday and said this is the kind of book that gets your job off from elite football clubs like because of the way you see the game and I want to know like how do you watch football because it sometimes feels like I don't get me wrong I watch football I wouldn't but it feels like you watch it from from the side from above because the way that you watch shifts and patterns for example the way you analyze PSG's goal the Dembele goal right against Arsenal in the first leg last uh last year Champions League I did not see the movements across the field that created the space for for Dembele to do what he did right in the first move I didn't see what Neves like how did do you see that stuff in real time or do you watch it back like are you constantly seeing all of this stuff and how do you how do you watch games what angle do you watch them on to see all of this well yeah it's a good question i don't know i don't i don't want to come across like some kind of guru because i don't think i am i think a lot of this a lot of this stuff just comes comes out of lots of hard work you know and yeah yeah it's funny right because i think people people think that like analyzing a game like that means that you're you always have this you're almost like constantly having this revelatory experience with the game and you You know, you're sort of sitting there and things just kind of pop out of nowhere.

21:31Jon Mackenzie: And a lot of people think of the creative process in that way as well, that you just sort of, the spirit descends upon you and vision is had. But for me, it's not that. It's for me, the hardest work is the hours and hours that are spent before that game. Getting a sense of, one of the words I've started using when I talk about football analysis is mood. because I think so much of what people talk about when they talk about football analysis is almost like a scientific view of like what you're doing is categorization, what you're doing is like pattern recognition, what you're doing is, yeah, I don't know, you're sort of trying to recreate the blueprint that the coach has in their head.

22:13Jon Mackenzie: And, you know, some of that stuff is true and is useful and is what happens. But I think the way that I think about it now is just more just getting into a sense of what each team's mood is. So you spend hours and hours before you watch a game. Not in a sort of conscious way, but when you're covering the Premier League, I watch a lot of Premier League football. And then I start getting a sense of what a team's mood is. Not just what are they doing from a spatial point of view. Although I think spatiality has definitely got a bit of a bad rap in the last few years. And I certainly wouldn't want to suggest that I'm not thinking in spatial terms.

22:51Jon Mackenzie: um but i i guess it's almost like i'm watching like a series and i i know i have all in my head all of these character arcs so i'm like when i'm analyzing a game i'm able to cycle through those character arcs and no and i i notice things that i'm like ah this is almost like a plot development in this area okay wow incredible yeah and so in that respect it's not so much that like i'm waiting for the get and you know there's an extent to which i should probably do this more right because I think it's easy when you're when you're trying to do this kind of approach to analysis it's very easy to sort of colonize the game um by which I mean just sort of impose your ideas onto the game and try and make it say the stories that you want and we're all in danger of doing that right but I think what one of the beauties of this is that it allows me like a it's almost like a a quick way of being able to make sense of what's going on so when I watch I don't know when I watch an Arsenal game i'll i will probably be thinking um in terms of just trying to think of examples but um you know what are they what what are they doing with their with their fullback here um given what i know what they've done with their fullbacks in the past so i'm almost thinking of that as a character arc and if something either i'll be thinking okay so this is almost extending this character arc forward along the line that i've expected it to go or oh this is a plot twist something's happened here that i'm not expecting to see and so that a lot of the time you're watching stuff and you're sort of siphoning through things and like okay not really interesting plot plots continuing here and then you're looking out for some of those plot twists where you're like ah actually this is kind of interesting and this is maybe where the most interesting story of the game is but um that's maybe a very romantic way of putting it because the reality is i'm having to spend a lot of time thinking and watching you know a lot of it is just sitting in front of a game and being like you know and it's boring like i sit in front and i'm like i'm doing it again like i've watched obviously hundreds and hundreds of games and then you sit there and the possibilities of what happens in a football game particularly in a in one league is so narrow that you're like oh am i really gonna am i really gonna enjoy this but then what i always find is i get into it and if you're focused and you have all of these like i say all of these storylines and this thought these things this thing thinking of mood so what is the team trying to do how are they trying to progress the ball how are they trying to cause opponents problems like where are the problems that they're experiencing always I find things then jump out at me and I'm like ah I'm within that wider tapestry of like ideas that I've built over time and and then the the stuff uh sort of pops out at me so it doesn't sound incredible it's like spell it's like spellbinding no because I mean actually let me just jump in quickly for Ryan asks something about story and I wonder then how many coaches script out the season and I tell you why I say that if you look at like peps rotations there was that season where only like the most starters i think i think someone like laporte started the most games it was less than 30 and i was wondering i was saying to ryan actually because the premier league script changed so quickly this year i wonder how many premier league coaches started the season with a kind of script in their head that they had to kind of tear up because the league was not what was was it clive says in the one of the arsenal podcasts the league was we were not playing the league that was on offer and if you look at how teams finish there's so many brilliant coaches that finished the season strong i wonder what kind of adjustment there was in terms of ripping up the script uh to that extent does that make sense john yeah i mean arnest slot literally said this he said halfway through the season he was like in almost all of the games we've had to tear up the match plan before the game obviously that's not like an overarching script that's just a week-to-week script but yeah i think that's that's definitely happened and there's an argument to be made that the reason why guardiola is such a genius is because he constantly rewrites the scripts through his seasons anyway right he's he's constantly finding different ways of doing things and so for example i think this season this season is almost maybe and maybe that's an interesting way of talking about it right it's like the the the the arc of each team's season because i think it's very easy to to just sort of focus on a season and be like this team tried to do the same thing the whole way through yeah um but you know as ryan was talking about before with arsenal like i think arsenal season is interesting in the at the beginning of the season I was super hyped about Arsenal because it felt as though this was like a new possibility and Arsenal had new ideas and that they were experimenting with with different ways of playing and we got lots of Calafuri doing lots of like quite fluid and flexible things as the season went on it almost felt to me as though Arteta sort of got swept up with the with his neuroses I think the the Villa game was that in injuries I think basically he made a point a couple of last week I think he even mentioned it there was like a week when Arsenal played Bayern and it was the first North London derby yeah and he was like that when we basically had pretty much everyone apart from Erdogan and we were kind of cooking yeah and that's what that's what we look like when we're yeah on it and then when we don't it's can you mention Villa actually right you mentioned Villa I want to sort of dig into that because that's interesting yeah sorry John yeah yeah yeah that's interesting I think and again I totally agree with you in terms of like the the injuries but I think the injuries play into the neuroses, right?

27:54Jon Mackenzie: Yeah, for sure. If you get to the end of the 22-23 season where you have the whole Etihad debacle that happened, that was in big part down to the fact that Rob Holding wasn't available. And so, sorry, William Saliba wasn't available. Rob Holding certainly was available. And yeah, you took an incredibly aggressive approach in that game and we all know what the outcome was. Well, you lost 4-1, I think, in the end of 4-0. I can't remember. It wasn't great. People who don't know the outcome, that's what it was. but tell me about there yet sorry mate um but and you know again that's like a really easy sort of narrative point to be like oh let's let's just read guard uh sorry arteta through that that that moment and you know i think you can do it i think it didn't change him i think it just merely changed his focus on certain things and i think he has that tendency when he's in those sorts of positions to sort of revert to norm a little bit and it felt in the second half of the season that that you were much more conservative than you'd been in the first half of the season as a team and um yeah we the most interesting aspect of that for me is that in it wasn't even across the course of the second half of the season you were more conservative it was just in very specific scenarios so we made a video at the time why do Arsenal look worse when they're winning and we dug through the the tactical aspects there and it basically just transpired that a big part of what's so good about your possession play is the the fluidity the rotations the dynamism that you you have um but obviously those things that are really good for in possession control and and and ball manipulation are really bad for out of possession control and etc and so what happens is that when you get into a scenario when you're in winning game states suddenly you're like like the the needle of risk and risk aversion shifts so you go away from being fluid and dynamic and and looking great and then you shift into this we don't want to give away too much we want to stay in and suddenly you're not able to possess the ball the opponent suddenly gets a bump of about five ten percent ball share and suddenly the game changes completely and then after a phase of conceding really soon after going yeah after scoring as well that run of like wolves and man united was that man united game in there yeah and i again i think that obviously arteta did that because he felt that that was what he had to do to to win the league and it's transpired that you have won the league but again it i think that sort of contributed to the fact that the season actually felt that the league title felt very winnable before two weeks before the end and ended up sort of dragging out a little bit but and I think that you know Arteta will go away from that from this season and will reassess because I don't think playing this way in the next season you'll get away with it I think that other teams that maybe and maybe you will get away with it you know I think it's possible but I also think that other teams aren't going to be as bad and there's probably going to be a little bit more pressure so yeah and you've got it you've got to evolve and that was what what Guardiola was so good at

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31:58Jon Mackenzie: Okay, we're delighted to welcome back to Stadio,

32:02Neil Atkinson: the great man from the Anfield Rap, Neil Atkinson. How are you, man? Very well, indeed. It's a pleasure to be back. I feel like I could be on more, you know, but that's your editorial choice.

32:11Jon Mackenzie: Dude, we'd have you back all the time, but first of all, every time I... It feels like you do so much. And also, I don't know if you were like me this season, especially... Well, you do Liverpool-centric stuff, right? So any opportunity that I had this season not to talk about Arsenal, I was like, let's go. So I just thought maybe next time we'll bring you on not to talk about Liverpool. We'll be like, this is Neil Atkinson's safe space.

32:37Neil Atkinson: I think I'm always of the view, if you do what I do, you've got to be able to accept not winning. Otherwise, what on earth is the point? So you can't tantrum this in my general outlook. So you've got to be able to accept the fact that you're not going to win every week. You're not going to win every season. that it was quite as difficult a watch, quite as difficult a time, I don't think, you know, would have been straightforwardly anticipated. You know, let's be clear about that. There was a lot of very bad games of football that Liverpool were party to.

33:08Jon Mackenzie: I think everyone was this season. We were chatting about it a little bit before, weren't we? Maybe chat about that a bit later. But yeah, from a Liverpool point of view, last time we spoke, I think it was off the back of the opening five wins. Yeah. Would you have imagined that it could have ended as it did? So basically if someone had showed you at that time

33:26Neil Atkinson: the final table of the season, would you have been like, hmm? No. I mean, I think part of, there's a lot of people who want to talk about various reasons that aren't directly to do with what happens on the pitchers. Dwight Oneslott is no longer Liverpool manager. To those people, one of my responses is he plays 33 games after the first five and takes 45 points. That is not, you know, when you actually do the maths of that, lay that out, that is not, you know, are going to ever in DE to continue and be a Liverpool manager. So, you know, people can write occasional pieces saying, well, did the fans do this or did the players do that?

34:01Neil Atkinson: But the truth of the matter is 45 points from 33 games is just not for a club with Liverpool's budget. It's just not going to be accepted. And everything else stems from that, really. Would I have believed at that point? No, if you'd have said to me this thing could just go off a cliff, I'd have gone, yeah, I can sort of see how that might happen relatively, relatively not quickly and not quite in the way i think one of the core issues that slot ends up with over the course of the campaign on a personal managerial level before you get into the specific issues liverpool had about size of squads and injuries is slot as a manager up to this point up to the point of the five wins at the start of the season what's he done in football what is the thing that underpins everything on a slot and it's win it's a very odd thing his career was not one with a ton of adversity.

34:49Neil Atkinson: That's not to say he didn't have to work exceptionally hard and there's not individual moments of adversity, but there wasn't the idea of a bad run. If you look at, and I'm not picking just because, you know, Jurgen Klopp, Brendan Rodgers, Rafa Benitez, they'd all been relegated as managers. They'd all gone through a relegation as manager. Arnishlott hadn't. He'd, you know, the biggest adversity he'd suffered was to do with the pandemic when he could have gone on to get a very unlikely title with AZ Alba. Feyenoord, even the season where they didn't win the league, they improved on the point tall of the season before.

35:23Neil Atkinson: And if PSV are just better, PSV are just better. But one of the things that I think happens and is difficult for Schlott is it starts to go wrong and goes continually wrong. And I just don't think, if I say he didn't know what to do about it, I think it was as much, whatever he had to fall back on the previous season had been at Liverpool, had been built on the expediency of the excellent players that he had. and if those players were being less excellent and the structure around them to make them excellent no longer existed in the same way, then I think he was falling back on, you know, the idea of him as a manager.

35:59Neil Atkinson: As he comes in, he sets the standards. He says, this is how we've got to play. This is the level. Everyone laughed about the Nottingham Forest obsession he had last year, but it was because he was continually saying that doesn't happen again on my watch. We do not lose a game like that again on my watch. I'm not having that. That's not what we're about, not what Liverpool are about, not what Arna Schlott's about. These are the standards. You've got to go meet them. It's very difficult to do that when you've lost 20. Ultimately, which is where he ends up over the course of the season. It's very difficult.

36:22Neil Atkinson: You know, Liverpool are unbeaten from that Nottingham Forest game until the Fulham game in April. It's a different thing when you lose three in a week, which he does. You know, Liverpool win five on the bounce, win the European game, win the League Cup game against Southampton, go to Crystal Palace, concede a 98-minute goal, which means that they lose 2-1. Then they go to Turkey. You know, it's a nightmare week, this. Then they go away to Istanbul, get beat 1-0. Then they come back, go to Chelsea away, and don't start at all well, play really poorly. They play really poorly in the first half against Palace and against Chelsea.

36:56Neil Atkinson: Come out second half, play better, get it back to 1-1, which is also what they did at Palace, and then concede a 95th minute winner to Chelsea with the last kick of the game. Estevão turns it in at the back post. And then the next game, there's an international break, and then the next game after that, Liverpool play Man Utd, concede a goal within 75 seconds, go 1-0 down work ever so hard to get it back to 1-1 and then concede a goal after the 80th minute to get beat again and right now this does not happen to Arne Schloss if you see what I mean this does not happen to him Do you think that's where

37:28Jon Mackenzie: the issues around the summer and the stuff that the club went through then starts to really come to the fore because for example we've all had moments where we've been grieving something and sometimes people go straight back to doing the thing that they feel most comfortable doing because it quite often distracts you from it right And I know that this was a topic that it felt a little bit like people weren't acknowledging at all mainstream-wise until maybe Andy Robertson's post-Scotland interview on the BBC. And then everyone started to acknowledge it a lot more because they hadn't. Whereas I think that yourselves, we were kind of referencing it through the season.

38:05At the beginning of the season, I remember saying, look, I think with everything that's going on, you don't know how that's going to play out in just how everyone's feeling.

38:14Jon Mackenzie: Champions League I feel that would be would be par for all things considered as a generous estimate I think when you kind of race out to that early lead people assume that everything's fine and I think that going back to what you're saying do you think it was the combination not wanting to over intellectualise it because at the end of the day if you play badly you just play badly as well right but do you think it was probably the summer and some of the issues with the transfer policy in the summer and not addressing some key areas like we talked about midfield and defence and attack like you said before and attack yeah do you think that's where that that combination was almost like it was almost like a perfect storm of things not not

38:53Neil Atkinson: to happen at that point i think there's i think there's there's a lot in amongst all of this i think one of the things that's key here is if we accept every version of events even if we were to withdraw the emotion which you can't do we'll come back onto that in a second but liverpool's pre-season is hugely disrupted. And the thing about a hugely disrupted pre-season is it's where you're building fitness. It's also worth saying and I agreed with it at the time. I don't know if I'd agree with it necessarily now but Liverpool effectively take May off. They've got not a lot to play for. There's four games left.

39:26Neil Atkinson: There's lots of bits and pieces of people going away. Players and manager going away because the games are done and you're just fulfilling the fixtures at that point. You've won the league. You've had the incredible moment. And I think that Liverpool had a sense. Liverpool come back for scheduled to come back for pre-season I think it was a week or two weeks before a lot of other teams it's worth saying that when Jota's incident happens the accident happens, he's driving back to go and catch a flight, to go back to be part of Liverpool's pre-season training that's part of where the car accident happens, it's on that journey and that's very early in July because what Liverpool I think had decided to do was give the players an easier time of it in May nothing to play for, Lads League's won but we're going to come back earlier because there's going to be a lot for us to work on going into next season.

40:07Neil Atkinson: All of that is completely knocked asunder by what goes on. All of it. And I think a massive problem that the side has all the way through the season is they don't look fit enough. They just do not look fit enough. And then these games that start to go late and then the early couple, they manage to ride them out. They're all right. But all of a sudden, not only do they not look fit enough, they don't look fit enough at the moment at which the Premier League is basically the other 19 teams are enormous physical monsters that you're going to have to deal with.

40:38Jon Mackenzie: The Premier League transforms in that season. It's a perfect storm, isn't it? Because also, it's not just that you're unfit, it's that you're getting everyone's best shot as the title winners. So everyone's going up in intensity, coming for you, yeah.

40:49Neil Atkinson: And all that sort of comes together. And then, and also they themselves, you know, the fitness of everybody else is absolutely exceptional. You're coming through that and then you're dealing with this. And then you're also dealing with the fact that there's something else that I said about Schlott not being used to. but all these players as I say the previous season they weren't beaten for six months they're then looking around going we've just lost four on the bounce what's going on here what do we do about this how do we deal with this they don't have a nightmare to beat at Brentford and everything's just out of control by the time you get to the Nottingham Forest 3-0 reverse after which they've been beaten 3-0 by Man City and 4-1 by PSV they get beat 3-0 by Nottingham Forest and it's like everyone is dazed and I think that this is where All of it is present.

41:34Neil Atkinson: The issues in the summer, Diogo Jota and everyone trying to sort of deal with that, the ramifications that that has on everybody. Let's also include the new players here. They've walked into a dressing room that is grieving from minute one. And they thought they were stepping into the dressing room of the champions. And instead they're walking into this broken emotional space from minute one. It's tricky for a lot of those guys.

41:54Jon Mackenzie: Yeah, just this broken emotional state. It's difficult to overemphasize it, obviously. And it's a football issue, but just felt like Liverpool, it was just the perfect storm this season, wasn't it? Lack of squad chemistry, lack of ability to recover, maybe a lack of institution memory, a lack of a kind of get out of jail card in the form of Luis Diaz, you know, all these different elements, you know?

42:15Neil Atkinson: Yeah, you end up in a situation where there's just not enough players. You've got salaries massively underperforming. They took a, and this is all Liverpool's agency. You know, the people who run Liverpool have got to really reflect on where they left Liverpool at the start of the season. So you're in a situation where Liverpool have got four forwards. One of them is Alexander Izak. Alexander Izak's not played a competitive game for four months or even a friendly game for four months the day he signs, and Liverpool can't get his fitness right. So now you've got three forwards, and the manager plays three forwards.

42:41Neil Atkinson: So now you've got no rotation option. You've also had an infrastructure that was very much about building to get the best out of Mo Salah, and that's gone. Diaz and Nunes playing number nine, both sold. Diogo Jota, obviously, there's bigger things in the world than football, but the footballer's gone, who was a pressing monster, who really helped Salah and did a lot of Salah's work for him. You've moved Sir Bosley either to right back because you've lost Trent Alexander-Arnold, who was also your best passer of the ball from deep. He's gone. You've moved Sir Bosley to right back or someone else to right back and you've ended up in a situation where now you're trying to embed Florian Vietz as a number 10.

43:17Neil Atkinson: Florian Vietz has got Florian Vietz to worry about. Hugo Eketike has got Hugo Eketike to worry about. These aren't footballers who are going to break their backs to get the best out of Mo Salah. But that was the case for Luis Diaz and especially Darwin Nunez. I always come back to the equalising goal that Liverpool scored at the Emirates in the title-winning season, where Trent plays a remarkable 80-yard ball. It's meant for Salah, but Nunez bursts onto it, gets there first. Salah goes centre-forward. Nunez, in the act of passing the ball, ends up wiped out on the deck because he's just desperate to put it on a plate for Salah.

43:51Neil Atkinson: He does. Salah puts it in the back of the net, 2-2. Really big result in the course of the season. all the constituent parts of that are gone and so that is a big problem for Liverpool when things are getting tough because you need things to fall back on but what you fall back on isn't there what does the manager have to fall back on will he set standards how can he set standards when his team keeps losing by three goals it's exceptionally difficult so all of this happens and as I say there just aren't enough players Liverpool are going to end up a situation Alexis McAllister has come back from the summer a shadow of the footballer that he was for reasons that I still don't think we have an understanding of by the time the season finishes, and I've said before about right back.

44:28Neil Atkinson: So you're in this situation where there's all these questions and none of them have been properly answered. There's mitigation for every player, in part because of Jota, in part because of the pre-season, in part even for the new signings, that not one of them looks a bad player. They just can't get any formal fitness. Jeremy Frimpong starts the first league game of the season. He's off with a hamstring injury after 60 minutes. Milos Kerkas is relied upon in the early part of the season, I think in part because the manager was... did not particularly want to pick Robertson in the aftermath of everything that had gone on.

45:00Neil Atkinson: Rightly or wrongly, and I am just guessing there, but rightly or wrongly, he came to that conclusion and that's what he went with. I said before about where Izak's fitness ends up. Ekotike starts really well and it's a big part of why Liverpool start the season well is that Ekotike is really exciting. But Vietz has taken a bit of time to settle, isn't used to the league. And there's a really interesting thing in that game against Galatasaray where Vietz loses the ball 80 yards from his own goal and Liverpool concede and he loses it sloppily and a bit weakly but there's 80 yards to fix this

45:32Jon Mackenzie: and I think this is one of this is one of the things that just to jump in sorry I think this is one of the things that maybe as an outsider and you obviously kind of correct me if I'm wrong here but it's one of the key things I think Liverpool need to address this summer it's not necessarily personnel but it's the type of personnel because one of the things that was so seemingly just otherworldly about Liverpool in the Klopp years as an Arsenal fan looking on very very enviously was their their sense of continuity between departures and certain player eras right there was actually quite a lot of management that goes on there that that seemed so seamless and obviously it was a big transfer window and quite an unusual transfer window last summer from a Liverpool point of view compared to like the last decade right but with everything else that's going on you can kind of have some factors there but you think that maybe that's one of the things to address from a footballing point of view because you can't you know you can't ever can't control everything you never know what might happen but from a footballing point of view because it felt like the less there was less of a sense of continuity compared to previous seasons in that summer that it made things even worse and probably something they need to try and reel back in now especially because of the departures that they've had this summer as well but the problem

46:46Neil Atkinson: with the departure that they've had this summer and where they found themselves is you're not going to get a sense of continuity when you need to buy seven players yeah Liverpool need to buy seven players I mean that's in order like setting them up for I think there has to be there has to be phasing in and I think they were but they were trying to do that but the you know the circumstances as they sort of go on over the course of the campaign because of injury issues and simply not having enough in the first place like there's I think Liverpool ought to have replaced Luis Diaz there's a lot of Liverpool supporters they think they shouldn't have sold Luis Diaz I would argue in the aftermath of the tragedy with Diogo Jota, one of Diaz and Nunez should have stayed if they weren't going to recruit one more.

47:24Neil Atkinson: And I would have been fine if it was Nunez. Now, a lot of Liverpool supporters at the time would not have felt like that, and I understand why. But what Nunez, at least until January, would have done was it would have given you the option to use Eketike off the left, make, he didn't need it in the end, but make his landing softer. It would have took the pressure off, feeling as though you've got to get Izak involved ASAP. it would have given Salah a little bit more continuity in terms of what he's got next to him there as I say none of this is to say that Nunez would have you know suddenly become a 30 goal a season striker but what was he?

47:57Neil Atkinson: He was a willing runner who would completely devote himself to what the team was trying to do

48:01Jon Mackenzie: and was devastating was very chaotic look at the games at St James' Park that kind of thing you know where he would just tear games open so Liverpool lost that option

48:08Neil Atkinson: so Liverpool just don't even have a bench option at this point to do something with you know and that would have helped as well. It's easy to say that with the benefits of hindsight, I always like Nunez a lot more than a lot of other people, in part because I think there was a real sort of, it reminds me a little bit of when Suarez went to Barcelona and accepted immediately Messi was the better player. Nunez came to Liverpool with a big price tag, and within three months, he knows part of his job is Mo Salah. How do I help get the best out of the better player? And I think that if anything at times, he might have shown a bit too much humility.

48:43Neil Atkinson: again people wouldn't think that from the way in which he's perceived by some Liverpool supporters

48:47Jon Mackenzie: I agree that was his but that was my one criticism of Nunez uh I think he just had to own it actually he saw something with Diego Forlan uh coming to uh Manchester United I I use the Uruguayan example because I think they came in very respect for the football culture and it wasn't they couldn't hack the Premier League I think they just had too much respect for it and they should just come in and just torn it down because Forlan went on to absolutely cook at European level at world level and Nunez was doing his thing in Benfica I think he just got in his own head because when Nunez actually took control of a game he was on you couldn't do anything you he was unplayable actually um and it was just it's no coincidence that the Nunez moments people remember are the inexplicable misses that nothing to do with technique it's actually yeah it's confidence actually the guy didn't have he didn't lack for technique I don't I don't agree with that for a second I think it was just I don't think he ever fully believed he was the guy I didn't want I don't think he wanted to be the main guy either.

49:40Jon Mackenzie: I think he's a very unselfish footballer. He reminded me a bit, actually, of Emil Heskey in the sense that, yeah, but Emil Heskey in the goalless draw against Italy when he cooked Maldini. Yeah. And was like spinning him like it was nothing. And like his combination play, I think Heskey, I thought Heskey and Fowler as a combination. Collymore and Fowler was fantastic, but the intelligence of Heskey's movement and what Heskey could actually do technically, and you look at his sons now, clearly he's passed down a lot of that. Yeah, just a confidence thing. as a United fan that probably roots at Liverpool a lot more than he should I think these were the particular points for me that were the sadness in the summer window going have you got enough you've got enough up top I know what Vietz can do in the long term but I just I was concerned about what you had in terms of midfield depth actually

50:22Neil Atkinson: Gravenberg and there wasn't enough there and again at the same time all of this is becoming more important again because of the nature of the way in which the direction of travel that the league's going in and I think that Liverpool the people who ran Liverpool took a gamble or a series of gambles gambles on gambles is whatever I've ended up saying. But it's better off not to see them as coin flips, but see them as dice rolls. And the issue they have isn't so much that they keep losing their tasks, it's that they keep rolling ones. Not twos, not threes, they keep rolling ones. And within that though, that's worth exploring.

50:51Neil Atkinson: It is in and of itself, it's a huge gamble to bring in Isaac for all that money at the moment when you know, or you've learned, that you're not going to get him out of Newcastle until the very last moment, the very last day of the window, and he's not going to have had a pre-season. He's literally not even done proper training all the way through. That is a gamble. It is therefore also a gamble to not have another backup forward. So it would have been a gamble anyway, but what you've done is you've squared your gamble. So you've not just rolled a one, you end up rolling a double one. You've gambled on Salah.

51:28Neil Atkinson: You accept there will be some form of decline, but what you've actually done is with the previous two gambles, you've made the decline that will happen with Salah the impact of it far greater so you've gambled on can Salah give us at least six more months at the very highest level but if he can't you've mitigated you've removed the mitigation of all of your safety nets with the previous two gambles that I've just referred to so you've rolled a 1, a 1 and a 2 and all of a sudden when you could have rolled 18 but you never do because it's football and that's the way the world works you could have coped with rolling 12 you've rolled 4 and now you're dealing with the reality of that in the aftermath as well here of, to go back to, the tragedy and the loss and the grief and all the confusion that that brings.

52:11Neil Atkinson: And you've got a manager who's now trying to run a football team through all this. What's really important to say, though, is that in amongst all of this, Schlott is not without responsibility and he's not without agency. I referred to those games Liverpool lose to Crystal Palace, to Chelsea and to Manchester United. In the games against Chelsea and Manchester United, he starts a player in McAllister who looks half fit and is responsible for the, or is a key aspect of why the first two goals are conceded in both of those games. And he starts Isaac. Now he starts him against Palace because Eketike got himself sent off for taking his top off when he was on a yellow card against Southampton in the League Cup.

52:45Neil Atkinson: Do you know what? I'd forgotten that that had happened. That's how wild this season's been. That's how wild the season's been. And doing my job, there's loads of interesting observations. Like I'm the fella who, you know, is lucky enough to host the Anfield Wrap. And often, all the way through hosting the Anfield Wrap, when Rodgers is manager, Klopp's manager, often we come and we do the talk in post-match, those of us have been lucky enough to be in the ground. And then you get loads of negative responses from people online. And a lot of those negative responses from people online are, why are you being so nice about this rubbish?

53:14Neil Atkinson: These are terrible. They're not trying. This isn't right. This is bad. Even, you know, this had happened during the Klopp era. And everyone who's been in the ground would almost have the attitude of, no, that's not fair. You know, I could see what was going on and it was difficult. Coming out of the Burnley game, we recorded in one particular pub post-match, and a lot of contributors to the Amphira app go there. And it would be fair to describe the atmosphere as absolutely feral. Everybody was furious, furious with what they'd just watched. So we put the stuff out, and now the feedback that we get is the opposite.

53:48Neil Atkinson: Oh, you're being a bit harsh there. They were unlucky. It was one of them. Sometimes you play them, you go 1-0. Burnley scored with their only attack. Expected goals, Liverpool are 2.5. Burnley are 0.3. Why don't you just all calm down a little bit? everyone was livid walked out to the ground livid in ways that it's hard to put over and I think that happens another couple of times over the course of the season people who were going to the matches cannot believe their eyes they cannot believe their eyes by the time we get to the end of the campaign like I when I'm out in the city people who don't come over as being particularly online older people people will come up they will come up to me ironically quite online a lot well they are unfortunately but they are the ones to worry about but you take me general points

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55:45Jon Mackenzie: Big thanks to John and Neil. We hope you enjoyed those two sections of some Patreon podcasts that we've put up recently. Like I mentioned at the top, if you want to go and listen to every single episode, ad free info you can go to patreon.com forward slash stadio in the meantime have a lovely weekend we'll be back with you on this feed on monday with a bit of a end of season review ahead of the world cup so much love have a great weekend everyone and we'll be back with you then

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