shen

Spain 2010 was ridiculous as well.

Why are so many sweeping statements made about large swathes of people based on some weird and frankly outdated left-right political spectrum descriptions? I get that it's a human trait to want to simplify, compartmentalize and categorize to more easily make sense of the world, but some humility and appreciation that the world isn't black or white, left or right, us or them would not go amiss. This isn't coined at you specifically, but a general comment on the political debate in here.

It wasn't in the playoffs, it was the group they won. It was effectively the group decider though.

Went there in October after a 10-year hiatus. It's a beautiful city, with way way way too many tourists. I found the prices to be surprisingly cheap around the center compared to what I expected (living in Copenhagen). A decade ago the price difference between the main roads/central areas and slightly off-center cafes was mindblowing.

One thing is the individual's character and mentality, another is the squad's. The latter can be reinforced or undermined by the manager, staff, the culture at the club, the fans. A player like Jordan James was a great recruitment. Hermansen and Fatawu were excellent buys. BDCR, as limited as he is, shows the right attitude most of the time. I'm not convinced that the players we've brought in have had a poor mentality, but for whatever reason they've been sucked into the mire as well. To me, this stinks of a culture within the club that drags people down. The body language of several of our players (Ayew, Ricardo, Fatawu, Winks et al) was off for most of last season and the one before.

I'd prefer Brazil over France or Norway in Sweden's shoes.

It is. "Sensible" and "football fan" rarely go together.

Senegal are arguably the best African side of them all, but playing France and Norway is just brutal. They would need a comprehensive win to make it, yeah. And I don't think it's that surprising so many go through considering 32 teams will make it. The CONCACAF and most of the AFC sides are comfortably worse than the top 4-5 African sides. Do you think Morocco or any of the other sides could make it beyond the QFs though?

Watched the Death of Robin Hood at the cinema. Some great makeup work, brutal scenes and decent film. Old bearded men are the shizzle these days it seems

https://www.transfermarkt.com/leicester-city/berateruebersicht/verein/1003 USG: Vestergaard, Lascelles, James, Alves. The Team: Nelson, L. Thomas, Choudhury, Aluko, Daka, Ayew. CAA: Winks, S. Thomas, Okoli. Cifuentes & Rodgers are with USG, Rowett is with The Team.

My game knowledge maybe isn't the best, but Skipp had quite a bit of PL experience at a top half Spurs side and had had a great season at Norwich. If you don't look at the price, then it wasn't such a braindead transfer for a newly promoted club at the time. The price and his subsequent failure to perform has made it a calamitous one. Why he's failed so bad is a good question though. With Okoli, I would also point to our time under Rodgers where we obviously tried to target tall centerbacks to address our recurring weakness at set pieces (Vestergaard, Souttar, Faes) - probably at Rodgers' request. Okoli was bought on the back of our season with Maresca where we got found out often with the ball in behind our high-pressing team. Vestergaard and Faes were too slow, so he wanted more pace in there, something Cooper echoed. So Okoli was brought in to give a different option, his lack of passing became secondary I guess.

I think the system that served us so well was hitting a glass-ceiling. I.e. with our increased reputation, finding the gems we were was getting increasingly difficult or expensive. In hindsight, we should've continued using a more data-driven approach similar to what Brighton, Brentford et al have done. But while their rise has been relatively fast, it was certainly more gradual and sustainable compared to our overnight transition from relegation-battlers to champions/CL participants. We've lost know-how but as others have pointed out, we still got Macia and had relative success with transfers until he left, suggesting we didn't turn hopeless overnight. But we were looking at a different calibre of players (i.e. Tielemans) than we were under Walsh, so there was obviously a shift that happened then.

I wasn't able to quickly find any reliable info about the staff, but Transfermarkt seem to think we have a few scouts employed. No idea how reliable or up-to-date this info is.

That doesn't quite add up though. We have several well-respected scouts and analysts at the club, so the club will obviously have identified players throughout the last few years. The question is whether Brendan Rodgers and subsequent managers have had too much sway in who we sign or whether there is another reason that we've consistently recruited players that are quickly cast off or never used. McCarron is obviously brought in to align our recruitment with our sporting team so we hopefully stop making these senseless signings. But either we completely lacked a strategy (doubtful), let managers have too much say or chose to sign players for other reasons (financial, favouritism, lack of connections, PSR etc). Would love if we could get some insider info on recruitment lists or scouting activities as I refuse to believe our scouts are sat doing nothing all day and all week.

I haven't found a thread focused solely on the current recruitment structure at the club, but if it overlaps too much with other threads i.e. about King Power/Rudkin/Glover/McCarron please delete or merge as you see fit. I tried to have a look at the different agent representations of our squad and staff as that has obviously been a theme of interest ever since Brendan Rodgers stepped into our club and oversaw the dubious signings like Bertrand (professional ties to Rodgers' son, shared the same agency as Brendan), to see if there are unusual patterns there. Although there are currently clusters of players from the same agencies (i.e. 6 from THE-TEAM (Wasserman rebranded), 4 from Unique Sports Group and 3 from CAA according to Transfermarkt) which are certainly noteworthy, there doesn't appear to be a more convoluted relationship to agents a la Wolves and Mendes. I could be wrong here, but it smells more like an overdependence on certain agencies and a lack of market knowledge at our club than actually agent-driven recruitment. With the appointment of Glover in 2022 as our head of recruitment, who is noted for "for his good relationships with agents and his ability to be creative in transfer negotiations to get deals done, when they may have looked otherwise difficult", it seemed to cement our change in recruitment strategy from the scout- and data-driven strategy that we mainly used under Walsh & Wigglesworth to the more agent-based approach we've seen in recent years. Is there evidence that this structure is a viable approach and if yes, what does it require to make it a successful model? It's probably safe to say this model has been a failure for us so far with very few hits (El Khannouss, Hermansen, James (loan), Fatawu (loan/permanent), Buonanotte (loan) and Mavididi at a push) and a plethora of misses. But can we course correct with James McCarron as our new Sporting Director?

To be fair, this result is an outlier. They don't normally get blown away.

Are you happy with the appointment? Or were there more suited candidates in your opinion?

You obviously need luck with timing, sure. But I don't think France have had many dead-easy group stage matches either in their last few WCs. Their group this year is arguably the toughest of them all. Question is how good will Mbappé be at 35 years of age for the 2034 WC?

He was a quality player. Looks like he did a fine job at Dender.

Barring injury, yes. Unlike Messi, Mbappé's game is very much about speed. He could drop off massively, especially if he gets a bad injury.

Is it just me that finds it odd that Araujo stooped down to head that rebound in instead of using his feet?

They deserve some respect. Qualifying automatically from Africa, comfortably ahead of Cameroon, is a feat. They are several rungs above Haiti, Curacao and on this showing even Tunisia.

Amazing stuff! Love to see it.

Hmmm I wonder if that region has a name. Would be pretty cool if it did! Denmark and Italy had their best chances in a while to qualify. Denmark ultimately didn't make it because they messed up at home against Belarus. Mentally they never recovered. Their last WC appearance was abject as well. In fact, if it wasn't for Kasper's heroics against Croatia in 2018, I'd argue they haven't done much of note at World Cups since 2002. But it's always been like that with UEFA, some strong teams will miss out. But that also makes the qualifiers worth something, so there's two sides to this. If anything, I'd question allowing the three strongest teams to auto qualify from Concacaf while then not reducing the amount of qualifying spots for that region. Then again, we likely wouldn't have the romantic Curacao and Haiti stories if they had curbed it.