Stamford Bridge Over Troubled Waters

Obligatory soccer gif ... or is that water polo?

APOLOGIES for the long time between blogs. I was doing that silly thing I do where I write novels again. (Shameless plug: click on the gadgets on the right of this page and buy some books! That is all.) Losing has gone on unabated in the past month, of course, and The Lose has his attentions divided between the MLB playoffs, the Rugby World Cup, an occasional peek at the NFL and NCAA football (WSU beat Oregon? Huh?) and now we’ve got the NHL and NBA getting going. But what I’ve been watching more than anything else is a healthy amount of soccer, which has been fun and fascinating and, in the case of Chelsea, downright hilarious.

Soccer is on the international break night now, with UEFA qualifying matches going on, as well as World Cup qualifiers on three continents, and the U.S. had that match at the Rose Bowl last night against El Tri which we don’t want to talk about. *grumble grumble …* The top leagues around the world take the weekend off. (England fills the gap with a nice tradition called Non League Day to honor and support grassroots football). The October international break, coming 6-8 weeks into the European season, is always a good time for clubs to take stock of where they are. Firing managers is common at this time of year, and a pair of jobs promptly popped open in the EPL. Already, underachieving Liverpool has axed Brendan Rogers and hired Jürgen Klopp, the former Borussia Dortmund manager who brought Borussia to the game’s highest levels during his tenure. His appointment has the faithful who fill the Kop at Anfield excited, and with good reason: his teams always play a high-energy, high-paced game that’s actually fun, which has been in short supply lately. (And whether or not Liverpool actually likes fun is another question entirely.) Sunderland, meanwhile, have appointed Sam Allardyce, the typical sort of hired gun manager who always has a place in football, one who goes about uglifying the game for the purposes of getting results. This sorts of guys never have a job for very long, simply because footballers get tired really quickly of such a dreary style of play, but it can work well when you need a quick fix. Sunderland need all the help they can get, as they are the worst team in the league and they have also spent stupidly – they currently have the 8th highest payroll in the EPL, and a drop to the second division could be disastrous, as the club carries an enormous amount of debt. Having watched a heavy amount of Div. 2 football last season, as Norwich was going about their promotion campaign, I could say there were probably 10 teams in that league which are better than Sunderland is now. It’s hard to imagine them winning any games at all in this year’s EPL. Big Sam’s got his work cut out for him.

This is the sort of stuff guys can do even in Div. 2

The whole of European football is something of a caste system, with 1-2 clubs in each country who necessarily dominate their leagues, and with only about 8-10 clubs continent-wide with a realistic chance of reaching the final of the Champions League. As great as the game can be to watch, there is a certain inevitability to what takes place. Regular seasons simply become coronation processions, as the big clubs march to the title, and it can get a little bit stale. But so far this year, the upstarts and the typical mid-table dwellers filling out the ranks of the leagues have refused to read the script. They’re refusing to play along, while some of the dominant clubs have been struggling. The results have been wildly unpredictable. It’s worth getting up early on the weekends to watch, because club football in Europe hasn’t been this fun in years.

Well, it’s a coronation procession in Germany. Bayern Munich have been aided by a friendly schedule (playing their three greatest rivals all at home at the start of the year) and a few fluffy penalties here and there as they searched for their form, but now they’ve found it and become absolutely terrifying. (Two words: Robert Lewandowski.) Bayern have won all seven matches, are seven points clear already in the Bundesliga, and are probably the best team in Europe. It’s good viewing simply to see a team that good play that well. As good as the quality of play is in the Bundesliga – year in and year out, it’s one of the highest scoring leagues in Europe, and also leads in attendance – most of the drama has already evaporated.

The same cannot be said of La Liga, which is completely chaotic. Real Madrid and F.C. Barcelona usually dominate of course, being two of the three biggest clubs in the world. They’ve also had a propensity over the years for playing by their own rules, flaunting the rules, or failing to abide by them entirely – which annoys the hell out of everyone else in La Liga. Any opportunity to take points from one of Spain’s big two clubs thus becomes a settling of longstanding grudges and scores.

And everybody’s taking their shots at Barca right now, who’ve got themselves into a hell of a quandary: Messi is hurt and out for two months, the tax troubles of Messi and Neymar hang over their heads, they were hit with a transfer ban until January and couldn’t add players to their squad in the offseason, and they’re stellar player development system has crumbled to the point that their reserve side finished dead last in its league a season ago. They’ve had to plug holes in their squad with second-rate players as injury concerns mount, and with no Messi out there to dictate the Barca style of playing defense with its offense, and putting the fear of God in their opponents with the threat of a lethal counter, no one is scared of them any more. Forced to play defense with their defense, the results haven’t been pretty – they’ve yielded four goals in a game thrice already. Nicking a game from Barca constitutes the highlight of most Spanish club’s season, and Atletico Bilbao celebrated mightily after thrashing Barca 4:1 in the Super Cup, but that result lost its luster when Barca got crushed by Celta Vigo by the same 4:1 scoreline, and last week Barca bottomed out and got beat by underachieving, bottom-dwelling Sevilla.

But Real can’t take advantage. New head coach Rafa Benitez, the beneficiary of yet another of Real’s infamous off-season power struggles, has a fleet full of sports cars in his garage yet somehow insists on driving the Yugo. He has managed to take a foursome of Ronaldo, Benzema, Bale and James and not figure out how to get them to play together. Real have bumbled along through a series of goalless draws with newcomers and bottom-feeders, and the natives are not amused. It’s not just enough to get results at Real and Barca. You also have to look good doing it. You have to be entertaining. The whole of La Liga is in upheaval at the moment – last week, none of the top six teams in the table won a match – and while logic would dictate that Real and Barca will eventually sort themselves out, it should be remembered that Atletico Madrid won the La Liga title two seasons ago, so the unexpected can actually happen. No matter how it all winds up playing out, it’s all been wildly entertaining to watch so far.

Serie A is also a mess. Juventus have responded to losing some players in the off-season, and suffering through some injury concerns of their own, by putting all of their eggs in the Champions League basket. Given that they made something like €95 million from reaching the Champions League final last season, you can see why they think that way. Juve has taken to resting key players on Serie A weekends to make sure they’re fit for the UCL group stage games midweek. In essentially blowing off Serie A for the first part of the year, they are gambling that no one will assert themselves and they can catch up later in the year – and given how it’s played out so far in Italy, they may be onto something there. Roma can’t get out of their own way, Inter are boring, AC Milan can’t mark the grass they are standing on, Napoli is a roller coaster, and no one’s quite sure whether Lazio is legit or not. Somehow, Fiorentina are top of the table, and not even the Fiorentines can believe that’s happening.

All of this is great for the fans, of course. More volatility means more meaningful games, and quantity translates into quality. I think I’m like most football fans in that my supporting of clubs is nuanced. I have my token big club I root for in the UCL – that would be Barca, even though I was just ripping them – and then I have my modest, good-natured club – Norwich City – for which I willingly temper my expectations. My two hopes for Norwich is that they avoid being relegated from the Premier League (I suspect they will be fine), and that they finish higher in the table than Stoke City, since I have a standing wager of tacos with “Words w/ ” Frentz, the Official Stoke Fan of In Play Lose, over which guy’s club finishes higher. Normally, the best you can hope for, when you root for a club like Norwich, is to nick a point here or there from one of the big guns, or possibly pinch a 1:0 victory from them at home. You simply cannot compete. But what’s becoming clear across Europe so far this season is that the middle class clubs can, in fact, compete. Most trends in football originate in the Premier League these days, of course, and everyone on the continent must be taking their cue from EPL, which so far this season has been absolutely, positively nuts.

Now, the pundits would have you believe the topsy-turvy EPL owes to the fact that no one is all that good. But pundits, of course, are there to sell the drama and the soap opera aspect of the EPL, which is the British paparazzi’s second favorite target after the royal family. A season without a set-up the usual 3-4 glamourous élite sides running away from the rest of the field is bad for the punditry business, since you have to actually have to pay attention to the games, at that point, in order to have something to say. I don’t think it is true at all that the league has somehow gotten worse. Instead, I would say the league is much more balanced and more competitive. Also, offense is up in the EPL about 6% over last year’s clip. More evenly matched sides + more goals = better viewing.

Now, over the course of a long season, what generally happens is wear and tear and injuries catch up to clubs with issues of depth. The bigger clubs have more talent and more depth, and they wear the others out in a 38-week war of attrition. But just because it usually goes that way doesn’t mean it’s going that way now. Each week, those ‘experts’ I mentioned above expect for Arsenal to stop being flaky, for Manchester United to stop playing ugly football, for Liverpool to come up with a coherent plan, and for the traditional powers to start imposing their will … and yet, that doesn’t happen. After 8 weeks of the season, two of the European places are held down by Crystal Palace and Leicester, with West Ham right behind them, and the next two places in the table belonging to the usual glass-ceiling folk, Spurs and Everton, who are threatening to break through. And we’re nearly a quarter of the way through the season now, and verging on losing the “small sample size” excuse. Something’s going on here, and since The Lose is always looking for bigger trends, it’s good to take a closer look.

The EPL has more money than it knows what to do with. EPL clubs spent something absurd like £1 billion on players in the offseason – which they can certainly afford, given their TV contracts. Norwich were basically handed £130 million in revenue when they won “the richest game in football” last May, and when the new TV contracts kick in next year, that number may jump closer to £200 million. But even with the £130 million Norwich got just for showing up this year, it pales in comparison to the sort of budget you’re talking about at Manchester United, who are estimated to have generated £195 million in kit sales alone last season, which allows United to pay a £200+ million wage bill and still do dumb things like shell out £55 million for an untested French teenager … or is that a dumb move? We’ll get to that in a minute. And there has usually been an almost exact correlation in the EPL between the teams which carry the largest payrolls and the teams which have the most success. Just this year, Manchester City crossed a rather dubious threshold, as the team which took the field for their game with West Ham was the most expensive team ever assembled, having cost the Emirati owners of the club over £300 million to assemble.

And, of course, Man City promptly lost to West Ham. So go figure.

The Brits may not know much about baseball, but they all seem to know a lot about Moneyball, as that phrase gets bandied about all the time in conversations about the EPL. For 5-6 huge clubs in the league, the solution to everything seems to be to just throw money at the problem. It’s actually something of a lazy approach, and just because you have the money to spend, it doesn’t you’re smart enough to know how to spend it. Liverpool have spent something like £291 million on buying players in Brendan Rogers’ tenure, and that’s worked out so well that Rogers no longer has a job. Man United spent well over £60 million to buy Argentine midfield Angel di Maria, who turned out to be a flop, and they promptly sold him to Paris St.-Germain and took a £15 million loss. Man United has the money, and can afford to be wrong sometimes, of course, but that’s £15 million you didn’t spend on anyone who was any good, and that’s the sort of inefficiency catches up with you. In the meantime, if you’re one of the other clubs in the EPL who doesn’t have that sort of spending power, you have to be smart about what you’re doing. You have to look for good deals when buying players, and have zero sentimentality about selling them. No one does this better in the EPL than Southampton, whose roster gets raided annually, yet Saints finished 7th last year and will likely be a top half of the table club this year. Lesser clubs in the EPL have been doing Moneyball-type analysis long before the term Moneyball even existed, but the financial gaps between clubs are so vast that it hasn’t yielded the same sorts of results you’ve seen in a sport like baseball. At least, not yet, anyway.

Being a smart money, analytical type can be advantageous in that it’s common knowledge in Europe now that the top English clubs will grossly overpay for players, meaning that if Man United and Southampton inquire about the same player from random European club, they’re likely to be quoted two different prices. And while the gap in revenues is still vast in the EPL, there is now so much money in the EPL that, while your club may not have as much money to spend as a Liverpool or Man United, you also have more money to spend than just about every other club on the planet, meaning your baseline for the type of player you can afford has risen greatly.

In this year’s EPL, the best signing of the season so far has been Yohan Cabaye, the midfielder who will be quarterbacking Les Bleus next summer in the Euros, who somehow slipped under the radar and was signed by Crystal Palace. Pair a great playmaker with the Eagles’ plethora of speedy wing players, and all of a sudden Crystal Palace are absolutely flying. Probably the second best signing has been Andre Ayew, the Ghanaian midfielder who was out of contract at Marseille and had a choice of clubs, and wound up at Swansea City. And as Frentz points out to me, the old adage “but will it play in Stoke on a Wednesday night?” is finally being put to the test, as the Potters went out and bagged the budding Swiss star (and all-name team member) Xherdan Shaqiri in the offseason. These are all terrific players, all potential game changers who were had for a relative pittance.

And with game changers in your lineup, the game plan changes as well. No longer are the smaller clubs simply hunkering down against the big clubs and trying to eke out results. Instead, they’re taking their shots and being rewarded for it. A pivotal moment of this season came when Swansea beat Man United. If you’d taken the names off the jerseys and looked at it objectively, you’d say those guys in the white shirts not only were the better team, but they were also better coached and had an comparable amount of talent to the guys in red. Mention that the guys in red have a £200 million wage bill, and you start wondering just how big the drain is that they poured all that money down.

But it’s probably a good idea for the little guys to get in their shots now, because the market for players is subtly shifting yet again. Everyone though Man United was nuts for dropping £55 million on Antony Martial, a 19-year-old French striker. He promptly showed up at Old Trafford and scored four goals in short order and all of a sudden, it looked like a pretty savvy buy. Man City dropped over £50 million each on 21-year-old Raheem Sterling and 24-year-old Kevin De Bruyne, and Chelsea were willing to spend up to £40 million to pry 21-year-old John Stones away from Everton. What’s not important there is the amount spent, but the ages of the players. Something analytics has taught us in all sports is that the peak performance age of players is actually a lot younger than previously thought. Much like free agency is folly in North America, because you’re paying for what’s already happened and unlikely to get a full return on your investment, plunking down large sums in soccer to buy players who are in their late 20s doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Let’s say Martial blossoms and gives United 10 good years at the club. That’s spending an average of £5.5 million a year, which would be a steal. Even if Martial only gives them 5-6 good years, spending only an average of £10 million or so a year for a striker is way under the market rates. And this ploy also undercuts most of the competition by, again, raising the floor. Most of the mid-range clubs have made their living buying low on young players and then selling high on them down the road, and huge price tags on younger players is going to make it harder to do that across the board. While the rest of the world of football punditry thought United were crazy for paying that much, I happen to think it was brilliant.

They say football is a game that is played with the head

The EPL, and quite possibly all of European football, is subtly changing the way it does business. And you have to look way down the EPL table to find where doing business as usual is turning into colossal folly. Way, way down the table, as in 16th place, which is where defending champion Chelsea finds themselves. Chelsea are on their way to one of the most colossal collapses in English football history. And English fans are loving it. The club’s white knight saga of a narrative – being rescued from the rubbish bin by a deep-pocketed owner riding in from the east, who saves them from near bankruptcy, throws colossal sums of money at the club and magically turns them into a super club – has grown tiresome. At this point, Chelsea just might be the most reviled club in England. (They’re not even popular on U.K. dating sites. It pleases me that Norwich are high on that list, as well as Swansea, since The Official Wife of In Play Lose has pledged her allegiance to the Swans. Clearly, we have good taste.)

So what are they doing wrong at Chelsea? Well, everything. Chelsea was brilliant and dazzling during the first half of last season, essentially wrapping up the title before Christmas, as they’d built a huge lead in the table. But in the second half of the season, owing to some injury problems and some ‘pragmatic’ footballing, Chelsea’s results weren’t nearly that good, as they took up an extremely defensive posture and eked out results, more stymying the opposition than doing anything of their own accord to take points. Now, it’s a results-oriented business, of course, and Chelsea walked off with the silverware at the end, but more than a few people started to wonder if papering over the cracks was starting to take place.

Well, this season, we have our answer. Chelsea have 8 points from 8 games and are lucky to have that. Their two wins were against a 9-man Arsenal team and a win at West Brom where they nearly blew a 3-0 lead. In their two draws, against Swansea and lowly Newcastle, they quite possibly should’ve lost both. The losses have been ugly, and follow a similar script. Crystal Palace basically published the blueprint for how to beat that team – run like hell up and down the flanks and simply dare Chelsea to keep up. Everton did the exact same thing, and Southampton pretty much ran Chelsea into the ground last weekend.

Chelsea are an older side, an experienced side with a veteran core. And while they have a huge payroll, they’ve always tended to keep a very short squad. You need depth in your squad in soccer, because a league campaign + cup matches + European play can add up to 55-60 games in a season. Add in the fact that most of Chelsea’s roster are first-choice players for their national squads, and it means they’ve played even more games. This team looks like a group of guys who’ve all played too much football and not have enough time to recharge the batteries. They looked old and slow in their season opener, a 2:2 draw where Swansea threatened to run right by them, and have looked old and slow ever since.

But where are the replacements? Chelsea have one of the best youth academies in the world – they’re currently European champions – but it hasn’t translated into any top-class players. The youth system for Chelsea is simply a moneymaker, as they then sell young players to other clubs. In keeping the squad short, Chelsea also keep the wage bill tight. They have 35 or some ridiculous number of loanees at the moment – loaning players out usually means not having to pay their salaries – and they’ve been perfectly willing, over the years, to buy up young players and loan them out without any intention of ever playing them at the big club. This is coming back to haunt them. The aforementioned De Bruyne was told he had no place at Chelsea and sold to Wolfsburg in Germany, where he became the Bundesliga player of the year, and has now been sold for a gaga sum to Man City, that team 15 stories higher in the standings than Chelsea are right now. Romelu Lukaku is another example – a young player Chelsea had no use for who is now running rampant at Everton, and who ran all over Chelsea earlier this season.

Those young players had no place at Chelsea because Jose Mourinho doesn’t have any interest in young players. Mourinho is one of a select few of the Phil Jackson types who coach at the highest levels of football and only want jobs where all the pieces are already in place to be successful. They show up at a club and impose a few tactics which might lead their teams to becoming champions – in Mourinho’s case, usually overly-defensive ones – and then they quickly wear out their welcome and hastily flee the scene. You can tout all of your master motivational ploys and tactical acumen that you want, but here’s an idea: how about if you actually try coaching your players and making them better? It’s what they seem to be doing at Swansea and Crystal Palace and Southampton and Everton, all of whom ran circles around Chelsea and left them looking like they were stuck in the mud.

Mourinho’s response to the poor results has been to go into a full-on, very public meltdown. First, he got into a row with the club’s doctor, who happens to be a woman and who had the audacity to do her job when bringing an injured player off the pitch late in the Swansea match, thus leaving them two men down at a pivotal point in the match. (Chelsea having been reduced to 10 thanks to a red card.) A series of rather sexist innuendos then ensued, and ultimately she left the club, all of which is a lawsuit waiting to happen. He’s blamed officials constantly, going so far as to say that they are afraid to give penalties to Chelsea – even though stats show they’ve had more free kicks and penalties awarded them in recent years than almost any other club. He’s benched club captain John Terry, yet let Ivanovic and Fabergas keep playing when they’ve been horrible, in part because he has no real viable options on that short bench. He’s taken to calling out players in the press and them humiliating them on the pitch, going so far as to bench Matic against Southampton, bring him on at halftime and then sub him off 20 minutes later, which is about the single-most embarrassing thing you can do to a player. And all of it’s being played out in the British press, of course, who are eating this stuff up, and now you have leaks coming out that the players are tuning Mourinho out, and Mourinho talking about “rats” in the dressing room. It’s all a colossal mess, and a hilarious one at that.

Many of the seemingly endless number of pundits out there keep insisting that, at some point, this team is going to right the ship and climb back up the table. I’m not sure why they’re thinking that, given the body of work put forth. If you take the names of the front and the back of the shirts and look at it objectively, you see a really bad team, and you see some players who’ve been among the worst in the EPL this season. It seems hard to believe that a team which was so good for the first half of last season can go so bad, so fast. But it does happen in sports. I always use the Seattle Mariners as an example here – in 2001, they won 116 games, and they won over 90 the next two seasons, but come 2004, they were a last place club, mired with a bunch of older players who could no longer perform when they hadn’t replenished the talent pool. Last year’s New Orleans Saints are a good example – everyone thought they’d be good because they seem to always be good, and then they started losing and you thought they’d turn it around, and by the end of the year, you’re looking at it and saying, “you know, that team isn’t any good at all.” Your reputation can precede you in sports, but it’s best if you not buy into your own narratives, and age does eventually catch up to everyone, no matter how good they are. (Which is why I’d be wary of putting money on the Spurs to win the NBA title this year, but we’ll get to that later once the NBA season gets a little closer.)

With only 8 points from 8 games, the math doesn’t work in their favor in regards to landing a European place, much less winning the title. Man United landed a Champions League spot after finishing 4th last year with 70 points. If that’s your benchmark figure to shoot for, then you need 62 points from 30 games to hit that figure – which, given the nature of the game and the preponderance of draws, means a target of something like like 19 wins and five draws. Now, I happen to think that in this year’s EPL, you’ll see some lower point totals at the end of the season. It may not take 87 points to win the title, like Chelsea amassed a year ago, and it is hard to say how points will get you a coveted top four finish. A more balanced EPL might provide opportunities for Chelsea to rally they might not ordinarily have. But a more balanced EPL also means more quality teams to leapfrog, and more quality teams in contention who have something to play for, which could make a rally even harder to pull off. No team with 8 points in their first 8 games has ever finished higher than 5th in the EPL. More often than not, they finish in the lower half of the table.

Mourinho just signed a new 4-year contract in the offseason, and Chelsea would be on the hook for about £30 million if they fired him, yet the rumours are already swirling. And Mourinho’s never been in this sort of a position before, always been having blessed with clubs that, in the end, have enough talent to run themselves, yet he’s always been quick to take the credit and quicker to assign others the blame. I’m not sure he’s capable of getting them out of this mess. And if the players have quit on him, then what good is he going forward? Quite honestly, that 3:1 loss to Southampton last weekend was a game in which it looked like the players were trying to get the coach fired.

When you have more money than sense, it’s imperative that you spend less time worrying about the former and more time worrying about the latter. In the end, Chelsea this season are an amalgamation of bad habits and lazy thought processes coming back to haunt them. They should serve as a warning to every other big club in Europe, many of whom have slid by on reputation and the size of their chequebooks in recent years in lieu of having any good ideas. Being dumb and rich allows you to trump those who are smart and poor a lot of the time, but being smart and rich allows you to beat almost everyone, and keep doing it over and over again.

There, and I managed to get through this blog without talking about that awful game last night in Pasadena. Go me. I’ll deconstruct the hot mess that is USA FC later on.