1
Check out your mind and don't be blind
Innovation in the use of analytics in sport - as The Bill James Baseball Abstracts taught us many decades ago - can come from the most unexpected places. A case in point, Rory Smith explains, is at Midtjylland - a Danish club now working to find new margins as the edges they previously found have been emulated around the world.
This young, ambitious club from Herning — a quiet city in the middle of Jutland, “a long way from Copenhagen,” according to Rasmus Ankersen, the team’s chairman — now sits not only at the pinnacle of Danish soccer, a three-time national champion and a regular in continental competitions, but at the very cutting edge of the sport.
Midtjylland’s search for competitive advantage has made it a place where ideas emerge. It was the first team in Denmark to make its young prospects train every day. It was one of the first teams to embrace the use of data in recruitment, training and playing style. It employed a full-time coach just for throw-ins.
2
Let's celebrate, it's all right
The turn of the calendar brings us lists, lists, and more lists. Rob Fielder puts a neat twist on the “100 best players of . . .” theme by dialing it back to 1980, and imagine what that list would have looked like back then - including some lovely byte-sized profiles from Allan Simonsen to Viv Anderson.
3
Standing in my front porch light
A likely trend in stadium design post-pandemic is going to be less enclosure, and more air. Perhaps by serendipity, St Louis CITY (yes, it’s supposed to be uppercase) FC’s new stadium looks to be in that vein, with a breezy open air “front porch” wrapping the venue.
4
Ain't no mercy
I will admit to not having given much thought to Niklas Bendtner in recent years. Only 32, his most recent outings have apparently been for an “old boys” outfit fielded by Danish side Tårnby FF. A career that started with such promise but continually drifted off the rails is captured neatly in EiF Magazine’s feature on Bendtner’s autobiography, filled with nuggets like this from his ill-fated loan to Birmingham City, then managed by Steve Bruce:
There is an anecdote in his autobiography which serves as a microcosm of his time in Birmingham. Early in the season, he was called up to the manager’s office. Bruce, who was red with rage, slammed the door shut and bellowed: “I’ve heard you were out on the town on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday! What the hell are you playing at?!” Bendtner took a deep breath before replying: “I’m afraid that’s not quite right coach. I was also out on Wednesday.”
Bruce could not believe what he had just heard. He began to sputter, put his head on his desk and roared with laughter. Bendtner got off with a warning and Bruce’s trust in him remained intact. Reflecting on his time at Birmingham, Bendtner says that while he got plenty of valuable experience on the pitch, he was on a completely different path off the field compared to the culture at Arsenal. “Some guidance from somebody I knew and respected could probably have made a difference”, he says. “Especially in my case because I was so curious-minded and also very easily tempted. I think it’s fair to say that Birmingham was full of temptations in 2006.”
5
Under neon loneliness
Stadiums are brought to life by fans. Without them, even those lucky enough to still be present for major sporting events feel their absence acutely. Tom Jenkins, a photographer whose job in a normal year is to document the energy, excitement and thrills of world class sporting action, captures that emptiness from 2020 with a brilliant photo essay on “life in football’s cocoon.”
Just before a match starts, I have often found myself walking the empty concourses behind the stands. Before, these places would be vibrant and buzzing with anticipation; places where friends would meet up, drink and laugh, around them walls painted in club colours. Now they are like haunted houses.
Evidence of what used to be keeps popping up – the bookies odds for first goalscorer still scrawled up on whiteboards, adverts promoting events in March. I can’t stop staring at the ones imploring people to go to the now notorious Cheltenham Festival in 2020.
6
Live is life
There has been a lot written about Diego Armando Maradona in recent weeks. One of the most striking pieces I’ve read came, perhaps surprisingly, in The Baffler by the poet Ezequiel Zaidenwerg. Musing on the multifaceted, mazy existence Maradona led, Zaidenwerg leads us through the complex layers of his life: which seemed to mean whatever you wanted it to.
My Maradona isn’t the one who captured the 1986 World Cup or had his legs cut off in 1994. Not the glory or the climax, neither heaven nor hell. My Maradona is two exhilarating lines (penned on paper, not cut with a card) from César Vallejo: “match and match in the darkness / tear and tear in the dust.” My Maradona is the one who was always uncomfortable in his own skin but loved being there anyway: the mournful gaze that is the life of the party. The one who made a fool of himself, joyfully. My Maradona is the one who knew the violence and the fragility of having to be a man.
7
A sense of enormous wellbeing
Have you ever enunciated in your head a word overly familiar to you - perhaps your hometown, or your high school’s name - and felt, the more you repeat it, how odd the syllables actually sound when you separate them out? How is it that syllables, words, sentences all flow so easily - when they seem so disjointed once you’ve broken them apart in your head?
That brings me to “How a Flock of Pigeons Explains Manchester City's Win Over Chelsea,” an intriguing musing by Ryan O’Hanlon that ties a paper on “Hierarchical group dynamics in pigeon flocks” to the apparent “magic” we see when a team moves with a grace and symmetry that the analytical tools currently at our disposal struggle to explain.
You’ve seen a flock of birds before, and perhaps you’ve taken it for granted, but take a second to consider what a marvel their movements are. The birds travel in near perfect unison, diving and cutting and ascending as if they were all connected by some invisible, imperceptible string, a single brain, or a hidden remote control. What the authors of this new paper wanted to understand was how the birds achieved such an impressive physical harmony.
Photo by Pille Kirsi from Pexels
After reading the paper, Marcelino, a lecturer at the University Institute of Maia in Portugal, wondered if a similar line of inquiry -- how do individuals influence and how are individuals influenced by their systems -- could be applied to the world’s most popular sport. “Players do not play alone,” he said. “They move together, and as such, it makes perfect sense to try to understand which rules govern these movements.”
Thanks to Marcelino’s latest work, we’re closer to understanding those movements than we’ve ever been before.
8
It's a start, a work of art
As Sports Illustrated highlights, one of the richest programs in the United States using soccer as a tool to improve the quality of life for underserved communities comes from Soccer Without Borders - some excellent recognition for a very worthy program.
The foundation was started in 2006 by former Lehigh University men's soccer player Ben Gucciardi and fellow soccer player, longtime coach, and former All-American at Dartmouth College, Mary McVeigh Connor.
"He and I were both in graduate school at Lehigh at the time and (SWB) sort of came about from being lifelong soccer players who saw that the game was so much more valuable than just the wins and losses on the field,” McVeigh Connor, who is also the executive director of Soccer Without Borders, tells En Fuego.
“And if you design it with intention, it can really be a living classroom that allows people to reach their full potential, explore who they are and what change they want to make in the world.”
9
Stand still laddy
Those of us with small children at home all the time these days know (almost) any new distraction is a good distraction. When Saturday Comes magazine has produced a lovely series of kids’ activities and reading guides on the world of soccer available for free download, from the dog that found the 1966 World Cup to the inventor of football stickers. Welcome stuff.
10
Express yourself
Has anyone written the definitive history of football and music yet? I don’t mean just all the good and awful literal crossovers of football to music, but of the relationships between the two cultures around the world. From style to fashion and politics; how and when music and football have intersected is a fascinating subject. This was touched on thoughtfully recently on the Brazilian Shirt Name Podcast, featuring The Farm’s Peter Hooton. The discussion weaves from football’s surprising absence across The Beatles oeuvre to its omnipresence in the life of Bob Marley.
Bonus: read this superb essay by Edd Norval on Bob Marley’s love of the beautiful game.
11
We've changed so much since then
A decade feels like a lifetime in American soccer; 2011, after all, was the inaugural season of the second incarnation of the North American Soccer League (miss you!). Remarkably, Soccer America is currently celebrating five decades covering the game - it was known as Soccer West when the magazine began publishing back in 1971. The clippings from those early issues are a trip, from a young Sigi Schmid to West Ham (featuring Bobby Moore) playing in San Francisco to farsighted coverage of the Bay Area Women’s League.