v!

him and szobo are the only ones i’ve seen vertical sprint to engage and push back a settled attack. that’s straight dawg. really painful to lose but it’s been coming

@user193705 me neither. rn. but it doesn’t mean it’s completely out of scope developmentally if he’s put in the right environment imo

@zoneoccupation Agreed with the system, but as an individual I can’t give him shouts of a metronome or controller, good passer.

Wharton is nothing close to a controller. He’s also not the player everyone think he is, Kroos type controller or whatever. He’s insanely overrated.

Our rest defense issues are downstream from the stop start nature of our attacks + the lack of huge physical profiles in midfield. But this is another serious problem to think about as we head into the transfer market and into next season

preference*

the reference for MacA over Jones is tragic. regardless of what you think about why, just represents poor decision making from the club. Jones is a game state controlling, game state shifting player. MacA is a cute 8 who plays some cute passes here and there

having an energy crisis as we enter a period where power and energy become a part of the ai roi bottleneck is just not good is it

@Salib_C4 slowing the game down. pausing for a couple seconds before he chooses where to play. watch thiago for us to get an understanding of what i mean. rarely would he just receive and pass instantly. would always take a small dribble, scan, pause the opposition, and then pick

@zoneoccupation Could you explain what you mean by kill tempo? How can he do that?

one thing i think he can improve is actually his pausa. brilliant passer, and if he can kill the tempo and force the opposition block into complete stillness, he becomes someone who can stunt and manipulate blocks, not just manipulate

@STATSWINGcom where did you get pose data from?

Companion technical note, 'Do Body-Pose Features Improve Shot Outcome Prediction?' When body-pose features derived from STATSWING's kinetic chain framework are made available alongside event-context metadata, the model relies exclusively on the mechanical features for prediction. All 10 of the top 10 features by SHAP importance are mechanical - upper body twist, hip angle asymmetry, and maximum knee angle ranking highest. Proof-of-concept: statswing.com/research/mecha…

The football transfer market's predictive infrastructure operates on a single analytical layer – statistical actions – while the layer that most determines whether those actions replicate in a new environment is structural execution quality: mechanics. The field conflates what a player does, the technique they select, and the mechanical quality of their execution into a single unit of measurement. This conflation propagates through every model, composite rating, and "league exchange rate" that consumes action-level data as its input. The data infrastructure to assess mechanics already exists in football's top leagues - 29 skeletal points per player, captured at up to 100 frames per second. The analytical products to use it have not been built - though basketball has demonstrated that they can be. Our latest publication SW-R-2026-003, 'Mechanics as the Missing Variable in Transfer Prediction.' statswing.com/research/mecha…

also what PSG do and generally do really well is they arrive into jumping pockets laterally rather than vertically, meaning the arrivals can't necessarily be just man marked by a player directly behind in the next line after the jump

its been far too long

Pretty clear that Liverpool need more deep passing quality as a priority. Have probably seen max 3 impressive passes from their own half in the first 45 minutes. Had the hot & spicy chilli of Trent for years now it’s all just vanilla.

their players are just so good at buying the extra 1-2 seconds to allow those rotations to actually manifest into players arriving into space at the right times. mostly a player driven thing, not some mystical tactical layer outside of potential diagonal arrangements

massive next 15 minutes. need the crowd’s whistles to unsettle

playing maca in a long ball counter pressing game plan is hilarious. is jones unfit?

god vitinha is so goddamn annoying. constantly making the 3-1 a flat 4 to kill the front 3 jump

front 3 blocking then committing to their back 3 IP + a zonal approach behind them to not get completely pulled apart. the zones depend on whatever the data and the eye test says over the last 10 games

i am deeply unsure about an off ball man 2 man approach given how lethal psg are with their rotations and how proactive they are.

dudes just so cute