J.A.F.O. 🚁

Gerard Houllier and Phil Thompson with Liverpool’s new signings of summer 1999. Who can name them all?

Mo Salah was right. Standards are down in the gutter.

One thing I really do not like about modern football is the convenient half way house it has created. Clubs now have directors of football, sporting directors, recruitment departments and data teams, all supposedly sharing control and shaping the long term vision. The manager is reduced to a head coach, told to focus on the training pitch and matchday only. But when things go wrong, it suddenly becomes old school football again. The head coach is the only one dragged out in front of the cameras week after week, answering for poor form, poor recruitment decisions he may not have made, and a wider strategy he might not even control. You cannot strip a role of power and still load it with all the blame. If responsibility is shared behind the scenes, accountability should be shared in public too. Otherwise the modern structure is just window dressing, and the head coach is nothing more than a convenient fall guy.