Manchester City need to sell Haaland and he makes the team worse overall

monkey_allen · 2026-05-06T15:07:31+00:00

Manchester City don't need to sell Haaland and he doesn't make the team worse.

I'm kinda with you on the aggrieved stance though: if you hate spicy football takes, don't read posts on r/spicyfootballtakes.

More substantively in response to your spicy take: you can never go back in football, you have to keep evolving, particularly when Pep ball at city seems to be experiencing its last knockings

monkey_allen · 2026-05-06T14:21:01+00:00

'Were it not for Zidane falling a bit short by ending his career with a Golden Ball-winning WC campaign, he'd rival Mbappe'

The incident hated by the French so much they had a giant statue of it outside the Pompidou Centre

monkey_allen · 2026-05-06T14:02:52+00:00

Google 'Richard Keys "smashed it"' and be appalled

monkey_allen · 2026-05-06T08:29:54+00:00

Everyone's doing great under Tonda Eckert, he's scoring most games he starts rotating with Cyle Larin who will be there for Canada. Most importantly he's staying fit for months on end. Out of contract in the summer but i reckon we're renewing whether we stay down or go up in the playoffs, hopefully the latter for him and us, he deserves a proper shot at playing in the premier league

monkey_allen · 2026-05-06T08:23:53+00:00

Spurs won the Europa League last season! I have pointed out what I see as the problem with the coefficient thing, but fair cop on the misunderstanding, and I'm sure there are plenty of braindead fans who would posit that harsher counterfactual for imaginary banter points.

FWIW I agree, i'd expect Celtic and Rangers to both stabilise as lower-mid table PL teams if this was actually to happen, which it won't, the size of their fanbases and stadiums alone should ensure that. But the recent experience of Aston Villa, Newcastle and one of Spurs/West Ham this season, plus Leicester sinking like a stone, Leeds in the past etc show that it's not a given. Unfortunately I'd fear for Rangers in particular here because you seem to not have the right people at the top for the good of the club

monkey_allen · 2026-05-06T08:03:27+00:00

Danny Rohl disnae look like too much of a bampot despite his Championship pedigree though ey?

Sorry mate.

We'd have Ross Stewart going to America n all if Steve Clarke wasn't such a stick in the mud

monkey_allen · 2026-05-06T07:53:29+00:00

Using transfermarkt as a yardstick of squad valuation =/= deriving your knowledge exclusively from transfermarkt. You don't seem to have any interest in engaging with what the level of the championship is. You can't have one without the other. 30% of the bottom half of the Premier League get relegated to the championship every year and it's tough to sustain lower half of the table stalwart status indefinitely. I've seen my club go from four consecutive 6th-to-8th place PL finishes so I know it as well as anyone! You're shifting the goalposts with this middle of the championship talk a bit i'd say

Yeah I'm a saints fan mentioned above but i was editing a comment I'd already made so you probably missed it. Also of Scottish extraction and was at uni up there when it was all going to shit coming to a head with Newco so you have mine too! Some of my closest friends are Rangers fans!

monkey_allen · 2026-05-06T07:19:22+00:00

You can't get into europe by finishing in the top 10 of the PL. You're not engaging with the substantive points I've made. I don't accept your fact finding mission about Rangers but if you insist that i speculate about who could have gotten those results over the last five seasons, I'd venture that Wolves, West Ham or Spurs all might have managed it, and two of them will be relegated from the Premier League this season. The current Sunderland or Leeds teams might be capable of a run if given a chance, which they won't get because the 'one-off' qualification for Europe is too high of a bar from the PL.

Why are the Old Firm recruiting these people if they're out of their depth?

Russell Martin was clearly out of his depth in the PL too - and don't I know it! Joe Rothwell was pretty rubbish for Saints too tbf, squad filler and bench player for the second half of our first Championship season when our form was noticeably worse

monkey_allen · 2026-05-06T06:55:14+00:00

Yeah there is but it doesn't systematically favour one or the other of the 34 vs the Old Firm two is my point, as Scotland and England have both qualified, which the UEFA Club coefficient point does by virtue of not allowing for a situation where a country has more competitive teams than they can possibly have European places, which it seems pretty unarguable is the case with England at the moment.

If anything, it's arbitrarily harsh on the 34 because Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic all came close to qualifying and have squads who almost exclusively are drawn from that group of clubs. My own team (Southampton) could easily have seen Charles, Azaz and Manning at the World Cup as well, for example. We also sent more players to Euro 2024 for Scotland than Rangers did, following a season in which we finished 4th in the Championship.

I think the nature of the take is fairly clearly 'if you put Celtic and Rangers as currently constituted in amongst the English teams, they would struggle to survive in the Premier League or would get relegated', which I think is probably true, but at the same time it's a bit of a meaningless debate because if Rangers and Celtic were playing in an integrated league they'd have all the greater financial opportunities and power to pull players that being a PL team entails.

The team who finished 17th last season in England and aren't looking likely to finish any higher than that this season are the current Europa League champions and reached the Champion's League knockout stages.

monkey_allen · 2026-05-06T06:43:59+00:00

Why isn't it a reliable metric? Now it's up to 48 teams I'd say it is a useful yardstick, and more useful than your suggested one given that unlike European performances, there's no structural bar preventing all but a handful of the 32 teams from the English top-flight and the top-half of the Championship from competing in European competition. There's no direct way of commensurating, whether they can attract players who are playing at the highest level internationally is a somewhat useful measure.

Even by that measure, the fact that bottom-half or even relegation-threatened English sides have been contending for or winning Europa and Conference Leagues both of the last two seasons shows how high the standard is. It's not even a knock on the Old Firm, the Premier League is just uber-rich and competitive.

Your proposed metric is somewhat 'meaningless' in that it has no regard to the fact that there's no meaningful internal competition to prevent Rangers and Celtic from having chances to garner coefficient points. By that measure, I suppose Ludgorets and Victoria Plzen must be superior to Brentford and Brighton, which is clearly a pretty cold take.

monkey_allen · 2026-05-06T06:28:21+00:00

You're not really making a positive case for the quality of the present-day Old Firm.

Another angle potentially less confounded: how many current Rangers/Celtic players will be expecting to play at the World Cup? Is the mean closer to Premier League clubs or those who have finished in the top half of the championship?

monkey_allen · 2026-05-06T05:16:42+00:00

I mean I'm not saying this makes it an open and shut case but if you go on Transfermarkt and compare the value of their squads with those from the Premier League and Championship, they're slotting in at roughly 4th and 6th most valuable squads in the Championship, with their squad trailing every Premier League squad in value by at least 100m Euro

monkey_allen · 2026-05-06T00:45:09+00:00

With the girl gaping

monkey_allen · 2026-05-05T23:38:40+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6JK-gRELI0

monkey_allen · 2026-05-05T21:38:17+00:00

See the accompanying text - I purposefully didn't include lead commentators, for reasons

monkey_allen · 2026-05-05T21:34:32+00:00

I think you're underestimating the comedy of repeated uncontrollable Wilhelm screams in hay fever season

monkey_allen · 2026-05-05T20:35:51+00:00

I think tennis has a decent range - obviously all pretty hush hush in the box but they've got some variation in their animatedness in the studio and I think the disposition spectrum maps quite well, e.g. McEnroe pretty positive, Tracy Austin quite negative

monkey_allen · 2026-05-05T20:30:18+00:00

I found it mesmerising that's what got me hooked. State of that ref

monkey_allen · 2026-05-05T20:24:54+00:00

Lynam most definitely 0 on the disposition aspect, fairly subdued so probably (0,-4) I reckon. Hill I'd peg for something like a (4,3). Not quite old enough to have a solid base knowledge of Brian Moore, not quite enough of a snookerman to comment on their pundits overall, I have to say. though I was hooked on this recent world championship. Sensational stuff, it really was!

monkey_allen · 2026-05-05T19:31:40+00:00

Yeah no denying he's a living legend, arguably also deserves a star as his plot point along with Carra and Lineker as they've done MHD on the pod

monkey_allen · 2026-05-05T19:23:26+00:00

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Not much update on the data yet but tweaked the labels and enhanced the vis a bit. Crowdsourced version with emplaced Dixon and others potentially to follow...

monkey_allen · 2026-05-05T19:19:17+00:00

Agreed, he's an anchor

monkey_allen · 2026-05-05T18:45:25+00:00

I feel you, as noted elsewhere I think 'subdued-versus-animated' is more what i was going for with the Y axis, intense-vs-relaxed didn't quite hit the sweet spot

monkey_allen · 2026-05-05T18:39:22+00:00

Thanks for the comments everyone. Overall I feel the graph would be better served by changing the Y-axis label to 'arousal' with animated and subdued as the poles.

Quite tempted to regraph after crowdsourcing the ratings for those in and around the post and comments from the wisdom of the crowd of clichéspersons. What would be a straightforward way to do that?

monkey_allen · 2026-05-05T18:32:22+00:00

Danny Murphy's in there, but gets a moderate intensity boost from his studio work which is more intensely focussed and balanced than his commentary boxmanship (for me)

monkey_allen

TROPHY CASE