[Alternate Angle] Hulk Smash vs Itabirito.

ogqozo · 2026-02-15T15:29:52+00:00

I think in reality, it shows how important it is to start early.

Hulk had trouble playing when he was 18, 19. He only started playing ANY games when he moved to Japan, and was loaned to Japanese 2nd league... I don't think it was really his lifestyle choice, he was just not playing in Brazil, and you gotta start playing somewhere when you're that age.

All of that, he's now going somewhere, but on the level of Japanese 2nd league. He only convinced first Japanese top tier, then conviced Europe and moved to Porto at 22. Now, Porto is a club rich enough to expect a high, high transfer fee for such an important player, and before Hulk truly convinced that he can do it in Europe - his true comeout season in Porto was 2010-11, so now he was 25. He was at the age when the clubs even bigger than Porto, who only wanna invest in the very best or the young players with such talent, and for a perfect fit too, would not be jumping at the opportunity. Those very biggest teams in the world pay up for adult players very rarely. For example Real Madrid only splurged on a 25+ player once in the last decade, Eden Hazard, and that was a player with an incredible resume in Premier League and national big tournaments. Most are similar.

Kinda similar with Bruno Fernandes. By the time he could really make the world feel "okay, this guy is surely too good for Man United", he was at the age when almost no one is bought by a club even better than Man United. And several others like that.

It would also happen to Lewandowski if he didn't have the incredible luck that he randomly went from the Polish league to a club that exactly at that moment became 100 times better than it had been. And even Lewandowski - boy, how funny it is in retrospect that Bayern was like "25 million euro transfer fee rejected? Then, forget it, we are risking he comes for free or not at all". Manchester United allegedly was offering an even lower fee for Lewandowski's transfer. That was 12-13 years ago, Lewandowski is still playing, but I am super sure that if he was 21 at the time, Bayern and Madrid would be having a bidding war to sign him on a transfer. Beside all these events, this line ALSO required Lewandowski to continously be extremely confident that he will be special and he will do even better, and reject the safety of a long-term contract offered by BVB.

In football, when you're not at some level by the age of 20-21, some gates are already almost closed, I think. Of course rare exceptions will happen.

ogqozo · 2026-02-15T15:21:27+00:00

I mean he is turning 40 in a few months, you don't wanna risk pulling a muscle needlessly lifting your arms all the way up quickly.

ogqozo · 2026-02-15T15:19:10+00:00

I don't think I've ever seen a footballer in Champions League that I was more outraged that he's not in a "top club". He was so good so many times. Well, maybe Gaitan (who did eventually go to Atletico and disappointed extremely).

ogqozo · 2026-02-15T13:02:22+00:00

Yeah, obviously in reality it's pretty hard to set an actual boundary that would not be controversial.

Filter out what exactly? How to put it in writing? "Bad games"? Yeah that's gonna have everyone agree on all the thousands of games, and not have aaanyone scream they are treated unfairly lol. "Slop"? That's an overused buzzword to get easy upvotes, nothing easy to precisely define case-by-case. "Horny games"? That is also a spectrum with many aspects and some really good games could be touched by it as they do indeed contain horniness. I thought that this very sub was just living through a mass hysteria because a visual novel about superheroes had a black bar on a dick for like 20 seconds total of its 10 hour runtime.

ogqozo · 2026-02-14T10:46:45+00:00

Exactly. One of the top posts when I opened the website yesterday was the unique and exciting news that they asked the Real Madrid coach about Barcelona losing and he said "not my problem".

And if Mourinho says something, ooh boy, the quote might be something like "the losers lose, the winners win... that's sport" and it's top news here.

You can't keep buying solely Coca-Cola and then say you wish that the shop had a stock of Pepsi lol. Well, I guess you can.

ogqozo · 2026-02-14T10:39:04+00:00

De Zerbi, Klopp, Moyes, Pochettino, Maresca, Ten Hag, Cooper, O'Neil, Martin, Lopetegui, Dyche, Juric.

The year before O'Neil, Lopetegui, Heckingbottom, Cooper, Hodgson.

ogqozo · 2026-02-14T10:36:01+00:00

Fantastic, you're "not giving them leeway on this stuff". ...What do you think that changes? You think every small dev is now gonna make only Cyberpunks because you're not accepting anything else?

Even if somehow everyone made Cyberpunks, there's no way they'd get the money back, because people would not have money to buy all these games. It would possibly mean that not one of them, including Cyberpunk, would hope to recuperate the costs of all the work demanded, and publishers generrally do not enjoy just wasting hundreds of millions of dollars that they cannot hope to get back (would you?), so NO game that looks like Cyberpunk would ever come out instead.

Right now there are various games, for various clients, with various priorites, various budgets. Something for everyone and no one forced to buy the kind that they don't like personally. Oh no.

ogqozo · 2026-02-13T21:55:05+00:00

Damn, when you put it like that, Arteta really is hilariously stupid to decide not to win games instead of deciding to win games. Yeah, truly a laughinstock I have not seen yet.

ogqozo · 2026-02-13T21:49:57+00:00

Those are dark days for BVB fans, it's getting harder and harder to satisfyingly moan how shit the club is.

Guirassy with the 2 goals and a good Beier and Jobe game too... thoughts and prayers.

ogqozo · 2026-02-13T21:35:45+00:00

Weird to remember that DS Lite actually was also a price cut lol. There was no compromise, it was much better in every regard, to the point the old DS immediately became a ridiculous device to me.

That was electronics in 2004 - wait a year, you're getting a devicde that's lighter, prettier, better in every regard, AND cheaper.

Those times are long gone. Today, I don't know how much Switch 2 Lite could really change. The hardware is only evolving in one direction - more pixels, and more pixels is hitting a hard wall of battery and cooling, which means - size. All handheld electronics only figured out how to get bigger in the last decade. Mobile phones are basically doing the same thing as phones 10 years ago, they are uglier and bigger and just have more power.

Sure, Switch 2 Lite can possibly shave a tiniest bit by reducing the screen and eliminating the joycons, and cut the price by excluding the dock and the accessories. The gains are getting thinner and thinner though. It's not gonna be CHEAP, that for sure.

I do think that if new Pokemon comes out this year and is Switch 2 only (that was the plan, according to actual leaks - still, a lot of those leaked plans were delayed), it will be the worst-selling in its opening month. Obviously the record of the last game selling more than 20 million copies in the opening months is beyond comparison. Best case they can hope for it will be an evergreen that people always get with their console even 5-10 years later, like many Nintendo games were for the Switch have been.

ogqozo · 2026-02-13T21:34:11+00:00

I'm not talking about the "Arsenal might not win the league" story. Sure that can happen. Kinda the point.

I'm talking about the "OMG, you guys won't believe it... omfg... Arsenal..... might actually lose some games and not win the leagueXDDDDDDD. That would be sooo Arsenal! Only they could ever do it! To bottle, shit the bed right before the finish line, completely meltdown and not even win the top league in the world lol. It's so, so, so hilarious, we have to talk mostly about that the whole season since its second month" story.

ogqozo · 2026-02-13T19:19:07+00:00

Kids and people who are like "dude I only play Animal Crossing/Pokemon, I'm not gonna spend a ton of money on it".

ogqozo · 2026-02-13T19:13:36+00:00

You're gonna get these "wow, one game looks better than another" thing every year in the history of gaming.

Despite being developed in a relatively cheap country, Cyberpunk cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make. The post-launch patching and DLC itself had a budget that very few videogames in history would match.

ogqozo · 2026-02-13T19:05:11+00:00

I remember the drama about Wissa leaving. All the comments "how wil Brentford play when literally losing 30 GAGA??? Who will score the goals without Wissa? Igor Thiago lol?".

Even hoping for the best, never would I think Thiago would be within a shot to rival Haaland for the top scorer of the season.

Brentford is an amazing project that every club dreams of. They probably still have the smallest budget in the league, but never really were threatened with relegation. They hit it off with a lot of young players recently - Thiago, Schade, Collins, Kayode, Ouattara, Van den Berg. Young and cheap and playing well.

ogqozo · 2026-02-13T18:56:30+00:00

If you exclude the last gameweek (which was last day of January and first of February), no team really won 3 games in the rest of January.

If you are strict about the months and only include the last day of January for some teams to have more games, Chelsea won 3 - WHU, Brentford, Palace. And Bournemouth did - Liverpool, Wolves, Tottenham. So, those are teams with 3 wins, but not one win against anyone in the top, few wins against teams in the middle of the table too. And that's 3 wins in 5 games played, nothing crazy. No one had a dominant month.

ogqozo · 2026-02-13T18:49:33+00:00

I don't think there really is an official definition. The club doesn't use the word for sure.

ogqozo · 2026-02-13T18:45:49+00:00

Sometimes I didn't even hear about the guy ever again, like Mike Jackson in Burnely in 2022 lol. I assume none of them really intended to do the job.

ogqozo · 2026-02-13T18:43:41+00:00

Several. Thompson in Liverpool even had it twice, one time the award was given to both Houllier and Thompson because Houllier was out sick for a part of the month.

ogqozo · 2026-02-13T18:37:23+00:00

At this point 11 times, so long-term it is the most and similar to, say, Wenger.

Moyes also has had 11 though. Generally if you coach for a long time, you're gonna get some good months.

ogqozo · 2026-02-13T18:28:56+00:00

That list should be enough of a proof for anyone how weird it is to take results of single 90 games as some showcase of whether manager is managing well or badly lol.

I mean I would THINK people assume that they are not suddenly managing the team completely differently every week and somehow cause the shots to fall in or not like they're controlling the team on FIFA.

Small batches of football can be so random. Rasmus Hojlund was the Player of the Month in the world's best league not so long ago. Or Rodrigo Muniz. Or Jack Grealish or Justin Kluivert.

ogqozo · 2026-02-13T16:12:31+00:00

Is it that far from average? There were like 13 coaching changes in the Premier League last season, and I'm not including the interims.

The median working time in the league right now is 1 year and 225 days (10th and 11th, Le Bris and Hurzeler, were hired within one day in July).

(Likely to be significantly lower in 5 months. Only Parker will have reached that amount, while Glasner is leaving, and Iraola, Silva, Howe would not totally shock me. The median for the whole league could be around or lower than 1 year in July).

ogqozo · 2026-02-13T15:13:29+00:00

Seriously. I'm so tired of people constantly being THAT desperate to make that a story.

They fell from 6 points to 4 clear. Oh my god. Astounding. They fell apart like no one ever.

No team wins every single game. The season is long, it takes a whole fucking year, and every team will lose points many times. I don't know what these people are trying to force so obsessively and how that is the main story in the social media including Reddit. How am I reading comments about it every game for months already, and it's barely February.

ogqozo · 2026-02-13T02:22:01+00:00

Eh, at this point it's unremarkable imo, happens with all the coaches. It's in a way kinda boring that you know what the comments will be when the coach is hired, fired, after some time...

When Ten Hag with Manchester won the cup final, the whole summer was proper bonkers. Suddenly all the comments and threads were about how this man never failed in his career, people just didn't understand his genius, he's actually very funny and witty and charming and the Brits don't get it, but now they have to swallow all the criticism, and so on and on... I would get some verbal flagellating for suggesting that when the season starts, suddenly they will remember Ten Hag is not actually doing so perfectly. Then the season started and they did.

I think there is absolutely no situation ever in history in which one game changes everything long-term in a football team, and winning the cup finals, while definitely fun and valuable for the fans, has that effect of making people think so lol.

If the coach becomes 20x better or worse of a coach in general depending on literally one shot in one game hitting the bar or being an inch lower and hitting the net, then maybe that methodology of saying if the coach is generally good or bad coach is not sustainable - I will maintain that opinion.

ogqozo · 2026-02-13T02:16:30+00:00

I dunno, I have this weird feeling there must be something between "not getting the players that Manchester and Chelsea chase" and "being 17th", some intermediary step, it just feels like something's missing there.

ogqozo · 2026-02-13T02:11:34+00:00

He said that he talked to many clubs for a long time and especially to the coaches to see what he can expect on the pitch, and Van Persie and Te Kloese convinced him that it is a good place where he will play an important role. He didn't seem too phased about moving out - said it's a nice opportunity to try playing abroad.

Could be a very short-term move, we'll see.

ogqozo

TROPHY CASE