I am a bit behind on my podcast listening as I am just getting back from a much needed family vacation. One of the podcasts that came out while I was gone was really interesting and I wanted to comment on was this one from the Arsenal Vision Podcast.
Episode 593 - No More Excuses? — ArsenalVision Podcast
There was some great discussion about Todd Boehly's early moments at Chelsea and some the hubris that he seems to have come into that team with. I agree with Elliot that the idea of 'trades' in soccer is crazy because there isn't a mechanism where the player changes but the contract doesn't like there is an American sports.
The way I understand transfers working is that the fees teams pay are the way to buy the player out of their remaining contract with their current team. The buying team then agrees to a new deal with the player. That is one of the reasons that player swaps are so weird and rare, because it depends not just on teams agreeing that the players that are moving have roughly the same values but the players are willing to or want to move to the other teams.
In American sports the players don't have a say most of the time in what happens to them after they sign their contracts (some players do get no-trade clauses put into their contracts giving them the leverage to veto trades that they don't agree to but that is really for the players with the most leverage).
The meat of the discussion and the one that I wanted to spend more time on was about this idea of 'no more excuses'.
One of the biggest things that I like to bang on is that I set expectations at the start of the season, I have picked what I think are important metrics that are a key towards future performance and set a level for where I want the team to meet based on historical performance. I have begun to set my expectations for next year
Early KPIs for Arsenal in 2022/23
If Arsenal are at the levels that I want but miss out on things in the table finishing outside the top 4 but the performance levels are at the levels I think I would be understanding. I was in full agreement with Elliot here that there are a lot of things that are outside of your control with other teams' performances making certain points totals hard to pin down.
I fully agree that there are not really excuses for this team to have worse performances next season, I think it would have hard to say that there are excuses for the team not improving on the performances from last season without there being serious retrospection about the management team. These are not directly tied however to the place on the table, I will have these questions if the team is in 2nd but it comes with smoke and mirrors and other teams failing rather than Arsenal excelling (aka the 2015/16 season).
Lots to look forward to and I am more full of optimism than I have been in a while.