This is going to be a very random article that will be very different to the well-structured articles that I have posted recently. I came across the 38-0-0 game as I was bored at night and saw someone mentioned it on Reddit, so I wanted to give it a try. A few hours later and now I am kinda addicted to building a Bundesliga team to win all 34 matches using my own knowledge about the league.

To keep it short for anyone who does not know what 38-0-0 is: it is basically a fantasy draft where you pick 11 players to build your best formation. The catch is for each pick, you will be assigned with a random team from a random season in a specific league. There are versions for the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, World Cup, and the Champions League as well. But I am choosing to stick with the Bundesliga because it is the league that I have followed the closest in the past few years.

Along the way, I have stopped a few times to reminisce about past Bundesliga teams and players while having some thoughts about squad building in general, since it is somewhat relevant to the game. Consider this article a mixbag of random thoughts, but I like to write this cause it is my blog :)

2018-19 Mainz’s keepers lineup

Apparently Mainz 05 have all five of these keepers in their squad for the 2018-19 season, which is a crazy thought to think about given how successful they all currently are/were throughout their career. What makes it better is that, besides from René Adler, who was obviously way past his best in 2019, the remaining four keepers all graduated into the first team from Mainz’s own academy, which is a testament to their academy work.

As for where they currently are after the 2025-26 season:

• Finn Dahmen is currently Augsburg’s first choice keeper, and after a terrific season, he is now a German international and has been in and out of Germany’s squad lately.

• Florian Müller managed to establish himself as Mainz’s first choice very early on, then got a move to Stuttgart and Freiburg later in his career. Where Müller fell short was he just never proved to be a consistent keeper, having conceded more goals than his peers and made errors here and there. At least he is now happy as Freiburg’s backup keeper alongside Jannik Huth, who was also from Mainz’s academy at the same time when Müller broke into the first team.

• Huth enjoyed a fairly successful period with Paderborn in the 2. Bundesliga, and got a move back to the top flight with Freiburg two seasons before Paderborn’s promotion last season.

• Finally, Robin Zentner has been around with Mainz the longest and has been their first choice keeper for a number of years, even with the inconsistency and tendency to make errors in goal.

It is somewhat crazy for me to think that Mainz went from having this keeper lineup that was full of academy graduates in the squad and unable to fit everyone in the team, to having a 34-year-old Daniel Batz, whom they picked up from third division side 1. FC Saarbrücken, in goal for most of last season. I have nothing against Batz and I do think that he is a decent keeper, but it is more of a reflection on Mainz’s academy recently, especially for an academy who also produced Loris Karius previously.

Yes, it is easy to make fun of Karius for the fact that he made two crucial errors for Liverpool and that will be the thing that most people will remember about him. But Karius has done very well to regain his confidence back and played a crucial part in Schalke 04’s promotion back to the Bundesliga last season. It is unsure whether he will be their number 1 next season or not, though, since Schalke have signed Kevin Müller, who was Heidenheim’s starting keeper for the longest of time and even up to before last season when he lost his starting spot to Diant Ramaj.

Going back to Mainz, however, it seems that Urs Fischer will be backing Zentner in goal for another season after Batz left for Gladbach. Mainz also currently do not have a good backup keeper heading into next season, which I assume they are currently searching for one during this transfer window. It will be interesting to see whether the club will find a long term first choice keeper and see Zentner as a backup, or find a decent backup for Zentner like they did with Batz instead.

2021-22 Hertha’s disastrous strikers lineup

Hertha Berlin have always been a basket case of a team in the Bundesliga. They play at the Olympiastadion, which is Germany’s national stadium, yet their performance just never lived up to the level that many people expected them to be at. This strikers lineup from their 2020-21 season is probably a good reflection of their most recent seasons in the Bundesliga and why they deserved to be relegated.

Ruwen Werthmüller just got caught in the crossfire here so I will spare him from my judgement, but everyone else in that lineup was so bad during that season. Altogether, they scored a whopping…*checks stats*…17 goals in the Bundesliga, with Stefan Jovetić led the goalscoring chart for 6 goals and was followed by Ishak Belfodil with 5 goals. To put things into perspective, Anthony Modeste alone scored a total of 20 goals for Köln that same season and Taiwo Awoniyi was only two goals short of 17 goals for Union Berlin. When even players who were not traditional strikers like Grischa Prömel (8 goals for Union Berlin) and Masaya Okugawa (8 goals for Arminia Bielefeld) scored more goals than all of Hertha’s strikers, you know how bad their recruitment was.

This was also coming off the back of huge investments being made into the club and Fredi Bobič was signed to be their managing director after a very successful period with Eintracht Frankfurt. Yet they only finished that season in 16th, was saved from relegation by winning the playoff matches, then immediately went down as the worst team in the top flight the season after.

The circumstances for when that group of strikers came together was also a reflection of Hertha’s terrible recruitment at the time:

• Myziane Maolida was probably signed as a promising youngster from Nice, but he never really stood out for the French side despite playing fairly regularly for Nice. There was nothing that would suggest at the time that Maolida would find his breakthrough at Hertha.

• Davie Selke was signed from Leipzig a long time before and he did start off his time at Hertha fairly well, but he did not hit the level that Hertha expected him to be. He was sent out on loan to Bremen for two seasons with little to no improvement before coming back and remained at the same level for the 2021-22 season with Hertha. At least he finally found a bit of success with Hamburg by leading them back to the Bundesliga before securing a move to Türkiye with İstanbul Başakşehir.

• Ishak Belfodil was somewhat similar to Selke, he enjoyed a fairly successful first season with Hoffenheim then his form immediately dropped off during the two seasons afterwards before Hertha picked him up. I do not know what Hertha saw in Belfodil for them to sign him as one of their strikers, only to be sold after a single season to Al-Gharafa.

• Krzysztof Piątek enjoyed a bit of hype early on when he grabbed the attention with his 19 goals in 21 matches for Genoa then managed to carry that form over to Milan when they brought him. But his second season with Milan was a disaster and he arrived at Hertha with little to no confidence, which did not help him when the pressure was placed on him to lead the line for Hertha. His last season in Germany’s capital city saw him scored 1 goal in 10 matches before heading to Fiorentina on loan. At least he has also found some success with Başakşehir before heading to the Middle East with Al-Duhail, which might have prompted the club to sign Selke as his replacement.

• Finally, Stefan Jovetić was already way past his best when he came to Hertha from Monaco for the 2021-22 season. The little bit of quality was still there as he managed to score 11 goals in total for Hertha throughout the two seasons when he was with the club. But it was definitely not enough and not at the level that Hertha had hoped he would be.

Maybe Bobič had hoped to replicate the success that he had with Frankfurt, where they bought strikers with low confidence and tried to give them a second chance. That plan definitely backfired heavily as many of these strikers would have taken up a decent chunk of Hertha’s wage budget while underdelivered heavily.

It is hard to pinpoint why that strategy failed for Bobič at Hertha because each striker had a different reason for why they failed. Jovetić was clearly way past his best and he was probably signed to provide more experience in the team. Belfodil was a cheap deal from Hoffenheim and it was supposed to be a low risk move. Maolida was a bit more expensive but they had high hopes in him because he was a young player, yet they still somehow made a lost when they eventually sold him. Selke arrived way before the 2021-22 season, but I assume instability and inconsistency with the playing style and managers must have hurt his ability to adapt. Piątek was supposed to be the big move for Hertha and one that they had high hopes on, but a playing style that did not suit him might have done the damage as well.

One good thing about Hertha since they went down to the 2. Bundesliga is that they have given more opportunities to their academy graduates, and that have somewhat yielded results. Kennet Eichhorn, Ibrahim Maza (Leverkusen), and Tjark Ernst (Feyenoord) are only three of Hertha’s academy graduates who have received regular playing time in the first team, then secured a move elsewhere for decent money. Their current squad also consists of many academy graduates like Márton Dárdai, Linus Gechter, Julian Eitschberger, Pascal Klemens, and Marten Winkler, some of whom also have the potential to play at a bigger club. It is definitely a good change in approach instead of constantly throwing money out of the window, they just need to find a better balance between buying players who can improve the quality of the squad and giving their academy players the opportunity. At that point, they can aim for a return to the top flight while being sustainable and can stay clear of relegation for a long time.

Guus Til’s forgettable single season with Freiburg

I was somewhat surprised to see the name Guus Til popped up when I was asked to draft a player from Freiburg’s 2020-21 squad, which then prompted me to research on why Til failed to make an impression at Freiburg. My curiosity was fueled even more knowing how good of a player he is now after returning to the Netherlands with Feyenoord and PSV. It would have been great to see Til teamed up with Vincenzo Grifo and Ermedin Demirović to form an amazing attacking trio for Freiburg and went on to make a huge impression in the Bundesliga.

After two average seasons in Russia with Spartak Moscow, Til made his way to the Bundesliga with a loan move to Freiburg, with a potential second year extension. It was meant to be a restart for a once promising young midfielder who was part of a very exciting AZ Alkmaar team. The two seasons in Russia seemed to have affected his confidence a bit, and with Russian teams being excluded from playing in European competitions, it was the right moment for Til to move closer to home with Germany not that far away from the Netherlands.

Freiburg also seemed like a good destination for Til as the club were finding their footing among the European challengers pack in the Bundesliga. Under legendary manager Christian Streich, the club went from strength to strength since escaping their status as a yo-yo club who bounced between the 2. Bundesliga and the Bundesliga. They constantly challenged for a European spot and were aiming to take the next step by qualifying for the Europa League. That, combined with the fact that they were about to move to their new home Europa-Park from the Dreisamstadion, signalled a very bright future for the club, a future where Til would be a key player for the team.

But one thing that sports in general have taught me is that it is still possible to fail when you are at the wrong place and in the wrong time. Freiburg was definitely not the wrong destination for Til, he seemed to have embraced the environment within the club and the city itself. But the timing of the move was very wrong, which limited him to just 7 matches in the Bundesliga for Christian Streich’s side.

An ankle injury kept him out of the team until November 2020, when he made his debut for Freiburg when he came on at the 88th minute for French midfielder Baptiste Santamaria. Even then, he was used very sparingly and was mostly on the bench afterwards as other midfield options like Santamaria, Nicolas Höfler, Jeong Woo-yeong, or Janik Haberer were favoured ahead of Til. He had to wait until March 2021 for his full debut against Augsburg, but he did not get to play the full 90 minutes either.

It is also important to remember that all of this happened during the Covid pandemic, where teams had to play without fans and with the expectation that the season could be stopped at any moment. A lot of disruptions definitely did not help Til settled in quickly after recovered from his injury, which prevented him from making any impact when he had the opportunity. But it was still possible for Freiburg to see his quality as he appeared in 4 matches for their B team in the Regionalliga and managed to score in 3 out of 4 matches. This Freiburg B team were not a bad team either as they had a lot of players who would eventually become staple players in the Bundesliga and 2. Bundesliga like Noah Atubolu, Killian Sildillia, Keven Schlotterbeck, Luca Itter, Yannik Keitel, Enzo Leopold, Noah Weißhaupt, and a young Kevin Schade.

None of this were in Til’s plan when he first moved to Freiburg, and I am sure that he was not able to control any of these external factors. There was no doubt that if it was a bit earlier or a bit later, Til would have potentially become a good player for Freiburg like he is right now for PSV. But that single season that he spent with Freiburg is a good lesson for player recruitment.

A player can love the destination where he will be moving to, be able to gel with new teammates, and suit his new team’s playing style. Yet, if the timing of the move is wrong and there are external factors that can affect the outcome of the transfer, then that transfer will fail nonetheless. This is why it is still fairly hard to judge whether a transfer is a success or a failure just by looking at a player’s on-field performance or their data alone. There are a lot of external factors that can affect a player’s adaptability to a new team, and those non-football factors are still quite hard to be quantified using data, for now.

As much as football are trying to be data-driven or even AI-driven as technology gets better over time, it is still important to remember the human aspect at the heart of the sport. A player or a coach’s performance can be influenced by their relationships with the club’s front office, their family situation, their adaptability to a new environment, things that players or coaches do not share very often during press conferences or interviews. It is impossible to remove or neglect those factors from football, because if one does, then they are setting themselves up for failure. As a result, it will open up opportunities for other clubs to capitalise on and turn that failure into a success.

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, this is a very random article that might just be a one-off. I understand that many people prefer to read well-structured, in-depth, well-researched articles about tactics and scouting and whatnot. That will continue to be my focus whenever I have a new idea that I want to work on. But, occasionally, I will have these random articles where I look back at football’s past with hindsight and see what can be learned from the successes or failures of teams and players.

I think it is always important to look back and respect the past because without the past, there will be no future. Football have had its fair share of successes and failures in the past, and there is at least a lesson to be learned from any of those. I also know that my opinions do not really matter that much, but I still want to write these for my own future references and maybe it will inspire someone to form their own opinions on how to change football.

Penalty shootouts have always been somewhat of a gamble to many football clubs and national teams. But it is a gamble that many are willing to take, especially underdogs in knockout tournaments who see that gamble as their best way to win the match.

After four penalty shootouts so far in the 2026 World Cup, that still seem to somewhat be the case. Paraguay and Australia pushed Germany and Egypt respectively to a shootout as underdogs, but only Paraguay came out victorious in the Round of 32. Meanwhile, equal-strength pairings Netherlands and Morocco, Switzerland and Colombia matched each other and had to settle the fight from the 18-yard spot, where Morocco and Switzerland came out victorious.

While, as of writing, the number of penalty shootouts have been on par with past tournaments despite the extended number of matches, there seems to be a sense that teams actively avoided going into shootouts. In most cases, teams preferred to settle the match within 90+ minutes and avoided going into extra time entirely. Besides from the four matches that went to penalty shootouts, only four other matches went into extra time as of the quarter-finals.

The data seem to support that as well. According to Opta’s data, the number of goals scored after the 85th minute was 16 goals as of after the quarter-finals, the most among all periods during the match. The number of winning goals also followed that trend with 12 goals, whereas other periods only saw one or two winning goals scored. Obviously the caveat with this visualisation is that these goals are not categorised by game state, but this still supports my hypothesis well enough.

The introduction of water breaks/hydration breaks (or pausa de hidratación in Spanish, for funsies) due to the extreme heat has introduced another variable to the equation. Coaches used these breaks to quickly brief the players on tactical changes, while the players themselves got a quick rest to re-energise. As such, these breaks were used to sway the momentum of the match towards them, which allowed for more goals to be scored, especially inside the first half.

Besides from having to play an extra 30 minutes, teams and players have been hesitant to drag the match into the penalty shootouts was because of the psychological aspect of it. With the use of data and video analysis being a staple among every coaching staff at this World Cup, it has been a lot harder to score a penalty compared to past tournaments. When everything is at stake going into a penalty shootout, teams will be a lot more incentivised to do their homework properly by preparing their players and keepers on where to shoot and where to dive respectively.

This has encouraged teams to take more risks before the penalty shootout. Firstly, through their order and player selections. A lot have been said about centre-backs stepping up to take a penalty this World Cup and the result of that decision has been slightly bad. On the contrary, however, midfielders have shown to be very reliable takers, with attacking midfielders, wide midfielders, and wingers leading the way for penalty conversion rate during penalty shootouts (80%), followed by defensive and central midfielders (70%). Once again, according to Opta’s data from Fotmob, 75% of defensive or central midfielders and 66.7% of attacking midfielders successfully converted their team’s opening penalty, while 100% of wide midfielders or wingers converted the third penalty.

More surprisingly, though, is that only one in four striker have converted their team’s fourth penalty while strikers have not been trusted very often in other penalty taking orders. Strikers are usually seen as very composed and confident in front of goal, yet coaches seemed to not believe that after four penalty shootouts. This could be the result of teams doing their homework properly on where strikers would usually shot towards, thus made coaches less confident that the striker would successfully convert the penalty.

The penalty conversion rate for all midfielders so far has only reinforced the belief that more skillful and technical players are better at taking penalties. This is despite the fact that many teams have access to data and clips of midfielders taking penalties to do their homework on.

But, this also begs the question, why aren’t full-backs being given the opportunity to take a penalty? During an era where the demands for full-backs are a lot higher and they are involved in most phases of play, the technical ability of full-backs have also risen a lot higher. That is not mentioning players who take on a hybrid role of both a full-back and a winger like Morocco’s Achraf Hakimi, Australia’s Jordan Bos, or England’s Djed Spence, all of whom have to dribble with the ball and take on opposition players on an often basis like a traditional winger.

Once again, going back to the point that teams now have deeper access to data and video of midfielders and forwards taking penalties, this might be the turning point where full-backs will be assigned as one of the penalty takers more often moving forward. This will only give coaches more penalty taking options in the squad, thus allowing for more rotations and preventing teams from doing homework properly in the future.

The potential emergence of full-backs taking penalties does not mean that more defenders will be taking penalties, as shown by the centre-backs’ conversion rate after four penalty shootouts, which is one of the main points of this article. Some centre-backs were forced into taking a penalty due to other teammates who felt nervous and were hesitant to step up, like Germany’s Jonathan Tah’s case against Paraguay. Some felt very planned by the coaching staff and might or might not have trained for the shootout scenario before the match, like Australia’s Harry Souttar and Lucas Herrington.

It is hard to know the actual truth without asking the coaches and players themselves, all we can do here is speculate based on what was said after the match and how confident the players were before stepping up to the 18-yard spot. But in both cases, it is still important to give the centre-backs the credits that they deserve for stepping up to take a penalty when others chose not to.

With a lower level of technical ability compared to teammates in other positions, it makes sense as to why centre-backs have either missed their penalty or have their penalty saved. Instead of choosing precision, centre-backs like Souttar, Herrington, Tah, Switzerland’s Manuel Akanji, and Colombia’s Davinson Sánchez opted for power and aimed for higher corners. Their instinct to clear the ball from danger did not help because they put too much power into their shot, thus allowed the ball to hit the crossbar or clear the goal completely.

Interestingly enough, the two Paraguayan centre-backs who converted their penalty, José Canale and Gustavo Gómez, along with another Paraguayan centre-back in Fabián Balbuena, all chose to place their penalty low instead. That gave all three a higher chance to score against Germany’s Manuel Neuer, and both Canale and Gómez’s penalties were crucial in Paraguay’s win over the 2014 world champion in the Round of 32. The other centre-back who also placed his penalty low, and scored, was Egypt’s Rami Rabia against Australia, who received a briefing of Mat Ryan’s early diving tendency right before the penalty shootout and might have been influenced to make such decision.

It is also interesting to see how cautious a lot of players were when stepping up to take a penalty. Many players still chose to avoid shooting straight down the middle of the goal or into higher corners despite the fact that those areas tend to have the highest conversion rate. Instead, a lot of penalties were aimed low into bottom corners, especially on the left-hand side of the goal.

That was the favourite aiming area for most attacking midfielders, wide midfielders, wingers, and strikers. But a few still decided to go rogue and aimed for the middle instead, and all four players (Egypt’s Mohamed Salah, Australia’s Awer Mabil, Switzerland’s Cedric Itten, and Colombia’s Juan Quintero ) managed to score. Defensive and central midfielders have gone close to those high corners, but their penalty were still aimed at tough areas to save in the end.

Many players chose to be cautious because of how stressful penalties could be, which have been well-documented at this point. Even with the psychological work that has been done to make players feel more confident at taking penalties, a penalty shootout still bring a lot of dread and anxiousness to a player’s mind. The long walk up to the 18-yard spot, the pressure of delivering for your club or country in an important match, then having to face the keeper who is potentially doing tricks to your mind, and potential delays that only make the moment longer. All of those factors will affect a player’s confidence no matter what, especially for players who have not taken that many penalties.

As such, it is understandable that many players chose to do something that they already know or have trained many times, which was shooting towards the opposite direction to their preferred foot. It did not matter whether a player was left-footed or right-footed, there was a high chance that the penalty would be aimed towards the opposite direction, which could easily be predicted from their run up.

Right-footed takers have added a tiny bit more variety by aiming at the bottom right corner instead, but instead very avoidant of the middle corner compared to left-footed takers. It is so interesting to me that out of the 21 penalties taken by right-footed takers during penalty shootouts at the World Cup so far, almost half were aimed at the bottom left corner. Yet, the success rate for penalties aimed towards this area was still very high, which could be because players have found a good balance between placement and power.

So, let us go back to the question that started this entire article. What do all of those data say about the future of penalty shootouts?

• Firstly, teams are definitely more aware of the psychological toll that a penalty shootout brings. Even though it is exciting to watch as a fan or a neutral, most players and teams definitely do not enjoy shootouts and will try to settle the match in 90 minutes instead. While there will be less or equal to the number from past tournaments (4 or 5 throughout the entire tournament), it will mostly be utilised by underdog teams who prioritise a defence-first playing style to give themselves a chance to go further into a tournament.

• Secondly, coaches might want to utilise full-backs as one of their penalty takers since they now possess similar technical ability to midfielders or wingers. Having full-backs on the penalty taker list give coaches another option to rotate, thus provide more noise to the penalty data and video, making it harder for the opposition to do homework on them.

• Lastly, because of the psychological toll of penalty shootouts, many players will continue to choose the safe and tested option, which is to aim the ball at the opposite bottom corner to their preferred foot. It will continue to work…until it does not, especially when keepers can dive faster or earlier without getting baited by the stuttering penalty. At that point, it might be time for players to consider aiming penalties into higher corners or straight down the middle instead.

A lot more can and will be done to help players with taking penalties, especially on the training ground and on the psychological side. With technology and sport science only getting better from here, I can definitely see the implementation of simulated penalty shootouts through VR headsets or indoor room layouts built specifically for simulating match scenarios. This will allow the players to feel more comfortable with penalty shootouts, from the long walk to after taking the penalty, by visualising different situations again and again, similar to how motorsport drivers train on simulators before they actually race at a specific racetrack.

Obviously, the argument against this is that simulated scenarios are different to real world scenarios, and you can only train so much on simulators. While that is true, the same can also be said for other match scenarios, where players can only train and prepare so much for a phase of play. But having something repetitive on a player’s mind will help them feel more comfortable in actual situations as they can draw from experience on the training ground and on simulators. Then, it is up to the player to make quick decisions on the fly and improvise when the actual scenario happens.

Until that day happens, however, we will have to get use to centre-backs taking penalties and a slightly higher rate of missed penalties thanks to the emergence of data, video, and analysts doing their due diligence.

You have read the title and the subtitle. You are thinking, I am an idiot and I am in the very minority. If that is your conclusion of me and do not want to hear my explanation, then feel free to leave. But for those who want to read what I have to say, thank you for choosing to stay. This is not a joke article, by the way.

I was never a huge fan of Tony Popović and have not been very impressed with what he has done with the Socceroos. Yes, he took them to the World Cup with a very pragmatic style of football. The ‘whatever gets the job done’ style of football is what I like to call. That style gave them the 2-0 win over Türkiye as well, which was arguably one of the best defensive performances during Popović’s tenure with the Socceroos. That might have swayed some fans over to support him, but I was not one of them.

Fast forward to Australia’s round of 32 clash with Egypt, there was no doubt that they deserved to lose just by their performance in the 120 minutes of playing time. There were questionable decisions made during that match and the group stage matches, like starting Nestory Irankunda as a lone striker in all but the match against Türkiye, or starting Matthew Leckie and Nishan Velupillay against the US. But I have seen many blamed the lost to Egypt on the substitute that saw goalkeeper Mat Ryan came on for Patrick Beach right before the penalty shootout, who had a good performance up to that sub, and I do not really agree. Here’s why I am willing to die on this hill.

Hindsight and recency bias

It is easy to reach conclusions after the match has finished because everyone know the result already. This is even more exaggerated after a penalty shootout where emotions have taken over, which means losing hurts a lot more and people tend to find and hang onto the most recent reason to cope with the loss. Those are hindsight and recency bias, and it is dangerous because you can be pointing fingers at the wrong reason for that lost. Australia’s lost to Egypt is a good example of that.

Many are pointing to the Ryan-Beach sub as the main reason for Australia’s lost. In reality, Australia have not done enough to win the match in any sense. Throughout the entire 120 minutes, according to Fotmob/Opta (and Sofascore) data, Australia made 16 shots, accumulated a total of just 0.84 xG, and only 1 of their shot was on target. They were kept alive in the match by an own goal, if not then they would have already been out. In contrast, Egypt made 14 shots, accumulated a total of 1.32 xG, and 3 of their shots were on target. Egypt were also not good either, but in a match where both teams were bad, Australia were worse and did not deserve to win. That begs the question, if Australia did not get the own goal and lost during regular time, who would be blamed for that lost instead of everyone blaming it on the Ryan-Beach sub?

To remove hindsight and recency bias from the final judgement, it is important to consider the context around what is being judged. Saying that the Ryan-Beach sub was the main reason why Australia bottled their chance against Egypt means that the entire match was not taken into account. Australia did not deserve to win the match anyway, and I do not think the outcome would have changed if Beach had stayed on.

What does the data say?

Data is another tool that can be used to make judgements and potentially remove hindsight from the judgement. Although, there is a catch with using data because you still need the context around and behind the data to understand the entire picture, instead of just looking at the number alone.

I do not doubt that Beach is a very good shot-stopper and the data across this World Cup shows that. According to Fotmob/Opta, Beach’s successful save percentage was 82.4%, only conceded 3 goals after 4 matches, and prevented 0.28 goals per 90s, all metrics where he ranked amongst the top 10% of World Cup keepers at the time of writing. I got the chance to see how good Beach was during the last couple of A-Leagues seasons where he was brilliant in goal for Melbourne City, so I was not too surprised of his shot-stopping ability at this World Cup.

But being a good shot-stopper does not directly translate to being a good penalty-stopper. Goalkeepers tend to have more time to react to a normal shot from open play, meaning they can dive earlier to reach the ball and push the ball away into less dangerous zones. They can also predict the ball’s trajectory easier, depending on how each team defend, allowing them to move towards one side of the goal quicker and earlier. Their physicality can also be an advantage, especially with Beach’s height.

Penalty is a completely different beast. The distance to goal is much shorter, meaning there is less time to react to where the ball is going. There is also no defender standing in between the keeper and the striker, and while that means there can be no deflection to make the shot harder to save, it also means the amount of time for a keeper to make decision is a lot shorter than a normal shot. And I mean very short, in the millisecond scale. This is an entire different topic that you can find some readings to read from football researchers or even coaches, but good penalty takers can place their shot well into tough angles and put power into it, which means the keeper cannot react to it quick enough to save it.

Those are just some of the technical sides of shot stopping and penalties, there is also the psychological aspect of it. Some keepers are more confident than others (see Argentina’s Emiliano Martínez as an example), so they feel more relaxed before saving a penalty. That is just normal human nature, even athletes are not immune to that. Keepers tend to build confidence based on their own experience, because a penalty is pretty much an unknown, so they can only rely on past experiences to help them make a split-second decision.

So, how does all that apply to Australia’s penalty shootout lost against Egypt, and the Ryan-Beach substitution?

I am too lazy to gather all penalty data, so I will borrow a visualisation that I spotted on BlueSky just before the penalty shootout.

Even though the sample size for Beach is quite small, the visualisation above from Max Oosterwegel showed that Beach is worse at saving penalties and had less chance to save one during a penalty shootout. His records from last season supported that too (even though I am unsure if Max’s dataset included these two shootouts). Against Auckland FC in last season’s A-League quarter-final and against Buriram United also in last season’s AFC Champions League Elite Round of 16, Beach faced a total of 11 penalties across two shootouts and saved…none. In contrast, both opposition keepers, Auckland’s Michael Woud and Buriram’s Neil Etheridge, saved one and two each to give their side the win.

The data did not support Beach but the actual match did not support Beach’s case either. Against Auckland, Beach either went the wrong way on five penalties or dove too low to save two penalties that were going to the top corner. His height could have played a bit of a disadvantage because it slowed him down and did not allow him to react quick enough. Against Buriram, he also went the wrong way on two occasions. On the one time where he went the right way, he was too slow to reach a penalty that was placed very well into the bottom right corner.

Judging on those observations alone and without taking into account Beach’s performance during the Socceroos’ shootout training before the Egypt match, it would be hard for any coach to be confident in choosing Beach for a penalty shootout that had a lot of stakes and pressure like the one against Egypt.

Meanwhile, Ryan was available on the bench, had more experience, the data supported him as the best penalty stopper among the Socceroos’ keeper unit, and had saved penalties before. Not that Ryan’s penalty stopping ability is much better because he only saved 1 out of 4 penalties faced last La Liga season for Levante, and 1 out of 3 penalties faced the season before for Lens in Ligue 1. But the argument is that he has at least successfully saved penalties in a higher pressure situation. Popović and his coaching staff probably knew that during their preparation for the shootout, which made total sense for them to plan the Ryan for Beach substitution way before the match started.

The human element of football

Another argument that supported the substitution was that Ryan was way more experienced and could have relied on his experience to make a better decision than Beach could have. It is important to remember that last season was Beach’s second full professional season where he got to play with Melbourne City after spending a few years on the bench and with the B team of Central Coast Mariners. While it is hard to doubt that Beach has the potential to be the Socceroos’ number 1 in the future, he still needs a lot more confidence and experience to make the right decision in a high pressure moment like a World Cup penalty shootout.

Many have also argued that Egypt have prepared for the substitution by studying Ryan’s penalty saving tendencies. This was absolutely true, confirmed by this image (that is not AI-generated, by the way!) posted on LinkedIn by one of Egypt’s performance analysts. The players were shown all of Ryan’s penalties faced last season, including one against Real Madrid.

But considering Egypt already had plans to study Ryan’s penalty stopping tendencies, they would have prepared for the scenario that Beach was Australia’s keeper as well. All 12 penalties that Beach faced during a shootout from last season are available to find on YouTube for literally anyone to find, and speaking from experience as an opposition analyst myself, the Egypt analysis team would have done that as well. The players would have known how to take a penalty against either Beach or Ryan either way, thus made the lost more inevitable.

Popović and his coaching staff could either have known or have not known this, depending on how thorough their preparation was. Thus, they could only prepare for what they knew at the time, which was that Ryan was the more prepared keeper to face a penalty shootout. Many could say that it was a substitution that felt out of the blue, but it was totally not because it was definitely planned out by the Socceroos’ coaching staff beforehand. They knew they wanted to drag the match into the penalty shootout, where they would have more chance to win, and prepared for such scenario by leaving out a substitution to bring Ryan on for Beach.

It is easy to look at that decision now and say that it is wrong, because, as mentioned earlier, hindsight is a funny thing. We do not know what would have happened if Beach was in goal during the penalty shootout, and we never will. Maybe if someone invent a universe travelling machine then we might know, but with the technology that we have now, that is not a possibility. Australia’s coaching staff prepared for the penalty shootout as best as they could, and they made the decisions that they thought were right, and most of them simply did not work out.

As much as I am a data-driven person and will say “let’s use data and build prediction models to make sure these decisions are right”, there is only so much that data can predict, especially with predicting the unknown, and the rest are left for human thoughts and interpretations to fill in. I have worked in football long enough to understand that the players and coaching staff are still normal humans at the end of the day with their own worries and nervousness. They handle things better than normal humans, but it does not mean that those worries and nervousness completely disappear during the match or during a high pressure situation. The best that they can do to overcome that is to prepare as best as they can and to the best of their knowledge.

In unknown situations and in the heat of the moment, sometimes, data will triumph. Other times, human intuition will triumph. That was the moment when Mat Ryan came on for Patrick Beach. At that moment, no one knew if the substitution would have worked out or not. The Socceroos coaching staff could only trust the plan that they had crafted before the match started and what they trained on. It could have gone either way, and unfortunately, it went the worst way.

Wrap up

I just want to reiterate that I am not voicing my support for Popović’s entire tenure and most of his decisions during the World Cup. I am only defending the decision to replace Patrick Beach with Mat Ryan for the penalty shootout was not wrong like most news articles and social media posts made it out to be. There are a lot of context missing when judging and saying that the substitution was the wrong one, and I hope I have brought back some of those context to fill in the bigger picture that was missed by the media and social media.

I think it is also a good lesson to remember that hindsight is very dangerous. It is easy to judge whether a decision is right or wrong in the aftermath, or use the word ‘maybe’ to make assumptions about a past decision. But it is also important to understand what was available at the time of making the decision, the knowledge, the thoughts, the emotions, etc. Sports are ruthless in that sense, there is little time to dwell on a wrong decision in the past, but what most athletes and coaches choose to do is to learn from those mistakes and bring those lessons to the next tournament or event. That is what Beach, Ryan, Popović and his coaching staff, and the entire Socceroos squad are choosing to do, I am sure about that, so that they can look forward to next year’s Asian Cup and achieve a better result.

It has been more than a year since I first started this little series where I look into summer transfers that do not receive enough attention (in my own opinion). This is something that I personally do quite often during transfer windows, go onto Fotmob’s Transfer Centre and look at all of the transfers that take place overnight, then research about the ones that are intriguing to me. This series was created as a result of that, as a way for me to organise the knowledge that I know about some players, use data to analyse their performance in past seasons, and theorise about how they will fit into their new team tactically. The only difference is instead of doing it in my own head, I am writing down the thoughts and notes that I have into an article. I guess my one hope is that these notes are helpful and entertaining to read in some ways.

With the World Cup currently taking place as of writing, most of the attention are on the global stage as plenty of analysis and scouting being done for those matches. That means there is even less attention on the current summer transfer window and more transfers going under the radar, which is where I hope this series will be helpful as a way to quickly catch up with some of the activities that are happening in the transfer window, then go back to watching World Cup matches.

For this edition, the focus is once again on transfers between German clubs, mainly because of one reason: German clubs tend to start their transfer business very early and way earlier than most European clubs, so a lot of domestic transfers and a few foreign transfers happen in early- and mid-June. With that in mind, I have picked four transfers to cover in this return edition for this series!

Notes: All stats and data used in this article and series are from Fotmob/Opta unless stated otherwise. I also used Sofascore stats as well for cross-checking and comparison purposes only.

Isac Lidberg

(Darmstadt → Mönchengladbach)

Last season was not a season that Mönchengladbach would want to look back on. They struggled at the beginning of the season and found themselves in a relegation battle, but they slowly regained their footing under Eugen Polanski and finished the season in 12th, albeit just nine points off the relegation playoff spot. Polanski experimented with different formations throughout the season, which explained the inconsistency in their form and prevented them from pushing into the top half and challenged for a European spot.

Another reason that contributed to Gladbach’s struggle last season was their inability to score goals as they finished the season with just 42 goals, the fifth-least in the league, and the total expected goals of 42.8 xG, the fourth lowest in the league. A meniscus injury restricted their main goalscorer Tim Kleindienst to just 10 total minutes played last season and Shūto Machino found it hard to adapt after moving to Borussia-Park from Holstein Kiel. This meant the goal-scoring responsibility fell on the shoulder of Haris Tabaković and the Bosnian striker truly delivered as he finished the season with 13 goals, eight more than the second-best goalscorer in Gladbach’s squad, centre-back Kevin Diks, who scored four of his five goals from the penalty spot.

Since Kleindienst is getting into their early-30s, there is no guarantee that he can be consistent and he is also more vulnerable to injuries. Meanwhile, Tabaković’s future is undetermined as Gladbach have not signed him permanently from Hoffenheim as of writing. As such, the need for Gladbach to find a long-term goalscorer is evident, which is where Darmstadt’s Isac Lidberg comes in. The Swedish striker arrived at Borussia-Park after two prolific seasons where he scored 32 goals across 64 appearances, a record that Gladbach gladly need to improve their goalscoring form. Darmstadt’s inconsistency on the pitch meant they never emerged as a major contender for a promotion spot in their past two seasons under Florian Kohfeldt, but Lidberg and Fraser Hornby (signed for Wolfsburg) kept the team competitive with their goals and both have earned a move to the Bundesliga during this window.

Lidberg is as classic of a poacher as one can be, which can be seen from a few of his goals for Darmstadt. He was very good at anticipating where the ball would be and positioning himself in the right space to capitalise on errors by the opposition defenders and keeper. This allowed him to constantly pick up scraps from inside of the box and turned most of those errors and rebounds into crucial goals for Darmstadt.

Making the step up to the Bundesliga means there will be less rebounds for Lidberg to capitalise on as teams and players in the top division make less mistakes and errors compared to 2. Bundesliga teams. But the Swedish striker can continue to utilise his anticipation and positioning to sit on the shoulder of opposition defenders, where he can receive through balls and attack the space behind the last defensive line. Since Gladbach have plenty of creative midfielders and wide players like Kevin Stöger, Robin Hack, and Joe Scally, this will play into one of Lidberg’s preferred playing style and give the Swedish striker more and better goal-scoring opportunities.

Besides from playing as a poacher, Lidberg can also drop deep to receive the ball from midfielders and use his pace and technical ability to take on opposition defenders, which he had done so for a few goals that he scored for Darmstadt. This was where his partnership with Fraser Hornby came in handy. Both players would often swap position with each other, which allowed Lidberg to receive the ball in between the opposition’s defensive lines and dribbled at them, while Hornby would make a forward run and attempt to push the defensive line back towards their own goal to create space for his teammate.

Should Polanski opt to continue with the 3-4-2-1 and 3-5-2 formations moving into his first full season with Gladbach, Lidberg will find himself receiving plenty of assistance from teammates behind and around him. It is also possible for the Swedish striker to form a close striker relationship similar to his relationship with Hornby at Darmstadt if Kleindienst can get back to full fitness and start up front in Polanski’s 3-5-2. Kleindienst can play as a target man to receive passes from midfield and hold up the opposition defenders, thus creating space for Lidberg to capitalise on and run in behind.

Since Gladbach have not signed both Tabaković and Alejo Sarco on a permanent basis, they are heading into pre-season with three striker options in Kleindienst, Machino, and Lidberg, at least at the time of writing. As mentioned earlier, Kleindienst’s fitness is still questionable given that he has been out for the entirety of the 2025-26 season due to a serious injury, which means the German international will need a bit of time to get back to his best. Machino is currently at the World Cup with Japan after being called up late and will likely join pre-season later than most of his Gladbach teammates. That leaves Lidberg with the opportunity to impress during pre-season, earn himself the starting spot in the opening matches of the new season, and solve Gladbach’s goalscoring woes that prevented them from breaking into the group that challenge for European football last season.

Sean Đulić

(1860 München → Hoffenheim)

It has only been a few weeks into the 2026 summer window, but Hoffenheim are already emerging as one of the heavy and aggressive spenders of the window. Despite the fact that they will be playing in the Europa League next season, they still choose to stick with the recruitment philosophy that was the foundation for their rejuvenation last season, which is signing young and promising players for a low fee. Die Kraichgauer have already secured the signature of promising striker Alessandro Vogt from St. Gallen back in March and have moved quickly to sign young midfielder Cajetan Lenz from Bochum for an undisclosed fee in May. Their spending continues into June as they snapped up full-back Mats Rots from Twente and winger Patrick Wimmer from Wolfsburg for a total transfer fee of €22m.

But probably one of Hoffenheim’s bargains of this window is picking up 20-year-old Sean Đulić from 1860 München on a free transfer. 1860 have produced promising academy graduates in the past and they are still continuing that tradition in recent years, with the cream of their current crop being Đulić himself, versatile player Clemens Lippmann, current Greuther Fürth full-back Lukas Reich, and winger Emre Erdoğan. Despite that, they have found it hard to get out of the 3. Liga in recent seasons and their financial instability off the pitch have not made that task any easier. Things have turned worse for 1860 München as they have been relegated down to the Regionalliga (4th tier) because they are unable to obtain the license to continue playing in the 3. Liga (3rd tier). This has forced the club into a fire sale with many players leaving on a free, including Lippmann to newly-promoted Bundesliga side SC Paderborn and Đulić to Hoffenheim.

What Hoffenheim are getting from Đulić is a young talent with plenty of potential and rooms to grow, which definitely fits the recruitment philosophy that the club are aiming to maintain. The 20-year-old player broke into 1860’s first team last season and have since accumulated a total of 43 matches played for his local club in all competitions, which should make the step up from the 3. Liga a bit easier to handle. Đulić, along with Cajetan Lenz, is most likely signed to address Hoffenheim’s lack of depth in midfield after Grischa Prömel joined Stuttgart on a free transfer and Leon Avdullahu attracting interest from elsewhere. Đulić can also play as a centre-back and have done so for 1860 München in the past two seasons, but since Hoffenheim already have 6 centre-backs on their books, including Kōki Machida returning from an ACL injury and Arthur Chaves returning from his loan spell at Augsburg, it is unlikely that Đulić will get too much game time as a centre-back.

Throughout last season, Đulić was used as a right-sided centre-back in 1860’s back three and usually took on the role of a ball-playing defender when his team were in control of possession. While his passing stats look fairly impressive, this is where the illusion of data can lead to false assumptions. After watching a few of 1860 München’s matches from last season that are available to view on YouTube, I thought Đulić was a fairly safe passer as a lot of his passes were sent backwards to the keeper or sideways to one of the centre-backs. He also linked up with the midfielders with some passes, which allowed either Đulić himself or one of the central midfielders to make overlapping runs into the opposition’s half.

But in contrast to my initial assumption that Đulić was a progressive passer, he definitely needs to be braver and needs more encouragement to look for teammates higher up the pitch. That is not to say that he cannot make forward and progressive passes because there were a few occasions where his long passes from the back led to goal-scoring chances for his teammates. At a higher and better playing environment like Hoffenheim, however, Đulić can definitely learn from his new teammates who are more comfortable with the ball, which will help him be braver with his passes.

Another aspect that Đulić can improve during his time at Hoffenheim is his defending style even though it is already decent, but there are definitely rooms for improvement. Although Đulić was quite aggressive in marking the opposition player and challenging for the ball, it was rare to see the German-Bosnian defender diving in for a tackle. One reason for that is because he did not look very strong physically when making challenges, which allowed the opposition player to get the better of him on a few occasions. He also did not engage in and win plenty of aerial challenges despite being 187cm tall, which is a weakness that can be easily exposed at a high-quality league like the Bundesliga.

As mentioned earlier, Đulić is a diamond in the rough that Hoffenheim have picked up. His performance for 1860 München was not bad, but he also received a lot of support from more experienced defenders and midfielders around him. It is also worth remembering that Đulić is just 20 years old and is entering his third professional season. Joining Hoffenheim will give him plenty of opportunities to learn from better players and in a more challenging environment, which will do him good for his long-term career. I do not expect Đulić to be a first team player straight away, but the bigger question is how will his time be divided between Hoffenheim’s first team and B team next season considering their B team will also be playing in the third division, where he can continue to get regular game time while also learning from first team players?

Francis Onyeka

(Leverkusen → Elversberg - on loan)

Elversberg have been a feel-good story of the 2. Bundesliga in the past few seasons. They have only secured promotion to the 3. Liga in 2022, but under Horst Steffen, the club have gone from strength to strength as they won the 3. Liga on their first attempt and reached the 2. Bundesliga in 2023. Just two seasons later, they came very close to the promise land but fell short in the promotion/relegation playoff against Heidenheim. Even with a managerial change as Vincent Wagner stepped in to replace Steffen, Elversberg’s momentum did not stop there as they did one better than last season and secured promotion to the Bundesliga as runners-up.

It is evident that Elversberg have been punching above their weights since their budget is considerably smaller than most clubs in the 2. Bundesliga and significantly smaller than most Bundesliga clubs. While that is an impressive feat for a club that were in the fourth division not long ago, the reality is the Bundesliga is a much more challenging and unforgiving league. Recent seasons have been extremely tough for clubs that were promoted from the second division as most clubs could only survive for at most 3 seasons then have to go back down. This includes clubs that have invested heavily in their playing squad like St. Pauli, Bochum, and Heidenheim as all three have suffered relegation just a few seasons after they were promoted. If Elversberg want to give themselves a chance to survive next season and beyond, the first thing that they have to get right is recruiting players to improve their squad.

As of writing, the club have signed two promising attacking midfielders to bolster their attacking options. Maurice Krattenmacher, who arrived from Bayern München, will likely be a depth option as he adapts to the Bundesliga after spending two average seasons on loan at Ulm and Hertha Berlin respectively. Meanwhile, after scoring 8 goals on loan at Bochum, Francis Onyeka was rewarded with a new contract with Bayer Leverkusen and then sent out on loan to Elversberg for his first full season in the top flight. Onyeka is part of Leverkusen’s current crop of promising youngsters that includes wing-back Montrell Culbreath, attacking midfielder Kerim Alajbegović, and striker Artem Stepanov, a group in which the club have a lot of faith to lead them into the future. While Culbreath and Alajbegović are seen as ready for the first team, Onyeka and Stepanov require more game time and have been sent out on loan, which Elversberg and Utrecht will happily welcome their reinforcement respectively.

During his loan season with Bochum, Onyeka was used in his natural position as the attacking midfielder in their 4-2-3-1 formation. While one might assume that means the German youth international is a playmaker, that assumption is quite wrong just through his stats. Just like Darmstadt’s Fraser Hornby that was discussed earlier, Onyeka is a second striker who has a very sharp eye for goals. Playing behind a target man like Philipp Hofmann allowed Onyeka to crash the box with his forward runs or even utilise the spaces that Hofmann created by dragging defenders out of their position for Onyeka to dribble the ball into.

Even though he comes across as a tall player (187cm) and looks to be a decent fit as a target man, Onyeka is very good at dribbling and controlling the ball, which suits him better as a second striker/attacking midfielder. His ability to keep the ball close to himself while dribbling makes it harder for the opposition player to dive in for a tackle without conceding a foul. He is also quick both on and off the ball, allowing him to leave the opposition defenders behind while attacking the channels or the space in behind the last defensive line. His height advantage also comes in handy as his late runs into the box allows Onyeka to be at the end of crosses and score a few headed goals (5 headed goals in particular for Bochum last season).

There was a sense of coolness and calmness in the way that Onyeka played for Bochum last season despite the fact that he only turned 19 in April. A lot of his movements on and off the ball felt relaxed and confident, like a young player who enjoyed every moment that he stepped foot onto the pitch. That confidence also carried over to his penalty taking, where he scored three of his eight goals last season. He knew where he wanted to place the ball, and while the run-up felt a bit unnecessary with the stuttering, he usually placed the ball into low corners and made them hard to save. It was also the approach that Onyeka used for his shots, which can be seen on the goalmouth at the bottom left of the visualisation above. His preference to place shots low but with a bit more power prevented the opposition keepers from reacting quick enough to save his shots.

With all of those praises, it does not mean that Onyeka is a complete package of a player. The German youth international is not a creative player and does not create chances for other teammates very often. The fact that he only registered 0.04 assists per 90 from 0.04 expected assists per 90, along with less than 1 chances created per 90, is absurdly low for a player who is playing in the #10 position. This means he will have to rely on other teammates around him to create goal-scoring chances that he can capitalise on, which Elversberg will have a few in the form of their full-backs, midfielders, and wingers. One good thing about Elversberg’s squad is that chances can be created by pretty much anyone in the squad, which means Onyeka will not be short of opportunities to score goals.

Another aspect that Onyeka will need to improve is his defensive ability, especially when it is expected that Elversberg will be doing a lot of defending next season against teams that will likely be dominating possession for the majority of the match. Last season, Bochum were not a team who pressed aggressively as they only placed 8th (3.7) for possession won inside the final third and relied more on recovering possession from a mid or low block. It meant that Onyeka did not have plenty of defensive work to do last season, but things will be different at Elversberg should Vincent Wagner adopt a more passive playing style due to the lack of possession that they will have. Being able to read the situation and position himself at the right space to intercept passes can be a lethal weapon that both Onyeka and Elversberg can utilise, especially when combining with Onyeka’s dribbling ability to start counter-attacks.

Nonetheless, Onyeka’s arrival will be a major boost to Elversberg’s squad and a good step up from the 2. Bundesliga for the German youth international. He will be a direct replacement for Bambasé Conté as he will be returning to Hoffenheim following the end of his loan spell and Elversberg have not opted to buy him on a permanent basis as of writing this article. Whether we will see the best of Onyeka’s ability will also rely on which playing style will Vincent Wagner adopt next season, but getting game time in the top flight will boost Onyeka’s development by a whole lot for him to return to Leverkusen and challenge for a first team spot in the future.

Satoshi Tanaka

(Düsseldorf → Schalke 04)

Along with Paderborn and Elversberg, a familiar name will be making a return to the Bundesliga next season after Schalke 04 won the 2. Bundesliga title in a fairly convincing manner. After two struggling season in the second division where they could not even finish in the top half, Miron Muslić was signed from Plymouth Argyle in the Championship and was tasked with getting Schalke back into the top flight, a task in which the Bosnian manager completed at first try.

With a playing style that favoured defensive solidity, Schalke finished last season with just 31 goals conceded from a total of 37.1 xG conceded, lowest in the league for both metrics, while also being prolific at the other end of the pitch, even if they underperformed their goalscoring numbers by a slightly large margin (50 goals scored from a total of 58.2 xG). Muslić has also built a squad with a mix of promising homegrown talents and experienced players, which is headlined by the evergreen striker Edin Džeko, former Liverpool goalkeeper Loris Karius, former Glasgow Rangers centre-back and Bosnian international Nikola Katić, and captain Kenan Karaman.

While their squad depth for most positions seems to be fairly good, there are always rooms to improve the squad quality when the right player comes around, which makes Schalke’s acquisition of Japanese midfielder Satoshi Tanaka from Fortuna Düsseldorf for a mere €1m feels like a bargain. Düsseldorf’s fortune took a significant downturn when Daniel Thioune, who helped the team challenged for a promotion spot in the last three seasons before the 2025-26 season, was sacked in October 2025. Markus Anfang and Alexander Ende came in as his replacements but neither were able to save Düsseldorf from getting relegated to the 3. Liga for the first time since the 2008-09 season. This meant that, while Düsseldorf have only signed Tanaka during the January window, they were forced to sell him for cheap along with others in the squad, allowing the Japanese international to make a move to the Bundesliga with Schalke.

Even though Tanaka only registered just a bit north of 1100 minutes played (or 13 matches played) for Düsseldorf, he still left a huge impression as a defensive midfielder in either a 3-5-2, 3-4-2-1, or a 4-2-3-1 formation that were used at different points of the season. He proved to be an important player in defence for Düsseldorf as he did not shy away from making challenges and tackles to recover possession while not conceding many unnecessary fouls. The Japanese international was also good at positioning himself in the right space and intercepting passes that came his way, which definitely helped kept Düsseldorf alive until the last day of the season.

With the ball, Tanaka also proved to be a prolific dribbler as he is very comfortable with controlling the ball at his feet. His small physical build and pace allowed him to get past the opposition players fairly easily while also drawing a few fouls himself. Those forward runs have also proved to be quite dangerous as it allowed Tanaka to crash the box late for potential rebounds or backpasses to create goal-scoring opportunities. While he did not get the chance to score for Düsseldorf, he has shown that he is capable of scoring goals for both Shonan Bellmare and Sanfrecce Hiroshima in past J1 League seasons.

However, it will be hard to expect Tanaka to be a prolific playmaker from deep. The Japanese midfielder does have an eye to look for forward passing options, but he has not created too many goal-scoring chances for his teammates in the past. In Schalke’s squad, though, that is a responsibility that Tanaka does not need to take on. With the likes of Soufian El-Faouzi, Adil Aouchiche, Kenan Karaman, and Dejan Ljubičić, Schalke have plenty of creative players in the squad that can take care of creating goal-scoring chances to allow Tanaka to focus on protecting the team’s defensive line. But do not be surprised if the Japanese midfielder slowly evolves into a more advanced midfielder throughout next season if creating chances and passing style are two of the aspects that Muslić wants to help Tanaka improve during his time at the Veltins-Arena.

Schalke’s midfield is a group with plenty of talents, quality, and depth, which means it is hard to expect Tanaka to be a regular starter straight away. It is, however, more likely that he will be an understudy to Ron Schallenberg and gain a few opportunities to play here and there. Since Jannik Bachmann is getting into his early-30s and was not used very often last season (412 minutes played), he is most likely going to be a backup option or an injury cover for both Schallenberg and Tanaka. But the need for a player who can be rotated or subbed on for Schallenberg is quite evident since the German midfielder was almost an ever-present for Muslić’s side, and that is where I think Tanaka will slot in while also improving as a player.

In just six months that he spent with Düsseldorf, Tanaka has shown why the Bundesliga and 2. Bundesliga have treated Japanese players so well and provided them a platform to bigger things across Europe. The last Japanese midfielder who came to Düsseldorf left the club after two seasons where he became a fan favourite to join Leeds United in the Premier League, and the name Ao Tanaka is slowly becoming a household name for many fans. The last Japanese player to have played for Schalke also left a fairly decent impression even though Maya Yoshida was not able to help the club survived relegation. Tanaka has also drawn comparisons to Kaishū Sano, who has enjoyed two good seasons with Mainz 05 so far. Nonetheless, he will be in good company as the Japanese contingency in the top two German divisions grows and in an environment where he can develop as a player at Schalke to potentially move on and achieve greater things like most Japanese players that have done so before him.

With that, the first weekly edition of the Transfers Round-up for the 2026 summer window is finally done! It has been good to return to working on articles that I enjoy researching and doing due dilligence for. While I cannot promise to be consistent, I will try my best to keep this series as weekly while the World Cup is taking place as a touch of something different in the midst of a lot of World Cup content. For now, though, thank you for reading if you have reached this point, I really appreciate the support!

Well, it has been a while since I have written something here, and firstly, I want to apologise for that. Life has gotten in the way and I have to prioritise what is more important at the moment, and blogging is quite low on my priority order. Nonetheless, it is World Cup season and I want to join the rest of the football analytics community in doing something for one of the biggest occasions on the football calendar. That has led to the project above, the World Cup Anything & Everything companion app!

The what app?

The name for the app sounds terrible, I know, but I cannot come up with a good name for an app that is meant to be multi-purposed. So it just has to be the ‘Anything & Everything’ app for now until I can come up with a better name for it without any help from generative AI models.

Coming up with a World Cup related project in this day and age sounds easy enough given the availability of gen AI that can suggest ideas for someone to work on. But I want none of that, mainly because it does not feel human to be fed an idea that will be worked on, that is a machine’s job. I miss the feeling of coming up with an idea that I resonate with, no matter how shitty that idea is, because in the end that is my own idea and it does not come from an aggregated AI model.

One original idea that I immediately crossed off the list is building a machine learning model for predicting the results. There are a million of predictive models specifically and ML models being made by other amazing data enthusiasts out there, the community does not need another shitty model with an accuracy of below 80%. It does not help that I am also quite burnt out, which means getting into the mindset to create an ML model is a challenge itself.

A football app is nothing new either because there is a football-related Streamlit app being made and shared on social media every few weeks. Not to discredit anyone’s work, but to me, Streamlit dashboards have become saturated due to the easiness to make one with the help of ChatGPT or Claude. Plus, working on the Match Analysis Tool 2.0 helped me realised that Streamlit can be quite limiting with its capability to go beyond what have already been made by the Streamlit team themselves. Because it is Python-based and Python is not meant to be used for web developing, there is only so much that Streamlit can do.

Thus, I wanted to build upon what I did with the MAT 2.0 and made good use of my web developing knowledge to make a similar app using TypeScript and Svelte. Personally, given that Streamlit is pretty much overused by the football analytics community at this point, it seems like the natural next step to move towards an actual language that is meant to develop web apps. One reason why I think not many people have done so is because there is a lack of football-focused packages or libraries for JavaScript and TypeScript like mplsoccer for Python, thus requiring plenty of custom-built functions for each use case.

I am also choosing not to rely on scraping data from any specific sources because that can get into the grey area of legality that I cannot be bothered to deal with. During the tournament, I will be relying on getting data via Wikipedia’s API and build my own data structure for the entire app. Ideally, that data structure would be in a cloud service somewhere and combine with either SQL and MySQL, but I am too lazy to set those up so JSON files will work for now. Not that I am going to sustain the lifecycle of this app beyond the tournament anyway. However, I will do a few patches after the World Cup ends if there is public data available for the entire tournament.

What does it look like?

This is where the part about the ‘love letter’ comes into play, because this companion app is meant to reflect some of the things that I enjoy about following football as a whole. Instead of having to do those things manually like when I was a kid, these things can be done manually by automated jobs and workflows, which is also a reflection on how much I have learned about computer science as a whole so far.

Schedule

Schedule is meant to be my attempt at replicating those tournament wallcharts that used to be sold at magazine stalls or supermarkets before a big tournament started. It was fun and engaging to keep up with the results of all matches and manually fill in the results as the tournament progressed, or at least that was how I felt as a kid. With everything being digital nowadays, there is less of a need to buy and update those wallcharts anymore since most fans now have access to football apps like Fotmob or Sofascore, or websites that update results in almost real time.

Technically speaking, this page is not doing anything different to most apps out there. But with this page, I can customise how results are displayed and expand on those results to include more information that I want to see, like xG, possession percentage, etc., things that wallcharts cannot have due to how little spaces available on an A3 or A2 paper.

Teams

I am a football nerd now and I was also a football nerd as a kid, which meant I really enjoyed doing my homework on teams that would be playing in a tournament. The process of discovering which team each player played for, learning their squad numbers, each team’s fixtures was quite satisfying for me in past tournaments. It was one of the reasons why I am doing what I am doing now because I was eager to learn about players that I did not know and did not play in one of the top 5 European leagues.

Nowadays I have an unnecessary encyclopedia of football players in my brain thanks to football analytics work and Football Manager, but I still like learning and scouting players that have not come up on my radar before. Thus, this Teams page act like a resource for me to do my own homework on players from all teams and get to know where they currently play.

This additional feature is still in the work, but I want to include a Tactical DNA Breakdown for each team to highlight their playing style during the tournament. That is also part of the homework that I will be doing because I hope to watch as many matches as I can and make my own observations on each team’s playing style, then rank those attributes on a scale of 1 to 5. It is a bit of a blend between current me enjoy seeing the tactical aspects of each match and past me wanting to learn more about football stats and tactics.

Preview

Preview is also part of me wanting to do homework, but along with the Teams page above, it is also an homage to those bulky tournament preview handbooks of ye olden days. This page is meant to show all information that I can get my hands on for each match, thus giving me an idea of what to expect in upcoming matches. I am currently unsure where those insights and information will go because I am not doing any predicting, betting, or fantasy leagues for this World Cup, but I guess I will try to use it for future projects or articles.

The entire page is currently in the workshop so I do not have any preview images here, but I might update this section when I have a version that I am happy with.

Live

Live is a page for current and future me to scout players and analyse matches. I want this page to act somewhat like a note-taking page that I can use while I watch the matches, whether it is live or a replay. Most of the information contained in this page will also be from me manually updating from publicly available sources like Fotmob or FIFA because I want to keep the scraping process strictly limited to just Wikipedia.

Figuring out a way to store my own notes, build a somewhat working note-taking app, and link those data together in a meaningful way is a big project on its own. But I do not really shy away from a challenge, so I will try to find a solution that is as efficient as possible and work ‘well enough’. It is one of the challenges that I am learning to overcome as a perfectionist, which is learning when to say ‘it is good enough’ and not chasing the unrealistic standard that I set for myself.

Data

As I have mentioned, I want to keep this app strictly to just scraping data from Wikipedia API. It also means I am making things harder for myself to extract meaningful data from HTML pages and build a data structure from only JSON files, which I totally agree. But there are a few reasons for why I made this decision.

Firstly, it is very hard nowadays to get good football data when most of the top data providers charge a crazy amount for a subscription to their raw data API. It is cheaper to use their data via their own platform, but you then lose the ability to build a custom solution and have to be restricted to what are available. For some, that is not a problem because it serves the purposes that they want to achieve. But for me, I want to explore beyond what is offered by data providers without having to spend thousands of dollars every month. Basically, I hate corpos and the monopoly that they currently have, so I want to build my own solution.

Secondly, I have the technical abilities and knowledge to build a custom solution, so the question simply becomes ‘why not?’. There are going to be challenges along the way, but I like to push myself through a challenge and really enjoy the process of coming up with a solution to solve that challenge. It might not be the best or the most optimal solution, but ‘best’ and ‘optimal’ can both be subjective and unobtainable at the same time. It is a solution that I can come up with at this point in time, and I want to learn to be content with that solution until I know more and improve on that solution. Part of the learning process, I suppose.

Finally…

I do not intend for this project that seeks engagements on social platforms as I have done that for a while and it has led me to burnouts on so many occasions. Just like the MAT 2.0, these two projects are meant for my creative soul and it is hopefully a part of the healing process.

I have taken a step back from working on football analytics projects and observed other creative people thriving at doing their own things, which explains the absent period so far. That period helped me realised that people are the most creative when they enjoy what they are doing and they are creating things from the heart and soul instead of the brain. That is where I want to get back to and I do not want to rush the process, I understand that it is going to be a long journey to get back to loving what I do and that is okay. So I just want to apologise for being inconsistent for the foreseeable future, but I hope to get back to my best self and create more amazing things.

For now, though, if you want to see how messy my codes and repository organisation are, feel free to take a look at the repository for this project here! Don’t blame that I did not warn you before viewing the dumpster fire that is my repo.

That is not a question that I thought my brain would come up with a while back. But after moving past the stage of casually following Formula 1 a few months ago and starting to follow more closely and learning more about the intricacies of the sport (not because of Drive to Survive, have to get this out!), I learn that Formula 1 is an extremely data-heavy sport. As a data nerd, that just sounds like music to my ears. But instead of trying to answer that question with all of the high-level language and knowledge that I have learned about data science, I like to keep things a bit fun and easy to understand. So, this article is my attempt to gather all of my research notes and answer the question in the most light-hearted way possible.

Overview

Core Similarities

Shared Similarities

1. Decrease in Performance Over Time

• In F1, each tyre compound (as labelled below, plus the intermediate (green) and wet (blue) tyres for wet races) performs differently to each other. But as the race goes on and the tyres experience more wear, the car goes slower lap by lap.

  

• In football, as players run more, run faster, and make more sprints throughout a match, they will get tired as the match goes on, especially after the 60th minute.

2. Optimal Timing

• F1 teams use undercut/overcut (pit before opponent/stay out when opponent pits) strategy to identify the ideal pit lap in order to balancing tyre life and their current track position.

• Football teams can also ask a similar question: at which minute does a substitution make the most impact? Research consistently shows subs made before the 60th minute yield more value than later ones because players need time to warm up (physically and mentally) and adapt to the current state of the match before using their ability to influence the match.

  • This actually mirrors the performance lifetime of an F1 set of tyres after a pit stop. The tyres start out cold and need to be warmed up, thus why drivers tend to do a warm up lap before achieving their fastest lap on a set of tyres that reaches optimal temperature during qualifying sessions or even during the race to gain track positions.

3. Performance Before vs. After a Pit Stop/Substitution

Both sports attempt to answer the question: did the intervention improve outcomes and results?

• F1: pace before pit vs. pace after on fresh rubber.

• Football: xG generated, pressing intensity, or defensive coverage before vs. after the sub.

4. Strategic vs. Reactive Interventions

Both can be pre-planned (a known two-stop strategy; a planned tactical sub at half time) or reactive (safety car window; an injury or red card), which can be simply deducted down to whether the intervention was planned or forced.

5. Profile/Compound Matching

• F1 teams chooses which tyre compound fits the track conditions and remaining race distance.

• Football teams chooses which player profile fits the tactical need, like a fresh striker to chase the score, or a defensive/holding midfielder to protect the lead.

Essentially, teams from both sports need to optimise the resources (players/tyres) that are available to them while taking into account their current situation in a race/match.

6. Window of Opportunity

• F1 teams exploits virtual or full safety car periods, which are low-cost windows to pit without losing or losing the least track positions.

• Football managers exploit dead ball situations (throw-ins, goal kicks, corners, free-kicks) or injury delays to minimise disruption and momentum.

Both can be seen as opportunistic timing relative to game/race events.

7. Compounding Effects

• Pitting two cars on the same lap has coordination costs for the pit stop crew and increases the risk of the crew or the driver making mistakes.

• Multiple football substitutions at once have a similar dynamic. They can be beneficial for fresh legs, but risks disrupting team shape and communication.

Nuances

• Reversibility: Theoretically speaking, F1 teams can immediately pit again and football teams can bring off the same player who was subbed on. However, these are considered forced interventions because they are unplanned and only happen when something has gone very wrong, like:

  • F1 teams need to pit again on the next lap due to a damaged component (usually front wing or body works) or a tyre puncture caused by contact on the track.

  • Football teams need to sub off the same player who was subbed on because of a severe injury or an immediate tactical change to react to what has happened since the player came on.

• Human variability: A fresh tyre performs predictably, while a substitute player introduces psychological and form variability that’s much harder to model.

• Disruptions:

  • In F1, pit stop strategy can be disrupted if the pit entrance/exit is closed due to various reasons (see Melbourne GP 2026, Valtteri Bottas’ retirement).

  • In football, theoretically, it’s not possible to prevent a team from making substitutions by blocking the touchline. Although, it can be delayed by keeping the ball in field as long as needed.

Game state dependency

What is a ‘State’?

State is a snapshot of all variables that influence the value of an intervention at a given moment.

How does a pit stop/sub depend on race/game state?

A pit stop or substitution is never evaluated in isolation - it’s evaluated relative to what the current situation in the race/match allows and/or demands.

In F1:

• A pit stop in lap 5 under a safety car is a completely different decision to a pit stop on lap 40 in clean air, even if the tyre wear is identical.

• What currently happens during a race decreases or increases the cost of stopping (track position loss is minimised under safety car, maximised during a fast stint battle).

In Football:

• Bringing on a forward when losing 1-0 in the 75th minute is a completely different decision to the same sub when winning 2-0 in the 75th minute.

• The game state reframes the risk that accompanies every substitution. Even with the same player, and the substitutions are made during the same window, both substitutions can bring entirely different values to a team depending on what is happening during the match and whether the team are winning/drawing/losing.

It can be easy to say that a substitution or a pit stop is made for the sake of making one. But, in reality, there are a lot of decision layers that are coupled with the final decision of why and when to make the pit stop/substitution. Without the help and/or suggestion of data, these decisions are made by football managers and F1 race strategists who have many years of experiences and they are utilising that knowledge bank of past experiences to make the call.

Where data and prediction models can help is removing the level of bias that people naturally have. It is still hard to find a balance level between rational and emotionally-driven decisions, having that bank of experiences definitely help to an extent, but even the most experienced managers and race strategists still make irrational decisions. The end goal is not to make both football and F1 more robotic because the final decision still belongs to the manager/race strategist, but to assist key decision-makers with making the most optimal decisions possible.

Going back to game state, data and prediction models can also help lower the amount of decisions that managers/race strategists have to make during a match/race. Each manager has a million things to process during a match and has to make a lot of important decisions, like tactical decisions to influence the result to go their way. The same goes with race strategists, they have to make important tactical calls that can change the imminent and final results for the team. Using data to find an optimal pit stop/substitution window is no different to having an intervention specialist who already has a lot of past knowledge and experiences on the pit wall/on the touchline.

How can race/game state influence strategy/decisions?

1. As a Trigger to Execute

Both decisions can be viewed as threshold problems, where teams act when the situation reaches a predetermined extreme point, like pit when tyre performance is starting to cause the car to slow down and lose track positions (for F1 teams), or make a sub when a player’s physical and on-field performance is slowing down while the team needs to chase or maintain a result (for football teams). The situation continuously updates that extreme point for every team, which essentially forces team to optimise the situation in real-time.

2. Cascade (one event reshapes everything)

In both sports, a single disruption can invalidate an entire strategy:

• A safety car in F1 can turn a one-stop into a two-stop plan instantly.

• A red card in football can turn an attacking substitution into a defensive reshaping, mid-thought.

This is what known as strategic volatility, where the current situation is not just an afterthought, it is actively influencing decisions and strategies to go in different, (sometimes) unpredictable ways. Both sports reward teams/managers who can react and make changes faster when the situation shifts unexpectedly.

3. Opponent Interdependency

Deciding whether to make a substitution/a pit stop or not is not just relying on everything that happen with the team themselves, but it is also reliant on what the opposition are doing at the same time. This adds an extra layer of connection to the similarity between the two actions, but also adds complexity to the task of predicting when to make the call.

Take these two scenarios as examples for how opponent’s decisions also link to deciding when to substitute or make a pit stop:

• In F1, if an opponent driver pits, a team may be forced into an early pit stop to cover the undercut even if their tyres aren’t ready.

• In football, if the opponent makes a substitution that changes their shape, it may force a reactive sub to restore a tactical matchup.

Conclusion

A good decision in the wrong state is worse than a mediocre decision in the right state.

For both sports, it is less about what to do, and more about when the situation makes it worth doing. There is also no ‘perfect’ strategy when things do not happen as planned, and that is usually most of the time due to the randomness of both football and Formula 1 (even though they are on different levels of randomness). There are simply so many factors that can alter the pre-planned strategies, like game state and other factors that will be discussed below. So, teams can only plan their strategy to an extent and have to be ready to react to external factors that can happen while a race/match is going on.

Performance decay

What is ‘Performance decay’?

A big word, I know, but it simply describes the question ‘how does a unit’s performance decrease over time’. In even simpler words, ‘why does a player perform worse as the match goes on/a car runs slower as the race goes on’. Using the earlier example as a simple way to explain the word:

• In F1, each tyre compound performs differently to each other. But as the race goes on and the tyres experience more wear, the car goes slower lap by lap.

• In football, as players run more, run faster, and make more sprints throughout a match, they will get tired as the match goes on, especially after the 60th minute.

As mentioned above, a decrease in performance is never a straight line and can depend on various factors, game/race states included. Human performance is still limited by how well each person treats their own body, and while professional athletes can perform at a high-level for a longer period, they also have a threshold where they become more vulnerable to injuries. The same goes with tyre performance, with the limiting factor simply being our good old physics friend, friction. Unless F1 turns to cars that drive using magnetic fields, which might happen in the distant future, tyre degradation is still one of the most important factors that teams have to take into account. Other factors include…

How can strategy and tactics influence performance decay?

Strategy and tactics don’t just respond to decay - they actively determine its shape and rate.

In F1…

1. Driving Style

A driver’s inputs and driving style directly influence how fast a tyre degrades.

• Aggressive corner entry, high lateral G-forces, and hard braking zones (see Max Verstappen’s driving style) all generate heat and wear on the rubber thanks to our good friend friction.

• A driver told to “manage the tyres”/”more LiCo” (lift and coast, or lower speeds into corners, smoother throttle application) can extend tyre life by 10–20 laps on the same compound.

This means the same set of tyres and on the same compound can have completely different performance depending on the driving instruction given by the race engineers, strategists and the driver’s own driving style.

2. Fuel Load Strategy

Teams who start the race with more fuel than needed to complete the race can increase the stress on their set of tyres, which means the car is harder to manage, degradation is higher early. By doing this, basically, teams change the performance curve of their tyres right on the first lap.

Race strategists overcome this problem by suggesting their drivers to drive aggressively during the early laps to utilise both the extra fuel and fresh set of tyres to gain as many track positions as they can before performance starts to drop. They can also choose to be cautious early to extend the lifetime of the first tyre set and shift the pit stop window to later than their opponents.

3. Track Position vs. Tyre Management Trade-off

Running in dirty air behind another car forces higher downforce loads and more tyre sliding to maintain lap time, which means lowering the tyre performance at an higher and faster rate. Meanwhile, a strategy that prioritises clean air actively reduces the rate of tyre wear even at the cost of track positions in the short-term.

4. Tyre Compound Choice

A softer tyre compound means faster pace at the cost of performance decreasing much faster. In contrary, a harder compound maintains its performance for a longer run, but takes longer to warm up, reaches optimal performance later, and the car reaches its maximum pace later.

In Football…

1. Pressing Intensity

This is perhaps the most direct parallel to tyre degradation. High-pressing systems (see Liverpool under Klopp, or Leeds under Bielsa) place extreme physical demands on players, particularly in terms of the total distance that players have to constantly run at high speed, or high-intensity sprint distance. Data consistently shows that pressing metrics drop sharply after 60–70 minutes in high-press teams, far more than in low-block (see José Bordalás’ Getafe) or possession-based sides. Choosing to press throughout the pitch is like choosing a soft compound in F1, where teams aim to extract maximum early performance, but at the cost of slowing down and experience decrease in performance much earlier.

2. Possession-Based Style

Teams that dominate possession (see Guardiola’s Barcelona and Manchester City) naturally regulate the physical output of their players, which means lower sprint distances, more walking/jogging phases, controlled tempo. This is the football equivalent of an F1 driver being told to manage tyres through smooth inputs. The decrease in performance happens later and allows players to remain effective deeper into the match because the tactical system conserves energy.

3. Positional Demands

Not all players experience a drop in performance at the same time. A manager’s tactical shape essentially assigns different performance drop-off points to different positions, which should directly inform the substitution priority order.

• Full-backs who like to make overlapping/underlapping runs cover enormous distances, thus their performance decreases faster than centre-backs in the same team. They, along with wingers/wide midfielders tend to be substituted the earliest.

• Central midfielders in high-press systems are the most exposed to early fatigue. They can also be placed high up on the substitution priority list having covered the most distance compared to other teammates (see Arminia Bielefeld’s Mael Corboz).

4. In-Game Tactical Adjustments

Dropping into a mid or low block when leading is the tactical equivalent of telling a driver to “back off and manage” because it reduces the physical load for the players and extends their effectiveness. Conversely, pushing for an equaliser by increasing pressing intensity late is like pushing a set of tyres past its optimal window, where teams extract short-term performance at the cost of rapid loss of fitness.

How can external factors influence performance decay?

External factors don’t just influence performance - they fundamentally rewrite the decay function itself, often before a wheel has turned or a boot has kicked.

Weather Conditions

Track temperature is the primary driver of tyre behaviour because rubber operates in a narrow thermal window. Too cold and it doesn’t activate (graining, no grip), too hot and it degrades rapidly (blistering, thermal degradation). A 10°C swing in track temperature can shift the optimal tyre compound entirely, invalidate a pre-planned strategy, and compress or extend the performance window of a given tyre by significant lap counts.

Similarly, in football, heat and humidity also rapidly increases the loss of performance in football. High temperatures elevate core body temperature faster, increase stress on the heart, and measurably reduce sprint frequency and distance covered particularly in the second half. Studies from tournaments in hot climates show high-intensity running drops by 15–20% in extreme heat, meaning the team’s effective pressing range shrinks significantly faster than in temperate conditions.

Football players are also limited by cold conditions that can actually suppress muscle performance and increase injury risk, particularly for hamstrings and hip flexors. This creates a different type of performance loss where the risk of sudden performance loss (injury) rises sharply rather than a gradual fade.

Rain is the most dramatic disruptor for both sports because it introduces an entirely different performance loss curve. Wet tyres have their own wear curves, and the transition window (when to switch from intermediates to wets or vice versa) is one of the highest-stakes decisions in F1 precisely because the loss of performance for wet and dry compounds are completely different from each other. Meanwhile, footballers experience heavier legs and increased injury risk from slipping when playing in a rainy condition and on a wet pitch. This makes a faster, more direct style of play becomes both more likely and more physically demanding.

Wind direction and speed affects aerodynamic balance corner by corner. For example, a tailwind on a straight changes braking points, increases tyre stress in specific zones, and creates uneven wear patterns across the four tyres. Wind also affects technical quality in football since long passes, crosses, and shooting accuracy all degrade in strong wind, indirectly forcing teams into shorter, more energy-intensive passing patterns.

Venue Characteristics

Each Formula 1 circuit brings a different challenge to teams due to the design and characteristics of the venue itself. High-downforce circuits like Monaco and Hungary allow for a balanced tyre wear across all four tyres, while high-speed circuits like Silverstone (England) or Spa (Belgium) place more tyre wear on the front-left due to the number of high-speed right-hand corners, all of which create a different performance loss curve unique to that circuit. Street circuits like Monaco, Baku, or Singapore introduce even more and faster tyre wear and graining (where the rubber surface tears before it heats properly) due to the imbalance between abrasive and smooth surfaces.

Footballers experience a similar problem when they play at different stadiums and on different turfs. A poor, bobbly pitch disrupts passing rhythm, increases the energy cost of ball control, and forces more physical duels. Conversely, a pristine surface enables the fluid, low-energy possession play that conserves player output. Artificial turf also increases the loss of performance because it encourages teams to play faster, increases joint impact forces, and is associated with measurably higher rates of soft tissue injury.

Altitude is the one common problem for both F1 and football. Take Mexico City for example, F1 teams experience a decrease in aerodynamic downforce because of thinner air. As such, teams run higher wing angles to compensate, which increases drag and changes the thermal load on the brakes and tyres in ways that require entirely new ways to model loss of performance. Meanwhile, Bolivia’s La Paz is football’s infamous example of how playing at a higher altitude shows measurable drops in aerobic performance, with players reaching fatigue thresholds significantly earlier. Visiting teams who haven’t acclimatised show steeper, earlier decay curves than home sides.

Scheduling & Fixture Congestion

For F1 teams, sprint weekends compress the preparation and prevent teams from have more practice data to predict their performance drop-off points, introducing greater uncertainty into strategy. Back-to-back race weekends also affect team personnel fatigue and car preparation quality, which can indirectly influence strategy execution.

Meanwhile, fixture congestion is one of the most frequently discussed topics in modern football. A team playing its third match in seven days and having to balance between both domestic league and domestic/continental cup competitions arrives with players whose baseline fitness is already suppressed. Because of that, the loss of performance doesn’t just happen quicker, it is also earlier because recovery is incomplete. Accompany that with travel fatigue where a team have flown internationally and crossed time zones decreases player performance at a much, much faster rate and players begin the match with a depleted baseline.

This forces football teams to have to plan and strategise thoroughly, including changing the optimal substitution strategy during a match. Teams and managers have to rely heavily on the quality of their starting XI and squad depth to navigate the loss of physical performance due to fixture congestion and travel fatigue while minimising the loss of performance on the pitch. Again, this is pretty much an optimisation problem that teams have to deal with every season.

Conclusion

The external layer essentially argues that decay is not a property of the car or the player. It’s a property of the car or player in a specific environment.

Relying on pre-match and aggregated data alone is not enough because deciding when to make a pit stop/substitution is not only constrained to what happened in the past and how teams have prepared. There are a lot of external factors that can also change the optimal strategies that a team have planned, which can only be predicted to an extent before the match and teams have no control over them.

Overall conclusion

This started out as a normal, naive question where I question how two intervene actions in two different sports can be similar to each other. tl;dr, the answer is yes, they are, surprisingly, very similar to each other. But as I went deeper down the rabbit hole, I also peeled back each decision layer that sports professionals have to make before deciding whether to make a substitution/a pit stop or not. I am quite sure that I am only scratching the surface level of this topic, but at least it has given me an idea and a challenge to do in my free time, so maybe keep an eye out for that!

A random day in the middle of February saw me reminiscing about the good old days of football games. The days when football games weren’t mostly seen as cash grabs for big game studios through loot boxes and various strange online multiplayer modes. The days when there were more efforts being put into making football games actually felt like a somewhat similar reflection of the football world.

It is hard to find a good football games in current times, there is hardly any entertainment value from EAFC and eFootball anymore other than both games being mostly a race to the top for how much money can one spend to get the best/most overpowered (OP) player cards in the game from loot boxes. And why those player cards aren’t classified as NFTs is a question that I don’t have an answer to. The latest installment of Football Manager is average at best. The Unity-based match engine definitely gives FM26 a fresh feeling, but just like any tech products that are developed back from the ground up, it’s full of bugs, both inconvenient bugs and game-breaking bugs. Besides those three, there aren’t any decent football games out there that I can sink hours into without being tricked into buying something else other than the game itself.

Naturally, I wanted to find something to fill in the Football Manager-sized hole in me, and FIFA Manager came up on my list of nostalgia games that I wanted to revisit. With FIFA Manager 07 being available to download, I had to check it out and, after some tweaks and changes made so that Wine on Linux can actually run the game, it was surprisingly decent for a game of 2006 standard. My favourite part of the game so far is listening to the curated, well-known classical tracks that came with the game while trying to guide St. Pauli out of the Regionalliga Nord (3rd division in Germany at the time).

Like other nerds who play football management games, I wanted to utilise the tools available to me to understand why my St. Pauli team weren’t performing very well even after signing this wunderkid. That was when the game’s MAT section started to reveal itself.

What in the world is MAT?

MAT v1.0

As the name from the title image suggested, MAT is not a fancy acronym by any means. It is simply just a Match Analysis Tool that most Football Manager enthusiasts would know as the Chalkboard before it was removed from FM26. This is in 2006 standard, and while a few very early works of football analytics were already emerging through Prozone (which came up quite recently in Sky Sports’ documentary about Sam Allardyce’s Bolton Wanderers side [timestamp: 1:15:17 - 1:19:02], you can find the footage of it below and I highly recommend checking it out!), the MAT in game is nowhere near the standard of where football analytics is currently at today. Although, it is still good to acknowledge where things started to know how far we’ve come.

The in-game MAT is actually not too far off from what Prozone looked like in the documentary above. As a player, you can view fairly detailed stats from a match like player movements, actions, shots, etc., along with a seasonal summary for the whole team, which included average stats that were calculated using what I thought was per 90s or something similar to the current per 90s that we know (but it wasn’t implicitly said). The best part about the MAT is you can rewatch the entire match in 2D, which is what gave me the idea to remake the MAT using modern tools and metrics that most football analytics enthusiasts already know.

Honestly, for a post-match analysis tool from 2006, it was surprisingly very detailed for how much information it provided and offered a good glimpse into what was available about 20 years ago.

MAT v2.0

Knowing what I have learned so far about football analytics and data, I wasn’t really satisfied with what I got from the game’s MAT. But I also knew I was asking a whole lot from a tool that is only 4 years younger than me and a tool that was made for a wider audience to use within a football game. So I set out to build my own MAT using modern tools, like most data nerds who also know a decent lot about programming. The original intention for the tool was to extract the 2D match from the game because it is the foundation to collect tracking data for more advanced metrics without having to train any model to scan the 3D live matches for on-ball actions and player positioning.

But then, I realised tinkering with the game’s binary files will probably take quite a long time to implement even with the help of an AI assistant. The fact that FIFA Manager 07 was probably coded in Lua didn’t help very much either because Lua is quite low on the list of programming languages that I want to learn. My next idea was to use OBS to record the 2D matches and have a backend model to detect the players, but I quickly realised that it was also not worth the time for a game that I might probably play a few times this year since I’m slowly transitioning out of sports games and have found some non-sports games that I want to sink my free time into.

Finally, I diverted the idea to retain the theme of the tool and make something that is similar using modern football data, visualisations, metrics, and tools. That is where the current state of the MAT at the moment, a personal data dashboard that will constantly improve over time to serve the need of…one person, which is me. For me, the MAT 2.0 is and will always be a work in progress because I know I will constantly have ideas that I want to try out and I see myself as a perfectionist of my own work, so I don’t easily feel satisfied with my own creations. My own version of the MAT is a personal tool, but it is also a sandbox for me to try out new ideas and constantly tweaking things to learn how to make things.

MAT v2.0’s features

At the time of writing, the MAT 2.0 is still only a very early first draft of what I want the tool to be. Definitely feels like the current version that I have is somewhat of a proof of concept. But as I develop the tool more and more, I also felt more and more confident of the concept that I have, which is why I decided to write this article now even though the tool is nowhere near where I want it to be.

With the Match Analysis page, I treat it as a mini match report where I can quickly view metrics and stats that can give me a decent picture of the match, which opens the floor for more in-depth analysis of both teams or any of the players on the Detailed Analysis page if I want to do so. This is me applying my past experiences as an analyst and putting myself in that same position again, thinking ‘what do I want to know when the match is finished from a data point of view’.

With the Team and Player Analysis pages, I want it to be on a more granular level where I can use data from any amount of matches that is more than 2 to find trends, patterns, details that I wouldn’t have noticed when I watch a team/player live on TV or at the stadium. That will include more detailed and more specific visualisations to assist me with detecting those hidden details that I can’t spot.

Last but definitely not least, the MAT will also serve as a vizzes creator for whenever I want to write articles on this blog or just casually posting stuff on various social media platforms. I’m okay with opening my working notebooks to create the vizzes that I need to use because I know where things are and how I organise things. But, sometimes, that can get tedious too when I just need to quickly generate 1 or 2 vizzes and I have to scroll through lines and lines of codes just to get to the vizzes and save them. Because I can slap a UI on top of those codes, I thought ‘why not?’

Why do I need to (re)make the MAT?

I have had to think about the ‘why’ part of this project for quite a bit because (I might or might not have mentioned this in my Update 3.0) I want to work on projects that I actually enjoy doing moving forward, projects that I feel eager and excited to work on, and projects that can sneak up in my mind whenever I’m not working on it. So far, I have managed to boil the ‘why’ down to three reasons.

Firstly, I have a genuine problem that I want to solve, and just like every engineers or welders who can make their own stuff to solve their own problems, I can also make my own tool to solve my problem through my programming knowledge. I think I lost that spirit somewhere on my football analytics journey because a lot of articles that I wrote or dashboards that I made, while I’m still proud of them, weren’t exactly for me and were geared towards seeking external validations. This project is just a good opportunity for me to find that spirit once more and also learning new things along the way.

Secondly, I’ve started treating my own creativity as an art. While I’m definitely not creating an art piece like a drawing or a music track, I still think creating things is an art and I choose to express that creativity via coding and creating digital things, sometimes via graphic designing too (I (re)made the app’s logos and background too!). This definitely has a good and a bad side to it, because I can be very self-critical of my own work and I always want to improve the next thing that I make. Sometimes that can challenge me to learn new things, but sometimes that has also driven me past my own limits without knowing when to feel satisfy about my own work. I still enjoy the creating process nonetheless and the MAT 2.0 being my personal sandbox is the perfect place for me to try new things and break them along the way.

Enshittification and monopolies

Lastly, I’m starting to get sick of the monopoly specifically with football data and the enshittification of technology in general.

The recent removal of Opta data from FBRef has and will do nothing good for football analytics, and maybe for football in general. A lot of innovations in football analytics have come from public work and, subsequently, a lot of talented people have been hired by clubs through blog posts, social media posts and contents. Taking that away means there will be less and less ideas being worked on over time. Fotmob is doing a decent job as a replacement, but they also have an app/company to run and a contract with Stats Perform to uphold, which makes sense for why they do not want anyone to scrape their data.

The worst part is the cost of getting access to the raw data from Opta or Wyscout is in the range of thousands of dollars. For a club that uses that data every day or every week, it is a necessary expense and they can cover that cost through other means. But for an individual who might only access that data a few times a month, those prices are absurd considering rising inflation in recent years. Given how precious those data are and the fact that clubs are willing to pay whatever the cost to get that data, I don’t think those prices are coming down anytime soon, which makes the entry barrier a lot higher for any aspiring analysts or enthusiasts.

Another problem is the lack of women’s football data is now exaggerated by the removal of Opta data from FBRef. As much as some football fans don’t like it, it’s hard to argue that women’s football is on a drastic rise, that means more attention is placed on the game and the need for more information rises. I recommend reading Catalina Bush’s article to know more about the situation, but long story short, FBRef was by far the best place to find data on the top women’s leagues in the world. Heck, I might even be one of the few rare users of the advanced A-League Women data on FBRef to write one article and make one Streamlit dashboard for it (shameless plugs, I know). Now, whoops, those data are now no more.

Zooming out a bit from the coverage problem and similar things can also be said for any coverage that are not about the top leagues in the world. It’s an argument that I know most people won’t agree with me, but football isn’t only played by the top clubs in the top leagues. Europe always gets the most coverage, while there are a lot of good people doing great things to bring the MLS into the spotlight (including the American Soccer Analytics team and John Muller’s futi). Besides from that, most fans barely know anything about football outside of Europe and the MLS. Having access to data to those leagues are good ways to learn about them, like Asian football or some of the Conmebol leagues, but it’s hard to find the data for those leagues anywhere.

I also want to quickly touch on the topic of enshittification a bit because even though it hasn’t really affected football-focused apps and platforms yet, I can definitely see it going that direction. Fotmob and Sofascore are doing good jobs to bring more detailed vizzes to the general audience, which I won’t discredit that at all. I know my use case has changed a lot compared to the general audience, and I understand those platforms’ purpose is to appeal to a very wide audience. But I’m also not entirely satisfied with some of the platforms made to serve the audience who wants/needs more in-depth info, having used some of those platforms in the past (I don’t want to name names here).

So, to serve my own use case and to save myself a bit of money that I can actually use it on something more enjoyable (like a vacay), I decided to make the MAT 2.0 just because I can and I have the knowhow to actually work on it.

A little bit of further thoughts

I think a few people (probably my own inner thoughts) might see this and ask ‘oh, why don’t you try to make money out of this?’ in a capitalism-driven world, which is becoming more and more of the norm. There might also be the thought of ‘why don’t you make this public?’, which might also only come from my own inner thoughts.

Honestly, my answer to both of those questions is I just don’t want to. In a world with so many public, football-focused Streamlit dashboards being shared on Twitter/X every other week and month, I want to have something to call my own. There are also so many similar dashboards out there already that people can use, like Ben Griffis’ Best 11 Scouting app is a prominent example. I don’t think the football community needs another Streamlit dashboard from me in general, so please support others who are making cool things instead.

I’ve already mentioned earlier, but I also see the MAT 2.0 as a learning opportunity and a place where I can try out new ideas. I currently have plans to deploy the first fully-working version of the app on a Docker image sitting somewhere on the cloud (maybe AWS or Google Cloud) and tie that to my own domain instead of deploying it on Streamlit Cloud. I’m also only using Streamlit to build the first version as a proof of concept, then will move most things over to a traditional web app using either React or Svelte because I’m already doing a lot of HTML and CSS code in the app. If I tie the app to making money, I don’t think I would have the freedom or the enjoyment to work on these ideas in my own free time.

I won’t keep the app completely secret because I’ll obviously share a live demo to people that I know/trust and have a video demo put up on my portfolio when I’m confident enough about the app. I might also use bits and pieces of this app in future Streamlit projects as well. But when it comes to the MAT v2.0’s production version and codebase, maybe I’ll just keep that to myself.

Thank you for sitting through most of my rambling about something that is most likely not going to be publicly shared anytime soon. It was a tough decision to keep the app just to myself and probably not a very common decision, but I think it will be a good decision for me moving forward. You, dear readers, will still see the end products of the app on this blog via the articles that I will be writing about in the near future, so you’re technically not missing out on everything.

I originally intended to include another section to discuss the technical nitty gritty about how I am making the app. But given that this article is already quite long and I’m still working on it as of writing this, it is probably best to leave that for Part 2 when I’ve worked on more of the app and have more to share about the technical side of things. But, for now, thank you for getting to this point of the article!

As a football fan, it is hard to escape the term ‘xG’ or Expected Goals in the past few years. It is everywhere, and I mean everywhere. From articles written by your favourite football/soccer writers, to plenty of posts all over social media, to some of the most popular football apps, and even onto live broadcast of matches in the past couple of years. While xG is becoming a household stat for most fans (despite plenty of hatred that the stat still gets), for football analytics fanaticos and data otakus, most people will know that xG is not really a new metric in the industry.

It is hard to trace back who actually invented xG because the concept of recording the probability of scoring a goal goes a long way back in football history, like way back in the 70s and 80s. There has been various papers since the 90s that have examined and refined the idea by adding more details to such probability in an attempt to add more context to a shot or a goal. But the earliest form of the xG that most people now know and love/hate was popularised by a legend of the industry, Sarah Rudd (formerly Arsenal’s head of analytics), and Opta’s Sam Green. Sarah’s presentation was later built upon by now-Arsenal’s data scientist Karun Singh to become xT (or Expected Threat), while Opta continued to build on Sam’s blog post and became one of the early adopters of the xG that we now know.

There is a reason for all of this talk about xG because it is always important to look back at the past in order to move towards the future. To quote Sébastien Coustou, formerly Parma Calcio’s Head of Football & Analytics,

We really stand on the shoulders of giants.

While xG is probably old enough that the young generations can call it ‘unc’, the future of football analytics is already here. Before talking about exo-skeleton data that various sports (like cricket, tennis, and basketball) are already adopting, tracking data is slowly taking up a more important role not just in the industry, but also for football professionals like players, coaching staff, sports scientists, etc. With xG now entering the mainstream, what lessons can we learn from the usage of xG in media that we can use for tracking data to make it more fun and engaging for everyone?

Data storytelling is an art

Conveying the meaning of a number is always a hard task. It is not only about finding the right context and information to build around that number and turn it from a single number into a full picture, but it is also about delivering the right message to the target audience and help them understand what is happening in the picture. The harder part about that is, there are different audiences with different level of understanding and different needs and intentions.

For the casual football fans, they want quick, easy-to-understand information that can be used to start conversations over a pint or two of beer (or to quickly make a post on social media for engagements, ughh). For the knowledgeable fans, they want a bit more details and in-depth metrics to help them understand why their favourite team(s) are playing well/bad, or to get a better understanding of the players that their club are signing and what they can bring to the team. For football professionals, they want a lot of information and metrics to improve their performance both on- and off-the-pitch, and both on an individual and team level.

The question here becomes, how can data practitioners and data storytellers find the right level of detail to tell a meaningful story? It is impossible to satisfy the needs of everyone, so finding the common ground for everyone is very, very important for a story or a metric to reach a wide audience. xG was able to breakthrough into mainstream because, on the surface, it is a relatively easy metric to understand. Basically, it measures a shot’s possibility of becoming a goal, that’s it. The lower the xG is, the lower the probability of a shot can turn into a goal, and vice versa. But xG is also hated by many because there are a lot of nuances to it, and even some levels of subjectivity, hence the need to create post-shot xG (or xG on target, xGOT in short) to add more context for xG.

Going back to tracking data, it would be a misunderstanding of its potential if tracking data is only used to calculate aggregated stats like xG. Obviously, there are some useful aggregated metrics that can only be calculated using tracking data and can still provide useful insights. But the reason why tracking data exists is to provide a lot more context that event data or aggregated data cannot, and to once again take that context away and restrict tracking data into just a single number is somewhat not getting the most out of it. That is where the second part of data storytelling comes in handy, visualisations.

Moving beyond 2D visualisations

By now, there have been countless football visualisations made by so many football analytics professionals and enthusiasts across different social media platforms, including yours truly on this very blog. From xG timelines, match momentum, pass networks, to player radars, pizza charts, percentile bars, football data have come a very long way.

But the one common theme among those visualisations that I just listed is that they are all plotted on a 2D canvas. They are still useful, no doubt about that, especially for player performance data and aggregated metrics. For tracking data, however, visualising such data on a 2D pitch does not really tell the full story. Sure, it can definitely look like the old days of Football Manager’s 2D view or the player radar view on PES/eFootball or FIFA/EAFC, but there is a reason why those football games still have and show a 3D view of the game. So, why not do that for actual live matches?

There have been attempts at showing a live match along with a player radar like on PES/FIFA, but that has not caught on at all, so I won’t be talking about that. Instead, I want to shift the attention towards what La Liga have been doing this past couple of seasons by using on-screen visualisations with animations to quickly show data and highlight interesting things during the game. The title image and this image below are just two examples of La Liga’s in-game graphics. A few tabloids have said it looks straight out of a video game, which it kinda is, but I think it is a good demonstration of how far tracking data and telestrations have gone in the world of football.

If the NBA on ESPN, Fox Cricket, and Australian Open with HawkEye have these 3D/in-game visualisations, why can’t football have them as well? It is definitely slightly harder in football since there are less downtime for any visualisations to quickly show up, but La Liga have pioneered such technology and have shown that it is possible to show in-game visualisations without significantly affecting the experience of watching a live football match. This is the reason why I wanted to use Sébastien’s quote earlier, football analytics where it is now is standing on the shoulders of giants because these ideas are not new and have already been implemented elsewhere. Nothing is impossible, it is just the matter of when and how those ideas will be re-implemented, but for football.

Originally, I had a bit more plans for this article where I come up with ideas and vizzes that can be introduced onto live broadcasts (albeit in somewhat of a different form) and attempt to use tracking data from Skillcorner to create some new visualisations that I think can be engaging to both the commentators and the fans. Here’s a sneak peak of what I was able to come up with (first in 2D, then mimic 3D through still images).

But a surprise cold came down, which did not help me make as much progress as I wanted to during the weekend. It also allowed me to take a step back and realised that this might take a lot more effort than I originally thought, especially without any telestration tools and me having to edit the still images manually via GIMP and Photopea.

As such, I want to leave this article here and maybe come back later when I feel a bit better and have more time to spend on making telestrations. But hopefully this article will inspire someone to look deeper into making 3D visualisations and create new and useful vizzes!

With the current iteration of the U23 Asian Cup heading into the knockout phase, the best teams have showcased their strengths while a few upsets have happened here and there. But while the attention of most people will immediately turn to the upcoming quarter-final clashes, I want to stay with the group stage for a bit and actually review what happened over the past fairly chaotic week.

I think the group stage of any tournament is usually where teams show the best of their ability and play the style of football that they want to play. Obviously elimination was still on the line, but the stake was definitely lower than the upcoming quarter-final and there were reasons for teams to push themselves in order to hopefully secure a surprise qualification to the knockout phase. I won’t be surprised if a few teams will start to take on a more defensive mentality because it’s knockout football and if there’s a chance to cause an upset, teams will take it. This also means teams won’t play to their true ability, which can be hard to identify good players or interesting tactical points.

So, which interesting tactical trends can we learn from the group stage?

4-4-2 defensive block is the new norm

Personally, I think the fact that a lot of teams during the group stage adopted the 4-4-2 as their out-of-possession mid block or low block is a decent reflection of Asian coaching standard, in a good way of course, since Asian coaches are following what plenty of top European teams are doing. From top teams who adopted it like Japan and South Korea to underdogs like Kyrgyzstan and Lebanon, the 4-4-2 defensive block became a very common sighting during the group stage.

That’s not to say that all teams defend like everyone else in the competition because each team added their own touches to the traditional 4-4-2 block. But the core principles were there: preventing teams from attack down the middle and through the block, guiding the opposition out wide with the aim of creating overloads to regain possession, and attempting to disrupt the opposition’s build-up phase with two strikers. The 4-4-2 is just the perfect fit for these defensive approaches because it has two wide players who can stay in their positions to block wide attacks while also allowing the central midfielders and centre-backs to shift across and provide numerical advantage. It also has two strikers up front, which allows for the closing down of the opposition’s centre-backs and, if done right, blocking their passing options to either flanks using curved pressing runs, which forces them to pass into the block instead.

But where teams added their own touches lied in what they decided to do when they didn’t have the ball and how they approached it. For the favourites like Japan, South Korea or Australia, their 4-4-2 defensive block also became a part of their high press as they attempted to regain possession right inside of the opposition’s half and, sometimes, defensive third and generated high turnovers for a quick counter-attack. While also utilising the strengths of the 4-4-2, teams also tried to deploy a man-to-man press and targeted the opposition’s weak links to aggressively win the ball back or guided the ball wide as usual.

Some teams have had successes with generating high turnovers that eventually ended up as dangerous attacks, including South Korea themselves when they played Iran, or Japan when they met Syria and Qatar. But for others, their level of success stopped at ‘meh’. In fact, because teams tended to over-commit players for their press, their last defensive line was left vulnerable on various occasions due to different reasons.

At times, the opposition had a bit of luck when playing through the press and left the pressing team’s midfielders with little to no time to retreat and support the defenders. This was more dangerous when the opposition had fast attackers who could dribble and get past defenders easily, or a combination of good and quick movements from the opposition’s players, which Uzbekistan demonstrated against Lebanon or even Thailand when they played Australia (even when they were down to 10-men).

Another way where the 4-4-2 high press was hurt was through long passes over the top to encourage attackers to run in behind. This also created a lot of damage for the 4-4-2 mid-block, which most teams also adopted as part of their defensive approach. With teams preferred to have at least three attackers up front, they usually exploited runs into the channels or runs on the outside shoulder of the defenders to receive the long ball in behind. This forced the defensive line to retreat closer to their own goal and stretched the defensive block if the midfielders also did not move back in time, which left a very dangerous gap where creative players could easily exploit.

Most teams chose to get their most technical players into that gap and let them did what they were good at. Some chose to work their way into the box via their own technical ability or by working with their teammates, but some also chose to shoot right when they had the opportunity. This explained the fairly high volume of shots coming from outside of the box, which might have also contributed to the fairly average goal per match tally of 2.125 throughout the group stage.

Asia still have a #9 pandemic

One particular reason for why teams opted to use more long shots is simply because Asian teams still cannot produce an actual out-and-out striker. Someone who is more than just a poacher who is quick when he doesn’t have the ball and only look to crash into the box when a low cross or a cutback comes in. Someone who can actually provide a height advantage for more technical players like wingers or attacking midfielders to target with their floating crosses. And particularly, someone who has a good positioning sense to be at the right position and at the right time to pick up the ball and score 7 or 8 times out of 10.

One look at the current top scorer chart and you will notice the lack of an actual #9 who scored more than 1 goal in the group stage. Only Vietnam’s Nguyễn Đình Bắc, UAE’s Ali Almemari and Iraq’s Amoori Faisal were used as a striker for their respective team, and they all are hybrids between a winger and a striker, not actual #9s. In fact, most of the players who scored more than two goals are either natural attacking midfielders or wingers.

This is in no part any team’s fault and it is not anybody’s fault. It is just the nature of how Asians are because it is rare to find an actual Asian who is tall and has good physicality to play as a focal point up front, probably rarer on the Eastern part of the continent. At the national team level, South Korea’s Cho Gue-sung is probably the best current example for someone who fits the description that I laid out above.

That said, a couple of teams have brought and experimented with the out-and-out #9 profile, but with little to no avail. Nigerian-Japanese striker Brian Seo Nwadike looked fairly out of depth in his first two matches for Japan’s U23 side as he struggled to link up with teammates around him. It is hard to blame him, though, since he is still playing at Japan’s university level while players like Ryunosuke Sato, Yuto Ozeki, or Yumeki Yokoyama are already getting regular minutes for J1 and J2 teams. French-UAE striker Junior Ndiaye has had a fair share of first team experience with Montpellier this season, but he also could not make much impact in the group stage and only managed to score 1 goal.

But every problem disguises itself as a challenge and if you view it from a different perspective, it is also an opportunity, as Japan showcased throughout the group stage and how Uzbekistan went 3-0 up against Lebanon after 60 minutes played. Both teams did not rely on their striker up front to provide the goals, but rather preferred to attack down the wings and put the ball at the feet of their most technical players, which were usually also their best players. While letting them did what they did best with the ball, other teammates around them also provided plenty of support.

That was how Japan’s Ryunosuke Sato and Yuto Ozeki ended up with 3 and 2 goals respectively. Japan usually preferred to attack with wingers like Yumeki Yokoyama, Haruta Kume, Shunsuke Furuya stretched the opposition’s defensive line by staying and receiving the ball wide, and their striker Nwadike held up the ball in the middle. This created spaces inside the half-spaces and also created channels for both Sato and Ozeki to frequently make runs into those areas and receive the ball from their teammate while they were also in good goal-scoring positions.

Uzbekistan also solved the problem in a fairly similar approach, but with a small twist. While still attacking down the wings and using their wingers and midfielders to the fullest, they also created spaces for plenty of off-ball runs and third-man runs to happen by constantly moving the ball side to side and dragging opposition players out of their natural positions. It allowed players like midfielder Sardorbek Bakhromov or winger Asilbek Jumayev to receive the ball in advantageous positions where they could continue to progress deep into the final third.

Is wing attack the most optimal solution?

But, amidst all of those innovative approaches, a question still lingers. Is wing attack the most optimal solution for Asian teams?

Throughout the group stage, that seemed to be the most popular attacking trend with so many teams attempted to enter the final third down both flanks. Crosses also became a somewhat common sighting in the group stage, especially when the opposition had managed to regroup and overloaded their own defensive third. At that point, crosses became the only way out for the attacking team as they were swung into the box as a hit-and-hope solution.

But without an actual #9 inside of the box, those crosses were largely ineffective and only served as an opportunity for the opposition to launch a quick counter-attack. Long shots from wide areas is not a sustainable option either. While one player might get lucky once or twice, it is hard to expect even the most technical player to replicate that long shot all the time, especially when the level of opposition analysis is getting more and more detailed, thus teams will be able to find solutions to limit those long shots sooner or later.

So…what now?

Japan and Uzbekistan have probably demonstrated a potential path moving forward, which is using tactics designed to bring the best out of each team’s best players, which are usually the midfielders or wide players like the wingers or the full-backs. While it is still relying on the core idea of attacking down both wings, these tactics also introduce the use of half-spaces and channels to get the ball into the box in a more effective way. Both teams also did not rely heavily on crosses, instead used plenty of movements and rotations to get their players into more advantageous positions to receive the ball.

While this approach requires high-quality coaching and a coaching staff who can get their players to buy into the ideas in a fairly short timeframe, it’s not impossible. The downside of this tactic is that it can be fairly hard to execute against a 5-man defensive line, where the opposition would most likely have a man advantage on most occasions. Once again, Japan have shown that it can be done against the UAE in the group stage, but it is also hard to compare Japan to anyone else since the quality of their players is very high.

Wing attacks are probably not going anywhere soon and might be more effective at the first team level where having naturalised strikers can be a significant game changer. But at youth levels like the U23 and below where most teams don’t have an actual #9 to lead the line, it becomes an interesting challenge for coaches to find other ways to generate goals and get their best players into good goal-scoring positions. This tournament is also a good opportunity for coaches to experiment with new ideas in an average stake environment and maybe, just maybe, interesting ideas can be found in a niche tournament that not many people pay attention to.

That leads perfectly into the next question…

Does the U23 Asian Cup need to happen every 2 years?

Now, to something different!

One thing that I noticed when I looked at the squads that teams brought to this tournament, which is the age of the players getting called up for this tournament is getting younger. My assumption immediately got validated when I checked Transfermarkt and realised that only the UAE and Lebanon’s squad average age is 22 and above.

While this can be because some teams do not bring their best talents to this tournament like Japan or South Korea, it also highlights a trend that is happening not just in Asia, but also across the world. In the past few years, teams have valued young players higher than ever before and gave them the opportunity to break through into the first team a lot earlier than before. Plenty of household names nowadays are still under 21 as many European teams continue to search all corners of the world for promising, young talents. Two famous alumnis of the U23 Asian Cup’s past few iterations are Manchester City and Uzbekistan’s Abdukodir Khusanov and Tottenham Hotspur and Japan’s Kōta Takai, both would technically still meet the requirements to be called up for this year’s tournament.

That begs the question, does the U23 Asian Cup actually need to be a biennial tournament anymore when this tournament only serves as Asia’s official qualification method for the Summer Olympics?

In the past, it made sense for the tournament to happen every 2 years as it opened up the window for scouts to look for the latest Asian talents coming through the pipeline. But many top teams are now seeing Asia as a serious talent factory, which means scouts and analysts are identifying young Asian talents way before they can even be called up for this tournament. Japan’s Rento Takaoka is a good example as he is already playing in Europe with Southampton and Valenciennes.

It does not make sense to change this tournament to a U21-focused tournament since the U20 Asian Cup is already doing its job. In fact, the quality of the U20 Asian Cup is also getting higher thanks to the quality of players being produced and developed by most Asian nations. The last iteration of the U20 Asian Cup was a good glimpse into what teams could do before they headed off to the U20 World Cup later last year, and I think it should stay that way, as a good practice and competitive environment for Asian teams to get used to before they compete at the worldwide stage.

So, while this tournament is still a good competitive environment where young players can test themselves against their peers from across the continent, where does that leave the U23 Asian Cup in the grand scheme of things?

Considering how much first team football most U23 players are getting at the moment, and the fact that the average age of the tournament is about 21 years old, it might be best to switch to being a quadrennial tournament (or happens every 4 years). This can actually raises the stake for the tournament as it can provide a platform for some players to be called up to the first team for the next Asian Cup. Teams can also experiment with new tactical ideas that they want to use at the next Asian Cup, which can provide interesting ideas for other Asian coaches to study and follow. Basically, the U23 Asian Cup should become a precursor to the next Asian Cup while also retains its status as Asia’s official qualification pathway to the Summer Olympics, in my opinion.

I actually think I might already be slow to the idea since the AFC commitee has agreed to do exactly that in their meeting way back in 2024! It will be a very positive change given the current landscape of football, which is heading towards being younger and being more global.

But, for now, let’s enjoy the final biennial U23 Asian Cup as it heads into the knockout phase!

Dear readers,

Over the holiday period, I’ve had a bit more time to do some reflecting on what I did throughout 2025 and one thing came to mind, which was the feeling of unfulfilled. I have had this feeling for a long while but could never figure out why or what caused it. So, I went and did some soul searching and read a bit about the feeling that I had, which led to me writing this newsletter.

I’ve debated whether I should write this because it is not something that many people will agree with me, especially when it comes to football analytics. I had a draft written during the break but I chose to delete it because I thought no one was going to read it either way. But I think it’s the right thing to write about and, since this is my blog anyway and I can write whatever I want, I think it’s best to share it.

tl;dr:

• I felt very unfulfilled this past couple of years while doing football analytics projects, and that came from the expectation and hope of being given an opportunity to work at football clubs.

• I’m not completely closing the door to working in football, but I’m not treating it as a priority anymore, which I think many people will disagree with me. I also realised that I don’t have to make money from my own hobbies.

• Once again, Talking Tactics is going nowhere and I don’t plan to put it behind a paywall anytime soon. But, this means longer breaks between articles, more experimenting with new formats and ideas to find something that I enjoy writing and reading afterwards.

What happened?

It all stemmed from the project below where I created a Streamlit dashboard within a month. It’s still a project that I’m proud of cause I learned a lot of new skills and techniques to build a dashboard, but it left a weird feeling where it was unfulfilling and I never truly felt satisfied by it.

That prompted me to stop doing anything related to football analytics and did some reflection on why I had felt that way. Turns out, it was because I had set a very unrealistic level of expectation for myself and for the project. I had hoped that by creating a dashboard that was unique and packed it with many features, I would be given the opportunity to work at clubs. When that never came, I felt disappointed in myself for not trying hard enough and immediately wanted to jump straight into another project just to prove a point that I have the skillset to be employed by clubs.

Probably about a year or two into my football analytics journey, I had developed a desire to work full-time at a football club. Every project that I did in the past was to build up a portfolio that I can show to people within the industry with the hope that they will give me an opportunity. In hindsight, that mindset feels very toxic and it is not a healthy way of thinking.

I blame myself for a part of that, but I also got a lot of external pushes from people saying ‘you should get a job for a club’, that I should make money for doing all of this. For the longest of time, I thought that was the norm and kept pushing myself for that opportunity without knowing that I have felt hollow and unfulfilled for most of the time. I did get a few opportunities to work with clubs on a part-time/freelance basis, and while I’m forever grateful for those opportunities, some part of me still felt unfulfilled.

Doing reflections also reminded me of why I started my journey in football analytics. I only started doing this because I wanted to know more about players, specifically about Nordi Mukiele when he first joined Leipzig. I’m happy about all of the experiences and opportunities that I got throughout my journey, but that was not what I had set out to achieve.

I was definitely influenced by the mindset of making money from your hobbies, which I think is not a good habit. Speaking from experiences, that mindset have drained my passion really quickly and led to burnouts after burnouts. It is even more difficult when I was surrounded by people sharing their achievements and employments on different social media platforms because I kept asking myself ‘what have I done wrong to not get the same opportunity’ and being harsher on myself.

I also think the environment within football clubs and organisations is probably not for me. I like to drive changes and innovations by bringing new ideas to the table, and the culture within football is sometimes the complete opposite of that. To paraphrase Benoit Pimpaud (his article is paywalled but you can read it via archival websites), formerly a data engineer for Olympique de Marseille, the culture within football is still not mature enough to accept and embrace football analytics as a part of the workflow and process, and I’m not talking about the simple process of using just Wyscout or Opta and review the data that have been presented and aggregated to them.

What now?

I’m not completely closing the door to working in football, but I’m not treating it as a priority anymore. At the end of the day, I started doing football analytics projects as a hobby and I want to go back to doing that once more without having to think about getting a job or making money from it.

This is the part where I think many people will disagree with me because there are so many people who would trade everything for an opportunity or a career working for football clubs. I’m not in a position to speak for others and I won’t discourage anyone from pursuing a career in football if they feel like they want to, which is also not the purpose of this update. This is just me talking about my experiences and about what I want to do in the foreseeable future, so if you disagree with what I have said above, that’s completely okay.

I think realising that I don’t have to make money from my hobbies have helped me a lot because it has set a barrier between my actual job and what I do outside of it. It also sets a limit for me of what I should be doing with football analytics, which project I want to do for the sake of my own fulfillment, how much should I push myself for those projects, and how much time I should spend on them. I have also refrained from posting and using social media a lot, so if you have followed me on those platforms and not saw me posting, you now know why.

Once again, Talking Tactics is going nowhere and I don’t plan to put it behind a paywall anytime soon. This blog is my passion project and it’s a place where I can write and do whatever I want, with some responsibilities to you, the readers, of course. But, as I have mentioned in my previous update, this means longer breaks between articles as I can only write whenever a spark comes to me. I will also experiment with new formats and ideas more often just to find something that I enjoy writing and reading myself. It’s kinda a self-centric way of thinking, but I believe that if I write something that I don’t enjoy reading it afterwards, how can I ask everyone else to read what I just wrote?

That will be my approach to 2026 and onwards to help put myself in a healthier and fresher mindset. I want to find the fun and enjoyment in doing football analytics stuff again and I want to give this approach a try because I believe that it will help me in the long run.

Thank you for spending time reading my rant. I know these updates are quite personal and not many people want to hear what I want to say about myself, and that’s fine. But if you have made it here, I really appreciate your time and choosing to follow whatever I do. I hope you have a great new year, and please be kind and patient to others.

This was intended to be a two-parter where I covered day 2 and 3 of this year’s U23 Asian Cup separately. But due to my own procrastination and the tournament schedule being so ruthless, it was hard for me to keep up with the routine of watching the matches live, stay up at night to write these articles, then still work a normal day job. Not a common problem that most people have, I know!

Nonetheless, this review is going to be a mega one as I try to cover as many matches as I can from day 2 and 3 to make up for lost time. This might also be the format that I do until the end of the tournament, which is doing a single mega review for each round played instead of splitting them up into separate days (thanks for the scheduling, AFC!). I figured this is the best way for me to maintain the quality as is while also not burning myself out and leave myself with no ideas to do after the tournament is finished.

Without further ado, let’s get into the actions that happened in day 2 and 3 of the group stage, shall we?

Note: All data used here are from Opta with the visualisations created by yours truly unless stated otherwise :)

Japan 5-0 Syria

While most people will deduct from the scoreline that Japan delivered an exceptional and dominant performance against Syria, and I don’t disagree with that point, but there is definitely more to the match than at first glance.

One aspect of Japan’s performance that caught my eyes early was how aggressive their high press was as they looked to chase down Syria’s keeper and defenders even inside Syria’s own penalty box. They seemed to press with a clear intention of guiding the opposition to move the ball out wide by using their #10 Ryunosuke Sato pressed Syria’s keeper while #9 Brian Nwadike closed down the nearest Syrian midfielder who dropped deep to offer to receive the ball. This forced the ball to be played wide on several occasions, an area where Japan were able to create overloads in an attempt to regain possession.

Very minor detail, but Sato’s pressing attempts also played a huge part because he did not run directly at the keeper Maksim Sarraf, which would have left Sarraf with two possible options to pass the ball out. Instead, Sato attacked Sarraf from one side, essentially blocked off that side before approaching the keeper, thus able to guide the ball into the corner where Sato’s teammates were ready to create an overload.

Take the situation above as an example, Sato’s pressing run aimed to block Sarraf’s left-hand side and guided the ball to Sarraf’s right-hand side, which was exactly what the Syrian-Russian keeper did. Also notice how Japan’s left midfielder (#11) Yumeki Yokoyama was already closing Syria’s right-back down, which signaled that they were ready to engage the press on that side of the pitch. The situation did end up with Japan’s left central midfielder (#8) Yuto Ozeki winning the ball in the air, but he could not controlled it properly and gave the ball back to Syria.

Again, very small detail that I don’t think most fans would recognise, but I thought it is interesting to point out because it shows how well-coached Japan usually are and how quick they are with adapting to modern tactical ideas.

Even though I opt to talk about one of Japan’s out of possession ideas first, it was not the main factor that contributed to their win. There is no doubt that their performance with the ball stood out and played a big part in their very convincing win. Ozeki, Sato, and Yokoyama all had a very prolific day individually as they contributed to different aspects of Japan’s attacks but still worked together very well to craft the dangerous chances that they had in front of goal.

Japan’s preference to attack down the left along with width provided by both the full-back and winger definitely helped brought out Yokoyama’s best ability. Since his starting position tended to be near the touchline, he received the ball wide on numerous occasions and used his confidence to take on the opposition’s defenders and helped the team bring the ball into the final third. I highly recommend looking up Yokoyama’s highlights from this match just to see how confident he was with his dribbles and skills as he caused a lot of troubles for the Syrian defenders.

Having both the full-back and winger near the touchline also stretched Syria’s 4-4-2 defensive block and created a lot of spaces in between the lines and also in between the Syrian defenders. Both Ozeki and Sato made very good use of those spaces by making constant runs into the half-space areas to receive the ball from the wide players and continuing the team’s progression into Syria’s defensive third. Those runs were also used to attack the penalty box, which left them in very good goal-scoring positions, and they definitely did not put those opportunities to waste with Sato scored two and assisted two, one of them was for Ozeki to open the score.

But as dangerous as Japan were when they had the ball, they could have scored a few more if not for the performance of Syria’s keeper Sarraf. Yes, he conceded five goals and made the wrong decision to rush out for the ball that ultimately conceded the penalty for Japan during the added time. But he also came up with a few important saves to keep Syria in the first half and only went into the break with a one-goal deficit. The team’s downfall in the second half probably did not help Sarraf because he received little to no help from the defence in stopping Japan’s attacks as Syria tried to push for a goal or two. So, I think he also deserves a bit of credits for what he was able to do to keep Syria in the game.

Probably a single criticism from me about this match was Japan’s striker #9 Nwadike’s performance. At first glance, he definitely looked like he had the physicality to be the out-and-out #9 that Japan had been craving for to lead the line, and that was their intention for playing him up front. Yet, during the match, I thought he looked very out of depth and could not link up with the rest of the team at all. When he was presented with a few chances to score, he wasted all of them and could not take the time to polish those chances better or be in a slightly better position to receive the ball. When Japan tried to use long passes from goal kicks to target Nwadike, he could not win the ball in the air or at least allowed the team to win second balls.

Overall, it was a disappointing performance from Nwadike. But…granted, he is still playing in Japan’s university system and has not signed with any professional club, which explains why he felt like at a different quality compared to the rest of the squad who have been playing for J1 and J2 clubs. I’m only criticising his performance against Syria but I also saw a bit of what he could do, so I won’t rush into judging him straight away.

This performance definitely concreted Japan’s position as the outright favourite to win this year’s tournament and retain their title. With a player core that have played with each other last year at two U20 tournaments along with a few new faces, their team cohesion was on show against Syria with slick passes, small and quick combinations, and their ability to cover for each other. I have nothing much to say about Japan other than I’m excited to see more from them throughout the tournament!

South Korea 0-0 Iran

Having two matches scheduled at the same time is probably a very poor scheduling decision from the AFC, but alas, South Korea were/are now scheduled to play at the same time with Japan and that makes my task a lot harder. But while Japan delivered really good attacking football against Syria, I came away from the clash between South Korea and Iran fairly disappointed since both teams fell short of my expectation as two of the strongest teams in the tournament.

One of the major reasons why I was disappointed about the match was that it was a very stop-start affair due to players making aggressive challenges towards each other and injuries happened every 15 or 20 minutes. It probably prevented both teams from finding their own rhythm and took control of the game, and also prevented both teams’ key players from doing their own magic. There were a few occasions where it was possible to see a glimpse of what they could do, but overall, I don’t think anyone actually left a huge impact on the match.

Amidst all of that, I was still fairly impressed with how South Korea approached this match, particularly when they did not have the ball. Using a somewhat similar pressing approach to Japan’s, South Korea pressed their opposition whenever the ball was in Iran’s defensive third. Their press was intense and aggressive, with players looking to chase the ball down and guided Iran to play the ball out wide, where they also could create overloads and made tackles to recover possession.

They were very successful with their press, so successful that their high turnovers might have generated more attacking chances for South Korea than their settled possession sequences. Iran’s lack of build-up ideas probably helped with that too; because whenever they had the ball in their own half, the defenders, keeper, and midfielders could only pass the ball among themselves while hoping that one of South Korea’s two flanks would open up or their right winger #10 Mohammad Hosseinnejad would be unmarked to receive the ball.

But as good as South Korea’s press was, they were not able to capitalise on those high turnovers to create more dangerous chances to at least put Iran’s goal under threat. The fact that they only had a single shot on target in the entire game probably said enough about South Korea’s attacking inefficiency, and drilling deeper into the chances that they had doesn’t make the situation any better. They relied heavily on getting the ball wide to the wingers, who did have a bit of impact thanks to their dribbles, but their crosses into the box were not good enough to put their strikers into a good goal-scoring position.

The same can be said about Iran’s attacking chances, though I thought they came a bit closer thanks to the counter-attacks that they had by winning the ball from South Korea inside of their own half. With South Korea’s preference to commit numbers forward for their attacks, they only left the two centre-backs back home to defend against counter-attacks and Iran was able to make use of that. But as Iran got into the final third, their wing reliance also backfired with South Korea quickly regrouped and overloaded the box, making it a lot harder for any Iranian attackers to connect with the crosses coming into the box.

As much as I wanted to find something positive to talk about the match, the overall picture was that there were so many reasons for why both teams failed short of most people’s expectations. With Uzbekistan still to play for both, I’m curious how will the result of this match affect the final standings after the third round of the group stage, and whether any team will look back at this regretting about not doing enough to get more than a single point.

Uzbekistan 3-2 Lebanon

Personally, I was quite excited for this clash because this (and the tournament as a whole) was a good opportunity to check up on Uzbekistan’s progress with their ever-improving youth development system and spot any potential players who might be on the plane to the US in the summer. Lebanon are also an unknown factor in this year’s tournament, they have every chance to be a dark horse and create some surprises along the way, including upsetting Uzbekistan in their U23 Asian Cup debut match.

That seemed to be the case during the early minutes as both teams came out with a positive gameplan, but that was quickly shut down by Uzbekistan, who took control of the game through their high intensity playing style and forced Lebanon back into a defensive mentality for the majority of the match. When they had the ball, they never looked like wanting to slow the game down or took a bit of a breather, thus allowed Lebanon to resettle into their defensive shape and made the task of breaking their 4-4-2 block down much tougher.

By constantly moving the ball and looking forward with every passes, Uzbekistan embraced the chaos and used that to their advantage to create plenty of scoring chances. Through the use of a lot of off-ball runs from their midfielders and wingers, the Uzbek players opened up plenty of spaces in between Lebanon’s defensive shape to pass the ball through and progressed into the final third with ease. They were also quite wing reliant and created plenty of passing triangles in order to make the progression phase a lot easier. It probably also helped that the Uzbek players looked to have very good chemistry with each other and they worked off and supported each other very well.

But as good as their build-up was, Uzbekistan initially did not enjoy a very good spell in front of goal. Their early chances felt quite rushed as their attackers usually had more time to control the ball and the shot, yet they just opted to take the shot right after receiving the ball and ended up firing it over the bar. Their opening goal was an immediate contrast to their previous chances up until that point, with a shot that was aimed towards the goal being parried by the Lebanese keeper straight into Uzbekistan’s right winger #17 Amirbek Saidov’s path for an easy rebound.

Saidov and his teammates could have easily scored more than a single goal in the first half and had even more opportunities to put the game to bed in the second half. If the players could have taken a bit more time on the ball or anticipated the ball a bit better, they would have been in better goal-scoring positions to put the ball into the back of the net. Nonetheless, that did not seem to affect their performance in the second half as they came out from the break with high spirits and scored two more fairly well-worked goals.

Lebanon only seemed to get into the game after they went 3-0 down and made three changes at the 61st minute. Probably with the mentality of having nothing to lose, they pushed forward more often and played a bit faster than they did in the first half, and that actually helped them got closer to Uzbekistan’s goal.

Not that they did not create any chances in the first half, but there was a sense of cautiousness in their approach to moving the ball forward and that either allowed Uzbekistan to regain possession fairly easily or Lebanon created a fairly harmless chance. Their first goal, which was also #19 Leonardo Shahin’s first of his two goals, was a good example of what they were capable of creating when they actually played with a more positive approach.

This match was also a match of individual brilliance that saw Uzbekistan’s central midfielder #7 Sardorbek Bakhromov and left winger #11 Asilbek Jumayev left a huge impact on the match. Bakhromov was a key cog in Uzbekistan’s midfield as he appeared both very deep to offer a passing option for the centre-backs and very high up the pitch through his off-ball runs to be the third-man in a passing triangle. His technical ability was very good as it allowed him to receive and control the ball in tight spaces, evaded the pressure from the Lebanese players, then turned to face forward almost immediately. His off-ball runs from the middle of the pitch into the half-spaces were also utilised to its maximum as it allowed Bakhromov to be in advanced positions to create chances for his teammates.

Bakhromov’s teammate in front of him, Jumayev, also possessed a similar skillset and, like most wingers that I have covered in this article, was very confident in taking the opposition’s defenders on. While his dribbles and skills caused a lot of troubles for Lebanon’s right-back, he lacked a bit of composure to time his passes and crosses a bit better to add a bit more threat to the chances that he created for his teammates. But hopefully those aspects will come over time for Jumayev as he gains more playing time and experiences with both his club and country.

Another team who have started this tournament in a very strong position and put themselves into the conversation for one of the favourites to win the title, Uzbekistan are showing people why they should not be ignored any longer. Having won the title in 2018, a new generation of the White Wolves is eager to replicate that feat and potentially win a spot on the plane to the US in a few months time. For Lebanon, I think they are still a fairly unknown factor having chose not to show everything that they could do against Uzbekistan. The odds are once again stacked against them when they face Iran and South Korea, but I think it’s still too early to count them out just yet.

Australia 2-1 Thailand

Many have said a red card can turn the game on its head very quickly, and while that statement have become less and less true nowadays due to tactical setups and planning, it doesn’t mean that it’s not happening anymore. The clash between Australia and Thailand might be a good example of that given how different the game state was during the first 10 minutes and the remainder of the match.

A quick glance at both teams’ lineups would suggested Australia to be the clear favourites due to most players in the squad being regular starters or getting frequent minutes in the A-League Men. But Thailand were actually the team who started out stronger and even looked to control early possession along with creating a few chances, and they were eventually rewarded with a very early, fairly scrappy goal from a corner situation. That advantage quickly went away when left-back #21 Phon-Ek Jensen made a tackle that very deservedly be awarded with a red card.

Up until Jensen’s red card, Australia looked like they were the second-best team for the majority of the time. Even though they did create a few chances here and there, the fact that Thailand started the match very positively probably caught them by surprise. They also had to do a bit more defending than they would have wanted due to Thailand’s plan of using long passes and through balls to look for runs in behind Australia’s defensive line. That plan persisted throughout the match and helped the Southeast Asian side created a few dangerous counter-attacks that they should have capitalised, if not for their attackers’ lack of composure and willingness to shoot from anywhere and at anytime they had the opportunity to do so.

It was probably not a good sign that even with a man advantage, Australia still left the door open for Thailand to find their way back into the game. If not for Thailand’s wastefulness in front of goal, the scoreline could have been very different. I can also say the same about Australia’s attacks honestly, because with the attacking power that they had up front, they could have and should have scored more than two goals, which one of them came from a penalty situation that was very debatable.

Winger #11 Yaya Dukuly and attacking midfielder #10 Aydan Hammond did leave some impacts on the game with their confidence to dribble and get past the Thai defenders with ease most of the time. But for Dukuly, those individual efforts only resulted in a few fouls drawn, including the penalty that central midfielder #14 Ethan Alagich converted, but not much else. Hammond did a bit better as his dribbles into the box drew the attention of the few Thai defenders, which allowed him to set up a couple of good goal-scoring chances for Alagich and striker #16 Luka Jovanović that were unexpectedly missed by the Adelaide United duo.

Meanwhile, Australia’s remaining winger #23 Mathias Macallister was the one player who took the match into his own hands and made it his own. Initially started on the right-hand side, he was left isolated due to Australia’s preference to attack down Dukuly and left-back #2 Aidan Simmons’ left wing. But the decision to swap Dukuly and Macallister’s positions after Thailand’s red card created more variety in how Australia attacked and also put the Sydney FC youngster in a position where he was more comfortable with.

Before scoring this worldie here, Macallister already had two attempts where he executed the exact same move. He would receive the ball out wide, then attempted to cut inside on his preferred right foot while also baited the Thai defenders to commit to a challenge and opened up the space for himself to shoot. The only difference between the first two chances and this worldie is that the first two were taken outside of the penalty box, which gave the Thai keeper a bit more time to adjust his positioning and save the shot fairly comfortably. This one, however, was directly inside of the box and the ball was curved to the far angle of the goal, leaving little to no chance for the Thai keeper to save it.

Once again, I’m giving credits to the losing team’s keeper and I think the Thai keeper #23 Chommaphat Boonloet deserved a bit of attention as well. While there was not much that he could do to stop Macallister’s goal, he did do a whole lot more afterwards to save a few of Australia’s dangerous chances and kept his team in the game. Even when Thailand switched to a back five after the red card, their defence was breached multiple times and conceded plenty of dangerous chances that could have made the scoreline a lot worse than it is. But Boonloet and centre-back #5 Nathan James showed up at important moments to dampen the damage.

While they did end up with all three points, Australia only had themselves to blame for not scoring more goals that could potentially help them with their goal difference. But the positives that they showed in this match should give them some confidences heading into the remaining two matches if they are to realise their goal to advance further into the tournament. The same goes with Thailand, they did leave a good impression even though they were down to 10 men, and it is good that Iraq drew China in a goalless match, which should still give them a fighting chance for qualification into the next round.

First and foremost, happy new year, dear reader!

As we roll into the new year, it is also the start of a new tournament calendar and a whole host of competitions that take place across the world. While AFCON is entering the knockout phase at the time of writing, the AFC are also busy preparing for two major tournaments that will be happening during the first quarter of 2026, the first of which is the AFC U23 Asian Cup that has kicked off yesterday with the first two matches from Group A.

The opening day of the U23 Asian Cup’s latest edition somewhat delivered with two wins for the favourites in Vietnam and Saudi Arabia. But while the scoreline is straightforward to understand, what else can we learn from Vietnam’s performance against Jordan and how convincingly did the Southeast Asian side secure the win? Let’s dive into the data, shall we?

Personally, the opening match was an interesting one, mainly because of the way Vietnam completely shattered my assumptions based on previous tournaments that I got to watch them. I will get to that talking point in just a bit, but to give a quick summary of the match, it felt more like a game of two halves where Vietnam were slightly in control of both halves.

First half

It was the first half that changed my view on Vietnam’s current U23 side since they looked very comfortable playing out from the back, probably for the first time since ever. Previous tenures and tournaments saw Vietnam played the role of the underdog and took up a more defensive approach, and it worked by helping them reached the final in 2018, until it didn’t when teams who control possession well started playing through their defensive block like a pair of scissors cutting through a sheet of paper. During the first half, however, it was Vietnam who took up the latter role as their share of possession was 55.4% and the players demonstrated a high level of comfort while playing through Jordan’s high and fairly aggressive press.

One positive thing about Vietnam’s ball possession sequences was that it was not mainly the centre-backs and the central midfielders passing the ball sideways or among each other. Because the players were constantly under pressure from Jordan’s high press, even deep inside Vietnam’s own half, there were not that many opportunities for the players to slow the play and pass among each others. This forced the three centre-backs to constantly find solutions to beat the press, either by playing through the press to the central midfielders or making a long pass forward for one of the attackers to run in behind.

But this is where my criticisms start, unfortunately. Even though Vietnam were able to create plenty of chances through their build-up and progression sequences, those chances did not seem to be very dangerous towards Jordan’s goal. This has been an ever-present problem for Vietnam at all levels, partly because the teams never have a consistent and out-and-out #9 up top who can contribute to the team’s play, hold up the ball in key areas while also scoring goals, and the current U23 side is not an exception either.

This meant that Vietnam were unable to progress the ball down the middle and had to rely on the pace of their wing-backs and wingers to get the ball into the final third instead. With Nguyễn Đình Bắc started up front, the team also could not use crosses to get the ball into the box and they only had very few opportunities where they could enter Jordan’s penalty box through open play. As a result of these deficiencies, the players had to shoot from anywhere they could and whenever they had the opportunity, and while some of the shots were on target and forced a few saves from Jordan’s goalkeeper Abdel Rahman Al Talalga, they were never too threatening to be an actual goal.

Vietnam actually did make up for that by being quite threatening from the few corners that they had in the first half. A combination of player movement and good ball delivery directly from the corner spot allowed them to create space for one or two players to move into and make first contact with the ball. That was exactly how centre-back Nguyễn Hiểu Minh scored Vietnam’s second and, ultimately, winning goal. While the question of ‘whether relying on set pieces can be sustainable throughout the whole tournament’ will continue to linger, at least it was good that Vietnam have found an avenue where they can score goals a bit more consistent than from open play.

Second half

Heading into the second half with a 2-0 lead, it was understandable that Vietnam chose to drop off and focused on defending that lead for their first three points of the tournament. This allowed Jordan to come back into the game, control more of the ball, and create goal-scoring chances. From making just 6 shots in the first half, Jordan more than doubled that tally in the second half with 14 shots. But that possession dominance was not translated into anything meaningful since the players were quite wasteful with their chances, only managed to register 2 shots on target from the 14 that they created after the break.

Wastefulness was only half the reason why Jordan could not score though, as credits must be given to Vietnam’s defence for being tough to beat and stopped plenty of attempts to enter the box from Jordan. In particular, Hiểu Minh himself had a fairly eventful second half as he did not shy away from making challenges and showed up at important moments to intervene a threatening attack. Combining that defensive performance with the corner goal that he scored in the first half and he gets my vote for the Player of the Match.

His performance highlighted a very high level of composure both on and off the ball, even though he was playing at the centre of Vietnam’s back three. Defensively, he never showed a strong tendency to lunge into a challenge or make an aggressive tackle, but rather opted to position himself at the right place to block a shot or stick out a leg to win the ball back. While other teammates around him committed fouls here and there, he did not concede a foul and still managed to recover the ball joint-most among Vietnam’s backline and was only topped by the central midfield pairing.

When he had the ball in the first half, Hiểu Minh’s composure was an important factor that helped Vietnam progressed through Jordan’s high press and get the ball to players who were more capable at bringing it forward to the attackers. He also did not shy away from making long passes forward to encourage the front three to make runs in behind either. In total (and proportion), out of Hiểu Minh’s 43 passes, 35 of them (81.4%) were forward passes and 8 (18.6%) were long passes, the most in both categories for all Vietnam’s outfield players. It capped off a very promising performance and put him firmly into my list of players to watch for the rest of the tournament.

Conclusion (and tl;dr)

I honestly don’t think the scoreline reflected the match too well. While Vietnam definitely deserved the win, the scoreline could have easily been 1-0 or something similar if not for the penalty that Jordan conceded during the 15th minute. Both teams had their own struggles in front of goal and Vietnam only came out with three points thanks to two dead ball situations, but it would still prove to be an important three points for the Southeast Asian side.

I praised Vietnam’s performance but they were not without flaws, which they will need to address soon ahead of their remaining group stage clashes if they want to realise their goal of reaching the semi-final. For Jordan, this was a match where they never seemed to be in the driver seat as their performance was fairly underwhelming for the majority of the match. They are not entirely out just yet, but will need to improve quickly and hope that other results will go their way to give them a slim chance to squeeze through to the quarter-final.

While I am quietly doing my reflection of this year in an attempt to find a different approach to make the process of working on football projects more fun and honest for myself, I stumbled across two unfinished articles about two data rabbit holes that I thought were quite interesting to me. Those ideas are still fascinating to dive deeper into, but even though I have gone to the extent to gather data and create a visualisation for it, those ideas just did not have enough ground to make up a solid article without me going on a ramble episode.

So, as a potentially final article for 2025 and as an early holiday gift, I have condensed both articles into two bite-size articles that still covers the visualisation that I have made while also not too long to feel like me rambling too much. Hope you will enjoy these very random, data-focused rabbit holes!

The curious case of Bundesliga teams and European football

In the past few seasons, there have been many Bundesliga teams who have not achieved the same height after playing in Europe. Without counting top teams like Bayern München, Borussia Dortmund, Leipzig, or Bayer Leverkusen, and teams who were somewhat consistent in Europe in the past like Borussia Mönchengladbach, Schalke 04, and VfL Wolfsburg, there are more than a handful of Bundesliga teams who have dropped off quite significantly after experiencing the height of playing continental football. The fluctuation in league position for the aforementioned teams, mostly for Dortmund nowadays, are either due to inefficient recruitment, managerial inconsistency, or off-field shenanigans. As such, I will only be looking at the remaining teams in the league, their European adventures, and the aftermath of those adventures.

Quick housekeeping

I will also only be examining from the 2009/10 season afterwards, which was when the UEFA Cup was reformed into the Europa League as we now know and familiar with. I am not that familiar with the UEFA Cup, and also with the complication of the Intertoto Cup, there are just too many variables that need to be taken into account. So I will be sticking to what I know, which is the current Europa League, the recently-formed Conference League, and the Champions League for some teams. Okay, with the housekeeping stuff out of the way, let’s get into the data!

What does the data highlight?

If there is only one example of a Bundesliga team who played in Europe then significantly dropped off in the seasons afterwards, then I will say it was that team’s problem of not managing or distributing the European money well to benefit the club. If there are two examples of such situation, then I will say both teams were in a similar situation. If there are three examples, then okay, there might be a correlation here…If there are four examples, then there is definitely something that is happening with German teams after playing in Europe. If there are more examples, then the problem is actually very real!

Three teams that easily come to mind that have experienced that “symptom” are Union Berlin and Heidenheim. With Union Berlin, their rise to the top of the Bundesliga since their promotion in the 2019/20 season had been steady and solid. Under Urs Fischer, they qualified for the Conference League, then moved up to the Europa League, and eventually reached the Champions League. But it was that season in the UCL that Union started to experience their downward trajectory, which left them 15th on the league table after the conclusion of the 2023/24 season, 13th at the end of the 2024/25 season, and currently 11th after 12 matches of the 2025/26 season as they slowly bounce back.

Heidenheim are also experiencing a similar symptom. Their rise from the Regionalliga to the Bundesliga under Frank Schmidt was nothing short of a magical run, and they capped it off with a Conference League spot for the 2024/25 season. Yet they only barely survived last season after finished in 16th and after beaten SV Elversberg in the promotion/relegation playoff, and after 12 matches of the 2025/26 season, they currently sit 16th once more with just 8 points to their name.

After recovering from a dreadful start to the 2024/25 season under Bo Svensson, Mainz 05 and Bo Henriksen finished last season in 6th place, which earned them a spot in the Conference League this season. But their fortunes have completely flipped this season as Mainz are finding themselves bottom of the Bundesliga table with two points less than Heidenheim’s current tally and a single win after 12 matches. They are the three most recent examples of Bundesliga teams who played in Europe then struggled in the league afterwards, but there have been a few more:

• As the title image suggested, 1.FC Köln’s 2017/18 season, where they played in the Europa League and finished last in the Bundesliga in the same season. They actually suffered the symptom again in 2022/23, where they finished 11th in the same season they played in Europe and got relegated in the season afterwards.

• VfL Wolfsburg qualified for the 2015/16 Champions League group stage, and while they managed to finish 8th in the same season, they finished 16th in the two season afterwards and survived two playoff wins to retain their Bundesliga status. They bounced back and made their return to the Europa League first in the 2019/20 and 2020/21 seasons, then back to the UCL group stage in the 2021/22 season, but Die Wölfe have since returned to a downward trajectory.

• This (2025/26) season was not the first time that Mainz 05 got the symptom, having encountered it twice after they played in the Europa League in 2011/12 then finished 13th in the same season, and in 2016/17 where they finished 15th.

• SC Freiburg also got the symptom twice in the 2013/14 season, where they also played in the Europa League and finished 14th in the same season, only to be relegated next season, and the 2017/18 season where they finished 15th, three points off of Wolfsburg’s 16th place.

• Eintracht Frankfurt experienced the same symptom in the similar timeframe as Freiburg, they finished in 13th in the 2013/14 season and recovered relatively quickly to finished 9th in the 2014/15 season, but they then finished 16th in 2015/16 and only survived by winning the promotion/relegation playoff match.

Of these examples that I have listed, only Freiburg and Frankfurt have managed to stabilise themselves and got themselves to a position where they are constantly competing for and securing a European spot every season afterwards. Both clubs have used the revenue from playing in Europe well to reinvest back into their squad with slightly different recruitment strategies, which have turned that inconsistent revenue stream from UEFA to a consistent stream, thus providing a solid foundation for both Freiburg and Frankfurt to be competitive every year.

Some of the successful recruitment strategies that both Freiburg and Frankfurt have applied includes:

• Buying undervalued players from domestic rivals for a fairly low price tag, with examples like:

  • Maximillian Eggestein, Michael Gregoritsch, Eren Dinkci, Patrick Osterhage, Igor Matanovic for Freiburg

  • Michael Zetterer, Jonathan Burkardt, Ansgar Knauff, Can Uzun, Nathaniel Brown for Frankfurt

• Buying underperformed strikers and provide a platform for them to show their ability, with examples like:

  • Sebastian Haller, Luka Jovic, Ante Rebic, Andre Silva, Randal Kolo Muani, Hugo Ekitike, Omar Marmoush for Frankfurt

• Invest in undervalued talents from other European leagues, with examples like:

  • Willian Pacho, Hugo Larsson, Jean-Matteo Bahoya, Kaua Santos, Oscar Hojlund for Frankfurt

What can we learn here?

The lesson is, sometimes, playing in Europe actually do more harm than good to a team. When a team participate in the UEFA Cup, Europa League, or now, the Conference League, the spotlight is on that team as they try to put on a magical performance that will put them into the history books. But, once that spotlight is gone, not many people actually follow up on that team to see if they are still kicking around, if not thriving, or are they feeling the effect of that European season and are currently struggling.

Bundesliga clubs are at a better financial position than some Eastern European clubs who have completely disappeared after a season or two in Europe, but that does not mean some Bundesliga clubs are not affected by that problem. One of the main reasons is plainly because clubs tend to overinvest into the playing squad for a single season, which leaves them in a worse financial position when European football is not on their calendar. Another reason is clubs do not redistribute and reinvest the revenue that comes from UEFA very well, thus that revenue cannot continue to sustain the club and generate future revenue for the club to keep them competitive.

It is not all doom and gloom, however, as Freiburg and Frankfurt have shown. There are definitely lessons to be learned from both teams on how to reinvest the revenue from playing in Europe into a revenue stream that can sustain the club long-term. Whether it is from smart recruitment strategies or off-the-pitch revenue streams, there are always rooms for clubs to improve on their financial decisions.

Why does this season’s AFC Champions League Two feels different?

Speaking of recruitment, if you have been following the AFC Champions League Two this season, you might notice something a bit different than previous seasons.

Asian clubs’ lineups back in the days were definitely not flooded with foreign players when the foreign players cap was still in place. Before 2022, all clubs from the East and West could only register 4 foreign players for the AFC competitions, three non-AFC players and one player from any other AFC members. Since 2022, the AFC have loosened the cap bit by bit, going from being able to register any amount of foreign players but clubs could only fielded 3+1 players in 2022 and 5+1 in 2023-24, to completely remove the cap when the competition was reformed and split into the AFC Champions League Elite and the AFC Champions League Two that we now know. Interestingly, these changes coincide with the heavy investment in star players by the Middle East clubs, but it’s probably just a coincidence…right?

While the lineup of Western Asian clubs look ever closer to a club who regularly plays in the UEFA Champions League thanks to those ‘timely’ changes from the AFC, the Eastern Asian clubs have also capitalised on those changes to bolster their lineup with major signings before this season started. Vietnam’s Nam Dinh and Singapore’s Lion City Sailors are just two clubs who have taken things to the extreme, but other Southeast Asian clubs have also spent big to bring in their own foreign signings.

Obviously there are two sides to this argument. On one side, bringing high quality foreign players into the club will help the development of local talents as they are able to train and receive mentoring from the foreign players. It is not a usual occurrence that Vietnamese players get to play and train alongside Ajax Amsterdam academy graduate and former Norwich City full-back Mitchell Dijks or former Brighton & Hove Albion striker Percy Tau, right?

However, on the opposite side, and the side that I am on, I start to question the sustainability of such approach and whether this is actually a good long-term thing for the club. There are so many questions surrounding the risk of bringing so many players in for a very short period of time. But before that,…what does the data say?

What does the data highlight?

While Eastern Asian clubs have always relied on the quality of foreign players in past Champions League seasons, this year has seen an unprecedented rise, with both Nam Dinh and Lion City Sailors leading the way in average minutes played percentage by foreign players. The two aforementioned clubs are somewhat outliers as foreign players took up more than 70% of their average minutes played, but the average for most Eastern Asian clubs is still on the high end, around 63%.

For clubs at the lower end like Pohang Steelers and Gamba Osaka, it’s easy to explain why their minutes played share by foreign players is significantly lower than the rest of the East. Japanese and South Korean clubs have never had to rely very heavily on foreign players to achieve good results in the Champions League because their domestic players are more than good enough to help them advance beyond the quarter-final. You do not have to look any further for an example as Kawasaki Frontale only used two foreign players in Erison and Marcinho during the knockout stages and on their way to the Champions League Elite final last season. Technically, they also had goalkeeper Jung Sung-ryong, who did not play any knockout matches, centre-back Cesar Haydar and striker Patrick Verhon, who both only played in two group stage matches each. Even though Macarthur’s foreign players have played more than 50% of their average minutes in the Champions League Two, they do not have as many foreign players as other Southeast Asian clubs due to them having to comply with the A-League Men’s foreign player cap and limited resources available to Australian clubs.

For the rest of the East, this highlights a fairly significant problem where clubs who do not have a strong domestic core have to rely heavily on the quality of the foreign players that they recruit. This problem has always been there for most Eastern Asian clubs, but with the cap now completely removed by the AFC and no financial regulations in place, clubs can theoretically recruit an unlimited number of foreign players as long as their finance allows. While this can increase the level of competitiveness for the competition, I think this will do more harm than good to the clubs.

What are some of the risks for East Asian clubs?

The obvious risk of this approach is to the club’s finance. The ability to recruit and field an unlimited number of foreign players will definitely encourage clubs to spend beyond their financial capability, which for most clubs can bring long-term consequences if they do not maintain their spot in the Champions League. For clubs who have strong financial backing like Lion City Sailors, the damage will be slightly less substantial and harder to spot. However, for clubs like Nam Dinh or Kaya-Iloilo, overspend what they are capable of is a one-way ticket to the realm of bankruptcy.

For example, it is fairly unlikely that players who have made a name for themselves in Europe and Brazil and are still somewhat in their prime like Mitchell Dijks, Percy Tau, Arnaud Lusamba, or Chadrac Akolo would take a significant paycut to join a Vietnamese club. As such, their salaries are likely to be one of the highest, if not the highest, that a Vietnamese club have ever paid a foreign player. Even worse, the contracts that are given out to these players are likely to be 1-year long to only cover the Champions League Two campaign, which means there is no possibility of selling these players to potentially recoup some of the salary paid, so most of their very high salaries are almost certainly a loss to the club.

Another risk is loss of club identity. This is a debatable one as there are always two sides to this argument, one set of fans (mostly Asian fans) prefer clubs to prioritise short-term wins by bringing in the best players possible; the other, smaller set of fans might worry a bit about whether the players who are representing their club are actually playing for the shirt. For me, if you are one of the clubs who represent your country at a continental level, it is more important to trust the local players who understand what it means to play for the club and push themselves against better players. In the end, the local players are somewhat an extent of the fans, there is nothing better than seeing a player who have grown up in the surrounding areas, went through the club’s youth level, to playing for the club at a continental level, which allows the fans to buy into the club and support the club even more.

Not last, not least (but I don’t want to make this article very long), is the risk that this approach poses to domestic players. As clubs prioritise short-term results over the development of local players, their minutes get restricted and hinders their development, which also makes the national team worse because most of a nation’s best players should be playing at the continental level. I think either Herve Renard or Roberto Mancini have spoken up about this problem when more foreign players are taking over the Saudi Pro League, leaving local Saudi Arabian players with less and less minutes played and weaken the player pool selection for the national team as a result. It has already happened across a few East Asian national teams, which is one of the main reasons that drives a massive boom in naturalisation for Southeast Asian nations, and it is only going to get worse if things do not change.

What can we learn here?

The lession is, once again, overinvesting into the playing squad and foreign-players-leaned recruitment approach are not usually the way to go if a club want to become sustainable in the long run. This is not a significant problem in European football because there is at least an intention to focus on the long-term and not trying to run the club into the ground. But, in most cases, Asian clubs prefer to think short-term and that never ends up very well for their fortune.

Finding a healthy balance between foreign and domestic players contribution is not easy and I have not seen a club outside of Japan or South Korea who have done that very well. With football analytics being mostly geared towards Europe and the Americas, I definitely think this is a niche area where having more data can be extremely helpful because recruitment models and strategies that work for European and American clubs might not work very well for Asian clubs. The same goes for any kind of data-driven processes because of how different football is being run in Asia besides from having the ball on a pitch and 22 players try to chase after it.

But, until then, there are a lot left to be desired about how Asian clubs are being run. The AFC definitely will not change the regulations anytime soon, at least not until the Saudi boom dies down a fair bit, which means East Asian clubs can freely spend the money that they do not have on players who are most likely not going to bring any monetary values back to those clubs. If lucky, the recruited foreign players might turn out to be a solid player and can bring values on the pitch, which will soften the blow a bit, but will definitely not slow down the downward trajectory that can lead to something fairly significant in the future. Something like a relegation from the top division or outright bankruptcy are not off the table.

The kitty is finally out of the bag…

I have been busy for the past month building a new Streamlit dashboard from scratch using what I have learned so far on my own journey and the lessons that I gathered from building the first two. Like most of my recent projects, I treat this dashboard as a one-off project which serves as a time capsule of what I was capable of doing at this point in time. The goal is simple, I want to have a project that I can look back on in 3 years time and cringe at how I have written the code or how I built certain functionalities.

Do I want to cater this project to people working in football and as a way to find opportunities? I would be lying if I say no, but having been through a lot with the industry this year, that is not one of my top priorities and it only plays a very small part. If there is any intention, then it is to show people working in football of the tools and dashboards that they can have and build, even with limited resources, because I built this dashboard on my own, with no paid tools used anywhere during my development process. It is somewhat an extention to the Tiny Tools, Tiny Teams article that I wrote a while back.

This dashboard was also meant to be part of a slightly different project that came with the article below that will now be stuck in the Draft Dungeon of Ideas That Will Never Be Executed. While some of the original functionalities stayed over to this new dashboard, the initial intention was very different and I had to repurpose both the repository and the idea for this new dashboard.

Without further rambling on about my own thoughts, I will leave you with the link to the app so you can have a play with it, the link to the GitHub repository for anyone who is interested to see how bad my code is, and an introduction to the functionalities of the app that I have written on my portfolio, if you are too lazy to move in between pages.

• https://alw-recruitment-dashboard.streamlit.app/

• https://github.com/daryl-g/alw-toty-dashboard

Overview

Having taken a fairly long break from working on football projects, I was inspired by the new A-League Women season that will kick off in late October 2025 (at the time of writing) and the league’s inclusion in the latest Football Manager installment. As a bid to learn more about the league, the clubs, and the players ahead of the new season, I returned to Streamlit with a new perspective and new knowledge learned to create a recruitment dashboard, inspired by Football Manager’s functionalities.

Functionalities

• In a hypothetical world with a data-driven club, most of the decision-making process is driven by data, thus there is a need for the data to be available and accessible at key decision-makers’ fingertips. The dashboard addresses most of that concern, thanks to Streamlit Cloud’s infrastructure for hosting the dashboard and the data being stored on the cloud, allowing for immediate access and request from the dashboard.

• Streamlit also supports responsiveness, which allows the dashboard to be viewed on-the-go and during important moments where data can be used to support and present to relevant stakeholders such as coaches, sporting directors, head of recruitment, etc.

• The dashboard can also be used by the players, encouraging them to take more ownership of their data while also educating them on their own performance data that can be beneficial for their development and improvement on the pitch, which was inspired by Vosse de Boode’s approach for Ajax Amsterdam.

• In contrast to previous Streamlit dashboards that I made, this dashboard prioritises visualisations interactivity, which makes the dashboard feels more modern and allows for more data to be viewed, in contrast to serving static Matplotlib visualisations on the front-end.

• That does not mean Matplotlib visualisations are not used here, however, as the dashboard still allows the user to save visualisations created on the front-end by mirroring Plotly’s visualisations as closest as possible.

Limitations

Since this was meant to be a one-off project, there were features and functionalities that had to be left off due to time and resource limitation. However, I hope that the dashboard serves as a foundation for better ideas with more time and resources, either by football organisations or sport technology-focused companies.

Two things before I finish off this article:

• Unfortunately the dashboard will not receive any further updates and supports heading into the new season. As much as I would love to do so, this was a solo project of mine and I had spent most of my free time over the past month to work on it while also balanced between a full-time job as well. I have decided for this project to be a one-off so I am not obsess over it and I want to have a bit of those free time back as some downtime and do my own things.

• If anyone is interested in knowing more about the development process of the dashboard, like my thought process and why I chose to do certain things or wrote my code in a certain way, let me know in the comments and I will write a Dev Log edition specifically for this dashboard and explain everything!

  Leave a comment

At the time of writing, matchday 2 of the U20 World Cup has come to an end with a few teams already secured their ticket to the next round while the rest are still battle for the remaining spots. Along with those results, a host of promising youngsters from across the globe also had the opportunity to bring their talent to the world stage and showcased it in front of many fans in Chile and many more watching through FIFA+.

With this first edition of my U20 World Cup scout reports, I have decided to highlight two players from two AFC representatives that I have really enjoyed watching so far. It is definitely easy to pick two players that I already have good knowledge and expectation of thanks to the U20 Asian Cup, and I will pick players from other teams that I am keeping track of for later editions, but I want to start off with two easy scout reports to gain a bit of momentum.

With that in mind, let me introduce the first player on my shortlist…

Paul Okon-Engstler

• Born 2005

• Central/defensive midfielder

• Australia U20/Sydney FC

Australia lost their first two matches of the tournament in very different fashion as they failed to find a breakthrough against a classic, well-structured Italian defence in their opening match, and got punished heavily for their individual errors as Argentina put four past the keeper on the second matchday. Even though their chance of advancing through to the next round has taken a big hit after those two losses, that does not mean the team do not have some positives to take away. One of those positives is Paul Okon-Engstler’s performance against Italy and Argentina.

I keep finding myself using the words ‘mature’ and ‘unique’ to describe his playing style because it is rare to see an Australian midfielder who looks very calm and composed on the ball while also controls the midfield well (probably since Aaron Mooy), let alone someone who is 20 years old or younger. A few young Aussie midfielders who are currently in the Socceroos pool like Max Balard or Patrick Yazbek are more known to be hard-workers and are not shy away from making challenges, which is the midfield type that you would normally expect from an Aussie midfielder like many examples in the past (Mile Jedinak, Massimo Luongo or Jackson Irvine). In contrast, players like Riley McGree or Connor Metcalfe tend to operate inside the final third instead of deeper areas on the pitch. The closest comparison that I can think of from the current Socceroos pool is Ryan Teague and he is currently having a bit of ups and downs at Mechelen.

When I watched Okon-Engstler at this tournament and at the U20 Asian Cup, there was a sense of assurance that if he received the ball from any of his teammates, he was likely to find a way out of the opposing player’s pressure, either by carrying the ball himself or passing the ball to a teammate who could continue progressing the team’s build-up. On many occasions when he was pressed by an Italian player, he used his strength to hold off the opposition and turned to the opposite side of the pitch or faced forward to find a teammate to pass the ball to.

His passmap here probably doesn’t do him a lot of justice because it looks like he made a lot of sideways and backwards passes, but those passes were very crucial to the Young Socceroos’ build-up, especially the sideways passes, since they were used to escape the pressure from the opposition and allowed the ball to find someone who was either unmarked or was facing forward. I am stressing this trait from Okon-Engstler as an important one because, unlike the SL Benfica academy graduate, many of Australia U20 players got dispossessed fairly easy by the opposing players on numerous occasions. This has resulted in plenty of dangerous turnovers inside of the team’s own half, sometimes even inside their own defensive third, and both Italy and Argentina have punished them a few times with a dangerous shot or a goal.

Okon-Engstler’s reading of the game and situation is also good and he has been using that to the full extent. On the ball, it has helped him make line-breaking passes to find teammates in more advanced positions and got the ball out of the build-up phase and into the attacking phase. According to FIFA’s data, 11 out of 23 line-breaking attempts from the Young Socceroos’ #6 was through Italy’s defensive block, which highlights Okon-Engstler’s tendency to find teammates who sat in between the opposition’s defensive lines.

Off-the-ball, his reading of the situation allowed him to position himself in advantageous positions to receive the ball from his teammates and then turned to face forward afterwards. It was very common to spot Okon-Engstler sitting behind or just to the side of the opposition’s attacking line (or strikers line) offering to receive the ball. Once again, this is not a frequent sighting from most young Aussie midfielders playing at a big tournament like the U20 World Cup because there is a sense of nervousness to do so against technically-and/or-physically-superior players, or most players would opt for a back or sideway pass to a centre-back or a full-back who would then play a long ball forward. That is one of the few reasons why I think his playing style is mature and unique because it is just not a common trait found amongst Aussie midfielders unless they go to Europe and get coached to do so on a frequent basis. Once again, FIFA’s data highlighted this trait from Okon-Engstler well as he led the team for number of offers made and received against Italy U20.

A good example of Okon-Engstler’s trait of offering to receive the ball in advantageous spaces is this short possession sequence against Italy U20. After the ball was passed to (#8) Alex Badolato, Okon-Engstler immediately turned to face forward while also separated himself from the attacking line to receive the next pass completely unmarked. As he controlled the ball, he looked towards the opposite side and noticed the free space where right-back (#16) Josh Inserra and striker (#9) Luka Jovanovic were ready to receive the ball, which he did find the Young Socceroos’ #9 with a short pass.

If he chose to take on the opposition players by himself, his ability to control the ball in tight spaces and his own technical ability tended to come in very handy. There were a few occasions against Italy where Okon-Engstler had the ball and decided to dribble over a couple of players, and you could see him skipped pass a challenge very easily by keeping the ball close to him and tricking the opposing player into making a challenge.

If it was a carry over a short distance to bring the ball forward, he had the tendency to do a stop-start carry (carried the ball then stopped) to bait the opposition to jump forward and close him down, which then opened up the space in behind for one of his teammates to move into and for himself to target with a line-breaking pass. Even though he was quite good at dribbling the ball, it was very rare to see Okon-Engstler take on any more than 2 or 3 players or dribble over a long distance. He only dribbled or carried the ball himself to put himself in a good position to make a pass forward instead of over-relying on his own technical ability.

Defensively, Okon-Engstler also came across as a smart midfielder instead of the usual aggressive midfielder that many Australian midfielders are. It means he did not try to regain the ball by throwing himself into tackles or try to outmuscle the opposition player on a frequent basis, even though he has the physicality to and has done so occasionally. More often, he could be found tracking an opposition player who was making an off-ball run into the box or screened a nearby passing option to look for an opportunity to intercept passes coming his way. He also showed a high level of determination on a few occasions against Italy and Argentina and used his pace to chase down a ball carrier if there were no teammates who were either close to or were willing to challenge the ball carrier.

While his defending style can be good when he is paired alongside a more defensive-minded midfielder or he has more coverage from the attacking line, so far it has left the Young Socceroos in vulnerable situations on a few occasions. In a midfield pairing with (#10) Rhys Youlley where he was playing deeper, Okon-Engstler was also expected to provide defensive support for the defenders behind him, which did not suit his slightly passive defending style. Both Italy and Argentina have managed to play through Australia’s defensive block a few times because the midfielders were not aggressive enough and put the defensive line in a vulnerable position, and, as I have pointed out in my preview that both centre-backs (#3) Sebastian Esposito and (#4) Panagiotis Kikianis were slightly prone to making individual errors, that meant that Australia’s opposition were able to attack the space in behind their defensive line very easily.

Nonetheless, Okon-Engstler is still a very special talent that can only get better now that he has headed back to Sydney FC for his first full season as a first-team player. Taking the drop down from playing with Benfica’s B team in the Portuguese pyramid is somewhat of a risk, but the A-League has been a platform to stardom for so many domestic youngsters in the past few seasons, it might as well be worth a shot. I would not be surprised if he somehow becomes one of Sydney’s best players come the end of the season, and if he continues to develop his playing style against more experienced players, he could potentially head back to Europe very, very soon.

Rion Ichihara

• Born 2005

• Centre-back

• Japan U20/RB Omiya Ardija

I think you will be hearing the name Rion Ichihara a lot more after this year’s U20 World Cup as he keeps going from strength to strength. Ryo Nakagawara has done a very early report on Ichihara that I highly recommend checking out if you are interested in how he plays in the J2 League, and since he is already on this year’s SCOUTED50 list, there will be a lot more coverage about Ichihara coming from the Scouted Football team, with whom I will leave you beyond this post. For now, I am here to review his performance in Japan’s first two group stage matches because he has been a joy to watch while also doing a bit of comparison with his performance at the U20 Asian Cup earlier this year to see how much he has developed.

Shogun Soccer

Shogun Soccer Scouting #3: Rion Ichihara

A hearty hello to you all! Today I’m (finally) back with another Shogun Soccer Scouting feature… on Rion Ichihara…

Read more

2 years ago · 6 likes · Ryo Nakagawara

Against both Egypt and Chile, the RB Omiya Ardija youngster proved to be a very important cog in Japan’s build-up as he demonstrated the traits of a modern ball-playing centre-back. Ichihara looked very calm when he had the ball, slowing the play when the opposition sat back into their mid-block to allow his teammates to move around and create spaces, but could also see the way out when being pressed by the opposing players either via a line-breaking pass or by carrying the ball forward himself.

Going up against Egypt’s 4-4-2 mid-block, Ichihara’s long passes helped the team progress into the final third on multiple occasions. The target of those passes were usually either left-back (#3) Keita Kosugi or left winger (#13) Hisatsugu Ishii as either usually found spaces around or in behind Egypt’s right-back to receive the long pass without being pressured. Along with midfielder (#10) Yuto Ozeki, they were the two key playmakers for Japan from deep and were important in progressing Japan’s attacks into the final third.

He was also capable of making passes with both feet, although it was more often seeing him making both short and long passes on his right. Starting as the right-sided centre-back in a two-man pairing and playing on his preferred side, that allowed him to make switch-play passes to find Kosugi and Ichii on the opposite side. It was one of the preferred build-up strategies by Japan as they looked to move the opposition towards the right-hand side, effectively creating space on the left for either Kosugi or Ichii to position themselves in and receive the long pass from Ichihara, allowing them to run at Egypt’s defence and make crosses into the box for Japan’s oncoming attackers or midfielders.

In defence, Ichihara formed a very strong centre-back partnership with (#4) Kazunari Kita and proved to be a dominating presence for Japan. With Funakoshi opted to play with a high defensive line, Ichihara’s pace was suited for his style as Japan’s captain usually looked to open his body towards the oncoming attackers to track any who were looking to run in behind, and then either used his pace to chase him down or stayed with the rest of the line to catch players offside. Ichihara also used his height well to win long passes and crosses that came his way from set piece situations by positioning at the far post and clearing crosses coming his way, which was important given that, against Egypt and Chile, Japan conceded a total of 12 corners in both matches.

What differed Ichihara from Kita is his slightly reactive defensive style that does not rely on getting stuck into challenges and making unnecessary tackles. Ichihara preferred to be a bit more patience and looked for the right opportunity to regain possession for his team while also waiting for his teammates to regroup and provide support. According to FIFA’s data, Japan’s #5 only regained possession 6 times in total over the first two matches (3 against Egypt and 3 against Chile). This could also be a result of Japan’s defensive style that looked to regain possession in wide areas, thus allowing the centre-backs to be more reactive in defending.

However, Ichihara compensated for his passive defensive style by being an extremely vocal voice at the back, which was also the reason that earned him the captain armband. It was possible to spot Ichihara instructing his teammates on where to position themselves during set piece situations or encouraging the team after a stop in play on many occasions. Combining that with his calm and composed playing style, it was understandable why he has proven to be so influential in Japan’s six-point tally and 0 goals conceded so far in group A.

It is also hard not to talk about Ichihara without mentioning the two penalties that he scored. As he stepped up on both occasions, he was not fazed by the distractions from the opposition while also kept his head down and concentrated on his task. The way he struck the penalties also showed the level of confidence that he had. His penalty against Egypt was a powerful one to the left-hand side of the goal, while the one against Chile was a cold penalty as he chipped the ball straight down the middle, with both times sending the keeper the wrong way.

After Kōta Takai left a huge impression at the 2023 edition of the U20 World Cup, it is Rion Ichihara’s turn to step up and be both a leader and a key player in Japan’s defence in this year’s tournament. His performance at the U20 Asian Cup earlier this year was already impressive enough, but he continued to surprise me with what he can do on the global stage. With him now under the Red Bull umbrella, he has every chance to be Omiya’s first export to either Salzburg or Leipzig in the near future, and they might need to get Ichihara on the move quick because he must be on the watchlist of a few European clubs by now.

As the tournament heads towards the last matchday of the group stage, more teams and players will be more familiar with playing in Chile, which can only be a good thing as it will allow them to be more comfortable on the pitch and show their true ability. While I have not been able to watch every match of the U20 World Cup so far, I have tried to watch a few matches here and there and have had a few names on my own shortlist, including Rion Ichihara and Paul Okon-Engstler, whom I have introduced to you above.

I will return with at least a couple more reports about players that have caught my eyes very soon. But, for now, if you want a taste of the players who are not currently playing in this tournament, head over to Scouted Football and dive into their annual SCOUTED50 list. With the new Football Manager also coming very soon, you will definitely want to note down a few names on that list to sign right away in your first save!

It has been a bit since my last post, but I am hopping in quickly to tell you two things:

• Firstly, there is a reason for my quiet period. I have shared bits here and there, but I am working on a project that I hope to release at the end of October. I will also do a full write-up for the Dev Logs series where I document my thoughts and process throughout the development of such project. Please bear with me as I try to push myself to complete it as soon as possible.

• Secondly, the U20 World Cup is starting…*checks schedule*…this weekend! As much as I would love to cover the tournament extensively like I did for the U20 Asian Cup and Asian tournaments that happened last year and earlier this year, I am getting stuck into the project that I mentioned above, which means most of my free time is being used for that project. However, I *might* write a matchday/weekly scout report here and there to cover some players who catch my attention during the tournament. I can’t promise that it will happen since it depends on how much free time I have, but keep an eye out for a few articles on the U20 World Cup!

Speaking of the U20 Asian Cup…Even though I do not have the time to write a proper preview for most teams who will be competing in the tournament, I actually can write a preview for the Asian representatives, thanks to the tournament notes from the U20 Asian Cup earlier this year! Finally, those notes will actually come in handy and they will not be wasted.

Everything that I write here are a shortened version of all of my U20 Asian Cup notes about Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Australia, including style of play and players to watch. If you want to read the full review of each gameday of the U20 Asian Cup, you can find them here under the Asian Cup tag. Without further ado, let’s look at the four teams who will represent Asia at the U20 World Cup!

Japan

Japan are probably one of the Asian teams that many expect to do well at the upcoming U20 World Cup thanks to the quality of their domestic talents, especially the players who are playing fairly regular first-team football for their club in the J1 and J2 League. They reached the semi-finals at the U20 Asian Cup before losing out to a slightly stronger Australian side, but Yuzo Funakoshi’s side did demonstrate their strengths on many occasions throughout the tournament at the beginning of the year.

Style of play

Even though Japanese players have been known for their technicality and many will expect them to play a possession-based style with a back four, what the team showed at the U20 Asian Cup was a good counter-argument against that expectation. Just like the first team, Funakoshi also used a back three throughout the U20 Asian Cup and they were capable of adapting to the opposition’s style of play due to their flexibility in possession. Against teams who pressed high up the pitch, Japan were not afraid to go long thanks to the passes from centre-backs Harumichi Shiokawa and Rion Ichihara. Those passes were aimed at runs in behind from Rento Takaoka and Ryunosuke Sato, who both have the pace to attack the channels and receive the ball in behind the opposition’s defensive line. Ichihara’s pass map against Thailand U20 is a good demonstration of Japan’s willingness to be direct in possession.

When they needed to be more possession-oriented against teams who sat deep or defended in a mid-block, Funakoshi’s side also showed that they were capable of playing through a well-constructed, discipline defence from the opposition. This was done against Iran U20 thanks to short link-up plays out the wings where the team utilised the technical ability of their wing-backs, attacking midfielders, and attackers to play through the press and block. Against the same opposition, they managed to enter Iran’s penalty box on multiple occasions and created plenty of good scoring chances inside the area, but were quite wasteful as most of their chances were either blocked by the opposition’s defenders or were completely off-target.

However, expect a lot of wing attacks from Japan whenever they have the ball since their priority will be getting the ball to their most skillful players like Ryunosuke Sato, Hisatsugu Ishii, and Yuto Ozeki to beat the opposition’s defenders and drive the team forward. It is also worth mentioning that both of Japan U20’s formations that they used at the U20 Asian Cup, the 4-4-2 and 3-5-2, allowed for a lot of wing attacks and direct attacks, which I expect Funakoshi will retain heading into the tournament.

Defensively, Japan did not press as often as I expected at the U20 Asian Cup. Instead, with their 3-5-2 and 4-4-2, they set up a very discipline mid-block that aimed to funnel the opposition into the wide areas, where they used overloads to regain possession. Their 3-5-2 formation was very well-suited for their defensive approach thanks to the numerical superiority in the middle and the ability to get extra players out wide without compromising on losing players in the central area. The 4-4-2 was a hit and miss, however, as both Thailand and Australia were able to play through their defensive lines quite easily on a few occasions. I expect Funakoshi will use the 4-4-2 if the team need to attack or chase some goals, otherwise their 3-5-2 (or even 3-4-2-1) will be his preferred formation.

The players

🧤 Goalkeepers

#1 Keisuke Nakamura (Tokyo Verdy), #12 Alexandre Pisano (Nagoya Grampus), #21 Rui Araki (Gamba Osaka)

🧱 Defenders

#2 Rei Umeki (FC Imabari), #3 Keita Kosugi (Djurgårdens IF, Sweden), #4 Kazunari Kita (Real Sociedad, Spain), #5 Rion Ichihara (RB Omiya Ardija), #15 Harumichi Shiokawa (Ryutsu Keizai University), #16 Soichiro Mori (Nagoya Grampus)

⚙️ Midfielders

#6 Kosei Ogura (Hosei University), #7 Ryunosuke Sato (Fagiano Okayama), #8 Katsuma Fuse (University of Tsukuba), #10 Yuto Ozeki (Kawasaki Frontale), #11 Yumeki Yokoyama (FC Imabari), #13 Hisatsugu Ishii (Shonan Bellmare), #14 Shunsuke Saito (Mito HollyHock), #17 Hagumu Nakagawa (Ryutsu Keizai University), #18 Nelson Ishiwatari (Iwaki FC), #20 Sota Hiraga (Kyoto Sanga)

⚡ Forwards

#9 Soma Kanda (Kawasaki Frontale), #19 Rento Takaoka (Valenciennes FC, France)

This will become the theme for all four Asian representatives, but Japan have brought most of the squad that reached the semi-finals of the U20 Asian Cup to Chile. Personally, I am very excited to see Alexandre Pisano, who is slowly becoming more influential at Nagoya Grampus and has made his debut in goal for the first-team at the EAFF Championship last summer.

Playing ahead of (assumingly) Pisano will be Harumichi Shiokawa and Rion Ichihara since they have developed a good relationship with each other at the U20 Asian Cup. Ichihara has also been playing a lot of first-team football for Red Bull’s first Asian team Omiya Ardija in the J2 League, which I think has helped him developed more since the tournament in China. Real Sociedad’s Kazunari Kita will be their rotational option as I think he will get minutes here and there, but the fourth centre-back spot will be pretty much up in the air.

One significant omission from this squad is Cerezo Osaka and FC Barcelona academy graduate Niko Takahashi, who I assume will stay with his parent club and see out the rest of the J1 campaign as he gets more and more playing time under Arthur Papas. Replacing him at left-back will be Keita Kosugi, who has enjoyed a very fruitful spell with Djurgårdens in Sweden and should be on the watchlist of first-team manager Hajime Moriyasu.

I have already mentioned the key players in midfield in Ryunosuke Sato, Yuto Ozeki and Hisatsugu Ishii. I think they will be very fun to watch at the tournament and should get most of the minutes for Japan. Sato and Ozeki will also bring first-team experience with them to Chile as they have played very regularly for Fagiano Okayama and Kawasaki Frontale respectively this season and they have also made their first-team debut under Moriyasu.

Up front, there is no Alen Inoue but Ozeki’s teammate at Frontale, Soma Kanda, will be a decent replacement. Partnering Kanda will be Southampton’s loanee Rento Takaoka, who I will be keeping a very close eye on given the Saints’ struggle to find a consistent striker so far this season. Takaoka has been getting minutes for Valenciennes in the National (French third division), which is a level that I think suits him after making the straight jump from university football.

South Korea

Both Japan and South Korea were in the same group at the last U20 Asian Cup and, coincidentally, they both went out at the semi-final stage and they will also be playing on the opening day of the U20 World Cup. These two East Asian giants just can’t seem to separate from each other, can they?

Style of play

South Korea adopted a simpler style of play at the tournament in China as they were very wing-oriented and relied quite heavily on the individuals in the team. With their 4-2-3-1 formation, they looked towards the full-backs and wingers to provide attacking width for the team. Usually, their full-backs and wingers could be found occupying the half-spaces and wide spaces waiting to receive the ball, where they could then either attack the channel or take on the opposition’s defenders.

Even though it was a fairly simple style of play, it suited the players that they had, particularly wingers like Baek Min-gyu, Park Seung-soo and Yoon Do-young, or attacking midfielder Kim Tae-won. The aforementioned trio had the technical ability and confidence to dribble and get past the opposition’s defenders, which meant that they were often the driving force of South Korea’s attacks. However, as I will discuss their squad later on, Seung-soo and Do-young will not travel to Chile with the squad as they have moved to Newcastle United and Excelsior (on loan from Brighton) respectively, thus their parent clubs have not released them for a tournament that is outside of the FIFA calendar (even though it is organised by FIFA?). Manager Lee Chang-won will have to look towards new talents to replace both Seung-soo and Do-young if he opts to retain his style of play.

Because of the nature of their in possession style, the team relied quite heavily on crosses into the box for the lone striker up front, which were usually made by the overlapping full-backs or the wingers. Once again, South Korea will also miss having Ha Jeong-woo up front, who had a good tournament and demonstrated his potential to be a leading striker for the first-team in the future.

Set piece was also one of South Korea’s strongest weapons at the U20 World Cup as they utilised long throws and corners a lot more often and effective than the rest of the tournament. That was shown in full against Uzbekistan U20, where their first two goals came from two corner situations. Without their key attacking players from the U20 Asian Cup, I somewhat expect South Korea to rely on their set pieces to generate goal-scoring chances, unless manager Lee Chang-won has identified the replacements from K1 and K2 clubs that I have not been aware of.

Defensively, South Korea can also be adaptive to their opposition as they can either sit back in a 4-4-2 mid-block or press high up the pitch. Like most teams, South Korea’s defensive block also looks to guide the opposition out wide, where they can create overloads or box of defensive players to regain possession. A fairly common, ‘nothing-too-fancy’ defensive strategy in modern days that I somewhat expect to see most teams at the U20 World Cup will be using.

The players

🧤 Goalkeepers

Park Sang-young (Daegu FC), Gong Si-hyeon (Jeonbuk Hyundai Motors), Hong Seong-min (Pohang Steelers)

🧱 Defenders

Ko Jong-hyun, Lee Geon-hee (Suwon Bluewings), Kim Ho-jin (Yong In University), Bae Hyun-seo (FC Seoul), Shin Min-ha (Gangwon FC), Lim Jun-young (Chungbuk Cheongju), Ham Sun-woo (Hwaseong FC)

⚙️ Midfielders

Kim Tae-won (Portimonense SC, Portugal), Kim Jun-ha, Choi Byung-wook (Jeju SK), Kim Hyun-min (Busan IPark), Baek Min-gyu, Choi Seung-gu (Incheon United), Shin Sung (Bucheon FC 1995), Son Seung-min (Daegu FC), Chung Ma-ho (Chungnam Asan)

⚡ Forwards

Kim Hyeon-oh (Daejon Hana Citizen), Baek Ga-on (Busan IPark)

With South Korea’s squad, it is still possible to see the core players who have helped the team reached the semi-final of the U20 Asian Cup. But it is also possible to notice that this squad feels quite weaker than what they had in China and I think South Korea will have a tough time due to the absence of their strongest players.

At the back, I expect Park Sang-young to return in goal after a decent U20 Asian Cup along with centre-back Shin Min-ha and right-back Bae Hyun-seo, who also showed promising performances in China. Lee Geon-hee and Kim Ho-jin are also back, but I am unsure if they will be starting or will manager Lee Chang-won give the opportunity to other defenders.

In midfield, look out for the central midfield duo Shin Sung and Son Seung-min (yes, that is his name, I am not making a typo, and yes, I am aware that his name is similar to Son Heung-min). When given the space to control the ball and dictate the play, they can be very good thanks to their passing and dribbling ability, which they did show on multiple occasions at the U20 Asian Cup. If South Korea’s oppositions do their homework well, they will know to mark these two carefully just like how Saudi Arabia U20 neutralised both in the semi-final clash between the two teams.

Up front, Kim Tae-won will be expected to lead the attack as South Korea’s main attacking midfielder along with left winger Baek Min-gyu, who will hope to have a good tournament after seeing both Seung-soo and Do-young earning a move to Europe for their performances at the U20 Asian Cup. With both players now missed out, Min-gyu should be South Korea’s starting option on the left-hand side. The rest of South Korea’s attack will be brand new, so expect to see new talents being showcased by manager Lee Chang-won.

Saudi Arabia

The only representative coming from the West side of Asia and also the runner-up of the 2025 U20 Asian Cup, I think Saudi Arabia will be a hard team to predict. On their best day, they can be good and become a potential dark horse of the U20 World Cup, which they have shown throughout the tournament in China. But they have also shown some shakiness and they can be beaten in a group that also contains teams that can cause upsets like Colombia, Nigeria, and Norway.

Style of play

Unlike the other three teams coming from the Eastern side of Asia (and Oceania), Saudi Arabia focused more on their physicality and aggressiveness, which were also their two key aspects of their playing style. Throughout the U20 Asian Cup, I was more impressed with the team’s press and defence because those were the foundations that helped them regain possession from teams like China or South Korea for the few counter-attacks that they also managed to convert into game-winning goals.

Inside of the opposition’s half, Marcos Soares’ side were not hesitated to press the opposition even close to their goal. They adopted a man-to-man press that aimed to guide the opposition out wide and generate turnovers from inside the opposition’s defensive third, which then gave them the opportunities to create a very quick counter-attack while the opposition tried to regroup. Against China and South Korea, they completely marked both teams’ central midfielders, namely Imran Memet, Shin Sung, and Son Seung-min, out of the game and neutralised them, which forced both teams to play long balls to their attackers instead.

But even then, Saudi Arabia also had a plan to deal with the long balls coming directly from goal kicks. Thanks to their physicality and, sometimes, aerial dominance, they were able to win the 1v1 ground and aerial duels while also prevented the opposition from making runs in behind their high defensive line. Their defenders usually looked to tight mark the opposition’s attackers and left them in a disadvantage position once the ball came to them, thus forcing them to lose the 1v1 duel or not able to control the ball properly, and giving the Saudi Arabian defenders an opportunity to steal the ball.

When they regrouped into their mid/low block, the players showed their discipline and set up a strong defensive block that frustrated many teams throughout the tournament. Because of how narrow their low block was, there were little spaces in between the lines for the opposition’s attackers to work with and they often resulted in making a long shot that goalkeeper Hamed Al-Shanqiti comfortably saved or missed the target completely. Their physicality and aerial dominance also came in handy as they were able to neutralise most of the crosses that came into the box, thus preventing the lone striker from coming close to receive it.

They also made good use of tactical fouls and their aggressiveness when needed, especially higher up the pitch when they could afford to concede free-kicks that would not be very dangerous to Al-Shanqiti’s goal. It was a fairly frequent occurrence to see Saudi Arabian defenders fouling the opposition’s attackers, especially when the opposition had the ball out wide. This frustrated a lot of the technical attackers from South Korea and China since they could not get into their groove and create anything meaningful for the strikers to capitalise.

Expect to see something similar at the U20 World Cup as I do not think Saudi Arabia will be very good in possession. However, their defensive shape did help them massively in getting through the knockout phase and forced teams into penalty shootouts. Against a lot more skillful players from Colombia or Norway, Saudi Arabia’s defence might have a tougher time, but I will not rule them out from scraping their way to a second place in the group and somehow make it into the knockout, where they can shithouse their way through each match.

The players

As of writing, Saudi Arabia are the only Asian team who have not publicly announced their squad, though I think Marcos Soares already has a list of 21 players either submitted or ready to be submitted. I also cannot hide the fact that I do not watch the Saudi Pro League, so I cannot make predictions on who might be in the squad and who might start. Looking at Japan and South Korea’s squads, there will be some players who miss out compared to the squad that played in China earlier this year, so I also cannot use my old predictions until the final squad is released.

Australia

Australia heading to Chile as the last Asian representative and also the winner of the U20 Asian Cup earlier this year. It was not without flaws or imperfections, but the recent investment in youth in both men and women football have started to bear fruits for Australia with lots of promising talents being given regular first-team minutes and secured moves to Europe or the USA.

Style of play

Similar to South Korea, Australia’s style of play was fairly simple but it was catered towards bringing the best out of the talents at Trevor Morgan’s disposal. With defenders and midfielders who were capable of playing out from the back, the Young Socceroos looked to play through the lines by having attacking midfielders dropping in between the lines to receive the ball, which they were then encouraged to dribble forward and take on the opposition’s defenders.

A key cog in that style of play was Paul Okon-Engstler, who was Australia’s deep playmaker at the back with his line-breaking passes and through balls to send other midfielders around him into positions where they could continue progressing the ball. His distribution was important, but his ability to read the game was crucial too as it allowed him to slow the play when needed or baited the opposition to press to create spaces for his teammates. His performance against Kyrgyzstan U20 was a good demonstration of his very mature style of play.

The team were also quite wing-oriented thanks to the talents that they have in the wide areas. The main goal with Australia’s wing attacks was to create spaces either for the wingers to take the opposition’s defenders on or for one of the central attackers (either the strikers or the attacking midfielder) to run into the channel and receive the ball inside the half-space. Most of the Aussie attackers have good pace to make runs in behind, which made this attacking style a lot more dangerous. When needed, they could also utilise long passes to encourage attackers like Luka Jovanović or Musa Toure to run in behind the opposition’s defensive line, which had proven to be successful for Trevor Morgan’s team on several occasions.

Defensively, Australia preferred to press the opposition inside of their own half, but I have found that strategy to be a hit and miss at times. Their press was sometimes effective in funneling the opposition into overloaded areas where they could regain the ball. But, sometimes, it also backfired when the midfielders were not able to win their challenges, which left the defensive line vulnerable to runs in behind. Iraq gave them a very tough time with this vulnerability and punished them a couple of times, which almost pushed the Young Socceroos to elimination at the quarter-final stage of the U20 Asian Cup. Their centre-back pairing of Sebastian Esposito and Panagiotis Kikianis, while was good most of the time, was also slightly vulnerable to making individual errors that left the rest of the team in a dangerous situation.

It will be a problem that Morgan will keep in mind heading to Chile while also hoping that both Esposito and Kikianis have learned a lot more thanks to getting more minutes at their clubs last season. Besides from that significant problem and a fairly simple style of play, if the Young Socceroos can perform at their best, they can definitely go beyond the group stage. But if the players let the nerves get to them and do not show up on the big stage, Australia can very easily go out in a group that has two heavy contenders in Italy and Argentina.

The players

🧤 Goalkeepers

#1 Steven Hall (Brighton & Hove Albion, England), #12 Alex Robinson (Macarthur FC), #18 Daniel Graskoski (Melbourne Victory)

🧱 Defenders

#3 Sebastian Esposito (Melbourne Victory, on loan from Lecce, Italy), #4 Panagiotis Kikianis, #5 Fabian Talladira (Adelaide United), #13 Lucas Herrington (Brisbane Roar), #16 Josh Inserra (Melbourne Victory), #17 Liam Bonetig (Melbourne City), #21 James Overy (Manchester United, England)

⚙️ Midfielders

#2 Daniel Bennie, #15 Jaylan Pearman (Queens Park Rangers, England), #6 Paul Okon-Engstler, #10 Rhys Youlley (Sydney FC), #7 Jonny Yull (Adelaide United), #8 Alex Badolato (Newcastle Jets), #20 Louis Agosti (Dolomiti Bellunesi, Italy)

⚡ Forwards

#9 Luka Jovanović (Adelaide United), #11 Musa Toure (Randers FC, Denmark), #14 Tiago Quintal (Sydney FC), #19 Max Caputo (Melbourne City)

As mentioned earlier, Trevor Morgan has opted to retain most of the squad that won the U20 Asian Cup with only a few changes that added more quality to an already fairly strong squad. Usually one would expect an Aussie talent playing for Man United to start in this team, but James Overy will have to fight for a chance to get minutes against some of the names who started week in, week out in the A-League last season.

At the back, Steven Hall will almost certainly to start in goal for the Young Socceroos, but the big question will be ‘who will Sebastian Esposito’s partner at the back’ with Lucas Herrington enjoyed a fairly successful season with Brisbane Roar and earned him a move to Colorado Rapids in the MLS next year, while Panagiotis Kikianis had a fairly uneventful season with Adelaide United. Another player who has his position locked in is Daniel Bennie at right-back even though he is listed as a midfielder. He was used fairly often as a full-back by Morgan at the U20 Asian Cup and there is no reason for me to believe it will be different this tournament.

Instead of Frans Deli, Paul Okon-Engstler will continue to develop his partnership with Rhys Youlley as Australia’s central midfielder duo after the pair returned from Benfica and Westerlo respectively to play for Sydney FC next season. The #10 spot will be occupied by Jonny Yull, who had a good tournament in China and a decent season with Adelaide, while the U20 Asian Cup Golden Ball winner Alex Badolato will start out wide or as the other #10 depends on whether Morgan chooses to use a 4-2-3-1 or a 4-2-2-2.

Luka Jovanović will get another chance to prove himself at an international tournament as he prepares himself to take over Adelaide’s starting striker spot following Archie Goodwin’s departure to Charlotte FC in the MLS. His partner-in-crime Musa Toure will also aim to get plenty of playing time under his belt after unable to sneak into Randers’ playing squad so far this season. Meanwhile, Max Caputo will be way overqualified for a backup striker following a season where he got regular minutes for Melbourne City, albeit did not have a good goal-scoring form.

And that were the four Asian teams who will be competing at the U20 World Cup in a few days time at the time of writing. As mentioned, I might write a few scout reports here and there to highlight players who catch my attention during the tournament. I have already compiled a list of players that I want to watch and I am trying to update it with more squads being released. But if I do not write anything throughout the tournament, I will see you at the end of October for a fairly big project that I am excited to share!

Missing out on day 2 of the ASEAN U23 Championship might prove to be the wrong decision for me as all four teams provided dramas and goals and, somehow, ended up with nothing to separate them. Cambodia and Laos set the show by playing out somewhat of a derby with both teams finished with one goal and one point each. However, the main attraction of day 2 was the clash between Myanmar and Timor-Leste where Timor-Leste caused a major surprise by keeping up with Myanmar and provided the fans with an 8-goal fest.

As much as both of these matches were fun to watch, they left all four teams in a slightly disadvantageous position to chase that single second-placed spot heading into Matchday 2 of the group stage. Both Thailand and Vietnam will be expected to crush their respective group with ease, which means all eyes will be on group A on the second matchday to find out who will take pole position in toping the group and toping the second-placed teams.

Let’s not wait any further and head straight into the actions of matchday 2!

Brunei Darussalam 1-7 Malaysia

Once again, I have to talk a lot more about Brunei’s opposition than discussing what they were able to do in the match because this was the second match that they got blew out and have completely sealed their fate as the worst team in this year’s tournament.

The first half turned out to be very similar to Brunei’s match against Indonesia where they found themselves being dominated in possession by Malaysia and could not get anywhere near the ball. However, the gap between their ability and the rest of the region was on show quite clearly even during the first 20 minutes of the half. Even though Malaysia did not have a variety of ways to attack and bypass Brunei’s mid-block, Brunei’s players still found themselves chasing the ball and leaving Malaysian players free to receive the ball on multiple occasions. The main reason that hurt Brunei quite heavily was their mid-block seemed to be set up to guide the opposition wide and prevent any passes coming in between the lines…which just happened to be the attacking style that Malaysia went with.

On many occasions, Malaysia’s attacking pattern was very clear to identify as the players attempted to create passing triangles out wide, particularly between a full-back, a midfielder, and a winger. The aim was to move the ball in and out of the half-space while encourage either the full-back or the winger to run in behind Brunei’s last defensive line for the final through ball that would help the team entering the final third. Once they got the ball in the final third, the ball carrier would rely on runners into the box, particularly the lone striker and the midfielders, to aim a cross or a cutback at to put themselves in a good position to score. This was very effective, but honestly, that was a very low bar to clear considering the technical superiority between the two teams. I doubt that Malaysia can expect seeing the same level of effective when using that play against the Philippines in the final matchday.

In particular, a lot of Malaysia’s attacks seemed to have gone down the left-hand side where left winger Haqimi Azim Rozli had a pretty busy day. On most occasions, he operated very wide and was often found near the touchline instead of moving into the half-space. He could also be found making runs in behind the shoulder of Brunei’s right-back to receive the ball from his teammates and get to the byline of the penalty box for a potential cross. At times, Malaysia’s #7 also attacked the box when the ball was on the opposite side, where he got himself on the scoresheet twice in each half.

At times, it felt relatively easy for Malaysia to enter the final third due to Brunei’s inability to stop third-man runs coming from the Malaysian midfielders. However, after the first two goals, Brunei’s defence managed to hold themselves up and was successful in blocking a few crosses and shots coming their way. That was maintained…until after the 30th-minute mark where the floodgate was opened once more as Malaysia’s pressure finally gave them the breakthrough with the third goal. From there, it was pretty much smooth sailing for Malaysia as they cruised to half time with a four-goal deficit.

Half time gave Brunei’s players the chance to regroup and refresh, which allowed them to contain the pressure once more and held out until the 70th minute, when their physicality once again let them down. Fresh changes brought fresh attacking pressures for Malaysia and they continued to assert their dominance with three more goals, including Fergus Tierney’s first goal to open his account for Malaysia and kickstarted a late chase for him against the other naturalised strikers in the tournament. However, a late surprise awaited as a quick counter-attack presented Brunei with their first goal of the tournament and probably a consolation in what is and will be a forgettable campaign for them. At least they will have something positive to take home and start building on, it is not much but…it is something!

Laos 0-3 Vietnam

Going into this match, I was expecting to see an exciting contest between a Laos team that just secured a point against Cambodia and the favourite to top group B in Vietnam. While the scoreline might have suggested a feisty contest, the actual match had a lot less excitement with Vietnam dominated possession but they ended up passing around the back and the midfielders quite often. I will be a bit critical here since I have been trying to be a neutral fan whenever my birth country play because I have known too many problems about Vietnamese football to be any more positive about it.

The match played out somewhat like I had expected when I saw that manager Kim Sang-sik went with the 3-5-2 formation against his compatriot Ha Hyeok-jun, who also went with a back five as he chose the 5-4-1 formation for Laos. It showed Ha’s intention of sitting back and defending the box while also waiting for opportunities to spring forward for a counter-attack. That was what happened throughout the first half with Vietnam opted to focus on wing attacks as their main way of entering the opposition’s penalty box. They utilised crosses very heavily, looking to make passes out wide and encouraging the wing-backs Nguyễn Phi Hoàng and Võ Anh Quân to make overlapping runs and push Laos’ last defensive line back closer to their own goal. From there, the wing-back would try to make a cross, or even an early cross, into the box where the attackers and oncoming midfielders would be ready to receive it for a cross.

This will be a reflection of how I see football and there is no absolutely right way to play football, but I think that approach made the game felt very dull and boring to watch. On many occasions, Laos’ defence were able to deal with the crosses quite easily as they managed to clear it out for a corner or clear it forward for their teammates who were on the edge or outside of the penalty box. Although, one of the very few occasions where it did bear fruit for Vietnam also resulted in Khuất Văn Khang’s opening goal, where Vietnam had 1v1 situations happened inside of the box, led to Laos’ defenders unable to reach the ball, and Văn Khang was able to volley the ball home. Still, the approach felt more like a ‘hit and hope’ approach to me and there is no guarantee that it will succeed against higher quality defences, which Vietnam will almost guarantee to face in the semi-final and final.

The second half was pretty much the same, but as Laos started to push forward a bit more and their physicality slowly decreased, they opened up more spaces in between their defensive lines for Vietnam to utilise. It resulted in more attempts to enter the box by playing through the lines, but those attempts were still slightly insignificant compared to how many times Vietnam tried to advance the ball down both wings, particularly down the left. It also resulted in more corners conceded by Laos since their players were not able to clear the ball properly, and it was from those corners where centre-back Nguyễn Hiểu Minh scored the final two goals to seal Vietnam’s first three points of the tournament and also seal Laos’ faith since they will not be playing in the third matchday and will be two points behind the Philippines in the race for the single second-placed spot.

I will give credits to Laos’ defence for putting everything on the line and trying to stop as many goals as possible, but they never proved to be a huge threat to Vietnam with their counter-attacks, especially when considering the fact that they got pinned down for the majority of the match. Laos’ counter-attacks were not very effective was because of two simple reasons, they did not have enough players to spring forward, and Vietnam’s rest defence always seemed to have the numerical superiority over Laos. Because of those two reasons, the counter-attacks got stopped on the halfway line on multiple occasions and could not advance further than that.

While I want to analyse a bit more about this match, I want to be honest and say that there was not much to say besides me being frustrated about Vietnam’s chance creation process. The ‘away’ side dominated possession and kept the ball for the majority of the match, yet they were slightly one-dimensional and relied on a single approach to get the ball into the box. It worked, but because this approach has proven many times that it will not be as effective against tougher oppositions, I only expect to see more from Vietnam starting from the semi-final. Meanwhile, commiserations for Laos since they have brought a fairly strong squad to this tournament, yet they come out empty-handed. Hopefully, however, this tournament will prove to be a good experience for a lot of their young players as they continue to build towards the SEA Games.

I am writing the conclusion part of this article wayyyyy past the conclusion of the tournament, and I will put my hands up and admit that I did a bad job covering the tournament after promising that I will cover the tournament in full. There have been a few personal things happening that are demanding more of my attention and they have taken the bit of free time that I have for this blog away from me for the past few weeks. Alas, I don’t want to use any excuses and I can only apologise for that.

It will take me a bit of time to sort out my personal stuff so, as mentioned in my first blog update, expect a bit more quiet periods from me. I will drop in with one or two articles here and there, or I might even go a different direction and do more Fantasy Premier League/SuperCoach stuff next season if I can get myself to play it and build a data model for it, but I promise to come back stronger and with better ideas.

For anyone interested, here is my ASEAN U23 Team of the Tournament from the few matches that I got to watch. I did also plan to write a data-focused article on this team and explain why I pick these players, but seems like that plan has also gone out of the window. Long story short, I believe these players had a great tournament and I think Opta’s data will also agree with most of these picks.

As someone who has been sitting on the outside of the football data analytics world and looking in for the past few years, I have always amazed with what teams have done with data and finding new ways to gain an advantage. But that is only the case with European and American teams. When I look back at Asian football, I have the feeling that most of Asia is still very behind in terms of data analytics and there are teams and organisations who do not even have their own data department.

The most prominent example of an Asian club investing heavily into data (that I can think of) is Singapore’s Lion City Sailors, who receive the backing of a very popular e-commerce company in Shopee (yes, that Shopee with the Cristiano Ronaldo and Ronaldinho ads that might or might have not gone viral on social media). There might be a few more examples, but I cannot remember off the top of my head or have not come across at all. But, generally speaking, I think the main reason for this slow adaptation is the lack of direction and not knowing where to start.

Having been settled in my full-time data science/engineer role for almost a year now, I have had the chance to see and work with a full-scale data operation of a company, and it is mind-blowing, to say the least. Then, back in October of 2024 until around April of 2025, I got the chance to help building out the data side of a football organisation that I still cannot say the name of. That experience, even though it left me frustrated and heartbroken, taught me a lot and encouraged me to learn from the experience of many that have gone through the same path, hence the few ‘What I learned from…’ articles about the MIT Sloan Conference and the American Soccer Insights Summit earlier this year.

Since I might be on the outside of football again due to reasons beyond my control, I want to share what I have learned and my vision of building a data department in football with limited resources at hand, because that was the situation that I found myself in. This article is also inspired by Ben Torvaney’s original ‘Tools for tiny teams’ and Devin Pleuler’s ‘Big Data, Tiny Teams’, who are two of football analytics’ greats and have written two brilliant articles that I highly recommend adding to your reading list.

Central Winger

Big Data, Tiny Teams

One of my favourite soccer analytics blog posts over the last few years is Ben Torvaney’s Tools for Tiny Teams. Even though many soccer analytics departments have outgrown the “tiny” label, his insights remain strikingly relevant…

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2 years ago · 36 likes · Devin Pleuler

Housekeeping

A quick reminder that this article might be a bit different to what you would have normally seen from my blog. I do not have a big brain to come up with new metrics or introduce a new way to look at football data. However, my brain is big enough to learn new technologies and applications, then come up with a vision of how to automate football-focused processes while still retaining the human touch and observation in it.

I have already made my point about AI, and (again, long story short) while I think AI can be useful in some things, it is currently being overhyped and overrated (until it becomes rated). AI is just another tool, at the end of the day. The same goes with football, AI can definitely save time and human power in some processes like traversing through a mountain of tracking and event-level data, or generating data from tactical cam footage, or even translating data into the language that many coaches and players can understand (see Twelve Football’s work on this). But you cannot ‘vibe code’ with AI and expect it to build a whole data department, unless you want confidential data to leak out.

Once again, this is just my vision at the current time and I am sticking with what I have known so far. There are definitely better, cheaper options that I might not be aware of. As such, please feel free to let me know through a comment as I am always open to learning new things!

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Tiny teams

Reinventing the wheel

This is one of the biggest lessons that I have learned on my journey so far and I have to credit Sébastian Coustou, formerly Parma Calcio’s head of data and analytics for this. The short answer to this is: no, you’re not.

Unless your team are one of the leading teams in football analytics like Liverpool, Barcelona, or Ajax Amsterdam, you are not doing anything new, and especially when you are just starting out. Like Sébastian mentioned in his presentation below at PySport’s London meetup back in March of 2025, we (as a community) are standing on the shoulder of giants, and many teams and organisations have also worked with most of the ideas that you will come across. Fortunately, that is a good thing! Because those ideas are not new, it provides a great opportunity to learn from the mistakes and the experience that others have gone through, then you can come up with your own way of solving the same problem.

Another reason why you are not reinventing the wheel is, the same problems and questions that you are/will be asking, they have been asked plenty of times, just in a different form. Take this question that I had (and was inspired by Sébastian and the Parma data team’s work below), for example:

If I want to build a data pipeline that sends reports to players and coaches using WhatsApp while they are playing away in a different country and their phone number might not work, how can I still reach them in the same timeframe?

The question might sound new and that is because it is not widely used in football. But flip the question to, say, an e-commerce platform, then the question immediately becomes familiar.

How can my data pipeline reaches an existing customer and sends them promotions through WhatsApp without knowing where they are and as long as their phone number is still active?

This second question has been answered a long time ago and it is the reason why you still get text messages or ads through WhatsApp or other social platforms even though you might be on vacation in a different country. At its core, it is the same question, you will need to use the same technology and write the same code to answer the core question. The only difference between these questions is that each question is targeting a different audience. That is why you are not reinventing the wheel, because you are just asking questions in a football context. Flipping the question to something more familiar like daily shopping or social media platforms and the solution might just be right in front of you.

I do not remember whom this quote belongs to, but it is along the lines of ‘we all share the same data providers, we are all seeing the same numbers, the only difference is our process to get to those numbers’, and I cannot agree more. At the end of the day, if a striker overperforms his xG by about +3 xG, every team will be able to identify that. It does not matter if your data provider is Opta, or Statsbomb, or SkillCorner, or Wyscout. While there have been some research done into the differences between these providers, the general trend that ‘striker A significantly overperforms his xG’ still translates the same way across those providers, and any team who can identify that trend and capitalise the quickest is the one who will reap rewards, just like how Eintracht Frankfurt and Sturm Graz are reaping rewards of their strategy of buying undervalued strikers and sell them for a significant profit.

Embracing the open-source spirit

If you are not doing something new, then what is the point of keeping things behind a curtain? While confidentially still need to exist at a certain level and I agree with keeping completely fresh and new ideas or ideas that are club-funded or organisation-funded secret, the remaining ideas are either a remix of an old idea, or it is just an idea that has been forgotten over time. This is a more common phenomenon than one might think since it happens across different art forms, from painting, literature, to music. That is just how human’s creativity works, and there are really no new ideas, there are just new ways of doing things and seeing things.

With that in mind, why not embrace the open-source spirit, open the doors, and show a glimpse of what is being built? During the process of building your own department and try out new technologies, there will be times that you will run into problems. Document that problem-solving process and share it to others because you never know who you might inspire next, and you might even find the next talent who wants to join and/or collaborate with your team. Sharing ideas also opens the floor for better ideas or suggestions, and this can be very important because ‘tunnel vision’ happens quite frequently while working on those ideas and better ways of doing things might get ignored.

I really like what Sébastian and the Parma’s data & analytics team have done so far, and the fact that they are very happy to share their own inner-workings and processes have inspired me and given me a lot of ideas to work with. Their ‘Gialloblù Open Analytics Lab’ is also an inspiration for me to write this article, albeit without any team or organisation branding, this is just my own experience. Seeing what they have done made me feel inspired to go down the path of open-sourcing ideas and it has become one of my non-negotiables when it comes to working on football projects.

Tiny tools

Now that you have a decent idea of what to do with your data department, let’s take a look at the tools that are at your disposal. We are still embracing the open-source spirit here because, as stated at the beginning, we are working with very limited resources. That means, little money and little personnel. I will also follow Ben Torvaney’s flow in his article while adding what I know to keep the list updated.

Databases

Like Ben said in his article, “you can’t talk about databases without talking about SQL because SQL is the most boring technology around” (the boring technology part is inspired by Dan McKinley’s article). SQL has become so fundamental for databases that it will be the language of choice for anything database related. In terms of the software for managing databases, Ben suggested Postgres and dbt, and I still recommend Postgres as a free, open-source alternative.

However, my own platform of choice here will be Amazon Web Service, or AWS in short. AWS:

• Offers more than just the ability to host a database instance as their tool suite is highly versatile for data-related tasks, from storing raw data files using S3 buckets to having a relational database using RDS/Aurora, and that is just scratching the surface.

• Has become a lot more common since 2021, when Ben wrote his article, which means more community support, answers, and easy integration.

• Will cost money, but does not cost a fortune and cost can be offset by using other available tools for different tasks. A free tier is also available for new starters, allow for free trialling and is scalable once the demands increases.

• Supports most SQL flavours with their relational database service (RDS), including MySQL, NoSQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, allow for more technical flexibility and versatility when building out the database.

• Has learning tutorials for both AWS and SQL widely available and on different platforms, from YouTube, Udemy or Coursera courses, to AWS’ official certificates.

Snowflake is another good data warehousing platform to consider and their tool suite is quite impressive, which includes Streamlit that I will talk about later. However, just like Ben’s advice, I would only consider Snowflake as an option if you are working with a decent amount of resources and a decently-sized team where you can afford to have someone who specialises in managing your database.

Source control & pipelines

After creating your own database instance, it is important to have a platform to source control your codes and projects. Why? Take this situation as an example:

After finishing a project and making updates to it, all of a sudden, you found that your latest update does not work and have created errors. Now, you want to roll back the previous version and keep your project online for relevant stakeholders, but then you realised that you have overwritten your old codes and there is no way to undo your code to its previous state. What do you do?

That is where source control platforms like Git comes in. Git…

• Gives you cover by allowing you to roll back to the last version that you have saved.

• Is free and open-source, with documentation, getting started guides, and community supports widely available.

• Can integrate with a wide variety of applications to keep track of your codes and progress everywhere.

• Allows for easy code collaboration between team members.

• Gives user the ability to create different versions of the code within the same project (branch) or as a different project as a whole (fork) that can be recycled for different ideas or used to extend functionalities, without modifying the original version unless user gives permission (merge/pull request).

• Monitors conflicts between the old and new versions of the project, prevents clashes when two or more people are working on the same project at the same time.

• Also has free learning resources widely available on YouTube and on different learning platforms mentioned above.

• Can work directly from the terminal, however can be tricky to remember and combine commands for new starters.

Along with Git, platforms like GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket are useful for hosting and storing codes and projects, either publicly or privately. Personally, I have not used Bitbucket before, and I found GitHub and GitLab to be fairly similar from what I got to work with. They…

• Connect seamlessly with Git, allowing for direct upload of projects and codes without having to deal with complicated steps.

• Provide an easy-to-use user interface that can be used to perform functionalities mentioned above without the need for using the terminal and remember Git commands.

• Extend the ability to collaborate within the team with code comments, issues reporting, project workflow and monitoring.

• Keep track of security vulnerabilities in real time and automatically check for new versions of required packages.

• Make it easy to provide documentation for your projects through Markdown language.

• Available with a free tier that contains most core functionalities, with the option to upgrade to a subscription for bigger demands for storages, runtime, and etc.

I have also used GitHub Desktop, which is GitHub’s an easy-to-use user interface that bypass the need of remembering and writing Git commands everytime I need to commit my codes onto GitHub. But the main reason why I am choosing these two platforms to talk about is their ability to also host data pipelines, or CI/CD pipelines, which is also available on your free account.

This was one of the functions that I pushed to be integrated into the workflow the heaviest when I worked with the [redacted] organisation earlier this year because I had seen what my full-time company had done with their existing pipelines. Thankfully, GitHub Actions made that process quite easy and I was able to set up a pipeline that scrape Transfermarkt for [redacted information] into an csv file that would be ready to be inserted into an existing PowerBI dashboard.

I am sure this was probably not the best way to do things, but here is a sneak peek of what I managed to build using GitHub Actions earlier this year! And, once again, this was done on a free account.

Web applications

This might be the part where most people dread the most because whenever ‘web apps’ gets brought up, people tend to think about using JavaScript and TypeScript to build and maintain them. While that is a logical step to do once the team has someone who has web developing skills and is also something that Ben recommended in his article, thankfully, the introduction of Streamlit for Python and ShinyApps for R have made this step a lot easier for non-experts. Since this is meant to be a getting started guide, I will stick with Streamlit as I am more familiar with the package and have made a few Streamlit dashboards over the years.

Streamlit…

• Has significantly grown in popularity in the past few years and has developed a significant user base, thus has fairly extensive community supports around it.

• Is available for free and open-source, with a detailed official documentation along with official and non-official guides widely available.

• Can be easily installed using Python’s PIP package manager and is easy to set up locally with simple terminal commands.

• Has started to officially support multipage web apps, allow for each app to contain multiple functionalities.

• Can be slightly restricted as Streamlit’s default template is slightly hard to modify without using and knowing a combination of CSS and Markdown.

• Apps are easily to be deployed and can be deployed through Streamlit Cloud and directly using a repository hosted on GitHub.

• Is integrated into Snowflake’s tool suite and private apps can be deployed via Snowflake.

Since I did mention earlier that we will not be pursuing Snowflake unless we are working with a decent-sized budget, there is another free, open-source alternative deployment service that we can consider, which is ShinyProxy. This is an idea that I am borrowing from Lydia Jackson, Teamworks/Zelus Analytics’ Machine Learning Engineer, and her presentation at the American Soccer Insights Summit earlier this year. I believe that if the idea works for a leading sports analytics company like Zelus (now Teamworks), it can work for a tiny data team.

While Lydia mainly talked about deploying web apps built in R in her presentation, ShinyProxy can also host Streamlit apps, as per their official documentation and guides. ShinyProxy uses a small AWS EC2 instance for its server, which adds another reason to have an AWS package for your team, and the instance is not required to be huge either, thus will not add much to the overall AWS cost. Once again, I do not remember whom this quote is from (could be from Sébastian Coustou again or from Akshay Easwaran, formerly Atlanta United and now US Soccer Federation’s data engineer), but the amount of data that needs to be processed for a football organisation is nowhere near the sheer level of data that is being processed by an e-commerce company where hundreds, if not thousands, of customers are making transactions every minute. As such, the need for a large database or EC2 instance is very minimal.

The main purpose of having an EC2 instance along with ShinyProxy is to host web apps on the cloud, which allows for instant access whenever and whereever a relevant stakeholder needs. This can be a very important factor when giving the players and managers more control of their own data, since they should be able to access their performance and match data and have them at their own disposal. It allows for quicker decision-making process and saves valuable time for analysts who would usually have to spend a few hours in their workflow to process and visualise data.

Advanced web apps

This will be a short section, but if there is at least one member who has experience with web development in your team, I highly recommend working with TypeScript and React for maximum control of your web applications and dashboards. At times, Streamlit’s default template can be a bit limited if you want a customised web app and only uses Python to achieve such purpose.

TypeScript is pretty much similar to JavaScript, but it is more type-script. That means it requires the user to understand whether a function or module is taking an integer, a float, a string, or a specific type like a list/array, etc. It can be slightly overwhelming when moving from a dynamic language like Python to a strict language like TypeScript, but I have found being more type-strict is making my coding experience a lot easier, especially during the debugging phase. I am so used to being type-strict that I have also started doing the same in Python, which also supports that. I see the whole process like I am building a factory and connecting machines to each other, it is easier for me to know that machine A is specifically producing this product and machine B requires elements of this type, then I can link them together quite easily, instead of having to guess and make assumptions at every step of the way, which is a very frustrating experience from personal experiences.

Meanwhile, React is a user interface/front-end framework that supports both JavaScript and TypeScript. The framework gives you full control of building the interface for your web apps and starting from scratch, which can also be overwhelming for non-experts. But once the need for highly-customised web apps rises and Streamlit’s framework cannot support what you want to achieve, then it is probably a good time to migrate to TypeScript and React.

Other alternatives that I have seen being mentioned are Bootstrap, Vue.js, and Svelte. As with the nature of these frameworks, they are all free to install via NPM, JavaScript and TypeScript’s package manager, and are also open-source with extensive documentation and community support. Combining these frameworks with CSS and you will be able to build your own customised template, then combine it with server-side frameworks like ExpressJS to process user requests or anything that requires the server and you will have a fully-functional web app.

Maintenance

Once you have built and deployed your web apps, you will also need an application to maintain these apps and monitor for any errors or warnings that come out from them. EC2 only provides you with a cloud platform to host your web apps, ShinyProxy only eases your deployment process, and that is where Grafana steps in. Grafana…

• Actually does more than logs management as it can also monitor up and down times of your apps, visualise runtime metrics, cost management, alerting, security and governance management, etc.

• Is also available for free and open-source.

• Also has a large user base providing extensive community support for all products that Grafana provides.

• Is fairly easy to use with a simple user interface that houses all products and allows for easy switching between products.

• Can help with identifying root cause of errors through logs and periods when your apps are extensively used through visualised metrics, along with other purposes that I have not worked with.

General theme

While I have tried to follow the general themes that Ben listed in his article, I have also added a few more of my own to this list.

• Choosing free, open-source or low-cost applications to build out your tech stack.

  • There is no need to invest in technologies that will cost you a fortune while you cannot find the talents who can actively utilise and maintain them. Save yourself a fortune and invest that money into talents instead, because a good data analyst/scientist/engineer working with an average tech stack can still make magic happens.

• Time is still your biggest constraint…

  • Going for open-source tools allows for more community support. If a tool is already widely used by a large user base, there is a higher chance that questions that you or your team might come across during the development process have already been asked and answered by the community, thus saving time plucking your hair and getting frustrated at how to solve this specific problem.

  • Invests in tools that save you time learning and utilising so you and your team can focus on the main purpose, which usually are tools that also already have a large user base. Rely on official, freely available documentation and guides to get you started, then improvise to adapt to your specific situation.

• …but now, money is also a constraint.

  • Find the right balance between outsourcing and develop things in-house (also another borrowed advice from one of the conferences). Too much outsourcing can lead to a loss of control and overpaying for simple tech solutions, while too much in-house developing can lead to extra workload for your tiny team and unable to focus on the main tasks.

  • Spend the money on the talents, not on your tech stack. An organisation with the most advanced tech stack but without the right talents to utilise and maintain it is only using that tech stack to boast about their ability to spend money and all will go to waste in the end. The magic lies in the creativity and improvisation of the talents because, sometimes, an average tech stack can still create outstanding results when great people are utilising it.

• Open the doors, even just a glimpse of it.

  • Currently, there is a huge difference between the advancements being made by the public sphere and people who are working at clubs. In fact, that difference is only getting bigger and bigger over time. There is only so much that passion and available knowledge can drive the public sphere to create new ideas. If clubs are willing to share a glimpse of what they are building and doing, just like Parma are doing right now, that can inspire so many people to build their own things and open the floor for new suggestions on how to improve football-centric processes.

Lastly, I want to write this article to prove that when people talk about football analytics, it is not just about looking at a bunch of numbers and then make assessments about them, and, honestly, anyone can do that. The true potential of football analytics in the next few years does not only lie in the data, but also in the process of how one team can generate quick, effective, unbiased insights that can aid their decision-making process. It is not about which providers we are getting the data from, because we all share them and we all collect data from the same matches anyway, it is about the process of how to get to those insights and who gets there the quickest.

This article might not be the most comprehensive guide and it might not even be as good as Ben Torvaney’s original article. However, I hope that this can be a decent starting guide for any team or organisation who want to start their own data department. Establishing a data culture can be a tough process at first, but once everything is in place, you will understand why many big clubs want to invest heavily in their data analytics department, and I hope this article can act as one of the starting points.

I certainly do not expect myself to write this article and another update this soon after the first update on this blog since I am working on another Dev Logs edition while also trying to keep up with the ASEAN U23 Championship. This will be a lot informal than what you usually see on my blog, but this article is just the place where I note down my thoughts after seeing a trending situation unfolds. Another heads up before I head into my train of thought is that this might be an unorganised wall of text, and if this is not what you want to read, feel free to ignore this article/email and wait for the next few articles from me cause I will get back to writing about football stuff very soon!

A bit of background

I do not have the authority or enough knowledge to comment on a VTuber’s situation even though I watch their content every now and then. However, seeing their current situation unfolds makes me feel sympathised for what they are going through and also allows me to reflect on my own creative journey so far. Without going into full details since, maybe, the overlap between my audience and the VTubers audience might not be very big at all, but the situation is the classic situation of a talent puts their trust on an agency and signs with them, only to be rugpulled by being betrayed or trapped under an absurd contract, and the agency gets away with a decent amount of money. It has, unfortunately, happened quite a lot within the music industry and it has happened in sports as well, so this is not the first time that something like this happened.

It’s sad to watch the whole situation unfolds because from the perspective of someone who also create things, all I want to do is to continue creating stuff for my audience. I do not want to deal with the legal stuff or have anything to do with a lawsuit that will take my energy away from my creative process. But when a situation like this happens that involves a reported amount of money that is at least $500k+ (yes, that is five hundred thousands US dollars and more, from what has been told from the talent themselves), you absolutely cannot brush that off easily. After all, that is half a million US dollars of charity donation money going missing and even more unannounced amount of money going missing from the talent themselves that we are talking about here. It’s a frustrating situation for the talent because they put a lot of trust into their agency, yet that trust gets misplaced and now they are the one who have to deal with the aftermath, having to file a lawsuit to chase that money down, then be the bearer of bad news to the charity, while the whole situation takes a huge toll on their mental health. That is all because someone mismanaged $500k+ and tried to cover their traces.

As I’ve mentioned just now, usually, the main thing that a talent wants to do, and it does not matter whether that is writing blogs, or painting pictures, or producing music and/or videos, or any kind of creative work really, is to keep creating things. Some talents do not have the energy to deal with the business side of things, which they then resort to trusting an agency or someone to deal with the remaining stuff like sponsorships, accounting, taxes, etc. Unfortunately, as the current situation and previous similar situations have shown, finding the right people to trust can sometimes be very hard, and I sympathise with what they are going through at the moment. I can only wish everything will be sorted soon so that they can be back doing what they enjoy the most, which is creating contents.

Keeping Talking Tactics independent and free

One of the things that I learned from the current situation is how hard our current system is for people who want to be freelance or go independent. Without the right people taking care of things for a talent, it will be hard to divide the energy and keep track of their own finances, doing taxes, and negotiating sponsorships, and those are just at the top of the surface. You essentially become a manager of your own company which you then have to employ other people to look after your stuff, which is something that I think not many creative people want to deal with.

As for me and this blog, I have made the commitment that Talking Tactics will be independent and free as long as I can maintain it. I know that I am lucky to have a full-time job that can put food on my table and allow me to do this for free, I will not take that for granted by any bit, but I am also doing a bit of freelancing on the side and just seeing the amount of invoices that I have to calculate for the upcoming tax time just gives me the sense of dread. If I monetise this blog, it means that there will be more work for me to do, and that will drive me away from using my energy and creativity to write things, which is also the last thing that I want.

Another reason why I am keeping this blog free, which I will discuss in a later article, is I believe in the power of inspiration. I usually think that the articles that I write and the stuff that I do, they barely have any meaning and it is just me writing down my thoughts for myself and nobody cares about it, I am just doing this as a creative outlet so that the thoughts and ideas that I have don’t get stuck in my own brain. But I also believe that if these stuff that I do can reach one person and inspire them to do their own things, then I will keep doing it until I can’t. I have been and will continue to be inspired by so many more people, so I want to at least give back and inspire someone else on their journey to go out and do your own thing because creating things is magical.

I won’t hide it, but my biggest inspiration on my creative journey so far is the Swedish DJ, Avicii. I don’t just enjoy his tracks, but it’s also the journey that he went through that has guided me a lot. His music has inspired many to kickstart their own journey and a few of them have now become top electronic producers or DJs because of his music. I want to do that as well, giving people a spark to start and create things. I tend to look forward most of the time because I feel uncertain about what the future holds for me, but sometimes I remind myself to look back and realise that maybe I have achieved that to some extend. My earliest work was writing scout reports in Vietnamese on a Facebook page that is now gone, and I was doing that at the time just because no one in Vietnam had scouted Nordi Mukiele when he moved to Leipzig, yet I did not see that what I had done (along with a few others’ work) basically kickstarted a whole movement that brought scouting players and tactical analysis onto the forefront of the Vietnamese football community for a short period. I still don’t attribute that success to myself because I don’t know how much I contributed to that movement, but seeing people mentioning me as part of that original movement really moved me and it tells me that I have left a little bit of impact like I had wanted, and I will continue to do that here with the articles that I write.

Getting paid

Have I considered opening up a paid subscription for this blog? The short answer is: yes, a few times. But I don’t want to do that because I still think the stuff that I do doesn’t really deserve your money, dear reader, and I am too inconsistent to provide you with the value that you will pay. I have kept that line of thought because I am a perfectionist and I set a very high standard for myself, I want the stuff that I create to meet those standards for me to share them out into the world.

There have been countless times where I had to completely rework my original draft for an article or even scrapping an idea entirely just because I thought what I had done was not good enough. I have embraced imperfection more and more recently, and that means coming to terms that I can only finish a certain piece of work to a certain level at that point in time. However, that perfectionist still leaves inside and sees that because it doesn’t meet the standard that I had originally hoped, it means that I cannot ask people for money to read or to use something.

One example that I can think of is my first version of the Scouted Handbook, a blatant copy/inspired by Scouted Football’s Handbooks at the time. I originally created also for the Vietnamese community because I realised that not many Vietnamese people would have had the chance to read Scouted’s Handbooks, so why not create something homegrown instead? So I singlehandedly designed every graphics in my own Handbook while also wrote most of the reports in there, then released it free of charge to everyone because I thought what I had designed looked quite bad. There were calls from people about asking for a bit of money that was equivalent to a cup of coffee for the Handbook, but I turned it down because I thought the Handbook didn’t hit the standards that I wanted and didn’t deserve the money that I would be paid for, even though I had spent my entire summer in high school to work on that.

And I did say ‘first version’, because there was supposed to be a second version after I felt the reception for the first one was quite good. I had completed designing the player graphics, which felt like a step up from the first batch and you can find them here, and also finished writing a few reports, including two for Angers’ Rayan Ait-Nouri and Valencia’s Ferran Torres, which I also have made public. But then the entire version got scrapped because I did not have time to complete everything on my own again. And yes, before you ask, I did try to find people to collaborate with, but most people said ‘no’, so I decided that because it was my idea, I should make it happen. Nowadays, I don’t really do much graphic designing even though I still have an itch for it, and you can still find me scratching that itch with the visualisations that I create.

But, long story short, I won’t try to make money from the football stuff I do for now and unless it is a job. I don’t expect this blog will get sponsored anytime soon, but if it does, I will only be willing to shill out for anything that I actually use and think that might be beneficial for my audience. I feel a sense of responsibility to my audience, and because you have put your trust in me and come to my blog to read the stuff that I write, I don’t want to betray that trust by shilling out a random product or, even worse, a betting service or company. I want to make that very clear and saying this here is also me trying to hold myself accountable for anything that I do in the future.

Final words

This has been a long-winded way of me saying that the blog will continue to be free until I cannot keep it that way anymore. But I also want to share a bit of who I am and how I have gotten here to show that I really do care about my audience and the stuff that I do. At the end of the day, I just want to continue writing things and create things. I don’t want to be tied to any company, agency, or agent, and with how scummy that industry is going, I think it’s better to continue being independent until I can find the right people to trust, and yet that might also be a tough task.

Lastly, I hope that everything that I have done will inspire you to create something. It’s never too late to start and I do cringe a lot when I look back at my previous stuff, that gets even worse since I’m a perfectionist and I’m being very harsh on myself, but I always take that as a challenge to improve every next things that I do and make it better and better every time. So, don’t be afraid to start and find your own audience, even if that’s just 1 person.

One last message that I have to edit in after publishing: If possible, please donate to any amount that you can to a charity that aligns with your values and causes. It makes a world of difference because someone that you might never meet will get a meal or the medication that they need for their disease, and that is a big difference. Make the world a better place, one bit at a time and in your own ability, and bring some positivity back into this current mess that we are finding ourselves in.

First of all, I would like to dedicate this newsletter to Diogo Jota and his brother André Silva after they passed away in July 2025. I found this article from Daniel Storey described my feelings very well, it is slightly hard to come to terms that a player who I followed for a while is not here anymore because I have had a small thought that football players are immortals somehow. But Diogo and André’s deaths showed me that players are still humans after all, and a human’s life can be quite fragile. So, dear readers, cherish every moment that you have with your loved ones. Forever in our hearts, and rest in peace, Diogo and André.

It has been a few weeks since I wrote one of these, and there have been many interesting transfers made in Europe. There is also no doubt that many more are to come with the actual summer window has opened since the 1st of July. I can try to squeeze a few signings into this article, but this will turn into a wall of text and that is what I am trying to avoid when I return to blogging because nobody wants and has the time to read that. As such, I will stick with the list of 3 players that I already had in mind and leave recent transfers for future articles.

I also want to give a quick shoutout to Filip Rózga’s move to Sturm Graz and Raul Florucz’s move to Union Saint-Gilloise, two transfers that I had to leave out at the last minute. Watch out for both players because they have landed at two clubs who are doing very well in developing young players and helping them get to the next level before securing a bigger move elsewhere. There might be a chance that you will hear their names again soon!

Without further ado, let’s get stuck into this edition of Under-the-Radar Signings!

Note: All stats and data used in this article are from Opta via FBRef and Fotmob, and vizzes are created using FBCharts’ extension for FBRef unless stated otherwise.

Adrien Truffert

(Stade Rennais → AFC Bournemouth)

At the time of writing, Liverpool have finalised the highly-anticipated signing of Miloš Kerkez from Bournemouth to replace Andrew Robertson. But, for a well-run club like Bournemouth who seem to be doing quite well with their recruitment department, especially in the last couple of seasons or so, it was more interesting for me to see who they brought in to fill in the spot that Kerkez left behind. And way before Kerkez’s move was publicly announced, Bournemouth have moved one step quicker and replaced the Hungarian international with Stade Rennais’ Adrien Truffert.

At just 23 years old, Truffert had already made almost 200 appearances for Rennes’ first team since making the breakthrough during the 2020-21 season. Truffert was exposed to different systems during his time with Rennes, having played as a left-back in a 4-4-2 and a 4-1-2-3 and also a left wing-back in Habib Beye’s 3-4-1-2 formation since January of this year, allowing him to develop his versatility while also retaining his main strength as an attacking full-back down the left-hand side. His attacking output over the five seasons that he spent with Rennes also supported that as he scored 9 goals and assisted 19 goals during that period.

While Bournemouth fans can expect to see a traditional attacking full-back from Truffert, whose profile closely aligns with the outgoing Kerkez, the French international will bring more than just the ability to create chances and bursting overlapping runs down the left-hand side. Firstly, having been used in a more offensive role than the conventional full-back spot, Truffert was given the license to push forward more and be a goal-scoring threat for Rennes (as shown via his 0.07 non-penalty goals from 0.08 non-penalty xG per 90s), even if he has already done that in previous seasons. Should Antoine Semenyo stay with the South Coast-based club, Truffert can bring a few more goals here and there and might turn out to be a difference maker if the team are having a tough time breaking down the opposition.

Moreover, Truffert is surprisingly comfortable receiving possession, especially inside of the opposition’s half, having received 7.95 progressive passes per 90s (ranks 95th among top 5 European leagues full-backs), made 22.04 touches per 90s inside the attacking third (ranks 83rd) and 1.86 touches per 90s inside the penalty box (ranks 70th). While he will be under more pressure with the ball when playing in the Premier League compared to his time in Ligue 1, this highlights the fact that Truffert can be an offensive passing option for the team, and for a transitional-focused team like Bournemouth, Truffert’s ability to retain possession inside the opposition’s half will be crucial.

In contrast to Kerkez, Truffert will bring a bit more defensive solidity as he has shown to be fairly active in both making interceptions (0.88 per 90s) and getting stuck into challenges and tackles (1.99 per 90s). In fact, the French international’s defensive ability is more aligned to Fran García’s last season at Rayo Vallecano, another left-back that Andoni Iraola has elevated to a higher level, as both players tend to be more active and engaging in defensive situations. This will come as good news for Bournemouth’s centre-back pairing, whoever might fill in those two spots after the departure of Dean Huijsen and the potential departure of Illia Zabarnyi, as Truffert can be a proactive defender while the centre-backs can provide a bit of coverage for the French left-back.

In a physically-demanding system like Iraola’s system, Truffert will be asked to run and cover a lot of distance, which he is definitely capable of doing. From analysing his numbers at Rennes over the past 365 days (or maybe from last season), his profile fits very well into a traditional line-hugging, attacking full-back who likes to create chances from his crosses (1.27 chances created per 90s, 1.24 successful crosses per 90s), which fits what Iraola is looking for from his full-back and also explains why García, Kerkez, and Truffert’s percentiles under Iraola’s guidance all look quite similar. There is also a potential that, maybe it is less realistic than I think, Iraola will explore Truffert in a slightly different role to an attacking full-back, particularly because his passing ability has not been utilised as much. It will not be a regular occurrence, but should Iraola look to adapt to the opposition, Truffert might offer the flexibility of moving inside or even be a free-roaming full-back thanks to his well-rounded profile.

Being able to find a player with a similar profile to Kerkez for an easier integration period is one thing, but the fact that Bournemouth found the Hungarian’s replacement who is only 2 years older and for just £14.4 million is quite surprising and a testament to Bournemouth’s recruitment department. Instead of being a raw talent who needs time to develop into a top-level player, Truffert arrives at Bournemouth having gathered plenty of experiences at a top level European league and even in the Europa League and Conference League, which might prove to be helpful as the club push for a European spot next season. At just 23 years old, Truffert still has the potential to return to the French national team if he can step up to be a regular starting left-back in the Premier League, and that will only bring more benefits to Bournemouth should an opportunity to make profit on him comes up in the future.

On the opposite side, while Rennes will be losing a top and promising talent at left-back, I do not think the club will struggle to replace Truffert. Firstly, the club have triggered the €12 million option-to-buy to bring back their homegrown talent Lilian Brassier from Olympique de Marseille. While Brassier’s preferred position is centre-back and manager Habib Beye prefers to use three centre-backs, Beye also has plenty of centre-back options at his disposal, so I suspect Brassier might cover at left wing-back for a short period until first-choice option Alidu Seidu has fully recovered from his cruciate ligament injury. But, more importantly, Truffert’s departure will pave the way for Mahamadou Nagida to play a more prominent role in the team. Last season, the 20-year-old Cameroon international played a total of 430 minutes and only started 4 matches out of the 13 that he played in, but I hope that Nagida will get more minutes in between Seidu’s recovery and Brassier covering the position temporarily, which will aid his development and allow for Nagida to step up to be the future starting left-back for Rennes.

Up until this point, I might come across as praising Bournemouth a bit too much for what seems like a pretty ordinary deal, or maybe because they are ‘smart’ in identifying Truffert as a replacement for Kerkez. While everything that I have said are just assumptions, I feel the need to actually praising a good signing in a business where a lot of clubs are still wastefully spending their money to overpay for a player or not getting enough value out of a signing. In this economy, getting a decent, Premier League-quality left-back for £14.4 million is quite cheap and, should Truffert’s development being guided rightly by Iraola and his coaching staff, the club can get a top-quality left-back in the near future or make profit from selling him to a bigger club. It is a smart, but sensible signing by Bournemouth, and I think time will provide the best answer to whether that statement is right or not.

Louis Oppie

(Arminia Bielefeld → FC St. Pauli)

In my short opinion piece about Arminia Bielefeld discussing their historic run to the final of the DFB-Pokal, I made the assumption that after a few years of being unsuccessful on the transfer market, the club and their new sporting director Michael Mutzel have changed their approach to signing promising youngsters from academies across Germany and giving them a chance to play first-team football in the 3. Liga. While their first year with that approach almost became disastrous as the club flirted with a third-consecutive relegation in a row that would have sent them all the way down to the Regionalliga, the second year was the complete opposite as Arminia’s young squad fired them to the 3. Liga title along with a ticket back to the 2. Bundesliga, another Regional Westfalen title, and the DFB-Pokal runner-up medal. And a player who played a very important part in that team was left-back Louis Oppie.

After signing for the club from Hannover 96’s B team at the beginning of the 2023-24 season, Oppie made the left-back position in Michél Kniat’s 4-1-2-3 formation his own during the two seasons that he played in the non-existent city of Bielefeld, and rightly so as he delivered during some of the most important moments for the club. Playing as an attacking left-back, the German youngster was given the license to make overlapping runs and drive forward with the ball into the final third, where he was the most effective. Last season alone, he made 9 assists in all competitions, with 8 came in the league, while also created almost 2 chances and made 1.2 successful crosses per 90s in the 3. Liga. His numbers from the previous league season were also quite similar, with 1.49 chances created and 1.59 successful crosses per 90s while also achieved a crossing accuracy of 36.2%, indicating that Oppie’s most effective weapon to create chances for his teammates is his crosses down the left-hand side. This makes a lot of sense when I think about the type of striker that Mutzel and Arminia targeted last season since Roberts Uldriķis and Joel Grodowski were all very good in the air and were targets inside of the penalty box that Oppie could aim his crosses at.

Besides from the ability to create chances for others, Oppie is also capable of converting chances by himself as his long shots proved to be a huge attacking threat that Arminia were able to make the most of. These two goals against Ingolstadt and Osnabrück were just two of the total nine goals that he scored for the club in all competitions and they are just a taste for what he is able to do. His ability to strike the ball well and with power made it very hard for the opposition’s keeper to save his shots, and that is not mentioning the placement of his shots that made it even tougher, Freiburg’s keeper Noah Atubolu will tell you how hard it was to save this shot from Oppie.

But as good as Oppie was when he had the ball, his defensive side left a lot to be desired. Since Arminia were predicted to be one of the dominant teams in the 3. Liga, Oppie’s defensive ability was not exposed that often and he got away with losing duels or not getting stuck into a challenge many times. In the two seasons with the club, he only won slightly more than half of his duels (55.4% in the 2023-24 season and 52.9% in the 2024-25 season) and made less than 1 interception per 90s (0.91 and 0.6 interceptions per 90s respectively). The DFB-Pokal final against Stuttgart was one of those occasions when Oppie was left exposed quite heavily and allowed Enzo Millot to run the show. Without adjusting for actual possession, it will be hard to know Oppie’s actual defensive numbers since the difference between both seasons also rely on the fact that Arminia had to defend more in their first season back in the 3. Liga. However, the plain numbers still raised a bit of concern and an aspect that the young German full-back will need to improve quickly.

Luckily for Oppie, he will be joining a St. Pauli side that are managed by Alexander Blessin, who prefers to use a back three on most occasions. It is very likely that Oppie will provide a bit of depth at the left wing-back spot where his weakness in defence will be covered by the left centre-back behind him, but he will also have more license to join the team’s attack more often without having to worry too much about the defensive side. Oppie’s role and profile will be somewhat similar to how Blessin used Loïc Lapoussin at Union Saint-Gilloise previously as the Malagasy international was successfully converted into a wing-back while still retained his goal-scoring ability. But Oppie will not be the only player who will compete for that left wing-back role, though, as he will face stern challenges from Lars Ritzka and another new signing in Jannik Robatsch. It will also be interesting to see how he will handle making the step up from the 3. Liga all the way to the Bundesliga since St. Pauli have spent €2 million for his service, a fee that while not too expensive, it still shows that the club have a lot of faith in him and Oppie will need to live up to that faith.

Meanwhile, Arminia have quickly moved and signed Tim Handwerker from Jahn Regensburg, who will potentially start and fill in the left-back spot that Oppie left behind. They still have the service of Christopher Lannert, who can play on both sides and have done so on multiple occasions over the last couple of seasons. However, it is more likely that the Austrian full-back will be a rotational option on the right with Felix Hagmann, another youngster that I am quite excited about. They have also signed Benjamin Boakye from Stuttgart, who can cover as left-back but only if needed since his preferred position is a winger and I expect Boakye to play higher up the pitch, unless Kniat decides to switch to a back three and uses Boakye as a left wing-back like in a few of Stuttgart II matches from last season.

It is quite exciting to see Arminia and Mutzel’s approach starting to produce some results and I will be following with a keen eye to see how Oppie will perform in the top division. The step up can be quite significant, but a few players have managed to adapt quickly and establish themselves as a decent Bundesliga player, including Benedict Hollerbach, who I have covered in the first part of this series. St. Pauli will have a very interesting player who can offer plenty of excitement on the ball and someone who, unintentionally, fits Blessin’s system like a glove, which can only be a plus in their quest to stay for another season and make progress in the Bundesliga.

Luca Marianucci

(Empoli FC → SSC Napoli)

After regaining the Scudetto title from Internazionale, Antonio Conte’s Napoli have been going hard in the current summer window. They have swiftly moved to secure Kevin de Bruyne’s service on a free from Manchester City and they are still working hard to bring in Darwin Núñez from Liverpool (as of writing, rumours have said their pursuit have failed and have since turned their attention to Udinese’s Lorenzo Lucca). But amidst the headlining moves that have rocked the transfer window, Napoli have quietly secured a signing that might complete their future centre-back pairing in Luca Marianucci from Empoli.

Another talent coming out of the Empoli talent factory in recent years after Tommaso Baldanzi, Jacopo Fazzini, Mattia Viti, Samuele Ricci, and Kristjan Asllani, Marianucci only made his professional debut for Empoli in 2024 after returning from a loan to Serie C-side Pro Sesto, where he made 32 league appearances, and it took him until November to make his Serie A debut against newly-promoted Como. However, he did start in two matches prior to his Serie A debut in the Coppa Italia against Catanzaro and Torino where he played the entire 90 minutes while also made 1 assist in each match along the way. That was probably a sign for what was to come from Marianucci, as he stepped up from February and started regularly in defence for Empoli even after he served a two-match suspension for a red card that he received against AC Milan during round 24. That is not accounting the fact that Marianucci is only 20 years old at the time of writing (he will turn 21 in late July of 2025).

Even though he only became a regular in the latter half of the season, Marianucci still managed to play in a total of 1069 minutes for Empoli and became an integral part of Roberto D’Aversa’s 3-4-2-1 system. In most matches, he was used either in the central or on the right of Empoli’s back-three, which suits his preference to play on his right foot more often. However, the Italian youngster also offered a bit more versatility as he was also able to step into midfield and play as one of the two defensive midfielders in front of the back-three on a few occasions.

While his individual effort was not enough to save Empoli from returning to Serie B and Opta/Fotmob did not give him a favourable overall rating, Marianucci still left the impression that there is a lot more to come from the young Italian centre-back, which Napoli have quickly caught onto. His per 90 stats and percentile ranks from last season painted the picture of a ball-carrying, forward-thinking centre-back who liked to get stuck into challenges to regain possession for his team, the centre-back profile that many top teams are seeking for.

What stands out immediately besides from Marianucci’s defending stats is that he is ranked very high for progressive carries (1.01 per 90s, ranked 81st among top 5 European league centre-backs) and successful take-ons (0.42 per 90s, ranked 86th), which are two highly unusual metrics for a centre-back to stand out in. At first glance, these outliers can be attributed to the fact that he was used in midfield, a position in which Marianucci would have been able to dribble with the ball slightly more. However, the number of occasions where he played in midfield was insignificant compared to how many minutes he was used as a centre-back. As such, these outliers highlight Marianucci’s preference to carry the ball forward and he excelled at doing so last season.

Another trait of his that I think is also worth pointing out is the fact that Marianucci is very good at making switch-play passes and crosses…as a centre-back. The Italian centre-back did not make plenty of passes last season (38.81 per 90s) and was ranked very low for both passes attempted and passing accuracy (%). Yet, when it came to long passes volume (5.39 completed from 9.93 attempted per 90s), he was ranked among the top 20% of top 5 European leagues centre-backs in that regard while he was also ranked among the top 10% for switch-play passes (0.76 per 90s) and crosses (0.59 per 90s). Combine with his preference of carrying the ball forward and it makes sense for why Marianucci was used fairly often as the right-sided centre-back since it allowed him to carry the ball forward from deep and make crosses into the box, very similar to Atalanta’s trademark overlapping centre-backs under Gian Piero Gasperini in previous years.

I have slightly refrained from analysing Marianucci’s defensive numbers because, even though they look quite impressive at first glance, it is important to note that Empoli conceded the third-most goals per match (1.6) and the ninth-most total xG (50.9 xGA) last season. This means Marianucci and his teammates had to do a fair bit of defending, which would skew his defensive numbers a fair bit and especially without adjusting for possession on top of the raw numbers to reflect his actual ability. However, his numbers still showed that he was an active defender who was good at getting stuck into challenges and being at the right place to intercept passes to regain possession for his team.

For Napoli, they will be getting a slightly different centre-back profile from Amir Rrahmani and Juan Jesus and someone who fits very well in a back-three system that Antonio Conte used at Internazionale previously. At just 20 years old, Marianucci is also a long-term replacement for Rrahmani and Jesus since they are both well into their 30s at the time of writing. Along with Alessandro Buongiorno, Napoli will have a domestic centre-back pairing that will lock in the two starting positions for a few years, or at least until a bigger club come swooping in for their service. However…with the recent rumours that they are also going for Bologna’s Sam Beukema, I think the chance of getting regular minutes for Marianucci might be slim since Conte and Napoli will have five centre-backs to choose from.

Unless Conte switches to a back three for next season, it might probably be better for his development to go out on a loan to another Serie A club or might even go back to Empoli in Serie B. It is also worth remembering that last season was only Marianucci’s second full professional season and his first at the top level. Getting more and consistent playing minutes at a higher level than Serie C will only do more good to his development and will give him more opportunities to improve his game. Nevertheless, securing a highly promising centre-back who has the potential to be a future starter for just €9 million is a good, low-risk piece of investment if Marianucci does not follow the usual path of an Italian player who gets loaned out every single season, and Napoli will also have a decent backup centre-back that can grow over time.

So far, it has been great to cover under-the-radar signings and using data to predict how they will perform at their new club. Being able to discover new players and revisiting names that I have known via Football Manager via this way has been fun and I hope you have enjoyed reading these four parts. Unfortunately, as much as I enjoy writing these, I think they are getting quite repetitive and I found myself repeating the same stuff a few times, which I don’t really like doing. It will not be the end of the series, however, as this will be on a small hiatus until August and make way for the ASEAN U23 Championship while I figure out new ideas and way to make this series more enjoyable for you to read.

It was not an easy decision, but instead of forcing myself to churn out these articles every couple of weeks and repeating the same stuff again and again, I want to explore other ways of making these bite-sized scout reports more enjoyable for you to read and for me to write. If that means taking a quick pause to improve the quality then I will do it. I am also open to any ideas or feedback that you might have or things that you want me to write about through this series, so please do not hesitate to leave a comment down below!

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