The Double Pivot: Soccer analysis, analytics, and commentary

We are joined by Semafor's Liz Hoffman, who has broken all the big 777 Partners news in the last week, to talk about what she discovered, what her business and finance reporting means for Everton Football Club and what we still have to learn.

Read Liz's reporting (and sign up for her newsletter) here: https://www.semafor.com/newsletter/11/15/2023/777-partners-bought-sports-teams-with-insurance-customers-cash

And check out her book too: https://www.penguinrandomhouse...

Roman Abramovich hasn't been owner of Chelsea for a while but he's back in the news with a big leak of documents from Cypriot banks where he did his shady banking. We take stock of what these stories actually mean, what they tell us about how oligarch football team ownership functioned, and whether there will be any consequences for Chelsea.

On the Video International "trade": https://www.bbc...

Everton, Brentford, Arsenal, United, Bournemouth, West Ham, Brighton, Liverpool and more.

The Derby gives us the opportunity to do the United pod that's been needed. An impressive win for City (who attacked!) but the real story coming out of it is how bad United were and how fully in line with their performance this season that is. Why is it so bad and can it get better?

Their numbers are so good. Drill down a little and their numbers are so weird. And this was true last season too except they were weird in a completely different way! What are we to make of this?

We asked for your galaxy-brain ideas to fix the game of football and you delivered. We discuss proposals to fix video review and the offside rule, as well as the multi-ref system.

The best team in the world lost again. Does it mean anything? We talk about how City and Arsenal approach their weekend clash, what we can glean from the data about City's attack not quite clicking, and how we think it could get fixed.

They got a big call wrong in an unusually straightforward way in Spurs - Liverpool. So what's to be done? We talk about what this means about refereeing and VAR, the prospects for positive change and the profound structural limits on organizing toward it.

Spurs and Arsenal played to a more or less fair draw, but given our priors this leads to different kinds of questions about Spurs and Arsenal. Why isn't Arsenal's attack quite clicking? Can Spurs keep taking these risks in possession? And we talk about the tactics of the game and stuff.

Caley did an analytics. Talking about Chelsea, Newcastle, Brentford, Brighton, Forest and the bottom of the PL table in terms of their schedule-adjusted numbers. And stick around for the appendices.

For reference, Caley's xG table: https://twitter.com/MC_of_A/status/1703908497543356705