He appeared in the dock at Manchester Crown Court like a familiar-looking stranger, a vivid memory from a distant past.

Jamie Cassidy had once been one of the most promising young footballers at Liverpool, England’s most successful club, a player deemed good enough to train with his national team ahead of the 1996 European Championship.

Today, Cassidy was jailed for 13 years and three months for his part in a conspiracy involving South American drug cartels that saw 356kg (784lb) of cocaine with an estimated street value of £28million ($35.8m) flood cities across northern England.

Cassidy, now 46, did not have a “pivotal” role like his 50-year-old brother, Jonathan, who received 21 years and nine months, but it was nevertheless “significant”, according to the judge, Sir Ian Dove.

Jamie’s job was to “ensure things ran smoothly” once the drugs arrived in Liverpool from the Netherlands, hidden in modified vehicles. He acted upon instruction, being paid a wage for his “managerial” input, which involved taking care of collections and deliveries that amounted to around 150kg of the drug.

Huge profits were laundered every month but the Cassidys’ operation was stopped after the EncroChat messaging service, once the preferred tool of communication in the criminal community, was intercepted by French authorities.

Jonathan Cassidy and Nasar Ahmed, 51, pleaded guilty last month to conspiracy to import and supply class A drugs and to launder money, while Jamie admitted to supply and laundering. Like Jonathan, Ahmed received 21 years and nine months.

Having been held on remand since November 2020, former footballer Cassidy had more than three years to consider his future.

It might explain why on Wednesday, as he emerged from the steps that led from the cells in Manchester Crown Court, he seemed relaxed and focused, as the scale of the charges against him were laid bare in a legal setting for the first time.

In his closing notes, the judge suggested “it seemed likely” that Jamie had been drawn by his brother into a “business” that was also described as “sophisticated”.

Each of the offenders will serve half of their sentence before being released on licence.

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Across a hearing that stretched over two days, there was only a brief mention of Cassidy’s life as a footballer whose talent was so vast that his name sometimes appears in the same sentences as true Liverpool greats.

In 1994, two summers before Cassidy lined up with future internationals Michael Owen and Jamie Carragher in the Liverpool Under-18s team that won the FA Youth Cup by beating a West Ham United side that featured Frank Lampard and Rio Ferdinand, he played for England as they reached the quarter-finals of Under-16 European Championship in the Republic of Ireland.

As a centre-forward, the regard in which he was held was reflected by the fact he was given the No 10 shirt in that England squad while Emile Heskey, who six years later would join Liverpool from Leicester City for a record £11million fee, had to make do with No 12.

Carragher became a legendary figure at Liverpool, making 737 appearances, second on the club’s all-time list behind Ian Callaghan’s 857. Yet when it came to England junior selection, Cassidy was called up ahead of him and David Thompson, who later featured in 56 Liverpool first-team games before fruitful spells in the midfields of Coventry City and Blackburn Rovers.

Thompson came from Birkenhead, which is separated from Liverpool by the River Mersey. In the early 1990s, Cassidy and Carragher, born in the same school year, were regarded as the best two young players in the city for their age group.

While Carragher came from Bootle and went to Savio Salesian College, representing Sefton Boys, Cassidy played for Liverpool Boys having attended the Alsop comprehensive where future Liverpool manager Gerard Houllier taught when he lived in the city in the late 1960s and early ’70s.

Cassidy’s home turf was Walton and the warren of streets near City Road, close to Everton’s Goodison Park stadium, which became infamous in 1993 because of its proximity to the old railway line where two-year-old James Bulger was murdered by two 10-year-old boys.

Much of the reporting that followed painted an unremittingly bleak picture of the area and an “urchin” culture where children roamed freely after dark, causing havoc. There was little attention or sympathy given to a district that had been compared, in a paper published by the European Union, to some of the poorest parts of southern Italy and the old East Germany.

Before he joined Liverpool, Cassidy played for a Sunday league team affiliated with a pub called The Pacific. This brought him into contact with Carragher for the first time, because he was signed to another team in the same league, Merton Villa. Other young boys from The Pacific, such as Jon Murphy, Ged Hennigan and Dominic Morley, would make it into the youth systems of Liverpool and Everton. Yet Cassidy went the furthest.

In his early years with Liverpool, he played up front with Carragher. The pair were so good that the coaches at Liverpool allowed them to play two years above their age group, even though they knew they were not quite physically strong enough. This meant that, sometimes, one would replace the other at half-time.

To his family, Carragher is still “James”. He is only known as “Jamie” to the wider world because Steve Heighway, Liverpool’s academy director, started referring to him and Cassidy as “the two Jamies” when they were both selected for Lilleshall, the FA’s residential School of Excellence in the Midlands.

Upon returning to Merseyside from a visit to Lilleshall in 1995, Heighway wrote in his Liverpool match-day programme column, “Both boys are super players.”

David Thompson, Jamie Cassidy, Michael Owen and Jamie Carragher, Liverpool 1996 @Carra23 pic.twitter.com/CmHI8RTIaF

— Angies Liverpool (@angiesliverpool) April 15, 2020

Cassidy was also ‘Cass’, a player team-mates wanted on their side because of his subtle leadership qualities. His presence provided reassurance because of his consistency and his maturity. Some looked up to him, not only because of his talent but also because of his dress sense.

His football associates from the time – all of whom spoke to The Athletic on condition of anonymity due to the severity and scale of his criminal case – describe Cassidy as an “elegant” footballer, with a shot as ferocious as his tackles. If a challenge was there to be won, he relished it. In conversations, comparisons are made with Steven Gerrard, then three years his junior, and now one of the greatest players in Liverpool’s history.

While he was good in the air and an able runner, Cassidy was also left-footed, which gave him an added grace. Those who watched the youth teams at that time describe a footballer who had it all — one good enough to be invited to train with England’s senior squad, under Terry Venables, in the build-up to Euro 96.

The Liverpool team who won that FA Youth Cup is described by Carragher in his autobiography as a group of “scallies”, not necessarily high on talent but full of desire. Cassidy fitted right in, albeit playing on the left of midfield. That success was timely for Liverpool because the first team was under fire due to their performance in an FA Cup final defeat to arch-rivals Manchester United. Over the months that followed, Cassidy, Carragher, Owen and Thompson all got more exposure to senior training. Their performances were rewarded with new contracts, rising from £250 to £750 a week.

In December 1996, aged 18, Cassidy was given a squad number (22) and was selected on the bench for first-team game at Anfield against Sheffield Wednesday. Though he did not get on that day as Liverpool lost, 1-0, he was getting closer to a first-team debut.

Some of the coaches at Liverpool identified that he was different to Carragher and Thompson, who were obsessives. Carragher would treat training sessions like they were full-scale games and Thompson would tell senior figures in the squad that he was coming to take their place. Cassidy could be aggressive on the pitch but his otherwise calm demeanour led to questions over his body language.

Did he care enough? His team-mates thought so. This was evidenced when he flew into a tackle during a reserve game not long after snapping his anterior cruciate ligament (ACL). A leg break meant he spent 18 months out in total, with those injuries having an impact on three seasons, just at the point his peers were breaking into the first team and establishing themselves.

There was some belief that this period caused him to lose a yard of pace, particularly damaging as football at the highest level was becoming more about physicality, especially in midfield. One person with an understanding of Cassidy’s position describes him as being “really, really unlucky”.

After another long period out, team-mates would stare at Cassidy’s legs at Melwood, the club’s former training ground. Above specialist shin pads, which looked like they were shatterproof, it seemed as though one of his knees had doubled in size.

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Owen became a global superstar because of his performances with England at the World Cup in 1998, and by the summer of 1999 he had represented Liverpool 86 times.

Carragher, meanwhile, had made it to 70 appearances, and Thompson had 25. Gerrard had also emerged from the youth ranks, playing in 13 games in the 1998-99 season.

Following a succession of setbacks and operations, Cassidy, aged 20, was still waiting for his first-team debut. All of this was playing out against a backdrop of vast cultural change at Liverpool instigated by manager Houllier, who was driving more professional standards. That shift ultimately led to some players, regardless of previous status, moving on.

According to administrators at the club, leading academy figures considered Cassidy to be a huge talent, though he was never quite in the same bracket as Owen and Carragher. These sources have told The Athletic that they cannot remember him causing any problems for the coaches, pointing only towards injuries as a reason he eventually left.

There was shock, however, when he signed for Cambridge United, nearly 200 miles away, in 1999. Cambridge were fighting to stay in the third tier of English football; many at Liverpool believed Cassidy could have made a fresh start at a higher level, earning decent money, for example, in Division One (now the Championship — England’s second tier).

Quickly, Cassidy lost touch with the players at Liverpool with whom he’d spent his teenage years. Most of the band of brothers who had won the FA Youth Cup in 1996 suddenly had less in common, and while some fell into the non-League system at clubs such as Barrow, Droylsden and Vauxhall Motors, others became associated with the game’s amateur scene in Liverpool.

Having entered a relationship with a woman, Cassidy slipped off the radar entirely. Some wondered whether he was too embarrassed or proud to try to work his way back up the football ladder, given how highly rated he had been.

If he lost his love for the game, he did not show it at Cambridge, but he made little impression on a dressing room dominated by senior professionals.

He stood out mainly because he was a Scouser, far away from home. Though it was obvious in training sessions he was technically excellent, he could not emulate team-mates such as Trevor Benjamin and Martin Butler, who would both sign for clubs higher up the food chain in Leicester City and Reading.

In a season when Cambridge finished two places and four points above the relegation zone, Cassidy started just four league games, with another four appearances from the bench.

He did not strike one of Cambridge’s most senior players at the club as a bad lad. “Quite the opposite, I liked him — a really nice kid,” he said.

Nonetheless, he continued, he seemed the type of player “that might need a rocket up his a**e now and then”.

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Cassidy’s career was over by the time he was 23. After brief spells at non-League sides Cambridge City and Northwich Victoria, he reappeared at Burscough, a sixth-tier club in west Lancashire, 18 miles north of Liverpool, partway through pre-season in the summer of 2001.

A match programme at the end of the subsequent campaign suggests he made just five appearances for the club, with three of them starts.

Money was tight at Burscough, and players were paid small sums, cash in hand. Yet the club were developing a reputation as a place where players could trampoline into the professional ranks, thanks to the manager John Davison, who worked as a schoolteacher, and his assistant, Peter King, who came from Liverpool and had a strong grip on a local football landscape where Burscough might naturally recruit.

Those who flourished at Burscough tended to be strikers, such as Michael Yates (who went to Dundee in the Scottish Premier League), Ryan Lowe (Shrewsbury Town), Robbie Talbot (Morecambe) and Lee McEvilly (Rochdale).

Cassidy, however, never really got going. One player thinks he arrived carrying a back injury. Had he been more established at the club, maybe he would have been sent to a specialist but he believes Burscough did not have the means to treat him.

After one training session, Cassidy seemed to disappear for a while. His absence was never explained. Though he returned to the squad, his stay at the club was ultimately brief. Even though he did play, some team-mates needed to be reminded of the data to prove it — he barely made an impression.

Elsewhere, Carragher and Owen were now Champions League players, having won their first trophies at Liverpool, lifting the League Cup, FA Cup and UEFA Cup (today’s Europa League) in the 2000-01 season. Cassidy, however, faded out of sight and mind.

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It is thought Cassidy turned to the building trade, where he worked with his father.

When he was arrested in 2020, a month after his brother Jonathan was apprehended after landing at Manchester Airport following a flight from Dubai, officers found an encrypted telephone with an Estonian SIM card in a search of his property.

On EncroChat, where drug deals were arranged with traffickers in the Netherlands who had connections to cocaine cartels from Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador, it was established by investigators that his user name was Nuclear Dog.

In April 2020, another EncroChat user going by Whisky Wasp engaged a contact by sending a photograph of his television screen. He was on Netflix, watching El Chapo, a dramatised TV series about a Mexican drug lord. Whisky Wasp joked that they shared the same birthday. He was, in fact, Jonathan Cassidy.

Judge Dove would later describe the comparison as a “stupid exaggeration”, albeit “one not so far from the truth to be fanciful”.

According to the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), Jonathan was the “leading” figure behind a cocaine import operation that delivered quantities of the drug on an “industrial” scale.

On Wednesday, it was revealed that, between March and April 2020, the Cassidy brothers were using EncroChat almost every day.

After Jonathan brokered agreements with suppliers in the Netherlands, Jamie “acted on direction” in his “operational role”, ensuring the drugs made their way around the north of England. From there, a third man, Nasar Ahmed, who was sitting beside the Cassidys’ in the dock today, dealt with the money. On at least one occasion, an exchange was made using a reusable bag from the Asda supermarket chain.

It was revealed that when one of Jonathan’s couriers was stopped by police as he met a supplier, “it did not dent his enthusiasm for the next deal”, and the following day, he went to work on EncroChat again.

When a consignment arrived in England, Jamie, as Nuclear Dog, sent his brother a list of clients and their shares. He was, in effect, the book-keeper in the operation. Subsequent correspondence suggests the pair considered using another encrypted device offered by the Sky organisation at the end of the April, but any change of direction at that point would have been too late to avoid the authorities.

On June 13, an administrator at EncroChat told users that the company’s domain had been seized by a “government entity” and that the service could no longer guarantee security. That entity turned out to be the French intelligence services.

On the same evening, online records showed investigators that Ahmed searched for Emirates airline flights to the United Arab Emirates. He was arrested in Bury, in the north of Greater Manchester, the following morning.

On July 8, Jonathan used his iPad to read an article about Mark Fitzgibbon, a Liverpool fugitive who had been arrested in Portugal following 16 years on the run. He also read stories on the Manchester Evening News’ website about police operations in the city.

That evening, he drove to Manchester Airport and flew to Dubai, where he told an estate agent that he had a budget of £2.3million to spend on a villa, which was later furnished with a bed costing £22,000.

By the end of the September, he searched the internet again, this time for his brother’s name, after he had briefly left the United Kingdom. Investigators established that he was trying to find out whether Jamie had been arrested.

It seemed the pair were in the clear but, the following month, Jonathan was arrested on arrival at Manchester Airport after returning from Dubai, telling officers that he “did not know what they were talking about”.

Jamie was arrested a month later. His defence tried to argue that he was the first of the three men to admit his part, yet this admission only came only after a long battle to try to prove the EncroChat evidence as inadmissible.

The smashing of EncroChat has ultimately helped the National Crime Agency carry out “the UK’s biggest law enforcement operation”, one which has since “dismantled entire organised crime groups”, leading to 746 arrests and the seizure of £54million in cash and more than two tonnes of drugs.

On remand, Cassidy was described by prison officers as a “positive role model for his peers”. In the three years since his arrest, he had taken on a role for the Samaritans and one letter partly read out in court heard how he had “listened to others in crisis, helping prevent callers from taking their own lives”.

Amid the prison population, he lived with drug users, coming to understand the impact of his decisions as a dealer. He admitted to being “ashamed” of what he had done and, in sentencing, the judge removed two years from Cassidy’s term due to his “redemptive behaviour”.

Cassidy will, in time, have the chance to rebuild his life, but for those who remember him from his early days, there is just regret at how a special talent was derailed.

(Top photo: Liverpool celebrate winning the 1996 FA Youth Cup, with Jamie Cassidy circled; Aubrey Washington/EMPICS via Getty Images)

This is an updated version of an article first published in June 2020.

Perhaps the best place to start is the story Harry Redknapp tells when he is asked about Michael Edwards and the remarkable chain of events that first took a frustrated IT teacher from Peterborough to a position of power and influence at Liverpool.

Redknapp had been Portsmouth manager when Edwards — or ‘Eddie’, as he is commonly known — was given his big break in football and, over a decade since they last worked together, he got back in touch a while ago to request a favour.

“I’d met a guy who had only a few weeks to live,” Redknapp says. “This poor guy was in his early forties. He had been married only a couple of years and he knew he was dying. Someone had got in touch and said, ‘Harry, he’d love to meet you. He’s football mad’. So I went round to his house one Sunday and spent a couple of hours with him, his wife and his in-laws. He was an amazing boy, so strong, and he told me it was his dream to go to Liverpool.

“I rang Michael Edwards and, straight away, he went, ‘Harry, not a problem’. I arranged a car, I got a driver. Eddie sorted everything else. There wasn’t any of the, ‘Oh, Harry, I’m sorry, mate, you know how busy I am’, that you can get sometimes.

“He put himself out, he organised the full day and treated him incredibly. We have to remember we are in a position where we can make a difference to people’s lives. Sadly, this guy died four or five weeks later. Eddie had got him into the directors’ box, introduced him to everybody — Kenny Dalglish, Jurgen Klopp — the boy had the best day of his life. Loved every minute of it.”

It was all done with no publicity, of course, because Edwards had a strict understanding with Liverpool that, as far as the media are concerned, he would rather keep everyone a long arm’s distance away and speak about as regularly as Chief Bromden in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

Edwards was the sporting director who identified Klopp as manager and brought in, among others, Mohamed Salah, Roberto Firmino, Sadio Mane, Alisson and Virgil van Dijk.

It was the collection of players that helped Liverpool end their 30-year wait for a league title and turned a drifting giant into the champions of England, Europe and the world, surpassing even the achievements of the club’s sides from the 1970s and 1980s.

Yet the paradox, at a time when one of the banners on the Kop read “Champions of Everything”, was that Edwards did not even have a Wikipedia page. If you typed in his name, the first result was that of an ex-pro from Notts County.

A lot has changed since then for the University of Sheffield graduate, who has just been persuaded to return to Fenway Sports Group, Liverpool’s American owner, nearly two years since leaving the club. Edwards will be returning to a new, bigger role as FSG’s director of football operations.

He will have a prominent say in choosing Klopp’s successor and his influence will quickly become apparent when he brings in Richard Hughes, formerly Bournemouth’s technical director, to fill the vacant sporting director position at Anfield. Liverpool, once again, will be relying on Edwards to work his magic behind the scenes.

There was a long period, however, in his first spell on Merseyside that the only photograph of Edwards in the media’s possession came from a Just Giving fundraising page for the 2018 Manchester half-marathon, for which the list of donations included £5,000 from a certain Mr J Klopp. Edwards could freely walk around Anfield without anybody recognising him and that was exactly how he liked it.

“He isn’t the most stereotypical football director,” Redknapp says. “In fact, he is probably the most un-stereotypical. You won’t often see him in a suit. He isn’t a go-getting, big-personality kind of guy. You look at him, he used to have this spiky hair… a very inoffensive, quiet guy. You’d probably think he should be standing behind the goal.”

Don’t be mistaken, though. Others talk about Edwards as a fiercely driven, intelligent and ambitious individual who possesses the streak of ruthlessness that is often required to reach the top in football.

Edwards has upset a few people along the way and was one of the three members of staff from Anfield cited in the alleged hacking of Manchester City’s scouting system in 2013. Liverpool offered a £1million ($1.3m at today’s rates) settlement, including a legally binding confidentiality agreement, to stop the matter going any further. As relations between the two clubs deteriorated over the following decade, Edwards’ presence was one of the reasons there was only a thin veneer of cordiality at boardroom level.

Not that Liverpool’s owner, John W Henry, or his colleagues at FSG, will have cared too greatly about that detail when they finally got wind that Edwards was, after all, open to the idea of leading the club into the post-Klopp era. 

Edwards was a youth and reserve-team footballer at Peterborough United who never fully made the grade and, having been released at the age of 18, trained to be a teacher before getting his first job in a local high school. He is the lorry driver’s son who grew up in Fareham, Hampshire, and developed a fetish for numbers and statistics. The “laptop guru” as he was called in one headline.

There is one story that should make it clear how highly the 44-year-old is regarded at Anfield. It goes back to the night — June 25, 2020 — when Manchester City lost 2-1 at Chelsea and the defeat meant Liverpool had won their first title since 1990. 

When the final whistle sounded at Stamford Bridge, the Liverpool chairman, Tom Werner, pulled out his mobile phone to get in touch with the people who had made it happen.

And the first person to receive a congratulatory text from Liverpool’s chairman? Klopp, perhaps? No, it was Michael Edwards.

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After everything that has happened since Klopp arrived on Merseyside, it can feel like a trick of the imagination that Liverpool gave serious consideration to hiring Eddie Howe rather than the man who, eight and a half years later, counts as Anfield royalty.

Howe was on a three-man shortlist with Klopp and Carlo Ancelotti for the manager’s position and it was part of Edwards’ job, then as Liverpool’s technical director, to determine who had the outstanding credentials to replace Brendan Rodgers.

Ancelotti passed all the criteria in terms of his record in the Champions League and the statistics relating to his teams at Juventus, AC Milan, Chelsea and Real Madrid, but his transfer record counted against him because the system devised by Edwards and Liverpool’s analysts deliberately placed less emphasis on a manager’s recruitment in his first year.

Their theory was that a manager might not have the ultimate say when it came to transfer business during his first season but, in years two, three, four and five, that manager’s influence would be greater and signings would not happen without his input.

A lot of Ancelotti’s recruits were deemed to be on the older side and that jarred with Liverpool’s thinking. Edwards wanted players aged 26 or under who were approaching their peak years and would still have a re-sale value three or four years later.

Howe, now at Newcastle United, was managing Bournemouth and had a reputation for developing younger players and playing attractive football.

He had also been a player at Portsmouth when Edwards was starting out at the south coast club. Their friendship, however, never came into it. Howe did not have the experience of competing in the Champions League, whereas Klopp ticked every box in terms of achievement, transfer business and playing style. Edwards made his recommendation to FSG and left them to get on with the business of making it happen.

Since then, perhaps the best indicator of Edwards’ influence is to consider Klopp’s line-up for his first Liverpool game — a goalless draw at Tottenham Hotspur on October 17, 2015 — and compare it to the team that is now taking on Manchester City and Arsenal to win the title.

Simon Mignolet was Liverpool’s goalkeeper that day behind a back four of Nathaniel Clyne, Martin Skrtel, Mamadou Sakho and Alberto Moreno. Lucas Leiva, Emre Can and James Milner formed the midfield and the front three had Adam Lallana and Philippe Coutinho on either side of Divock Origi. Liverpool’s substitutes were Adam Bogdan, Kolo Toure, Jerome Sinclair, Joao Carlos Teixeira, Connor Randall, Jordon Ibe and Joe Allen, who never did fulfil Rodgers’ description as “the Welsh Xavi”.

Edwards helped Klopp build virtually an entirely new XI but, first of all, he had to get the confidence of the manager and create a relationship where they fully understood one another.

“It is a very good relationship,” Klopp said. “He is a very thoughtful person. We don’t always have to have the same opinion from the first second of a conversation, but we finish pretty much all our talks with the same opinion. Or similar opinions.”

It was Edwards, for example, who pressed Liverpool to sign Salah and convinced Klopp to disregard the fact the Egyptian had struggled previously with Chelsea.

Klopp’s preference was said to be Bayer Leverkusen’s Julian Brandt, a future Germany international he knew well from his time managing Borussia Dortmund, but Edwards persisted in his belief that Salah was the better option. Klopp listened, took it in and decided to trust his colleague. Salah has since established himself as an authentic Premier League great and a serial breaker of scoring records.

Edwards’ success cannot just be measured by the players Liverpool have signed when some of his more spectacular business has revolved around the ones the club have moved out — and his ability to get some huge transfer fees.

Coutinho’s £142m transfer to Barcelona was the biggest deal, but Liverpool also raised significant sums by offloading fringe players. Ibe and Brad Smith went to Bournemouth for a combined £21m. Kevin Stewart moved to Hull for £8m. Leicester City paid £12.5m for Danny Ward and Crystal Palace paid £26m for Sakho.

All this was masterminded, to a large degree, from Edwards’ first-floor office at Liverpool’s training ground. His door was always open. It was directly opposite Klopp’s office and the poster-sized “Class of Melwood” picture on the wall was because every year the entire staff — from the security and kitchen workers to the first-team players and manager — posed for an all-in-it-together photograph.

Edwards and Klopp, the older man by 12 years, were described by one colleague as “kindred spirits”, freely wandering in and out of each other’s offices. During the transfer window, Edwards’ television would be switched on to show the rolling news coverage. The two men swapped opinions, they debated and sometimes they disagreed. They also spent many lunchtimes playing padel after getting hooked on the sport during a winter training camp in Tenerife. They even arranged for a court to be built at the training ground.

The two men, it is understood, were no longer as close by the time Edwards announced his departure in the form of an open letter that surprised many people given he had never wanted to speak publicly before.

“I had always planned to cap my time at the club to a maximum of 10 years,” he wrote. “I’ve loved working here, but I am a big believer in change. It’s good for the individual and, in a work setting, good for the employer, too. Over my time here, we have changed so many things (hopefully for the better) but someone new brings a different perspective, new ideas and can hopefully build on (or change) the things that have been put in place beforehand.”

Edwards went on to eulogise about his assistant, Julian Ward, who was taking over as sporting director, while praising his other colleagues in the recruitment department as “geniuses… without doubt the best in their field in world football.” And Klopp? “Being manager of Liverpool is probably harder than playing (the shirt hangs heavy, so they say), but he has delivered so much joy to the fans and reasserted so many of the club’s historical values that he will go down in history as one of the club’s managerial greats.”

Rodgers, in contrast, had seen Edwards as a threat to his authority at a time when the workings of Liverpool’s “transfer committee” had created all sorts of politics behind the scenes. It was an awkward title and an awkward time. Rodgers was not a fan of the setup and it became a source of regret inside Anfield that the club’s owner had ever coined the name.

In reality, it was the kind of operation that could have been found at just about every major club, where there was an understanding that the manager was too busy to go on overseas scouting missions himself and become embroiled in negotiations that could take months. Edwards was part of a group that included the then chief executive, Ian Ayre, along with the analytics team, senior coaching and scouting staff and sometimes representatives of the club’s commercial department.

Rodgers still had the power to veto transfers and, early on, was probably entitled to question Edwards’ knowledge. Liverpool had made a flurry of signings — Iago Aspas, Luis Alberto and Tiago Ilori, to name but three — who passed through Anfield without making a favourable impact. Lazar Markovic was the most expensive failure, costing £20m, and not everyone appreciated Edwards’ occasionally blunt, very matter-of-fact manner.

Scouts were moved out, some unhappily. Mel Johnson, the talent-spotter who had recommended Jordan Henderson, claimed in one interview that Liverpool missed out on Dele Alli because the club relied on their “computer and stats-led” approach. The sport, Johnson complained, was “not played on a computer”, pointing out that experienced football people were being edged out. “Some of these IT guys have come straight out of university and landed jobs at top clubs, despite having no football background whatsoever.”

The politics eventually contributed to Rodgers, now at Celtic, losing his job on Merseyside. Ultimately, though, he might have to accept that he underestimated Edwards, particularly when it came to the £29m signing of Roberto Firmino from Hoffenheim.

Rodgers had not been keen on Firmino whereas Edwards and the scouting team were certain the Brazilian would be an ideal wearer of Liverpool’s colours. Chief scout Barry Hunter had tracked him in Germany and the numbers showed how, by being involved in 45 league goals in the two seasons up to 2015, Firmino was the second-highest performing Brazilian in Europe, second only to Neymar, then at Paris Saint-Germain. Rodgers remained unconvinced and, to begin with, Firmino was used on the right wing.

But it didn’t work out badly. “One of the questions I always get asked is: ‘Who was/is your favourite player?’,” Edwards wrote in his open letter. “That’s a really difficult question to answer, so I won’t even try. All I will say is my dog is called Bobby.”

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When Barry Fry was asked if he had any particular memories of Michael Edwards, the former Peterborough United manager had to apologise.

“I’m embarrassed to say no,” Fry, now the League One side’s director of football, told The Athletic. “I don’t remember the boy at all, I’m sorry.”

Edwards had been part of a junior football academy in Southampton before being recommended to Peterborough for their youth system, going on to sign a two-year apprenticeship at London Road.

“Probably not the most talented, but he worked hard,” is the verdict of one former team-mate. “A proper squad player, who made the best of what he’d got. He was never going to be a star but he was always quite dependable. And very clever. He was probably old for his time, the way he thought about everything and the way he spoke. You could tell he had a good head on his shoulders.”

Edwards was a right-back who would occasionally be moved into a holding midfield role and, though he was not regarded as loud or a shouter, there was one occasion when he turned on two team-mates and accused them of thinking they were “big-time”.

“There were two colleges in the area,” another former Peterborough player says. “Some of us — the ones who never got the better qualifications — went to Huntingdon College. Michael went to Cambridge to do leisure and tourism with the more intelligent lads, one day a week. Academically, he was very able. On the pitch, you could see he understood the game.”

It didn’t work out, though. Edwards left Peterborough without making a first-team appearance and had to make a new career for himself. He went back to college and enrolled for university, obtaining a degree in business management and informatics. He returned to Peterborough to start his first teaching job in the town, but colleagues say he missed being around football and was not enthused by his new profession.

His breakthrough came in 2003 when Portsmouth agreed to take on Prozone, the football data company. Other clubs had already signed up and Simon Wilson, one of Edwards’ former Peterborough team-mates, was in the relevant department at nearby Southampton.

“I said to Simon we had won a contract with Portsmouth and needed an analyst,” Barry McNeill, then Prozone’s business development manager, says. “He rolled off a few names and said, ‘There’s one guy I know who’s probably not happy where he is, why don’t you have a chat with him?’.”

Edwards was in his early twenties. “We found him working as an IT teacher,” McNeill says. “He clearly had pretty low motivation for that vocation. I interviewed him at a service station between Peterborough and the M1. I explained Prozone, showed him the technology and within a month he was on-site at Portsmouth’s training ground.”

Though Edwards might not have enjoyed teaching, McNeill thinks the experience hardened him for the football business. “The first few years (of teaching) are the toughest because you are totally out of your depth. You need a spine. That was probably great preparation.”

This was a time when data was still relatively new to football and, all these years later, it is strange to hear one of Edwards’ fellow analysts say that “it was only the Sun on a Monday that had passing and possession stats”.

Redknapp had been persuaded by his assistant, Jim Smith, that Prozone was worth a go. Smith had been the first-ever manager to take it on at Derby County. Steve McClaren, one of Smith’s assistants at Derby, then took it to Manchester United. Sam Allardyce, then at Bolton Wanderers, was another advocate. And, as soon as word got out that Sir Alex Ferguson was using it at Old Trafford, other clubs started to follow.

“I would be in Sam’s (Allardyce) office after games,” McNeill says. “If they had beaten Portsmouth, Sam would say to Harry, ‘What the fuck are you doing? Why have you not got this? Why don’t you have it? It is as expensive as your cheapest squad player’. He would almost embarrass people to jump on the bandwagon. Harry would have taken a lot more of that from his peers and Jim Smith would have been having a word in his ear.”

Even so, it took a while for Redknapp to get to grips with it.

“There is a famous story where ‘Eddie’ is trying to get through to Harry,” one of Edwards’ former associates says. “This is folklore in analyst circles. Harry said, ‘Does your computer say we are going to win today?’. Eddie said ‘yes’ quite flippantly. They lost and Harry quipped, ‘Maybe your computer can play next time’. Nobody even knows if it is true, but we all repeat it.”

In Edwards’ early days, Redknapp called to ask why he could not get anything out of a CD-ROM filled with player data. It turned out Redknapp had put it into the CD player of his car.

Edwards had his own office at Portsmouth and was of an age when he could mix with the players without it seeming unusual. “On the team bus, for example, he would be with the lads and we would play Mario Kart,” Gary O’Neil, their former midfielder, says. “You might have an eight-person league and Ed would be in it. He didn’t overstep the line, though. He wouldn’t be on lads’ nights out because he was, technically, staff. We were good friends and he came to my wedding.”

O’Neil, now the manager of Wolves, remembers Redknapp never previously being stats-oriented, but something must have gone right because Edwards followed Portsmouth’s manager to Spurs in 2009.

“Michael came to Portsmouth as a very young analyst,” Redknapp says. “I remember a massive game, the year we stayed up (2005-06), at Fulham. We were second-bottom and he put this video together to play on the coach. He was scared to show it because it took the mickey out of me. I thought it was a great laugh. He was a smashing lad and when I went to Tottenham I took him with me.”

Edwards stayed at White Hart Lane for almost two years before Damien Comolli, then Liverpool’s director of football, headhunted him as part of FSG’s instructions to implement a new data-led approach, in keeping with their management of baseball’s Boston Red Sox.

Comolli had previously been at Spurs, whose chairman, Daniel Levy, was dismayed to discover Liverpool had taken away another of their key men.

Spurs had an exclusive agreement at the time with a data company called Decision Technology and Liverpool wanted to see if they could muscle in. Edwards, however, persuaded his new bosses to leave Decision Technology alone and target Dr Ian Graham, the data scientist who helped run their operation.

The two men were on the same flight to an analytics conference in Boston, Massachusetts. It was an eight-hour flight and, 37,000 feet in the air, Edwards convinced Graham to join him as Liverpool’s head of research. The task was aided by the fact Graham was a boyhood Liverpool supporter. Graham, who held a Cambridge doctorate in theoretical physics, informed Spurs when he returned to England and that began a working relationship that continues to this day.

Graham took a key role at Anfield until quitting in November 2022, Liverpool’s worst season of the Klopp era, to start his own venture. A couple of months later, he launched Ludonautics, a sports advisory business, and was reunited with the man with whom he had shared so many professional highs. Edwards took a consultancy role, giving him a level of independence that was not always there during his years at Anfield. 

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What people sometimes forget about Klopp’s title-winning season at Anfield is they did it while spending considerably less than the majority of Premier League clubs.

Liverpool’s net transfer spend of £92.4m from the previous five years was less than Watford’s, not even half that of Brighton & Hove Albion or Aston Villa and a fair bit behind Mike Ashley’s Newcastle United. There was only Crystal Palace, Sheffield United, Southampton and Norwich City from England’s top division with a lower net spend in that time. Manchester City’s total was £505.6m, Manchester United’s £378.9m. And that, in no small part, was due to Edwards’ expertise.

All of which makes it easier to understand why Liverpool have been almost obsessive in their attempts to persuade him to return to the club.

As one person with inside knowledge of analytics told The Athletic in 2020, speaking anonymously to protect their relationships: “They have barely had a failed signing. I don’t think that can continue, I don’t think anyone is that good. If you get 15 out of 15 transfers right, it can’t always be that way. He (Edwards) is over-performing and it will regress to a mean at some point.”

It was certainly a far cry from the time, in 2017, when an online petition was set up by a disgruntled Liverpool fan campaigning for Edwards to be sacked. The petition rustled up 36 votes and the first comment — “he’s useless, just useless” — did not age well.

It was Edwards who convinced Liverpool about the potential of Andy Robertson at Hull City to flourish at a higher level and become one of the outstanding full-backs in world football.

It was Edwards again who insisted when Barcelona signed Coutinho in 2018 that a one-off clause was written into the deal to stipulate that the Catalan club would have to pay a £100m premium to sign any other Liverpool player over the following two years. He knew Barca might come after their elite players and had the foresight to make sure it could not happen unless it meant some mind-boggling sums.

Colleagues talk about the period in 2018 when Edwards had it in mind that Real Madrid, their opponents in that season’s Champions League final, might increasingly be attracted to the idea of signing Salah, Firmino or Mane. Liverpool’s response was to tie all three to new contracts, none with release clauses.

Edwards can be tough. He was unflinching when Can, coming to the end of his contract, told the club he would sign a new one but wanted a release clause in it. There was a stand-off. Edwards refused to budge and Can was allowed to leave on a free transfer rather than the club setting a precedent.

What will never change, it seems, is Edwards’ reticence when it comes to letting us hear what his voice sounds like.

“You’d never imagine the guy sat in the tiny Prozone portakabin at Portsmouth would go on to be the guy who plays such a big role at the biggest club in the world,” says O’Neil.

Good luck, too, trying to find a photo of Edwards on the pitch with the Champions League trophy from the night Liverpool beat Tottenham to become six-time European Cup winners, adding Madrid, 2019, to the list of Istanbul, 2005, as well as Rome, 1977 and 1984, plus Wembley, 1978, and Paris, 1981.

Klopp invited all his staff onto the podium to join in the celebrations. Edwards, however, preferred to keep to the edges and take photographs of the jubilant Liverpool supporters. He consoled some of his former colleagues from Tottenham, including Levy, and helped make sure Liverpool’s kit man got a picture with the trophy.

Then the quiet man of Anfield disappeared into the background, just the way he likes it.

(Top photos: Michael Edwards, left, and John W Henry; by Getty Images)

Picture the scene: a team has been awarded a goal kick. The goalkeeper throws the ball to one of two central defenders standing nearby in the six-yard box. One of them puts it down to restart and plays it laterally to the ‘keeper, who receives the pass and rests their studs on the ball as opposition players close in…

That’s just one variation of a way of restarting play that has become extremely common in the last five years, and one that tends to split opinion like it does centre-halves.

To some it’s a tactically and statistically proven method of starting a high-value sequence of play. To others it’s needlessly risky, a fad that may work for Pep Guardiola in the rarified air of the top end of the Premier League but which invariably fails as you get lower down the leagues.

Who’s right? Who’s wrong? How did we get here? And what happens next?

Here — to help answer those questions — is The Athletic’s complete guide to playing out from the back.

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How did we get to this point in football’s evolution?

Tactical innovations can come from various sources.

They can arise because of law changes. They can be inspired by individual players interpreting roles in different ways. They can come from revolutionary managers with new ideas. They can emerge because of improvements in the conditions football is played in. And they can grow because football has evolved from being pure recreation to being both big business and a form of entertainment. The history of playing out from the back takes into account all five of these concepts.

First, law changes have been important. The most important change was the introduction of the back-pass law in 1992, which meant goalkeepers could no longer handle balls deliberately played back to them by defenders. It’s bizarre to watch matches from the pre-1992 era today; it’s almost like a different sport.

One of the first red cards for a goalkeeper in the Premier League era came when Sheffield United’s Simon Tracey panicked after receiving a back pass at White Hart Lane and ended up running the ball out of play on the touchline, before hauling down the Tottenham player trying to take a quick throw-in.

This change meant goalkeepers were, for essentially the first time, forced to practice kicking a moving ball. Their improved confidence in possession meant passing the ball out, rather than hammering it downfield, was more viable.

80s goalkeepers just booting it pic.twitter.com/KRrXE3SChv

— Bryan’s Gunn (@bryansgunn) December 7, 2021

There was also a key law change in 2019, which meant that goal kicks no longer had to be played outside the box before another player could touch the ball. Opposition players still have to start outside the box, but goal kicks can now be taken short to a team-mate inside the penalty box, essentially giving goalkeepers and defenders a few seconds’ head-start over their opponents. This has enabled them to play out under (slightly) less pressure.

Second, pitch conditions have improved dramatically over the last couple of decades. Go back to an average mid-1990s Premier League pitch, especially in winter, and you would be mad to attempt to pass the ball across your own box. There was a danger the ball would simply get stuck in the mud — or, at least, not run properly to its recipient.

These days, players can broadly trust the turf and therefore trust their technique to pass the ball properly.

Third, the revolutionary goalkeepers tend to be those who push the boundaries in terms of what they’re capable of in possession. Essentially the goalkeeper has become an 11th outfielder. After the back-pass law change, Peter Schmeichel insisted on being involved in ‘outfield’ drills with the rest of the Manchester United players. A future United goalkeeper, Edwin van der Sar, was often credited with being the first ‘modern’ footballing goalkeeper in his days with Ajax. In recent times, the likes of Claudio Bravo and Andre Onana have been recruited by major clubs on the basis of their ability in possession, but have often looked under-equipped in terms of actual shot-stopping.

Fourth, in terms of managers who have proved particularly influential in terms of playing out from the back, in the Premier League era — and the post-back pass era — things probably start with Mike Walker, manager of Norwich in 1992-93. Walker was, unusually for a manager, a former goalkeeper and recognised the need for ‘keepers to completely adjust their way of playing. In Bryan Gunn, he had a goalkeeper who was particularly adept at using his feet, and Norwich’s free-flowing style worked very well in the new era of football. They were top for a considerable period during the first Premier League season, eventually finishing third.

Arsene Wenger is often credited with transforming Arsenal’s style of play, although arguably the initial revolution came from his predecessor Bruce Rioch, who put a big emphasis on Arsenal playing the ball out from defence and through midfield, rather than playing it long straight away as they had usually done under George Graham. Goalkeeper David Seaman was another who proved calm in possession and was unusual at this point for being able to use both feet effectively.

Brendan Rodgers’ Swansea were hugely courageous in possession upon their promotion to the Premier League in 2011, with goalkeeper Michel Vorm recruited for his footballing skills as much as his shot-stopping ability, while the arrival of Guardiola in 2016 was another key moment. He immediately ditched Joe Hart, considered too old-school to adjust, but his first goalkeeper, Claudio Bravo, took an absurd number of risks on the ball, while also looking uncomfortable at the basics of goalkeeping.

In recent times, Roberto De Zerbi has also proved something of a game-changer, often asking his goalkeeper to stand still with their studs on top of the ball, almost baiting the opposition to move up and close down, creating more space in midfield for Brighton and Hove Albion to pass into.

Fifth, supporters are paying serious money for tickets these days, and expect to be presented with something that is aesthetically pleasing. Tastes vary, of course, and too much playing out under pressure can rile some supporters even more than hoofing the ball long. But, as a general rule, modern supporters don’t want route one football.

They want something more precise and considered. What was once the preserve of Barcelona is now, broadly speaking, the norm for most Premier League clubs — goalkeepers playing short passes to players in and around the edge of the penalty area.

And, of course, that filters down to every level. Everyone wants to play like the footballers you see on television, but we don’t all have the technical skills to pull off one-twos in our own penalty box, and for the risk-and-reward situation to be in our favour. At almost every level now, you see maddening goals conceded by overplaying in deep positions.

Sometimes, just thumping the ball long makes most sense. But in 2024, that approach is barely tolerated.

Michael Cox

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How do you teach (and convince) players to do it?

“That rule change has influenced tactics more than any coach or manager could. And, as the stats will prove, it led to a big spike in teams playing short from goal kicks. It’s almost a little bit embarrassing if you don’t. It’s a real message that you don’t want the ball – and I think that exposes teams.”

An experienced coach at a Premier League club is talking about the 2019 goal kick law, which gave teams a “free” pass, essentially.

Speaking on condition of anonymity so that he can talk openly about his own experiences, the coach recalls a presentation that he put together for a group of players a few years ago (prior to the law change) showing multiple examples of what he describes as “really good teams” punting the ball forward from goal kicks.

Manchester United, at a time when David de Gea was in goal and Romelu Lukaku was up front, were one of those teams.

“And I said, ‘In that moment, no matter who you are, you could have the best striker and goalkeeper in the world, and the best midfielder in the world, that is a 50-50 ball. If we’re saying we really want to dominate the ball, we cannot kick it long and just hope for a 50-50. That’s not valuing possession.’

“So if you’re asking me why we’re doing it, it’s because we want the ball.”

Risk and reward is the phrase you will hear a lot on this subject — and for some coaches (and a lot of fans) the risk is too great. Lose the ball in the first phase of build-up and the consequences can be calamitous. Beat the press, however, and the pitch totally opens up.

That is easier said than done. Playing out from the back requires bravery on the ball and a high level of technical ability too.

Or does it?

“I saw some pretty average players… the execution of what we’re asking a player to do here is very simple,” the Premier League coach adds. “We’re talking about a 10-yard pass, or we’re talking about control and a 15- to 20-yard pass, maybe a one-touch pass. But we’re not talking about something the player can’t do. We’re talking about, does he have the decision-making capacity to make the right choice at that moment?

“Decision making — I think that’s where the good coaching does come in, to really be clear and make it simple and effective for them, and make them believe it.”

Graham Potter’s time in charge at Brighton provides a good case study. His appointment in 2019 is worth revisiting, not least because he took over a group of players who had previously been coached to play a totally different way under Chris Hughton.

Speaking at the 2020 OptaPro Analytics Forum, Tom Worville, who was working as a football writer for The Athletic at the time, pointed to a graph showing how Brighton had taken 75.8 percent of goal kicks short under Potter compared to 6.4 percent under Hughton. Even allowing for the fact that it was the same season that the new goal-kick rule was introduced, the shift was huge.

“I know Brighton were used to it (playing out from the back) in a certain era under Gus (Poyet),” says Dale Stephens, who played for Brighton under Hughton and Potter. “But we’d not seen it for a few years, so it’s almost like re-educating the players and the crowd.”

Potter was an excellent teacher in that respect. A hands-on coach, he married practical work with the theory and, perhaps more than anything, had total conviction in his beliefs. Naturally, that rubbed off on his players.

“He convinced the lads from when he first came in,” Stephens says. “We had a great start and that just builds confidence with the evidence of what you can see on the pitch that it’s working. So the message from the manager and the confidence from him repeating that message day in and day out… because it’s not just something that you can do ad hoc.

“I’ve been in teams that try to do it (play out from the back) because it’s ‘the thing to do’. That never works. There has got to be an idea and a process as to why you’re doing it, and why you’re going to try to do this to get into a better attacking position.”

That idea, or process, will usually involve trying to move up the pitch by creating — and exploiting — a numerical advantage.

Some managers have choreographed moves to play out — passages of play that are rehearsed over and again on the training ground.

Others work more on principles around finding “the free man”, including rotation — the use of inverted full-backs is an example — and third-man movements.

Much, however, depends on the opposition press. At times, the onus is on the team in possession to provoke pressure, whether that be through a bounce pass (a straight one-two), the use of the sole of the foot as bait, or dribbling towards an opponent to commit them.

Last season there was a fascinating interview on Sky Sports when Jamie Redknapp, the television pundit and former England international, showed Lewis Dunk a superb passage of Brighton build-up play after a game.

A fascinating insight from Lewis Dunk on how Brighton play out from the back pic.twitter.com/AnDeR573Uo

— Sky Sports Premier League (@SkySportsPL) May 4, 2023

Smiling as he watched the footage, Dunk told Redknapp that he hadn’t made the pass that he was supposed to do in that scenario — a comment that said a lot about De Zerbi’s meticulous approach on the training ground and the extent to which principles, or phases of play, become ingrained.

“Graham didn’t necessarily have patterns in terms of, ‘This is the pattern we’re going to try this weekend,’” Stephens explains. “(Instead), he almost gives you alternative solutions. So it is off their (the opposition) pressure: how many players are coming to press your centre-backs? Are they coming right to the box? Are they not pressing? Are they really aggressive on the full-backs?

“Brighton (under De Zerbi) will let the centre-half take the goal kick, pass to the goalkeeper and he will roll his sole on top of the ball, and when he’s doing that he’s looking to see who is coming to press him.

“So it’s not necessarily manufactured patterns. It’s multiple solutions for wherever the press comes from, and what’s happening behind that first line of pressure.”

That could easily end up being a much longer pass from the player whose role has changed more than any other over the last 30 years or so.

“The goalkeeper is in charge of everything now,” Stephens says. “I think we’ve seen it at Brighton with Jason Steele. He’s pumped the ball 60 to 70 yards and they’ve created the attacking transition that way because they’ve (the opponent) gone real high pressure and he’s just gone over the top of them.”

Guardiola, whose influence on this whole way of playing is impossible to overstate, has often talked about the importance of players moving up the pitch together in build up.

The Manchester City manager is “a big fan of short passes”, overloading spaces, in particular in central areas, and players staying connected, rather than big distances opening up between them or between the lines — a strategy that also makes it easier to regain possession.

An EFL coach, who has been wedded to playing out from the back across several divisions and different clubs, touches on that theme when he discusses how “our trigger to move is when the opposition releases to the ball carrier” and why it is important not to “miss” players during the build up.

“So if I switch from right to left (in one pass) against a structured press, that team will be able to shuffle by the time the ball travels that distance,” the coach, who asked to remain anonymous, says. “But obviously the more ball speed you have, and the shorter the passes, the harder it is for that team to have a specific trigger.

“So you’re constantly getting people to jump and as they jump — provided you’re passing at the right speed — their jump will be too late because I’ve never seen a player that can run faster than a ball can move. And then you’ll find that spare man, that left-back, without them having the structure to be able to slide and press.”

Potter, Stephens says, was “huge on playing in tight spaces”.

The idea behind that was to draw as many opposition players towards the ball as possible and leave room in behind to exploit, opening up what Stephens describes as “a four-v-four in half a pitch, which is a lot of space, especially if you’ve got dynamic, quick players in wide areas”.

A goal that Swansea scored against Manchester City in an FA Cup quarter-final in 2019, during Potter’s time in charge at the Championship club, provides a good example of both his philosophy and what another coach describes as the “attract to take advantage” premise.

Take a minute out of your day and look at what Swansea have just done to Man City in the #FACup…

A superb team goal to go 2-0 up, what a story! #DontMugOffTheCuppic.twitter.com/pb6qrey1l4

— TNT Sports (@tntsports) March 16, 2019

This goal that Pascal Gross scored for Brighton under Potter at Old Trafford in 2022 talks to the same point — a great example of the philosophy working as it is designed to.

“If you ever want to see a goal to sum up the work of Graham Potter and this Brighton team, it’s this.”

Pascal Gross has a second and #BHAFC lead 2-0 against #MUFC at the break.

@SkySportsPL pic.twitter.com/a2UhHRCXwz

— The Athletic | Football (@TheAthleticFC) August 7, 2022

Stuart James

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Mitigating risk and the importance of convincing fans

There are examples of a very different kind, where the ball gets turned over close to goal, a team concedes and supporters despair.

𝘾𝙡𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡 𝙛𝙧𝙤𝙢 𝘾𝙖𝙧𝙫𝙖𝙡𝙝𝙤!

Brilliant pressing from Jaden #hcafc | @McVities pic.twitter.com/ve4IMvIFUQ

— Hull City (@HullCity) February 20, 2024

So, tactically, how do coaches mitigate risk when playing out from the back and what can they do to prepare players for all the external factors — crowd reaction in particular — that impact on the team’s ability to execute what they’ve practised?

The EFL coach who spoke earlier offers an interesting response to those two questions.

“This is the hardest thing — replicating the chaos of match-day on the training pitch. And the chaos of match-day includes fan noise and fan pressure, the weight of expectation — you have to manage all of that,” he explains.

“But, for me, it’s just practice, repetition and recruitment. Recruitment is key, and if you’ve got a clear ideology of how you want to play the game, then it is absolutely vital that you recruit to that ideology.

“As for the risk mitigation, initially that comes from having the ‘plus one’ (a free man), so we’ve still got the numerical advantage — I think that’s really important.

“We try to stay compact centrally as much as we can, and the movement wide to disrupt and stretch the opposition always comes on the ball side. So once we manipulate one side of the pitch, we can be stretched that side but, as best we can, the opposite side is in a structured position inside the pitch, ready for transitions.

“Also, we’ve worked really hard on counter-pressing, just avoiding disappointment, no negative body language, just a fast reaction to swarm the ball. It’s the acceptance of it going wrong, because that instant fast reaction can almost make it right straight away.”

All of which makes you wonder how footballers feel about playing this way.

On the face of it, being encouraged to pass to a team-mate and retain possession should be a lot more enjoyable than chasing second balls off a 70-yard hit-and-hope punt.

That said, with so little margin for error in the first phase of build-up in particular, and a collective groan often the soundtrack to any misplaced pass in that area of the pitch (let alone the prospect of your team then conceding), it must also be stressful trying to play out at times.

“I loved it,” Stephens, the former Brighton midfielder, says. “I just felt we had more control over what we were trying to do rather than percentage balls.

“But it wasn’t really necessarily just possession that we wanted. It was more: can you attack quickly from small spaces to big spaces? And that was Graham’s consistent message.

“Even from throw-ins he’d try to get bodies around the throw-in, so that the opposition would go man for man, and the space would be on the other side of the pitch, and from there you can attack big space.

“It opened my eyes. I was 30 years old and had been playing since I was 17 but I’d never really done it. I was learning so much from Graham and the way he saw football.”

Football is always evolving, though, and a lot has changed since Potter took over at Brighton. The Premier League coach who spoke earlier says that, generally, clubs are much bolder and more aggressive in how they press now — and the quality of the opponent is almost unimportant.

He cites Manchester City as an example and says there was a time when opponents thought, ‘Drop off. Don’t go near City in the build up, they’re too good, they’re going to kill you, they’ll rip you apart.’

“But now you look at a lot of teams and they’ll go and press City when Ederson has got the ball,” he adds.

In fact, in a scenario that would have been unthinkable years ago, teams are now quite happy to press high and leave themselves man-for-man (three-versus-three) on the halfway line.

The coach smiles. “And this is where the game is going and why this is such an interesting topic, because the whole benefit of playing out was that it was all about generating the free man. And that was generated pretty easily because you obviously had your goalkeeper plus one other player, and your front three would pin back four players.

“Basically, you know you have got seven players versus their six, plus your goalkeeper, so eight-v-six. That eight just need to get the ball… in my head, build-up is getting the ball over the halfway line successfully. If you’ve done that, you’re out of the build-up phase.

“Let’s say their six were pressing your seven — forget the ‘keeper for now; now it’s their seven pressing your seven, so the only free man is the goalkeeper.”

Interestingly, what shines through more than anything when talking to coaches on this subject is that the people they worry least about buying into the merits of playing out from the back are the players.

“I think players who have come through the academy system from the 2010 era onwards all understand it,” adds the Premier League coach. “The hardest bit, I think, is convincing the fans. If they’re not on board, the whole thing can quickly fall apart.”

Stuart James

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Quantifying how it works in the Premier League and beyond

Build-up play is booming these days. That’s as true in London and Liverpool as it is in Las Palmas or Los Angeles. The trend is especially striking in the English Championship, not long ago a bastion of the old long-ball game, now a proving ground for an international talent pool, technically gifted academy graduates and a new generation of coaches schooled in Pep-ish positional play.

But is this fad for futzing around at the back really a good idea? As with most football tactics, that depends on who’s doing it, how and why.

One interesting thing about the Premier League’s playing-out craze is that it’s not restricted to the elite. Over the last six years, the top five teams on the league table have stayed fairly steady in their number of build-ups per game (where a build-up is defined as a possession that includes at least three passes ending in a team’s own third). Meanwhile, the bottom half of the table, once all too happy to hit and hope, are building out about 50 per cent more often than in 2018-19, daring to dream of more watchable football.

But the steepest increase has come from the upper-middle class, teams five through 10 on the table, who are doing twice as many build-ups per game as they did just six years ago. This season, for the first time, the second tier has actually overtaken the first, averaging more build-ups per game than the top five clubs.

What’s going on here? One part of the answer is that, when it comes to playing out of the back, it takes two to tango. Opponents often feel safer falling back into a compact mid-block while Manchester City or Liverpool walk the ball up to midfield, bypassing the build-up phase. When Manchester United or Chelsea start passing the ball around the back, though, they’re more likely to draw pressure.

De Zerbi’s Brighton fall right in the sweet spot for maximum build-up play: they want to be pressed high and opponents are happy to oblige them, since both sides figure the reward of playing the game in Brighton’s half will outweigh their risk. Although Manchester City have more overall possession, Brighton do more build-ups than any team in the Premier League.

But not all build-ups share the same purpose. For Brighton, who want to break from small spaces into big ones, passing around their own half is an attacking tactic. All that press-baiting sole-on-the-ball stuff? The point is to find a short pass into the space behind the first presser, then lay the ball off to a nearby “third man” who’s facing forward so that Brighton can move briskly through the lines.

City, on the other hand, don’t mind taking it slow. Even when they build out of the back, City tend to do it with side-to-side circulation designed to push the defensive lines back rather than pry them apart. This serves a defensive purpose, since passing the ball through pressure in your own half is dangerous, but also an attacking one, as it allows City to move all of their players into the other team’s end and keep the game trapped there.

We can see the stylistic difference by mapping where teams take their touches during build-up possessions. In the graphic below, Brighton’s bright red press-baiting blob in the middle of their own half means they take a lot more build-up touches there than the rest of the league, while City’s red wedge at the other end suggests that even on possessions that start with a few passes in their own third, the goal is to set up a good rest-defence structure and play patiently in the attacking half.

You can see hints of other build-up styles here, too.

Although Liverpool don’t play out of the back that much, when they do they split the difference between City and Brighton, spreading the ball safely across the width of their half before looking to attack quickly with long passes.

With Oleksandr Zinchenko or Takehiro Tomiyasu tucked inside, Arsenal rarely use their left flank in the build-up. They build through the middle but take their time when the ball reaches the wings, where their possessions lean slightly toward Martin Odegaard and Bukayo Saka on the right.

Some talented teams such as Aston Villa, Newcastle and Chelsea are willing to court danger by playing in areas out wide of their own box, where any opponent who wants to press them will have to open large spaces between the lines. Other, perhaps less talented teams such as Brentford and Wolves get stuck out there on the flanks and rarely make it to the final third at all.

Burnley are an especially interesting case. Last season their build-up dominance made them look like the Manchester City of the Championship. But instead of moderating the team’s style when they reached the Premier League, Vincent Kompany has stuck to his principles, resulting in the rare relegation candidate that keep trying to pass their way out of the back even when the results are disastrous.

Which brings us back to the most important part of a good build-up: the players.

It may not look that hard to make a few practised movements and string together some short passes, but doing it at the speed the Premier League demands, against increasingly sophisticated pressing schemes, takes technical and decision-making abilities that can’t be easily coached. A manager may influence the frequency and style of a team’s build-up play but outcomes still depend largely on the players.

The chart below compares the number of passes a team makes in its own third per game against the average expected goal difference in the next 30 seconds after each pass. Brighton do the most passing at the back, of course, but all those dicey combinations in front of their box are nearly as likely to lead to conceding a goal in the near future as to scoring one. It’s the same story for Tottenham, who are playing out of the back a lot more under Ange Postecoglou but also committing more costly mistakes.

In general, the teams that see the best results from their build-ups either have a lot of talent or don’t take a lot of risks. That’s old news. The question the current craze for playing out of the back poses is whether teams have been taking enough risk. Just how much can skill in possession be taught in order to nudge a squad’s probabilities in the right direction? Can improvements in the build-up phase outpace innovation in the press?

Nobody really knows how far football tactics can stretch one way before they’re pulled back in another, but the answers are just a short goalkeeper pass away.

John Muller

(Photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)

While Leap Day may not hold much significance for most of us, it is a crucial day for anyone born on February 29, whose birthday technically only happens once every four years.

People born on February 29 must decide whether to celebrate their birthday on February 28 or March 1 – although it is often joked that Leap Day babies are technically a quarter their own age.

It’s not unheard of for celebrities to shave a few years off their age to look younger, but leap year babies may jokingly claim that they’re doing it legitimately.

So who are the famous faces born on February 29 and what is their leap year age compared to the actual number of years they have been on this planet?

Yes Rule

American rapper Ja Rule was born on February 29, 1976.

The rap artist, real name Jeffrey Atkins, turns 48 today, but his leap year age would be 12.

In 2016, Ja Rule joked about his age as he turned 40 during the launch of his show in Las Vegas, writing on Instagram at the time: ‘My @foxtailatsls residency kick [sic] of madness [sic] my 10th birthday party lol.”

It comes after the rap icon revealed yesterday that he was banned from entering Britain days before the start of his near-sell-out tour due to his criminal record.

Ferran Torres

Ferran Torres Garcia was born on 29 February 2000 and is a Spanish professional footballer who plays as a forward for La Liga club Barcelona and the Spanish national football team.

The Barcelona forward turns 24 today, but as a leap year baby he has only been able to celebrate his birthday every four years, which technically makes him seven years old.

Pedro Sanchez

Prime Minister of Spain Pedro Sánchez was born on February 29, 1972 in Madrid.

The economist and politician, who has been Prime Minister of Spain since 2018, turned 52 today, but his birth in a leap year means he is also 13 years old.

It comes as Ilia Topuria has been promised Spanish citizenship after a meeting with the country’s prime minister on Tuesday.

Earlier this month, the 27-year-old became the first Spanish champion in UFC history following his stunning KO win over Alexander Volkanovski at UFC 298.

Sir Lucian Grainge

Sir Lucian Charles Grainge CBE was born on February 29, 1960 in North London.

He is a British record executive and music businessman who has been chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group since 2010.

Sir Lucian celebrates his 64th birthday today, but because he was born in a leap year, he has celebrated 16 birthdays.

Some of the world’s most successful and popular artists are currently signed to Universal Music Group, including: Taylor Swift, Adele, Harry Styles, Billie Eilish, Justin Bieber, U2 and The Weeknd.

Joss Ackland

Sidney Edmond Jocelyn Ackland CBE was born on February 29, 1928 in North Kensington, London.

Ackland was an accomplished English actor who appeared in more than 130 film, radio and television roles, including The Mighty Ducks and The Apple.

He was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for playing Jock Delves Broughton in White Mischief.

Ackland died in November 2023 at the age of 95, but he would have been 96 if he were alive today – this would make him a leap year age of 24.

Peter Scanavino

BenErican actor Peter Muller Scanavino was born on February 29, 1980 in Denver, Colorado, USA.

Scanavino currently stars as ADA Dominick ‘Sonny’ Carisi Jr. in the long-running NBC crime/legal drama series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

He turns 44 today, but because he is a leap year baby, he is also celebrating his eleventh birthday.

Tony Robbins

Tony Robbins – full name Anthony Jay Robbins – is an American author, coach and motivational speaker, born on February 29, 1960 in California, USA.

He is known for his infomercials, seminars, and self-help books, including the books Awaken the Giant Within and Unlimited Power.

Together with Sir Lucian Grainge, Robbins turns 64 today, but because he was born in a leap year he also turns 16.

Alex Rocco

BenErican actor Alex Rocco was born on February 29, 1936 in Massachusetts, USA

Known for his distinctive, gravelly voice, he was often cast as villains, including Moe Greene in the Hollywood classic The Godfather, as well as his Primetime Emmy Award-winning role in The Famous Teddy Z.

Rocco died in July 2015 at the age of 79, but if he were alive today he would be 85 – or, in leap year age, 21.

Mark Foster

BenErican musician Mark Foster was born on February 29, 1984 in California, USA

The singer-songwriter, married to actress Julia Garner and frontman of the indie pop band Foster the People, turns 40 today – or, in leap years, 10 years old.

Dina Kust

Dinah Shore was an American singer, actress and television personality, and the top singer of the 1940s. She rose to prominence as a recording artist during the Big Band era.

Shore was born on February 29, 1916 and died in 1994 at the age of 77. If she had been alive today, she would have been 107, or just over 26 years old in leap years.

Everyone seems to have a slightly different estimate of how many people were outside the stadium on that strange November afternoon, but the consensus is that it was a lot.

As the bus crept through the crowd, the Brazilian footballers on board stared out of the windows. Locals — tens of thousands of them, on some accounts — flooded the streets. Most greeted the bus with diffident waves. A few ran alongside, hoping to catch a glimpse of someone they would not have recognised anyway.

An hour later, those same footballers walked through a long underground tunnel, up a flight of stairs and out onto the pitch. They lined up in front of the dugout and sang Brazil’s national anthem.

The match that began moments thereafter took place in 2009, but you would never know it from the photographs. There is an austere, monochrome quality to the images, and not just because they were captured on a basic digital camera. There are no advertising hoardings and none of the other hypercapitalist trappings that adorn the modern game. As a result, it looks a lot like pre-war football.

Then there are the stands, which are packed but oddly lifeless; these appear to be spectators rather than supporters. There is also a jarring uniformity to them, which starts to make sense once the context becomes clear.

One picture, taken before kick-off, shows an outmoded electronic scoreboard. It reads “PRK 0-0 BRA”. That’s North Korea vs Brazil.

The game was played in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. The home team represented the most closed-off nation in the world, a military dictatorship which has been shrouded in mystery for decades. The away team? That’s where things get even more complicated.

North Korea hosting Brazil at the Kim Il-Sung Stadium would have been a major geopolitical event. You would have heard about it if it had happened, which it didn’t.

But something even more unlikely did.

The team billed as ‘Brazil’ were, in fact, a tiny club side from a satellite town 80 kilometres north west of Sao Paulo. Theirs was a squad of journeymen and part-timers, none of whom could believe their eyes when they walked out of the tunnel and looked up at the scoreboard.

“It was clear that the North Korean regime wanted the word ‘Brazil’ to appear there,” says Waldir Cipriani, one of the organisers of the match. “But we were just a Brazilian team who wore yellow.”

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The Reverend

Fifteen years ago, there were two football teams in Sorocaba. The most historic was Sao Bento, whose greatest claim to fame was reaching the last 16 of the Brazilian championship back in 1979.

Their neighbours, Atletico Sorocaba, had only been around since the early 1990s and had never made it higher than the third division nationally. Their matches — low-level affairs in the regional leagues, mainly — rarely drew more than a couple of thousand fans.

If the very notion of a Brazilian club team landing an away fixture against North Korea seems a bit far-fetched, the idea of that team being Atletico Sorocaba… well, we’re so far into the realm of the absurd that we’re going to need a map to get out again. That, though, is exactly what happened.

To understand how and why, we need to go back to the early 2000s when Atletico were acquired by a South Korean investment group led by Sun Myung Moon — or, to his friends and followers, ‘Reverend Moon’.

Moon was the founder of the Unification Church, a religious movement that stressed the importance of the family and proclaimed Moon himself to be the second coming of Christ. To call the church controversial would be to undersell it; the ‘Criticisms’ section of its Wikipedia page runs to 7,000 words. Moon, who died in 2012, was found guilty of tax fraud by a United States federal grand jury in 1982, spending 13 months in prison.

Atletico Sorocaba was not Moon’s first incursion into Brazil. After growing disenchanted with the U.S. — “the country that represents Satan’s harvest… the kingdom of extreme individuality, of free sex” — he acquired 85,000 hectares of land in Mato Grosso do Sul state in the 1990s. He planned to create a model community in the town of Jardim, on the border with Paraguay. According to news reports in Brazil, thousands of South Koreans relocated to the region at his behest.

As the Unification Church expanded, Sorocaba — around 100km from Sao Paulo and with a population of around a million — was seen as a useful staging post. It was Cipriani, a prominent figure within the church structure in Brazil, who recommended that Moon buy Atletico. Cipriani subsequently became the club’s vice president.

“Reverend Moon invested in football because he had a vision,” Cipriani tells The Athletic. “He believed that football was the cure for human hatred. He used to say that you forget about your enemy when you’re running after a ball. That was why he wanted to promote it.

“He especially liked the characteristics of Brazilian football — the playfulness, the love of dribbling. He believed that Brazilian football would help him. He saw it as a force for peace.”

Whatever Moon’s motivations, he could not be accused of thinking small. His largesse allowed Atletico to renovate their training complex and the result was so impressive that Algeria would later choose it as their base for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Atletico would play numerous games in South Korea over the years, despite their relative irrelevance on their own domestic scene.

North Korea, though? That was another level entirely. No team from outside the Asian Football Confederation had ever played there.

Atletico Sorocaba opening that door owed, mainly, to two factors. The first was North Korea’s qualification for the 2010 World Cup. A team that had had little motivation to leave its bubble in 43 years — their previous World Cup appearance had been in 1966 — now needed a crash course in the global game.

“North Korea were interested in getting experience of Latin American football,” explains Cipriani. “There was this pressure from the government, who wanted the team to do well at the tournament. The team performing well was going to be good for the country.

“This was just one month before the final draw. They had been trying to organise friendlies, but which other country was going to go to the effort of going to North Korea, sorting out all the visas, for 90 minutes of football?”

Enter Moon, whose background provided motive and opportunity. Moon was born in 1920 in what would become North Korea. He was imprisoned in a North Korean labour camp for two years in 1948, only moving to South Korea after being liberated by United Nations troops during the Korean War. As a result of his experiences, Moon was staunchly opposed to communism — “especially atheistic Marxism,” says Cipriani — but still cultivated links with Kim Il-sung, the supreme leader of North Korea between 1948 and 1994.

“I learnt the essence of Christianity from him,” says Cipriani. “People speak a lot about loving your enemy, but you have to put it into practice. His teaching was to love your enemy, but hate the thing that makes him your enemy — love the ill, hate the illness. Reverend Moon was anti-communism, but not anti-communist.

“When Reverend Moon went to Pyongyang, it was after being invited by Kim Il-sung, who had spent 40 years trying to kill him. Before he died, Kim Il-sung authorised Reverend Moon to build a car factory and acquire a five-star hotel (in North Korea). So in practice, due to that relationship, we had great contacts in the North Korean ministry of sport.”

Those connections bore fruit in 2009, against a favourable diplomatic backdrop.

“Brazil was in a honeymoon period with North Korea,” says Cipriani. “Lula da Silva (Brazil’s president at the time) had opened an embassy there earlier in the year and the ambassador liked socialism. We never discussed it because he showed us a lot of hospitality. We left out the politics and the ideology. Our objectives were sporting and diplomatic. We were there to build bridges. That was Reverend Moon’s aim.”

It is impossible to know whether Moon’s opportunism was truly in service of improved relations between North Korea and South Korea, or merely part of a wider strategy for himself and his church. Either way, it was adventure time for Atletico Sorocaba. They were heading to Pyongyang.

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Black-and-white city

“I didn’t even know there were two different Koreas,” Leandro Silva says with a grin.

Silva was 21 years old in 2009. He was Atletico Sorocaba’s right-back, one of a handful of players who had come through the youth ranks at the club. “Simple lads,” Cipriani calls them.

Initially, Atletico’s players did not know they were going to North Korea. The plan was to play games in China and South Korea, a fun little jaunt that would help them prepare for the 2010 season. The news that they might be taking a detour came late in the day; they were already in Beijing by the time their visas were finally approved.

“Enchanting, a novelty,” is how Cipriani describes the chance to go to Pyongyang, but not everyone was quite so animated by the prospect.

“My first reaction was one of shock and fear,” recalls Silva. “I tried to find out a bit about North Korea but I could only see bad news. Poverty, lack of freedom, food shortages… everyone said it was a country at war, heavily armed.

“I thought about what it would mean to be there when something happened. I thought about my family. They (club officials) explained everything to the players but we were worried.”

The journey to Pyongyang did not exactly settle the nerves. “We set off from China on this aeroplane… this ugly, scruffy, old thing,” says Silva. “You can’t imagine how bad it was. There were suitcases rattling around in the back and others strapped to the roof outside. The plane bounced and wobbled the whole way.”

Cipriani remembers Edu Marangon, Atletico’s coach, being so scared he could barely speak. The team masseur, Sidnei Gramatico, summed up the situation in an interview with GloboEsporte: “Have you ever seen an aeroplane stuck together with superglue? I have.”

A frosty reception awaited them at the airport. “Soldiers everywhere… it felt like you were arriving at a concentration camp,” Marangon told Record TV. “It was like we had taken a space shuttle to another planet.”

The players and staff were asked to hand over their electronic devices. Mobile phones were confiscated and put into storage at the airport; laptops and cameras were inspected as if they were bombs.

From the airport, the delegation boarded a bus. Destination: Mansu Hill, home of a 22-metre-high statue of Kim Il-sung. It was the first of a series of excursions to important North Korean cultural sites, organised by the dictatorship. “Our itinerary there was decided down to the last millimetre,” says Cipriani. “Every part of the trip was organised.”

That first drive through Pyongyang left a mark on Silva. “It was like something from a film about the old days,” he says. “You know those period dramas on Netflix, with vintage cars? It was like that, a black-and-white city. There was no colour there.

“There were men crouched down on their haunches, smoking cigarettes. There were people working on plantations and no kids out playing. You could see in people’s faces that their lives were dedicated to work. It was very regimented and very grim. What we saw was a real dictatorship.”

The players laid down flowers at the monument, had a brief look at the pitch they would be playing on two days later, then went for a meal at the embassy. At all times, they were shadowed by North Korean officials in long coats. “We were always accompanied,” says Silva. “We couldn’t do anything without an escort. If you went to the bathroom, someone would follow you and wait outside the cubicle door.”

Some of the players saw the funny side. Marangon, the coach, did not. He found the entire experience deeply unsettling. “I asked God to let me see the sea one more time,” he told Brazilian website UOL. “I didn’t know whether I’d ever leave that place.”

In the evening, the players got settled at their hotel, which was not nearly as bleak. “It was top quality, five stars,” says Silva. “They put on these special meals for us, almost banquets. They tried to make things from our cuisine: rice, beans. It was a long way from the Brazilian food we were used to, but we could see the effort they put in. It was really cool.

“We all had a good laugh, joking as normal. The hotel staff didn’t understand anything we said and we didn’t understand them either. Waldir Cipriani understood a bit of Korean, but for the rest of us, there was a lot of laughter. There was also a microphone in the dining room and we would sing Brazilian songs and dance a bit. They would laugh at our style of music.”

At night, there were card games in the rooms. At least until 10pm, when the electricity went off, plunging the city into darkness.

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‘Brazil are here’

On the second day, Atletico trained for two hours on the Kim Il-Sung Stadium’s artificial pitch. They were studied throughout by the North Korean players and coaching staff, all of whom were sat in the stands. At the end of the session, it was North Korea’s turn to train. Atletico were not allowed to watch.

“We had no information about the team we were playing,” says Cipriani. “Zero.”

The following afternoon, after a little more obligatory tourism (a visit to a museum dedicated to Kim Il-sung’s fight against the Japanese), the Atletico players returned to the stadium. There, they were confronted with scenes that would have made even an international footballer draw breath.

“When they saw the stadium, with 80,000 people inside and 20,000 more outside… well, you can imagine their reaction,” says Cipriani, and while most estimates put the capacity of the Kim Il-Sung Stadium at around 50,000, that hardly dilutes the anecdote.

“It was a lot of people,” says Silva. “It was a novelty for them. I think it was this feeling of, ‘The Brazilians are here, Brazil are here’. I think they wanted to see different people — people of a different race, a different colour.”

Brazil, or just Brazilians? That part is up for debate. Some insist that the game was, in some sense, ‘sold’ to the North Korean people as a historic meeting with the most successful nation in World Cup history.

“I think that’s the story they told the people there,” goalkeeper Klayton Scudeler said in an interview with Radio Novelo. “The stadium was packed on every side. I think people thought we were the Brazil team and that’s why it was so rammed.”

Cipriani agrees. “They created this political propaganda,” he says. “The regime wanted people to see North Korea beat Brazil before the World Cup.”

Others, like Silva, are more sceptical. What is certain, however, is that the letters ‘BRA’ up on the scoreboard lent the occasion an extra dose of prestige.

“When I saw the scoreboard and looked at us, all wearing yellow kit… it was cool but I also felt this responsibility,” says Silva. “I felt like I was playing for the Selecao (another name for the Brazil national side). It was an emotional experience.”

It was the same for Marangon. “We had to put on a performance that honoured our country,” he said. “In that situation, we were Brazil.”

For the players, that sense of patriotism was tempered by pragmatism. “Edu said to play hard, but we were joking around before kick-off,” says Silva. “We said, ‘If we win this game, we might not get out of here alive’. It was a stadium full of soldiers! We thought a draw would make everyone happy.”

As it turned out, they did not need to go easy. North Korea were better than they expected.

“We didn’t expect North Korea to be the best technically, but they were very good,” recalls Silva. “They were also very fast. They clearly did a lot of fitness work. They must have trained with the military because physically they were very strong. They played quick football, each player taking one or two touches, always in the direction of the goal.”

That was one memorable aspect of the game. Another was the behaviour of the crowd, who cheered enthusiastically when North Korea had the ball and were eerily quiet when Atletico were in possession.

“It was like they were organised or controlled, like they were following rules,” Silva says. “It wasn’t the kind of energy you get from fans in other countries and it wasn’t this big mix of colours. They were all from the military, all in dark green uniform.”

Cipriani agrees. “It was clearly the work of the state,” he says. “In North Korea, you click your fingers and you fill the stadium. If you decide that this school will send 50 students, that this union will send its workers, that other groups and factories will do the same… it was a state directive to fill the stadium.

“There was no comparison with a stadium in Brazil. There was this deathly silence when we had the ball. It was like a funeral.”

The game ended 1-1. Two days later, over a celebratory meal at one of his residences in South Korea, Moon thanked the players for their efforts — and for the result.

“He said that the North Koreans would have been really angry if we had won,” Cipriani recalls. “He was happy that we drew.”

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Recon and recognition

A month after Atletico’s trip to Pyongyang, Brazil were drawn in the same World Cup draw as North Korea. A story that had been doing the rounds in the local press went national.

All of the major Brazilian newspapers got in touch with Marangon, Cipriani and the players. So, too, did Brazil manager Dunga and his technical staff.

“They didn’t know anything at all about the North Korean team,” says Cipriani. “There was no information. Brazil were set to play North Korea and Atletico Sorocaba knew more than they did.”

Silva looks back on that period with great fondness. “My phone rang off the hook,” he says, giggling. “People wanted to know about their best players, their technical level, their tactics. The fact we went there ended up being a big deal.

“When the World Cup began I was getting so many messages from friends and family. ‘You played them, right?! That’s so cool!’. I remember watching the (Brazil vs North Korea) game and telling my friends, ‘I marked that guy! I’ve got his shirt!’. It was really gratifying.”

In the years that followed, Atletico made three more journeys to North Korea: the senior side visited in 2010 and 2011, and the under-15s took part in a youth tournament in 2015.

“It was different each time,” says Cipriani. “But by (the second visit) they had realised they weren’t playing the Brazil national team, just a small club from Sao Paulo state with a yellow away kit.”

Cipriani stepped away from the club in 2014. Two years later, with financial support from the Universal Church having dried up in the wake of Moon’s death, Atletico Sorocaba folded, leaving behind only surreal memories.

“I still have a North Korea shirt from that game — the number two, from their right-back,” says Silva. “I’ve been offered a lot of money for that shirt, but I’m not selling it. It’s important to me, historic.

“I’ll cherish these memories forever. They were very special moments in my career. There are so many famous players and teams in the world who have never done what we did. I’m really proud of it.”

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Postscript

Brazilian journalist Renato Alves visited North Korea in September 2017. He was there to research his third book, The Hermit Kingdom. He was taken on a 10-day propaganda tour and was accompanied everywhere by three guides.

One of the sights on his itinerary was the Arch of Triumph, a huge structure aping the Parisian landmark of the same name. Stood on top of the monument, one of the officials accompanying Alves pointed to the Kim Il-Sung Stadium, just a stone’s throw away.

“In this stadium, our eternal president made his first speech after liberating the Korean people from Japanese imperialists,” he said.

“Oh, and it was also there that Brazil played against our national football team. You must have heard about that match. It was very good. I was there.”

(Top photos: Waldir Cipriani; design: Eamonn Dalton)

On Tuesday evening, Sir Jim Ratcliffe and INEOS completed their purchase of a minority stake in Manchester United, as the British billionaire acquired a 27.7 per cent stake in the Premier League club in a deal worth over $1.3bn.

On Wednesday, Ratcliffe spoke to the written media for the first time about his decision to take a minority investment, for which he has received control of the club’s sporting operation. Inside a boardroom at INEOS’ offices in Knightsbridge, London, Ratcliffe sat at the head of the table and took questions from 13 assembled journalists from the British and international media.

Along the way, Ratcliffe answered every question, including:

• His ambitions to restore Manchester United to the summit of English and European football, knocking the “enemy” Liverpool and Manchester City “off their perch”
• How INEOS will make a fresh decision this summer on the future of Mason Greenwood
• Insight into the year-long battle to secure a stake in Manchester United, “odd affair” of Sheikh Jassim’s rival bid and how INEOS previously thought they had won the battle nine months ago, opening a bottle of champagne to celebrate at the Monaco Grand Prix in May
• Why Manchester United have targeted Newcastle’s sporting director Dan Ashworth and the club’s battle to prise him away
• His ambitions to create a ‘Wembley of the North’ as Manchester United seek to redevelop Old Trafford or build a new stadium, including his argument for the British state to support funding plans for the project

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Has the last decade been quite painful? 

Sir Jim Ratcliffe: “It’s been a complete misery really in the last 11 years and it’s just frustrating if you’re a supporter during that period of time. That’s football isn’t it? It has its ups and its downs. I remember pre-(Sir Alex) Ferguson it wasn’t great for quite some time — for a more extended period of time, actually, for about 25 years.

Is that your incentive for investing: to transform Manchester United into what it used to be?

“Fundamentally, you want to see your club being where it should be. It’s one of the biggest clubs in the world. It should be playing the best football in the world and it hasn’t been doing that for 10 or 11 years. So it’s certainly related to the decision (to invest).”

Do you have a time frame for achieving success?

“It’s not a light switch. it’s not one of these things that change overnight. We have to be careful we don’t rush at it, you don’t want to run to the wrong solution rather than walk to the correct solution. We have two issues: one is the longer term, getting Manchester United to where we would like to get it but there’s also the shorter term of getting the most out of the club as it stands today.

“We would like to see the Champions League for next season if we can. The key challenge here is that, longer term, we need to do things well and properly — and thoroughly. So it’s not an overnight change. It’s going to take two or three (seasons). You have to ask the fans for some patience. I know the world these days is about instant gratification but that’s not the case with football, really. Look at Pep Guardiola at Man City; it takes time to build a squad.

“What you need are the foundations to be in a good place for Manchester United to be successful, which means you need the right organisational structure. It means not having a coach reporting to the chief executive, for instance.

“Then we need to populate all the key roles with people who are best in class, 10 out of 10s, and there’s clearly a lot of interest in these roles in Manchester United because it’s one of the biggest clubs in the world but also it’s one of the biggest challenges — because you’re taking it from a difficult place to hopefully where it should be at the top of the pyramid.

“Thirdly, you need to create this environment which is driven and competitive. It is going to be intense at times, but equally it needs to have warmth and friendliness and be a supportive structure because the two things marry together well. They probably haven’t had that environment for the last 10 years. If we get those three things right, then you have to believe the results will follow.”

“If you look at a club like Manchester City, you see they’ve got a very sensible structure. They’ve got a really driven competitive environment but there’s a bit of warmth to it. There are two clubs not very far from us who have been successful and have got some of those things right, and United don’t.”

How is a minority stake going to work? What do you get to drive?

“We have a really good relationship with Joel and Avram (Glazer), who are the only two of the siblings that we’ve got to know and have met. And there’s a fair amount of trust between those two parties. And they obviously are very comfortable with us running the sports side of the club.

“This is going to be a very sports-led club, it’s all going to be about performance on the pitch. I’m still a significant shareholder even in respect of all the other things in the club.

“We’re obviously going to be on the ground, whereas the Glazer family are a fair way away. So I don’t see an issue in us being able to influence the club in all the right ways going forward, to be honest.

“I don’t think we’re going to be taking the legal agreements out of the bottom drawer. I just hope they gather dust and we never see them. Which it should be. It should be on the basis of a relationship.

“As long as we’re doing the right things, then I’m certain that relationship is going to go very well.

“One of the things I’d add is that the transaction was quite challenging, as you know. We met all sorts of obstacles on the way, a lot of them in relation to hedge funds, and SEC, American (regulations) and a few with the Qataris and all those sorts of things. It obviously it was a rocky road for quite an extended period of time.

“And the Glazers really, from the beginning, preferred ourselves to the Qatari option — which, in a way, for them was a much easier option because they could just sell the whole thing and they would have walked away and financially done quite well.

“But they stuck with us through the whole process. Our offer was a bit more complicated and that sort of adversity, that rocky road for a year, has forged a relationship between ourselves and the other shareholders.

“We’ve all got to know each other. You get to know people better in adversity than when the whole thing is going swimmingly.”

Did you always have confidence that you would end up here? Were there moments when you thought about walking away?

“How long have you got? Time and time again. I remember at the Monaco Grand Prix, which was in May, we opened a bottle of very expensive champagne and all celebrated. That was in May — but that was a false dawn and we went through several more false dawns after that.

“We had a few surprises on the way. Not at the Glazers’ making. We just kept bumping into problems, particularly with the non-executives on the board.”

How would you rate the scale of this challenge? You are up against clubs linked to nation-states, financial fair play, it has not been a great season, etc…

“I don’t know about the biggest thing in my career. But certainly, the biggest challenge in sport that we’ve undertaken. It’s enormous — and the club is enormous. The tentacles reach around the world. Everywhere I go in the world, it’s Manchester United. It affects an awful lot of people on the planet, and getting it right is not easy.

“We’ve got to get so many aspects of that club right. And the right people doing the right thing at the right time and doing it well. It’s a very complex problem, football – which is surprising considering it’s just putting 11 players on a football field, and they run around. But it’s very complex getting there.”

Part of the INEOS mantra is a compass which says you “don’t like losing money” — but you have spent so much for a 27 per cent share…

“To be honest, I don’t think I’ll ever lose money. For me, it’s not about a financial investment. The objective was to get involved and be influential in the future of Manchester United.

“I don’t believe I’ll ever lose money in it and I’m not interested. I’ve just put that aside. It’ll sit there forever but I don’t see that the value is going to devalue. I don’t believe that. In that sense, I don’t think I’ve been financially stupid but it’s not my motivation in life at all.”

What do you think the biggest growth is financially, in terms of the ability to grow revenue?

“We’re really, really clear about that: it’s football-led. So if we’re successful on the pitch, then everything else will follow.

“Manchester United (has been) a bit, I think, in the last 10 years or so, that if you’re really good in commercial and you make lots of money, then you’ll be successful in football because you’ve got lots of money to spend.

But I think that’s flawed because it only starts for a certain while and you start to degrade the brand if you’re not careful. But we’re really clear that football will drive the club. If we’re really successful at football, then commercial will follow. And we’ll make more money.”

And how do you take on the challenge of those nation-states? It’s now almost viewed as impossible to take them on…

“I don’t agree with that. Firstly, the nation-state bit helps to a degree but FFP limits the degree by a considerable margin, doesn’t it? Ultimately, it becomes about how successful the club is because that dictates your FFP.

With FPP, you have to operate the club within its own means. So clearly that means that if you’ve got a bigger club it ought to be more successful than a smaller club, by definition, because you’ve got more means that you can spend more money and recruitment.

How much is FFP an issue for United (particularly ahead of the summer)? How patient will fans need to be with the damage that’s been done before — i.e with what’s been spent?

“Firstly, FFP has become a new aspect of running the football club, and it’s clearly a really critical part of running a football club. And you have to think about how you can manage FFP to the benefit of the club. But ultimately, FFP says you have to operate the club within its own means. Effectively, it takes into account your prior expenditure, and the club’s spent quite heavily in the last couple of seasons. So that does impact FFP going forward because they’ve used quite a large part of their allowance.

“I don’t know the full answer to that question at the moment. It’s obviously related to sales as well as purchases, and so we need to get our heads around that well before the summer window — there’s no question that history will impact this summer window.

You have been heavily linked with Newcastle’s sporting director Dan Ashworth in the media in recent weeks. Would it be fair to say that identifying player sales and purchases is an area that United can make a real improvement on?

“Recruitment in the modern game is critical. Manchester United have clearly spent a lot of money but they haven’t done as well as some other clubs. So when I was talking about being best in class in all aspects of football, recruitment is clearly top of the list.”

What do you make of the recruitment under the current manager? Because it seems like he’s had quite a lot of sway…

“We don’t benefit too much from thinking about that. I’m thinking about getting recruitment in a good place in the future. There’s not much I can do about what’s happened in the past. Our thinking is all about how we become first in class in recruitment going forward. Which means you need the right people.”

You talk about being best in class… is it a five-year plan or is it a 10-year plan?

“It’s not a 10-year plan. The fans would run out of patience if it was a 10-year plan. But it’s certainly a three-year plan to get there.

“To think that we’re going to be playing football as good as Manchester City played against Real Madrid last season by next year is not sensible. And if we give people false expectations, then they will get disappointed. So the key thing is our trajectory, so that people can see that we’re making progress. I think it’s the club’s 150-year anniversary in 2028… if our trajectory is leading to a very good place in that sort of timeframe then we’d be very happy with that. Because it’s not easy to turn Manchester United into the world’s best football team.”

Is it the aim to win the Premier League and then the Champions League?

“The ultimate target for Manchester United — and it’s always going to be thus, really — is that we should be challenging for the Premier League and challenging for the Champions League. It’s one of the biggest clubs in the world. There are six who are probably the six biggest clubs in Europe: three in the north west (of England), two in Spain and one in Germany. United should be in that small group. It hasn’t been for a while. And so, therefore, it must be challenging for the Premier League. And if we’re not, then in a way, we’re not doing what we saying we ought to do.

Does FFP influence your thinking about the need for a modern stadium? 

“You have to think about how you can optimise the football club in FFP terms — and a stadium is one of those. You can increase your revenues by building a new stadium, rebuilding a stadium or putting all the facilities in. You have to think practically because money doesn’t grow on trees. The two most talked-about issues at Manchester United are number one, the football, the performance on the pitch and the second one is the stadium.

“What we can see so far is a really good case to refurbish Old Trafford, probably about £1billion in cost. You finish up with a great stadium, it’s probably an 80,000-90,000-seater. But it’s not perfect because you’re modifying a stadium that is slap-bang up against a railway line and all that type of stuff, so it’s not an ideal world. But you finish up with a very good answer.

“Manchester United needs a stadium befitting one of the biggest clubs in the world and, at the moment, it’s not there. Old Trafford maybe was 20 years ago but it’s certainly not today. There’s this wider conversation with the community as to whether you could use a more ambitious project on-site as a catalyst to regenerate that Old Trafford area, which is quite an interesting area in a way because it was the heart of the Industrial Revolution — it is the oldest industrial park in Europe, it was the first industrial park in Europe. And it’s still one of the biggest ones. And they obviously built the Manchester Ship Canal to service it. That’s where all the coal came in, the cotton. And that’s why they built Old Trafford there.

“People would finish their shift and then walk to the ground; there was no transport in those days. That’s the history of why the club is there. But today it’s a bit run-down and neglected in places. There’s a strong case for using a stadium to regenerate that area, like with the Olympics, as Sebastian Coe did with that part of east London quite successfully. City have done it and they’ve done quite a good job.”

But both of those had some state funding… (There have been reports suggesting United may seek state support) 

“The people in the north pay their taxes like the people in the south pay their taxes. But where’s the national stadium for football? It’s in the south. Where’s the national stadium for rugby? It’s in the south. Where’s the national stadium for tennis? It’s in the south. Where’s the national concert stadium? It’s the O2, it’s in the south. Where’s the Olympic Village? It’s in the south.

“All of this talk about levelling up and the Northern Powerhouse. Where is the stadium in the north? How many Champions Leagues has the north west won and how many Champions Leagues has London won?

“The answer to that is the north west has won 10 — Liverpool (six) have won more than us — and London (Chelsea) has won two. Where do you have to go if you get to the semi-final of the FA Cup and you’re a northern club? You have to schlep down to London, don’t you? So what happened to HS2, which was going to be a substantial amount of investment in the north, what happened to that? They cancelled that. And where are they going to spend that? They’re going to spend it on the rail network in London.

“People in the north pay their taxes and there is an argument you could think about a more ambitious project in the north which would be fitting for England, for the Champions League final or the FA Cup final and acted as a catalyst to regenerate southern Manchester, which has got quite significant history in the UK.”

Might your tax status, having relocated to Monaco, pose a challenge in the optics of requesting state support? 

“I paid my taxes for 65 years in the UK. And then when I got to retirement age, I went down to enjoy a bit of sun. I don’t have a problem with that, I’m afraid.”

Do you prefer a new ground or a refurbishment? 

“In an ideal world, I think it’s a no-brainer, a stadium of the north, which would be a world-class stadium where England could play and you could have the FA Cup final and it’s not all centred around the south of England. So in an ideal world, absolutely, that’s where I would be, but you’ve got to be practical about life.”

Is there a financial estimate of what that might be?

“In broad terms, a refurb is one (billion) and a new stadium — both of these would include the campus so, you know, the museum’s crap and the shop is too small and you’d have the Xbox thing for entertaining the fans. So in other words, the fans could come there and do some stuff. So include the campus in both cases, in very simple terms you are talking about one versus two (billion).”

And how long would it take to happen?

“I think the refurb would take longer than the new one because it’s more complicated, because obviously you’re building and you have to build over a main railway line which is quite complicated and expensive.”

And a stadium for the women’s team as well?

“If you use that as a centre of regeneration, a bit like the Olympic Village, then I think what you probably finish up doing is Old Trafford would end up being reduced in size to a smaller facility still in the same footprint but a smaller facility which can be used for all sorts of community things, be it a concert or whatever. The ladies’ teams could play there. The academy teams could play there. Some of the local teams could play there and Old Trafford could sort of become a community asset and then you’d have this world-class stadium next door to it.”

What’s your vision for broader control of Manchester United? Would you like to increase your stake?

“We spent well over a year getting to where we are. We got to where we could do. I’m really pleased we are here and we are going to be able to influence the future, to be in charge of the sports side. I haven’t had the energy to think about the future or worry about it because I’m focused on the problem today — not what I might do in three, five, 10 years.”

In the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) filing, it said that if the Glazers received an offer for a complete buyout within 18 months, then they could force you to sell…

“There’s all sorts of scenarios. We might get hit by an asteroid. There’s been lots of opportunities for someone to come in and buy United in the last 12 months.”

What are your ambitions for the women’s team?

“I know we have been around since Christmas but we only took over today. What I would say is that if it’s a team wearing a Manchester United badge on shirt then it’s Manchester United and they need to be focused on winning and being successful.”

Dan Ashworth, are you confident you will get him?

“Dan Ashworth is clearly one of the top sporting directors in the world. I have no doubt he is a very capable person. He is interested in Manchester United because it’s the biggest challenge at the biggest club in the world. It would be different at City because you’re maintaining a level. Here it’s a significant rebuilding job. He would be a very good addition. He needs to decide if he is going to make that jump.

“We have had words with Newcastle, who would be disappointed. They have done really well since their new ownership. I understand why they would be disappointed, but then you can’t criticise Dan because it’s a transient industry. You can understand why Dan would be interested because it’s the ultimate challenge. We’ll have to see how it unfolds.”

There have been reports of a £20million asking price. Does £20m seem strange for a sporting director?

“A bit silly, personally. I won’t get dragged into that. What I do think is completely absurd is suggesting a man who is really good at his job sits in his garden for one and a half years. We had a very grown-up conversation with City about Omar Berrada. When things got done, we sorted it out very amicably. They could see why he wanted to take that challenge.

“You look at Pep and when he’s done with one of his footballers: he doesn’t want them to sit in the garden for one and a half years. He doesn’t do that. That’s not the way the UK works or the law works.”

One of the main stories at Manchester United last year was what the club would do with Mason Greenwood (who is on loan at Getafe). That is now a problem on your doorstep as you control the sporting operation…

“I can talk about the principle. I am not going to talk about Mason. I am familiar with it. The principle is the important one. We will have other issues going forward. You are dealing with young people who have not always been brought up in the best circumstances, who have a lot of money and who don’t always have the guidance they should have.

“What we need to do when having issues like that is understand the real effects — not the hype. Then we need to make a fair decision in light of the club’s values. That’s what we need to do and that’s how we will deal with it.”

Will that be a fresh decision then? 

“Yes, absolutely. We will make a decision and we will justify it.”

So it’s feasible he could still have a future at Man Utd?

“All I can do is talk about the principle of how we will approach decisions like that.”

What are the values you are defining? 

“Is he the right type of footballer? Is he a good person or not?”

We don’t want to misquote you or take this out of context… Are you saying you are not closing the door on Mason?

“He’s a Manchester United footballer, so we are in charge of football. So the answer is ‘yeah, we have to make decisions’.

“It’s quite clear we have to make a decision. There is no decision that’s been made. He’s on loan obviously, but he’s not the only one. We’ve got one or two footballers that we have to deal with and we have to make a decision on, so we will do that. The process will be: understand the facts, not the hype, and then try and come to a fair decision on the basis of values, which is basically: is he a good guy or not, and answer could he play sincerely for Manchester United well and would we be comfortable with it and would the fans be comfortable with it?”

Is the INEOS ownership of French club OGC Nice an issue for playing in the Champions League if you both qualify under UEFA’s regulations? 

“We’ve spoken to UEFA. There are no circumstances upon which an ownership of Nice would prevent Manchester United from playing in the Champions League — I’ll be crystal clear on that.

But at the moment, the rules say you can’t…

“It says you have to change the ownership structure. So it’s all about influence and positions on the board and that sort of thing. So, a) the rules are changing, and, b) there are shades of grey, not black and white. Manchester City will probably have the problem before we have the problem because they’ve obviously got Girona who are doing well in the Spanish La Liga.

You tried to buy Chelsea when they were for sale in 2022…

“We have a collection of quite interesting sports clubs, Formula 1, America’s Cup, cycling etc. but we’ve always recognised that the biggest sport in the world is football and the Premier League is the biggest league in the world. So we’ve always had an interest in having a Premier League club — but they don’t come up very often, and at the time we had no inkling that Manchester United might ever be sold. So that’s how we finished up in that Chelsea equation.”

Dave Brailsford is the director of sport at INEOS. Can you talk about what his role will be, how important he is and what his attributes are? Some will look at his history in cycling and query his role at United amid the criticisms…

“Well, I think he will be critically involved in the future of Manchester United. He’s interested in elite sport and performance, which is what Manchester United is and I think he’s been very, very successful in sport in cycling, but he’s generally viewed as one of the world’s best thoughtful people on the subject of sports performance.

“It’s for good reason. I’ve known Dave now for quite a few years. He is obsessive about performance in elite sports, and he is going to be very successful at Manchester United.”

Rival fans will bring up the parliamentary select committee and (his role in) questions about Team Sky previously…

“I’m not interested in all that. Really, I’m not. You can keep harping on about the past, but I am not interested in the past. I’m interested in the future. My view is he is a really good man and is really good at his job.

“That, for me, was all nonsense, in the past. I’m not interested.”

Chelsea was a very busy process but there seemed to be fewer bidders for United. Why was that?

“Good question, that.”

There was this Qatari guy (Sheikh Jassim) that no one’s ever seen. It was very odd…

“Still nobody’s ever seen him, actually. The Glazers never met him… he never… I’m not sure he exists!” (laughs). I would say this but there is no comparison between Chelsea and Manchester United. The scale of Manchester United is incomparable to any of the London clubs, to be honest with you.”

The SEC filing suggested Qataris did not provide proof of funds…

“No, they didn’t. No.”

Were they really bidding against you, or were you potentially the only bidder?

“I don’t know. They were they were obviously there and there was a whole host of people on the team in their squad… I didn’t ever meet them. But it was it was a very odd affair.”

There seemed to be a lot of background briefings. Did they play clean?

“I’m not going to comment on that. I know what the answer is.”

They claimed the bid was a lot higher than it was…

“Yeah, that’s correct.”

Do Chelsea show how not to do things given their recent spending?

“I don’t want to finish up criticising Chelsea but what I would say is that, in having bought other clubs in Lausanne and Nice, we have made a lot of cock-ups. We’ve made some really stupid decisions in both those clubs. There are a lot of organisations in the world where, if you make a mistake, you get shot, so nobody ever puts their head above the parapet.

“But at INEOS, we don’t mind people making mistakes — but please don’t make it a second time. So with that, we’re much less than sympathetic when they make the same mistake twice. We have made mistakes in football, so I’m really pleased that we made those mistakes before we arrived here at Manchester United. If we hadn’t, this would be a much tougher job for us. Because it is huge and it’s very exposed.”

What sort of player do you want at the club? Youngsters or superstars?

“We’re probably still debating what precisely is the style of football we want to play. If you look at Manchester City, they know precisely what the style of football is they want to play and all 11 teams at the club play the same formula. We need to do that, but I think in terms of the nature of the players, you want Manchester United types of players: attacking football, exciting football, bringing the youth through. You want players that are committed. You want players that play 90 minutes — those are the types of players you want playing for Manchester United.

“The academy is really, really important for us. It’s probably the most successful academy in football in terms of number of players that have come through.”

“We’ll decide that style, plus the CEO, sporting director, probably the recruitment guys, what the style of football is and that will be the Manchester United style of football, and the coach will have to play that style. We’re not going to oscillate from a (Jose) Mourinho style to a Guardiola style. That’s not the way we’ll run the club. Otherwise, you’re changing everything all the time, you change your coach, you’ve got the wrong squad — we won’t do that.

“In modern football, you need to decide what’s your path and stick to your path.”

You are doing something today that has been very rare at Manchester United in recent decades: communicating. How important is it to reconnect the fans and the club? 

“Again, I have a very simple view of a football club. It’s a community asset. The club is owned by the fans, that’s what it’s there for: for the fans. We’re guardians or stewards for a temporary period of time. I’m not going to be there forever. It is important we communicate to the fanbase. We underestimate how important an aspect it is of their life and how it affects their life.

“On a wet Monday morning in Manchester, that’s the first thing you talk about when you go into the office or the factory: how did we do at the weekend? And you either start off with a good week or a bad week depending on how it went. It’s beholden upon us to… It’s not my job to do it on a frequent basis but it was quite important today that we are seen by the true owners, who are the fans really.”

You are sitting in front of a jersey in here where there is a No 7 on the back and the collar up. It looks like an Eric Cantona shirt.…

“He was a maverick, obviously. He was the catalyst for change in Ferguson’s era… and that kickstarted everything off. He was a talisman.

“There has always been a bit of glamour attached to Manchester United which has been lacking a bit in the last few years. You’ve had George Best, Bobby Charlton, Eric the King. At the end of the day, we are in the entertainment business. You don’t want to watch bland football or characterless football. And to be honest, since Christmas, with the young lads, they have played some fantastic football. There have been some great matches.

“I can’t remember many matches at the beginning of the season that I was really excited by. The three young lads sitting on the hoarding at the side; that was a good picture. So I think that’s the Eric point, really. We are cognisant of the fact you do need a bit of glamour in this.”

How would you assess the job Erik ten Hag has done during his time at Old Trafford?

“I’m not going to comment on Erik ten Hag because I think it would be inappropriate to do that. But if you look at the 11 years that have gone since David Gill and Sir Alex stepped down, there have been a whole series of coaches — some of which were very good. And none of them were successful or survived for very long. And you can’t blame all the coaches.

“The only conclusion you can draw is that the environment in which they were working didn’t work. And Erik’s been in that environment. I’m talking about the organisation, the people in the structure, and the atmosphere in the club. We have to do that bit. So I’m not really focused on the coach. I’m focused on getting that bit right. And it’s not for me to judge that anyway — I’m not a football professional.”

Have you spoken to Sir Alex Ferguson much? 

“I have. He was the first person I met when I went up there, which I think was the second week of January. I had a meeting from 9am to 10am at his house and I left at 1pm.

“He never stopped. He’s got a lot of experience, a lot of stories to tell and a lot of thoughts about the club.

“I don’t think he has been encouraged to get involved but he is still very thoughtful about the club and he has an immense amount of experience. He really understands the values and traditions of the club and what it’s all about. He’s still fiercely competitive, Alex Ferguson.”

You have mentioned Manchester City an awful lot in this conversation…

“Well, they are one of the best teams on the planet.”

Are they a blueprint?

“Blueprint? (laughs) We have a lot to learn from our noisy neighbour and the other neighbour. They are the enemy at the end of the day. There is nothing I would like better than to knock both of them off their perch.

“Equally, we are the three great northern clubs who are very close to one another. They have been in a good place for a while and there are things we can learn from both of them. They have sensible organisations, great people within the organisations, and a good, driven and elite environment that they work in. I am very respectful of them but they are still the enemy.”

Would it help if they were found guilty of 115 breaches they are accused of by the Premier League?

“I would not wish that upon them. I don’t understand any of that. I just want to smash them on the football field.”

When you refer to knocking them off their perch… is that a knowing nod to Sir Alex Ferguson’s famous comments about knocking Liverpool off their perch?

“It is, actually. He was the first one who came out with that expression. I am in the same place as Alex — 100 per cent. He was fiercely competitive and that is why he was successful. We have to be the same.

“Queen Victoria was present at the first America’s Cup when we (the UK) challenged America in 1851. They sent a yacht across called America. We had 11 yachts and we had a race around the Isle of Wight. It was hosted by the Royal Yacht Squadron. In the end, the American boat won the race. Queen Victoria turned to the commodore and said ‘Did we come second?’ And the commodore said: ‘There is no second’.”

(Top photo: Peter Byrne/PA Images via Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)

Maybe this was a glimpse of the future.

On Saturday night, Paris Saint-Germain took on Nantes without Kylian Mbappe in their starting XI. After playing 90 minutes against visitors Real Sociedad in the Champions League in midweek, and then privately revealing his intention to leave PSG at the end of the season, Mbappe was dropped by coach Luis Enrique.

The striker had sat on the bench against Lille the Saturday before that Champions League last-16 first leg — a precaution due to an ankle knock — but, other than that, the occasions he has been relegated among the replacements have been few and far between over the past seven years.

In the context of what has happened this past week, it felt symbolic of a power shift.

Had his confession over his impending exit ended his untouchable status and made rotation easier? Luis Enrique preferred a simpler reflection. “There was a Champions League match during the week and we needed energy to be competitive,” he said after his side’s 2-0 away win. “We had to give playing time to those who didn’t have it in Europe. Our goal is ambitious and I need all players involved to achieve it.”

But this picture in Nantes, of a PSG side without Mbappe, will be the norm soon enough. A team without a storied individual. The Ligue 1 champions and current leaders will be shedding the spotlight and the baggage that can come with that. But they will also be losing a game-changer who can — as he inevitably illustrated when he came on after an hour on Saturday — step off the bench, embarrass an opponent to win a penalty, score it, and kill off a match.

PSG have become accustomed to those moments of brilliance from Mbappe. But now, change is coming.

The impact will be huge.

Preparing for life after Mbappe has not been an unforeseen eventuality for PSG. Speculation about his future has been a regular, and often tiresome, soap opera that has rumbled on through almost every transfer window over the past two years. Now, however, the conclusion feels more concrete. It may not have been publicly stated, nor his new club formally agreed. But this time it is for real.

Mbappe will leave PSG in the summer. And PSG must focus on life without him.

That is not going to be easy. Mbappe is not just any old player — and not only because of his talent. He is the most influential French player to have ever worn their shirt. He may have insisted that the club was not ‘Kylian Saint-Germain’ in a marketing dispute last year but, at least in recent times, it is hard to escape the veracity of that description.

Mbappe is arguably the best player in the world today, having established himself as PSG’s record goalscorer by the age of 25. He has claimed multiple records since he signed, at 18, from Ligue 1 rivals Monaco in summer 2017 on an initial loan that turned into a €180million (now £153.8m; $193.7m) permanent switch a year later.

He has scored the most goals for PSG both domestically and in Europe, as well as the most hat-tricks, the most ‘doubles’ and the most goals in a single game (five). He has helped France win the World Cup in that time, scored in successive World Cup finals, including one hat-trick, has won the tournament’s Golden Boot, and gone on to become France captain. He is the most prolific and consistent goalscorer the French league has seen since Jean-Pierre Papin was running riot for Marseille in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

If he wins the Ligue 1 Golden Boot again this season (a near-certainty: he is on 21 goals, second-placed Wissam Ben Yedder of Monaco has 11), he will have received that award six times in a row — no player has done that before.

How on earth do you fill that Grand Canyon of a void?

On the field is one thing. Off it, his achievements place him not only among the greats, but above most of them.

Mbappe’s relationship with his hometown club has at times felt transactional; a pretense of an emotional link while ensuring international eyeballs, impressive brand embellishments and enormous financial recompenses. That may be why his relationship with the PSG supporters has not always appeared perfect — you could even argue he may not have achieved the levels of adoration his achievements deserve purely due to the repetitive nature of these transfer sagas.

But there is no doubting there is affection for him.

It was telling that at the start of this season, after Mbappe was cast aside as the club laid out their ultimatum of “extend or be sold”, that supporters near the Virage Auteuil — a stand at PSG’s Parc des Princes stadium frequented by the club’s ultras — were reticent to discuss the issue when approached by The Athletic. They acknowledged instead the delicate balance of that situation, respecting the club’s position but also pointing out the risk of losing a beloved player.

Again, on Saturday, the supporters held their fire. Mbappe has been whistled before over the intrigue and uncertainty around his future by the club’s fervent fans, but he was not whistled by those in the away end in Nantes.

Mbappe is a global but local star — born on the outskirts of Paris, and now a worldwide ambassador for his country and a player who has proudly worn PSG’s shirt. To lose him is a significant blow; and more so if it is confirmed he is to join a rival for the coveted Champions League in Real Madrid.

With fans also facing the uncomfortable prospect of PSG leaving Parc des Princes, their home since 1974 — just four years after the club was founded, it also adds to the uncertainty about the club’s future identity.

PSG will be viewed differently without Mbappe.

The club have already begun the process of regeneration.

Last summer was the onset, when they parted company with both Lionel Messi and Neymar, under the declaration that their ‘superstar’ era was over and that, instead, PSG would pivot to a younger, more cohesive team built with a longer-term focus — and clear playing philosophy —  in mind.

More than €300million was spent on talent with 13 new faces signed, plus the appointment of new head coach Luis Enrique. January saw the addition of two more youngsters in Lucas Beraldo and Gabriel Moscardo. The average age of the team has dropped dramatically.

PSG have also opened a new, €300million training ground, which brings together all aspects of the club — not just the men’s, women’s and academy football teams but also their judo and handball sides — on one site in Poissy, west of the city.

They have also found new financing via the American investment firm Arctos, which club sources, speaking on condition of anonymity to preserve their relationships, like all of those consulted for this piece, claim may dilute their sole ‘state-backed’ status. It is thought further investment will be pursued.

But it’s losing their last ‘galactico’ that truly closes the door on what has gone before.

That should at least mean a reduction in off-field dramas, which reached their height last summer when, after Messi’s unauthorised travels and subsequent suspension, Mbappe was left out of the club’s pre-season tour of Japan and South Korea and made to train with the club’s fringe players.

The notion of the “club above all else”, a point stressed in a pre-season speech to the players by the president Nasser Al-Khelaifi, may be easier to enforce. Mbappe’s influence always seemed above what most clubs would consider normal; his contract renewal was said to give him a say in recruitment and the appointment of some key staff, such as Luis Campos, PSG’s football advisor who works in recruitment on a consultancy basis.

On the other hand, though, this evolution means a loss of the spotlight and of course, the departure of a truly elite-level talent. This recent era may have failed to secure the longed-for Champions League, but has provided near-certainties of success. During his time at the club, Mbappe has won five titles and is well on his way to number six, and lifted the two domestic cups (before the League Cup was scrapped in 2020) a combined five times.

PSG may have paraded him triumphantly holding a shirt emblazoned with “2025” when securing Mbappe to new terms only two years ago, but they say they have been preparing for his departure with a dual-track approach from the moment this saga exploded last summer.

On the sporting side, that represents a continuation of their “long-term” project under Luis Enrique, a part of which has seen public statements downplaying the “necessity” of winning the Champions League. That project will mean acting further in the market. On their list of summer targets, as The Athletic have reported, are Napoli’s Victor Osimhen and Barcelona midfielder Gavi. The expectation is there will be multiple reinforcements. PSG still want to be an elite club after Mbappe goes and they will attempt to fill the void if they can.

On the field, there are quality players already in place. Take 21-year-old Bradley Barcola, who has hinted at his own exciting potential in a left-wing berth with his recent performances — and he will have competition from the exciting Xavi Simons, also 20, who is currently on a season’s loan at RB Leipzig in Germany. In the central attacking position, which Mbappe has often occupied, PSG have the options of Randal Kolo Muani, 25, and 22-year-old Goncalo Ramos, signed last summer in deals worth a combined €170million, before considering further action in the market.

There is more youth too — none more exciting than homegrown midfielder Warren Zaire-Emery, who is poised to sign a new long-term contract, probably after he turns 18 early next month.

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Tactically, Mbappe’s exit will mean the final departure of a player who transcends tactical instruction.

“He plays where he decides; he has total freedom,” said Luis Enrique in December. “He has complete freedom to play inside, outside, wherever he wants, and we have to balance our positions in relation to him. The question is who will follow Kylian by attacking inside or outside; it will depend on the match.”

This year, Luis Enrique has fiddled with the position of Mbappe in his team, moving him from out wide to a central role. But his exit also means the loss of a match-winner — as was witnessed again on Saturday. Replacing his goals will be tough. His 21 league goals this season are 15 more than any of his team-mates.

Financially, the club also say they prepared for both eventualities. They point to how Mbappe has been costing them €200million per year in wages, and that investment will now be funnelled, in part, into their recruitment plans. There’s also the wiggle room created last summer by significant exits, including those of Neymar and Marco Verratti — players who commanded transfer fees in addition to the club getting their salaries off the books.

There are, though, commercial implications to all of this.

Club sources have tried to play down the impact Mbappe’s exit, certainly in the short-term, will have on commercial agreements where a majority have longer terms to run. PSG’s collaboration with the Jordan sportswear brand, for example, should continue for at least another two years with both parties already working through future designs, while their agreement with Nike, Jordan’s parent company, is in place until 2032.

They also point to broadening their horizons with multiple players who can now grow in stature out of Mbappe’s shadow, and those who can access new markets — such as South Korea international Lee Kang-in.

The club’s profile has grown significantly in recent years, and can now hold its own in spheres beyond football.

But there is no denying Mbappe is the closest thing PSG have to a Michael Jordan — a globally-recognised star whose impact off the field of play mirrors their achievements on it, boasting a legion of fans, independent of club loyalty, who will tune in and buy tickets to watch them play and take notice of which companies they work with. Some of that audience will go when Mbappe does.

PSG point to how the club have continued to grow despite the departures of Messi and Neymar last summer, but Mbappe’s will not be an easy one to overcome.

His exit will also have implications for Ligue 1, which is in the middle of trying to negotiate a new domestic television rights package after its broadcast auction was scrapped in October having received no offers.

Losing Mbappe, so quickly after Messi and Neymar moved on, is a big blow.

When it comes to new partners Arctos, PSG sources insist Mbappe leaving is not an issue, owing to the fact that placing so much investment in one individual, who could be injured at any time, would represent a significant liability.

There may be other consequences, too.

Campos, the club’s football advisor, joined PSG as part of the negotiations to persuade Mbappe to renew his contract in 2022. His own fate has been tied to that of Mbappe, so there has to be a chance this transfer marks the end of his tenure, too. Campos did, of course, play an integral role in the club’s summer overhaul last year, and is now preparing for the next phase of the project, suggesting they still value his input. He is understood to be keen to stay; what he puts in place over the next few months may be key to whether he does.

In the short term, it remains to be seen how all this will affect the rest of PSG’s 2023-24 season. The players are still adapting to Luis Enrique’s philosophy and remain a team in transition. This was always going to be a major sticking point when it came to Mbappe’s future — reconciling a player determined to achieve everything in the here and now with a project that is being built for the long term.

The reality now is that, for Mbappe to achieve his ultimate goal and bring the European Cup to Paris, the clock is ticking. It has to happen this season. That adds extra pressure, even if it has outwardly been stated, by Al-Khelaifi to Luis Enrique, that the competition is not the club’s be-all and end-all any more.

“We want to win it, like all teams, but we don’t feel any particular pressure or obligation,” said midfielder Fabian Ruiz last week.

The certainty of Mbappe’s departure does take one aspect of speculation away, even if it has not yet been officially confirmed. It introduces a long goodbye that could galvanise the team. For once, there won’t be distracting talk about what he will or will not do in the summer.

PSG can now look to the future and enact those plans they have long had prepared.

But no matter how much work has been put in to get ready for it, losing a player of Mbappe’s calibre is going to have a huge impact. Both and off the field.

(Top photo: Jean Catuffe/Getty Images)

Last season, it was a Brazilian midfielder at Liverpool. This season, it’s been his international team-mate at Manchester United.

“I think Casemiro’s legs have gone,” Jamie Carragher told the Covering Liverpool podcast in October. “I noticed it last season at Anfield and I didn’t like what I saw. It took me back to watching Fabinho last year for Liverpool. I want to be the first to say it (about Casemiro). I don’t want to say it when everyone else is saying his legs have gone.”

Regardless of who said what and when, Carragher — who played for Liverpool until he retired at age 35 — is not a lone voice in this debate, and Fabinho and Casemiro are far from the only players singled out for seemingly having lead in their boots.

Any footballer over the age of 30 who is struggling for form leaves themselves open to that type of criticism, but in particular if they are now coming off second best in the sort of duels they used to win and playing in a way that makes it look like the game is now a split-second too quick for them.

Casemiro, who turns 32 on Friday, was at risk of straying into that territory against Luton Town yesterday. “A serial offender who kept fouling time and time again”, was the way former England midfielder Jamie Redknapp, a pundit on UK broadcaster Sky Sports’ coverage of the match, summarised his display.

Withdrawn at half-time, and fortunate in the eyes of many to have avoided a second yellow card, Casemiro is collecting bookings at quite a rate, even by his standards. He has now been cautioned in eight of his last 11 matches for club and country, and four out of five since returning from almost three months out with a hamstring injury in January.

What is clear is that the spotlight can be unforgiving for older players and, at times, unfair.

Gareth McAuley, who was still playing centre-back in the Premier League at the age of 37, viewed the “legs have gone” comment as an “easy shot” when it was directed at him at West Bromwich Albion, especially given how hard he was working to keep in shape and that it was not backed up by the data he was privy to at his club.

“I was thinking, ‘I’m doing more than people who are 10 years younger’,” the 80-cap Northern Ireland international McAuley tells The Athletic. “You think, ‘Do you know what? Show some respect’. But it’s getting even younger now: boys at 28 and 29 are being described as ‘done’.”

Not every player has reason to feel hard done by in this situation — in some cases, they are in denial.

One former international midfielder, not long retired from playing, was viewed by his coach as ‘undroppable’ because of his status. But others at the club felt the player had become a liability as he could no longer track runners and move fast enough.

Some are honest enough to hold their hands up and accept that time has caught up with them – a reality that can creep up on players during a season or, in the case of Gary Neville, be revealed in one brutal moment.

At West Brom on New Year’s Day in 2011, a 35-year-old Neville made his first start for Manchester United in two months. He describes in his autobiography how he made West Brom winger Jerome Thomas look like Cristiano Ronaldo during a deeply uncomfortable 71-minute performance in which he was lucky to avoid a red card.

Neville recalled how Mike Phelan, United’s assistant manager at the time, wandered across for a word when the ball rolled out of play close to the dugouts.

“You’re f***ed, aren’t you?” Phelan said.

Neville nodded.

Thomas, who made more than 150 appearances in the Premier League with four different clubs, remembers that game well, and also the comments Neville made later.

“I guess that was how Gary rationalised it because he was on his way out and he didn’t feel he was at his best,” Thomas says. “I don’t want this to come across the wrong way, because Gary Neville is a legend, but what he doesn’t realise is he wasn’t the only person I was doing that to. As a left-winger, I would go into every game with the goal to either get the right-back sent off or subbed.”

Neville would have been dismissed on another day. Instead, he was subbed. The following morning, he told United manager Sir Alex Ferguson that he was retiring. He never played for them again.

Sol Campbell, Neville’s former England team-mate, had a different experience before bringing the curtain down on his career.

“My legs never went. It was just you needed the right rest period,” Campbell, whose last match was as a 36-year-old for Newcastle United in the 2010-11 Premier League, tells The Athletic. “Once I went back to Arsenal (for a second spell midway through 2009-10), I was 35 and my numbers weren’t there, but getting back to good training helped me compete with the guys. It’s difficult, though, as you get older with the recovery. It’s hard on the body.

“If you play one game a week it’s great, but sometimes it’s four games in 10 days and that’s when you start to feel it. If you have a sympathetic manager who understands that you’re not 21 anymore, then it’s OK. So, for me, it’s not about ‘Legs gone’, it’s about recovery.”

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His legs have gone.

“Sport, never mind football, is full of throwaway phrases like that,” says Chris Barnes, an experienced sports scientist who has worked for several professional clubs, starting with Middlesbrough in 1998.

“Wearing the sports scientist’s hat, one of the big challenges we have in football is getting away from focusing on averages and norms and looking at players as individuals. The reality is that phrase is appropriate (for some players) and in others, maybe not so.

“If you track a player’s journey from a physical perspective, it’s pretty widely accepted that they peak around about 26 to 28. What that means can be interpreted in a number of ways – peak is different for different players in terms of how fast they can run, their ability to do repeated high-intensity activities and so on.”

Although the data never lies, it is important to not get carried away with who runs the furthest, which is to take nothing away from the evergreen James Milner, who topped the charts at the age of 37 last season.

11.2km – Which players covered the most distance (in kilometres) per 90 minutes in the Premier League in 2022-23 (min. 900 minutes)?

11.2km – James Milner
11.2km – Brenden Aaronson
11.0km – Ryan Christie
11.0km – Christian Eriksen
11.0km – Roberto Firmino

Ageless. pic.twitter.com/FQDvKn9GPT

— OptaJoe (@OptaJoe) May 30, 2023

“Total distance is full of noise,” Barnes adds. “The Blackburn winger (Morten Gamst) Pedersen always had the highest total distance of any game, but you must look at what is effective work and what isn’t.

“(Centre-back) Robert Huth, who was at Middlesbrough, would always come and look at how little work he’d done, because he felt his best games were performed when he made good decisions and was positionally correct and therefore the amount of work he needed to do was less. So it’s not really a ‘More is better’ situation. Football isn’t a maximal sport. It’s what typifies, if you like, the DNA, the characteristics, of a player’s game.”

How players engage with their physical data is interesting. Some bury their head in the sand or — and this was witnessed first-hand with a Premier League centre-back during a fly-on-the-wall pre-season piece a few years back — even challenge the figures. Others go actively looking for their data, to use it as a yardstick to not just inform how hard they need to work in training, but also to ensure that the manager doesn’t have an excuse to leave them out.

“The high-speed running and things like that, you get your data and they (the sports scientists) know exactly what you need to be hitting,” McAuley explains. “But in certain sessions as a defender, you won’t get what you need. So I could say, ‘OK, I need another 200 metres of high-speed running’, so I would go and run box-to-box to get that and keep me on the sports-science knife-edge between injury and peak condition.

“I had (Craig) Dawson, 10 years younger than me, who was trying to take my place, so I had to make sure I was trying to be better, trying to stay quicker. In a way, that was driving me. Also, if you weren’t in the team and you’re knocking on the manager’s door, he can’t say that your data has dropped off in training and that your legs have gone.”

SkillCorner works with around 150 clubs around the world and is at the forefront of physical data. It released some fascinating graphs on Twitter in November: the first shows the top speed of players by age during last season. In the over-30s category, Manchester City’s Kyle Walker, 33, remained the fastest player, while both Jamie Vardy and Ashley Young, who are now 37 and 38 years old respectively, were way above the average for their age.

That said, it is also worth remembering Barnes’ comment about the importance of analysing players as individuals and against their own benchmarks rather than comparing them to others.

Every Premier League club will have access to this kind of data and, crucially, will be able to see how a player’s physical levels go up and down over time.

This next SkillCorner chart gives a glimpse of what that looks like — in this instance, it shows Dani Carvajal, the now 32-year-old Spain and Real Madrid right-back. Carvajal’s high-intensity activities per 90 minutes are represented game-by-game and there is also a season average, measuring what SkillCorner describes as “a player’s longitudinal physical performance”.

Of course, there are other factors to take into consideration, especially when analysing an extended period. Managerial, tactical and positional changes can all impact the physical data gathered in matches.

“In training, the sports scientists have a responsibility to be looking at appropriate data to give a mark on the condition of the players they’re working with, and that would involve things like recovery between bouts — heart-rate data is super-informative in things like that,” Barnes adds.

“These high-intensity actions and efforts are the key and unlock a better understanding as to whether the qualities and characteristics of a player have changed. But you definitely have to take into account the tactical context: how the game is evolving and how coaches want it to be played.

“It’s been widely documented how the physicality of Manchester City’s game has grown year on year with Pep Guardiola’s philosophy and Kyle Walker has been able to fit into that. If anything, it’s provided a platform for him to showcase the qualities he possesses even more.”

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“You play football with your head and your legs are there to help you.” – Johan Cruyff

Peter Taylor was singing from that hymn sheet when he brought Roberto Mancini to Leicester City in 2001, Taylor, the club’s manager at the time, openly admitted he signed the 36-year-old Italian forward “for his football knowledge, not his legs”. Chelsea clearly felt the same way about Thiago Silva joining them at the age of 35.

Barnes talks about how “game intelligence continues to increase” and, at times, can compensate for the ageing process, but he also points to a 2015 study that he was involved in looking at “longitudinal match performance characteristics of UK and non-UK players in the English Premier League” and the hard evidence that football at the highest level had become “seriously more demanding from the point of view of the high-intensity requirements”.

“SkillCorner has carried on that work and brought it up to date and that has shown that the demands of competing in the game have grown again,” Barnes adds.

“Gary Neville, Kyle Walker and Dani Carvajal are interesting examples, because they’re all right full-backs, and I would argue that full-back and striker are where this evolution has been most dramatic in terms of requirements to play the game.”

For a No 6 in the modern era, the skill set and the physical demands are huge.

“In this position, you need a guy who wins challenges and protects everybody, but who plays football as well,” Jurgen Klopp, Liverpool’s manager, said last season. “Fab (Fabinho) did that for us for plenty of years (and was) absolutely brilliant. At the moment, it’s not clicking. We have to go through that.”

Outside the club, pundits were quick to judge what had gone wrong with Fabinho. “You know when you’re a midfielder and your legs just start to go and you can’t get around the pitch as much as you would like, that’s what it seems to be,” Micah Richards, the former Manchester City defender, told BBC Sport.

Defensively, Fabinho’s output did drop last season. According to Opta, he was recovering the ball less, winning fewer duels and not making as many interceptions, which helps explain why Liverpool were happy to cash in on him in the summer. With Casemiro, his data shows he is making fewer interceptions in the Premier League this season compared to last (down from 1.4 per game to 0.9) and winning possession on fewer occasions too (down from 8.7 per game to 6.0).

Of course, none of those statistics can be seen in isolation. Last season at Liverpool, for example, Fabinho was far from the only player struggling for form. There is also the question of the team setup and how much that leaves a player exposed. Casemiro, in now Sky pundit Gary Neville’s words, was “absolutely torn to shreds” against Wolves in the first match of this season — a comment that was an indictment of the shape of United’s midfield as much as anything.

In the absence of detailed physical data to prove otherwise, people will draw their own conclusions from what they see during matches (just as managers used to do before the sports-science revolution) and it doesn’t take much for a narrative to take hold, especially when a player is in their thirties.

The sight of 20-year-old Jamal Musiala skipping away from Casemiro three times in the space of seven minutes during United’s 4-3 defeat against Bayern Munich in the Champions League earlier in the season (albeit the Brazilian scored twice that night) provided one of those moments.

In reality, Casemiro was always going to be an easy target for the “legs have gone” narrative, mindful of the reaction when United agreed to pay Real Madrid £70million ($88.2m at current rates) for a 30-year-old in summer 2022. Even INEOS, United’s new investors, were surprised at the numbers involved in the deal.

As a counterpoint, it is important to remember that Casemiro performed really well for United in that debut season and with more time to get up to speed after his recent injury, and with the hugely impressive teenager Kobbie Mainoo operating in the same midfield, there is an argument he could still be an important player at Old Trafford.

Either way, it’s a matter of time before the same four words are levelled at someone else.

McAuley smiles. “I think that (phrase) is kind of deep-rooted in pre-sports-science football,” he adds.

“Do the legs go? Maybe. But what I would say is that it’s the desire to keep doing it — the mental side. You can tell yourself to do anything. And with the mind and the willpower to do it, you can.”

(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)

THE FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup is just around the corner as sixteen of the world's best teams come together to win the biggest prize in sport.

The competition will take place in Dubai for the second time this year, having previously taken place there in 2009.

2

Russia are the current owners, having won the competition on home soil in 2021, beating Japan 5-2 in the final.

However, they will not defend their crown now that all Russian teams have been banned from participating in FIFA competitions.

There are a number of strong teams taking part in this year's competition, with European champions Italy being firm favorites to win the competition.

The Azzuri have recent FIFA Best Goalkeeper award winner Leandro Casapieri in their squad.

Brazil and Portugal are currently the top-ranked teams in the world.

Spain, ranked fourth, only qualified for the tournament after Ukraine withdrew in protest at allowing Belarus, a Russian ally, to participate.

2

What are the rules of the FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup?

The main rules of the sport are that there are five players on each team.

Seven substitutes may be appointed on each match day, with an unlimited number of substitutions allowed.

A typical beach soccer match lasts a total of 36 minutes and the matches are divided into three 12-minute periods.

There will then be three-minute breaks for each period, with the game clock being paused if there is a stoppage in play due to an injury, a foul or a goal scored.

There is no offside rule in the sport, while players are not allowed to score directly from kick-off.

Players can decide whether to take the throw-in (or kick-in) with their hands or feet.

When is the FIFA Beach Football World Cup?

The Fifa Beach Soccer World Cup starts on Thursday 15 February and the final takes place on Sunday 25 February.

All matches of the tournament will take place at the Dubai Design District Stadium.

Which TV channel will air the Fifa Beach Soccer World Cup and can it be streamed live?

The tournament is NOT available on British television and no broadcaster has the rights.

However, every match will be streamed live for FREE on the FIFA+ website, which is available in the UK.

US viewers can watch the tournament on the FOX Sports network.

Fifa Beach Soccer World Cup 2024 schedule

Thursday February 15

United States 1-3 Italy

United Arab Emirates 2-1 Egypt

Tahiti 4-3 Argentina

Spain vs Iran

Friday February 16

Colombia vs Japan

Senegal vs Belarus

Portugal vs Mexico

Brazil vs Oman

Saturday February 17

Italy vs Egypt

United Arab Emirates vs United States

Spain vs Tahiti

Argentina vs Iran

Sunday February 18

Japan vs Belarus

Senegal vs Colombia

Mexico vs Oman

Brazil vs Portugal

Monday February 19

Argentina vs Spain

Iran vs Tahiti

Egypt vs United States

Italy vs United Arab Emirates

Tuesday February 20

Belarus vs Colombia

Japan vs Senegal

Oman vs Portugal

Mexico vs Brazil

Thursday February 22

Quarterfinals

Saturday February 24

Semi-finals

Sunday February 25

Competition for third place

Last

What do Mohamed Salah, Neymar, Kevin De Bruyne, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Lionel Messi have in common? Their contracts are all expiring in 2025.

While the summer transfer window looks set to be headlined by Kylian Mbappe and the saga of his potential switch from Paris Saint-Germain to Real Madrid, the world’s biggest clubs will be on alert as they attempt to navigate the contract situations of some of the best players in the world.

Who might move? Who looks likely to stay at their club? Which teams are interested in Alphonso Davies and Joshua Kimmich, whose contracts also expire in 2025?

The Athletic explains below.

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Mohamed Salah

Who is the player most synonymous with Liverpool’s success during the Jurgen Klopp era, if not Salah?

The Egypt international is out of action after suffering a hamstring injury during the Africa Cup of Nations. Still, he remains as important as ever to his club as they aim to win their second Premier League title.

The 31-year-old was the subject of significant interest during last summer’s transfer window, with Saudi club Al Ittihad testing Liverpool’s resolve with a bid of £150million ($188m), and this saga appears likely to continue into next summer providing the prolific forward does not sign a new contract.

Sources close to Al Ittihad indicated they had not given up hope and were prepared to pay up to £200million for the most famous Arab footballer on the planet — a move that would place him alongside Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar as poster boys for the Saudi Pro League. The package offered, understood to be worth around £1.5million ($1.9m) per week, around four times his current salary, would help grease the wheels, too.

Salah appears to be in his prime years, unlike Fabinho and Jordan Henderson, whom Liverpool sold to Saudi clubs last summer, and has shown no signs of agitating for a move. However, with Liverpool’s future uncertain in light of Klopp’s upcoming summer departure, Salah may want to wait for key roles to be addressed before committing his future to the club.

Neymar

All is not well for Brazil’s biggest star in Saudi Arabia.

Two months after joining Al Hilal from PSG in an £80million ($102m) transfer last August, he suffered an injury to his anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) and meniscus in his left knee, requiring surgery. The 32-year-old is not expected to play again this season.

In recent weeks, he has addressed claims from Saudi supporters that he has put on weight during his injury rehabilitation, with Neymar responding in Portuguese, “Overweight, great. But fat? I don’t think so!” in a video posted on Instagram.

Due to his unfortunate start to life in Saudi, Neymar’s long-term future is in the air. With the World Cup coming to the United States in 2026, Brazil’s record goalscorer may want another attempt to win one of the only trophies that has evaded him, potentially opening the door for a return to Europe to ensure he plays at the highest level before the tournament. A homecoming to Brazil cannot be ruled out either, nor can staying with Al Hilal, where Neymar is due to earn an estimated $300million (£235m) over two years.

Lionel Messi

Fresh from being named men’s player of the year at the FIFA Best Awards in January, Messi is travelling the world on a pre-season tour with Inter Miami and a few of his best friends — Luis Suarez, Sergio Busquets and Jordi Alba.

His decision to depart Europe for Major League Soccer before staying with PSG, returning to Barcelona or following in the footsteps of Cristiano Ronaldo and going to Saudi Arabia looks like the right one.

While his move has been an undoubted commercial success, the prospect of rejoining his hometown club in Argentina, Newell’s Old Boys, retains its appeal.

Messi will be 38 on the expiry of his contract, leaving the prospect of staying in Miami, returning to Rosario, or even retiring as genuine possibilities. As is customary for MLS players, his contract expires in December (the end of the American soccer season) rather than June, with an option to extend his deal until 2026, which would take him to the age of 39.

Joshua Kimmich

Before Harry Kane’s arrival, Kimmich was arguably Bayern’s most important player.

Since joining the club in 2015 from RB Leipzig, the 28-year-old has made 248 league appearances and won eight Bundesliga titles, as well as the Champions League once. With Manuel Neuer and Thomas Muller approaching the end of their careers, all seemed set for Kimmich to take over the mantle as club captain and play the remainder of his career in Bavaria — which makes it more surprising that his contract situation is not yet sorted.

Manchester City are exploring a move for the midfielder as they look for someone to play alongside Rodri, as well as providing cover for his position, but they know a deal will not be straightforward. If Kimmich does not sign a new contract with Bayern in the coming months, with negotiations yet to begin, the German giants are expected to put him up for sale in the summer. That would be a shocking development for a player that former club executive Karl-Heinz Rummenigge described as “the embodiment of world class” in 2021.

Like in 2014, when Toni Kroos was allowed to depart for Real Madrid, Bayern could lose a top-class player in his prime for under market value.

Trent Alexander-Arnold

Like Jamie Carragher or Steven Gerrard — up until his late-career move to the LA Galaxy — it is difficult to see Alexander-Arnold, who grew up a 10-minute drive away from Anfield, ever playing for a club other than Liverpool.

Having been promoted to vice-captain by Klopp before the start of the season, Alexander-Arnold has grown under the extra responsibility and he looks set to wear the armband permanently in the future. With 18 months remaining on his contract, Liverpool will look to tie down the 25-year-old to a long-term deal that reflects his importance to them.

While the departures of Klopp and his staff may complicate things slightly, given the German coach gave him his debut and has retained faith through more challenging moments in recent seasons, Alexander-Arnold is a bedrock for Liverpool to build on when they enter a new era.

Alphonso Davies

Alongside Kimmich and Leroy Sane, Davies rounds off the trio of world-class talents whose contracts are set to expire with Bayern in 2025.

Still only 23, Davies broke into Bayern’s first team in 2019 at 18 and has since won five Bundesliga titles and a Champions League. He’s already considered among the best full-backs in the world and there are few players, if any, who can replicate his pace and attacking quality in his position.

Bayern are expected to put him up for sale in the summer if they cannot agree a contract extension beforehand. Many clubs will be interested in a move this summer and Real Madrid are monitoring his situation. Considering he has started in all but one of the 27 games he has played for Bayern this season, they will not let him depart easily.

Kevin De Bruyne

Despite missing half of the season through injury, it has not taken long for De Bruyne to find his best form. In his first appearance since suffering a hamstring injury on the season’s opening day, he scored and assisted in City’s 3-2 win against Newcastle United in January.

On January 31, in his first start back, he assisted Julian Alvarez as City made light work of Burnley in a 3-1 win. For almost any other player with De Bruyne’s injury history, a club with City’s resources would likely be searching around Europe for his immediate replacement. Still, the Belgian is arguably the best midfielder in the world and any alternative in the same position would be a certain downgrade.

Given De Bruyne’s age (32) and injury history, it would be irresponsible for City not to be preparing alternatives. With most clubs in Europe unable to offer a salary he would demand, there are very few realistic options available, particularly if he can put his recent injury woes behind him, and City will be keen to keep their star creator.

Leroy Sane

After three years in Munich, Sane has found his best career form under Thomas Tuchel. In 20 Bundesliga matches this season, he has scored eight goals and laid on 11 assists, an excellent return for the wide player who has adjusted brilliantly to the arrival of Kane.

Yet if his contract is not renewed in the coming months, Sane will likely be put up for sale in the summer. Expect Bayern to be keen to renew his deal, given his immediate connection with Kane, but the former Manchester City man will have suitors.

The prospect of attracting the versatile 28-year-old — a left-footed wide player capable of playing on either wing — at a cut price means top European clubs will keep an eye on his situation before this summer’s transfer window.

Son Heung-min

Following the departures of Hugo Lloris and Kane from Tottenham Hotspur in the summer, Son has taken on the mantle as club captain and star player this season. Under Ange Postecoglou, the South Korea international has put last season’s struggles behind him — scoring 12 goals and adding five assists in 20 league games.

Son signed his most recent deal in 2021, a four-year contract with an option to extend by a year — something Tottenham are expected to do. But this will likely be Son’s last major contract as he will turn 34 in 2026.

Virgil van Dijk

Since being given the captain’s armband by Klopp in pre-season, Virgil van Dijk has quietened suggestions that his prime years are behind him with some dominant performances at the heart of Liverpool’s defence. But with 18 months remaining on his contract, he and Liverpool are caught in a dilemma.

Van Dijk is one of the Premier League’s greatest centre-backs, combining athleticism, technical quality and defensive anticipation in a way that few have ever done, making Liverpool’s decision whether to invest heavily in the future more challenging.

He is turning 33 this summer and there will be question marks on whether he can replicate his best form as his physical qualities decline, particularly as Van Dijk is one of the club’s highest-paid players.

With Klopp’s departure this summer, Liverpool’s future is still being determined. Asked whether he sees himself as part of the next era, Van Dijk responded: “That’s a big question. I don’t know.” He later clarified that he is still “fully committed to the club”, indicating he is not considering his long-term future while Liverpool remain in the hunt for four trophies this season.

Ivan Toney

It seems the right decision for all parties for Toney to depart Brentford this summer. After serving an eight-month ban for betting offences, the England striker has returned to action in excellent form, scoring two goals in two league matches — immediately picking up where he left off last season, where he was one of only three players to score 20 Premier League goals or more.

Fortunately for suitors, Toney has made it clear he sees his long-term future away from Brentford several times.

“You can never predict when the right time to move elsewhere is but I think it’s obvious I want to play for a top club,” Toney told Sky Sports in January. “Everybody wants to play for a top club, (one) fighting for titles. Whether it’s this January that is the right time for a club to come in and pay the right money, who knows?”

In January, Brentford head coach Thomas Frank said it would take an “unbelievable price” to take Toney away from the west Londoners. Still, with one year remaining on his deal in the summer, it would be in the club’s best interests to facilitate a move, with their star striker seemingly seeing his future elsewhere.

Warren Zaire-Emery

PSG are known for producing some of the best talent in Europe. Kingsley Coman, Adrien Rabiot, Christopher Nkunku, Patrice Evra and Nicolas Anelka have all graduated from the Parisians’ academy in the last three decades. Zaire-Emery could turn out to be the best out of the lot.

The 17-year-old has already made his international debut, becoming the youngest player to be called up for France since 1914, scoring a goal in a 14-0 win over Gibraltar. As a versatile midfielder capable of playing as a No 6, 8 and 10, he has drawn comparison to Jude Bellingham, three years his elder. Zaire-Emery is a different type of player but they share world-class potential.

So PSG, who are preparing for the eventual departure of Mbappe, will be keen to tie Zaire-Emery down long term. Born in Montreuil, an eastern suburb around 6km from the centre of Paris, he is the ideal face of a post-Mbappe PSG. If discussions stall, however, expect all of Europe’s top clubs to react quickly.

Weston McKennie

For those who followed Leeds United’s relegation from the Premier League last season, it might be a shock to see McKennie starting regularly for Juventus. Under Massimiliano Allegri, however, he has developed into a critical cog in Juventus’s midfield as they compete to win Serie A.

With a home World Cup in 2026, McKennie will want to play regular club football to ensure he retains an important role for the United States. Clubs needing a high-energy midfielder will monitor his situation if he falls out of favour. Until then, though, McKennie looks settled and happy in Turin.

Thiago Almada

If Almada departs Atlanta United this summer, he will likely become the most expensive player to leave Major League Soccer in its history. The record is Miguel Almiron’s transfer from Atlanta to Newcastle United for £21million ($27m) in 2019, and Almada, already a World Cup winner with Argentina, is expected to fetch around $30m.

Like Toney, Almada is keen to secure a move to a top European club. Eager to take advantage of a franchise-altering fee, Atlanta will facilitate a transfer, providing a club meets their valuation. They will have slightly more time than Brentford, however, as the 22-year-old’s deal expires in December 2025. Still, given the potential for a big sale, the MLS outfit will be keen not to let the value decline by allowing Almada’s contract to run down.

Conor Gallagher

At the beginning of 2023, Chelsea tried to sell Gallagher to Everton. Last summer, Chelsea rejected a £40million bid from West Ham. Tottenham were interested in January but a move never materialised. If Gallagher’s future is not sorted before the summer transfer window, his future may lie away from Stamford Bridge.

As the England international is an academy-trained player, a fee received for Gallagher will count as pure profit in the club’s accounts. Having spent over £1billion since Chelsea’s owners took over in May 2022, the money will help when it comes to Profit and Sustainability rules. However, Gallagher has played regularly under Mauricio Pochettino and has worn the armband several times this season — indicating the manager’s trust in him.

A potential departure may upset Chelsea fans, who have seen academy graduates depart frequently in recent seasons, but if there were a decision to part ways, the 23-year-old would not be short of suitors.

(Top photos: Getty Images)