Jagten

I’m not sure you did but thanks for playing!

Personnel variability hurts you because players are less likely to know their role and pressing triggers, but Howe should be doing better. It’s not as if this sort of thing is a one-off.

Is this a problem of personnel, or is it the system?

This vulnerable "high line" goal has nothing to do with the keeper. This is probably most on Howe, but early sub clearly doesn't help.

We have extremely limited information, do not properly understand his diagnosis, and don't even know if it's the same knee. Of course it's possible we screwed up, but I think the uncertainty is so high it's basically impossible to have any conviction re our mistakes.

Gary O'Neil didn't improve Bournemouth and they got better after he left. You're allowed to think whatever you want of Howe, but pitching Gary O'Neil as a better manager is obviously insane

Man City initially handled their wealth poorly, and it took them ages to develop a coherent strategy. In retrospect, Gary Cook probably held them back a lot

For balance, at Monaco, where he probably had the highest degree of autonomy, Paul Mitchell spent 200m euros and mostly missed. That said, it’s always difficult to determine the extent of his responsibility for any of these signings.

They are still one of the most well-capitalised clubs in France and have spent a lot of money, if not offset by a few large sales. In his three years as sporting director they spent over 200m euros (huge for the France) and appointed four managers. Very few of those decisions look, right now, especially successful.

His record at Monaco is ... not great?

Agreed, but I don't think he's an obvious starter for anyone outside of the bottom three. The standard of the league is extremely high, and his function is heavily dependent on the system.

I agree with this. I think the current management team probably have to face existential risk themselves before jettisoning Howe. Presently, I think we are a long way from a decision like that

I think Bruno is more important to the team, but limited realistic forward options make this true. I couldn't give you a name that wouldn't have big risk and cost loads

Both things can be true: you can enjoy football for everything that cannot be quantified and also enjoy what can be in pursuit of some truth. People don't like xG because it is the most popular latent statistic, one which has to be approximated via methods that are not understood.

We have no idea what's he responsible for.

It's actually an exponential moving average FWIW, so it does weight toward more recent games. We can look at the individual games too and they weren't good. We were, for example, very lucky to win at Forest.

Depends how much you care about estimating latent quantities from noisy data (results), especially with a small sample size. I don't visually think performances have improved either.

This is just high-variance outcomes from high-volume chances, both for and against. The underlying trend has not improved. (Villa was good though.)

Benteke was a Rodgers buy. The transfer committee, and Iain Graham's influence, grew significantly in the summer of 2016, which is why I mention that period specifically. They built, for a time, the best team on the planet, without spending best-team-on-the-planet money. Circa 80m for Mane and Salah was obscene. Any team would be do well to replicate their success from that period. I disagree with your characterization of their process: it was data-led value, which correlated with, but does not explicitly target, distressed sellers - and a process that Klopp often disagreed with (e.g., it is reported he wanted Brandt over Salah). I have no specific thoughts on our current process, other than I wish we had better data people. I only hope we did not see Ashworth leaving as an opportunity to concentrate our bet on Howe's coaching and talent spotting abilities. He of course should have an important role. I think Howe is mostly quite good at recruitment and better than his critics think.

Liverpool's transfer committee between '16-'21 probably as good as you can get. Some big misses (Keita), but mostly massive hits.

The skill required to do what he did with Bournemouth is immense, but it doesn't always scale to buying elite talent. His trading book-value PnL at Bournemouth in the Premier League was maybe zero, all said, which is reasonably hard to achieve, but not enough to close the gap on e.g. an increasingly competent talent ID at Spurs who have 2x our budget.

Net balance of 8th. He's alright, but not an elite talent ID guy

Going max long Howe might make more sense if he was our principal competitive advantage, but it is, whatever you think of Howe, Saudi Arabia. We should obviously hedge his failure.

We’ve conceded 31 goals in our 13 league games since the start of December. This is the same as Sheffield United, but we have played one game more.

0 shots btw