Welcome, friends, to 87 Minutes. A football tactics dispatch brought to you in partnership with the wonderful folks at BackPage. They tell ‘World-Class Sports Stories’, so it was only a matter of time before they collaborated with someone who does dick jokes on YouTube.
Basically, right, football’s incredibly stupid. But if you’ve ever tried to wade into the murky, pungent waters of tactical analysis you’ll know it can often cease to be any fun before you’re even up to your knees. So we’re going to change that, one email at a time.
Whether it’s highlighting the innocuous little tweak that decided this weekend’s Super Sunday™, explaining how some journeyman forward lump is suddenly an FPL-Must-Have, or even just - and this one’s real - why Cole Palmer sometimes plays right-back, it’s all good stuff! It’s not supposed to be maths.
Hopefully, I’ve managed to harness a lifetime of being Terminally Online to give you a small video introduction on this post, but just to put things in writing: Hello, I’m Adam.
You’re likely here because you’ve seen some of the tactics videos I produce on the FourFourTwo YouTube channel, or read one of the explainers I do in the very same magazine. They’re good, aren’t they? I’ve done alright there! And that’s sort of what the vibe will be here but, crucially, also not.
The faceless overlords of digital algorithms lean, heavy and sweating, on you to constantly talk about the BIGGEST TEAMS playing in the BIGGEST GAMES, but beautiful, gentle, forgiving Substack won’t. Instead, the criteria is literally just “is that interesting?”.
If it is, I’ll knock up something approaching “””insight”””, nice people like you can suggest things they’d like to read about, I’ll read those suggestions with my eyes, and around and round we’ll go. That’s it!
You are constantly bombarded by people having bad-faith takes on football as loud as they possibly can, so if I’m any good at this you’ll have a small digestible gift in your inbox to hopefully make you feel sane again. “You’re not going mad”, it will seem to say, “Jan Paul van Hecke really did outsmart Man City’s entire midfield”.
Anyway, by some total coincidence, our first post is about Jan Paul van Hecke, and how he really did outsmart Man City’s entire midfield. It’ll be along shortly.
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