It’s not that I don’t believe them when they say it’s too many games. However I still don’t understand why teams don’t simply ignore the league cup matches in their entirety and just send their u23s + their coaching staff to those games, while keeping their 20 to 25 core players + manager at home. Or even better: scheduling recovery/tactical sessions during league cup nights

Surely the FA will take notice when teams just say “fuck it” like that. Are there rules in place to prohibit this?

Highest ball knowledge yank

I actually feel that it’s more of a new/plastics fan sort of thing to hate on international football. You know, the people who started to support City and PSG 2 years ago.

Interesting. I think Haaland makes sense to not be assigned as the free kick taker. With his size and finishing/heading ability, he is much likelier to score off a free kick rebound or cross, than to score the free kick itself.

Mbappe is indeed a little more puzzling, but I think it boils down to 2 things:

1. Kicking a dead ball is suprisingly unpredictive to a player’s general footballing ability. Relatively speaking of course. Most greats like Messi, Ronaldo, and Ronaldinho are great FK takers. Some, like Ronaldo Nazario, aren’t. Some of the best FK takers like Juninho and James Ward-Prowse are not considered amongst the greats. Mbappe is probably ‘merely good’ at the FK.

2. He does not have many seasons at the top flight and in those he always had a teammate with world class FK ability. Moutinho at Monaco, and Neymar, Di Maria, and Messi at PSG. So there never was a need for him to get better at it