In this episode of the Football Pod, Gareth and Callum attempt to predict the scores of the Premier League's top four and bottom four in the Champions League, the Europa League and League Cup, and the League Cup semi-final. They also look ahead to the FA Cup final between Manchester United and Liverpool, and make predictions on who will get promoted and who will be relegated from the league. Plus, a look back at the first half of the season and a look forward to the second half. 5 Star Potential is a Football Pod regular Football Podcast brought to you by ! - The Football Pod is your pod dedicated to all things Football Pod! Hosted by , , and . If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and we'll read out your comments and thoughts on the next episode. Thanks again for listening and supporting the podcast! - Your continued support is so appreciated and we hope you enjoy listening to this podcast. - Best Fiends - Tom and Gareth xxx - Yours Truly, Tom, Gareth & Gareth Music: "The Football Podcasters" - "Alfie" by & "Ajax (feat. (Music: "Athletic" by "The Real" by Fergie) and "AJaxon" by Pippa ( ) Thank you for listening to the podcast and spreading the word around the world about the podcast, Tom & Gareth's Football PodCast, and supporting us on social media? We hope you all enjoy the podcast. Thank you so much for all the support we get, love you, love ya, bye, bye bye! , bye! - Your support, bye! Love you, bye Love, bye - Rory, bye Bye Bye bye, Bye Bye, bye - Love, Love, Micky & Rory & Jacky, Love, EJ & Alyssa, - P.A. - - EJ (AJ) ( ) - PSYCHE, EK ( ) and Jacky ( ) & P.M. ( ) ( ) Thank you, Rory & Joe ( ) xx , P. & Mikey ( ) - (Athol ( ) (Sue, John ( ) , ) (
00:00:07.000Maybe you're an American, maybe you're a conspiracy theorist, maybe you're thinking, "Why the hell are those two limeys?"
00:00:13.000You might be thinking those bloody limeys talking about football because it provides a beautiful framing for all of our social understanding.
00:00:26.000The narrative itself can be found in football As someone once said, the world is not made of atoms, the world is made of stories.
00:00:33.000And the stories that emerge from football are some of the greatest stories available.
00:00:36.000It also gives me and Gareth an opportunity to make predictions in a game that I'm sure to win, where we have to predict the scores of certain fixtures.
00:00:44.000We get three points if you 100% get it right, one point if you get the general result correct.
00:00:52.000Who's going to get relegated from the Premier League?
00:00:54.000Are West Ham United, the football club that I support, going to reach a European final?
00:00:58.000Albeit one that Simon Jordan of Talk Sport calls the Papa John's, meaning it's sort of a low-rent... Papa John's is a sort of a pizza parlour that sponsors sort of low-rent domestic competitions.
00:03:04.000Because Luton is an old school football team.
00:03:07.000Like, I think, I don't know this and I don't judge you if you're a Luton fan, but I have a sense that Luton still has what you might call traditional 80s fans.
00:04:04.000And even like when they won against London, there was a pitch invasion and it felt like a bit... It doesn't feel like a sort of a friendly pitch invasion.
00:04:16.000I'm just saying, this is the point I'm trying to make.
00:04:19.000Football has had to become sanitised in order to commodify it to the degree where it could become an innocuous global brand, even though it is still full of the glory that football will always contain and present.
00:04:34.000But as it becomes more and more commodified, more and more detached from the fans that it's traditionally associated with, the gentrification of the game, something that began a long, long time ago, really, sort of with the advent of the Premier League, most notably, in our country, it's sort of certain aspects of the game, the sort of eating a pie, drinking Bovril, getting punched in the face by a stranger, All of the things we are proudest traditions.
00:05:02.000I think it's like that thing with stadiums.
00:05:05.000It's like, I think we want to retain, we don't want all football to become, as you say, sanitized.
00:05:11.000We don't want every stadium to be one of those new, all look exactly the same stadiums.
00:05:17.000And so when you get a stadium like Luton's that's 10,000, you know, I guess it's the difference between Optum Park and the new stadium.
00:05:25.000Because, right, at West Ham you used to have to walk down Barking Road or Romford Road or Green Street and you're walking through, like, communities.
00:05:35.000Bengali people and shops full of saris and little pie and mash shops and pubs that have had generations of West Ham fans there.
00:05:43.000The statue of Martin Pears and Bobby Moore and Geoff Hurst and it's sort of full of real ritual.
00:05:49.000The inconvenience of arriving at Upton Park or maybe getting out of Plastow because there'll be too much people.
00:05:53.000Upton Park, gonna get off one earlier on Monday.
00:05:56.000And now you're in a Westfield shopping centre at Stratford.
00:05:59.000You're moving for a place of commerce.
00:06:02.000If you look at the sort of the economic class that are represented by the walk along Green Street versus where the kind of tax arrangements probably enjoyed by the unit proprietors in any Westfield.
00:06:17.000Like all of those kind of, if you were to look at that, it would tell you a story.
00:06:20.000There's information in that story about the way that the game is being co-opted and changed.
00:06:24.000It's impossible not to regard it through a political lens.
00:06:27.000So whilst I'm not glorying in like the aspects of football in the 1980s that were obviously prejudicial, violent, what I'm saying is it was something that was clearly owned by a particular community and that there was something, I feel a kind of nostalgia about that even though at the time I was Probably quite frightened.
00:06:46.000Well we know where these massive stadiums and franchises lead us to.
00:06:50.000It leads us to something like the Super League, doesn't it?
00:06:52.000That's the trajectory of the way football is kind of going and we don't want that.
00:06:57.000So retaining something like Luton being in the Premier League would feel like a kind of resistance to that.
00:07:03.000You can have a look now at the entrance to Kenilworth Road versus the LA Galaxy entrance, just to sort of see for yourselves.
00:07:12.000So that's on your way into Luton, and then what's it like to go into LA Galaxy?
00:07:18.000That's all that Royal Road tells you a great deal and almost you can feel they'll come a point where people almost welcome a Super League because they'll say oh well you know what's the point Man City always win the Premier League Bayern Munich always win the league in Germany yeah once it's we're doing it already then why why not you know yeah And once every stadium kind of looks like that and Man City type teams and franchises keep winning all the leagues and all the trophies, then it'll be like, well, why not?
00:07:48.000Why don't we just do the Super League?
00:08:53.000Newcastle were amazing then, perhaps, as now it's like an exciting time to be a Newcastle fan.
00:08:57.000And I still remember this moment of watching Tony Blair exchanging headers with Kevin Keegan, and I still, for all the war crimes and all the dead Iraqi children and all of the globalism, this still in part informs my impression of Tony Blair favourably.
00:09:10.000Like, for example, if, like, some world court arrested Tony Blair and were about to execute him as a war criminal, let's face it, that's no different to what happened to Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gaddafi, and unless you're making the argument that it's more right to do that to brown people than white people, then why would that not happen?
00:10:30.000Because then politics became sanitised, centralised, the idea of an alternative, a challenge to the relationships between corporate power and the state.
00:12:10.000I would like to see if he can reliably produce prose of that standard.
00:12:17.000I suppose, yeah, what do you like... Well, the big news, obviously, is that Man City have basically won the title now, haven't they?
00:12:23.000Yeah, because Brighton are too good at football, inexplicably.
00:12:27.000And like, now that, this is what I think, now that Spurs aren't going to have Nagelsmann as their next manager has been confirmed, I think they're getting Deserby.
00:13:11.000Because I thought that what deservedly looked like is the sort of least popular member of a boy band.
00:13:17.000You know, like they have one that's sort of like, you can be in the boy band, but we know that you're struggling with your weight and we're not going to let you be near the front.
00:13:27.000You know, he's like that and he deserves it.
00:13:29.000But he's taken over from Graham Potter and he's fundamentally improved.
00:13:54.000I was listening to a podcast the other day that was saying that there's never been anyone like him in the Premier League in the kind of effect that he's had on Brighton.
00:14:21.000Apparently he's a lovely, lovely guy as well.
00:14:23.000Potter got the job at Chelsea on the basis that what he'd done at Brighton was incredible, as well as his previous employment in the game of football.
00:14:32.000He eventually ascends to one of the top positions in British football, manager of Chelsea, albeit a position that's understood to be quite temporary.
00:14:43.000Then De Zerby's come in and sort of been a bit better, a bit better than him.
00:14:59.000Potter must have been looking at Brighton and thinking, oh no, I've got all these too many good players here at Chelsea on contracts that are too long and Brighton are better now.
00:15:10.000He must have experienced some self-doubt.
00:15:20.000Because there'll be another job for Graham Potter.
00:15:22.000Yeah, but what happens, because I think that there's a sort of, there's an upward trajectory, say Hasenhuttle of Southampton, there was a minute where he was looking like, oh he's in the ascendancy.
00:15:34.000He's gonna get a new, he's gonna get a brilliant job, and then it sort of doesn't, if you don't, there's so much timing, if you don't jump ship at the right moment, then you go back into descent.
00:15:42.000Like, other than this peculiar anomaly of Frank Lampard being given another job at Chelsea temporarily, what can, and I like Frank Lampard, But he's seemingly can do no wrong in the managerial sense.
00:15:55.000Doesn't matter how many times he fails.
00:17:20.000Because I think Man City are just an unstoppable sort of killing machine now.
00:17:26.000And perfectly embodied by the red helmeted Ireland.
00:17:32.000There's nothing that can realistically be done to stop them.
00:17:35.000The Man City thing isn't it, is like, you know, in terms of like from a footballing sense, people were like, well look at the size of their squad, they're able to like, you know, rest certain players and bring in other players who are just as good as those players.
00:17:47.000But there is another, and obviously with Arsenal, you could point to the injuries that they got at the wrong time, in a Saliba got injured at the wrong time of the season.
00:17:53.000Yeah, but like Gary Neville says, you can't just have one injury and then say that, oh well, the whole project doesn't work anymore.
00:18:07.000It's a mentality isn't it at that point and it's always a fascinating thing for me in football that you know as many tactics as you've got and as many like amazing players and everything that's something like you know personality and character and that.
00:18:20.000A clear example of that is Fergie's last title like in his final season as manager they managed to win the Premier League within retrospect looks like a team that shouldn't have been capable of that.
00:18:33.000Certainly on the basis of what they did for the subsequent, is it 10 years now?
00:18:37.000And immediately afterwards, it's like, oh, that person was able through will and belief.
00:18:42.000And I guess that's why, when I've really, my fascination with football, even though I'm fascinated with many aspects of it, the game itself, the moments of drama it can produce, transfers, the history of the clubs, the behavior of the fans, what it really comes down to, to me, I think, is the sort of power of belief and thought.
00:18:59.000That's why I sort of fixate in particular on managers, So I think, like, can individuals create meaningful change?
00:19:07.000Now, look at that team, mind you, it does look like quite a good team.
00:19:09.000You've got Patrice, you've got Wayne Rooney, you've got, like, I mean, yeah, I'm Percy.
00:19:46.000Like if you took, if he just relayed all of his information into an AI device and it dispatched that information, like I don't think the results will be the same.
00:19:55.000There is something human and interpersonal.
00:19:56.000And I think as we continue to see the power of commerce and technology and dehumanizing us and stripping our culture of meaning, Even when enhancing superficial beauty or efficacy or safety or convenience or whatever the claims that are made by commerce are, the idea that something about human beings can't be replicated, that amounts to sacredness, I think, in the world now, that they have a sacred role to play.
00:20:22.000I heard someone say the other day that if like there were certain managers that you'd never would see them on the pitch I think well you know like like sort of like a Fergie you wouldn't see it like you'd know you're in trouble if he'd come down or that they'd ruin things like their ideas will be annoying you wouldn't want them it's left to the coaches that kind of stuff right that it almost is a totemic and talismanic power that these figures have And I suppose there's many ways of doing that, whether it's Roy Hodgson's presumed avuncular sweetness or, you know, what is it they're bloody well doing?
00:21:36.000He said, didn't he, that he knows as much as Klopp or Guardiola.
00:21:40.000And then afterwards when they sort of went, you can't say that because of their achievements in the game.
00:21:46.000Like you've not won the competitions that they have won.
00:21:50.000He said, I was doing what Fergie done.
00:21:52.000Like I was taking attention away from the players and putting it on me.
00:21:55.000So he sort of actually made yet another claim while trying to... yeah I saw that and I thought like with Sam Allardyce I wonder if he could sort of say like is it that they can instill in the Leeds team, listen you're in the championship next year this is about you're playing for your lives you've got two games Otherwise, everything's going to change for you.
00:22:18.000You don't want to have that experience.
00:22:19.000I wonder what it is you say to people.
00:22:22.000The way that in their style of play, it literally looked like they were trying harder.
00:22:25.000I know there's that joke that we say pressing is trying harder, but they were chasing everything down in a way that Leeds haven't done maybe all season.
00:22:33.000So if that's one of the results that Allardyce has had, then I don't know.
00:22:57.000No, I haven't been to social events and the neighbor I worry about every time I drive back to my- In case he hears this.
00:23:04.000Well, no, I worry about bumping into him because I think that, I think now as a result of telling you this story that maybe he's feeling awkward about this as well.
00:23:13.000Cause it was a bit of a, it was a strange night.
00:23:16.000Why don't you go round there tonight and secretly record yourself making sexual remarks in his presence and then we'll play it on the show.
00:23:26.000Like you're just round there going, I enjoyed that barbecue, you know I've charred my chops, you know I've smoked my bacon, or the tip of my sausage.
00:24:37.000That's the universe telling you you should have manned up and played, sorry to use that phrase these days, but you should have personed up and played football.
00:28:06.000It's actually not about the individuals.
00:28:07.000It's not even actually about the team.
00:28:09.000It's about, it's impossible to extract it from the fact that there is, it's currently the most obvious example of how outside factors are influencing the game.
00:28:25.000And But when people sort of make arguments about Nottingham Forest being it, I think that's when it's right.
00:28:30.000Because Nottingham Forest, that's the ingenuity of individuals and the cohesion of a team, yeah, Clough and Taylor.
00:28:37.000And then, like, and now it feels like we are sort of moving towards, like, whilst it's always appalled me that in American sport franchises like the LA Raiders have come from somewhere else and they've gone somewhere, like, they'll just move about.
00:28:50.000They've just took their football team and put it somewhere else.
00:28:53.000I like but like now you sort of in a way have that like the fans are in a sense set dressing for an Abu Dhabi enterprise like you could as we learned during Covid that you can extract the fans from the experience albeit it does massively diminish the entire spectacle it does hollow it out it is weird to hear the ringing shouts of players talking to one another And the expletives.
00:29:18.000It is difficult to be denied things like this.
00:30:03.000That's what's beautiful about it, it's one of the things that's beautiful and also I don't feel like what's underlying that is, yeah, let's destroy this guy and hurt him.
00:30:16.000And the amazing thing about that, just to kind of come full circle, is when you have these modern grounds where you can't get anywhere near the bloody pitch anymore, you don't have situations like that.
00:30:25.000I just want to see this thing of Declan Rice, West Ham captain, presumed to leave at the end of this season, being so beautiful to a child that I shuddered and quivered and nearly wept.
00:30:40.000Like someone who's in love with Declan Rice, Mike.
00:32:16.000I want to see Roy Hodgson talking more, really, but here is Roy Hodgson failing to control the ball, much in the manner that I might at a five-a-side game that I'm participating in this very evening.
00:33:20.000Right, there's somehow not the kind of fanfare that someone like Mourinho... And maybe that's to do with his style and his demeanour and manner.
00:33:30.000Rather than his style of play, his demeanour as a manager.
00:33:33.000What type of style is attributed to Ancelotti as a footballer?
00:33:37.000I don't think as a football, but as a manager, he's calmness personified, isn't he?
00:33:42.000And I guess maybe the headlines go more towards your Mourinho's and your Ferguson's and Guardiola's, but actually what he's achieved, he's got to be up there.
00:33:56.000I think they'd been taken over, a lot of money put into the club, they spent a lot on wages and I guess he was kind of between clubs or between managing Real Madrid and they managed to persuade him to do it.
00:34:15.000Leicester look like they'll go down now.
00:34:18.000Leicester can only get 36 points I think.
00:34:20.000The way that Leicester are playing, I saw some of the game against Liverpool.
00:34:24.000They started well the other day and then Liverpool just kind of blew them away and they just, I don't know, it doesn't feel good at Leicester at all.
00:36:54.000Yelling Susanna and grabbing your balls and doing the horn.
00:36:58.000Rebecca Broome, I have to wear exactly the same thing I wore last time my team won.
00:37:01.000I sit in the same place, I eat the same food.
00:37:04.000It was one time long ago when I still smoked that my family wouldn't let me back in the house because the Packers scored when I went outside to smoke.