You Can't Hack Football

On the danger of forgetting who you are.

Danny Blanchflower, 1963.

I had a particularly negative reaction to Spurs CEO Vinai Venkatesham’s recent message from the Board. A more positive reaction wouldn’t have been unreasonable, at least because the message was something rather than nothing after many years of uncommunicative boards. And as corporate pablum goes, the message was far from the worst of that genre.

What bothered me about it was less in its particulars than in its generality, a definitive trait of manicured corporate communication. What Venkatesham’s letter said to me was, essentially, ‘I know you’re frustrated with the state of the football, but don’t worry, we’re doing Best Practices here.’

The problem with that is I’m not sure corporate best practices are always aligned with football best practices, and I mean that well in excess of conventional tradeoffs between profit motive and footballing excellence, a stale conversation among Spurs fans in particular and sports fans at large. In this case, the corporate best practice I’m referring to is fast becoming a football best practice, and we’re seeing it not only in the leadership strategies of ‘moneyball’ clubs like Brentford and Brighton, but also, in different guises, at massive clubs like Manchester United. The best way to sum up the thing I’m trying to put a finger on here is the idea that you can ‘hack’ football, which is a version of the idea that you can ‘optimize’ an organization.

Fuck ‘Optimization’

If you’ll permit me a minor detour for a moment: I’ve always been a skeptic of the idea of ‘optimization’ in corporate culture. In its most innocent form it’s a platitude; it simply means ‘given your constraints, do the best you can.’ But in its more insidious form—which is also its most common form—’optimization’ is a kind of deception.

More often than not, ‘I can optimize this’ is a promise to transcend one’s hard constraints, to make possible the impossible. Discerning persons will recognize this is, well, not possible. It’s nonsense. The whole thing rests on sleight of hand. Look over there while I ‘restructure’ (eliminate) the Customer Service division, now look over here at the chatbot application I built for customer service. Does that chatbot perform what the Customer Service division did? Of course not, barely a fraction of it. But the chatbot’s line item is called the same thing (‘Customer Service’) and it costs 95% less. Optimization! The trick is to convince people that you’ve actually transcended a hard constraint (such as labor costs)—you’ve done the impossible—when what you’ve really done is hidden an opportunity cost by moving shit around.

Football’s version of ‘optimization’ is ‘do more with less.’

Like corporate optimization, it’s a form of deception, no matter which way you slice it. At Brentford and Brighton, it’s pouring analytics resources into recruitment, but the tradeoff is every year fans have to suffer the loss of their best players up the food chain, in essence supporting feeder operations for bigger clubs that will never, under that model, become the bigger clubs themselves. At Manchester United, it’s eliminating workers’ canteen privileges and leveraging the club’s historic and global commercial brand to manage PSR constraints, but also—opposite Brighton and Brentford—to sink all of that massive PSR overhead into expensive recruitment mistakes.

In either case, you can’t escape tradeoffs. Performances and outcomes against resources can always be a little better or a little worse based on hundreds of different factors, but ‘optimization’ itself is neither a coherent nor realistic instrument with which a football club can advance itself in the game of football. Whether statistically or verbally, it’s all rhetoric, all misdirection, all tradeoffs dressed up as intelligent leadership.

My concern with what’s happening at Spurs right now—indeed, with what’s been happening—is foremost that we have an overbalance of corporate-thinking people in club leadership, thus an underbalance of football-thinking people. Interestingly, I think Thomas Frank is really a combination of the two. Of course he’s football-thinking, but his idea of football is extremely ‘corporate’ in this sense: he believes in ‘optimization.’ He believes you can violate the second law of thermodynamics. He believes you can ‘hack’ football.

By stark contrast—for purely illustrative purposes!—his predecessor at Spurs was always clear-sighted and open about tradeoffs. ‘It’s just who we are, mate’ wasn’t only about identity and bravado. It was also, fundamentally, about understanding and accepting the reality of tradeoffs, that you can’t ‘fix the defence first and then work on the attack,’ that you can’t hack the game. I suspect this is one of the reasons our players appear to have loved playing for Postecoglou, even when things weren’t going well. As the primary practitioners of football, they understand better than anyone that you can’t be two places at once on the football pitch, you can only choose your tradeoffs and move forward from there.

Let me come now to the point of this discussion.

One of the tradeoffs that a corporate ‘optimizer’ approach to the game is poorly positioned to see is that whereas certain business decisions can be corrected, as can many football decisions, in the end you can’t rewire the psyches of the players.

In other words, if you start thinking about human footballers as assets, fungible tokens, or bundles of metrics, one thing you’re blinding yourself to is that they are also significant and complex agents in this whole network of club performance. They can’t be manipulated in straightforward or linear ways like other things in business, in part because they are highly non-fungible, in the sense that it’s a lot easier to find another office manager than it is to find another Micky van de Ven. You have before you a group of elite athletes who’ve gotten to where they are by learning and adapting to a concatenation of intense pressures. The group of players before us—like all such groups of top-flight players—are not necessarily all the strongest, or the fastest, or the most technically gifted (though many of them are also that); most importantly, they’re the ones among countless others who have the physical and technical gifts to play the game at the highest level who also possess the cognitive and psychological gifts to excel in elite sport.

Let me be blunt: Elite footballers want to play elite football. They do not want to be set up with the mentality that their opponents are superior and the best thing to do is sit back and let their opponents dictate the run of play, and then react to that. Cuti Romero won the World Cup with Messi, who calls him the world’s best center back. Xavi Simons came through La Masia and PSG. Mathys Tel was a prodigy at Bayern Munich. Randal Kolo Muani is a French international who’s gotten regular minutes in probably the most talented pool of attacking players on the planet. Whatever you think of their level right now at Spurs, they think it’s better than this, and they’re probably right.

When Spurs’ executive leadership make decisions—like the decision to appoint Thomas Frank—based on ‘optimization’ and the fantasy of ‘hacking’ football—the one big factor they’re failing to account for is that we have a roster of players who will absolutely see themselves as ready to play elite football, and with good reason: many of them already know what that’s like because they’ve done it before.

We are in dangerous territory now.

As a fan, I don’t think of our players as assets, but as components of building a successful football team. I think if we want Spurs to become a successful football team again—winning Europa was what success looks like; finishing regularly in the top 4 and challenging for the title under Poch was what success looks like—then we’re going to need to hold onto our very best players, many of whom are prime age. That point stands even if you only view them as assets.

Romero, van de Ven, Kulusevski, Udogie, Spence, Porro, Simons, Kolo Muani, and now Gallagher are top-end players with options, regardless of their contracts (unhappy players locked in contracts is not healthy for a football club or its performance on the pitch). They can all slot into any number of Champions League teams. Some of them have already had attention from the likes of Real Madrid, Barcelona, and Manchester City. Others, like Vuskovic, Gray, Bergvall, Sarr, Odobert, and Tel are not yet prime-age, but promising and increasingly experienced young talent in whom we’ve invested and whom we should want to nurture.

Again, people can quibble with how good I think these groups of players are, but most of them are coming from elite footballing backgrounds and have already proven themselves in elite club and international competition. The fact that they haven’t looked good this season under Frank—particularly that our attacking players have been systematically starved of opportunity—is, in my view, not surprising, and not a basis for negative judgment against them.

We’ve all watched many of these players show frustration this season, in some cases uncharacteristically. Micky van de Ven, for example, is not shy of a battle, but also not usually one to lash out like he has so often lately. Even Romero, despite his reputation, had settled in to a composed figure, with minimal cards, in the seasons prior to this one. The frustration on the faces of Spence and Tel every week, for example, has been concerning, as has the mis-usage of Tel, a player who pointedly came to Spurs from Bayern in search of more game time, and who’s seen his minutes stagnate even as he’s scored goals for us lately in his limited appearances.

I call this a dangerous situation because I fear that, results and performances aside for a moment, the club’s ‘more with less’ mentality, epitomized in the appointment of Frank and manifested in the unambitious football we’re playing, has begun to alienate our players. We speak often of the club’s relationship to the fans, of fan alienation from the club, but not enough about the perils of player alienation. I don’t say this out of concern for the players themselves (though I do care about them as human beings too, even as I understand they’re paid millions in part to figure out a way to show up to work and put their best foot forward even when they’re not feeling it), rather out of concern for the club and our prospects for success if we’re giving our best and most promising players incentives to start looking elsewhere to move their careers forward.

For this reason, I think, it’s imperative that we—as fans, and I hope as a club—can get behind our players right now and take the rest of this season to show them that Tottenham is their home, that this is the best club for them to achieve their footballing dreams. It’s hard to see it that way right now, I know, but we have to get ourselves there or we’re going to regret it.

In practice (a bit of burying the lede here), this means parting ways with Thomas Frank as soon as possible and bringing in someone—literally anyone, for now—with the directive to let this group of players play football: build-up, possession, control, attack. Let this group of players walk onto the pitch like the titans they are, rather than as pieces on a magnetic tactics board, an extension of some football ‘optimization’ scheme in which they’re not allowed to take the game to their opponents.

And for us, as fans, it means vocalizing our support for the players despite our frustrations, if we can manage it. I’m encouraged to have seen this already among our match-going fans and hope it continues. If there’s one thing this divided and beleaguered fanbase can unify behind, surely it’s remembering who we are.