The Jose Mourinho box office & a one-man war on factually incorrect football anecdotes

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I'm sorry, you can sit there and look and play with all your silly machines as much as you like.

Is Gascoyne going to have a crack? He is, you know. Oh, I think

brilliant.

But geez! He's round the goalkeeper. He's done it!

Absolutely incredible! He launched himself six feet into the crowd and Kung Fu kicked a supporter who was eyewit without a shadow of a doubt getting him

Amazon Prime just about pulling off the equating of the formation of the Champions League with the moon landings, a potential world record for the hypothetical number of league points a good goalkeeper is worth to a team.

Jose Mourinho's last remaining elite quality is brought into question.

Typically tuneless American deployments of self-deprecating football chants, the definitive body of cross-referencing research into footballers' initializations and UK postcodes, and the one-man operation to shut down factually inaccurate footballer anecdotes.

Brought to your ears by Goal Hanger Podcasts. This is Football Clichés.

Hello everyone and welcome to Football Cliches. I'm Adam Hurry.
This is the midweek adjudication panel. Joining me is Charlie Eccleshare.
How are you doing? I'm all right.

Yeah, although I'm a little bit rattled from a, yeah, like I struggled to get too on board with your irritation about the BBC chain, a match of the day change of music, but I was very annoyed by a match of the day tweak.

And I don't know if this has been there all season, but I was watching...

I quite like on the Sunday version, they just rattle through all the goals from the weekend, which, you know, sign of dwindling attention spans, et cetera, I find quite useful for games I might not want to sit through highlights and analysis for.

And they did it all with crap angles, crap camera angles, like when Premier League years started doing that in the 2000s. And so you get no real sense of what these goals are like.

They're all done from sort of arty,

whatever angles. And who's that for? Who wants that? It really annoys me.
Let's bring in David Walker here with

a broadcasting sensible head on his shoulders. Dave, I think I can understand the rationale here.
It's probably that they think everybody's seen these goals already.

Let's show them them again in a kind of arty, alternative kind of way, in the way that Premier League years would have done.

Yeah, I do share Charlie's annoyance with that, because I think if I was watching that programme, I would want to see them all in a standard way.

I mean, though, the BBC themselves are putting highlights on the iPlayer now, aren't they? Like at, I don't know, seven o'clock or something after all the games have finished.

So maybe, yeah, maybe they think our people will have already watched them. I don't know.
But I think it's an unnecessary thing to do. I don't understand why you would mess with that.

And on the subject of match of the day, I'll chuck one into the mix.

You know, they had their goal of the month for August. I thought, again, I don't know if this is something that has been done for a number of years now, but it stood out to me.

Before they played the first goal, they showed the celebrations, like a quick montage of all the celebrations of all the goals that were to come, which I just thought was a bit of a weird way round of doing it.

Well, you prefer the suspense of not knowing.

God, yeah. Did they celebrate? Did they not?

I just thought it was a bit unnecessary, but yeah. Unnecessary little tweaks.
This is what's happening. The match of the day we all love and new is disappearing before our eyes, week after week.

This came from Craig MacDonald, by the way. Here is some accidental Andy Gray from David Walker on the pod the other day.
There we go. A practitioner of the dark arts.
Yeah.

And just to crown those dark arts off, Dave, David Smith actually secured secured himself a move to Aberdeen in the transfer window. Did he? Yeah.

The delivery is perfect. It sounds Scottish.
It wasn't intentional.

Did he? Just slipped out. It's so perfect.
It's both the delivery and just the sort of thing he would say. It's so spot on.
Doesn't even deserve a diddy either, really, did it? Yeah.

Yeah, quite a mundane development. Yeah, just great.
Amazing that. As we've all discovered, Andy Gray is such a hard person to impersonate.

And then, Dave, you've sort of stumbled across it unwittingly there. Love it.
Love that it's creeping into our collective consciousness. Speaking of Keys and Gray,

after the Peloton story the other day, Charlie, Mason Brick got in touch and said, there's a Richard J. Keys who has three workouts logged on Peloton in 2020.
Couldn't be, could it?

A lockdown Keysy getting on it. Yeah, that feels very possible.
And that, yeah, the timing works, the number he do before

packing it in. I imagine he's got a gym in his complex that he will use.
But yeah, could have shipped in a Peloton in the depths of lockdown for sure.

He's doing something anyway. I think he's looking a little bit trim.
He's trim at the moment, Keesy, by the way.

Big news, the paperback version of Extra Time Beckons Penalties Loom: How to Use and Abuse the Language of Football is out today.

I've got a pile of them by my feet, and I'm going to find a way to get rid of them, actually. I'll give them out of the quiz.

But if you are interested in a bendier, smaller version of Extra Time Beck and Penalties Loom, you can get it on Amazon and everywhere else.

But if only you had an upcoming eight-date tour of the UK, of which you could sell books and other merchandise. Is it the dumb thing to sell your own books?

It feels like a cell boy out the back of a van. I think so.
All right. Haven't we done it before anyway?

Yeah, but of course, Adam, you are the man who turned up to your own book launch show last year, seemingly without any knowledge that you were going to be selling your own books.

I'm just not commercially minded.

I don't want to sell out. Speaking of which, Key Jason is going live in 2025.
We're in Brighton, Cardiff, which I think might well be sold out. There might be just a couple of tickets left for that.

Hack me Empire in London. Old Rep in Birmingham.
Put your fingers out, Birmingham. Dublin, Manchester.
Leeds and Glasgow sold out, so you can't join us there.

On Brighton, Dave, James Roach says, I'm putting in a vote for the Earth and Stars pub after the Brighton show.

Wife, who's coming to the show and bought me a Dreamland subscription, grew up with the landlord just round the corner from the comedia. She knows the pub.
That's good. Brighton's a really tricky one.

That's the third recommendation of a pub within a couple of minutes of the venue.

There's so many round there, and it seems everyone's got their favourite, so we might have to just work it out on the night.

Although I do think we should perhaps publish the official list of after-show pubs. It's sort of like the football cliché's fringe.

I mean, we make a thing out of the post-show points, Charlie, but yeah, maybe we should formalise just how fucking great they are and and and make it even more of a thing.

Yeah, I don't think it's necessarily standard at post-podcast live shows.

So should be should be anyway go to tickets.football clichés.com and join us for the most pedantic footballing night of your life. Right adjudication panel time.
Champions League is back.

I don't want to sift through the chaos of Tuesday night's action, but this came from Jimmy B94 who directed me towards Amazon Prime's Champions League promo video.

I've got three parts of it to play you.

Here's the first clip, which is

the real setting of the scene of this. And it just turns out you really can just use any words for this sort of thing, can't you?

What began as an idea

became history's greatest state.

70 years.

A dream that carried the promise of change.

In a restless world that found its voice. There will be no contest.
It won't! Nothing at all!

This was a win for Great Britain. One for fifth for man.

Right going in! One by a week for man. I act for the third year.
A world turning louder. I am good for this.
I wrote the book, I see that. What are you on about? Fuck you.
Oh my god.

Just a sweep of modern, recent, modern history, things that are totally incidental and irrelevant to the Champions League. The Beatles chucked in there.
Yeah. The moon landing.

Also, like, is that not a bit of a misreading of the mood around the Champions League now? I feel like people are pretty, you know, the Champions League is like this corporate monster.

It's a money-making thing. It's flogging players.
It's got these extra games. Like, fuck off that it's this like noble.

Sorry, that that really

annoys me. It's just like, who, it's just such a misreading, I think, of the mood.
Like, yeah, we like the Champions League. It's a good football competition.

The idea that it's this some sort of noble pursuit is just nonsense. Yeah, all right, Henry Winter.

Not content with mugging off FIFA in the summer. You've now got your wafer in your crosshairs.

He's just pure grassroots, isn't he? Don't go to Switzerland anytime soon. Yeah.
You won't see me in neon.

Here is the second clip.

This is a lovely little combination of news event and Champions League moment here. Move over, Georgie Thompson.
Defiance found its moment. Water has been found on Mars.

Oh, my God.

When you take it in isolation, Charlie, it just feels really silly. The moon landings, yeah.
Water has been found on Mars.

At least Primitive Gears didn't intersperse them. You know, there was a degree of separation.

It's over an image of Drogbert heading the ball in against Munich in the final.

It still doesn't quite beat the news event on Premier League Years where they said, and Viagra became commercially available.

But that's what I was thinking, but you didn't have a kind of hard CERN and Viagra. Like at least they were split up.

Just if you thought they couldn't squeeze any more artificial gravitas out of the Champions League, here is the sign-off for this video.

Time passes, but through it all,

the same silver prize remains, waiting to be won again.

The silver prize. That was a bit Lord of the Rings, that one.
Yeah, it was, yeah. Very Lord of the Rings.

I wondered if there was some sort of cultural reference that I was missing here for the inspiration for this, but it incredibly overwrought.

But as I said at the top, Charlie, you... There's no kind of upper limit for this sort of thing

that will end up raising

anybody's eyebrows other than ours. Like, you can just get away with this sort of stuff.
Like, you say what you like.

Yeah, it does feel they're very like broadcasters have been quite new to an event and sort of

and I'm sure having you know a load of money and wanting to sort of you know really celebrate and puff up this competition in a way that you know for most people it's Champions League's just a kind of regular thing, but it's not a whatever this is supposed to be.

Yeah, and the thing is off the back of that a presenter presumably would have welcomed everybody to the Phillips Stadium for the coverage of PSV Against Union Saint-Gilois. Cracking game, it was too.

Right, next up, this came from Dave O'Leary. Here is football montage constructions in BBC Proms promos.

Keep enjoying the 2025 prom season for just a little bit longer with BBC Sounds.

What an extraordinary opening. Well, what a piece that is.
Well, everyone's on their feet.

It's good to know, Charlie, that pretty much any form of entertainment can summon the Van Percy drug bar!

He's done it!

I just love overlaid pieces of commentary, but I think it's really effective, and in this case, it's worked very well as well. Not the first time that classical music has strayed into our art sites.

Football and classical music go hand in hand. Next, this came from Purple Bobbin Toaster.

The pseudo-scientific hypothetical goalkeeping quantification continues, and there's some hyperinflation going on.

Here's Nikki Butt on the highly necessary new football podcast, the good the bad and the football

a good goalkeeper saves you 15 20 points a season yeah

20 points now that's ludicrous

i want lev i want two lev yashins for that that is a lot also just the title of this episode the good the bad and the football i'm sure that must have been used on one of those like blooper videos when everyone was doing it around the turn of the century and has has the football podcast sort of become that now now that's a really good theory that everyone needs one and i'm sure and i'm sure even paddy mcguinis would have had one of those videos himself yeah i think that i think this is fair to say that the football podcasts have now filled the exact same space that football dvds did in the 2000s dave and sort of vhs tapes in the 90s i think i think there feels it does feel like there's the exact same amount of space for uh for them to fit into and we might hit the same saturation point hope not hope not yeah i mean i guess you could sit your kids down in front of an episode of the good the bad and the football or The Rest is Football, or Stick to Football, or whatever it might be, kill a few hours in the summer holidays.

But nice little parallel with the example from the other day, Charlie, where Theo Walcott was the one to offer up the yeah to confirm Danny Murphy's quantification of the importance of a goalkeeper.

The yeah you heard in that clip there was from Paddy McGuinness himself, the host.

And he's the former soccer aid glovesman, so he knows a thing or two about the importance of being between the sticks. Yeah, how many of those does he want for his team? Yeah, fair play to him.

The big news unraveling unraveling in european football dave is that jose mourinho is on his way back to benfica

um neil mccoll says mourinho to benfica is this the archetype of unfinished business i mean the only theory i have here dave is that the unfinished business is so long ago and was so fleeting that i don't know if this can count but he is going back home so there is that element to it it was like a really really short spell wasn't it at the first nine

start of his career here nine games

i mean he didn't even he didn't even start any business to finish it he even came in to replace someone who'd been sacked at the start of the season and then got s you know left under a cloud charlie in that december but i i suppose those elements to it make the business rather unfinished as well he was kind of forced out of the job he didn't just sort of just you know leave gently yeah i think so and like he will he may well see it in that way like he's one to hold grudges so he'll always have felt that he was hounded out unfairly is it unfinished business i suppose it's specifically benfica do we have any knowledge as to whether mourinho has an allegiance to a particular Portuguese club?

Obviously, Porto is obviously his big club. I think he's playing such a bell.

Yeah,

I think so. But

it seems to me that it's kind of all right to represent all the big three in Portugal in the same way that it's increasingly okay to play for all the three big Istanbul clubs and nobody bat an eyelid.

I mean, I mean, there was talk of Amarim maybe going, sort of ending his Manchester United misery and quietly going off to become Ben Fica manager. I think, well, is that all right then, is it?

Just being the other Lisbon club's manager?

I don't know. It's strange how some cities tolerate this sort of thing than others.

But, Charlie, I mean, as someone who's basically given up on the Mourinho legacy and think that's it, that's we're done with Mourinho now. Nothing else is going to happen.

He's not going to contribute to the development of football anymore.

I'm quite glad that he's delayed his descent into comedy/slash irrelevant management in Saudi or whatever and gone to Benfica because it just keeps the dream alive for the Mourinho heads.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, he rides again. I mean, there'll be the, you know, I'm sure the usual suspects will be out there to, you know, speak to him at his first press conference, the so-called special one.

Will they ask him in Portuguese? They'll try to do it. Will Cotterell be there?

You'd have thought so. Yes.
Good trip thing. He's still box office, 21 years old.
That's what I was about to address. Try telling these fans that he's not relevant.
Is he actually still box office?

Because that's the one thing Mourinho is still clinging on to. Is he still box office, Dave? I don't think he is.

Well, define box office.

If enough people say it, then I mean,

that's all it is now.

It's just lots of people unthinkingly saying it and not being challenged because it's just always, like, forever, it's just been, well, whether you like him or not, what you can't deny is that he's box office.

And if you keep saying that, I guess people can't deny it. We're talking about it.
You can't deny it. He's box office.
Well, yeah,

annoyingly, that is true.

But if you had to define box office in this context, Dave, I would would say, if Mourinho said something either in a kind of clip on Sky Sports News or a press conference, are you sitting up and listening?

Are you going out of your way to listen to it? And the answer these days is no.

Because you know it's either going to be bitterness

or, you know, a quite obvious attempt to get a soundbite in. Did he do something recently on like the pitch when he was in Turkey?

A sort of, you know, less impactful version of when he put his finger in Tito Villanova's ear. Oh, yeah, he's yeah, he tweaked somebody's nose, didn't he? Yeah.

So even that stuff isn't really landing anymore, is it? Exactly.

It feels old hat. It feels like he, yeah, I don't know.
He's like De Niro, isn't he? He's like De Niro in the Mid the Family Eight.

Right.

Footballer's Names in Things. This is good.
This is good, I promise. It came from Neil Electricity.
And he says, I wonder if this counts as a footballer's names in things.

It's from the WWE podcast, Guerrilla Position. So they're butting heads, basically, Jay and L.A.
Knight.

And at the end of the show, after it, because it was was LA Knight versus Bronson Reed, one-on-one, and then obviously Shanann's begin, and it ends up with

Jay spearing or Jay

spearing LA Knight.

Are these the purest form of footballers' names in things, Dave? Or do you prefer actual names of semi-obscure footballers popping up in incongruous contexts?

Or do you just like names just happening accidentally in a bit of a sentence? I think I do like a bit of both.

The actual names in things, there's a it's harder to get that right. Higher bar.
Yeah, there's a higher bar for sure.

I was actually sent one recently by a guy on Instagram, and it was a really, really good setup. Like really long, it was building to it.
They kept talking about a person without naming them.

And then the person turned out to be Kyle Walker. And it just, it had all the ingredients, but it just needed a slightly more exotic name than Kyle Walker.
This is spot on.

I was trying to think of the example of the one that I've been sent loads recently, Charlie, and it was the Kyle Walker one. I can't remember where it was from.

And I just think, and I don't know why it doesn't meet the bar, but I just think I just discard it. And I'd love to know what my selection criteria are, but I don't know.

Is that too

recent? Do you want a degree of

something distinctive and ideally one you haven't thought about for a little while? If the build-up led to it being Sun G high,

then you know, just some, just something.

Yeah. yeah, I mean, I hesitate to say it, Dave, but it's basically any Barclaysman is always going to be a good candidate for this.
But yeah, there has to be just the right level of obscurity.

But I don't know, but I don't want to overthink this. It's footballers' names and things.
Let's not dwell on it.

Next, this came from Joe Tyler. He says, I enjoyed this Route One footie bance from Stevenage manager Alex Ravel when greeting new signing Lewis Orford.
How are you, son?

Good.

How are you?

What's it? Where are your best club up?

Huh? I'm good. Yeah, I'm good.
Yeah. I thought we might have had a bit of a nicer car than that.

All good?

This is great, Charlie.

So, in the space of about six seconds, he's had a go at his clobber and his motor, which is like it's so good to see that down in League One, yeah, they might be passing out from the back, they probably wear GPS vests, they probably do cooldowns and pre-activations, but some things just ain't broke and they don't need fixing.

Clobber and motor. Also, just so many of the things Dave pointed out: that you good? You You okay? Just like every there's so many you goods there as he enters.
But yeah, that's incredible.

That reminds me, Dave, Chris Wilder, of course, is now back at Sheffield United, and they posted a video of him greeting the squad on his first day back. And it's it's really mundane content.

It is literally just him saying hello to about 35 people. But the sound, just the constant repeated sound of him slapping hands with players is so life-affirming.

Like, it's like, I wanna, I wanna slap hands with Chris Wilder. Get me in there.
I know. No one ever shakes hands in the traditional way in football anymore.

It's just constantly just slapping each other's hands. Proper handshake takes longer.
It's inefficient.

I mean, these guys are obviously pros at it, and they get the execution right, but you do need to, you do need to, there is potential for it to go wrong. Yeah.

And you don't want to be too emphatic, Charlie, as well. Because

looking like you're congratulating you, it's got to be a greeting-style hand slap as well. So it's got to be perfunctory.
Yeah, very subtle differences. Chris Wilder doing it again.

It's a bit mad, isn't it? I mean, obviously he has to sort of say hello to everyone, but it's not like he's a long-lost old friend. He was, how many weeks ago was he last there?

Oh, it's a new look squad, I can tell you that. So there's a lot of players to say hello to, but yeah, some old faces as well that he gave extra energy.

Anyway, this episode is brought to you in association with NordVPN. For those who don't know, VPN stands for virtual private network.

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Indeed, over to the USA we go for some football chants in college American football. This came from my flat on Reddit.

It's from the home of the Virginia Tech Hokies, who are 0-3 so far this season, and the fans are getting restless.

Dave,

if I hadn't heard this clip and you'd teed it up, that is the exact amount of limp adherence to the actual tune of the chant that I would have expected. Like, four out of ten.

It's like really bad drunk group karaoke, where almost everyone's badly out of tune, not singing the right melody.

There's one guy in there who's nearly got it,

but it's just a mess. Yeah, Charlie, what percentage of people singing that song do you think actually knew the original sort of soccer tune? Yeah, not that many.

It reminds me, Dave, of like WWE when occasionally you get chanting and it's awful.

It's like that kind of vibe. It's just like, I don't know, there's something so like unthreatening about it.
They like our fan culture. They just want a bit more of it and that's fine.

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Welcome back to Football Clichés. Dreamland episode 8, by the way, is in the pipeline before the end of the month.
But don't be shy. Tell us what you'd like.
in a Dreamland episode.

We can go as narrow or as broad as we need to. So if you want to suggest some topics that you think deserve the Dreamland treatment, get in touch.

Dreamland, for $5.99 a month, you get ad-free listening of all of our episodes. Two episodes a month of Dreamland, our exclusive news show, and various other bits as well.

Go to dreamland.football cliches.com. Just before we recorded, we had a thoroughly entertaining Reddit AMA, Charlie.
Between the three of us.

Lots of questions about the pod, our personal lives, which is always fun. But this one rattled me.
I'm going to admit it rattled me. This came from Mately.

says how good were slash are you at football what sort of level are we talking because i assume you were all a bit rubbish but you speak about it like you could have gone pro i'm i'm annoyed i'm annoyed why do we sound rubbish at football what is it is it is it because we're a bit nerdy about football and therefore you can't possibly be good at football if anything charlie the logic works in the other direction if you know loads about football and you care about it to that extent you have to be good at it well you should be but i but there are maybe it is that assumption that oh you know most people who talk about football you know, most football journalists aren't, you know, never really played.

But, I mean, that's right in some instances, but not in this. Not in this one.
Dave, do you know what?

I hesitate to make any grand claims about my footballing ability, and it's quite easy to overstate how good you are at football. But do you know what? If I was rubbish at football, I'd play into that.

I'd play into it and just say, oh, God, I'm shit.

I've got two left feet.

No, and having seen you play on a number of occasions, you were better than I imagined you to be, I think. Of the three of us, you're definitely the best technically.

You've got a really nice ping on you. Good off both feet.
Charlie, I would say, got the best engine

of the three of us. Lovely.
Really committed player. Versatile.
And I'm somewhere in the middle, I would say. There we go, from the man himself.

Great judge of ability. So nothing I didn't have to say anything.
There you go, mately. Right.

This came from Sonto Obi. Here's the great commentator John Helm, the ultimate world feedsman, doing the World Cup quarterfinal between France and Brazil in 2006.

Maybe it will be cometh the 89th minute. Cometh Ronald Enio.

I don't know where this stands in the big cometh the hour debate, Charlie. I don't know who's proved more right by this.

I'm just like, I never knew that was that guy's name. And I knew as soon as you said the ultimate world feedsman, that's who that was going to be.
Good old John Helm. John Helm.
Yeah, the Helmsman.

Did he score that free kick? No, no, no, no. Finish one now.
Yeah, fair play.

Right, next up, this came from Depth Visible 2425 on Reddit, talking about literal football chants, hyper-literal football chants.

He says the majority of football chants are, as you'd expect, a little far-fetched. The most obvious one is claiming that your club are by far the greatest team the world has ever seen.

Are there any chance that he can be considered more accurate? Us Burnley fans for our sins have coined one lately for Josh Cullen that's close to factual and borderline offensive.

Josh Cullen, he's always in the middle. Josh Cullen, he plays it nice and simple.
Josh Cullen, he never gives the ball away.

I mean, I really like old-fashioned chants like this, Charlie, which just talk about the specific acts that a footballer does. So if you remember, like, Ryan Giggs running down the wing,

there's a real charm to that song. Nothing outlandish.
He's not going to score 100 goals a season. He's just running down the wing.
Yeah, there are. I mean, like LeBoef as well.

He's there, he's there, he's every effing where. So, I mean, that was, you know, just kind of popping up a lot.

I mean, some of them are big, you know, he scores when he wants is obviously quite a big claim about a player. But some of this also is to do with...

They've not come up with this chant specifically because Josh Cullen doesn't give the ball away. That's just a variation on...
This is the Earth, Wind and Fire September

tune, isn't it? I decided not to sing it, but that's all right because I committed and that's the main thing. So presumably it would be like Josh Cullen plays it nice and simple.
Josh Cullen

never gives a ball away.

I used to sing it for

you.

You just need to have the right amount of syllables in your name to fit into the chant and be in midfielder. Yeah, I don't like the name fitting into that at all.

But yeah, in just terms of the sentiments, Dave, it's good to have these mundane things thrown into a song for a player. I think it's cooler than going overboard with it.
Yeah, yeah. I don't mind it.

But there would be players who genuinely don't give the ball away, who just by virtue of not having the requisite amount of syllables in their name won't be able to have this song about them.

Poor Joe Allen would have been perfect. Obviously, some very silly ones in this Reddit thread, but Range is good, Charlie says.

From Arsenal back in 2004, he's bald, he's shit, he plays when no one's fit, Pascal Sega. But it again doesn't scan, so

yeah, how do you fit? He's bald, he's shit, he plays when no one's fit, Pascal Sega, Pascal Sega, Pascal Sega.

Fucking it, why are you always wrong with people? Not being able to make things fit. So running down the wing never gives the ball away.

What other sort of relatively mundane functional things could we have in football chance in this modern era in particular?

PPDA.

More of a collective team thing, though. You need an individual sort of contribution.
I don't know. I mean, talking about what centile they're in for

any given thing. Take-ons.
90th Centile for ball recoveries or successful take-ons. Jules 1.
Yeah, aerial jewels, definitely. Really high jewels one percentage.
Yeah. Headers won.

Yeah, I mean, it would be in ops's interests to kind of popularise their metrics, Dave, by getting them into popular football chance. It might be artificial, but I don't know.

It might be good marketing as well.

Yeah, I mean, that would be the ultimate, wouldn't it? For like, you know, he outscores his XG or something, would be the ultimate endorsement. He outscores his XG, outscores his XG,

it's unsustainable. Yeah, before

would fans think that Kunya and a BOMO, haven't they? Didn't they famously outscore their XG last season? Yeah, they're sporting. Pitch is unsustainable.
Your underlying numbers are shit.

That would be such a good retort. It'd be so good.
More. We're so good.
It's unsustainable.

Really good. Really good.
Right. Now I want to go down a rabbit hole of people taking this podcast and football

or both too seriously. Michael J.A.

has leapt up on a point we made a while ago, Dave, about Cristiano Ronaldo's CR7 nickname, a dreadful, a dreadful thing, but how we thought it might be a UK postcode. Here we go.

Girlfriend went to bed early. You know what that means?

I've made a big old spreadsheet with what I believe to be every active Premier League player whose initialism and number, a la CR7 or R9, is a real UK postcode.

Initial viewing suggests that KT9, Kenny Tete, may be closest to the team's ground. Kingston-upon-Thames to Fulham.

Few shouts for the longest include KA-13 and PH5 down to Arsenal, KW2 to Burnley, or BT25 over to Sunderland. I would check, but I frankly don't want to.
And he's published the whole list, Charlie.

How cool is this? Service, yeah. I mean, is this useful in any way?

No, but I mean, it's still an amazing piece of work. Tajani Rinder's TR4.
That's St. Urm in Cornwall, Dave.
He could so easily become a TR4.

I don't think City fans are particularly prone to this, are they?

I think he could do it himself, though. Yeah.
So

the KA-13 in question there. So that's

Kepa Ariza Bellaga. And the KA-13 KA13 postcode is in kill winning North Ayrshire.

I just want to know if a Premier League player has got my postcode in their name. And the answer is no.
Annoying. That would have been cool.
That would have been a cool thing to claim.

But yeah, Brian Farnett replied to this on Reddit saying, probably best not to show your girlfriend this. She will look at you differently.

Right. Further madness comes from SamePenshon2455 who

we mentioned on a recent clichés pod because they'd done an in-depth statistical analysis of the cliché usage by Premier League managers in press conferences in the 2024-25 season.

You may remember that.

Egged on by the success of listenfairplay.com, he's created the website expectedcliches.com, which

sort of visualizes all the findings he's done. So this is an ongoing real-time statistical analysis of the clichés uses of managers in press conferences in the Premier League in 25-26.

Again, don't know what I'm going to use it for, but fair play. So at the moment, Graham Potter and Reggie LeBrie of Sunderland are leading the way with clichés per 10,000 words.

Eddie Howe, surprisingly, bringing up the rear at Newcastle with less than 0.5 clichés per 10,000 words. And he's had a transfer saga to deal with as well, Charlie.

That's cliché mana from heaven. Yeah, I wonder if some of them aren't picked up.
You know, talking about the football club and that sort of thing.

Probably doesn't make it, but said in the right way, that is very distinct.

Actual statisticians would point out, Dave, that the reason for Eddie Howard's low rate of clichés per 10,000 words is because he's actually said more words than every other manager by an absolute mile.

So the saga's played into it, it hasn't helped him.

Yeah. He's stat padding.

Interesting. Graham Potter has produced 4.32 cliches per 10,000 words.

Yet another, it's another sign that perhaps he's not long for the job there, just desperately trying to reach for anything he can find to make it all better.

Yeah, beleaguered managers produce the most clichés.

It makes a lot of sense. Right, I want to end today's episode with this.

It's TikToker Carell Prince, who is making a name for himself by calling out factual inaccuracies in footballers' anecdotes on podcasts and talk shows. And what a public duty.

Lots of examples that he's gone through, but this is my personal favourite so far.

This is when Harry Redknapp tells a story about Paolo Futre storming out of the West Ham dressing room before a game against Arsenal, leaving them with a team sheet dilemma.

You can't change the team without Mr. Venger's permission.
So in comes Arsenal. Oh, what is this? Tactics?

Arsene Venger said that to you on that day, Harry Rednapp. Yeah, right.

Let's break this down quickly. The match was on the 16th of August 1996.
But but but but what's this? Arsen Wenger joined Arsenal as manager on October the 1st 1996. But the match was 16th of August.

Harry, Harry, how do you have a conversation with a man that's not even in the job? He's not even in the building.

It feels right that Red Knapp is sort of patient zero zero for this because I have to say, I mean, I've done a number of interviews with Red Knapp and others where you get great anecdotes and the crushing realization when you fact check them and you're like, this couldn't have happened.

This doesn't add up. It is really, really disappointing.
So this is hilarious what Corel Prince is doing. And it seems to be rife as well, Dave.

I mean, there are a lot of footballer anecdotes out there.

If you count the number of football podcasts there are, there are 10 times as many footballer anecdotes floating around the ether at the moment. But I don't know.

How do you feel about this Corel Prince operation? Do you think is it fun policing?

Are we sucking the joy out of anecdotes that we, you know, we could have just happily, just blissfully, ignorantly assumed were correct? Or is it is it important work to call this stuff out?

I think it's done with enough good humor that it's fine. It's harmless, isn't it? Footballers sort of, you know, exaggerating or embellishing a story to make it sound a bit better on a podcast.

It's not exactly a big crime, is it? And he's doing it with enough fun for it to be interesting.

What will be interesting is if, as I think has already started to happen, is if anyone does bite back. Ah, well, funny you say that, because he's now embroiled in a row with Carlton Cole.

You had to pick a player for this, about telling a story about Jose Mourinho that very possibly never happened. And it's the tiniest details which makes it funny.
He's got wrong.

So, but this body of work, Charlie, has made me realize that there is a cut-off point between, you know, misremembering sort of minor details and maybe maybe just sort of smoothing a few things out for the purposes of a good anecdote and like Harry Rednapp there just fundamentally and essentially semi-deliberately getting something completely wrong so you can tell a story and I think that's a bigger crime clearly yeah but I would say like in my experience of this my sense from when I've been told anecdotes that aren't true I think and you don't know but I think generally they are misremembering rather than embellishing like I think they've j I think I find it really interesting like I think they have genuine they just like meld things together and we all do it to some extent.

You know, you'll tell a story that fuses a few things. Well, you know, I'd like to think I don't, but like,

but like a lot of the time, people with normal memories,

you know, you'll hear these stories.

And I remember, and I, I may have mentioned this before, but I remember talking to Clive Allen and he was saying that he got in an argument with Keesey because Allen was convinced, convinced, in the when in the FA Cup final that Coventry played against Spurs, Alan was convinced that he'd, I think, scored the equalizer to make it 1-1, when in reality reality it was 1-0.

And Keese, who's obviously a commentary fan, was like, you didn't, Clive. He scored the opener.
And Alan was adamant. He was like, Richard, I know.
I scored the goal.

Don't tell me what happened in that game. And then they looked it up and Keesey was right.
I think they just, there are, you know, and that's not, he's not embellishing. He's just misremembered.

And I think those things just take hold and become truth for them. Like that coal example, which is really funny.
And he points out like numerous mistakes in that. I just, I...

I don't think that's done with malice. I think it's just muddling loads of things up.

Dave, if you put yourself yourself in the football figures' shoes here, it's basically just asking them to remember something that happened on a day of work in their life.

Can you remember every day of work that you've done?

It's true. We obviously just think about football history in a different way.
Yeah.

They lived it and they were thinking in the moment or whatever. Yeah.

You see it a lot. People can't.
I'm always amazed that people can't remember. What do you mean you can't remember that moment when you played that pass in that game? That's really deflated.

They don't think of it as a YouTube existence do they no exactly yeah i like the idea of you know if corel prince uh continues to build his reputation as the footballing tax man but he could be like almost like um you know like a really feared food critic or something and if if he starts turning up at the after-dinner circuit and they go relax correl's out there all right keep it tight tonight no no bullshit

that'll just kill me after dinner circuit all right show's over.

To some extent, Charlie, it's the fault of the formula of the football anecdote. We spoke recently about how there's a certain cadence to a football anecdote.

And they all seem to start with, now we went up there on a Tuesday night. I think we won 4-2.

And you know then that they don't really know.

There's a lack of commitment in the voice that you know is wrong.

And what's funny as well with some of them is you see the presenters and whoever have to kind of go along with it.

And I don't know, like a lot of the time they wouldn't know off the top of their heads whether this was wrong or not. But even if they do, it's a very awkward thing.
You can't.

And I've had that before.

Like, there are ways where, and it's different because obviously if you're just interviewing them privately, but even so, it's always a bit would have been like, yeah, I think that was 95, actually.

Yeah, I'm totally

literally, but yeah, no, no, no, no, totally. Like, yeah, but you just can't help but do it.
I think it was 95, actually. Oh, God.
Like, it's so vivid in my head to the idea of you doing that.

Right, that's it. You should team up, Charlie.
Then he wouldn't need to use soccer bass. He just just got you there to do all the stats.

Tremendous.

Right,

that's about as deep into football as we could possibly go for one episode. Thanks to you, Charlie Eccleshare.
Thank you. Thanks to you, Dave Walker.
Thank you. Thanks to everyone for listening.

We'll be back on Tuesday. See you then.

This podcast is part of the Sports Social Podcast Network.

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