England in the semi-finals and Manchester United’s infamous five – Football Weekly

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Hello and welcome to the Guardian Football Weekly.

Back for good now after our extended summer break and into the Euro semi-finals.

England, Italy on Tuesday and Spain, Germany on Wednesday.

Extraordinary comeback from the Lionesses Lionesses against Sweden.

No one has quite explained what proper English means, but if that's what's helping them get through, then fair enough.

There's some depressing and predictable online racism aimed at Jess Carter to discuss as well.

Germany knocked France out on penalties.

A brilliant game.

Germany surviving with 10 women for the best part of 110 minutes.

They missed a penalty in normal time and a quite brilliant performance from their keeper and Catrin Berger.

Also today we'll discuss Manchester United's Bond squad and Marcus Rashford to Barcelona.

Liverpool lineup Hugo Ekatike with Mbumo and Frank Gon amongst others.

We'll ask if anyone's worried about Brentford.

Philippe wants to talk multi-club ownership, and Wilson's written a book.

Find out what he's inverting this time in part three.

All that, plus your questions.

And that's the Bay's Guardian Football Weekly.

On the panel today, Lucy Ward.

Welcome.

Hi, Max.

Hello, Jonathan Wilson.

Morning, how are you doing?

I'm very well.

And bonjour savvy, Philippe Auclaire.

Bonjour sava, Max.

Savabia.

Let's start in Switzerland, where you are, Lucy.

You're in Geneva.

Since we last did a pod, the semi-finalists have been,

I was going to say, revealed.

It's not really how football works.

It's like a reality show now.

England, Italy, tomorrow.

Spain, Germany.

on Wednesday.

Let's start talking about England's game, shall we get Sweden and the semi-final.

Lucy, look, they were pretty bad.

It's sort of a bit like the France game for quite a lot of it, that they weren't good, but then they did somehow turn it around.

And like I said in the intro, you know, they keep saying proper English as a kind of, have they kind of made up a thing that doesn't exist, but we all now think it exists.

And whatever happens, as long as they win, they say, well, that was a proper English thing to do.

And you go, okay, yeah, maybe it was.

And now I'm, I'm being sort of, my mind is being sort of moved in this way to thinking it's an actual thing.

Yeah, I think what the meaning is, and I think

it is a characteristic of this team that they don't quite know when they're beaten.

So, you know, they've got a little bit of an edge, this England team, and a resilience to them that is not always on show, but it has come at the right time in this tournament.

I think that, you know, we were really poor against France, if you're thinking that far back.

In fact, I did that game, was so excited leading up to it.

And then it's just like, how, what, what is going on?

And then why did we not make any changes at half-time?

You know, the questions that everybody was shouting at the TV.

And the similar to then, obviously, Netherlands were not the same as France.

I think the difference is when we are faced with mobile, dynamic, athletic, particularly central midfielders, I think we really struggle because I don't think that we are that.

I think that we're, you know, we've got a lot of benefits to our team.

And, you know, going forward defensively, we

end up quite resilient, but we've not quite got that match

to what France have and to what Sweden had as well.

You know, that as soon as sort of Blackstennius gets away from defenders, that's it.

And we saw that a couple of times, but they just stick in, they just stay in the game.

And I think she has been a little bit adaptable.

Serena Viegman, you know, she doesn't really like to change.

And you're sort of looking at the clock ticking past 60 minutes and thinking, well, come on.

But we, you know, something needs to happen.

But she did sort of mess a little bit with the back four, changed to a back three, which allowed Bronze to get up.

She scored a goal, changed back to a back four.

I think that tomorrow night she might have to make some changes to that.

I think Leah Williamson, they've sort of made noises about how optimistic she's going to be fit, but you don't do that to your ankle and be able to play a few days later.

So, she is not, I don't think, is going to be able to play to 100%.

So, I could see Niamh Charles coming in.

Esmer Morgan played, you know, all right.

I think she's the future in terms of centre-back, she's got the stature, but yeah, it's it's been interesting when you just think they've quite got it, and then we get a performance like that against Sweden.

Italy again will be a little bit different, but you know, whoever if they do get through to the final and they beat Italy, whoever they play, then you know, we need to be better than we were against France and Sweden.

But, Lucy, how early can we say, get it launched to Aguamang?

Yes, listen, there is different ways of playing, and that, like, sometimes, and she's done it in the past where she's thrown Millie Bright up front.

She's not, she isn't really FA Serena Viegma, which is one of the things I quite like about her.

So, you know, the FA teach everybody to coach the same, so then we produce the same, you know, which is absolutely ridiculous.

But that's another podcast.

but she will she's just not bothered about just

doing that you know let's let's go a little bit more direct they have played a little bit more direct this tournament but yeah adjuman i mean i've been where our commentary position is we're right in front right behind the england families so you see the the sort of you know when they've when they've lost when they've won it's the the dynamics are brilliant but michelle adjumang's family honestly she comes on the pitch just to walk around to have a look and they're waving on that.

Honestly, it's absolutely wonderful.

And that's the human side, which will obviously go on to with Jess Carter, the human side that people don't always think about and don't always see, but it's just beautiful, honestly.

It reminds me when Cambridge played Gateshead in the playoff final at Wembley, I think 2015, to get into League Two.

We were sitting around the families and our sub-right back, I can't remember his name, was a scouter.

And I can't remember our current, who with the right back was on the pitch.

But whenever our current right, the right back who was on the pitch got the ball, they would boo their own right back because they wanted to get them

on.

It was very funny.

Now, the penalties, Wilson, were, I mean, so exciting.

There have been an extraordinary number of missed penalties.

You know, Spain missed one, Germany missed one, you know, Ada Hegeberg missed a couple.

And I don't, I can't, you know, the pressure is something and I don't know really what the question is.

It's just been quite fascinating.

Yeah, I mean, I think, and this is not just to do with penalties, but I think tournaments develop, and it doesn't really make much sense, but tournaments develop their own personalities.

If the first half dozen games of a tournament are really tight and cagey, that seems to sort of spread through everybody else.

If the first six games are really open, that spreads through everybody else.

And for whatever reason, I mean, obviously, the France, so the France-Germany penalties counterman this because 12 of the 14 were scored in that shootout.

But suddenly, people decide, hang on, penalties are really difficult.

And yet, you look back at the Winnipeg Super League last year, only three penalties missed out of 31.

So, you know,

it's not this is consistent, it's something specific in this tournament.

You know, the pressure of the shootout, and you could see players on both teams walking forward, you could see the real terror.

You've seen nonsense online because, oh, you need to move a penalty spot closer to the goal.

But the great thing about penalties is that over, you know, penalties were introduced in 1891.

Penalty spot, although the penalty area has changed size and shape, the penalty spot has always been 12 yards from an eight-yard goal.

And that one and a half times the width of the goal seems to be about perfect.

Because

throughout football history, at every level of a game, from sort of under 12s to whatever,

roughly 75, 77% of penalties are scored.

That whatever lack of power the kicker may have, well, the goalkeeper is also slightly smaller and therefore it balances out.

And you do just get sometimes, you get these shootouts where everybody is terrified.

And you can think back to Barcelona v.

Star in 1986 when it finishes 2-0.

Barcelona doesn't score a single penalty in that shootout in the European Cup final.

You look at Manchester United v.

Sunday in the 2014 League Cup semi-final, which Sunday 1-2-1.

And for some reason, there are times in penalty shootouts when terror descends, and kicking the ball 12 yards into an eight-yard space becomes the hardest thing imaginable.

And I sort of felt watching that game, game, and this is maybe partly this sort of

England had become a little bit like West Germany in the 80s.

They've got this Tonya Manschaft thing that almost doesn't matter whether they play well or not.

They've got something about them.

They scrape their way through.

I think it's dangerous if you sort of begin to rely on that.

And I've been slightly concerned by some of what I've heard in the last two or three days.

There's a sort of, oh, it's all fine.

This is just what we do.

I really hope that's a surface thing.

And behind the scenes, they are addressing the sort of, you know, the fairly obvious problems have been tactically but that capacity to sort of drag your way through games when you don't really deserve it tournaments are often like that and you know if you look at the football played sweden have been much better in this tournament france have been much better in this tournament than either england or germany but england and germany are in the semis and ultimately that in a tournament that is what what matters and i just sort of thought you know one of the things that goes in with that is you get these sort of elements of of narrative that sort of it just makes sense so it seemed to me very obvious at the end of 120 minutes that Hannah Hampton was going to have a key part to play because she's got a wedge of bloody tissue up her nose, and Lucy Bronze is going to have a key part to play because she's got that strapping on her thigh.

And so I was just sort of let Lucy Bronze take it because she's obviously going to score.

And then we just had to wait until the seventh penalty for some reason for that to happen.

But and even the way she took a penalty, it was like, well, she's obviously going to smash it down the middle because that's just the right thing to do in these circumstances.

Yes,

many things to say.

First of all, congratulations to Jonathan for finding the football equivalent of the golden section.

Basically, that's what it is, Jonathan, isn't it?

The relationship between the distance from the goal line to the width of the goal.

So that's football's golden section.

This is the pie number of football.

Can I just stop you?

Can I just stop, Philip, for those listeners, obviously I know exactly what the golden section is, but could you just explain what the goal is, you know, that's football's golden section.

What's golden section's golden section?

Well, I think if you look in architecture, there is a magic number, which is the golden section, which basically gives you a sense of harmony.

Okay.

so we have found a kind of sense of harmony in in in the penalty shootout well so if i can just come in on that so the fibonacci sequence was you know what here we go no but you see this in in in in

nature so how you know you see this in nature all the time in terms of you know how how um the petals on a flower for instance but you find it this pattern of

one plus one is two, one plus two is three, two plus three is five, three plus five is eight, five plus eight is thirteen.

That expand if you look at Premier League winners, it's at the minute it's a perfect Fibonacci sequence.

So, in fact, it's the golden section in the shape of a nautilus shell.

Exactly, that's yeah, yeah, that is exactly it.

So, you're not getting this on the rest is football.

That's all

more or less seriously.

I mean, when it comes to the fear factor in a penalty shootout, I think we've got to give this.

I mean, to be honest, this is not a stat

I found myself.

I think Paul Joyce actually mentioned it quite a long time ago.

But there was this penalty shootout in 1998 in the Derby Under-10 Community Cup

between Michelova Lightning Blue Sox and Chilliston Boys.

The Sox won two one-on-penalties, but they had to take 66 of them to get there.

So

it could be much worse.

And also, I wanted to get back on what Lucy was saying.

One name we haven't mentioned is Kelly, and we also, that the huge impact she has.

And I think many people are wondering: is there a better

crosser of the ball in world football?

Should she be kept as a kind of not-so-secret weapon?

And the other thing is about Aji Mang.

I think there is a tendency to perhaps diminish her value as a player because she's so obviously strong and athletic and fast and all these sort of things.

But actually, quite a few of her finishes show a player who's got genuine skill, who is a proper, I mean, a proper box player, who has got the technique and the skill to actually

make chances.

I mean, put the ball in the back of the net.

You know,

it's like a bit like people saying that Gerd Müller was somebody who it just was there at the right time.

Well, yeah, he put it in the net as well.

And I do think it's a little bit unfair to Ajay Man because it's very often unfair to players who are physically imposing, you know, be they, you know, Olivia Giroux or Romelu Lukaku.

Aisha Man, yes, she's tall, she's incredibly athletic.

I think it's a little bit perhaps too restrictive to talk about her in those terms.

Yeah, but forgive me, my love of the target man/slash target woman.

I mean, it's just a love.

I can't help myself, but loving her, you know, however skillful or not a number nine is.

That's like Hoffman from Germany as well, was my favourite.

Honestly, sorry, Jonathan.

But I mean, it was a classic sort of old school number nine's performance.

And the first two touches which she came on were absolutely terrible.

Like one of them, sort of a ball went backwards 10 yards incredibly quickly.

Her next two touches were amazing.

There was sort of a chest down on a difficult ball that kept them out of the attack, and then the finish, which it would have been really easy to have snatched at that.

Yeah.

Especially when you've just got one back, and this is a chance to equalise, but to very calmly sort of assess that workout where the keeper is side-footed in.

And you often see that with big players, that the bigger the player, the worse the poor touch looks, if that makes sense.

Yeah.

Can we talk about France, France, Germany?

Can we start, Lucy, with

that save from Anne Catherine Berger?

Like, I've watched it so many times.

Like, it's, it is extraordinary.

Like, it's absolutely, I, I, I'm, you know, recency bias and hyperbole try and avoid them, but I was just trying to think, I just, I just thought it was such an amazing feat of athleticism.

And, like, it's every sinew, that is like every single muscle is working to just get there and just

get that ball at the last second.

It's, and she's not particularly tall.

It's not like she's a tall goalkeeper.

I think she's probably a little bit smaller than me.

Which is the height by which all keepers are judged, of course.

It is exactly the height.

On the Lucy Ward scale.

Are you taller or smaller than 5'10?

If you are, then, you know, brilliant.

They need to be taller.

But I think it because when it happened, obviously commentating on it, when it happened,

when the defender got the head on,

I was just thinking, oh, this is not how you're going to lose this.

This is not, honestly, this is not.

And I was watching it.

And obviously, everything about the stretch, athleticism, but the timing of when she'd made the jump, that was a critical bit.

The timing of the jump off the foot was critical because she,

and that is all learned.

And, you know, she's obviously made saves, similar saves than that.

Not obviously, I haven't seen them, but in training and et cetera.

Even when she made the save, I thought that must have gone over the line.

Surely that's gone over the line.

And because France were already celebrating, I could see them celebrating.

But yeah,

absolutely incredible.

But yeah,

you know, it was a really good game to do.

It's probably the best game I've done so far, I have to say.

Yeah, I mean, there was a lot in it, Philippe, wasn't there?

When I mentioned the game, I had a wonderful

from you.

So if you could expand on your uh, please.

Well, uh, I think anybody who's watched the game will have understood.

I think, first of all, there's this uh deflation which comes uh with the realization that

whatever Sisyphus

does,

it'll never work out.

And

we could play Germany for the next three decades, and it's always going to be the same thing.

And then

there's the voodoo, the hex of the final phase of the tournament.

France out, I think, eight out of nine times in the quarterfinals in the last big tournaments.

And the other time was in the semis, and who against was it against?

It was against Germany.

and and you think everything is in francis favor and that is not going to be enough uh hindritched moments of absolute madness playing 10 v 11 v 10 for how long 110 minutes something like that an absolutely gorgeous team goal which is chalked off for

such a

and actually you wonder oh maybe she could have held a run just a little bit more like a fraction of a second and would have been the the goal of the tournament and it would have been no way back for germany and then you think, oh, penalty saved.

That's our day.

No, it's not.

No, it's not.

It's not.

But on the other hand, I was absolutely astonished by the energy levels of that German team.

I was absolutely astonished because very often if you find yourself, you know, 10v11, you know, people always think, oh, that's again in Turbarsa, you know, the 10, you know, defending your 30 yards.

That's not what they did.

That's not what they did.

They did that too.

The blocks were there.

The incredible bravery in the way that they dealt with dangerous situations and an extraordinary performance by their keeper.

But as well, France were not able to do anything in midfield.

Every time a player received the ball in midfield in a half-dangerous situation, there were two or three German players who were immediately closing in.

But when they were closing in, they were not creating space for somebody else to exploit.

And so France looked bereft of ideas.

And

I don't know, Luis, if you saw the comments in the French press, but they have been brutal, absolutely brutal.

And I think to an extent

which is not right.

You have to just acknowledge the fact that this young French team has got a lot of talent in it, but they came across a team that is far better organized than they are, and which technically was far more aware than they were, despite the fact they were missing out so many defenders, despite the fact that if you're a right back for the German team, it means you've finished the game on a stretcher and all these sort of things, and still France couldn't do it.

So, yeah,

it's a

kind of game, definitely.

I think Bonnadaire's got, it looked like he'd found the solution.

I think not including the senior players, you can argue about that, but France will benefit from this and bringing the young players in and the experience they've had in the next tournaments in Nations League later on in the year, the next World Cup.

I think that at the moment it's all, oh, how on earth we lost to Germany again.

But I do think some of these, I mean, the young players in central midfield, brilliant.

I mean, they have been brilliant throughout the tournament.

You know, the centre-backs that he had to play

before he ended up playing his first choice in Umbach and La Cra.

But that will help them in the future.

It's just Germany played better with 10 than they did with 11.

I think there's nothing much more powerful than a player or a team with a cause, something to hold on to.

And whether that was good.

They felt like they unfairly went down to 10.

They felt like the referee was a little bit against them in the first half.

And it just galvanized them.

They just disrupted everything about France.

France was like, right, we've got a plan A.

Let's keep going.

It's not working.

Let's keep going.

They didn't do anything different.

Couldn't find the spare player.

They couldn't stretch the pitch.

But take nothing away from.

I mean, Hoffman was my sort of centre forward.

I mean, she was, I mean, the last sprint that she did, she literally had no zero.

And it's not often as a player that you get to the stage where you've got zero energy and your legs left.

You know, you've always got something if you come off.

She just had nothing left because she was consistently bullying everybody on the park as well.

But yeah, I love that.

But

yeah, Germany, brilliant.

France just could not find the answer.

But I just think it just looked the longer it went on, it was just, this is going to be, this is going to be Germany's day.

We'll cover those semi-finals on Wednesday and Thursday.

Let's talk about Jess Carter.

Susie Rack writing that England have condemned the, what they call, online poison of racist abuse directed at Jess Carter.

Said they'll stop taking a knee before matches because football needs to find another way to tackle racism.

Carter wrote on Instagram, from the start of the tournament, I've experienced a lot of racial abuse.

While I feel every fan is entitled to their opinion on performance and result, I don't agree or think it's okay to target someone's appearance or race.

As a result of this, I'll be taking a step back from social media and leaving it to a team to deal with.

The chief executive of the FA, Mark Bullingham, said, as soon as we were made aware of the racist abuse Jess received, we immediately contacted UK Police.

They're in touch with the relevant social media platform.

We're working with police to ensure those responsible for this hate crime are brought to justice.

It's not surprising, I guess,

Lucy, and I

and I, as producer Joel said, look, if 7.4 million people are watching England's games, you're going to attract some people that don't follow the women's game regularly because sometimes we see the women's game as a different space in terms of lots of things to do with fandom.

Yeah, I mean, you know,

there's not any sort of equivalency, but I get loads of online abuse and none of it is about the colour of my skin.

And that is the whole premise here.

This is like, it must, I mean,

for a start, I don't think that if I was them where I would be looking at social media because obviously it has a massive effect, but my word, the people who write this stuff are absolutely emboldened by

people in the world at the moment, infamous, famous people, who are saying and behaving exactly how they want to behave without any consequences.

And we know, like, freedom of speech is fine, but it's it isn't freedom of consequence.

And we've just got that far over the line at the moment that people accept and shouldn't accept, you know,

this sort of abuse to

players like Carter.

You know, Carter,

you know, you look at it

in the game, she was targeted by Sweden.

She had a little bit of a nightmare, and that's as far as it goes.

You shouldn't even have a go at her the way she plays.

You know, that's but to then go and I can just imagine.

But as a teammate, for me, I put myself in the shoes of her teammate.

I would be incredibly angry and frustrated that I couldn't do anything about it.

And you could tell that from Lucy Bronze's reaction, from they put a statement together, from Woman Moy's reaction.

They desperately want to do something and help hold people accountable.

But at that level,

they feel like they can't do it.

This needs more from above.

You know, how do you hold these people accountable?

So they don't just sit in the little bedroom and

inconsequential people who are having massive effects on people's mental health.

And

we're still here and it's 2025.

It's incredible.

Yeah.

I mean, it's a wider conversation, Philippe, about what social media companies do or don't do.

Well, it's what they don't do.

And I think,

I mean, am I wrong in assuming that most of those comments were on X or yeah, Instagram as well, I think, Philippe.

Instagram on X, yes.

Instagram as well.

Well,

I think that there is a point where if you are the FA, for example,

you have to think of divesting from those platforms because you're helping them survive and live.

And you are part of building the echo chamber in which these people can scream abuse at players.

just players, managers, loads of people.

And you have to think, well, you can divest.

And can it be done?

Yes, it can be done.

You will see that a number of German Bundesliga clubs have now divested from those social media platforms, which are problematic.

Werda Bremen have completely divested.

I think Union, St.

Pauli, quite a few others.

And instead of constantly complaining about what these platforms are not doing, well, go for the platforms themselves.

First of all, don't go there.

Tell your players not to be there.

There's absolutely no obligation for anybody to be on those platforms.

And then,

if you can actually go to them and

put them in front of their responsibilities by attacking them.

And there is absolutely no necessity for anybody to put up with that.

And every time we hear the same comments, every time we say, well, we're going to punish those people, we very well know that those people will not be punished.

They are expressing themselves on a platform where people are basically praising Hitler.

So it's without any any fear of consequence.

So it's not going to happen.

So, you know, you've got to be a bit more proactive about that.

Sorry, Max, that was my

morning.

No, no, no, you rant because it really annoys me.

I know it won't be your last one, I'm sure, today, but I'm

when you look, when you start ranting, I'm always listening, as everyone else is.

All right, that'll do for part one, part two.

We'll begin with Manchester United.

HiPod fans of America, Max here.

Barry's here, too.

Hello.

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Welcome to part two of the Guardian Football Weekly.

Let's talk about Manchester United.

Five players have been completely ostracized from the club.

Marcus Rashford, Anthony, Jaden Sancho, Alejandro Garnacho, and Tyrrell Malasia.

They can only access the training ground when Ruben Amarin and the other players have gone.

I will say, I mean, it's just such a funny image, isn't it?

It's like it's the idea that

are they just waiting around the corner like with their boots holding their boots?

Are they what if there's one man United player who's always the last to leave the training ground?

He has, you know, someone's practicing free kicks for hours and hours and they're all just thinking, can we not come in?

I mean, or is it just, I don't know.

Maybe this is what you do with players that you want to ship on.

It's just a it's another strand to the Manchester United story.

Oh, it just seems...

totally baffling.

I mean, look, if it's a disciplinary thing and you think the player might be disruptive, fair enough.

But surely the way you get the best price for the player is to have them as fit as possible in as good a form as possible.

You make it look like you want to keep them because then

you can say that's going to cost you 50 million and another thing.

Well, no, you need to get rid of it, but we'll give you 30.

You might get nearer 50.

I just don't understand the logic of it.

I sort of get it at Chelsea last season when they had a squad of 840 and they had to reduce that just in terms of pressure on the pitch space.

But

I just don't understand why when you've got a club so dysfunctional, you're actively taking five players out of it.

And, you know,

I asked this question, I did this on Substack last week.

Uh,

I said, who was the last player who actually improved last signing?

And obviously, young players are a bit different, young players will get better just by nature of getting older.

Who was the last signing United made who got better?

I said Bruno Fernandes,

Roy Keene.

Well, unfortunately, you can give a boring and probably correct answer of Bruno Fernandes, but I think

you could also say that he was really good when he arrived and he stayed really good.

And actually, his best period was the first six months after he arrived.

So arguably, he hasn't got better.

I think an answer that you can't really argue with, but is also quite boring, is Diego Delos.

But I mean, he turns up as a worker day fullback.

He's still a workaday fullback, just a slightly older, more mature, better workaday fullback.

But I think you can go back to the week in 2012 when they signed David De Gea

and Ashley Young.

So that's 68 players ago, in which they spent £1.75 billion.

I mean,

I accept

you could say, yeah, Ahmad Jallo is showing signs of possibly, yeah, he could.

You can pick holes in that if you want to.

But the fact that that's even a plausible answer is just is ludicrous.

It's 13 years ago since they last improved the player.

And then you've got examples, you know,

have you seen the

Alvaro Carreras, the left back that Real Madrid had just signed for £50 million from Ben Ficer, or 50 million Euros from Ben Ficer.

He was at United.

And so when United had an injury crisis at left back, their solution to that was not to pick the, I think he was, he might have been 19, 19 or 20-year-old left back they had, who turned out to be brilliant.

They were like, oh no, we'll bring in Sergei Region from Spurs, even though we know he's not really Premier League quality, and we'll send him out on loan to Granada, or then we'll sell him for 6 million to Ben Fica,

and

two years later,

Ben Fica made a 44 million Euro profit on him.

I mean, just the inability to judge players is extraordinary.

Yeah, I mean, in terms of the players on the training ground where they've got to train by themselves, there are some rules the PFA put out that

it used to be that they couldn't train in less than groups of five because that was that broke the PFA rules or some sort of contractual thing.

So you couldn't punish like one player and bring them back in the afternoon, even though managers would want to do that.

But they literally will have the player that says

the whole group will come in at 9 or 10 a.m.

They will come in in the afternoon at a set time.

So that means that there'll be a group of staff that then have to come in at that time to do the training with them.

And it's supposed to piss them off.

It doesn't always work.

And it creates around the training ground, like it's quite quite awkward because all the rest of the staff, you know, that those are part of the bomb squad or

what David Proton used to call them, the mushrooms, you know, you know, in darkness and covered in shit.

So he used to say, I said, what are you doing today?

Proton says, oh, part of the mushrooms.

So, right, okay.

And some players will make

fun of that, but it does make it quite awkward around the place.

And it becomes a badge of honour.

They're like slow horses.

They're like the slow horses.

Maybe they're the guy.

They'll win the league secretly for Manchester Manchester United and

no one will ever know.

Just, you know,

exactly.

Interested in James.

But scoring the winning goal in the Champions League final, but no one knows about it.

What do you make of Rashford to Barcelona, Philippe?

I make it that Dustin Villa very sad.

I make it that it's going to be another example.

I mean, the reverse, the negative of what Jonathan was talking about, because we could probably do a whole team of players, which he got better once they left Manchester United.

Probably would be a pretty decent one.

I was a little bit surprised, I have to say.

I wasn't completely convinced that Barcelona needed a player with the kind of profile of Marcus Rashford.

But thinking back about it, I'm thinking, actually, that might be a really, really clever move.

To be honest, I'm a bit non-pluss by the whole thing.

It has,

I have to say,

if you had, Max, Max, if you think a few years back, not that long ago, if you were told, oh, yes, Marcus Rashford, have you heard he's going on loan to Barcelona from Manchester United?

What?

What are you talking about here?

This is ridiculous.

That's what's happening.

But to be honest, many things are ridiculous in this transfer window, and we'll come to that in a second, I'm sure.

Yeah, they are.

Wilson, what do you make of Mbumo to United?

I think he's a very good player, but it seems a lot of money for somebody who basically has had

one free scoring season

in the top flight.

So I think there's every reason to think he will be a good player.

But

it could be 71 million, including various clauses.

That's a lot of money.

And it just sort of follows this same pattern of United

seemingly overpaying for players who are near the peak of their value.

I mean, he's, what, 25, so three years' time, he'll be right at the peak.

He'd be on the way down in terms of his value.

It just, I can't see how they'll ever make that money back on him.

I think when you get clubs that have such a clearly defined way of doing things, you take any individual element out of that.

You can't quite rely on that working elsewhere.

So, you know, Brentford had last season the second lowest wage bill in the Premier League.

But because they were put together so cleverly and because they had a manager who was so in tune with the squad, because everything that club worked, they had this sort of great holistic quality that everything was pulling in the same direction, so everybody overperforms.

So, you take anybody out of that, there's a massive danger that they don't live up to that.

And I think you've seen that with players leaving Brighton, you've certainly seen it in the past with players leaving Ajax.

So,

I hope it works.

I think he's a good player, and I like him as a player, but I've got doubts.

If you look at Mbombo's numbers, and I know it's not all about numbers, but it's over a period of time, you know, which is a long period of time because he's been with Brentford for a long time.

And up until 2024, it was 45 goals in 184 games, which is not a ridiculous return by all means.

And then he has a season when it's 2038.

And that, which is crazy.

I mean, it's like he has one of absolutely bumper season following Ivan Tony's departure from the club and finding a relationship with Issa because Brentford also worked

has also worked with relationships, Tony and Bermo, Beaumo Issa, and so forth.

And then you break this relationship.

The player is not going to be the same, obviously.

I'm non-plus by the transfer fee as well.

It looks like one of those players.

I mean, he's also very good when he's...

He's not just a goal scorer.

He's also a creator.

He has got a number of assists and so forth.

But he's not a player that will work as...

the probably sole striker that Manchester United fans are hoping for.

The guy who is going to make all the difference, you know, the guy who scores back full of goals.

I don't think he's that.

Lucio, are you worried about Brentford at all?

You know, Mbuma going, Frank,

Wisa might go, Norgard's gone, who's actually quite a key player for them.

Yeah, I think because Jonathan was right,

the relationship between Thomas Frank and the players, and I know the way that they work in the background is

incredible.

You know,

they've got well-researched investments into players, then they make them better, they give them time.

That's for a start, which other clubs don't do.

You know, look at Damsgard, we all knew he was a good player, he didn't settle straight away, and then a few injuries, and then, you know, played well last year.

Then they sell for a profit, it, you know, increases competitiveness, et cetera, et cetera.

But

that relies on someone being the glue.

And at that particular point, it was Thomas Frank.

And I know that Keith Andrews was part of that.

He was part of the set piece, but I'm not sure.

And they may surprise us, as Brentfords do quite a lot of time, is surprise people, but it's not quite as easy.

If you were taking over his group of players, it's a little bit easier, but you're losing these players, and even though you may invest in more,

if this they usually start quite slowly and they did last year, but you just know that they'll come good because of Thomas Frank

and his staff.

I've just got this feeling that

it won't be quite as easy as Brentford think it will be.

And I hope that they prove me wrong.

Can I just add one thing about Brentford, which you might take out?

I'm really struck by the synchronicity

of door guard, Bumeau, Frank Leving, and the fact that Matthew Benham had just sold 25% of Brentford's stake, his stake in Brentford, to

Gary Lubner, the South African millionaire, and to Matthew Vaughan, whom people probably

best know for his films, but also because he's the husband of Claudia Schiffer.

That's for a bit of

glitz.

And he sold

part of the club for £100 million,

which is almost exactly the amount of money he's invested since he bought it.

And I'm thinking, well, if I'm Matthew Bennard, I'm thinking things might get a bit rocky, you know.

Maybe it's time for me to see if I can sometime get my investment back, in which case, you know, well done to you, Matthew.

He's a very clever operator.

I wouldn't put it past him.

And I wish Brentford well, you know, honestly, I don't have any problem with that.

But I thought the synchronicity was quite interesting.

Yeah.

Hey, Wilson, talking about Hugo Ekatiko, Liverpool, 70 million coming in from Frankfurt.

Well, he's very mobile.

I think when he's got space he won into, he's excellent.

I think on the break, he's an excellent forward.

I think the concern about him is that

he

maybe isn't as effective against deep line defences.

and obviously Liverpool will come up against that quite a lot.

So I don't think he's the finished product by any means but I think enormous amounts of potential.

So I think the hope is he can become an Alexander Isaac style player, having that mobility, that ability to run into the channels.

But I don't think he's got that sort of capacity to sniff out chances in tight spaces yet.

So that's the one question mark.

But he's clearly enormously talented.

All right, that will be for part two.

Part three, we'll begin uh with Philippe on multi-club ownership.

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Max here, Barry's here, too.

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Welcome to part three of the Guardian Football Weekly.

Stuart says, have you got the lawyers ready for Philippe and a long run at multi-club ownership?

Rick says, we'd love to hear Philippe's take on this stage of Palace UEFA saga.

Off you go, Philippe.

Well, the Palace UEFA saga

was totally predictable.

And basically what's happened is that I don't think that anybody at Palace

even thought for a second that they would qualify for a European competition.

I think that's the root of the problem.

And suddenly, when they realized that, oh, shit, we might actually, well, if we win the UFA Cup, you know, it's great.

Europea league.

Yeah, except that you have a problem.

The deadline, 1st of march has passed that has been set by uefa to show that the owners of your club were not involved as significant stakeholders in other club participating in european competitions and they could have done it so some of them did it in a way that is quite extraordinary because the way was actually devised by uefa themselves and by the person who is in charge of basically financial compliance which is sundil gulatti you might remember him the former u.s soccer Federation.

No, no,

I try to avoid remembering these people.

He devised this system by which you can use this mechanism, this legal mechanism, called blind trust.

And blind trusts are actually not necessarily a bad thing in themselves.

Like, for example, say that Max Rushton, who is, as we know, has got millions of assets in various companies, and you're elected prime minister, right?

And okay, you've all plausible so far.

Totally credible.

So you become party to information that might actually change the value of the assets you have.

So what you do is that you pass on these assets, the control of these assets, to a blind trust, people that you don't know.

Got it.

Okay.

So that they do.

They now own the Subaru.

Well, exactly.

And they do what they want.

Well, they do what they want.

Obviously, they look after your interests.

And well, you're no longer in a position to benefit from inside information, for example, you get the control back.

Okay.

So that's like politicians often do that.

Mark Carney in Canada has used it when he was elected.

He's given everything to a blind trust.

Now, the difference is that the UFI said, well, you can do that with football clubs.

How does that work?

So

Nottingham Forest, Evangelus Marinakis,

who has Olympiakos in the Champions League, realized that, oh my goodness, we might have Olympiakos in Nottingham Forest in the Champions League.

That's a problem because that's not possible.

So what he did is he put his club into a blind trust, okay?

Supposedly not having control over it at all, which is obviously.

So, he'll have no idea.

He'll have no idea.

No idea what was going on.

He won't know the results.

Exactly.

And

Ratcliffe did the same for Lausanne because there was also a possibility that Lausanne might find themselves in the same competition as Manchester United.

He had already done that for For Nice.

And because of that, And it's a system, a mechanism, which actually has been proposed by UEFA themselves to clubs which are into multi-club ownership.

So they're basically

advising multi-club ownership entities

as to how they can circumvent their own regulations, which is absolutely magnificent, isn't it?

So there is absolutely no more obstacle now.

There is no obstacle now to multi-club ownership structures to have several clubs in the same European competition thanks to UEFA themselves.

And I found one thing which really amused me because the same situation with Manchester City and Girona last year, you remember?

And Girona, nobody was expecting them to qualify for the Champions League.

So they had to devise something.

So they did exactly that.

They divested some of the shares, but just for the duration.

And the amazing thing is that they used

as the main,

one of the main guys for the operation

became a director of Girona.

And he's the same guy who Evangelos Marinakis used to be a director of Nottingham Forest.

And the guy was both a director of Nottingham Forest and of Girona at the same time.

It's beautiful, isn't it?

But there you go.

So it's that, so basically it's a charade.

And Crystal Palace, their big problem here is that John Texter couldn't see that there might be a problem at some point and that they didn't act before the 1st of March, which was the cutout date.

It doesn't matter what you do after that.

That's it.

There's no way in, no back-end for them.

It makes you think when Maranakis was on the pitch with New York.

Yeah, he was in charge.

It's hard to know what was he complaining about when he didn't know what had happened because it's in a blind trust.

He couldn't have seen what had happened.

Wilson.

So just to put this in context, the 1st of March, the deadline, was the day that Palace beat Millwall in the fifth round of the cup.

So I really like the idea that on the 28th of February, suddenly Palace got, hang on, what have we gone and you win the FA Cup, win the the first thing in our history?

We better rush through the blind trust thing today.

And then Millwall fuming,

pinning on the dressing room wall, the statement of Company's house.

So it's not just about the pride of South London.

There they are, running around Company's house, taking the piss.

So that would have been a great thing.

And then, of course, the other complication here was there's two other things that seem almost designed to annoy Crystal Palace.

So they're now in the Conference League, pending appeal.

Conference League final has been played in Leipzig.

Leipzig, it appears, have a relationship with Red Bull.

And Red Bull Salzburg have happily been playing in the Champions League along with Red Bull Leipzig, or yeah, RB Leipzig, Rausland Baalsport Leipzig.

So, I mean, obviously that's all fine.

That's all above board.

But were you a Palace fan?

That might sort of irritate you a bit.

And then, of course, there's the relationship between Maronakis and Jon Texter.

There's one of the clubs Jon Texter also owns, or Eagle Holdings,

his company owns, is Botifogo, who've just signed their Brazilian National Centre forward Ego Jesus to Nottingham Forest for what would appear a knockdown £10 million.

So that's odd.

Isn't it?

It is odd.

Hey, Wilson, you've written a book.

Congratulations.

Oh, thank you very much.

What is it?

It's a history of the World Cup.

It's called The Power and the Glory.

It's out on the 4th of September, but it's available for order now.

It's very long, but actually quite short at the same time.

So it was an awful lot of work to squeeze it down to 600 pages.

I think it is.

Blimey.

Is it a page turner?

Is it a page turner?

I think it is.

Yeah.

No spoilers, eh?

No spoilers.

Don't tell us who won in 66.

Yeah.

So, I mean, 66 is a good example because I sort of thought, right, this is going to be a bit of an effort to kind of plod through because everybody knows 66.

But for instance, the pickle story.

Is that what Barry said

on the front cover, the testimonial?

Quite an effort to plod through.

Barry Pandenna.

He wouldn't have plodded through.

He'd be lying if he said that.

So, yeah, the pickle story.

I thought, I better mention this.

But yeah, everybody knows what happened.

World Cup goes missing.

It's found by this colleague.

The story is way madder than you could possibly believe.

I think Charlie Richardson, the gang leader, organised the theft of it, pay off a debt to the South African Secret Service.

And

that is odd.

That is odd, yeah.

They're all dead as fine.

Things happen, coincidences, you know.

So, uh, but there was a whole kind of

ransom plot that I think gets gets lost.

Even the sort of absolute ineptitude of the security company who were looking after it, you know, was it was stolen from a stamp exhibition in Westminster Hall, and the people who nicked it basically just they unscrewed the back door and walked in, and nobody stopped them because the security guy was at the toilet at the time.

But then there's descriptions of a bloke who was seen hanging suspiciously around

outside but again this is so inept that it said he's wearing a scarf but the description printed in the times next day says he has a scar because they've just misheard it so it's it's this bizarre sort of carry-on comedy and then how the world cup actually ends up hidden behind a car wheel on beula hill in south norwood is all yeah and it's it's called uh dave corbett a 26-year-old lighterman goes out to use the the phone box with his dog with pickles yeah Pickles just sniffs out at the World Cup, this package he just finds on a driveway, goes and knocks on the neighbour's door and sort of says, is this yours?

I don't recognise that.

So they open it and go, oh, shit, it's the World Cup.

And so they take it to Gypsy Hill Police Station.

And the desk sergeant goes, it doesn't look like the World Cup.

It doesn't look very World Cuppy.

But it is indeed the World Cup.

But nobody knows how it got there.

But probably...

And so there's two explanations.

So either it proved unsaleable because of the, it was just too famous, or people thought it was made of gold, which it wasn't it was made of silver so the the the value of the the bullion was it was about 60 quid it just wasn't worth it uh it was you know just silver painted gold pickles himself is a tragic story because low he he he stars himself in a film he's named dog of a year in both britain and west germany uh a unique double i believe yeah it really is he he he gets free dog food for life but then with within a year he he's dead he's uh he's gone chasing a cat and his leads got caught in a branch and he's hanged himself which is uh okay or is that the south african secret service taking him out because he he knew too much all of that and more anything else you want to do did um did people think the world cup since i think baz mentioned this but like the club world cup and we've all been a bit sniffy about it for lots of good reasons but when the world cup began did everyone think this is a silly idea Yes, they did.

I mean, the Europeans especially, there's only four European countries bothered to go over to Uruguay for it.

The British nations didn't want anything to do with it until 1950 and then embows themselves by being crap.

So, yeah, there was a lot of scepticism.

And that first World Cup, there's a lot of farcical stuff happened.

So there's one game where the penalty spot was marked 16 yards from the goal, not 12 yards, which, as we established in part one, is an inappropriate distance.

12 yards is perfect.

Fibonacci would be furious, wasn't he?

About that.

And yeah, there's a lot of scepticism.

But actually, the person who really takes it on is Mussolini.

Mussolini really got behind the World Cup.

And

Trump's behaviour on that stage during the presentation, I think the nearest thing we've seen to it probably was Mussolini.

Mussolini had invented his own World Cup.

It was three times the size of the actual World Cup, the Coppa del Duce.

So presumably, if you'd taken that in the Gypsy Hill Police Station in 1966, it'd have been...

That looks really World Cuppy.

But yeah, he got very involved in

the celebration.

He said to the Italy squad, look, you've done a great service for the fatherland.

You can have anything you want.

What do you want?

And because there's a couple of sort of party members, absolute absolutely lick spittles in the squad.

One that goes, Oh, what I'd like most of all is a signed photo of you.

But then in 1938, when they retain it, then they know they're going to get offered this again.

They say, Lads, let's be sensible.

We're going to ask for lifetime rail passes.

That's that's the thing he will give us.

And we've already got a signed photo.

And so, yeah, we get lifetime rail passes.

I don't know if that extended beyond the war, but they had lifetime rail passes after 1938.

What a thing's a funny thing to ask.

I'm just so unfootballer.

You know, football has changed, hasn't it, since 1938?

Yeah, I love the idea and that's what they say that's what you know that's what the liverpool squads say like if we you know the england squad if they win the world cup they'll say oh could we just get a freedom pass but earlier that's what we really want and i presume you can get it wherever you get books wilson yes absolutely yeah yeah i'm not sure if there's any better place for me to get it but yes i i assume the guardian bookstore has it so maybe maybe it should stay on brand and say go there but yeah amazonbookshop.org walterston's all the usual places and there will be a u.s there will be a us edition out in October.

Yeah, I'm going to buy the book, Jonathan.

But on a side note, in the 90s, when you got into the Premier League, you got a black McDonald's card, which means you got all three McDonald's.

Yeah.

There you go.

That's perfect.

That's not winning the World Cup.

It's getting the Premier League.

Yeah.

Have you still got it?

Have you still got it, Lucy?

No.

That seems counterproductive.

Yes, exactly.

Exactly.

At Wetherspoons.

Free Stella at Wetherspoons, if you make it to the Premier League.

That's why the teams keep going down again, doesn't it?

Anyway, that'll do for today.

Thanks, everybody.

Thanks, Khali.

Thank you very much, Max.

Thank you, Wilson.

Cheers.

Thank you.

Thank you, Lucy.

Cheers, Max.

Football Weekly is produced by Joel Grove.

Our executive producer is Danielle Stevens.

We'll be back on Wednesday.

This is The Guardian.