Funnily I used to be like that, I was like “Champion’s league is the greatest tournament on earth,” then when I realised we aren’t in it and you’re just watching Liverpool run to the final two years straight my narcissism kicked in and I decided I don’t care about anything unless it directly affects me.
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Haha yeah when it comes to European Football I do prefer non-English teams to win it, if it can’t be Arsenal 
Exactly, your boys against Pool last year would have given me someone to root for but the tournaments a mess right now and I’ve totally fallen out of love. I guess we can blame ourselves for that a bit too by always valuing top 4 but never really caring about competing in the Champions League with any really conviction.
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Last time I did that was 2014, when United had Moyes, we had Ozil and were top of the league.
6 bloody years!!! 
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I don’t even know who that guy you’re using as a smiley is.
He looks like someone who could play beautiful football, but we’ve never had players like that.
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It does feel like we are one of the few sides with very little to be genuinely excited about. We have played shit football for almost 2 years and before that we were perennial also-rans for a considerable period of time, basically the best part of 10 years. And we have no character.
Shit on the field and shit off it. I’m not sure many people would pay that extremely competitive price for articles about such topics.
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Tell me about it.
For me, exposure to football is watching the 90 mins and this place.
When I was younger, it was about watching the pre match build up religiously, watching the post match analysis (which is now fast becoming a post-mortem!) and reading analysis of pundits.
What a waste of life
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I almost spat out my coffee I wasn’t even drinking when I read this…
We’ve been playing shit football since the end of 2010/11. (*we had a decent run in 2013/14 though)
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I started reading an article earlier about some USMNT photoshoot from before the 2002 world cup that I certainly wasn’t aware of prior to clicking into the article. Had to stop when the photographer in question described Landon Donovan as having “cock sucking eyes” in one of the pics…there must have been another 2,000 words to go in the article.
This is exactly the kind of shit @Midfield_Maestro was talking about. 
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I’m actually going to cancel my sub.
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This is from the start of December, so I’m a bit late and many may have read this already, but this is a very good piece.
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I must have missed this originally. Cheers for posting Jakey. This is excellent. Didn’t even now that happened!
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This is probably the best thing I’ve read on the athletic so far. Really interesting read. It’s very long aswell almost like a chapter in a book haha but the detail its goes in to is phenomenal and stuff like this makes it such a worthwhile subscription.
You seen this @SRCJJ ?
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Really good article this one.
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Very interesting this
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A cheeky little excerpt posted only to convince you all to part with your hard earned for top quality exclusives like this, brought to you by The Athletic.
Although Gazidis had explained the club’s troubling injury record, Burgess was largely satisfied with the competence of the staff within the department. The issue wasn’t one of quality — it was one of culture.
“The players often ran the place,” says Burgess. Many of the performance staff had been in place for some time, and had developed relationships with members of the squad that were a little too cosy.
“In a lot of clubs, masseurs and physios in particular, as they spend a lot of time with players and provide them some relief, can develop really strong relationships. That can make it a little bit harder for people — doctors, physios and other therapists — to have the really difficult conversations.
“I think there was a reluctance of some of the people involved to use hard training as protection, and so instead they’d do more rest and recovery.” Why? “Because that was the easy option. It’s easier to sell to players, in particular.”
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I don’t think we need to pay money to know this sort of thing was going on though. We had such a broken heriarchy, it’s actually hilarious we thought Emery would come in and be able to lay down the law.
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Highlights a very dysfunctional club. Not sure any of its being adequately dealt with yet.
Well it’s definitely hilarious that you guys thought Emery would be able to, but to think that another manager could change that culture is not crazy at all, Poch did the same with just as nasty a culture at Tottenham, Klopp with just as messed up a club at Liverpool…the list goes on. This happens everywhere, all the time. It’s what good managers do, they come in and fix what is wrong and impose their ideas on the club with efficacy, it’s literally the stuff of good management, and thus as you say, should come as absolutely no surprise that the injury issue that we suffered under the last decade+ of Wenger was part and parcel of his bad management/state of being a bad manager.
Its almost as if I wasn’t being serious and it was just a pretext to share the most interesting part of that article with the good folk of OA.
Won’t fucking bother next time you miserable little shit.
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