Martin Cloake

All indications are that no one at the club has the slightest idea what they are doing.

This is a great little snippet.

"HERE WE GO!": the lowdown on "football journalist" Fabrizio Romano The Italian "influencer" who has never worked as a real journalist, has 100m+ followers on social media and leverages them for cash. This is a tale about modern sports media

"HERE WE GO!": the lowdown on "football journalist" Fabrizio Romano

sportingintelligence832.substack.com/p/here-we-go...

‘Newcastle is category B’ is going to go down in club history alongside ‘Queue up for your League Cup Final tickets after the game’.

Gareth Roberts | Substack Comms for Spirit of Shankly. Talk LFC at The Late Challenge Podcast. Also found on The Overlap and Radio Merseyside.

Superbly written and why we started the #stopexploitingloyalty campaign on ticket pricing.

Wow - that’s great. Proper rock n roll years

Really enjoyed talking about the actual football on this.

The message is getting louder.

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Lovely bit of writing mate. Something the clowns currently ‘running’ our club have no concept of, either.

Really interesting piece

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Save Our Seniors: Why Tottenham’s Concessions Fight Is Far From Over We are going to set out the reasons why the issue is not resolved, illustrate why the Club’s policy remains wrong on practical, financial and moral grounds, and call on fans to step up once more to se...

thefightingcock.co.uk/2026/01/save...

Save Our Seniors: Why Tottenham’s Concessions Fight Is Far From Over We are going to set out the reasons why the issue is not resolved, illustrate why the Club’s policy remains wrong on practical, financial and moral grounds, and call on fans to step up once more to secure justice for our senior fans.

Why the #saveourseniors campaign at Spurs is not over. Not our biggest problem, but still a problem. #coys

Why VAR is the worst thing that has been inflicted on football I'm going studs up on VAR – bear with me. Plus, what do we mean by "best-run club"?

Seems like a good moment to re-share my piece on VAR.

Crowd pleasers Why support goes sour, FIFA's latest disgrace, and a strange kind of financial glory

Latest edition of The Football Fan on real support and the 12th man, FIFA’s scandalous treatment of fans with disabilities, and Brighton’s financial example.

Latest piece from The Football Fan on @ludopedio.bsky.social

Lose The Loyal And Football Loses Itself An annual raid on the most committed supporters is a bleak strategy for clubs who claim to value their culture

Great stuff from Gareth.

In the Bleak Midwinter With full respect to Bournemouth, losing to their 94th minute winner would not in normal circumstances been seen as a significant moment in the recent history of any Premier League club, let alone …

Nail on the head pretty much every time.

Left over from the previous game. A proper club would go into any area its players and staff were using and make sure everything was as it should be. Amateur hour from top to bottom at ours.

This is exactly it. The whole row over this is a pantomime, but it absolutely underlines the lack of attention to detail, professionalism and pride that comes from the very top of the club.

This is a lovely piece on Martin Chivers. And if you are Spurs in particular tonight, a lovely piece is what’s needed.

open.substack.com/pu...

RIP #BigChiv I interviewed him a few years ago - nice guy. I remember him saying “The number of people who told me they were behind the goal when I scored against Wolves in the UEFA final - that stand must’ve been bigger than Wembley.”

Paul Grech (@paulgrech) Enzo Maresca works under a microscope that seems permanently switched on before opting to leave / being pushed out .Ruben Amorim loses his job. Arne Slot feels the early tremors of impatience. Different clubs, different contexts, same outcome: the head coach absorbs the shock while those who shaped the project remain in the background. This is now English football. The league that previously rejected the idea of sporting directors has now fallen in love with them to the extent that they often feel untouchable. More than that, they are inaccessible and insulated from all that happens on the pitch despite their roles. The dismissal of Ruben Amorim followed this script precisely. Amorim’s reputation was built on coherence: a clear tactical framework, a strong link between recruitment and game model, and an ability to develop players within defined constraints. When that coherence failed to materialise, the explanation quickly narrowed down to his inability to change. As if that was not known beforehand by those who got him into the club, the reckoning stopped at the dugout. Enzo Maresca was the same, tasked with imposing structure on a squad assembled across multiple windows, with varying profiles, price points, and timelines. And little coherence. Consistency was expected even when the raw materials pulled in opposing directions. With Arne Slot, the pressure is different. He has the cushion of a league title won last year but whatever credit that gave is eroding fast as his side fails to gather momentum, dragged down by an imbalanced squad that was was transformed over the summer. In all cases, the managers have to shoulder their responsibilities; all made their own poor decisions. Yet what links these cases is not just managerial inadequacy, but asymmetry of accountability. Sporting directors and recruitment teams make decisions with long tails. They choose age curves, wage structures, contract lengths, and player profiles. They decide whether a squad is built for stability, transition, or opportunistic upside. These choices shape what is possible on the pitch, yet there is never the opportunity to interrogate them with the same intensity as a team selection or a late substitution. For, whilst English clubs may now embrace the role of sporting director, they have not adopted all of the traits of their European counterparts. In the Bundesliga, sporting directors routinely engage with media in mixed zones after matches and give interviews to broadcasters before and after games. Directors in the Serie A, La Liga and Ligue 1 also speak regularly: they all have to explain their decisions. In acting this way, English football has turned its managers into little more than cannon fodder. They are exposed and endlessly interrogated, while those who make the defining decisions remain insulated from consequence. Worse still, they remain silent. There is no explanation of strategy much less any acknowledgement of mistakes. Fans are asked to trust a process they are never allowed to see or understand. And when trust erodes, as it inevitably does, the blame falls once again on the figure in the dugout, not on those who designed the conditions that made failure predictable.

Excellent from Paul Grech

Who wants the World? (Cup) Is the furore over tournament ticket prices a positive sign?

Latest edition of The Football Fan on World Cup ticket prices, Premier League tricksiness and the power of protest.

How are you mate?

The Atmosphere at Spurs: Blame the Club before Blaming the Fans The supposed lack of atmosphere at White Hart Lane has become ingrained into the story of Spurs’ season. As each home game passes without a victory, so early season passivity turned to audibl…

Absolutely brilliant from @spursblogger

tottenhamonmymind.com/2025/12/04/t...

Premier League clubs have crypto sponsors not covered by Britain’s financial regulators | The Observer

More here. Football, bloody hell.

observer.co.uk/news/sport/a...

This.

All-time price chart of Spurs fan tokens, showing a peak of about £3.75 after launch in early 2024, with a sustained fall to the current price of 18p.

To be fair to Spurs, they are not wrong when they describe their fan tokens as "high-risk."

This new regime needs to be careful it doesn’t end up looking like the old regime. Clubs shouldn’t be putting this stuff anywhere near fans. @uglygame.bsky.social has done the research.

He gave very generously of his time, was a bright and insightful interviewee - and still very passionate about Spurs