Curated Cutback #2:

Hi everyone,

This past week in Italy we celebrated Ferragosto, a national holiday that falls during the prime vacation week of the year.

In fact, the period of August, particularly the two central weeks, is when almost the entire country takes a break from work for 1 to 3 weeks, with Ferragosto week being a fixed point, depending on various factors. For this reason, I didn’t find much to read and very little that I consider interesting or worth recommending, so there will only be one link in Italian instead of the two I’ve decided will be the standard going forward.

However, there will be an extra link in English.

Before sharing the links, I’ve decided that by Friday - probably Friday -, I’ll publish a preview of the visualizations related to ball-playing centerbacks, with Logan Costa of Toulouse, currently linked to Bologna, as my subject. Initially, I planned to focus on Todibo, but after running various tests to create the visualizations, I feel I’ve already gotten a good sense of his passing profile, while Logan Costa remains a mystery to me. If you disagree with this change, please let me know.

In the meantime, here is Todibo’s Pass Sonar for two reasons: 1) to give you a preview of a preview and 2) to let you know that this visualization has been the most complex to create among those I’ll be showing in the coming days. It’s based on an R tutorial created by the user TheComeOnMan on X/Twitter. I use the Jupyter Notebook environment to code, which is in Python language, and since I don’t have a background in data science, I relied heavily on ChatGPT to replicate the code. If you’d like to see the code/use it/collaborate with me to improve it, please let me know.

Now, to the links!

English:

• Manchester City, the Premier League and the season everything might change; by Adam Crafton for The Athletic

  • Adam Crafton has written an in-depth post that thoroughly and accessibly breaks down what to expect from the upcoming verdict on Man City's breaches of Premier League rules, but also on what is happening behind the scenes. If there's one article you should read, make it this one. (The Athletic is accessible only to subscribers)

• Why Man City won't win the Premier League and Arsenal will; by Ryan O’Hanlon for ESPN+

  • A fantastic article where Ryan uses data to offer a credible and well-respected opinion on why Manchester City, in his view, isn't the favorite for the Premier League title this year. If you’re not subscribed to The Athletic, this is the must-read article of the week.

• What Could Noussair Mazraoui Offer Man Utd That Aaron Wan-Bissaka Lacked?; by Ryan Benson for The Opta Analyst

  • A concise, data-driven comparison between Wan-Bissaka and his replacement, Mazraoui, highlighting why the latter is an upgrade for ETH.

Italian:

• Guida al Milan 2024/25; by Emanuele Mongiardo for Ultimo Uomo 

  • Emanuele is a Milan supporter, and it shows in the preview. While it’s well-written, it’s not particularly engaging in my opinion. However, it does a good job in highlighting what to expect from Fonseca’s Milan. In the meantime, other previews have also been released, including those for Inter and Bologna, if you’re interested.

A couple of other useful things:

• I found this:

• Statsbomb has updated its expected passes model by incorporating 360 data to include player positions relative to events.

• The episode on Ten Hag (particularly interesting as it also covers his life before football) from the podcast Heroes and Humans of Football by Simon Kuper, journalist and author of Soccernomics among others, and Mehreen Khan, a journalist for publications like The Financial Times, The Guardian, and Mirror Football, among others.

All the images were taken from the respective posts, and I’m not currently monetizing from this newsletter, so I don’t want any problems.

If you enjoyed The Cutback, I’d appreciate it if you would forward it to a friend. If you’re that friend, welcome! You can subscribe to The Cutback by clicking below.