The Nico Williams Noise

Our growth is fuelled completely via word of mouth right now, and growth is important because it will eventually help us generate non-obnoxious ad revenue to keep this venture going, and to spawn new projects.

So… if you see something you enjoyed, forward this email to your friends. Mention us in the group chat. And tell people to follow our socials.

The signup page is here.
The link to our archive of newsletters is here.

Thank you for all the support so far.

358 of you voted in the Antony vs Mudryk transfer catastrophe poll, with Antony taking the title at 72% of the vote.

Hooray, Antony is the winner!
Hooray, Antony is the loser!
Ahem… according to the wisdom of crowds, Antony is the most shit transfer for the price.

This is what just a few of the MANY comments said. [I can’t remember the last time I have gotten this much interaction on Twitter outside of Arsenal fans bashing me for my Partey analysis. You people had TAEKS.]

“Off field mayhem aside, Antony was not at the level required. Off field mayhem taken into account, he was the Sideshow Bob rake gif”

“Antony is a douche but has his teams have been better with him on the field with a proven 21-22 season before his signing. Their trajectories after the 23-24 seasons are going opposite directions, so might be pretty close at this point.”

“Antony has added more value in England overall - he had that spell late in the 22-23 season where he looked like he might be good - and there was less squinting required to see something in his profile at Ajax vs Mudryk’s at Shakhtar”

“Both are equally bad to me, but I am particularly allergic to poor signings from managers' previous teams. So Antony it is”

“I'm on the toilet and was not expecting to fill out this feedback form. Huge fan of the newsletter and the podcast though. Love the insights you're giving and I feel smarter after reading or listening”

“If it's close, Chelsea's potential financial position tips it.”

The most common points made were
a) one of these two seems like a terrible person (I have to be careful what I write because I reside in England), and that firmly tips the scale.
b) Mudryk’s alleged cost was closer to £62M, with significant add-ons. We intentionally chose the headline number for both transfers as reported by Sky, so feel free to blame them and not us.

My take is this: Both of these were terrible transfers, to about the same degree.

They were probably 2x overpays for deeply uncertain future production, and maybe most incredibly, helped cap-lock two of the biggest teams in the world going into this summer. Neither United nor Chelsea have any financial flexibility right now, though Chelsea clearly have more digging to do around the PSR makeweight merry-go-round.

Rumours and News

• Michael Olise is apparently locked in with Bayern now. The story via Darren Ambrose and Talksport is that he had a £60M release clause that only a Champions League club could trigger. It feels like everyone sort of wins on this one? Even Reading, who get £8-9M of the fee and have recently removed the term “winning” from fan’s vocabularies.

• Dortmund reached agreement with Pascal Gross, but it’s not final yet. Gross was the single player we were most interested in signing if Brentford was promoted from the Championship in 2015. His creation stats both from open play and set pieces were out of this world, and it’s been heartening to see him become a mainstay in the Premier League at Brighton.
  
  Even as he’s aged, his contributions from midfield have stayed fairly constant on the attacking side, and he continues to have one of the best set piece deliveries in the world.

• Bayern Munich are allegedly interested in Bernardo Silva. Weekend at Bernie’s is 29 now, with two years left to run on his contract and a £50M buyout clause. This feels like it’s an agent leak to see if someone is interested in moving for Silva and stumping up for a nice, big contract. At this point, I think City would be totally fine replacing Silva with someone younger and not eating the last two years on Silva’s contract.
  
  This isn’t to say Bernardo hasn’t been pretty great and wildly underrated, he has. But in order to run a club well, you have to ruthlessly move on from your darlings when good offers come in, especially as they age. I’m not sure City will get a good offer, just that I would listen very closely if one came in near the buyout clause.

• Chelsea are in for 21-yo forward Maximilian Beier from Hoffenheim. He’s young and had a competent season in the Bundesliga last year. But this was after not looking very good at Hannover in Bundes 2 the season before… I quite like the way Beier plays right now, but feel like he’s a solid year in the gym away from being able to withstand the physical load from the Premier League.

• Everyone playing a possession style has now gotten in touch with Kimmich’s agent for a price check. Except… Kimmich doesn’t have an agent? This process either just got a lot simpler or a LOT more complicated.

• Mats Hummels and Como are also in discussions, which harkens back to our point last week about making your money and then sunsetting your career in places with better weather.

• Nico Williams is now the hot name in the wide forward market. He can play either side, is tall, strong, and fast and approaching elite dribbler status in a tough league (La Liga). I think he’s good and has a lot of potential, but he also loses the ball a lot (bottom 4 percent) and the passing models think he’s mostly average. I’m cautiously interested, but not excited about him as a top tier prospect.