Welcome to the Total Soccero!

Welcome to the Total Soccer Show and a brand new show format.

We're calling Beyond the Big Six.

It's a Premier League show where we turn our attention to the biggest storylines outside of the Big Six teams.

So stick around to learn about the small 14, the not so small 14, the something 14. we'll get there. Today, we're talking about Brentford's magical kickoff formula, the No No Revolution at Nottingham Forest, the incredible work, tiny baby boy Fabian Hurtzler is doing at Brighton and much, much more. My name's Ryan Bailey, joining me today, Power Trio Alert. Taylor Rockwell's here. Hello, Taylor. Hello, Ryan Bailey. We are talking about the Premier League, so it's like the still pretty big 14, at least from a financial side. But it is great to be here. Nice to be back. Thank you all for covering in my absence. Yes, indeed. Good to have you back on the show. Tea joining us, Graham Ruffin. Hello, Ryan. How are you? Are you ready to talk about all the bad teams in the Premier League today, Well, some of the bad teams. There's no myonetty chat today for once. We're going to leave them out. Yeah, maybe we can workshop that not the, excuse me, what was it, the small 14, the small 14 that can still put 40 million euros on your best striker if Porto or AC Milan. They're not that small.

It's still going to be predatory to all other top five leagues. Yes, indeed. That's a good point. Maybe for Taylor, it's an upsetting fact that Man United are very much in the small 14 now. I don't know how Telly you feel about that. I mean, upsetting, realistic, accurate, all of those things of the case. I'm really looking forward to this show because so much of this I thought going in was going to be like, why are they struggling? Why haven't they been better? Are they going to be able to stay up? And I think we have that for a few clubs. But for the most part, there have been some surprising starts and some very positively surprising starts. So I'm excited to get into some of these teams that we haven't really had a chance to talk about who have been doing, if not great, then at least very interesting things and very stable things in a few situations.

Very stable things. Indeed, we'll get to that very shortly. But before we do...

Are we still using that one? I think we should. He's not wheeled that one out in a while, is he? He's got other ones about canines and felines and such. Conscious of our plan. Oh, boy. Let's not do that. Patreon.com slash total soccer show where we get our bonus content. Bonus episodes, bonus video content on our feed. And of course, access to our Discord where all the cool kids are are hanging out most of them anyway. We're in there too. Don't know what you make of that. Patreon.com slash total soccer show. Best way to support this show. One other little thing as well. We're doing a little fan survey at the moment. If you head to the show notes, there's a link to it. We want to learn about you. You know, what you like about

the show? What you don't like? Just tell us. Give us your answers. Vote from me, please. That's the best.

Yeah. It just helps us inform our show going forward. Thank you very much.

It does indeed. Luckily, none of the responses so far, I've been like, what don't you like?

Taylor, Grail. That would have been, that would have been maybe slightly personal. I appreciate that. I've been editing at night just to make sure you don't see those. It's changed all the reins to Taylor. It's a find and replace. Thanks for that, Ryan. And also, I think with that in mind, we'd love to hear what people think of this episode. Because our assumption is essentially that people want to hear more about the Premier League, more about some of the medium smaller clubs in the Prem, but we don't always have time on the weekend review. Yeah. We end up going over an hour anyway, so this is kind of an experimentation to see what works, what doesn't work, what people like, what people don't like. Yeah, to provide a peep behind the curtain of weekend review. There's so much to cover that we can't cover everything and every weekend we have the dilemma of do we talk about Chelsea,

Manchester, Liverpool and Elton. and of weekend review. There's so much to cover that we can't cover everything. And every

weekend we have the dilemma of, to we talk about Chelsea, Manchester, Nighting, Liverpool. And ultimately, we do because these are the teams that most listeners are interested in. But there's always interesting stuff going on further down the Premier League table. So we thought this would be an opportunity to give a spotlight to some of those teams. Although I'm not sure. Like, we've used Big Six in the title of this episode. It's more like a big seven or eight now, because I don't think we're going to be talking about Villa or Newcastle because they're kind of counted among that upper group in the Premier League now. But, yeah, I lose track of how many big clubs are in the Premier League these days. Maybe they're all big. Well, they certainly are, Graham. I think we've established that. But the relatively small 14 is what we are ostensibly covering in this franchise, which we're going to kick off talking about Brighton, which confusingly are in sixth. But they're not in the big six. But they're in sixth anyway. Obviously, a big win, Graham, over Spurs as we covered on the weekend review.

One win in the last five, but obviously, obviously, baby boy Herzl has got some good things going on down on the South Coast. Are we calling this Brighton? Is it 3.0? Is that what this current iteration is? I'm losing. It's like iOS is. I can't keep track of... So 1.0 would be Potter, right?

What are you counting Chris Houghton?

That was just 0.0. 1.2. That was a little upgrade. Yeah. So what are the three eras? Potter, Deserby and now Hurtzler. But the thing is, like... That feels right. That's a continuation between all three of them, right? And that's what makes Brighton such a well-run club is they don't have these big dramatic eras between managers. They just kind of have that continuity. So even though Hurtzler is new to us, I mean, I wrote about him for the soccer dispatch last season when he was at St. Pauley, but I haven't watched a huge amount of any of his teams before he ends up in the Premier League. But even though he's new to us and to Brighton fans, it's still kind of the same principles that Brighton have underlying at their club. Yeah, I think Graham is correct. I would still say this is like Brighton 2.0 reverting back to 1.0 with like a deserbie interregnum in there. That's right. I'm using fancy words upon my return. Because a lot of what I was reading about Brighton, like comparing it to under Deserby was that he wanted more control over player acquisitions. He wanted specific players. He wanted a specific style of player brought in. And when some of those players didn't hit, he then gets frustrated. There's a frustration with him. And I think there's a lot of tension there. Whereas nowadays, it feels like

there is more of a business as usual approach to their transfer strategy, to the players

they're bringing in, and to the kind of collective spirit that seems to exist at Brighton, not

trying to say, Deserby did bad by any stretch of the imagination, just to say that it does seem like there are a few differences between what we saw under Deserby last season and what we are seeing currently under Baby Boy Hurtzeller. I still don't understand that one. I may have missed that reference the first time it came about. Where does that come from aside from that he is He's a tiny child. That's it. That's all

it is. Okay, cool. Cool. If they're younger than me, they're a baby boy. That's how it goes in soccer. He's younger than me, which is a frightening thought that there's now a Premier League manager who's younger than me. That was a watershed moment in my life, quite frankly, this summer. Yeah. Yeah. That's how that one works out.

But I suppose,

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