The Athletic

Hello and welcome to the TIFO football podcast.

I'm John McKenzie and I'm joined as I always am by my good friend and producer Mike Zimmerman.

Mike, how are you?

I'm doing good, John.

It's finally December and is it too early to put up Christmas tree? Because I've got mine up

and I've gotten some weird responses. Well, I am not wanting to be decried as a modern-day

Mr. Scrooge, but I do not have my Christmas tree up right yet. Usually it's like a last-minute

thing for me as I frantically try and get everything ready for Christmas and yeah, this year has been no different.

But speaking of Christmas, speaking of gifts, speaking of looking forward to good things, we have one hell of a show for the listeners to get into today because we're talking all about League Un.

I was joined by two of my colleagues, Liam Tharm and Alex Barker, to talk about the tactical revolution

that is happening in League at the moment. Mike, you've just listened to that conversation. What did

you make of it? Well, one popular Christmas gift, John, is money. And that's something that League

doesn't have a lot of compared to the rest of the other big leagues. And we get into those financial

issues that the league has. So in order to make some sort of profit, their strategies really to develop

players and sell them. And all of that leaves the league with so much turnover and inconsistency.

The tactics change ever so often because of that player turnover. And Alex and Liam really kind of dive into the direction that the league is going in.

Yeah, and we were lucky enough as well to talk about a couple of coaches who are quite exciting at the

moment in Francesco Farioli and Will Still, who everyone knows about already.

But we talk a lot about those.

But as always, the best thing for us to do, I think, is to just jump straight in with Ligand and its tactical revolution.

Ligand has always seemed a little out of place in the so-called top five European leagues. It has garnered a reputation for being a

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