The Athletic.

Hello and welcome to the TIFO Football Podcast. I'm John McKenzie and this is the final

podcast episode of the 2023-24 season. In today's episode, I'm joined by Liam Tham to review

the season with an eye to some of the tactical trends that we

saw as it unfolded. But before we get to that, I just wanted to give a tribute to my friend

Ome Arvind, who passed away earlier this month. Ome was a seminal person within the football tactics

community. He was one of the OG bloggers whose analysis of Real Madrid and the women's game

undoubtedly shaped a lot of people's ideas of how

football works. He also inspired a lot of us to think more analytically about the tactical side of the

game. Without Ome, it's unlikely that I would be doing what I do today. Most importantly, though,

Ome was a good friend who always had time for me, who cared about me and who would regularly

check up on me to see how I was doing. So thank you, or friend. Go well. And now it's

time to get to that conversation between me and Liam Tharm looking back over the trends

of the last season. Liam Tharmer is great to have you back on the Tifo Football Podcast. Hello.

Hello John. Thank you for having me back.

It's always great to chat to you about football. And we have a very special show in store for our listeners today because what we're going to do is we're going to do a big picture overview of the last season, the 23-24 season, particularly focusing on

the Premier League, I guess, but we will talk about some of the other trends that are happening

around Europe and particularly the tactical trends. You've just written a piece for the

athletic looking at some of the tactical trends, so we'll work our way through some of those.

I did a thread on Twitter talking about some of the things that I've been thinking about as the season has worn on. And so between the two of us, hopefully we'll get to the end of an hour and have had plenty of things to talk about. But I think the best place to start is the place where your piece starts, which is talking about goals, a lot more goals in the Premier League. Yeah, like a ridiculous amount. So the record got broken last season, but it got broken last season on the final day compared to the season prior to that.

This time it was broken in late April. So we end up with 1,246 goals, the goals per game rate is the highest in the top

flight English season since the 60s. And what was particularly interesting to me was that

...