Jerry Seinfeld once said that sports fans, by and large, fan the teams’ jerseys and not the players themselves. Once the players change teams, according to Seinfeld, the fans will hate them. This approach may be a little extreme, but it connects to one of the biggest questions in sports.
A team, after all, is made up of players. Things like “club spirit” or culture are also significant, but it starts with the players themselves. Even if today there are no icons who play for 15 years in a club like in the nineties, every team has the players who are identified with it for several seasons such as Neta Lavi in Maccabi Haifa, Dan Glazer in Maccabi Tel Aviv (in addition to Sharan Yeni) or Miguel Vitor in Hapoel Beer Sheva.
These icons are great footballers, but to some extent we have become a bit “used” to them. Seeing Vitor strike for BS or Dor Malol on the wing of Hapoel Haifa, after years, became a bit obvious. Manchester City and Liverpool, too, after amazing seasons, will advance to the next season with a different lineup.
Where is the border? The Australian company “Gain Line” conducted a comprehensive study on the subject from the founding year of the Premier League, 1992, to 2019. They reached a number of interesting conclusions. The results of the study, by and large, led to the proof that talent is as important as group coordination. Most of the champions signed two or three new players and left the existing squad. It’s the best of both worlds: on the one hand, one-off reinforcements (such as Robert Huth, Angolo Kante and Shinji Okazaki at Leicester in 2015/16), on the other a squad that has been together for several years.
Simon Strachan, the Australian analyst who conducted the study, called this phenomenon: the juggling effect. “If two people start juggling together, after a few months they will be very good. After five years, they might be world champions. If I change partners every few months, our coordination will suffer.”
It also connects to football. It takes time for the players to get to know the coach’s method and the movement of the other players. According to the study, it takes a player on average three years to get used to a team in an optimal way and teams that spend more time together will often be better, but this conclusion is misleading on a certain level: a team that starts the season in a bad way will want to make radical changes, similar to what happened in the Galilee landscape last year.
Therefore the logic is somewhere in the middle. On the one hand, a skeleton that exists and runs together for several years. On the other hand, reinforcements in specific positions. Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool made these changes on the fly, and from the team that reached the Champions Final in 2017/18, 5 players remain. Real, who won the championship this season, did it with Vinicius, David Alaba and Thibaut Courtois, who were not in the team, but also with Luka Modric, Toni Kroos, Casemiro, Dani Carvajal and Karim Benzema. Teams do lose patience – continuity today is 30% lower than it was in 1992 according to Strachan – but a squad that runs for several years together can be part of the solution.
Manchester United, for example, signed a number of new players to the team every season in recent years and failed to improve, even under the influence of the pressure and the attempt to connect the players in the pressure cooker at Old Trafford. The lack of continuity is one reason for United’s big crisis, along with players who probably don’t fit the system and great pressure from the crowd.
This study provides a good opportunity to examine the situation of each of the candidates for the championship in Israel according to the last window.
Spot upgrade – Maccabi Haifa
have arrived and may start in the lineup: Frantezdi Piero, Daniel Songdran, Pierre Cournot.
Maccabi Haifa’s changes are not particularly big. They have upgraded in specific positions, such as the foreign striker’s slot (with Piero instead of Godsavi Donio), which gives them another player who can finish the attacks of Dolev Haziza and Omar Atzili, along with Dean David. Piero adds another dimension in attack as an excellent striker, which connects with both defenders.
Songdran and Korno are expected to take the place of Mikael Alphonse and San Menachem in the 11th. The defenders were not particularly central to the offensive contribution to Barak Becher’s method, but the replacement of the two defenders in the same season is a significant change. While offense may be based primarily on dribbling or the talent of individual players, coordination in defense can be especially significant going forward.
Maccabi Haifa’s European campaign is in full swing. Even if they are eliminated against Olympiakos in the Champions League, they still have at least 4 more games (two in the third round of the Europa League qualifiers and two in the Europa League or Conference League playoffs), and a defense that hasn’t played a significant amount of minutes together is a troubling sign. If Bogdan Palanić also leaves, the champions could find themselves in the Europa League qualifiers with only one defender who played for them last season – Josh Cohen.
Upgrading in attack – Hapoel Beer Sheva
have arrived and may start in the lineup: Estrit Salmani, Tomer Hamed, Shay Elias.
The strengthening of Hapoel BS was also spot-on, similar to that of Maccabi Haifa, but mainly focused on the attack. The study by the Australian Gain Lane did not distinguish between new players in defense or attack, but in the case of two strikers the team coordination may be less significant: they finish moves and not necessarily starting them.
This was perhaps Beer Sheva’s most obvious need after the last season, in which two of its most prominent attacking players were a central midfielder (Ramsey Spori) and a stopper (Vitor), especially after the departures of Danilo Asperia and Nikita Rukavica. These point changes are interesting, certainly considering that Bash opens the season with a different coach than the one who was on the lines the previous season.
Eliniv Barda, the coach and professional manager in 2021/22, brought to the team that summer Eitan Tibi, Itai Schechter, Eugene Ensa, Mariano Barreiro, Dor Micha, Asperia, Helder Lopes, Roy Gordana, Ariel Harosh, Iyad Abu Ebid, Nikita Rukavitsa and Omari Glazer. BS built the team almost from scratch the previous season, and it had a negative effect.
The Reds also failed to advance to the group stage of the Conference League after being eliminated against Anorthosis in the playoffs and also parted ways with Roni Levy in the middle of the season despite good results. The attempt to sign too many players at once forced them to make several changes in the middle of the season, which ended with winning the state cup and second place, and this season they went for smaller changes based on the skeleton.
Extreme Makeover – Maccabi Tel Aviv
have arrived and may start in the lineup: Eran Zahavi, Nir Biton, Parfa Goyagon, Yoris Van Overeem, Belem Zar.
There is a good chance that Maccabi Tel Aviv’s lineup will include 5 players (assuming a foreign defender arrives) who were not there last season, and possibly even more if Dor Peretz eventually returns. At the same time, a new coach arrived, Vladimir Ivic, and Enrique Savorit will move back from the position of brakeman to left defender.
This is a relatively radical change, especially considering the existing situation with the two brakes that are supposed to hold the defense. Beaton is injured at the moment and in any case will play in a role that is not the natural position, and we still do not know who will be the other shortstop who will come next to him. The lack of coordination, certainly in critical games, can be problematic.
The situation in the case of Maccabi Tel Aviv is a little different. Zahavi and Biton have yet to play in the team’s uniform and are dealing with injury, the foreign defender and Peretz have not arrived yet and the team continues with large parts of the previous season, a disappointing season by Kiryat Shalom’s standards. The Yellows do not have a “golden parachute” in the event of being relegated from the Conference League qualifiers, similar to Haifa, who can be relegated from two establishments and still play in Europe this season, and this is a kind of question mark.
Vladan Ivic himself said that they still have a lot of things to work on, but they could find themselves out of Europe given the injuries to some of the reinforcements. Not sure that this is a bad thing considering the desire to recapture the league and the load of games that will be on the opponent. This team is good enough to make the playoffs in the Conference League, even if Zahavi doesn’t play at all in the qualifiers.
Still, this wave of procurement can lead to a lack of coordination that will have a negative impact. The players themselves are good and experienced, but will it be enough to make up for the relative coordination that exists in BSH and Haifa? Time will tell.
