Alfie is a highly talented young player who we are delighted to welcome to the club. His attributes and character will complement and add value to the group and we are looking forward to him realising his potential in the years ahead.
Huge amounts of work happens behind the scenes via scouts, sporting directors, agents, and intermediaries, to determine if a player is the right fit for their club, both in terms of what they can offer on the pitch, and if they're a realistic and affordable target.
Manchester City and Manchester United will battle it out to sign England midfielder Elliot Anderson from Nottingham Forest as both clubs have made the 23-year-old one of their main summer transfer targets.
For much of the dynasty era in New England, the Patriots were a destination most players hoped to sign with to give themselves the best chance to win a Super Bowl, led by quarterback Tom Brady and head coach Bill Belichick. Beyond winning, the staff and the roster were another desirable part of heading to Foxboro, so once most of those players and coaches departed the team, and their production fell, more often than not, the new regimes couldn't get players in the door,
Myles Straw may be suited for a role as a Major League Baseball General Manager when his playing days are over. The Toronto Blue Jays outfielder is putting in the work this offseason by trying to make the team better and he's doing it in ways that's catching the attention of many Blue Jays fans online. Over the weekend Straw was playing the role of "active recruiter" as he was trying to entice one of the biggest names on the market to join the Blue Jays.
I reached out to the agent and what was really interesting in the first call is the reaction was, 'We don't want his story to be in a documentary, because we've had plenty of opportunities for a documentary for his story.' He thought we were calling not because of his footballing capabilities, but because we wanted a documentary story. I'm like, 'Wait a minute. I didn't even think about that'.
The NWSL still lacks a unified academy system, but with the college draft being abolished and combines -- including a youth combine to scout talent as young as 13 -- age is not holding recruitment back as it did in years past. Now, more teams are increasingly identifying young players who can make a difference -- and several already are, in big ways.
Expected goals (xG) is a metric used to determine how likely a player is to score a chance and to calculate how many goals a team is expected to score in a match. The metric was invented in 2012 by Opta's Sam Green and has become commonplace across football analytics. In xG, every shot a player has is given a score between zero and one.
It would be wrong to get too far ahead of anything on this one. But it was impossible to ignore the alternative reading: Spurs did not want to be drawn into a battle with their rivals over one of the most exciting talents on the market. Spurs were fearful of that, and for good reason. They had to know that, given the choice, Eze would go for Arsenal over them.
