Ryan Christie. Like Caicedo or Gravenbech. But better

No, wait, HONESTLY. I can prove it with numbers

Adam Clery writes about football tactics for Nutmeg every month. But he writes about football tactics ALL THE TIME on 87 Minutes (subscribe below). And his videos about football tactics are some of the best football content on the internet and you should check them out, too.

Bournemouth are going to win the FA Cup this season (if you’re not familiar, it’s basically a version of the Scottish but solely for English teams and with 400 more sponsors), and that’s genuinely quite remarkable. As both a feat on their part and a claim on mine.

When they do, you’ll be able to hear the chequebooks opening across Europe for manager Andoni Iraola, left-back Milos Kerkez, winger Antonie Semenyo, and centre-back Ilya Zabarnyi. It’s not all down to them, of course, but the universal truth of football is that if you have a relatively cool sounding name and are a relative new-comer to the general collective consciousness, then you get a massive wedge of the praise.

Ryan Christie just sounds like someone you went to school with, and at 30 years old is surely too much a part of the footballing furniture to be a catalyst for the Premier League’s most explosive and high-intensity surprise package. Or so you may have previously thought, until I, a nerd, with stats and facts and such like, showed you otherwise.

Ryan Christie: a creative being playing stag-do dress-up as a midfield shitkicker