Monthly newsletter - January 2024

January 2024 Blog

Hello ballers,

Welcome to my January 2024 Newsletter - the first of the year! If you missed any of the previous months, you can check them out here: https://strivefootballacademy.com/blog

It’s been a pretty good January for me - relatively cold weather but pretty dry and lots of positive, enthusiastic training sessions.

February half-term

We are back for the February half-term at Ridgeway Academy from Monday 19th to Friday 23rd. We were lucky enough to have Eman SV2 (over 3 million YouTube subscribers) join us at our January camp, which everyone loved! For more information or to sign up, follow this link: https://strivefootballacademy.com/football-camps

What I’ve been watching

This is always an interesting part of the season; clubs are starting to get desperate about pushing on or staying away from promotion along with players being bought and sold.

Spurs seem to have done some good business bringing in Timo Werner on loan from RB Leipzig and Radu Dragusin from Genoa. The rest of the Premier league clubs have been relatively quiet, although there is still time as the market closes tonight (1st Feb). I really thought Arsenal would try to boost their squad for the remainder of the season. They were heavily linked with Ivan Toney, who is now back playing following his lengthy ban for Sports betting, although that deal looks like it’s dead in the water.

Liverpool looked great last night against Chelsea - who still can’t seem to put a decent run of games together. I worry how long the club will stick with Pochettino. Chelsea have a long history of not giving managers time, but now that Todd Boley is at the helm, maybe they will change tact and start to give managers a little more leeway.

On the note of Liverpool, they announced last week that Klopp will be stepping down as manager to take some time away from football. In his 20 plus minute interview he spoke about how he now longer has the energy to do the job justice and feels that for the club to move forward and prosper, they should have someone else in charge. I think it’s a brave move - managers who are lucky enough to not get sacked, seem to sometimes stick around too long at clubs, so for Klopp to walk away on his own merit deserves some credit.

Worth a watch

If you haven’t seen Klopps full interview, it’s definitely worth a watch: https://youtu.be/mHYsAgAx5I4?si=AgvRAV4_oAeUHP6E

Spurs vs Brentford was an exciting 5 goal thriller: https://youtu.be/fgwtTkZzZnU?si=dL178Nun6Gt5CSTy

Thanks for reading,

Jesse