World Cup 2026: Western Europe Dominates the Stats

Now that all the teams have played once, it's time for a little stats roundup, Francis-style. Last time around, I built on an idea floated in Soccernomics, by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, that showed that national teams from Western Europe dominated the Men's World Cup (I added that qualifier because I'm sure they do well in the Women's World Cup too, but I haven't crunched those numbers yet).

In short, Soccernomics noted that Western Europe was so strong that no Western European team lost against a team from the rest of the world (including Eastern Europe) in the 2006 World Cup. I then counted up the results from the subsequent tournaments (and from 2002, for completeness), and found that the signal is still there, if less pronounced. In short, teams from Western Europe won, on average, 66.7% of their matches against teams from the rest of the world, with draws counting as half a win (which follows Soccernomics' methodology).

2006 was the highest, with an 89.7% record against ROW (rest of world), or 2.59 points per game. 2002, held in South Korea and Japan, was the lowest with 59.1% against ROW and 1.64 points per game. 2022 was the next lowest, with 59.4% wins against ROW and 1.66 points per game.

So how does 2026 stack up so far, with each team having played once?

As of now, Western Europe's record against ROW is 79.2%, or 2.17 points per game, making it the second-highest average since 2006. Although there have been a couple of surprises, like Spain's draw with Cape Verde and the Netherlands' draw with Japan, no team from Western Europe has yet lost a match. This is likely to change as the tournament goes on, especially since Austria has yet to face Argentina and Scotland has yet to face Brazil - and based on Argentina's performance against Algeria the other night, we can expect them to encounter more Western European teams as the tournament goes on.

There are two other ways to slice this data. I decided to do a league-style table for each confederation participating in this tournament, which for once is all six, and this is how the points per match shake out:

1. UEFA: 1.69
2. CONMEBOL: 1.33
3. Asia: 1.22
4. CONCACAF: 1.17
5. Africa: 1.11
6. OFC: 1.00

UEFA's number includes four teams from Eastern Europe, but if you separate the two regions in UEFA, the picture is stark:

1. Western Europe: 2.17
2. Eastern Europe: 0.25

This mismatch is due to Czechia, Turkey and Croatia all losing their opening games, while Bosnia-Herzegovina drew against Canada, whereas no Western European team has lost a match yet.

The other way to look at this data is to split out the so-called EU5: England, France, Germany, Spain and, er, Italy, who aren't here. But even with just four teams in the tournament, the EU5's points-per-game record is even better:

1. EU5: 2.50

As Kuper and Szymanski argue in Soccernomics, Western Europe's chief advantage is in being at the center of the world's football networks. The world's best players and best coaches converge there, particularly in those nation's club tournaments, exchanging knowledge every time someone moves from one team or league to another. One example is Pep Guardiola, who's just left his position as Manchester City manager: he brought the style of football he learned at Barcelona first to Bayern Munich and then to City, and by the end of his tenure in England, pundits noted that even teams down in the lower divisions were setting up with goalkeepers controlling distribution from the back of the pitch.

The system is self-sustaining, because the most money and the most visibility is in Western Europe, and particularly the EU5 leagues. Unfortunately, it doesn't export well, because - apart from leagues that distort the economics, like MLS, the Saudi Pro-League and, previously, the Chinese league - the best paychecks are still in Western Europe.

That said, there are now more cases of players returning to South America after a stint in Europe, such as Neymar - though he doesn't feel as culturally omnipresent as he was in his time in Europe, when he'd cameo in movies like XXX: The Return of Xander Cage. Action-movie cameos aside, Neymar likely went home to Brazil to get game time in a different environment than Paris or Barcelona, and it's paid off in that he was selected for the national team this tournament.

Though it feels more important for the longer-term development of the game outside Europe that Brazil selected an Italian, Carlo Ancelotti, as its coach for the tournament. Ancelotti isn't necessarily a theoretician the way Guardiola or Austria's coach Ralf Rangnick are, but his decades of experience winning the Champions League should provide a different perspective in how to set up to win a tournament. The question will be how well Brazil does under him, and whether the experience he brings will take root longer term.

There's more to be said about coaches with European experience filtering out into the rest of the world, but Round 2 of the group stage, featuring Czechia vs South Africa, has just started, so I'll leave those thoughts for another post. But I'll be interested to see how these numbers, particularly Eastern Europe's, change over the next two rounds, and over the tournament as a whole.

World Cup 2026: Every Time I Think I'm Out

I may have talked about it on this blog, but my enthusiasm for this year's World Cup felt a shade more muted than it has in previous years. Some of it was the political backdrop, in which the tournament seems like it'll be used for propaganda purposes by the Trump administration; some of it was the corruption of FIFA; and some was the lack of cheap tickets, coupled with my reduced buying power and the lack of fun matches near me at Levi's Stadium. It also didn't help that Italy has once again failed to qualify.

I didn't think I'd skip it, God forbid, but I sort of figured I'd be a lot more relaxed about it than previous years: maybe I'd focus on the most important games, or the most intriguing. I'd be there for the final, for sure, but there might be some groups I'd completely forego in the interest of sanity and maintaining a reasonable schedule.

Fast forward to Sunday, June 14th, my fourth straight day of watching as many matches as possible. As I type this, I'm sitting in front of the TV and splitting my attention between this blog and Sweden v Tunisia. In case you don't understand what this says about my sickness, it's a match-up between possibly the most boring European team (other than Switzerland) and the most boring African team. 

Yesterday I had a game in the background or in the foreground from noon (when I was at a friend's house for a barbecue) until past 11pm, when the day's fourth game ended. My day today started, not with the gym as it normally does, but at the local German pub to watch Germany's 7-1 demolition of the unfortunate Curaçao. I had a dark moment this morning when I realized that there would be 3-4 matches every day until early July, which means I'm going to be in front of the TV for a giant amount of that time.

Goodbye, productivity. Hello, spreadsheets about Western Europe's record against the rest of the world at the World Cup (expect a full blog post on that topic at the end of the tournament). My podcast-listening will consist exclusively of World Cup daily rundowns for the foreseeable future... and I still haven't finished yesterday's episodes of Totally Football and Football Weekly.

Now, before you think I'm totally World Cup-addled, I should note that I missed two matches in their entirety today: Netherlands v Japan, which apparently was a cracker, and Côte d'Ivoire v Ecuador, which didn't promise to be a cracker. Though I should say, the only reason I didn't watch them is that I was spending time first with my stepdad and then with my writing group. Which is to say, if I have better things to do, preferably with other humans, I will do those things instead of parking myself in front of the TV.

But also, yeah, if I don't have plans, I'm totally gonna watch Uzbekistan v Colombia on Wednesday night... when else am I going to get to see how the tactical nous of Italy legend Fabio Cannavaro deals with the free-flowing football of James Rodriguez and Yerry Mina?

On a more serious note, this World Cup is just as absorbing a spectacle as it usually is. On the pitch, some of the matches have been as entertaining as you might hope, with the USA's game against Paraguay being a good example. And if Germany hammering Curaçao 7-1 felt a little cruel, that brief moment when the minnows had equalized against the four-time world champions was a validation of the promise of the World Cup: maybe not that any team can beat any other team, but that any team can spring a surprise.

Off the pitch, the US is quietly getting excited about the World Cup, with a bunch of promotions from the likes of DoorDash and McDonald's livening things up. There's a good number of soccer-related ads at half-time (and on Fox, during the hydration breaks that bisect each half), and while many feature David Beckham, a pretty good amount also feature USMNT star Christian Pulisic. And of course, social media is awash with stories of Europeans coming to the US and encountering the outsize plates of American casual dining restaurants, as well as the outsized capacity of Americans, at their best, to welcome strangers to their country. 

That last part is the most important. We're in a particularly ugly period in American politics, as evidenced by the fact that the US launched an unprovoked attack on Iran, another participant in this tournament, and has denied entry to several of the Iranian team's staff. There was widespread worry that the matches would form the opportunity for ICE to deport a bunch of people, and we've been treated to the unedifying spectacle for about 18 months of US officials saying that of course everyone is welcome to attend... as long as they go home immediately afterwards.

FIFA likes to trumpet how football unites the world, to the point that it's become a meaningless cliche. And I'm not naive enough to suggest that taking a German dude to eat brisket tacos will save NATO or bring about world peace. But given how negative a view the rest of the world has developed of us, it's good for Europeans to come here and see that individual people are still welcoming and up for a laugh, even in places that overwhelmingly voted for Trump in 2024.

As I finish up this blog, another miracle has occurred, which is that Sweden has just spanked Tunisia 5-1. As noted, I have no horse in this race, but it's pleasing to see that a team I considered stodgy and unimaginative found it in themselves to break down a team that revels in negative football. This might be another outlier into which I shouldn't read too much significance, but coming on the heels of Germany 7-1 Curaçao and Netherlands 2-2 Japan, it's good to see free-scoring football, at least for the moment.

Every World Cup summer is a good one, and if the games are anything to go by, this year won't be an exception. The fact that the party is here on our doorstep and it's inviting in not just the world, but also the rest of America, hopefully will make it even better.

Champions League 2026: So, So Close

As I do every year, I watched the Champions League final this morning, and watched Paris St-Germain beat Arsenal on penalties to win its second Champions League in as many years. Like last year, it was a little depressing to see PSG beat a team I have some appreciation for - the only consolation is that at least this year Arsenal gave the French champions more of a game than Inter did last year.

Much was made of the fact that this marked the first successful title defense by a team since Real Madrid won three on the hop in 2016-18, but that's not that impressive, if you remember that Milan, Nottingham Forest, Liverpool, Bayern Munich, Ajax, Inter, Benfica and Real Madrid (again) have all done it too, going back from the 1950s to the 1980s. Every team that won the European Cup in the 1970s (apart from Feyenoord) did it multiple times in a row.

What's more interesting to me is that this win marks only the third time a French team has won Europe's biggest club tournament, and that PSG is only the second French team to win the tournament. Whenever I talk about the Champions League on this blog, I always refer to the Top 4 leagues (England, Spain, Germany and Italy) and France, which reflects the dominance of those leagues and their much higher UEFA ranking coefficients than that of France.

That is to say, France is the fifth-ranked league in Europe, but even with PSG's dominance of the Champions League of the past two seasons, its score is almost as far from fourth-place Germany as it is from sixth-place Portugal. Another way to look at the gulf between France and the Top 4 leagues is that France has never qualified for one of the two European Performance Spots that give a league a fifth participant in the Champions League - those have gone to England and Spain (twice each) and Italy and Germany (once each).

Well, here I need to admit something. When I started writing this blog post, I was going to argue that maybe it's time to start counting France as among the Top 5 leagues, and that Italy should start looking over its shoulder lest it drop out of the Top 4. Instead I find myself decrying the closed shop that means serial underperformer Italy, which hasn't had a Champions League winner since 2010, remains in second place, ahead of Spain, which feels like it's dominated in recent years.

Of course, it also confirms my belief that the only reason the French league is overperforming at the moment is because PSG keeps doing so well in the tournament. But it's the only French team that seems to challenge for anything, thanks to its massive financial clout, so there's no reason to give the fifth-place French team an extra Champions League spot.

But what of poor Arsenal? This is their second tilt at the Champions League final, after they lost to Barcelona in 2006. Incidentally, that was the last final I missed entirely, for the reason that I was graduating from grad school - my Arsenal-supporting friend, with whom I watched today's match, was there to see me walk and still holds missing the game against me.

The Gunners will feel hard done by, given that they scored first and held the lead for about an hour. And while they admirably held off PSG's attack, which has to be the best in Europe overall, they also weren't able to break through the PSG defense to score again. And then came the penalties, which exposed Arsenal's nerves, with two players missing their kicks.

It could have been a dream season for Arsenal: winning the league for the first time since 2004, seeing their North London rivals Spurs almost get relegated (and how hilarious would that have been), and getting to the final of the Champions League. What has to be even more agonizing is how close Arsenal came to winning this time - if a couple of shots had been taken better, if a few refereeing calls had gone their way (the ref was shocking btw)... if, if, if.

All these narratives, around coefficients and individual teams' seasons and whatever else, are part of what makes me love the Champions League so much. I may be a little sad that an English team I like lost to a cynical petrostate sportswashing project, but the occasion still delivers overall. It may not be the Super Bowl in terms of pageantry and cultural heft (the Champions League final isn't a place where companies debut their new ad campaigns), but it's my favorite yearly sporting event, but a wide margin.

So, dusting ourselves off from the 2025-26 season, we can look forward to the World Cup and the 2026-27 season after that. We go again, as the saying has it.

So Long, Pep

When I wrote my last post, about Arsenal's Premier League win, I talked about Pep Guardiola's departure from Manchester City as a done deal, though apparently it hadn't been completely decided yet at that juncture. It was subsequently confirmed, though, and so today marks Pep's last day in charge of Man City, after ten seasons in charge and oodles of trophies.

How many trophies make up an "oodle"? He won the Premier League six times, the FA Cup three times, the League/EFL Cup five times, the Champions League once, and the Club World Cup once as well. Not counting the Community Shield or the UEFA Super Cup, that makes 15 major trophies in ten seasons. Only in two of those seasons (2016-17 and 2024-25) did City fail to win a major trophy (though they won the Community Shield in 2024).

Compare that with his tenure at Barcelona, where he won the league three times, the Copa del Rey twice, the Champions League twice, and the Club World Cup twice, for a total of 9 major trophies (again, not including Supercopas de España or UEFA Super Cups). And then there's Bayern Munich, where he won the league three times, the DFB-Pokal twice and the Club World Cup once, for 6 trophies.

His trophies per season at Barcelona were 2.25, at Bayern he won 2 per season, and at City a comparatively paltry 1.5 per season, though it's fair to say he had a similar level of dominance in each league. I've said I don't think the Premier League is as competitive as some make it out to be, but it's also true that the Bundesliga is pretty much a closed shop and the Spanish league is not that far off - six league titles in ten seasons, including one where they dominated so heavily that City racked up 100 points, is pretty impressive, no matter how you slice it.

Not only that, but his time at City elevated Pep into a cultural figure, such that he made an appearance in Ted Lasso and felt impelled to weigh in on topics like the war in Gaza or Catalan independence. His time at Barcelona was fortunate enough to coincide with Lionel Messi's, which made Guardiola something of an icon among fans, but coming to City felt a little bit like raising his profile globally. Which sounds weird, but because so much of world culture is in English, and so much of what isn't in English still looks to the Anglophone world, means that when he came to England, his face would become instantly recognizable.

Now, I don't know any Man City fans personally, so I can't vouch for how they see him, though I suspect many on the blue side of Manchester have named their children Pep in the years since he came to their club. But I think I can confidently say that, global cultural figure or not, Pep didn't make himself as associated with the club as Jürgen Klopp did at Liverpool - Klopp seems to have bought into the Liverpool ethos more readily than Pep did at City, and so became a beloved figure among the fans. I don't know if Guardiola's as associated with City, which is funny when you consider that the hierarchy at Manchester City is heavily Catalan precisely so they could bring Guardiola on.

That also points to one of the big criticisms I've seen leveled at Guardiola: that he's always played on easy mode. He cut his teeth at Barcelona, one of the world's richest clubs and the place where he learned to play the basics of the style he popularized; then he moved to Munich and Germany's most successful club, kicking off a run of 11 successive league titles; before taking the reins at a petrostate-backed sports washing project. I once watched an interview where a pundit suggested that Jose Mourinho, Guardiola's main rival in Spain, was a better coach because Pep had always managed such dominant clubs - I think that pundit might reconsider given Mourinho's subsequent performances at Manchester United, Spurs and elsewhere, but there's something to the criticism.

Certainly it's hard to imagine how well Guardiola would get on if he suddenly found himself managing a team in League Two, where the budget to buy the best player for every position just isn't there. Though it's also true that Mourinho always benefited from managing the biggest and/or richest teams too.

None of this is to say that I don't rate Guardiola. I absolutely do, more than Mourinho or Klopp, if I'm honest. Klopp may have become more of a local hero (and more of a local hero than a lot of preceding Liverpool managers, it has to be said), but he didn't upend the game the way Guardiola did at Barcelona or City. One of the podcasts I listen to mentioned how when Pep came to England, the style of play was more basic than now, but in 2026, even teams down in the lower leagues set up in the same way as Premier League teams, with play flowing out from goalkeepers in a way it never did before. 

I'm actually quite excited to see where Guardiola ends up next. He seems not to have ruled out managing in England again, but I hope he doesn't - big-name managers who come back always seem to end up plunging down the table until they find themselves relegated to the Championship (see Rafael Benitez at Newcastle). I'd actually like to see Pep take over in Italy, so that he can work his magic at one of the big clubs there - even potentially win a Champions League again. My preference would be for him to pitch up at Juventus, of course, but I can't deny that it would be exciting to see him in the dugout at Napoli, for example.

He might also come and manage the England national team, which feels like it would be a mismatch for his talents. His career is based on meticulous training with a team he's built in his own image, whereas at a national team he'd have to make do with whoever has that country's citizenship and he'd have them only a few days per month for qualifying campaigns. Which isn't to say it'd be fun to see what happened if Pep did manage England, but I just don't think it'd bring the dominance many are expecting.

As far as the future, it's been noted that Mikel Arteta, at Arsenal, learned his trade from Guardiola, which makes this campaign a fitting capstone to Guardiola's time in England. Another fitting capstone is that Pep's replacement at City will be Enzo Maresca, another Pep student. Though given what I've heard about Maresca's tactical inflexibility, I suspect he won't be quite as dominant as his mentor was.

It's unlikely that there will never be a Premier League manager as dominant as Guardiola, but I think I can say that none of the current crop seems like they'll be as dominant or influential on the way the game is played. But I'm eager to see the next chapter, for Pep, for City and for the Premier League as a whole.

Arsenal Are 2025-26 Premier League Champions

It's funny how the football league system works: because teams earn a certain amount of points for wins and draws, the aggregate of results over a season can make it so that a team wins the league through results elsewhere. So it was today with Bournemouth's draw with Manchester City in the Premier League, which handed victory to Arsenal despite them not even playing today.

Of course I've been following the league eagerly all season - both from general interest and because of my participation in various Fantasy Premier League mini-leagues. And it's been fun watching the ups and downs of Arsenal's campaign, with the constant question each week of whether this would be the match that Arsenal fucked up, or if it would be when Man City turned on the style and steamrolled to their inevitable victory. Despite a couple of hiccups, neither of those things happened.

I'll admit I haven't always been convinced by Arsenal, or by their manager Mikel Arteta, over the last few years. I think that's partly because I memory-holed the fact that they came second in each of the past three seasons, but also because they came second in each of the past three seasons, including one memorable year when they threw away not one but two sizable leads over City to lose at the very end of the season. 

It also felt like every season was the same thing with Arsenal, the same problems of not scoring enough goals, because they never seemed to have a good enough striker. Ironically, this season was kind of the same, as they win the league with the fifth-lowest goals tally (I think in the Premier League era). Much was made of their ugly style of play and reliance on set-pieces, particularly corners, but another way of looking at it is, for whatever reason this strategy clicked and was enough to keep Arsenal ahead of their competitors pretty much all season.

The thought that strikes me is that Arsenal seem to have broken the City-Liverpool duopoly of the last couple of seasons - the last time a team other than those two won the league was Chelsea in 2017. Arsenal winning this year bolsters the argument - which I don't entirely buy - that the Premier League is the most competitive big league in Europe. There's some truth to the argument, because the EPL isn't dominated by one big marquee team (like Germany or France) or by a pair of dominant teams (like Spain), but also, in the previous eight seasons, City won six titles, including an unprecedented four in a row.

The reason people think the Premier League is more competitive is because the pool of teams that can challenge for the title is larger than in Spain or Germany. There used to be talk of the "Top Six" teams in England, which were City, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, Spurs and Manchester United. No matter that when this designation was coined, Liverpool hadn't won a top-flight title since 1990, or that Spurs hadn't done so since 1961 (and the less said about Spurs this season, the better). Arsenal also hadn't won since 2004, the Invincible season, and United hadn't won since 2013, Sir Alex Ferguson's last in charge.

It's worth noting that all of these teams have challenged for other big trophies in these past few years, even if they haven't always been competitive in the league. Liverpool won the Champions League in 2019, beating Spurs in the final, and Spurs won the Europa League last season against Manchester United. Arsenal have also qualified for Europe most seasons since their last title, so they've been doing well.

By comparison, since 2018 only two teams have won the Bundesliga (Bayern Munich and, just once, Bayer Leverkusen), two teams have won Ligue 1 in France (PSG and Lille, also just once), while in Spain, Barcelona and Real Madrid have won most of the titles in that same period (and yes, the one-time outlier is Atletico Madrid). The only moderately competitive league in this same period has been Serie A, where there have been four winners (Juventus, Inter, Napoli and Milan), of whom all but Milan have won multiple titles.

That list of league winners across the top four leagues, plus France, is a who's-who of extremely rich clubs. It's worth remembering that for all the talk of Manchester City's alleged financial doping (what's happening with those 115 charges, btw?), the richest teams win the richest leagues, and they also win in Europe. Chelsea didn't win a Premier League title until Roman Abramovich contributed his billions, and both City and PSG are effectively petrostate sportswashing projects, so of course they have a lot of cash behind them.

There's perhaps a temptation to suggest that Arsenal winning this season is a David vs Goliath style triumph against football's one-percenters, but no, let's keep in mind that Arsenal are themselves in the one-percent. Indeed, the title sewn up today is Arsenal's 14th in their history, which makes them the third most successful club in terms of league titles won, after Liverpool and Manchester United. Arsenal may not have won as many leagues as their stature implies, but that's only because some club has always come up with even more cash than them to buy their way to league success.

(Incidentally, Arsenal have also won 14 FA Cups, which is more than any other club, so they have those trophies to fall back on too)

In terms of what's next for the Gunners, I'm even more excited to see how they'll do in the Champions League final against PSG at the end of the month. And looking farther forward, I found myself sizing them up against their league competition next season - Man City will have a new coach, in Enzo Maresca, Xabi Alonso will be new at Chelsea, and Michael Carrick will have entrenched himself more at Manchester United (unless they decide not to hire him after all?). All of these teams will have the summer to rebuild and realign their playing styles, as will Liverpool, which may yet have a new coach in the dugout come August.

Arsenal have already vowed to keep improving, which will hopefully make for a better title defense than what Liverpool mustered this year. Without getting too far ahead of myself, I'm looking forward to seeing how they get on next season.

Objectivism is Immoral

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers

I'm really not a fan of Randian objectivist libertarianism, so the quote above has always resonated with me.

I remember in college I had a friend who identified as libertarian explain to me what exactly it meant. He said that, in his view, the government shouldn't own any land, so a libertarian government would immediately sell all public lands off. When I pointed out that meant that all the national parks would get sold to logging and mining companies, he shrugged and said that was just how the market would work. And that's when libertarianism lost me forever.

I've spoken before on this blog about how I'm big on rule of law. I believe I'm also on the record as being not the biggest fan of large corporations that distort markets and do what they want. Libertarianism would give us a lot of corporations doing whatever they want without worrying about downstream effects, and without being beholden to regulators or accountability.

The downstream effects thing is particularly important. In the objectivist view, companies shouldn't have to reckon with negative externalities, but that just means that everyone else would have to. But because the federal government would be effectively nonexistent ("small enough to drown in the bathtub", as many right-wingers like to say), cleanup wouldn't be the responsibility of taxpayers: there'd be no regulatory or centralized bodies to clean up oil spills and mining disasters and whatever else would happen. We'd just have to deal with the after effects of all these disasters individually.

If you don't believe me, Senator Rand Paul's reaction to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that poisoned large sections of the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 was, "Sometimes accidents happen." This was, it needs to be noted, in reaction to the US government attempting to make BP clean up its mess. Paul is possibly the most objectivist member of either house of Congress - it's no coincidence that his first name is "Rand", after all.

Without imputing further motives or ideology to a sitting US Senator, I just want to reiterate how immoral that viewpoint is. In that worldview, a pharmaceutical company that poisons its customers would suffer no consequences, and the victims - or rather their next of kin - would have no recourse. And if you think that's a far-fetched example, look up the Elixir Sulfanilamide poisoning of 1937, which killed 100 people and led to the introduction of toxicity testing for food and drugs.

About the only good thing about libertarianism is that it doesn't mind people smoking pot, but unfortunately, most libertarians in the US are also Republican voters, so we get the worst of both worlds: libertarians who want to control what you do in the privacy of your own home, but who don't want to stop companies killing you in the course of doing business.

This is why it's so concerning to see the Liz Truss-Javier Milei wing of politics running rampant all over the world. And why it was so concerning to see people talk about Milei's policies as "interesting" back in 2024, after Donald Trump was re-elected, because some of Milei's shock treatment in Argentina has seen reductions in inflation, albeit at the cost of higher prices for individual households, but that was because Argentina was a basket-case, economically. When Liz Truss attempted to push through unfunded tax cuts in the UK in 2022, she spooked the markets so badly that she lasted just 45 days.

By contrast, I'm heartened by the example of Zohran Mamdani in New York City, who's managed to fix a lot of quality of life issues like fixing potholes and clearing snow off the streets, while also balancing the budget without cutting social programs that people rely on. Instead of the libertarian view that the government can't do anything well, Mamdani's example is showing exactly how government is well-placed to fix certain things that the free market can't. I hope he'll manage to continue on like this, because government works when lawmakers understand what normal people need - libertarians can never understand that, and so they'll only ever offer cuts to regulations and services, all while everyone's daily life gets worse and worse.

Which is, as I say, immoral.

Another First Draft in the Can

I'm pleased to report that I finished the first draft of my romantasy novel yesterday. In its present form it weighs in at an impressive 148,930 words, which makes it the longest thing I've ever written. Though that word count will have to come down a little, not just in the normal course of revising and editing, but because debut authors plunking down phonebook-sized manuscripts into agents' Query Manager are, ahem, frowned upon.

To put that word count into perspective, Sarah J Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses runs to about 130,000 words, while Rebecca Yarros's Fourth Wing is apparently over 200,000 words. Neither is the first book by their respective author, so I'll have some cutting to do.

The other notable thing about this accomplishment is that it took me barely three months to write it. The key factor was obviously my current lack of employment, which meant I had a lot of time to devote to it during the day, but I also think I did a better job of plotting it out than I've done with my previous attempts at novels. For example, the last novel I wrote, which ran to 98,000 words when I subbed it to agents in 2024, took about six months to write, mostly in one-hour increments at 8pm when I'd finished all my life stuff (work, dinner, tidying, etc). The novel I wrote before that was intended to hit at least 80,000 words but came out at 50k, so I cut 10,000 words out and repackaged it as a novella.

I'm not entirely sure why this one stuck in my imagination so well, but I suspect it's because I plotted it out much more thoroughly than those others, with a lot more emphasis on the two POV characters' journeys. Although who knows, maybe when I go back to revise it I'll see all kinds of glaring plot holes and infelicities. I won't know until July at the earliest...

It's also worth saying that, apart from any outcomes I may be hoping for, I just had more fun writing this than I have in a long time. Partly that had to do with the spicy scenes (if we're being honest), but those were a way to get further into the characters' heads - to me at least. My critique group might be horrified (or worse, bored) by them. But the upshot is that I'm a little sad to be leaving the characters behind for the moment - they were my main creative focus for a relatively short but intense time, and now I have to try and banish them from my thoughts for a while, so that I can come back to them at revision time with fresh eyes.

Though, one thing I've been pondering (and this might just be the bargaining stage of my grief journey at leaving them) is how this "put the book away for at least 6 weeks" thing works for authors who are on deadline? Surely when Rebecca Yarros or Sarah J Maas or Joe Abercrombie finish their first draft, they don't put it aside for a couple of months, do they? Their editors must be waiting for something, surely.

This is one of those things I'd like to learn first hand.

On the other hand, I have other projects that have started to demand attention, and I've been looking forward to revisiting and revising them, so at least I'll have other things to keep me busy for the time being. And my critique group has been asking about one of them, which is, with luck, going to be my next main project - unless my brain falls in love with something else and makes me work on it at all hours like it did with this project.

Brains are fun!