I listened to Knutson a few times. I thought he was making a bad conclusion based on good data. There were basically two sets of data, and he was weighting his decision incorrectly on both.
The first set was Thomas’ performance data. He felt that Thomas wasn’t superlative. Thomas has, however, had statistically better seasons historically and was clearly offensively restrained under Simeone.
The second set was his age-modeling. This is where he made the bad managerial decision. While his overall assessment is correct that most players are best off in the 24-28 age window, you must be willing to make allowances for exceptional talent. This became abundantly clear to me when I tried to understand our formations / squad depth and realised that we had to keep Aubameyang or risk disaster despite his age. We needed quality players, particularly midfielders. So his overall analysis about peak ages remains true, but you need to be willing to make exceptions based on target and squad.
One last thought for Ted: we need to be relevant today to be relevant tomorrow.
