Manchester United's Louis van Gaal and West Ham's Sam Allardyce are Feuding Over "Long Balls"

The current English Premier League season needed a good, old-fashioned managerial feud. After Sir Alex Ferguson retired the odds of these type of squabbles decreased exponentially. Sure, Jose Mourinho can irrate, but the Special One is a bit like Floyd Mayweather Jr. and operating on his own level of managerial mind games. By this comparison Arsene Wenger is Manny Pacquiao, which is kind of apt since the Frenchmen’s best fighting days are behind him, despite shoving Mourinho earlier this year.

Leave it to West Ham manager Sam Allardyce to stir the pot. At this point Big Sam doesn’t have much to lose. Opposing fans tend to loathe him, as do managers, so if he wants to mess around with Louis van Gaal and Manchester United following Sunday’s 1-1 draw at Upton Park, who’s going to stop him?

Actually, Allardyce kick-started, perhaps, the nerdiest managerial feud pro soccer’s ever seen. After the game the Irons boss used some passive-aggression to put down van Gaal’s tactics saying, “You might criticize Louis van Gaal for playing long balls as much as I am sometimes criticised for being direct. In the end it’s paid off for them.” (Allardyce’s longstanding direct style, which West Ham has broken away from this season, remained one of English soccer’s easiest punchlines.)

“Long ball” — aka direct, route one soccer — carries a stigma in this day-and-age when seemingly everyone who follows soccer is obsession with passing charts, heat maps, expected goal charts and any other analytic measuring tool that helps bring a more mathematical, logical approach to the game. If Allardyce were a stand-up comic, he basically called van Gaal a hack — a word that sets people off due to its public connotations.

Allardyce’s comments didn’t only stick in van Gaal’s craw, they appear have caused the tightly-wound, stern Dutchman to damn near lose his mind. During a Tuesday press conference van Gaal didn’t only address Allardyce’s remark, but produced four pages of data and distributed them among journalists to prove the “long ball” tag for Manchester United is, umm, false?

From The Guardian:

Hmmmmmm?

Based on the initial reactions, van Gaal’s data-driven retort didn’t quite go-over quite as well as expected.

Normally this is something that you could laugh off. If Manchester United played some long balls (The Guardian charted the club as the most-accurate long ball team in the EPL), is it the end of the world? The team was down 1-0 on the road and brought on Marouane Fellaini, who is excellent at winning aerials due to his massive frame. The Red Devils are locked in a tight race for one of England’s four Champions League berths, however many long or short or medium passes it takes to notch a goal are wholly irrelevant within the context of a game when you desperately need points, be it one or three.

What’s surprising is van Gaal, who’s built up a reputation as a no-nonsense, my way or the highway type, would actually allow the words “long ball” to raise his hackles so much. This is a guy with coaching experience across Europe at the highest levels with plenty of winner’s medals, yet allows one little comment to irk him. Worse than that, the way the media landscape works, for the next couple times United plays every single long pass will be tracked, discussion and dissected at length. So Allardyce’s chiding worked van Gaal and United into a media narrative they no longer control.

Now the chorus of voices with nothing better to do than stir the pot are going to wonder why a team with Robin van Persie, Wayne Rooney, Angel Di Maria, Juan Mata and Falcao is restoring to long ball tactics, to mixed results.

Advantage: Allardyce.

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[Photos via Getty]