Thought the pod was excellent and why it's content so consistently outstrips others in the field (i.e. contributors put forward constructive criticism instead of shying away and happy clapping).
Agree with Antynwa's post above there is something really weird about the high likelihood of us winning the league, while having played poorly for a good couple of months, looking knackered, making odd team selections and having major squad issues hanging over us going into the summer (the contracts).
One thing that needs to be added on the contracts point is that players will often play out of their skin towards the start/midpoint of a contract expiry year, but then will start to become more reticent towards the very end of the contract as they look to avoid injury (so that they are not injured while looking for a new club). This might be what is happening with Salah to an extent, though he has trailed off towards the back end of seasons in previous years too.
It feels like (with the exception of Brentford) we've had very few games where we have scored late on to rescue points, this could be a recency bias thing, but again comes back to the overall look of tiredness/lack of match sharpness and rotation.
My long term concern about this derives from the ownership/club hierarchies deep aversion to investment in the team outwith circumstances where we get unexpected windfalls (Barcelona's farcical Coutinho bid, the Saudi acquisition of Henderson and Fabinho). Having a manager who may throw young players under the bus (Quansha), maligns/excludes squad players (Elliott, Endo, Chiesa), doesn't rotate to a great extent and seems dismissive of the notion combined with a potential* lack of recruitment of his particular purloined first team players looks like it might not be a great mix in the future.
It would be interesting to know what the recruitment team think of the Chiesa situation given the recent comments by Ian Graham about Brendan Rodgers reticence to play certain players that had been recruited to specific roles by the team.
*Being very catastrophist there