The longer Project Restart is delayed over relegation, the more reasons Manchester United, Liverpool, Manchester City and the rest have to listen to the weird fantasies of the European Super League fanatics. Andrea Agnelli and his fellow European Club Association extremists thus far have been thankfully ignored but in a pandemic-era Premier League enmeshed in arguments over relegation, even that option starts to look attractive.

Sam Wallace, The Telegraph, 30 May 2020

16 August 2025. The fourth season of the European Super League kicks off with the following 3 fixtures:
11:45 CET (18:45 Tokio/Seoul) Bayern Munchen – Manchester United
17:00 CET (20:00 Doha/Riyadh) Real Madrid – FC Barcelona
23:45 CET (18:45 Rio/Buenos Aires) AC Milan – Liverpool.

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Just a quick note about the way we consume information during this time. My approach is to reduce the number of sources pushing information to me, and relying more on the sources where I can pull information myself.

Concretely, I unsubscribed from all the newsletters (even though most of them were pretty good) and I trimmed the list of people I follow on Twitter. At the moment, my sources of information are:

PS: a tip for reducing the time spent on Twitter is to save the interesting stories in Pocket. The goal is to read them when I pull them from Pocket, not when they are pushed to me by Twitter.

My view on the recent study arguing that the lock-down measures implemented in Belgium should be relaxed to match the ones in the Netherlands, which lead to similar infection numbers. For completion, the 3 main differences between the two countries are:

• no legal enforcement of the lock-down in the NL
• all shops remain open in the NL
• telework is encouraged, but not mandatory in the NL

Note: For the sake of readability, I will add the relevant links at the end of the post.

What I liked in the study

• the dependency between the policy, human behavior and outcome
• the use of Google mobility data

The two premises

• I pretty much agree with the first one – about the complexity of the epidemic models and the fact that the Belgian government is not very transparent in sharing all the data. But we should not underestimate the importance of the scientists working together with the decision-makers.
• However, I do not agree with the second premise: that the models need precise data in order to work. Scientists routinely work with incomplete or imperfect data. Confidence intervals, margins of error, type I and II errors are all part of the game. This is not a perfect world.

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