Jon Mackenzie

speaker

464 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 30 Aug

Jon Mackenzie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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The Athletic FC Podcast · Where next for Iraola? · 27 May 2026 podcast

team.

I think, again, in a team which doesn't have a huge amount of options in that area, particularly from a defensive point of view.

So, yeah, he'll be a mainstay for them, I expect.

Yeah, and the other unknown is the structure of the tournament, right?

This is a structure format of the tournament that we've not seen before.

I don't think there's probably been any tournament where it's been easier to get out of your groups, technically, because the best-placed, third-placed teams will end up going through into knockout stages.

So I wasn't anticipating this question before we started recording, so I've sort of been back of a fag-packeting, trying to work out what's going on here.

What's really standing out to me is that if you finish top of their group,

you then have a potential 16 different teams that it could feasibly be.

So if you finish first, you have less certainty about what's going to happen.

If they finish third, they're probably going to play Portugal.

That's almost guaranteed when you look at the Portuguese group.

Then if they finish second, they've got a good chance of coming up against a team like Egypt, Iran, New Zealand, assuming Belgium come top of Group G.

So if they come second or third, you have a sort of good idea of what they're going to do.

If they come first, there's three different potential groups where the third place team they could come up against.

And there's teams in there like Japan, Sweden, potentially Norway, Senegal.

These are tough teams.

So there's a degree of uncertainty about where they might end up going if they finish first in that group.

I think you would make the argument that actually finishing second is probably...

going to be the best option for them because they will come up against as i said one of egypt iran or new zealand if if belgium win that group as you would expect so it looks to me like that's that's probably going to be their not only their easiest group but also the one that the easiest route sorry but also the one where they have a bit more control over where i mean obviously it's hard to maybe finish second but um they might be keeping in that that in mind but yeah i think

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