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Celebrities, Statistics, And New Show Announcements At IAB Podcast Upfront – Forbes

Celebrities, Statistics, And New Show Announcements At IAB Podcast Upfront - Forbes nevin manimala
Celebrities, Statistics, And New Show Announcements At IAB Podcast Upfront - Forbes nevin manimala

Iab Podcast Upfront 2019

IAB

Celebrities, Statistics, And New Show Announcements At 2019 IAB Podcast Upfront

The 2019 IAB Podcast Upfront was a star-studded event that presented many new shows and encouraging statistics to marketers about consumers increasing appetite for podcasts while making one thing clear – “engagement matters now more than ever.” That was a quote from Wondery CEO Hernan Lopez in a speech at the top of the program that was a call to action for marketers to invest in advertising in podcasts as he highlighted that pronouncement with information about how audio ads are more effective than video or print ads. 

Wondery’s big announcement was that they will be working with NBC News on new narrative podcasts premiering in 2020 and that they will be co-marketing each other’s content.

When Ira Glass of This American Life speaks, people listen. “Life” along with “Serial” is number nine on the top publishers list in terms of unique monthly audience according to Podtrac with only two active programs while the only other network in the top ten with close to that small of a number of shows is The New York Times with 10. “I don’t think everyone’s gotten the memo that narrative matters,” Glass said as he announced his new currently unnamed show about white children in Brooklyn moving into a mostly non-white school while commenting on integration in America overall. “I know integration doesn’t sound like a sexy topic,” he added, “but in the hands of the team behind Serial it’s fascinating.” The new four-episode series premieres Q1 2020.

WarnerMedia Podcast Network shared the stage with Rooster Teeth’s podcast network The Roost to announce several new shows while Jason Baron, Senior Vice President of “WarnerMedia” told the audience why they should buy from them. “Through our parent company AT&T we have access to over 170 million customers,” he said while sharing detailed statistics about how the listening habits of consumers can help inform marketers about their buying decisions.

New shows announced from WarnerMedia:

  • Down the Hill: The Delphi Murders – True Crime podcast from HLN about the 2017 murders of two young girls from Delphi Historic Trails in Delphi, Indiana.
  • Ledlow & Parker – Turner Sports basketball commentators Candace Parker and Kristen Ledlow will co-host a new podcast to debut during the 2019-20 NBA season.
  • The Plot Thickens – TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz hosts this new podcast that features conversations with film director Peter Bogdonovich known for films like “The Last Picture Show” and “Paper Moon” and will premiere in spring 2020.

Rooster Teeth is owned by WarnerMedia and helps them reach a younger more media savvy audience. Burnie Burns one of the Executive Producers of The Roost and Geoff Ramsey the Executive Creative Director announced three new shows of their own.

  • Beneath – a scripted horror podcast that explores the hidden mysteries from the wreck of the Titanic.
  • Good Morning from Hell – a scripted comedy podcast about working on a morning television show in Hell.
  • Atlas – a near-future scripted political thriller about the world’s first start up nation.

AEW World Champion Chris Jericho appeared in a panel discussion for Westwood One representing his podcast Talk is Jericho where he has long form discussions with figures from the world of wrestling, film, music, and other entertainment fields.

Conan O’Brien appeared in a video to promote his Earwolf podcast Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend and thanked the audience for paying off the mortgage on his beach house before signing off saying, “Let’s do a lot of business together.”

Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey of The Office talked onstage about their new podcast Office Ladies that premiered this week about their memories of the hit television program one episode at a time.

Dan Pashman of The Sporkful hosted the afternoon session and announced his own new show called Pasta Project about his quest to create a new pasta shape that he hopes to have sold in stores.

iHeart Podcast Network announced Forgotten about the people buried in the famous tunnels of El Chapo. 

Celebrities, Statistics, And New Show Announcements At IAB Podcast Upfront - Forbes nevin manimala

The Questlove Podcast Network

Joshua Dudley

Jake Brennan of Disgraceland appeared on stage with iHeart to announce his new show The 27 Club about famous musicians who died at age 27. He was followed by Questlove of The Roots and head of the Tonight Show house band to promote The Questlove Podcast Network.

Will Ferrell as Ron Burgundy appeared in a pre-taped video wearing clown makeup to promote the third season of The Ron Burgundy Podcast.

Shondaland Audio announced a partnership with iHeartMedia to produce over a dozen shows over the next three years. Shondaland head Shonda Rhimes is well known for being the creator of Grey’s Anatomy and appeared on video to the attendees.

Celebrities, Statistics, And New Show Announcements At IAB Podcast Upfront - Forbes nevin manimala

New People Magazine Daily Podcast

Joshua Dudley

Meredith Corp announced new podcasts for their print brands People, Entertainment Weekly, InStyle and Parents. InStyle Editor-in-Chief Laura Brown will host Ladies First, for and about women “who are consistently brave, kind and curious.” Julia Dennison, Executive Editor of Parents.com will host It Takes a Village and interview a diverse lineup of parents in America to look at the problems we all face while People Magazine will launch a new daily podcast.

The actress Annie Murphy of the television show Schitt’s Creek sat down for a conversation to promote the newly announced EW On Set: Schitt’s Creek.

For ESPN Matthew Berry, a famous sportswriter once known as the “Talented Mr. Roto” for his fantasy sports picks, was on hand to promote Fantasy Focus Football.

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Intel will publicly share its race and gender pay gap statistics – Engadget

Intel will publicly share its race and gender pay gap statistics - Engadget nevin manimala

Pay gaps are a widespread issue, and they are particularly prevalent in the tech industry (especially in AI). Even so, critics dismiss the issue as a myth. The program spearheaded by the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is meant to help gain some clarity around the actual data. The results, though, are not mandated to be published; Intel is making its data public voluntarily. “You must be willing to put yourself out there as a company that can withstand criticism to achieve real progress,” said Intel’s VP of human resources, Julie Ann Overcash, when speaking with Bloomberg.

The EEOC previously collected data on race and gender, but not pay. 2019 will likely be the only year that employers are required to submit compensation data, though. The organization says that the cost of gathering the data — which is shouldered by the businesses themselves — is 15 times more expensive than expected.

Just this week, Intel reached an agreement with the Labor Department to pay $5 million for payment discrimination toward minorities. “As part of the agreement, Intel will pay $3.5 million in back wages and interest. It is also allocating at least $1.5 million in pay adjustments over the next five years for US workers in engineering positions,” says the Associated Press. The chip makers asserts that it reached global pay equity in January. Publishing the payment data will put some weight behind that claim.

Other tech companies like Google and Apple do report on diversity, but these are typically high-level documents that also serve as PR pieces. The reports sent to the EEOC presumably will be more detailed and will focus on hard data. Intel’s push for more transparency may lead other companies to be more detailed and include payment data in their own public diversity reports.

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The NCAA’s most recent statistics show 89% of all athletes who enrolled in college in 2012 earned degrees – NBCNews.com

The NCAA's most recent statistics show 89% of all athletes who enrolled in college in 2012 earned degrees - NBCNews.com nevin manimala
The NCAA's most recent statistics show 89% of all athletes who enrolled in college in 2012 earned degrees - NBCNews.com nevin manimala

INDIANAPOLIS — Graduation rates among college athletes continue to hit record highs.

The NCAA’s most recent statistics, released Wednesday, show 89% of all athletes who enrolled in college in 2012 earned degrees, an increase of 1 percentage point over last year’s all-time high. That’s nearly 10 percentage points above the 80% goal the late NCAA President Myles Brand established when the governing body first started calculating this measure in 2002.

“Our students engaged in intercollegiate athletics continue to demonstrate excellence in both athletics and academics,” Georgetown President John DeGioia, the Division I Committee on Academics chairman, said in a statement. “These numbers — nearly 30,000 additional graduates because of the NCAA’s academic policies — show that our work is vital.”

Players in the Football Championship Subdivision and Division I women’s basketball players maintained their numbers from last year at 79% and 91%, respectively.

And for the first time, every women’s sport finished with a grad rate of at least 90%..

But Division I men’s basketball players saw a 2-point drop to 79% overall while the percentage of black players fell to 79%, a 3-point decline.

Still, NCAA President Mark Emmert applauded the results.

“College athletes continue to meet and exceed the benchmarks set for academic achievement,” Emmert said in a statement. “They have surpassed the original goal by nearly 10 percentage points, a phenomenal achievement that highlights the commitment these students have to succeed in all areas of life.”

Federal stats also show athletes and non-athletes each graduating at rates of 68%, according to federal data.

The two measures differ because the federal rate does not consider whether students earn a degree from a school other than the one in which they first enrolled.

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Information theory as a forensics tool for investigating climate mysteries

During Earth’s last glacial period, temperatures on the planet periodically spiked dramatically and rapidly. Data in layers of ice of Greenland and Antarctica show that these warming events — called Dansgaard-Oeschger and Antarctic Isotope Maximum events — occurred at least 25 times. Each time, in a matter of decades, temperatures climbed 5-10 degrees Celsius, then cooled again, gradually. While there remain several competing theories for the still-unexplained mechanisms behind these spikes, a new paper in the journal Chaos suggests that mathematics from information theory could offer a powerful tool for analyzing and understanding them.

“In many systems, before an extreme event, information dynamics become disordered,” says Joshua Garland, a postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute and lead author on the new paper. For instance, information theoretic tools have been used to anticipate seizure events from disturbances in EEG readings.

Initially, the authors anticipated they would see a signal — a destabilization in the climate record similar to those seen in pre-seizure EEGs — just before the warming events. But those signals never appeared. “Around these events, you have the same amount of information production,” says Garland. And this, suggest the authors, indicates that Dansgaard-Oeschger and Antarctic Isotope Maximum events were most likely regular and predictable patterns of the climate of the last glacial period rather than the results of unexpected events.

In addition, information theory could improve how scientists calculate accumulation — how much snow fell in any given year. “It’s very challenging. Many people are working on this, and they are using sophisticated math, combined with expert knowledge and known features, to figure out the accumulation,” says Garland. Currently, fine pollen signatures are some of the best differentiators between years in ice that is tens of thousands of years old, compressed under the weight of each subsequent snowfall. Information theory, and specifically a statistical approach called permutation entropy, offers a different approach. “This could be a fast and efficient tool for the experts to corroborate their work,” says Garland.

“When you’re dealing with a timeseries, you want to know what meaningful information is present. You want to extract it and use it, and to not use information that isn’t useful,” says Garland. “We hope this tool can help scientists do this with ancient climate records.”

Information theory is already being used to identify anomalies in the climate record — particularly, to flag anomalies introduced during the collection and observation of the ice cores.

This paper follows on the heels of two related studies published in Entropy and Advances in Intelligent Data Analysis XV.

“These information-theoretic calculations are not only useful for revealing hidden problems with the data, but also potentially powerful in suggesting new and sometimes surprising geoscience,” write the authors in the new paper.

Story Source:

Materials provided by Santa Fe Institute. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

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Trump is at war with statistics — and it’s going about as well as you’d imagine – The Washington Post

Trump is at war with statistics — and it’s going about as well as you’d imagine - The Washington Post nevin manimala
Trump is at war with statistics — and it’s going about as well as you’d imagine - The Washington Post nevin manimala

For that, Trump has a response.

“Now the do-nothing Democrat con artists and scammers are getting desperate,” Trump said in Minneapolis. “Thirteen months, they got to move fast because they’re not beating us at the polls and they know it despite the phony, despite the phony polls that you see all the time. They have phony polls, you know, polls are no different. Remember, I always used to talk about polls. I know polls very well. Polls are no different from crooked writers. They’re crooked polls, crooked polls — no different.”

Trump did use to talk about polls a lot — back when they showed him winning the Republican primary by a wide margin. Here is a sample tweet:

Since he took office, though, the polls have been fairly grim. He’s resorted to repeatedly lifting up outlier polls from consistently Trump-friendly pollsters that show him hovering around 50 percent approval. On more than a dozen occasions, for example, Trump has highlighted a poll from Rasmussen Reports showing his approval at or over 50 percent.

Trump’s line about polls being like reporting is accurate in one sense: If he doesn’t like what it says, he dismisses it as fake — even when it’s obviously not.

Polling is, of course, a statistical endeavor, in which pollsters collect information and weight it to accurately represent the population being polled. There’s subjectivity involved in determining what that weighting looks like, who’s polled, and what’s asked but it’s largely math — with a long track record of accuracy.

In recent days, Trump’s frustration about polling has been focused not on his approval rating or his chances in 2020 but on impeachment. When Fox News’s pollsters last week announced that 51 percent of respondents believed Trump should be both impeached and removed from office, Trump turned against his favorite cable news network.

“From the day I announced I was running for President, I have NEVER had a good Fox News Poll,” he tweeted on the day the poll came out. “Whoever their Pollster is, they suck.”

As is often the case, Trump was joined in his efforts to brush away bad news by allies and the conservative media ecosystem. In short order, Trump defenders started digging into the Fox poll, raising various specious questions about how it was conducted and who was targeted.

There emerged during the 2012 presidential race a concept called “unskewing,” in which polls that showed President Barack Obama leading Republican nominee Mitt Romney were adjusted by third parties to (in their estimation) better reflect the electorate. Those unskewed polls generally showed Romney winning, though, as history books can confirm, Romney did not win.

The New York Post decided to unskew the Fox News poll.

“Princeton, New Jersey, pollster Braun Research, which conducted the survey, noted 48% of its respondents were Democrats,” the tabloid’s Mary Kay Linge wrote on Friday. “But the actual breakdown of party affiliation is 31% Democrat, 29% Republican and 38% independent, according to Gallup.”

The “real” values? “A poll weighted for party affiliation would have concluded that 44.9% favored impeachment and 44.4% opposed it,” Linge wrote, pointing to “Post analysis.”

There are all sorts of misleading aspects of that “analysis,” including the use of tenths of a percent to make the results appear more statistically accurate. Doesn’t 44.9 percent look more precise than Fox News’s original 51 percent value? Well, it isn’t.

Among the many reasons? The assumption about what Gallup shows is itself wrong. Yes, Gallup’s most recent polling shows the party breakdown above. But most independents typically vote with one party or the other. Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents make up 49 percent of the population — about where the Fox News poll had them. There are a range of other problems with reweighting solely on party and without access to the original numbers, but we think we’ve made our point.

Trump, of course, loved the Post article. On Monday afternoon, he used it to try to debunk a New York Times article that referenced the Fox News result.

Shortly afterward, his 2020 campaign decided to try to fundraise on the idea that the polls were out to get the president. It highlighted a Drudge Report headline about the Fox poll.

“The FAKE POLLS are at it again,” an email from the campaign read. “The same people who GUARANTEED that Crooked Hillary would win in 2016 are once again saying that the American people have turned against me.”

(An amusing footnote to the email from the Trump campaign that was sent to my personal email? The line reading, “I’m much more interested in what Philip from New York thinks, than what Fake News Outlets think.” Why not both?)

I’m not sure that Fox News ever “guaranteed” Clinton would win in 2016, and, in fact, I seem to recall something quite different from that. But Fox News — like most pollsters — did predict Clinton had a national lead over Trump. Which, of course, she did, winning nearly 3 million more votes than Trump. (What did polling get wrong? Some state polls were off the mark on their models of who would turn out, giving Clinton an edge in states that she went on to lose, throwing off electoral vote calculations.)

Again, all of this is very much in keeping with Trump’s strategy from day one. Anything negative is contrived, fake and emanating from an untrustworthy source, even if that source has been celebrated as reliable by Trump in the past, and even if the information provided is ultimately proved to be accurate. Trump lives in a very narrow window of time, a bell curve of existence in which yesterday and tomorrow quickly vanish from view in favor of the now. As long as he keeps his supporters living in that same moment, the immediate worldview he offers them is sustainable. It’s an existence that relies on the assumption that everyone is biased and fickle, which is in itself probably revealing.

But, as the saying goes, the truth will out. And on Tuesday morning, it did, in the form of a new poll from Scott Rasmussen, formerly of Rasmussen Reports. According to Rasmussen, fully 50 percent of the country supports impeaching and removing Trump from office. That’s higher than the percentage of voters who approve of Trump’s job as president in the estimation of Rasmussen’s old firm.

No doubt the New York Post’s crack team of statisticians is already digging into the party breakdowns.

Correction: The article was corrected to indicate that the new poll came from Scott Rasmussen, not Rasmussen Reports.

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Copa Holdings Announces Monthly Traffic Statistics For September 2019 – PRNewswire

PANAMA CITY, Oct. 14, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Copa Holdings, S.A. (NYSE: CPA), today released preliminary passenger traffic statistics for September 2019:

Operating Data

September

September

% Change

FY

FY

% Change

2019

2018

(YOY)

2019

2018

(YOY)

Copa Holdings (Consolidated)





ASM (mm) (1)

1,992.1

2,108.2

-5.5%

18,964.7

19,373.0

-2.1%

RPM (mm) (2)

1,691.5

1,704.0

-0.7%

16,059.9

16,194.8

-0.8%

Load Factor (3)

84.9%

80.8%

4.1p.p.

84.7%

83.6%

1.1p.p.

1. Available seat miles – represents the aircraft seating capacity multiplied by the number of miles the seats are flown.

2. Revenue passenger miles – represents the numbers of miles flown by revenue passengers

3. Load factor – represents the percentage of aircraft seating capacity that is actually utilized

For the month of September 2019, Copa Holdings’ capacity (ASMs) decreased 5.5%, while system-wide passenger traffic (RPMs) decreased only 0.7% year over year. As a result, system load factor for the month was 84.9%, 4.1 percentage points higher than September 2018.

Copa Holdings is a leading Latin American provider of passenger and cargo services. The Company, through its operating subsidiaries, provides service to 80 destinations in 33 countries in North, Central and South America and the Caribbean with one of the youngest and most modern fleets in the industry, consisting of 103 aircraft: 6 Boeing 737 MAX9s, 82 Boeing 737NGs aircraft and 15 Embraer-190s. For more information visit www.copa.com.

CPA-G

CONTACT:

Raúl Pascual – Panamá

Director – Investor Relations

011 (507) 304-2774

SOURCE Copa Holdings, S.A.

Copa Holdings Announces Monthly Traffic Statistics For September 2019 - PRNewswire nevin manimala

Related Links

http://www.copa.com

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Mazzuca: The misleading statistics of economic inequality – Vail Daily News

Mazzuca: The misleading statistics of economic inequality - Vail Daily News nevin manimala
Mazzuca: The misleading statistics of economic inequality - Vail Daily News nevin manimala

Former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli once quipped; “There are three types of lies; lies, damned lies and statistics.” 

And no one can manipulate statistical information better than the media that loves comparing “the rich” and “the poor.” But those comparisons are seldom what they appear to be because the government statistics they use are simply snapshots taken at a given point in time, a situation that fails to reveal how “the rich” and “the poor” are in many cases the same people at different stages of their lives.

During a recent broadcast of MSNBC Live, Ali Velshi and Stephanie Ruhle did a story about wealth inequality in America. The liberal canard was transparent as the cable hosts self-righteously described how the wealth of the upper 1% of Americans had increased by $16.8 trillion during the last 30 years while the bottom 50% saw a $900 billion decrease. 

If one accepted those figures at face value, one might conclude there’s a problem with our system.  But the cable hosts conveniently omitted the fact that Americans in the lower echelons of income and net worth do not stay there because we live in a dynamic society where people move within economic brackets, and the upper and bottom quintiles don’t comprise the same people from year to year.

Velshi and Ruhle are educated people and surely understand when referring to people in particular income brackets as “the rich” or “the poor” they are implicitly assuming these are enduring conditions and the residents in these brackets remain the same from one year to the next when nothing could be further from the truth.

As the American Enterprise Institute points out, we live in a society where the vast majority of people move from one set of economic circumstances to better ones and few Americans remain in the same quintiles over time.  Lest we forget, the founders of Microsoft, Google and Apple didn’t start off as billionaires; each of these iconic corporations began in a garage, and through diligence and innovation, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and their fellow hi-tech entrepreneurs moved up through the economic quintiles.  

During my working years, I took part in a study conducted by the University of Michigan illustrating that very point. The study followed the economic fortunes of a given set of working Americans over a 20-year period and revealed that 29% of the people initially in the bottom 20% rose to the top 20% during the study period, while just 5% remained in the bottom 20% throughout the study. 

But it’s this second statistic that’s so revealing, to wit: high school algebra teaches us that 5% of 20% is 1%, which means that as an economic matter, only 1% of the people in the study never moved out of the bottom quintile. 

Another misleading yet “accurate” statistic occurs when using household income as a barometer of income inequality. By definition, we know the number of households in each of the five quintiles must be identical (if that weren’t’ the case it wouldn’t be a quintile).

However, according to 2017 data from the United States Census Bureau, nearly 40 million more Americans were living in the top quintile of households than the bottom quintile; and even more telling, four times as many people were working in that quintile than in the bottom quintile, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the average household income was far greater in top quintile than in the bottom quintile.  

While the aforementioned illustrations bear out Disraeli’s oft-repeated quip about statistics, the truly troubling aspect of this matter is the common theme, i.e., each distortion is designed to create the illusion that there’s a problem when in reality none exists. And of course, by extension, the remedy to this “problem” is always the same — more government intervention in the economy.

Yes, income inequality does exist in America — some of it self-inflicted, some not. And to address this matter we must keep in mind the great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus; history has proven repeatedly that the only way to raise the standard of living for people on a mass scale is with an economic system that creates wealth, not one that simply redistributes it.

Quote of the day:  “When looking at the biggest study of the American dream, the No. 1 correlate for upward mobility is having two parents in a home.”— Stephen Marche

Butch Mazzuca, of Edwards, writes biweekly for the Vail Daily. Follow him on his blog at butchmazzuca.com.

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Statistics Suggest ‘Essential’ Casemiro Close To Burning Out For Real Madrid And Brazil – Forbes

Statistics Suggest ‘Essential’ Casemiro Close To Burning Out For Real Madrid And Brazil - Forbes nevin manimala
Statistics Suggest ‘Essential’ Casemiro Close To Burning Out For Real Madrid And Brazil - Forbes nevin manimala

MADRID, SPAIN – OCTOBER 05: Casemiro of Real Madrid reacts during the Liga match between Real Madrid CF and Granada CF at Estadio Santiago Bernabeu on October 05, 2019 in Madrid, Spain. (Photo by Quality Sport Images/Getty Images)

Getty Images

He has arguably been Real Madrid’s best player this season with both his club and country lacking something whenever he is missing. 

For Tite’s five-time World Cup winners Brazil, this was no better seen than in the humbling 2-1 World Cup quarter final defeat against Belgium in Russia last year. Ruled out through suspension, an exposing of aging stand-in Fernandinho left Kevin De Bruyne to fire at will and forced his Manchester City teammate into a temporary retirement fueled by racial abuse. 

Casemiro led the Seleção to their first major trophy in 12 years this summer, but the hosts were almost knocked out in the last eight in successive years – this time by Paraguay on penalties – when he picked up too many yellow cards in the group stage and his absence was confirmed.

Returning to a Madrid in transition, where Zinedine Zidane hopes to reinvent the wheel in his second stint at the Bernabéu, the former São Paulo FC academy product has been more involved than ever for the La Liga giants and his country leading MARCA to brand him ‘Don Essential’. 

Lucky not to be red carded for playacting last week in a 4-2 win over Granada that kept Los Blancos top before the international break, Casemiro has also been outstanding in games. This includes the 2-0 win over Osasuna, which saw them originally reach the summit while the midfield enforcer provided a stunning long-range assist that allowed compatriot new boy Rodrygo mark his dream debut with a golazo. 

As has been highlighted this weekend, of the 1,170 minutes there have been possible to play for Real Madrid and Brazil in 2019/2020, Casemiro has completed an astounding 1,114 of them. No less than 95.4%, then. 

By the Catalonian press, concerns were voiced about Arthur completing a ‘senseless’ 13,500 mile trip to Singapore as part of the Chevrolet-sponsored Brasil Global Tour. It is one that Casemiro has embarked on too, again completing the full game against Senegal as a clearly-fatigued Arthur was criticised by the press in their shared homeland for appearing absent without leave on the pitch. Now, compounded with the overall duties Casemiro has faced, the same fears over his physical well-being are beginning to emerge from the media in the Spanish capital. 

For today Casemiro could again play the duration of today’s with Nigeria before heading back to Spain. With Toni Kroos out injured, his elder Luka Modric featuring for Croatia and the youthful Fede Valverde not due until the start of the weekend, will Casemiro be in the first XI away at Mallorca on Saturday night? And then yet again in the Champions League in Istanbul in a must-win showdown with Galatasaray midweek?  How about four days later at the Camp Nou in El Clasico where defeat could mean bitter rivals Barcelona usurping his side in La Liga?

As essential he is and impeccable his athleticism may be, the ‘Tank’, as he is fondly nicknamed, is at risk of running out of gas and it might not be pretty when Zidane and Tite’s reliability on him exposed at a great cost.   

When such a dependence on Alisson from Jurgen Klopp and the Brazil manager reached an ugly conclusion at the beginning of the current term, the shot stopper was ruled out for two months. Though the Selecao may survive their November friendlies without him, Zidane simply might not.