Our Writers

Ijaz Shah spent seven years working in performance analytics at club level before turning his attention to international football. His work sits at the intersection of traditional tactical analysis and modern data science. He is more interested in what the numbers explain than what they merely describe.

At Gegenpresss, Ijaz covers deep-dive analysis pieces and data journalism, with a particular focus on how statistical trends across domestic leagues translate into tournament performance. He believes most football commentary is qualitatively overconfident and quantitatively under-informed, and he is here to fix that.

His method: find the metric nobody is tracking, build the argument from the ground up, and never mistake correlation for a narrative.

Joe Reeves has been watching football for longer than he should admit and has been wrong about it in public for most of that time. He does not consider this a problem. Being wrong loudly and on the record is, he argues, more useful to the discourse than being diplomatically vague and technically unfalsifiable.

His remit at Gegenpresss is hot takes — the kind that make you read the piece even when you are already sure he is wrong. The key rule, as he sees it: every take must be arguable, specific, and stated without hedging. No "could", no "arguably", no escape hatches.

Joe grew up watching lower-league football in the north of England before years covering fan media convinced him that the best football writing comes from people who actually care about the result.

Tim Raven-Hill has been building tournament prediction models since 2010, when a spreadsheet he made for a work sweepstake got more accurate as the rounds progressed. He has been refining the methodology ever since.

His approach combines squad depth analysis, recent competitive form, historical tournament data, and, in his own words, "the coefficient of bottling it under pressure". He insists this last variable is measurable. His colleagues are not fully convinced but the track record is hard to dismiss.

For the 2026 tournament, Tim is covering all 48 nations in the Gegenpresss Tournament Prediction series: a structured verdict for every team, a clear exit-round call, and the reasoning written out in full so readers can tell him exactly where he went wrong.