There is a superb report in the FT on the influence of statistical analysis on football. The use of data by clubs to make decisions about players was pioneered in this country by Arsene Wenger at Arsenal, over a decade ago, but it's now reaching a whole new level of sophistication:
I recently toured several actors in football’s data revolution, and was struck by how far it had progressed. “We’ve somewhere around 32 million data points over 12,000, 13,000 games now,” Mike Forde, Chelsea’s performance director, told me one morning in February in the empty stands of Stamford Bridge. Football is becoming clever.
Stats are by no means an infallible guide to judgement:
In August 2001 Manchester United’s manager Alex Ferguson suddenly sold his defender Jaap Stam to Lazio Roma. The move surprised everyone. Some thought Ferguson was punishing the Dutchman for a silly autobiography he had just published. In truth, although Ferguson didn’t say this publicly, the sale was prompted partly by match data. Studying the numbers, Ferguson had spotted that Stam was tackling less often than before. He presumed the defender, then 29, was declining. So he sold him. As Ferguson later admitted, this was a mistake. Like many football men in the early days of match data, the manager had studied the wrong numbers. Stam wasn’t in decline at all: he would go on to have several excellent years in Italy. Still, the sale was a milestone in football history: a transfer driven largely by stats.
Mistakes like that, say the sceptics, spring from a crucial difference between baseball (where stats have long been crucial, as documented in Michael Lewis's Moneyball) and football: one is digital and one is analogue. Baseball is a series of events; it can be measured pitch by pitch. Football is a more 'fluid' game - 22 men kicking a ball about for 90 minutes - which makes it difficult to model accurately. But the data-nerds are getting better and better at doing so, and their science - or art - is assuming a new centrality to the business of buying, selling and coaching players.
Apart from anything this story is a great counterweight to the post-Blink strain of books about the superiority of 'gut instinct' decision-making. Our instincts and intuitions about reality all too often let us down:
If you looked at Manchester City’s Yaya Touré, with his languid running style, you might think he was slow. If you looked at the numbers, you’d see that he wasn’t. Beane says, “What stats allow you to do is not take things at face value. The idea that I trust my eyes more than the stats, I don’t buy that because I’ve seen magicians pull rabbits out of hats and I just know that rabbit’s not in there.”
It's be interesting to know what the stats are on Peter Crouch.
Read the whole thing, which is fascinating throughout (if you're interested in that kind of thing).
Who is Beane?
Posted by: Ogilvy | June 23, 2011 at 05:33 PM