From the leftfield - stats and the new Football

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/06/how-spreadsheet-wielding-geeks-are-taking-over-football
Almost exactly a decade ago, the American writer Michael Lewis published a book called Moneyball. It told the story of Billy Beane, the general manager of an unfashionable baseball team, the Oakland A’s, who was using new statistics to evaluate baseball players and strategies. From this unpromising material, Lewis crafted a bestseller that has sold more than a million copies.

Books hardly ever change anything but this one did. Moneyball changed baseball and almost all ball games from basketball to cricket but it also affected worlds beyond sport. Ken Mehlman, Republican campaign manager in the US presidential election of 2004, instructed his staff to read it, because he realised that it wasn’t just a sports book. It was also a perfect case study of how crunching numbers can give you an edge. That made it a book for our era of “Big Data”, in which the amount of data on earth more than doubles every two years and the only mystery is how to use all these confusing numbers.

Football, or “soccer” was always the most hidebound sport and it held out longest against the numbers revolution. But now, as Chris Anderson and David Sally write in their engaging and stimulating book The Numbers Game, “The datafication of life has started to infiltrate football.” That is quite a change. In football, people always did what they did because they had always done it that way. Clubs were historically run by autocratic managers who had left school at 16 to become players and didn’t hold with book-learning. However, unseen by most fans, something profound is happening inside the sport.

Like Moneyball, The Numbers Game reaches us from the US, which is rapidly becoming a soccer society. Anderson, originally from Germany, played semi-professional soccer before becoming a professor of government at Cornell. His neighbour Sally, once a baseball pitcher at Harvard, is a behavioural economist at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Watching soccer on television together, they grew interested in the game’s relative lack of numbers and analytics.

That absence had struck the first pioneer of numbers in football, Wing Commander Charles Reep. Not a fighter pilot but an accountant in the RAF’s Bomber Command, Reep made what is probably the first known attempt to log “match data”.

In 1950, at a Swindon Town game, he logged 147 attacks by Swindon in the second half. Extrapolating from this small sample, Reep calculated that 99.29 per cent of attacks in football failed. He continued to offer his services as an analyst to clubs into his late nineties but, as Anderson and Sally show, he was on a wild goose chase. Reep assumed that there was only one correct way to play football and, naturally, he thought he had found it. Boot the ball long, said the wing commander – put it near the opposition’s goal and you will win.

In reality, Anderson and Sally write, “There is no winning formula. There is no right answer to football.” Different strokes suit different teams. To quote the great Liverpool manager Bob Paisley: “It’s not about the long ball or the short ball; it’s about the right ball.” (The best managers of the past, including Paisley, intuited many of the findings now emerging from the numbers.)

In the mid-1990s, the spread of computers reignited the data revolution. Companies such as Opta and Prozone began collecting stats on football matches. Suddenly, clubs knew how many passes each player had completed, how many tackles he had made and how many kilometres he had run.

As soon as data becomes available in any industry, some people will use it – but they often use it wrongly. As the American baseball analyst-turned-master psephologist Nate Silver says of the new Big Data: “Most of the data is just noise, as most of the universe is filled with empty space.” Alex Ferguson, Manchester United’s manager, discovered this after he sold his defender Jaap Stam in 2001 because Stam’s number of tackles was decreasing. Ferguson thought Stam was in decline. Stam went on to play several more years for big clubs.

It turned out that tackles were a poor measure of a defender’s worth: they were just noise. We now know that great defenders such as the Italian Paolo Maldini barely tackle. Maldini stopped attacks from happening by positioning himself to close holes. Yet, as Anderson and Sally point out, that kind of negative event – the attack that doesn’t happen, the dog that doesn’t bark – is often hard to spot in match data. Football statistics tend to focus on things that do happen and, above all, on goals that do get scored.

As the data revolution progresses, more and more clubs are finding clever ways to use numbers. Each season, the number of sceptics declines – in part because many people in the game have now read Moneyball or at least seen the 2011 Hollywood movie starring Brad Pitt as Beane.

Not all the traditionalists are going quietly into the night. Some are now scheming to defend their turf against spreadsheet-wielding geeks. But others are learning not to believe their own eyes. As Beane told me: “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.”

The data revolution keeps stumbling on new truths. At Manchester City, for instance, the analysts finally persuaded the club’s then manager, Roberto Mancini, that the most dangerous corner kick is the inswinger, the ball that swings towards goal. Mancini had long argued (strictly from intuition) that outswingers were best. Eventually he capitulated and, in the 2011-2012 season, when City won the English title, they scored 15 goals from corners, the most in the Premier League. The decisive goal, Vincent Kompany’s header against Manchester United, came from an in swinging corner.

The most powerful figure in English football remains the manager and the statistical revolution has progressed fastest at clubs where the manager believes in data. Probably the leaders in this field in England today are Arsenal’s Arsène Wenger (an economics graduate and gifted mathematician), West Ham’s Sam Allardyce (not a gifted mathematician) and Manchester United’s incoming manager, David Moyes.

In March, I visited Moyes’s then club, Everton, and one of his data analysts told me, “In terms of managers, he is probably as into it [data] as any.” Moyes would often march into the analysts’ offices firing out questions: how efficient were Everton’s next opponents at scoring from crosses? What types of passes did their midfielders make? In which areas of the field did Tottenham’s superstar Gareth Bale usually receive the ball?

For managers such as Moyes, data isn’t everything. It is one tool among many. It gives you an edge and, since you could employ perhaps 30 statisticians for the £1.5m that the average player in the Premier League earns, it’s an edge you can afford. Still, as Anderson and Sally caution: “The data cannot do the manager’s job.” Interpreting data is an art more than a science.

In 2004, the data told Wenger that an unknown French teenager, Mathieu Flamini, was running an astonishing 14 kilometres a game. By itself, that number wasn’t enough. Did Flamini run in the right direction? Wenger went to watch him, decided he did and signed him for peanuts.

Even more cheaply than hiring another statistician, a cunning manager could pop into a bookshop and splash £12.99 on The Numbers Game. The book contains several fascinating examples of statistics that could help club chairmen, managers or fans. Perhaps the book’s most remarkable finding is that football is a “weakest-link game” – although it’s nice to have great players in your team, it’s more important not to have rubbish players. Games are typically decided not by the Wayne Rooneys but by oafs such as Zurab Khizanishvili, a defender whose blunders in a play-off in 2011 arguably cost Reading promotion to the Premier League.

Anderson and Sally crunch some of the new data on individual players to estimate that upgrading your weakest link typically improves your team more than buying a new superstar would. Despite this, managers, being human and wanting to please fans and journalists, usually prefer the superstar.

The book overturns several other tenets of football thinking. For instance, the old saying that you’re most likely to concede a goal straight after scoring turns out to be nonsense. According to the stats, that’s when you’re least likely to concede.

The numbers also show the outsize role of chance in football. In one study of 43,000 matches, the underdog won 45.2 per cent. Favourites win much less often in football than in other ball games.

That is chiefly because goals in football are so scarce: you can attack all match but if the opposition nicks one lucky goal, you can lose. Then the media and fans provide a post hoc rationalisation for your defeat, even though it was dumb luck.

The Numbers Game also shows that sacking the manager – football’s equivalent of the human sacrifice – is usually pointless. Typically, the manager is sacked when the team hits its lowest point. Yet any statistician can predict what will happen after you hit your lowest point: performance will improve, because of the statistical phenomenon known as regression to the mean. Anderson and Sally explain: “An extraordinary period of poor performance is just that: extraordinary. It will auto-correct as players return from injury, shots stop hitting the post or fortune shines her light on you once more.”

Sunderland briefly improved this spring under their new manager, Paolo Di Canio, not because fascism works but because of regression to the mean.

 

(cont...)
There is an excellent final chapter predicting how football’s data revolution will progress. The authors forecast, for instance, that the historic undervaluation of goalkeepers and defenders – who command lower average salaries and transfer fees than strikers – is likely to end.

That’s because stats show that keeping a “clean sheet” helps a team more than scoring lots of goals does. And, as data evolves, we will find ways to value the almost invisible contributions that defenders such as Maldini make. Anderson and Sally believe that football data will increasingly focus on the geometry of the game off the ball – which is crucial, as the average player has the ball for only 53 seconds a game.

They also predict that the biggest innovations will come from poorer clubs, football’s equivalents of the Oakland A’s: “The strong do not need to innovate; it is the weak who must adapt or die.” Rich clubs such as Chelsea can succeed simply by buying great players. As the authors admit: “Analytics will help you win, but so will money.”

Moneyball was the Communist Manifesto of the data revolution, in sport and beyond. The Numbers Game isn’t as groundbreaking as its authors proclaim. Its subtitle – “Why Everything You Know About Football Is Wrong” – is an unnecessary overstatement. Nonetheless, the book is a valuable addition to the scarce literature at a time when pioneers inside football are only just starting to work out which stats matter, while people outside the game still scarcely know that anything is changing.

The Numbers Game is energetically and cleanly written and is free of academic jargon, though it is occasionally guilty of faux-poetic overwriting: “Each side possesses a light side, seeking the goal, and a dark side, hoping to divert it. And at the centre of that collision between the positive and the negative, the yin and the yang, is the ball” – and so on.

The authors have done their homework and I have only one sad correction to make: Nick Broad isn’t a performance scientist with Paris Saint-Germain any more. He was killed in a car crash in January, aged 38.

 

V.good read but all the examples they gave were in my way of thinking anyway, especially the bit about only being as strong as your weakest link, I've said that on here many many times.

Found the bit about the average player only seeing the ball for 53 seconds a game interesting though. Also explains why I prefer to play five-a-side

PS...bloody long read too

 

Good read, it's interesting to see this number crunching starting to be taken seriously by some.

 

Re the maldini thing, and occupying a space, I touched on that ways back on here re beating Barcelona, preventing a player running into a space just by being there and how we limited Bale at Anfield with much the same tactic. I was called insane as usual when I put out things people just don't comprehend. Fast forward a year and Chelsea beat Barcelona by some luck but also by occupying space to prevent certain occurrences which reduced the probability of successful attacks though this was more organic as there was nothing else they could do with the mentality set out before the game, as in they didn't believe they could take on Barcelona in a game of football.

You don't need numbers to see this, geometry, a visual understanding of it topologically, playing a console game from top down gives you a feel for this type of thing in a basic way without actual numbers.

Things that can't be run by the numbers game though, keeping possession to prevent opponents momentum for example, very important say when you are ahead against United in the later stages of a game, teams that can hold on to the ball under that mental pressure usually go on to get the victory, but most think they can just fall back to defend and give up the ball and end up drawing or losing. That's mentality which is a massive aspect of football matches and again not a numbers game.

With football the using the right numbers is a totally correct assessment. I would assume a manager like Rafa would interpret similar facts of a potential contest without actual number crunching but replace it with knowledge\experience and intuition and probability without actually using the numbers.

Ferige got rid of Stam because he said some ****, it was **** all to do with tackling numbers

 

Alonso was always very good at being in the right place at the right time (in a defensive perspective; ie... filling the space/gaps), as is Scholes. Neither are/were great at tackling but they knew the game tactically. Hansen was superb at this too and it is a reason Carragher has done so well for us over the years; he covered the space but was also able to read the game, reading the game is effectively seeing the gaps that remain, these IMO are the dangers, not necessarily the players themselves. That has sort of taken me on to zonal marking Same principle; let them shoot in certain zones because it is very hard to score from there and we have an excellent shot-stopper in goal, but don't let them score from areas that have a higher chance of success.

 

for me the problem with fixed zones in defensive areas is when opposing players cross from one to the other. When its copped it can be used against you. It's gotta be a flexible system and not fixed, at times Rafa's downfall

 

Rafa's system was a little to rigid at times but we had been using a mixed system of zonal and marking for years, in fact the pundits that condemned zonal had played in these systems too; someone on the post is marking a zone!

I prefer the zonal approach but with two others picking up their most dangerous threats. An attacker could get a run on the defender(s) but that can happen in any system. With zonal, the defender concentrates 100% on attacking the ball, thats surely got to be better than having split concentration between player and ball? If the defender attacks the ball properly then there is little the attacker can do unless the cross is a one in twenty pinpoint accuracy cross, no system is 100%.

I actually play the game in the way this suggests, filling the space and playing the percentages. I very rarely go in for a tackle, I prefer to stand of and let the player make a decision, often forcing them onto their weaker side (I have a nack of learning my opponent fairly early on). I then either nick the ball should I be given the opportunity or see my teammate(s) do their job and sweep the ball clear behind me.

 

Said for a long time that players like Parker are **** and massively overrated. Good players stop the danger before it happens without having to scamper back and make a last ditch tackle. Carra was one of the finest in the league at doing this - handy really because he had awful control and wasn't the best in the air either!

Not sure I'd enjoy reading articles/books on topics like this. They mostly offer alot of waffle before deciding that stats are great for 'some' things if used correctly. A lot of hot air to just state what the average person with common sense knows already.

 

Which category would you put Macherano in then? He was always rushing to make tackles and had one of the highest tackles stats in the league whilst with us. He didn't seem to be a tactically aware player; ie...he rarely just filled the space, the only time he did this was when the FB went forward but that is different.

IMO, you need the players that fill gaps and make teams play but, depending how the team is set up, you also need the Mascherano type that is willing to run through walls for his teammates and press the opposition. Henderson and Lucas are like this too whereas Allen is a space filler (he just needs to learn where the space is)

 

Interesting stuff on Moyes.

I might steal the Moyes bit

 

Of course you need players who can run, but highest tackle count doesn't necessarily make you the most efficient defensive midfielder. It could mean you recover well from a poor position and cover well when other team mates fail to stop the danger. Interceptions are, imo, a greater indicator of defensive effectiveness than tackles; it shows being positionally aware to nip in and cut out the danger earlier meaning you can launch a counter faster whilst they are out of position.

Yeah, I guess it depends on your team setup (again, stats only useful sometimes and if used correctly) but high tackles made isn't always a good thing.

The example earlier was Chavski against Barca in the final. Their midfield did a great job of closing out the space (10 people behind the ball makes that easier though ) rather than diving into tackles which they'd just skip out of. Most the tackles made were last ditch when Barca had broken through. There's no stat for 'closing out space', but you'd have to argue that it was probably more effective in snuffing out the danger earlier and further from goal.

Regarding Masch, individual players are different. He was well known for diving into tackles anywhere on the pitch, that was his thing, even if just a simple foot in would do. He was good at his job in that nothing got past, but I seem to recall him tackling higher up the pitch rather than charging back 30yards and recovering. He'd run forward 20yards and fly into a challenge instead...usually getting booked too

 

yeas a good read.....

the point on sacking someone based on a bad run is rather simplistic. IN GENERAL it is ok if you assume everyone is behind the manager and the results dip for reasons such as injuries or transition between players.... however many times "losing the dressing room" and such factors come into play requiring change.

just as it says there is not just one way to play football there cannot be just one reason to sack a manager.

In fact if we look at newcastle sacking hughton or southampton or even us the sackings shock the public yet by this theory the chairmen wish to make a step change in mean performance.... you sack kenny cos you think 7th is his ability, when rodgers does one year at 7th do you sack him or do you maintain that being a winner could be his mean once he has the time to put things his way..... again did they sack kenny for his mean level or for other reasons such as suarez commentry and vastly over paid signings?

 

A couple of associated links.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/fo...iples-such-as-Moneyball-and-Sabermetrics.html

What's interesting is the bit about Bolton being one of the first clubs using data analysts - Mike Forde being the man behind Big Sam's fascination with it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2007/mar/17/newsstory.sport1

 

****ing typical, **** off you thieving ****

 

There was a lot of talk about Allardyce taking to statistical approach at Bolton. Guess his style of football suggests he likes it too considering he goes for the simplistic 'get the ball near the goal' approach

 

I don;t think Jack Charlton was a number cruncher, he had Ireland doing that very thing years ago with some success, well success in WC qualification, you dont need to be a number cruncher to bypass midfield, solid defence and hoof ball, that got maureen a few trophies but you need a nial quinn or a drogba to play it effectively

 

I was just having a pop at Allardyce

 

Oh Jesus ****.

 

I'll break it up into tweets for you.