Can Football be Analysed like "Moneyball"

rcoobc

Those of us who don't follow baseball have probably only heard about this idea with regards to Liverpool's owners financial control. Essentially the idea is that by looking through statistical analysis you can find undervalued players through which to buy a "Championship winning team." In Baseball the Boston Redsox (amongst others) are considered to do very well through these methods using "Sabermetrics" the "measure of in-game activity"

The Daily Mail have an article on its use in football so can it be done?

Xander45

I read a bit about this, and somebody pointed out that they're in a league of 4 (in which they've finished fourth not too long ago) with no worries of relegation and they've not actually won anything but rather got into the playoffs a couple of times.

EDIT: Looks like i should read more what the OP said rather than jump in based on an assumption.

I don't think it could be analysed like baseball. With baseball it's quite simple thing as each "play" is set up by the pitcher's throw and ends when the ball goes dead. Football isn't quite that simple, and even the best shots or passes can be saved or intercepted. There's already a lot of stats out there for a lot of different things and i don't know how you could improve on those, and like i said even they can paint a false picture.

peterstorey

We had a thread about it a while back (more interesting for the links than the comments reading it)

quantitative football analysis blogs

rcoobc

I had a look for it as I thought I could remember it, but couldn't find

peterstorey

He, he, I knew I'd given everyone the benefit of my tuppenceworth in it.

holdsteady

That's not really how it works, baseball is more set up like the Euros. Qualification is the regular season (162 games) and after that is the playoffs. Oakland would be comparable to a club like Wigan. They really changed the entire zeitgeist of the sport.

That said, I completely agree with you in regard to the obvious failings a system would have in football.

Mockney

I've only just got around to watching the film, and it certainly does ask some interesting and pertinent questions. I don't think it can work in football no, for many of the reasons stated above. American sport is a far more stats based industry anyway, with little continuous play and a far bigger emphasis on the miniature ..All Moneyball essentially did was re-focus attention on a different kind of stat.

Moreover it hasn't worked as well for the more athletic sports in the same way it has in baseball, most likely because baseball is inherently suited to it by not being a particularly athletic sport. So you can use someone who can't run, or is 58, or has AIDS as long as they can fulfil one criteria on a team who's mostly static for 473 hours, or however long a Baseball game lasts. Continuous athleticism in an arena populated by constantly moving practitioners, each attempting to adapt to the spontaneous actions & reactions of their opponents makes cold hard stat-egy harder and less accurate. A one armed blind 58 year old who's good at set pieces is also only as good as the person on the end of them, and a huge liability for the rest of the game.

It would probably work really well in team bowling though.

However the idea that there is some ingenius way to make the sum of your parts more valuable than their worth by going against the traditional romantic thinking of football is very interesting, and certainly worth exploring in an era where the poor simply cannot compete and anyone below 5th in a 20 team league has given up any shot at the championship before the season starts (unless you're a Liverpool fan, in which case this year's the year, obviously)

The most interesting bit of the film was Pitt's interactions with the old school, who all said stuff like this..

Now, I sort of agree with Pete, and I think it's far more applicable to football than it is baseball, but people were talking like that, and were writing him off just for going against the established myth of romanticism...I read a review of the film a few months back that made a very good point, which was that in any and every other film made about sports before this, Pitt & Hill would've been painted as the baddies. The cold, hard, unfeeling pencil pushers who knew nothing about the beauty of the game, who'd eventually be beaten by the gut feeling of a grizzled old coach who had baseball/football/darts in his blood, and whose ghost would lead a team of Benetton misfits to victory due to a maverick last minute play that had only been tried once before, 20 years ago, but had gone disastrously wrong and castrated the school pig sending the player/now coach-ghost into a shame spiral of alcoholism and obsessive masturbation. But his gut feeling that it would work if you just believed in yourself was right all along. *cue music*

And that's true (the 'they would be the villans part, not the pig castrating player-coach ghost masturbation' bit) And that's exactly what the feeling towards the real guy was like in real life. That is the perceived wanky myth of sport. RAWK's poems are testament to that. Even some of the more over emotive "i cried when we won the so and so/Sir Matt was looking down on us" posters on here are like that. It is actually just a game (you big fannies) and I'm positive there is a way for the Wigan's of this world to challenge the wealth disparity with some unconventional thinking..

It's just not moneyball in this instance....And I have absolutely no idea what it is either.

Hectic

Probably have more success if we replaced it with Rollerball.

Excal

Mockney's post is a bit of an oversimplification of the philosophy of that the front office of the Oakland Athletics used, albeit not an uncommon one. "Moneyball", referring to the philosophy and not the book or movie, was not "on-base percentage is important". It was about identifying traits, in the most famous example the ability to get on base, that were undervalued relative to their actual importance in scoring runs, and that's where it could potentially be relevant to football. Given that the two teams we're directly competing against for position are going to have bigger budgets than us, it'd benefit us if we could identify undervalued players, but that's obviously easier said than done.

Mockney

What would be a good example of the "get on base" strategy in football? Since there's no direct equivalent because football doesn't work in such an incremental way. It's free flowing. Ability to get free kicks around the box perhaps? In a relative way?

nistleloy

Don't some managers like Big Sam use the Opta stas and Pro stats (I may have made that up) to assess player performance etc etc. I don't know how much it can tell you as it as it's all relative to some many different factors.

Try analysing a centre midfielder. Do you base it on pass completion, distance covered, amount of forward passes, possesion and so on, and what you find is that it has to bear relevance to not only what another 10 men are doing around him but also the opposition. Cold hard stats can't really tell you the whole story. The only way you can really use it is perhaps identify set piece takers with specific tactics in mind i.e inswinging corners but as pointed out it's no good if that player can't run, dribble, tackle, or generally make any impression on the game whilst it's in open play.

holdsteady

Think it would have to be crosses & corners.