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Downing IS Moneyball...

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Buddha

Very Well-Known
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Still want him gone?
Dan Kennett@DanKennett
30m
Lot's of @ replies on Downing, most seemingly unhappy or unbelieving that he was one of the top 10 creative players PL last season
  1. Dan Kennett@DanKennett
    46m

    Those are pretty challenging numbers for any upgrade or replacement to beat next season

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  2. Dan Kennett@DanKennett
    46m
    For F3rd passes, Downing averaged 19 completed per game @ 77%, enough for top 20 in EPL with a tidy 5.1 interceptions/recoveries per game

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  3. Dan Kennett@DanKennett
    46m
    On corners into the box Downing was a remarkable 23/55 (42%) compared to Gerrard 36/112 (32%)

    Expand
  4. Dan Kennett@DanKennett
    47m
    Downing also got into the EPL top 40 for clear chances created with 7 and had best crossing numbers of his career (5.7 per game at 28%)

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  5. Dan Kennett@DanKennett
    47m
    For creativity, Downing was 2.8 total chances per game (top 10 in EPL) and 2 from open play (top 20 in EPL). Both better than Gerrard

    Expand
  6. Dan Kennett@DanKennett
    47m
    Did the end of season review for Downing on TTT today and found some real quality numbers in there for Stewie. Stats coming up
 
@mark1975

See what happens when someone thinks just because something can be counted its relevant ?

Heh, stats can be used to everyone's advantage, you're shy of using them yourself. Clearcut chances created is hardly a pointless stat, but we all know the truth regardless, £20m was too much money so he's never going to be considered anything but a waste of money, a few people might actually acknowledge that he's had a decent season though, then others might just act like cunts for the sake of it because they made their minds up from day one, cf our friend above who can't wait to jump in, while telling us a quasi eyed Italian is the dogs bollocks, oh and some shit keepy-uppy type who failed at Ipswich Town.
 
Rosco, could you compile all the wisdom you are withholding from us all in one neatly organized post, with citations? I think it'd save us some time over making every thread a teachable moment. I know there must be more to it than a series of masked platitudes, like "don't get emotionally attached to a player," "don't overvalue big name players," "understand the true value of players, good statistics are good", "know when a player is getting worse", and "everyone should be sold if it represents good value," and all the other moneyball meets mattress salesman aphorisms.

You have been cryptically intimating that you have gained some incisive understanding of player value, the economics of football, and The Truth, that eludes everyone else, on the back of your obvious interest in sports science and the business end of things. I'm a boring person, I'd like to read those boring things? So what were those things you read? Is it mostly based on other sports and your anticipation that this analysis will be applied to football once some metaanalysis is done? Or is it something that some clubs are really taking advantage of now that you can point out?

Out with it.
 
Don't you hate it when someone continually compares a player to Gerrard ? Regardless of what postion they play in and other aspects of their game.
 
Rosco, could you compile all the wisdom you are withholding from us all in one neatly organized post, with citations? I think it'd save us some time over making every thread a teachable moment. I know there must be more to it than a series of masked platitudes, like "don't get emotionally attached to a player," "don't overvalue big name players," "understand the true value of players, good statistics are good", "know when a player is getting worse", and "everyone should be sold if it represents good value," and all the other moneyball meets mattress salesman aphorisms.

You have been cryptically intimating that you have gained some incisive understanding of player value, the economics of football, and The Truth, that eludes everyone else, on the back of your obvious interest in sports science and the business end of things. I'm a boring person, I'd like to read those boring things? So what were those things you read? Is it mostly based on other sports and your anticipation that this analysis will be applied to football once some metaanalysis is done? Or is it something that some clubs are really taking advantage of now that you can point out?

Out with it.


What a post.

The post of the year in fact.
 
It is a brilliant post.

I won't try to match it, Downing is not particularly good at football.

I could back it up with a stat but fuck it....
 
Everyone knows I am a Stu fan. He needs to stay, he is a great PL squad man. All champions have a Stu in their squad. Last season he deserved a lot of praise may it continue.
 
Rosco, could you compile all the wisdom you are withholding from us all in one neatly organized post, with citations? I think it'd save us some time over making every thread a teachable moment. I know there must be more to it than a series of masked platitudes, like "don't get emotionally attached to a player," "don't overvalue big name players," "understand the true value of players, good statistics are good", "know when a player is getting worse", and "everyone should be sold if it represents good value," and all the other moneyball meets mattress salesman aphorisms.

You have been cryptically intimating that you have gained some incisive understanding of player value, the economics of football, and The Truth, that eludes everyone else, on the back of your obvious interest in sports science and the business end of things. I'm a boring person, I'd like to read those boring things? So what were those things you read? Is it mostly based on other sports and your anticipation that this analysis will be applied to football once some metaanalysis is done? Or is it something that some clubs are really taking advantage of now that you can point out?

Out with it.

I don't have the time to put all my wisdom in one post.

Start with the Sloan Sports Conference, watch the videos. Read the research papers. And read what the people involved have written elsewhere.

You'll see clubs are using analytics but do so quietly for a variety of reason - the info is all proprietary, they haven't figured out what to do with most of it yet but they're collecting it which is a start. Sloan has had people from United, Chelsea, City and Arsenal speak there in the past few years - unsurprisingly we've never had anyone there.

I read a mix of football related stuff but also baseball and basketball. Lots of stuff could easily be cogged from basketball - Kirk Goldsberry's shot charts for example , player efficiency ratings, 5 man rotation +/- figures are another more difficult possibility.
 
wp-content-uploads-2008-11-neo.jpg
 
Everyone knows I am a "Stu fan". He doesn't need to stay, he is a PL squad man. No champions have a Stu in their squad. Last season he deserved little praise. May he not continue.

I've edited your post so that it makes a little bit of sense.

You'll have to tell me what "Stu Fan" is code for.
 
Did @Farky miss out on "managers do not make any difference"?

Meaning
Chelsea will remain third even though after Jose came back.
Man U will remain first despite Moyes moving in
Man City to remain second after losing Mancini
 
http://pitchinvasion.net/blog/2009/...on-kuper-says-he-could-do-alex-fergusons-job/

Apart from transfer rumours, commentary on managers probably forms the bulk of football chatter. Before, during and after every game, every decision is scrutinised; every minute move debated; tactics, strategy, man-management, motivation, appearance — all feed into an endless discourse debating whether any given manager is succeeding or not. Protest and praise come by the truckload, and managers end up prematurely grey from it in every country.
Now Simon Kuper comes along and says, at least at the highest level, it doesn’t even matter who the manager is or what he does. He himself could do as good a job as Alex Ferguson. “The obsession with football managers is misguided,” Kuper writes in today’s FT. “Hardly any of them make any difference to results. The institution of manager is something of a con-trick. Ferguson and Ancelotti are best understood as marketing tools.”
Kuper cites Stefan Szymanski’s research which looked at 40 English teams between 1977 and 1997 and “found that their spending on salaries explained 92 per cent of their variation in league position.” (Though he curiously doesn’t mention it in the article, Szymanski is the co-author of a new book with Kuper using statistics to explain football phenomena).
It’s only when there are “knowledge gaps” (such as Wenger’s advanced knowledge on nutrition and foreign players in the 1990s) that a manager makes a difference, according to Kuper. At the highest level in England now, though, “the Premier League is like a market with almost perfect information,” so no such gaps exist (at least currently — how do we know this will always hold?). Therefore, Kuper concludes, “If I managed United I would probably get about the same results as Ferguson does.”
Kuper acknowledges this wouldn’t actually work in practice, as fans would not accept a man like him due to their cultural need for a manager to meet a certain stereotype — he must be over-35, a former professional, “almost always white”, and have a neat haircut. But in his view, a manager is a mere figurehead conveniently embodying a stereotype to fulfill a cultural expectation in football and avoid rocking the boat.
create-manager.jpg

There is something to Kuper’s claim here. He’s right that the cultural stereotype of what a manager should look like is sadly limited and the role a manager plays certainly does become totemic to a level that exaggerates the actual impact he has. But Kuper oddly concludes that (a) we didn’t already know that the economic factor is dominant; and (b) that this means no manager would be better than any manager.
Syzmanski’s research in fact has only found what’s actually a pretty obvious fact we all understand anyway — being able to pay your players more than your rivals is by far the most important factor in a team’s success? No shit. One doesn’t need to be a professor of economics to have figured that one out. I think most fans with any sense already realise that if you put Alex Ferguson in charge of Hull City, they still wouldn’t win the league given the disparity in resources between Hull and Manchester United. Managers might be lionised, but everyone knows the reason David Moyes won’t win the title with Everton has little to do with his abilities. Common sense has told us this already.
It’s fair that Szymanski and Kuper may help redress our understanding of the balance between the factors a little, if they are correct in the 92% figure cited that leaves perhaps less of a role for managers than we commonly accept (though it’s hard to analyse this rather exact number without seeing Szymanski’s research — for example, how does it account for the fact that the clubs that spend the most on player salaries to get the best presumably also do so for managers?).
The problem is that Kuper runs away with this “discovery” to reach some curious conclusions, beginning with his belittling of Alex Ferguson’s success: “If you are able to stay manager of the world’s richest club for 23 years in an era when money determines results, you are guaranteed to stack up trophies.”
Well, yes. The question is why he has stayed so long. Kuper says it’s because Ferguson’s “accomplishment is not winning, but keeping all the interest groups united behind him for so long. They back him because of his personality, and because he seems to incarnate United.” But wasn’t it Ferguson’s accomplishment in the first place in breaking United’s title drought in 1992 that set in train their entire period of dominance and was crucial in making them the world’s richest club? Where is the analysis explaining that Ferguson had resources that had been unavailable to all his predecessors after Busby over two decades to break the long run of failure in the first place? If you’re going to make this argument based on numbers, you need to back it up with some.
Even if Ferguson has only made a 1% difference on results at United due to his management out of the remaining 8% unaccounted for in determining success from Syzmanski’s research cited, surely that’s significant at the highest level of sport, where we know the margins between success and failure are infinitesimal. After all, many teams with more resources than United have come and gone from the top. Having that consistent 1%, or whatever it is, over 23 years has obviously been critical to United’s ability to build and rebuild under Ferguson.
Sure, Ferguson probably isn’t actually a genius and by far the most important factor in the results under his tenure is indeed Manchester United’s ability to continually pay very high salaries (though notably, he often succeeded with a far tighter wage structure than rivals, something Kuper does not examine) and maybe we should mention this more often. Point taken.
But Kuper takes this and twists it to go from managers not being as crucial as we think they are (except when they are, as in the cases of Wenger, Clough and Shankly that he cites as exceptions) to not mattering at all: “One day a club will stop hiring managers, and allow an online survey of fans to pick the team. That club will probably perform well, because it will be harnessing the wisdom of crowds, and because it can use the money it saves on managers to raise players’ salaries.” (That experiment didn’t get very far with MyFootballClub, did it?)
This seems a bizarre conclusion to reach based on the evidence he’s presented. To say a manager might not make all the difference in the world as some fans think is miles away from being able to conclude on no evidence that not having a manager at all wouldn’t make a difference and would actually improve results.
Kuper has gone just a little too freakanomic here.
 
I don't have the time to put all my wisdom in one post.

Start with the Sloan Sports Conference, watch the videos. Read the research papers. And read what the people involved have written elsewhere.

You'll see clubs are using analytics but do so quietly for a variety of reason - the info is all proprietary, they haven't figured out what to do with most of it yet but they're collecting it which is a start. Sloan has had people from United, Chelsea, City and Arsenal speak there in the past few years - unsurprisingly we've never had anyone there.

I read a mix of football related stuff but also baseball and basketball. Lots of stuff could easily be cogged from basketball - Kirk Goldsberry's shot charts for example , player efficiency ratings, 5 man rotation +/- figures are another more difficult possibility.
rosco_bullet2.jpg
 
I think a lot of people disagree with this bit Gerry:

"I think most fans with any sense already realise that if you put Alex Ferguson in charge of Hull City, they still wouldn’t win the league given the disparity in resources between Hull and Manchester United. Managers might be lionised, but everyone knows the reason David Moyes won’t win the title with Everton has little to do with his abilities. Common sense has told us this already."
 
So we ignore improvement of performances and league position and purely look only at whether a manager can win a league title? Really? Is that the argument here?
 
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