He's shocking
Not to mention he's 28 and 13 months left on contract
We'd be lucky to get 12
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Transfers Summer 2021 - Transfer Thread
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Not to mention he's 28 and 13 months left on contract
We'd be lucky to get 12
The three best run clubs in the PL are City, Liverpool, and Leicester in no particular order.It doesn't even take vast amounts of money to do. If someone at the top of the club has the vision to set up a smooth operation and can resist sticking their nose in its operations...
... then we could easily do what Leicester are in terms of recruitment.
While I'll also accept that they've known when to/have been willing to sell their 'top' assets and get a premium for them, the Mahrez and Maguire money is easily exceeded by our operational profits compared to theirs.
What all three have in common is that the operational representative of ownership, the chief executive of the club's business operations, the person making the call on player transfers and the head coach of the team are four different people. Plus they are decisive and well-resourced relative to their revenue in their player dealings.
Woolwich have the right structure but are starved of investment. Chelsea have a higher player spend to turnover than anybody but are a mess organizationally.
And then there's us.
Then under bid on all their suggestions so they leave, then we can keep Hitchen
I'm a little suspicious of the sabermetrics revolution in football, but in theory the next great Director of Football in the Premier League is the 30 year old computer nerd who runs the analytics department at one of the top clubs.
It would be tough, they'd come in for way more abuse than the guys who broke that boundary in baseball (who took their fair share no doubt), but that's the next step in the evolution.
The trick of course is that so much of the football transfer market is corrupt backroom dealings in a way that is much less true of the closed shop American leagues. Tough to navigate that world as a geek with a computer screen.
I don't think sabermetrics will take off as well in football compared to baseball.
Football is far more dynamic and unpredictable than baseball. There's also other factors to consider such as injury risk which is higher in football, general living e.g. Top footballers are likely to play in various countries around Europe so how a player settles is important, this is where an old school scout who meets the player and their family and can judge their personality is crucial in football.
Ndombele is a great example. His numbers on a stats sheet might look great but he really struggled to settle. Mourinho eventually won him over, but it looks like he's gone back to not being interested to fight for his place with Mason in charge. Who knows what his attitude will be like with the new manager. Sabermetrics doesn't take into account any of this. Bear in mind he's our record transfer.
The thing is, it will eventually, it has in baseball. Those competitive advantages get shriveled down to nothing fast and it's onto the next thing to find some marginal advantage.
When this revolution first swept through baseball it had three big weapons:
1. Massive amounts of quality, objective data
2. Decades of really awful, counterproductive conventional wisdom
3. Competitors who laughed at them and totally ignored their insights
Those first analytics GM's in baseball had such an enormous advantage it papered over them being underqualified dorks in many ancillary parts of the job.
I don't think the xGistas have any of those same advantages.
I do think that in football you have some additional considerations that the Moneyball guys didn't have to make. I'm sure a baseball team while fielding defensively needs to gel but the 'he gets on base' thinking shows how much simpler the recruitment of hitters is in MLB.
By comparison we need a team of 11 players starting who are not only talented individuals but will gel together and will fit the style of football we want to play. Decisions like Guardiola getting rid of Sane shows the balance issue.
One thing I know for sure having done it as a job myself is that there is so much data, the top analysts are those who have the ability to pick out what's important.
Trust me I've spent many hours staring at boring spreadsheets with GPS data.
Its an integral part of modern football now. But the role of a traditional scout is still very important imo. And something I don't think we have at spurs.
A harmony of both methods is what we need.
Question: do you think a football club that invested in AI learning with this kind of data could get a huge advantage (and/or a scouting organisation doing the same thing to sell to the clubs would get insanely rich)?
The question is how good the underlying data is, and given some of the things you've outlined, the answer is "not that good".
As opposed to baseball where the stuff you could find in the newspaper in 1985, with today's knowledge, you or I could go back and totally dominate the sport.
Very interesting. I mean, for example I think we've discussed on here before about the obvious flaws of xG (despite it having some use as a measure of how a match unfolded).
Yes definitely.
If the organisation were built on the premise of buying really young talent and the selling them on, then AI would help them get insanely rich in theory.
Particularly given how the rules are currently with transfers and HG players there is high demand for them and their prices are 10-20 million more than what they should be.
I think the German clubs are on this path already. Not quite implemented with AI, but I do know they were at the forefront of Sabermetrics in football. I spent some time on an exchange trip working with Borussia Dortmund and Bochum about 10 years ago and they were using data to make decisions on transfers and scouting players essentially from schools and Sunday league clubs in the view to sell them on in the future if they made the cut in the older age groups.
The Germans have continued this, you may have noticed they have a bunch young English players there now. All with the view to sell them back to PL clubs but for higher prices because the HG quota means the PL clubs will pay it.
Agreed.
Like any modelling package the output is only as good as the input. Which is why in my earlier post, the real art to this is picking out the important data. That's always been the case with 'big data'.
The reason baseball is so supremely easily to apply analytics to as opposed to football (or other sports really) has a lot to do with sample size. Baseball is very rigid in its actions. The pitch always comes from the same place, the bases never change, the strike zone is gray as fuck but still theoretically practically identical. So every baseball game in the world you can capture data from can be objectively crunched to provide comparative analysis. Its also destroyed any semblance of entertainment value the sport has.
Football is just so different. You can't boil everything into an ideal set of characteristics and methods, because what works in one system won't work in other systems. What works against one system won't work against other systems.
You can absolutely crunch the data to find indicators to guide you, but analytics in football isn't going to provide you with a spreadsheet that tells you never to steal bases because its fucking stupid (but incredibly exciting and fun) to steal bases.
The NYT article on Rangnick makes me think he understands this more than many, and already has a mind for how analytics can be combined with traditional scouting and other methods to develop a profile of a player within a system and then highlight and compare players within that profile to identify ideal signings with higher probabilities of success within that style of play. He also seems to have next step ideas on utilizing sports science and nutrition to inform and maximize training programmes.
Whether its him or someone else, that seems like the next great leap in football similar to when footballers stopped getting fucking plastered every night and smoking cigarettes at halftime. We need someone on that cutting edge while City is still patting themselves on the back for buying success...because administrators and DoFs are so much easier to buy than footballers they'll have 1,000.
Football is just so different. You can't boil everything into an ideal set of characteristics and methods, because what works in one system won't work in other systems. What works against one system won't work against other systems.
You can absolutely crunch the data to find indicators to guide you, but analytics in football isn't going to provide you with a spreadsheet that tells you never to steal bases because its fucking stupid (but incredibly exciting and fun) to steal bases.
The NYT article on Rangnick makes me think he understands this more than many, and already has a mind for how analytics can be combined with traditional scouting and other methods to develop a profile of a player within a system and then highlight and compare players within that profile to identify ideal signings with higher probabilities of success within that style of play. He also seems to have next step ideas on utilizing sports science and nutrition to inform and maximize training programmes.
Whether its him or someone else, that seems like the next great leap in football similar to when footballers stopped getting fucking plastered every night and smoking cigarettes at halftime. We need someone on that cutting edge while City is still patting themselves on the back for buying success...because administrators and DoFs are so much easier to buy than footballers they'll have 1,000.
That's a good thought. On top of good players you need a system in place that everyone can buy into. Used to have it in the first few Poch seasons.
Decisive is the key word there. No mucking about. When these clubs identify a player that fits, they go for them straight away. Complete opposite with Spurs (at least so it seems from the outside)
Would be cheaper to buy them the latest version of football manager though. My ITK says we’re still running the ‘17 version
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