We don’t often get a chance to run video on the site, but I was lucky enough to be invited on a panel this month at Charles Russell Speechlys on Analytics in Football. It was the first panel I have ever been on and – I rarely say this – but I am genuinely proud of what came out there.

Ian’s a great moderator, and Chris and Blake are both big experts in the field with plenty of practical experience. My comments are fairly wide ranging, and bring in a lot of diverse topics I have had a chance to learn about the last two years. This is nearly as good as any job interviews I will be giving in the coming months.

I know it sounds heavy, but some of the material covered here will crop back up again and again over the next five years, both inside and outside of football.

Though maybe not the part about the bear developing IP…

Analytics Cliches That Are NOT True

• Stats guys don’t watch games. In fact, they generally watch a ton of matches to verify what the stats are suggesting is correct, both at the player and the team level.
• Stats guys can only add value to the numbers side, like technical scouting. In fact, if your stats guys are at all like me, they are voracious readers and can have a major impact in fitness, medical, style of play, team and opposition analysis, cutting edge research like sleep/diet/fatigue AND in player recruitment.Essentially, if you are only getting basic stats stuff from your stats guys, you are either employing their skills badly or you need to find new stats guys.
• Technical scouts/stats scouts hate traditional scouts.They only generally dislike BAD traditional scouts with terrible biases. You could create a whole book chapter of hilarious reasons why traditional scouts have explained why they don’t like a player. Just when you think it can’t get more ridiculous, it often does. HOWEVER, you need good traditional scouts – they are the lifeblood of recruitment. If you can educate the biases out of your scouts, everyone can probably get along swimmingly.
• Every team uses stats and data now so first mover advantage is gone.
  Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

  Few teams have built an organization that employs data-based decision making throughout the club. As I say in the video, it does not matter how amazing or incisive the information at your disposal is if decision makers are not using it, or continue to make poor decisions despite it.Having been inside football now and talked to tons of people there as well, I am more convinced than ever about the general level of backwardness in England. Clever teams can generate huge, sustainable edges because of it.

Analytics Cliches That ARE True

• Some “stats guys” are definitely charlatans. They speak buzzspeak, but develop little or no IP of their own, but are good at repackaging ideas as if they did the work. They probably also happen to be good at marketing themselves. I say this again and again, but these same people are found in every discipline, inside and outside football. It’s not a stats problem – it’s a people problem.
• Teams are terrified of making change. What if change doesn’t work out? As Chris says in the video below, relegation from the Premier League can be existential for some clubs.
• Plenty of traditional teams fail. Some stats teams will fail as well. What you don’t know is WHY they failed. Without process information, it’s damned hard to judge a team from the outside.

I’m sure there are more, but these were the ones that quickly came to mind. Anyway, enjoy the video. Hopefully in the next year, someone will do a few more of these.

Note: for those who want us to do more podcasts, ignore the video and it sounds JUST LIKE A FOUR-MAN POD. You’re welcome!

A couple of years ago, I used to produce regular mailbags, where I answer reader questions about whatever seems interesting to them. Today we’re going to do that again.

Despite the fact that this is being published on April Fool’s Day, I’m not going to post any idiotic jokes, pranks, or lies herein. These are all actual questions from actual readers and actual answers from actual mes.

Additionally, since I am not employed by any teams right now, we get to talk about transfers and I get to say whatever the hell I want to, regardless of whose plans it might screw up.

I can see the world’s recruitment analysts and technical scouts wincing already.

This should be fun…

Here we go!

Who should Arsenal buy as a CM/DM for next season?
A lot of this has to do with who do you think needs replacing and why. Most people asked for a defensive midfielder, but seemed to want passing range and versatility. That is a tough combination to come by, and I think the rumored Granit Xhaka is rather good.

However… if I am buying one central midfielder in Europe right now, it’s Naby Keita.

Need a DM? Naby Keita.

Need an 8? Naby Keita.

A 10 that scores, creates, and destroys?

Na-bee Kay-tuh.

(Last time I did a bit like this, it was about Ivan Rakitic replacing Steven Gerrard before there was even a whisper of Rac-attack moving to Barcelona, so you know I am deadly serious.)

Just 21 years old, he played as an elite defensive midfielder in a pressing system last season. This season he moved forward into an 8/10 role and has put up outrageous scoring stats while losing very little defensive output.

No one does that.

Only 1.72m tall, Naby is both fast and strong and has excellent balance. He’s an outstanding dribbler. He’s honestly one of the most athletic young central midfielders I have ever scouted. The only question is whether his touch passing fits in with Arsenal’s style well enough for Wenger to pick him. I think Arsenal need more of this type of athleticism in their squad for certain matchups, and this guy is wildly talented.

I have been keeping track of him for quite a while now. At my old job, we [hit by electrical shocks].

So yeah, if I have to pick just one guy to fit in midfield for Arsenal, it’s probably him.

What Manager Should Chelsea Hire? What Center Forward Should They Recruit?
The answers to this one are really boring and I apologize for that ahead of time, but these are the questions you gave me!

I think Conte is an exceptional head coach who created utterly dominant teams in Serie A. The only real question is whether he can get players to buy into his methodology. I have information from very good sources that he is seriously intense.

So is Diego Simeone.

Those are my top two choices for manager, and I think Conte is far more likely to end up in London next season. Can either of them win over the players and get the maximum out of them without losing the whole squad like Mourinho did?

As for a center forward, it’s hard to see Chelsea improving much on Diego Costa and Bertrand Traore. I think Traore is one of the best young CFs in Europe and just needs some game time to adapt to the Premier League.

I guess they could buy back Romelu Lukaku for twice what they sold him for (ouch), but barring that…

Oh, and someone else said Chelsea need a new center back. The good news is you already own the guy I would probably recommend for you – Andreas Christensen.

The bad news is that he’s allegedly on loan to Gladbach for another season after this one.

What Goalkeeper Should Liverpool Buy?
Sorry folks, stats don’t work on goalkeepers.

Okay, that’s not entirely true, but they only sort of work on GKs and I don’t quite have enough time to answer this properly in full. Instead I’ll just say they should buy Naby Keita for the midfield and that way whomever they do buy to compete with Mignolet next year will probably have less work to do.

That’s assuming Arsenal and Spurs don’t buy him first. And let’s be honest, assuming Arsene Wenger is not going to buy a central midfielder in the summer has been a safe bet for a very long time now.

He’s probably a more natural fit for Liverpool or Spurs than Arsenal anyway.

Who would you pick – Vincent Janssen or Sebastien Haller?
This is like making me choose between my kids. For those who don’t follow the Eredivisie, these are two of the top young center forwards in the league.

Do you know that Haller was bought by Utrecht on an option from Auxerre last spring for only 800k Euros? And bigger clubs than Utrecht wanted to buy him both last summer and in January and pay him a LOT more money, but he stayed put. Rumor in the Netherlands is he only has eyes for Ajax right now, but I could see bigger fish with more money testing his desire to stay in Holland.

I could also attempt to tell you an awful lot more about Haller and explain why I know a lot more about him, but that would trigger additional electrical shocks and I’m still kind of jittery after the last batch.

Meanwhile Janssen is one of the top scorers in Europe this season. A physical shot monster, I’m not sure about his pace, but he certainly causes huge problems for Dutch defenders. A couple of scouts I trust have also insisted he’s the real deal (stats suggested this was likely months ago), and from what I have seen they are probably right.

I would say Haller has a bit more potential and creates a few more goals for his teammates, while Janssen is a tremendous goalscorer right now. For me, Haller wins by a whisker, but it’s basically too close to call. (And in the end, it all comes down to price and what the player wants to do anyway.)

This is an interesting question, and the real answer is that no one actually knows.

I suspect Arsenal are probably furthest along in football research and they should be, as StatDNA had the biggest head start (outside of the Bolton group that dissipated). I have met a number of Arsenal’s top level people on the analysis side and they are wicked smaht. It is annoying when your favorite team is also the team that would need your skill set the least, but thems the breaks.

Liverpool are somewhere in the “we develop new football research/tech” sphere. They even have a Director of Research, so something must be happening there! That’s pretty much all I know.

Southampton and Spurs probably have some cool stuff going, but I don’t know enough about either place to say what. City is really hard to tell what is getting generated and what gets used, but they do have some personnel working on it. I don’t think Chelsea or United have been developing anything on the analytics side for some time. Leicester City are doing smart things, but how much of that is related to stats research versus how much is just nailing normal decisions is something I am on the fence about.

But… and this is important… I could be totally fucking wrong.

All this stuff is supposed to be secret. If you are developing edges inside a club, you should NOT be talking about it. That makes it a whole lot of guess work on my part to say who is doing what well.

I know we had some things at Smartodds that I was very happy with, and that I am pretty sure are bleeding edge tech (not just cool visualizations), but I can’t be totally certain no one else developed those ages ago and simply didn’t talk about it. Our research was developed with a little over a year of full-time access to the Opta database and about two man years worth of output.

*light bulb switches on*

Funnily enough, I no longer work inside a club, so if Chelsea or Manchester United wanted to find someone smart who COULD talk about cutting edge research and what it could do for them…

*makes the “call me” motion*

The reason why I am talking about what clubs may or may not have developed is because that’s the baseline for state of the art. Some things public analysts have going for them are as follows:

1. You can collaborate and make each other smarter. Clubs can’t do that except by hiring people from the outside, and they can never do that in scale. I’m not sure if you guys are the vehicle Voltron or the lion one, but you can certainly join together and fight space dragons and shit.
2. There are lots and lots and lots of you. Teams have a comparatively tiny number of analysts and most of their brain is likely occupied by day-to-day tasks like how to beat Alan Pardew.
3. Many of you have fascinating and unique skill sets to bring to bear on any number of football-related problems.

And some things that public analysts have going against them are as follows:

1. Poor access to data and what you have is probably poorly organized unless you are a data/code pimp. If you are a data/code pimp, then you probably spent a lot of time getting your data organized and not doing any analysis or coding new tools or having any fun or…
2. Everyone is learning from scratch in most cases and there is no clear path to accelerate that. Those who might create such paths are disincentivized to do so. Constantly recreating the wheel is costly when it comes to edumacation.
3. Almost no one does this full-time. Or even half-time. It limits depth of expertise in the subject matter.
4. No one has access to all the cool tools you can build which really can accelerate knowledge growth.
5. Some of these club analysts have access to sweet proprietary data that only exist inside those clubs! The bastards.
6. Top clubs have big budgets that they could spend on this if they saw the value. *again with the “call me” motion (mixedknuts@gmail.com)*

Seriously, if I couldn’t walk into any non-Arsenal, non-Liverpool club at this point and introduce them to a single competitive edge that could get them a minimum of 3 extra points a season (which equate to millions of pounds in revenue depending one where a team ends up in the table), I would hang up my analysis boots right now. The advantage left on the table OUTSIDE OF RECRUITMENT is fuck-ing massive at nearly every football club in existence.

(Says the person who was just made redundant by a football club.

Well, two of them, actually.)

AHEM.

I know it sounds incredibly arrogant or mildly insane that someone who no longer works at a Championship football club believes these Champions League clubs are missing out on enormous competitive edges, but that’s exactly what I am saying.

My work and reputation at this point is pretty solid, right? You guys trust me not to bullshit you at least a little bit? So you understand there is no way I would insist this to be the case unless I absolutely believed it to be true, and could damn well prove my case in private to people who wanted to listen.

I don’t know everything. Hell, I barely know anything. As a whole, we know the tiniest bit about how football works. But that’s the thing about sports – it’s not about knowing everything, it’s about understanding more than your competition.

The thing is, once you start looking at these competitive edge problems with the right perspective, you notice improvements all over the place just waiting to be exploited.

I dunno man… I assume the guys who figured out on base + slugging percentage were shocked no one else was exploiting it. So did the ones who developed the 3-pointers and drives offense in the NBA. As did the guys who developed the spread offense in American Football, and countless other sport innovators. Hell, this is the epitome of Bill James’ early and middle career.

That’s kind of where I’m at about all this stuff right now. (No, I did not compare myself to Bill James. He’s a legend and I’m just barely getting started. I’m just saying he had an awful lot of knowledge that no one inside the sport really paid attention to for way too long a period of time.)

And the funny thing is, [SO MUCH REDACTED ELECTRICAL SHOCK TREATMENT].

Manchester United copying a single set piece (badly) is the tip o’ the fucking iceberg, my friends.

Back to the question at hand, I think certain public analysts are creating new things or at least derivative work that is really interesting. So some research might be state of the art. I am definitely not one of those people who think everything has been done already with event data. In fact, I think we’ve barely scratched the surface of possibilities there, and I say this as someone who has done an awful lot of scratching.

Of course, whenever a public person introduces new material, there’s a chance it gets absorbed into the club IP sphere without so much as a thank you, but most people seem to do it as a-fun-hobby-that-could-eventually- some-day-in-the-far-distant-future-possibly-lead-to-a-job-that-doesn’t-totally-suck?

Do this stuff for yourself. Make sure you are having fun with it, or go do something else with your free time. And if something happens, great, but don’t wait by the phone for that girl to call because there are no girls who actually work in European football.

Well, except Sarah Rudd, who happens to be one of the top people in the world in this area. So if you are a girl, there is still hope that you can also be totally awesome and work in football!

And then there would be two of you…

Or three, I guess, if we count Marina Granovaskaia at Chelsea. Who I have not met but by all reports is also awesome.

But I digress! (And I am clearly going to get in trouble with this, so it’s probably time to move on and cut my losses.)

Two quick throughts before I answer other questions.

I have run across multiple club owners and directors of football in the last year who have no idea what an expected goal is. Or a shots model. Or almost anything else to do with football stats and data. And these were definitely smart people I was talking to. I mention this not because I was surprised, but to detail a tiny piece of knowledge that people who are in the analytics community take for granted, but which has almost zero penetration beyond this particular football niche.

You don’t need to know about expected goals to succeed in football. It helps. When applied correctly, it can definitely allow you to make smarter decisions. But the fact that Arsene Wenger mentioned it once in a press conference and you once-in-a-very-rare-while see it appear in mainstream media does not mean the concept has disseminated among the masses, either in fandom or by those employed in football.

This also relates back to why I think first mover advantage still exists and is enormous.

The second anecdote goes back to this excerpt from “The Arm” by Jeff Passan that appeared on Yahoo Sports earlier in the week. That part of the book is awesome and you should read it.

Kyle Boddy is the guy developing high velocity pitchers that gets profiled in that piece, and he’s been a friend of mine for over a decade now. We’ve been grumpy old men on the internet together since well before either of us were of an age to be considered old. We have always been grumpy. Anyway, he’s a genius, but this isn’t about him, it’s about this bit further down.

“The Dodgers were run by Andrew Friedman, the hyperintelligent president of baseball operations who had just left the Rays after a decade-­long run of success. In Los Angeles, no budget bound Friedman. The Dodgers had just started an $8 billion local­-television contract that allowed their annual payrolls to threaten $300 million. Even better, Friedman and general manager Farhan Zaidi were allowing Fearing to build baseball’s biggest, best think tank. They were seeking experts in quantitative psychology and applied mathematics.”

That’s where baseball is right now. The only way to win more consistently is to be smarter, even when you have one of the biggest budgets in the league. And yet the excerpt from Passan’s book goes a very long way detailing how backwards and wrong baseball have been about development of pitchers for the last decade (and longer). So much of the accepted conventional wisdom was completely and utterly incorrect regarding the most valuable position in the game.

Now think about football, which is arguably twenty years behind where baseball is right now.

How much advantage is there for a club who sees a glimpse of the future, has the brain trust and money in place to invest in finding smarter ways to do things, and has the decision making structure to exploit the new intelligence that is discovered?

In no other sport in the world do clubs control so many elements they can use to create advantages.

Football clubs have access to academy players when they are children. In the United States, they almost never get access until they are 18 or older. Football clubs also have the potential to completely revamp their roster on a yearly basis if they want to. None of the U.S. sports can do that.

Also unique is the worldwide access to talent via the transfer market, and the fact that more people in the world play football than any other sport.

Advantageous styles of play. Tactical edges. Better players, for cheaper prices. Better coaches. Better, different training.

The potential for discovering and leveraging marginal gains for performance improvements is astounding, and this is not pie in the sky stuff. These are things that have been delivered successfully time and again as other sports grew into their analytical ages.

But like my wish for a media provider that sees the value in people flocking to their site to generate radars and shot maps on the daily, this vision of what’s possible in football is nothing more than a dream that you hope someone with power or influence or money eventually turns into a reality.

That is a project I would like to be a part of.

Moving on!

You know how everyone always says that the real strength of using data in sports is to help teams avoid making stupid mistakes?

Someone introduce Boro to the concept.

Don’t get me wrong, they have a great head coach – the hardest position to recruit – and they are lurking right at the top of the Championship again. That said, their value for money in the transfer market this season has been poor, and the wages they pay out… woof.

It’s weird for me to say this, as I have written publicly about Rhodes being a very interesting and sometimes undervalued striker in the past. The reason my tone has changed is because his data changed. After being one of the best forwards in the Football League for almost half a decade, he’s now posting below average numbers. This is a big red flag, especially when it comes to forwards, and double especially when it involves a monster £9M fee plus add-ons plus wages.

It’s too early to say this is a mistake, but there is an enormous amount of risk attached to it.

Risk that Boro will happily deal with and/or write off, should they finally make the promised land of the Premier League.

Spurs centerbacks last year was a huge clash. Actually, given they had AVB before, it’s weird that Spurs still had CBs that were slow and completely incapable of playing a high pressing style even through last season. They solved that problem really well this summer.

There are countless examples you could roll through – from an unsuitable Mario Balotelli trying to fill a Sturridge/Suarez role at Liverpool, to crossing wingers being added to possession teams, to purely defensive fullbacks being added to teams that need dynamic over- and under-laps to unlock teams in the final third.

Recruitment is tricky in the best of circumstances, but it absolutely must start with a clearly defined style of play that you can then fit players into and around. And it needs a coach who can coach that style of play, or your team is likely to end up in real trouble.

I did not. I did manage to get a picture with it, which ended up being really important to me because in this business it is so easy to forget your successes. I was lucky enough to play a tiny role in a team winning its first league title and making the Europa League knockout stages.

Given that I started all this when I was on chemo, the day FCM held their trophy celebration meant a lot to me. I still get goosebumps when I watch the video.

The reffing might be the biggest single difference between the leagues. Lack of called fouls make it a lot harder on skill players, and you definitely focus a bit more at body type when scouting, so that players can have more durability in the Championship. That said, some fitness guys go too far in having players put on muscle at the expense of actually being able to play football, so there’s a balance there.

People don’t perceive it this way, but there is probably only a small difference in quality of play between the bottom half of the Premier League and the top 6 to 8 teams in the Championship. Plenty of Champ teams now go up and stay there, especially if they have good coaches. Swansea, Southampton, Watford, Bournemouth, and Leicester are all archetypes of clubs that not only go up, but who can perform pretty well once there.

Off the pitch, I think the facilities are tremendously different, especially at the sides who have been established in the Premier League consistently. Then again, most of my time has been spent at one of the lowest revenue clubs in the Championship, so maybe other clubs are way more posh than I expect.

The last thing I think is very different is the quality of head coach or manager. The foreign influx in the Premier League, has been enormous, even more than with the players, and as of next season it will be absolutely loaded with top coaches. I think the Championship is still a bit behind that right now, but we are seeing more foreign coach recruitment there as well, so it may not stay that way for long.

True story: I was watching set piece training, and comparing it to what I saw at FC Midtjylland.

Maybe some day. Here’s the thing – you only get so many minutes on a training pitch each week. And yet you have a ton of things you need to teach players about the next opponent, about their own performance, about how they need to develop… about everything. I think at most clubs, the usage of coach analysts is a great way to bridge this gap, from young players through the first team.

And at most clubs I don’t think this is happening, at all.

Very little, but it does depend a bit on culture/country. I think player capacity for learning is hugely underestimated, especially in England. That said, you need to be really careful with what you introduce and how you introduce it.

If I were starting somewhere new, I would do this, but very gently, and I would go out of my way to find out who would likely be receptive ahead of time.

This is funny, because we actually looked at this in detail at work, but it was with Andros Townsend in mind instead of Coutinho. I don’t want to ruin it because I still plan to use Townsend in a future presentation and article, but I will say that Coutinho’s average shot is about twice as good as Townsend’s. (This assumes that my script isn’t horribly bugged, which is not a guarantee right now.)

While on this topic, two more fun facts from the Opta data set.

First, Bayern’s lightning quick wide player Douglas Costa clocks in at around .05 xG per shot average, which is startling for a Pep player and explains the whole two goals in 1700 minutes thing for him.

Second, Alessandro Diamanti (briefly of Watford this season) had the worst goal expectation per shot of any high volume guy we looked at back when we were arguing at work. There was one season where his expectation – and I am absolutely not exaggerating this – was about one goal in every 40 to 50 non-penalty shots.

James already knows I am going to say player evaluation and transfers. People love to read it, which in turn means more people will be reading smart data pieces, which HAS to be a good thing, right?

I also think a lot more people should poke around in the same areas that Dustin Ward and Thom Lawrence have been researching (click their names for links to the articles). Their stuff is very smart and as cutting edge as it gets.

I’d suggest more people follow in the footsteps of Will Gurpinar-Morgan and Martin Eastwood, but I am pretty sure the education and skills required to do so would be a massive hurdle for just about anybody, myself included.

Five years is a long time, and it’s hard to stay dumb that long about transfers and stay in the Premier League unless the team is unconscionably rich.

I think Arsenal rarely make mistakes in who they buy, so they probably win the award for most impressive. On the other hand, I think they frequently make mistakes with who they don’t buy, or who they sign to new contracts, but those last two things are almost entirely down to Arsene Wenger.

I think Chelsea waste a ton of money every year buying confusing players that are highly unlikely to succeed, but they do have some fairly high profile hits as well. They also have a gigantic portfolio of player assets out on loan that could potentially benefit from better management. Overall though, things aren’t that bad there.

United have been really poor at signing new players right up until this past season, when they got smart really fast. I think they found a source of good advice in the summer that directed them to good players, even if they seemed to dramatically overpay in almost every instance.

It’s been really difficult to see a consistent plan at Liverpool. In fact, from the outside their recruitment has often looked like two rival factions, each getting half the players they wanted and then attempting to assemble a competent squad on the pitch. That seems sub-optimal, but who really knows the truth?

If I had to pick one long-term PL club that has shit the bed consistently with regard to transfers over a five-year period, it has to be either Villa or Sunderland. Given the money spent, I’m pretty sure Sunderland win this one by a nose. (And to be fair to them, Villa had so much dead money immediately after the Houllier era, they actually couldn’t spend any more and are still digging out of that hole.) I don’t know what happens behind the scenes there, but the recruitment in that place has been horrific for just about as long as I can remember.

Finally, if I’m picking a club terrible at recruitment that used to be in the Premier League but isn’t any more, it’s probably Fulham. From Europa League final in 2010 to 21st in the Championship as of right now. Someone needs to pull the cord there, and soon, or they will follow Wigan and Wolves plunge from the Premier League to League One in no time at all.

Nearly 4500 words of blathering, all in response to questions by you. My wife assures me that I am absolutely, positively going on holiday next week, which means no new content from yours truly on the site.

Thankfully, since there is actual football on television this week, James and company will be back and better than ever.

Even though I had to lose my job for it to happen, I have really enjoyed being able to write about football again this week, and I hope you have enjoyed reading it.

–TK

Hi.

I am giving a presentation at Science and Football on May 1st entitled The Death of Traditional Scouting. I am looking for a big splash image for the presentation in the style of a movie poster. My current thinking is something like an old Godzilla/Giant Robot disaster movie, but you people are awesomely creative, so if you think of something better, do eet!

Prize: £25 Amazon gift certificate.

All entries should be submitted to mixedknuts@gmail.com no later than Saturday April 16th, 2016. Please only submit finished entries and not works in progress or my email and head will asplode.

I will then choose the winner and the top 5, and include them in a post on the site here. I will also plug your work whenever I use the image.

All the best,

–TK

Some of you clicked on this just to ask, “WTF is PDO?” Which is fine – we take all kinds here.

The seeming acronym doesn’t stand for anything – it was the online handle of Brian King who created the stat in hockey. The definition of the metric PDO is listed below but Wikipedia actually has a page for hockey analytics, so if you want to know more click here.

PDO – Uhhhh…

I’m just going to copy the definition from James Grayson.

“PDO is the sum of a teams shooting percentage (goals/shots on target) and its save percentage (saves/shots on target against). It treats each shot as having an equal chance of being scored – regardless of location, the shooter, or the identity or position of the ‘keeper and any defenders. Despite this obvious shortcoming it regresses heavily towards the mean – meaning that it has a large luck component. In fact, over the course of a Premiership season, the distance a teams PDO is from 1000 is ~60% luck.”

Now you may have seen an occasional tweet from me expressing displeasure with the use of this particular metric, but I’ve never actually sat down to detail why I think it’s dumb. Today I will do that.

Reason 1) It’s Theoretically Flawed
Why? Because it treats all shots as equal.

Here’s a clue: All shots in football are NOT equal. Not close.

Look at it visually. This is from one of many pieces by Michael Caley discussing expected goals metrics and it clearly shows all shots are not equal based on distance alone.

Then you add in the whole headers are a lot harder than shots with feet thing that Colin Trainor did way back when and POOF there goes your theory and your metric, and we haven’t even gotten to all the other factors that impact a shot’s probability of being a goal.

It’s kind of sort of fine in hockey I guess because shotqualityomgwtfbbq, but it’s just fantastically dumb to use anything that makes this assumption in football.

If you need an image in your head to help explain all of this in personal terms, picture yourself with a football on a football pitch facing a goalkeeper. You take 20 on target shots at the goal from 20 yards out in the center of the pitch. You also take 20 on target shots at the goal from 6 yards out in the center of the pitch.

Which one of those scenarios is going to yield more goals?

Reason 2) It Combines Attacking and Defensive Conversion As If They Are Remotely Related
They aren’t. Teams technically have infinite choices in how they attack and how they defend. They don’t have to be related at all. Therefore, why would we treat them as if they were?

You can have a normal, straightforward average attack and a league leading defense. Or you can have an attack that consistently creates insane chances and pairs it with a defense that gives up exactly the same. Or you can… well, anything. The point is that by combining the two separate phases of play into one metric, you miss out on the signal.

“Hey, this team is overperforming PDO!”

Okay, why?

THIS IS ALWAYS THE NEXT QUESTION, and if it is always the next question, then maybe you can – I DUNNO – treat the two phases separately and immediately jump ahead a step.

“This team is giving up far fewer goals than expected in defense.”

Aha, now you have my interest. Tell me more.

“This team brought in an attacking assistant coach in the summer to try and boost the number of goals scored…”

Excellent, let’s analyze that. Wait… no team would actually do that in the current football landscape, but if they DID then this would be a very good thing to analyse.

Reason 3) Every Team Does Not Completely Regress
This is a fundamental nerd point, but the fact of the matter is that every team’s PDO does not completely regress toward zero, even across multiple seasons.

Why?

BECAUSE ALL SHOTS ARE NOT EQUAL!

There are systemic reasons why some teams allow far worse chances season after season than others. If a team’s defensive structure is such that the average shot distance it allows is from 20 yards instead of 15, your goalkeeper has more reaction time on average to make saves, there are likely more men between the ball and the goal, and the team is almost certainly going to post a better save percentage.

Or if you are a crazy high pressing team that tends to keep the number of opposing shots low, but the trade-off is that when someone beats your press they get awesome chances right on top of your goal, then your save percentage numbers are also going to look weird and are unlikely to regress to anything approaching average.

The same applies for elite attacking systems. Some head coaches have an attack that consistently creates better chances than average, which means their shots are more likely to go in the goal, and the team is more likely to post abnormal PDO numbers that have very good reasons to stay that way.

And all of this is before we even touch the impact of super elite or sub-par players with regard to skill.

One reason why it may look like teams revert to the mean over the course of many years is because manager or head coach tenures last between 12-15 months on average. Start tracking these things by head coach tenure (or tracking head coach performance across different teams) and it yields a lot more clarity.

A weird PDO by a team might be random variation, but there’s a decent chance it isn’t and for reasons you care about. Other ways of analyzing team performance would be a lot more insightful and should be examined first instead of simply assigning outliers to the random variation dustbin.

Conclusion
Regardless of its common usage in hockey, PDO is theoretically flawed in football and people need to stop using it. Yes, I know there may be data reasons why some analysts continue to use PDO, but as explained above, we should try to find a way past this at the earliest possible opportunity.

Do something smarter that better relates directly to the sport you are analyzing.

The good news here is that there is now a giant open space just waiting for a clever person to tell the world what they should be using in place of PDO, and that person could be you!

As you may know, I have had some time on my hands recently. In addition to taking a bit of a holiday, during my free time I have also been writing a book explaining the various competitive edges I have uncovered in the last couple of years researching football.

Now the majority of this book may never see print, but that’s not really the point – the point of this is to explain to stats laypeople how their football teams can improve. A lot of the material inside it isn’t completely unique, but it adheres to some extremely important requests decision makers inside of various sports have with regard to analysis.

1. It’s practical.
2. It’s hopefully easy to understand.
3. It focuses on what is important: winning.

In the past, there has always been a fear among analyst types that by writing about edges and explaining too much of their research, they would be giving away hugely valuable information for free.

What if that’s the only edge I ever uncover? Do I diminish my own chances of success by making everyone else smarter?

For a while, I also held this fear until I realized something I explained in a mailbag a couple of weeks ago – the well on improvement goes incredibly deep. I could cut this or any number of other chapters out and still end up with a book chock full of innovation and improvement.

At the end of the day, it seemed a lot better choice not to live in fear and just work hard at being awesome.

Amusingly, even if a team knew all of this information and kept it to themselves, they would not be guaranteed success. As I have been explaining publicly for the last two months, simply possessing great information isn’t enough – it’s how you use it that truly matters.

Unnamed Book Title Chapter X – Shot Locations
We’ll start here because I think this is one of the easiest concepts to grasp from an analytical perspective and one of the hardest to teach to football people. It flows from four basic principles

• The closer a shot is to goal, the more likely it is to be converted.
• Central locations are better than wide. (This mostly has to do with angles of the goal covered by the goalkeeper from wide shots.)
• At the same distance, shots with feet are far more likely to become goals than shots with the head.
• Crosses are hard.

If you want to visualize these principles, they look like this:

Principle 1 is very easy to explain and understand. Principle 2 is also quite straightforward, with or without the trigonometry involved to prove the concept. 3 and 4 might seem open to argument, but are conclusively proven by data analysis.

From these principles flows one core concept: We want to push players to take the highest quality shots possible. And related to that, at a team level we need to find ways of attacking that create high quality shots.

I’m not suggesting these are ground shaking ideas – far from it. These are basic truths about the game of football. Why then are they hard to teach?

Consider the following common football cliches:

You can’t score if you don’t shoot.

Go ahead son, have a pop.

We want our players to have the freedom to try things on the pitch – we don’t want to limit their creativity.

He unleashed a thunderbastard from distance!

Players are often taught to “try their luck from range,” and to “test the keeper.” In my experience, they are rarely taught where good shooting locations are and not to shoot unless they are inside them. This creates a problem because the whole concept of shot locations competes directly with a far more powerful force: habit.

We try to automate as much behavior as possible on the pitch so that players can use their active brains to concentrate on reading the game. When it comes to shots, you are dealing with hundreds of thousands of past attempts at every level of football played, where that player has taken a shot. If they have never been taught where to take them, a player then needs to think before every time they might shoot whether that shot is good or not, and then choose whether to take it.

The combination of fan culture where long-range goals are the ones that make the highlight shows and get the plaudits from the pundits and the sheer weight of habit make this a hard concept to convey, especially to mature professional footballers. This is even more true if no one has bothered to explain the concept of good and bad shots to players previously.

At some point not limiting creativity of your players begins to directly butt heads with the probability of winning games.

Okay, whatever – it seems hard for some players to learn this… Why bother?

Because taking higher value shots makes your attack and scoring output more consistent. As a result, it should make you more likely to win.  

These are two huge edges to grind over the course of a season.

It helps to add some very basic math into this to fully illustrate the scale of what I’m talking about.

Take the picture below.

A shot from this location would have about a 3% chance of being a goal (.03 expected goals or xG). If a player is completely by himself with no teammates around, it might make sense to take the shot, but on average you will get 1 goal for every 33 shots from this location. For most teams that is about one goal for every two to three games worth of shots. Not great, Bob!

Now add an additional player to the mix that is making a vertical run toward the goal.

A completed pass here creates a likely 1v1 with the goalkeeper from fairly close range. The resulting shot is approximately a minimum of .40 xG, so it would be converted into a goal at least 40% of the time.

How often does that pass need to be successful for passing to be a better option than shooting?

The mathematic answer is easy, but I can tell you from experience that most players gut instinct gives them an answer far higher than the actual probability.

If we do the math(s), we find the shot in example 2 (after the pass) is 13.3 times more likely to become a goal than the shot from distance (.40/.03). Even if your players could only pull off this successful pass one in every ten times, it still adds positive expectation to the result at the end of the game.

However, it doesn’t mean that making this pass every time is the correct way to go about it. In every strategy game in the world, you need to vary your strategies to have the highest chance at success. Football is no different.

There’s another factor here that gets far more math-y, but it involves variance. The ride on the variance train is a bumpy one, and we would far prefer to minimize variance whenever possible in an effort to create more certainty in the outcome.

Consistently creating fewer, higher quality chances lowers the variance in scoring output. The example used in a great piece of writing by Danny Page is Team Coin vs Team Die. Team Coin takes 4 shots a game, making their expected goal return 2. Team Die takes 12 shots a game, which on a six-sided die would also make their expected goal return 2. Simples. However, this is where variance comes into play.

If we simulate these two teams playing each other 10000 times, what we find is that Team Coin wins an average of 40% of the time, Team Die 36% of the time, and a draw occurs 24% of the time. The point return over the course of the season would be 1.42 for Team Coin and 1.36 for Team Die.

.06 points per game difference seems microscopic, right? Take that across a whole season, however, and you end up with 2-3 points more for the team with lower variance in their chances. 2-3 points is often the difference between relegation and survival, and it can also be the difference between Champions/Champions League spots or automatic promotion vs the playoffs.

This is counterintuitive across the entire sport, so let me state it again:

All things being equal, you would rather have fewer chances with a very high quality than many small quality chances.

Creating the big chances is hard, but it’s also damned important in giving your team the best chance of ending the season at the top of the table.

The variance train also makes a huge difference in player value when it comes to scoring goals.

This is the same player, two seasons apart. As you can see, nearly every detail in this plot is identical except one thing: the goal return. In one season the player scored three goals and was considered good, but not great. In the next season, he scored 10 across almost exactly the same number of shots and was considered one of the best players in the league.

What changed?

Nothing.

His expected goals per shot were the same. His shot locations were almost shockingly similar, despite playing in a couple of different roles. And yet one season the goal return was below xG and the other it was basically twice expectation.

That’s the role that variance plays in the game and in our perception of player value.

Should it? Almost certainly not.

What about shooters who we are sure are good at shooting from long distance?
This is a question I get asked all the time whenever I present this information to coaches. “We know David and Frank are good shooters from long range – shouldn’t they be allowed to shoot from distance when they want to?”

The answer to this question and so many other ones in football is: Lionel Messi

Messi is assuredly one of the most skilled shooters in football. His accuracy from almost any range is precise and in many cases astounding.

This is Messi’s shot map from the 2014-15 season.

Nearly every one of his 181 non-penalty shots that season were clustered in good areas. The ones that are outside the good areas are almost exclusively from direct free kicks. This is despite the fact that we know he is skilled at shooting.

The rationale behind this is simple: Barcelona know that shooting from prime locations makes them far more likely to score, which in turn makes them more likely to win. They pass up tons of possible shots over the course of a possession in search of a better one, a choice that few teams and players in the world make.

However, the teams that do make this choice tend to be the teams that have the most success.

To put it another way: if shooting only from prime locations is good enough for Leo Messi, shouldn’t it be good enough for you?

How can we teach this to players?
There are many ways you can go about introducing and reinforcing the concept to players and coaches alike, but I have two favorites. One of these is an experiment and the other involves a bit of paint.

The Experiment

• Put two one-yard wide targets on either side of a normal goal, spanning the entire height of the goal.
• Mark out shooting locations at 9, 15, and 23 yards away from goal.
• Ask players to estimate how many of their own shots out of ten they expect will hit either target from each distance.
• Roll the ball to the players and have them shoot for the targets. Do this 10 times from each distance and record the results. (You can do this over a few days, and you can also do it multiple times over pre-season and early in the year.)
• Tabulate the results by individual and by population and present them.

The reasoning behind this easy: merely telling players about the concept is one thing. Having them learn it for themselves is a far more potent learning tool. Additionally, it teaches you a bit about their accuracy from distance in a laboratory setting. Game settings are obviously much harder, and you expect performance to be worse there.

Even if players are two or even three times as likely to score from 23 yards as an average player, that still only takes their expected goals per shot from that range from .03 to .09. This continues to compare poorly to the .40 you would get from completing throughball passes to runners into the box. That said, you also have learned who you are more likely to want taking long shots versus a packed defense to help mix up your strategy.

The Paint
Explaining to players constantly about what is and is not a good shot annoys everyone and will wear thin pretty quickly. As an alternative measure, you can paint rings like you see on the shot maps on each of your training pitches. The solid blue line below corresponds to an 11% chance or better for a normal shot taken with feet, and it’s convenient because it basically rubs up against the 18-yard box). The black line is a 6% chance or better. Anything beyond these lines is considered a poor shot unless something special is going on (like a 1v1 with a keeper).

Explain to the players what the lines mean, and then let them evaluate themselves every time they take a shot. In behavioral economics terms, this is a nudge, and it’s one that will likely have a large impact across your entire club as time progresses. If the senior players in your team buy in to the concept and start to police it, you’ve already succeeded.

Other Ways to Reinforce the Concept
You have seen the shot maps above. A further method to highlight the issue to players is to review their own past shot locations and how successful they have been from each spot. Another way is to have them highlight past players they thought were good at shooting from specific locations and review how those players performed as well.

Almost inevitably, everyone remembers the long range screamer that went into the top 90. No one pictures the other 30 shots from that same distance that never turned into goals.

This is a classic example from a Premier League legend.

Massive volume of shots from long range. Zero open play goals outside the prime rings, and only 1 from a direct free kick.

Yet Lampard was a great goalscoring midfielder – he just didn’t get many goals from long distance, even though many people would suggest that was an important part of his game. (And to be fair, he had to deal with packed boxes constantly, which is why there are so many blocks in the chart.)

Even great players can improve their games, as long as we find the right ways to teach and emphasize the concepts.

Final Thoughts

The concepts in this chapter aren’t new – they have been floating around the football analytics stats sphere for years. Hell, plenty of proper football people understand this stuff intuitively as well, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it explained from base concepts there in public.

A couple of other notes before I go:

I think both the shot quality rings idea and the shooting location experiments listed above developed out of a discussion between DOCTOR Marek Kwiatkowski and myself about how football teams might train these things, but details are pretty fuzzy now.

As far as I know, no teams have currently painted their training pitches with shot quality rings. I would love to get feedback from people if/when this ever happens. Feel free to send me an email and a photo to mixedknuts@gmail.com or hit me up on twitter at @mixedknuts.

I also have never actually seen the results from the experiment listed above. It’s incredibly basic, but would be fascinating to track the data across age groups, league levels, table placement and any number of other wrinkles I’ve probably never even considered. It’s also potentially a really simple way to track shooting skill as players continue to develop.

Ted Knutson

As you may have noticed from my last update, I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to apply what we learn from studying football stats. How do you take academic knowledge and make it practical? What feedback do we get from talking to players and coaches about how to better apply these ideas in the future? What simply does not work?

I cannot stress enough that the world is just getting started in this area. What we understand and think is correct now may dramatically change over the next 20 years, but you do the best with what you have. Progress is a bumpy road.

What follows is a goofy idea I was fooling around with some time ago related to developing player skills in ways that are intuitive, especially to younger players. The concept here is that coaches could introduce this, and coach a couple of brief sessions on proper usage and technique, and then players could then use this as part of their free development time to help improve skills.

Confession: It might be dumb for reasons I have never thought about but many of the coaches out there have.

Here’s the rub…  that’s fine!

Experimenting with concepts and ideas is one of the most important things new people can add to the game. Plenty of potentially bright ideas won’t work out for [reasons], but many of those interim steps might be required for something truly brilliant.

The other thing I am fairly certain teams do not do enough of is learn from their training information and data. Game data only takes you so far. Being able to objectively evaluate your own players based on training drills from the first team right down through the academy is a hugely valuable resource that can’t be replicated in any other way. The ideas below were me poking around with developing an environment where that became fairly natural.

Anyway, here you go… the

FIFA Skills Pitch
You know the FIFA skill drills that help teach you how to perform certain drills in the game? Let’s adapt those and use them for objective performance and skill tracking.

The concept is to create a pitch with different areas designated to different types of skill drills. At regular intervals, coaches/analysts track player performance in the various skills and update the skill leaderboards.

Game data only generates a very small sample of information about certain important skills.

Example: In order to find out who the best shooters in the world are, it can take from 3-5 seasons of data to tease out whether a player is good versus lucky with regard to shooting skill. For skills like long shots, free kick taking, or corner taking it could potentially take even longer to discover this information.

However, by starting to track data in training for skills we care about, we can rapidly overcome the small sample size problem and learn in a matter of months what it might take years of game data to discover. We can also tailor player roles better to personnel who actually have the skills we want. And finally we can start to track player improvement in these areas objectively.

The objectives here are as follows:

• Increase player development by posting a clearly defined way to evaluate their skills and development
• Better evaluate our own players by creating data driven metrics that teach us more about player skills than we would learn from small sample sizes of game data.
• Post regular leader boards with player rankings across all levels, so that players are incentivized to compete and improve.
• Eliminate on-pitch arguments about who gets to take free kicks or corners or penalties or whatever (Note: This actually happens!). Point to the data, and that person takes it. Want to take more free kicks yourself? Get to the top of the leader board. This should help foster an environment of continued skill work and improvement at all team levels.
• Increase player buy-in by creating skill “games” directly related to one of the world’s favourite player past times – playing the FIFA video game.
• Decay data over time so that players can move up or down the leader board by showing continuous improvement.

If this pitch gets a high amount of use, you might consider developing it on turf, because the free kick and corner locations especially will get chewed to bits.

Free Kick Skill Location
How?  For free kicks, pick 5 spots on the pitch (Example: central, 22 yds, Right 20, Left 20, Right 26, Left 26).

Add two 1-yard wide targets from top to bottom of the goal on each side (make sure they are color coded different colors, since it makes it easier to remember and for the brain to process) plus elevated wall simulations.

2 times a week, have any potential free kick takers take 2 shots each from those locations and track the data. (The fitness guys cannot POSSIBLY complain about 10 total extra free kicks, right?)

(Note: Remember to randomize the locations they take kicks from so that they mimic game situations as much as possible. You never get to take a FK from the exact same spot twice in a row in a match.)

If you want to maintain the ability for guys to keep practicing and move up and down the leader board (and the on-pitch FK taker roster) then have data expire after a certain amount of time for leaderboard purposes or weight the newer data as more important than the old.

Also look into mixing in actual team practice with keepers and walls and tracking that at a less frequent interval to mimic in-game situations.

One of the things we might learn here is that certain guys are just better at converting from certain locations and we can use that for in-game decisions.

Crossing and Corner Takers Skill Location
Do something similar to the free kicks except for corners. Set up elevated targets (or rubbish bins, if you want) at the different locations and heights you want your corners to land in and track the performances twice a week from each side.

(This is a really vanilla example from the game itself, but there’s a lot that can be done here depending on what is durable and practical.)

Obviously there is some subjectivity to the evaluations – this guy hits it harder, or flatter on corners or whatever – but now coaches have actionable information on player skills, and the analysis team has more info to help evaluate the ability and importance of players in the team.

Penalty Kicks

Use the same targets as the free kicks except add a large target centrally as well (Insert important game theory point about slow central penalties here). Alternatively, you can literally just recreate the target setup from the video game.

Dribble Slaloms

One left and one right, exiting into the very top of the penalty box. From there you get 2 options

• Dribble through the slalom and shoot to one of the traditional targets
• Dribble through the slalom and set up a key pass to a number of very narrow target passing areas (say 1.5 balls wide?). Goes along with the concept of making sure all attacking players keep their heads up and are aware of passes to teammates in the box at all times. (Note: Is there a way that we can vary which targets are read as open vs covered?)
• When available, you can use players and defenders here for more realistic simulations.

Variation: Something like this for wide players:

What the hell is a radar?
It’s a way of visualizing a large number of stats at one time. In our case, the radars specifically deal with player stats. Some people also call them spider charts or graphs because they can look like they make a spider web.

Why bother creating them? What’s wrong with tables? Or bar charts?
Hrm, let’s deal with the last questions first. There is nothing is wrong with tables of numbers. My brain loves them, and so do many others.

However, you have to admit that tables of numbers are a little boring. Bar charts are better, but they kind of fall apart when trying to compare many attributes at the same time. Radars allow exactly that.

Why bother creating them? That one is complicated. Why bother making infographics or doing data visualization at all? The answer is probably at least a book long, but the quick response is because people like to look at stats presented in this way far more than they like to look at a set of numbers. Radars invite you to engage with them. They create shapes that brains want to process. People have real reactions, and once you get used to what they display and how they display it, you can interpret them much faster than if you had to do the exact same analysis with a table of numbers.

Many of the shapes created correspond to “types” of players, at least when it comes to statistical output. Pacey, dribbling winger. Deeplying playmaker. Shot monster center forward. Starfish of futility.

There’s a lot more methodology chat in the various articles I have written about on StatsBomb, but I need to explain one very quick thing before I move on to player type shapes and examples.

Radar boundaries represent the top 5% and bottom 5% of all statistical production by players in that position across 5 leagues (EPL, Bundesliga, La Liga, Serie A, and Ligue 1) and 5 seasons of data.  In stat-y terms, the cut-offs are at two standard deviations of statistical production.

In non-stat-y terms, Lionel Messi made EVERYONE look terrible. I know, that doesn’t sound that bad because it’s true, but trust me, the newer way the templates are constructed is better.

The design for these was taken from Ramimo’s 2013 NBA All-Star poster. I thought it would be really interesting to apply this to football, and then through testing, became irritated by what Messi made everyone else look like if I just used pure stats output. That’s when I added the standard deviations idea, and started playing with different positional templates.

QUICK NOTES:

• The only thing these represent is statistical output.
• If you put players in different systems, it may change their output.
• If you put them in different positions, it almost certainly WILL change their output.
• Age will also change statistical output.
• In short, these are a tool to help evaluate players. Like any tool, they have strengths and weaknesses. In general, I have found it much easier to evaluate players WITH this information than without it.

Explaining Bits and Bobs

This means that all the non-percentage stats in this are normalized for 90 minutes played. The reason you do this is to correct for the fact that some players don’t always play 90 minutes. Players that frequently get subbed on or off will inherently look worse if you look at per game stats than per 90 minutes played.

This is the age the player would be at the end of the season. We will change this soon to season age + birthday.

Why use non-penalty goals? Because penalties are converted at a 75-78% rate almost regardless of who takes them. They are a different skill to scoring goals that are not penalties (some teams have even had goalkeepers as their lead penalty takers), and so we strip them out of the scoring numbers.

DRAWING penalties is a great skill (and will be added to assist stats over time). Converting penalties is a very common one.

Shooting%
How many shots were on target out of ALL shots that a player has taken. This includes those that were blocked.

Key Passes
Passes that set up a teammate to take a shot. These are highly correlated with assists, which are passes to teammates who score a goal quickly after.

(Note: This is the same stat as Chances Created. Somewhere along the way Opta made Key Passes only mean passes that lead to shots that are NOT goals and CC is all. Which is weird.)

Through Balls
Opta definition: a pass splitting the defence for a team-mate to run on to. Why do we care? These types of passes are generally considered the single type of passes most likely to score a goal.

Scoring Contribution
Combined non-penalty goals and assists per 90 minutes.

PAdj stands for “possession adjusted” stats. The reason why we do this is because it normalizes defensive stats for opportunity. Think about it this way: If your teammates always have the ball, then you can’t make any defensive actions, and you would look worse in this statistic compared to a Tony Pulis-style team that sits deep and constantly defends.

When adjusted for possession, tackles and interception output becomes moderately correlated with shots conceded and goals against, as opposed to having no correlation without the adjustment.

In short, it’s an imperfect adjustment, but much better than not having the adjustment at all.

In the bottom left of every radar is the actual statistical output in numbers for each spoke of the radar. Numbers in green are in the Top 5% of output in that stat for the player population and numbers in red are the Bottom 5%.

Forwards + Attacking Midfielder Shapes

Pure Goalscorer

Elite Creative passer

 Wide, Dribbling Playmaker

All Around Super Forward

Starfish of Futility

Bowtie of Sadness

Central and Defensive Midfielders

Pure DM

 Heavy Attacking CM

 Deep-lying Playmaker

 General All Around CM

Fullbacks

Defensive

Attacking

All Around

I broke down fullbacks in detail here: http://statsbomb.com/2014/07/introducing-and-explaining-fullback-radars-sagna-debuchy-lahm-alves-and-more/

Center Backs
These were developed later, and to be perfectly honest, they are less valid overall than the other positional templates. I knew this ahead of time, but legendary Scotland, Everton, and Rangers player David Weir – who is also a centerback – asked me to take a swipe at creating these and I couldn’t say no. They give you a sense of how a centerback plays, but become tricky beyond that.

I do know that Thiago Silva is pretty fantastic, though.

–Ted Knutson
mixedknuts@gmail.com

You know the part in The Big Short where Michael Burry (Christian Bale) is sitting there at his desk, explaining to an irate investor that the housing market is guaranteed to crash, it’s just that no one knows it yet? And the fact that it has never crashed in modern times has nothing to do with his certainty that this future crash is now inevitable?

I feel that way about stats and data in football.

I believe with utter certainty that stats and data will play a huge role in the future of the sport. This is despite knowing that my certitude makes me sound like a bit of a loon to parties that approach this subject with some skepticism.

Today I’m going to explain why I carry this certainty about the future, but it requires the audience to shed one big misconception most people seem to carry about the game.

Football is not unique and unrelated to other sports.

Football actually bears reasonable similarities to basketball and both forms of hockey, such that certain ways of analyzing those sports are easily adaptable to football. And this goes beyond stats – German coaches have long consulted with elite field hockey coaches about defensive tactics, and Pep Guardiola includes legendary water polo player Manuel Estiarte in his coaching staff. Even now, researchers like Luke Bornn are taking what they learned applying spatial statistics to SportVU data in the NBA and seeing what they can learn from football’s tracking data.

Yes, football has its own idiosyncrasies and you need to understand the game at a high level to get the most out of your analysis. No one intelligent disputes that. But the fact that we’ve seen massive revolutions in how other sports are analysed that have lead to changes in how the sports are also played means we should expect a revolution to hit football in the future as well.

Chasing Perfection
I have been reading Andy Glockner’s book recently, which catalogs and explains the NBA’s analytics evolution, and it continually amazes me how much it parallels a movement still in its infancy in football.

“There is way more money involved in [the league] today than even ten years ago, and teams have to work harder and harder to find and maintain competitive edges. How they are doing so varies wildly from team to team, and heavily involves state-of-the-art technology to try to move ever closer to solving an impossibly complex and nuanced sport.”

Is that quote about basketball or football? The NBA or the English Premier League? It could be either, right? Except in the Premier League there are bushels full of competitive edges sitting in easy reach of anyone who knows where to look.

Another thing I believe for certain is they won’t stay that way for long. Spending money now to obtain the low hanging fruit and discover new ones also gives a team a head start in what will assuredly be a brain race at some point down the road, and more importantly, will likely yield huge dividends in terms of points, money, and potential titles now.

That’s the thing that I think the analytics movement in football may have gotten wrong through absolutely no fault of anyone involved. The stats guys developing new ideas and doing the work often think of it as, “how do we apply stats to football to learn new things?”

That’s technically correct. However, it misses the major point.

The real goal for the analytics movement in any sport should be: how do we discover and deliver new competitive edges?

Stats and data are a very useful tool in doing that, but it’s a big tool box.

Another thing Glockner highlights in an early chapter is this piece by Chris Ballard discussing the new stats movement in the NBA, circa 2005. What amazes me is not that most of the names mentioned are still quite prominent in NBA front offices, but instead how bloody young they are.

Sam Presti is 29. Sam Hinkie is 27. Celtics “Senior Vice President for Operations” Daryl Morey is… 31.

Anyway, Glockner’s book is excellent, especially if you read it with an eye that it may be foretelling the future of a football analytics movement that has yet to start across most of Europe.

Statheads Are The Best Free Agent Bargain in Baseball
FiveThirtyEight is a mixed bag, but their sports stuff is still generally pretty good. This piece, which examines the expansion of “numbers-savvy front-office staffers over time” is excellent.

“Although the analytical gold rush began before the period we examined, hiring has accelerated at an almost exponential rate over the last few years.”

One of the main takeaways from the article is that baseball teams are spending more and more on stats dorks because they provide a dramatically bigger boost to win totals on a per dollar basis than many free agent signings. Part of that is because baseball’s player market has become more efficient over the years thanks to improved use of stats, but a bigger part comes down to basic economics.

They estimate a five-man analytics team costs about $350,000 per year, which still lags behind the minimum salary for a single player.

The takeaway: It paid to invest in analytics early. Teams with at least one analyst in 2009 outperformed their expected winning percentage by 44 percentage points over the 2012-14 period, relative to teams who didn’t — an enormous effect, equivalent to more than seven extra wins per season. 

Even the minimum estimate of two extra wins per year would represent a return roughly 30 times as efficient as spending the same amount on the free-agent market.

One more thing that really struck me out of that piece and that I feel is hugely applicable to football.

Although the big-budget Boston Red Sox were also one of the first teams to demonstrate that an analytics department could help win a World Series, a number of low-payroll, small-market teams — including not only the Moneyball A’s, but also the Rays, Indians, Padres and Pirates — were among the first to form quantitative departments and develop systems to house and display statistical data. It made sense: The more pressing a team’s financial imperative to stretch every dollar and wring out every win, the more likely it was to try a new approach.

How can teams compete with the traditional giants beyond just spending more money?

• Apply the marginal gains.
• Make consistently better decisions than other teams.
• Play more efficient football.
• Recruit better coaches.
• Recruit better players.
• Make fewer mistakes in the transfer market.

Find. The. Edges!

Baseball and Basketball are hugely different sports. In fact, they are more different from each other than basketball is from football. And yet in both of these areas we have seen teams dramatically ramp up spending to get smarter faster than the competition.

Why?

Because it helps them win more.

This WILL happen in football.

The only questions are how long it takes before it happens in scale across not just England, but European football as a whole, and which teams will lead the charge and reap the rewards as early adopters.

–TK

mixedknuts@gmail.com

Note: This was originally given as a presentation at the Science + Football conference in May 2016. After a great many requests, it has been lazily converted into the article below.

In the beginning…

Cavemen scouts watched cavemen footballers live and in the flesh.

Then…

Cavemen invented television, and cavemen scouts could watch cavemen footballers on video.

Now…

Cavemen have invented computers.

And spreadsheets.

And air conditioning.

New, useful tools in evaluating cavemen footballers in a search for the best, brightest, and undervalued.

What Did Video Bring To Scouting?

• It’s cheaper. Look at a year of video provider service (like WyScout or Instat) compared to a year of travel budget to put scouts at live matches.
• Scouts now have easy access to more players and leagues than ever before.
• Finally, and most importantly… it’s all on demand. Whenever your scouts need to watch footage of players, they can. No more of this waiting for actual football to be played in front of you while you sit in cold, rainy stands on a Tuesday in Stoke nonsense.

What Does Data Bring to Scouting?

• Instead of evaluating hundreds of players a year, you can profile tens of thousands.
• Of those players, you get every minute played and every event they were involved in.
• Once the infrastructure is created, costs are whatever your data costs are.
• DIFFERENT, OBJECTIVE DATA than traditional scouting reports.

Plenty of people talk about the “data revolution” in sports. For me, it’s just another step and another set of tools to use in the evolving recruitment landscape.

How Does It Work Inside a Club?
With a small recruitment team of 2 stats + 6 part-time scouts, we evaluated over 1000 players in a year for the first teams of Brentford and Midtjylland.

Yes, but were you successful? This is the most important factor, and obviously it depends on how you look at it.

After a disastrous start in the first 9 games due to a poor manager choice, Brentford earned points at nearly a playoff pace, despite awful injuries in the first half of the season. The team also lead the league in goals scored and avoided an FFP-related transfer embargo.

And most importantly, they did it with one of the lowest wage budgets in the league and a £10-11m transfer fee surplus* in the year we were involved in recruitment.

I’m going to notch that up as success, while admitting that at the start of the season, I was hoping for promotion just like the owner and every other Brentford fan out there.

*My estimate, not gospel truth.

Not Scouting Players Live is Ridiculous!
I get this sentiment a lot, both from fans and even from smart people who work inside of football. My perspective is like this

• By not spending time and money sending scouts to watch (many) live matches, we are able to watch a much greater volume of matches and more players. Travel time is a resource cost and it can be significant.
• Also by not sending scouts to watch live matches, we cut out an enormous source of cognitive bias.

Take this quote for example:

“I can learn more about a player in 20 minutes in the stands than I can by watching him in hours of video footage.”

For this to be true, you either have to be some magical savant of player evaluation or you are full of shit. Conservatively, I would say 99% of people who feel this way have to be the latter.

This is a HUGE problem when it comes to scouting. If 4-5 games worth of video scouting work can be wiped away by sending one guy to the stadium, your process has a huge flaw, and likely so does your scout. It’s a correctable flaw, but if this type of thing is what decides whether you sign a player or not, good luck to you.

Yes, you need information about what the player is like with their coaches and teammates. That’s what personality profiles and background checks are for. Thinking you can get all of that information based on seeing a player once or twice in person is a myth the scouting world has sold itself.

Do I think there is potential value in watching certain positions live? Yes. And some leagues have no useable video, so old-fashioned, in-person scouting is the only way to get the job done. In general though, I would do as much video work as possible in any club that I work in for the reasons explained above.

The Story of Radamel Falcao

And all of this was above and beyond the ACL injury, which for a 28 year old striker is a real concern.

Loan fee: Unknown (Rumored to be 5-10M a season)
Wages: Massive (Rumoured to be 13M+ a season)

Outcome: 4 goals and 4 Assists at Manchester United. 1 Goal, 0 assists at Chelsea.

Lesson: Even if the ONLY THING adding data to your recruitment does is save you from a couple of bad decisions every year, they still pay for themselves. (In this case by saving something like 20M in wasted money on Falcao.)

Nate Silver and PECOTA

• PECOTA = Statistical scouting system for baseball.
• It was a very good system for evaluating Major League talent at the time.
• In 2006, Silver started applying it to minor league prospects. At that time, the only competition was from the scouts.
• In 2011, he compared PECOTA projections to the scouts…
• Scout forecasts were 15% better than PECOTA’s predictions, resulting in $+336M worth of extra wins during that period.

Reasoning behind this was two-fold. First, the scouts started to use basic numbers more to inform their scouting. Second, scouts have far more than just statistics at their fingers to evaluate prospects. They know whether guys are smart. Or overweight. Or hard working. Or any number of other things PECOTA did not know.

Nate’s conclusion:

“The only way a purely stat-based list should be able to beat a hybrid list is if the biases introduced by the [scouting] process are so strong that they overwhelm the benefit.”

Building a Hybrid Process

• Names come in from any source – agents, coaches, players, scouts, numbers… whatever
• Initial check on Age/Passport/Realism/Need
• Stats check in leagues where you have stats – initial quick video scout in leagues where you don’t
• If players pass that, they go into the proper scouting queue. The player also triggers a detailed stat check.
• Scouting report comes back. Combined recruitment group ranks players for positions based on clear guidelines from head coach.
• List with executive summaries + video delivered to coaches.

Scouting Biases

What follow are actual quotes from scouts I have collated by networking with other football people for the last couple of years.

• “Six months in the devs and maybe he’ll be good enough.”
  This player went on to a big 5 move after being voted best player in his league
• “Poor tackler.”
  This player lead his league in tackling.
• “Couldn’t play in a midfield 2.”
  This player was the best DM in his league the year before. Then he was the best AM in his league the next season.
• “Plays in a shit league.”
  Quants have solid algorithms that tell which leagues are good/bad. This league was actually solid.
• “Few Shots. Snatches at the ball. Not a finisher.”
  Finished with an NPG90 of .9 for the season, and shots90 above 4. Whatever he was doing seemed to put the ball in the back of the net a surprising amount.
• “Not enough heart for a [REDACTED] player.”
  Sadly, we have no algorithm that directly measures heart. Also, I’m not sure how you argue back about this in a recruitment meeting without being extremely sarcastic. Thankfully, I wasn’t involved.

So if this is the general environment you are walking into, what do you do?

Profile Your Scouts

• Scouting reports are DATA! Data is meant to be analysed.
• Go back through past work and review it.
• If using numbers, what are the average scores for each scout? For each position? What if some scouts never find a centerback or fullback that is deemed good enough to play in your team? You need to know that and adjust for it.

Are they biased:

• Toward young players?
• Against foreigners?
• Just don’t understand the football in certain leagues? If the style of football in certain leagues differs a lot from what a scout is used to, they can have problems evaluating players in those leagues.

Data analysis is complicated and hard. Scouting is also complicated and hard, but uses an entirely different set of skills.

One club I know of has scouts in 37 different countries, speaking more than 10 different native languages. Standarizing output across that organization simply based on linguistic differences is nearly impossible.

Standardize Your Scouts

• Scouts are not just plug and play. Scouting is hard work and scouts from different clubs and backgrounds might be looking for totally different things in players than your club requires.
• Scouts need training, and clear guidelines on what to look for when evaluating players.
• Scouts may need training across multiple leagues and styles of football.
• Youth scouts need even MORE guidance, since there are a ton of pitfalls regarding relative age and growth spurts they need to work around.

Lesson: You need to standardize traditional scouting output as much as possible to make better decisions and so that even your scouting output is consistent.

Conclusions

1. Increased use of stats and data is just a part of the long-term evolution of the recruitment landscape.
2. Talented scouts are hard to find and will remain extremely valuable members of any club.
3. Hybrid processes – both stats and traditional scouting – are mandatory as best practice.
4. On-demand video and data allow teams to use these valuable scouting resources more effectively.
5. You MUST be aware of scouting biases in order to get the most out of these valuable employees.

Ted Knutson
@mixedknuts
mixedknuts@gmail.com

No one quite knows what is going to happen at the world’s biggest club this summer. What was supposed to be a season where United returned to glory looks a lot more like a dumpster fire of missed opportunity.

With performance at the top of the league as weak as it has ever been, it’s shocking to find United once again likely to miss out on Champions League play. The question is why? Is it van Gaal’s fault? Are the players not good enough? Is there a brain cloud over Manchester affecting the entire city’s footballing performance? Let’s find out!

Facts

• Transfermarkt estimates United have a net spend on transfers of £150M the last two seasons. I suspect this underestimates the Martial deal and includes flipping Angel di Maria to PSG for a loss, but it’s a big number however you slice it.
• Combine that with nearly £60M spent the year after Sir Alex retired and you are looking at well over £200M invested into the playing squad the last three years, two of which were clearly guided by Louis van Gaal’s requirements.
• United’s payroll is monstrous, though so too are their commercial revenues. They can get away with paying high wages, even to declining performers like Wayne Rooney.

In terms of quality, the recruitment has actually been pretty good. Shaw’s injury was bad luck, but Blind, Herrera, Shaw, di Maria, Martial, Memphis, and Schneiderlin are all excellent players. Schweinsteiger was always going to be an occasional guest star because his body was breaking down well before he left Germany, but he’s a classic “winning mentality” guy and a genuine leader.

So yeah, I don’t hate the recruitment aside from the prices paid, but if any team in the world can afford to spend to much on good transfers, it’s Manchester United.

And yet… this is actually difficult to believe but…

Manchester United are generating 11.3 shots a game.

That’s bad.

Actually, it’s putrid.

The only teams who create fewer chances a game are the three teams that are probably getting relegated plus attacking powerhouses West Brom Albion and Stoke.

Let me put this a different way…

BIG SAM’S TEAM TAKES MORE SHOTS A GAME THAN MANCHESTER UNITED.

Over £200M in net spend, can’t create more shots than Sunderland.

We can talk about shot quality all you want, but LVG’s United are taking 50% fewer shots than the elite teams in the league. That might be a problem if you want to compete for CL spots, let alone win a title.

Yes, the defense has been good, but there’s a bit of luck involved. Okay fine, some say “luck”, others say “the otherworldly skills of David de Gea.” Either way, the tradeoffs for keeping the defense sound is making eunuchs out of all the attackers. That’s a huge systemic flaw, and the blame for it can’t be pointed anywhere else except van Gaal.

To illustrate the drop-off a little more clearly, I’ve taken shot maps from the last Fergie season and put them next to what United have done in 37 league matches this year for comparison.

Let’s start with the defense.

(Click to embiggen)

Despite giving up 20 shots to West Ham on Tuesday, LVG’s team this year will concede somewhere between 15 and 20% fewer shots than the last Fergie team. The quality of shot conceded is a fraction higher, while they block 5% fewer. So Fergie’s United gave up more volume in defense but the rest is a bit of a wash.

Now for the attack…

Woof.

25% fewer shots taken, which over the course of a season is 125-150 shots less. Quality of shot generated is also about 25% lower. Combine those two factors and you end up with a FORTY goal difference between the two years with one game left to play.

Fergie’s teams were amazing at generating central shots between the penalty spot on the goal. LVG’s are anything but, and that’s likely to cost them another Champions League campaign.

The players are good. Compare the squad to West Ham and Southampton, both of whom have scored more goals than United and have a better goal differential, and figure out which one you’d rather have.

United are losing out compared to title contenders in attack, and their players aren’t allowed to attack aggressively because how they defend doesn’t allow it. So to me, the problem is the tactical system they are playing, which is dictated by…

Non-United fans love van Gaal at least as much as David Moyes, which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about how good United have been under the former Dutch master.

Mailbag time! Readers ask questions. I promise to answer the best of them and not make fun of the worst of them.

I also promise to answer all of these questions honestly to the best of my ability, and not to lie or misdirect people from the truth.

Mostly.

Depending on what sort of tools the people you hire bring with them, maybe a month? To some extent it depends on how quickly you get the data company to send you the data, and how much time it takes you to get it organized. As long as I can query a database, we can get work done.

If I walked into a new club tomorrow that worked with Opta data, it would be a matter of days before I could advise on recruitment and maybe a month or two before the Death Star becomes fully operational. On the other hand, any analytics department should spend at least a fraction of their time learning new things so that the value of their output always increases. The curve of starting from scratch is somewhat painful, but as long as you can be less wrong than the teams you are competing against, you have an edge.

Statistical analysis in sport is a competitive endeavour and you will never, ever be smart enough.

Cost is a hella-tricky one right now, and I can tell you this out of personal experience. Part of this is because all of this is new, and football is still confused about the value of the role.

• A performance analyst role is probably £20-30k on average.
• Data analysts are not the same as performance analysts.
• A top data scientist is well into six figures as a base salary in the corporate world. Add some experience to that and you get serious money. (Well, serious for normal people, not for footballers.)
• Good data people in football should be able to save you millions of pounds a year in the transfer market
• Smart data people in football should also be able to generate goals on the pitch, provided they are listened to and integrated as part of your process.
• A single Premier League goal probably equates to £2M next season.

Now consider the fact that in American sports, estimated average salary for General Managers is $2M, depending on sport. (General Manager = Director of Football or “People who can use data to make smarter decisions”)

And there’s a pretty strong argument that the good GMs are vastly underpaid. (Read this from Benjamin Morris to explain why.)

Tricky, eh?

If you are willing to hire smart kids right out of school and deal with the mistakes and learning curve alluded to above, you can probably staff a full department for £150k plus data costs. If you want more experience – and there just plain aren’t many people who have experience in stats and have worked in football right now – multiply that by a lot, but you should still get huge value.

For those who are unaware, Kevin de Bruyne is one of my favorite players in the world and has been since his first Bundesliga stint at Werder Bremen back in 12-13. When I first started writing about statistical transfers in summer 2013, I suggested him as a cheeky option as a wide attacker for Arsenal, and then thought Chelsea sold him to Wolfsburg for 50% less than they should have. Also two of my three kids are gingers, so “Ginger Freak” is a very affectionate nickname.

Obviously I am still totally in love with the Ginger Freak. He’s one of the best players in the world in transition and this season you can see him learning to become a better player in and around the box. Thinking about what he could become under Pep’s tutelage is the kind of thing that will make City games only air after the watershed next year.

Sorry kids, mature audiences only.

Britain has a fairly huge “manager” problem right now. Tactically, the country was backwards for a very long time, especially in the lower leagues. The style of football many of the current 40-60 year old coaches learned is not a great style for the modern game. Thus you are seeing more and more coaches from other countries imported into the Premier League and Championship.

Are they smarter? I don’t know, but for whatever reason, they certainly seem to have had a better football education.

I have a lot of ideas about how to find and educate better coaches – so many that I can’t fit a reasonable answer here. I have also been interacting with smart young coaches a lot in the last year, and I think the next generation of coaches here in the UK will be much more modern and forward-thinking.

If I were a young coach in England right now, I would aggressively try to find internships under coaches that are tactically innovative, because that will give you and edge in the future and the country needs that. You need to learn what they have to teach you, and you need to see how they train those tactics in sessions on the pitch.

If I couldn’t find helpful internships in England, then I would go to Germany or Spain to learn instead.

Coaching is a knowledge-based occupation. If you were going to university, you would seek out the best possible place to teach you. You need to do that with football too, it’s just that instead of a centuries-old university system, you get the chaos and disorder of modern football.

Good luck!

Rico Henry from Walsall.

English. 18 years old.

League One team of the season.

Left footed.

Plays Left Back.

Zoom zoom.

For those who have never heard of it, Smartodds is my former employer, and is owned by the same person who owns Brentford and Midtjylland football clubs. The team I was part of sat inside the company, but worked primarily for the clubs – a bit like City Football Group does for Manchester City and their sister clubs in New York, Melbourne, and Japan.

The first project I worked on for Smartodds was probably the most valuable thing I will ever create in football, and I never would have worked on that unless Matthew Benham asked me to do so. It also made me realize how much space exists in football for smart people to innovate.

If you are a team and you want to know what that project was, you can hire me to explain the details. My contact info is at the bottom.

Beyond that, it was fascinating to learn just how hard it is to get transfer deals across the line. Even when you find players early and are the first club to show an interest in a player, and everything looks great the entire time, so many transfers just do not work out.

The other big lesson is that even when you exist in a place surrounded by smart people, plenty of mistakes will be made. It’s part of life, it’s part of science, and it’s part of football.

Learn the lessons and do better next time. It’s so fucking vanilla and self-help it’s almost painful to type, but it’s the truth so there you go.

In terms of recruitment, analytics creates a bigger multiplier in lower leagues but in real monetary value, just avoiding mistakes in the top leagues is strictly worth more.

To explain: The majority of individual transfers in the top half of the Premier League this season will cost more than what Brentford paid for their entire squad. A team can buy a lot of guys for £500k and sell them on later for £2.5M. You can’t buy a lot of guys for £10M and flip them for £50M though – there just aren’t enough £50M buyers out there (or likely £50M talents).

My team at Smartodds was probably one of the few in the world that did extensive work on transfer evaluations from small and medium leagues throughout the world. Most of the teams that have analysts working on recruitment are in the Champions League and don’t need to look that far down the ladder to find talent. Because we had one of the smallest budgets in the league, we did and we learned a lot because of it.

Number of Championship clubs that have talked to me so far this year about recruitment or anything else: 1.

Seems like plenty of teams are missing some tricks right now.

With regard to everything else stats dorks can do in opposition scouting, style of play, etc, the value is probably equal across leagues, but the competition is worse at the lower levels, so it should be easier to win disproportionately more there on a small budget.

Tell me what you see on the pitch. What’s the first touch like? How does the player evaluate game situations? What mistakes are being made? What took your breath away, even if it didn’t quite work out? We have a scouting template that highlights the important stuff we want to know, so evaluate that.

Don’t worry about what the stats might have missed. If you explain the football you are seeing in front of you, that stuff should come out anyway.

I thought Morata had an excellent season last year. Adjusting to a new league can be tough, and his performance was still exceptional for a young forward.

On the surface, this season has not gone quite as well, but I’m not sure I agree. Scoring contribution per90 in the league this season was .80. Last year was .88. There no noticeable difference in output except last season he had more goals and this year he had more assists.

He also had 2 goals and 2 assists in 534 Champions League minutes against tough teams, including this piece of filth at Manchester City.

And yet worries (and the narrative) persist. The question you start to ask is why might this season be different than all the others? Stats won’t really tell you the answer to that, so I’d watch every match and compare it to previous years. What’s going on behind the scenes as well? For the numbers being batted around now, teams need to do all their due diligence, almost regardless of whether they think this year was better or worse than Morata’s past.

I thought he was huge value back when he moved to Juventus in 2014. He’ll probably move for silly money this summer and the value will be gone. That said, if I was looking for a guy to lead my line, score goals, and create goals for his teammates as a center forward for the next four years, he’d still probably be it.

For what it’s worth, I still believe Memphis has a reasonable chance to be great as well, but I’m not certain that’s possible under LVG. Football is complicated. So are humans. Memphis only turned 22 in February. Stick him with a head coach that actually wants his forwards to attack and we’ll have a better idea of whether my evaluation was terrible.

There are a myriad of ways to profile head coaches/managers with data and find more objective ways to evaluate them than just the performance on the pitch. It’s actually one of the more valuable services an analytics team can provide to clubs, and there are consultancies out there that quietly do this too.

The big thing to take away from it is whether a particular coach fits the style of play your club wants to play and/or how your personnel might fit into their new style of play. If you have to bin half your squad simply by hiring a new head coach, maybe you want to look a bit closer at some other coaches whose style doesn’t require quite so much immediate, expensive change.

No one writes about it though, because it can be a bit boring and readers seem to care not at fucking all.

*awkward silence*

*clears throat*

Set pieces and their results are random. You might as well ask me about my favorite drop of rain.

*walks out of press conference*

*stops*

Fine, one last question.

Eggggzactly.

And on that note, I am out of here…

–Ted Knutson
@mixedknuts
mixedknuts@gmail.com

POSTSCRIPT

If you follow football Twitter at all, you’ve probably seen commentary about Marcus Rashford’s ascent to the English National Team.

There are two fairly clear sides in this argument.

Side 1: Hey, look at this amazing young Manchester United player who can’t stop scoring goals!

Side 2: He’s been really lucky to score as many goals as he has so far. Statistically, there is little reason to think he’s as good as his goal return suggests, so should he really be going to Euros?

I was intrigued by the stats argument for a lot of reasons, not least because I hadn’t seen anyone actually examine whether it was true outside of some hot takes. Additionally, I figured it was a topic that would let me discuss young player statistical  development, an area that has always intrigued me, in a context that people might care about.

Hot or Not: Marcus Rashford
Having seen Rashford score two goals in living colour (I was at Midtjylland Europa League knockout tie at Old Trafford), I can tell you he looks like a genuine football player. He’s reasonably tall, has a good frame, but he’s an 18-year-old who is still filling out. He’s got good pace and thus far seems to have a great knack of timing his runs to be in the right place at the right time. That’s an incredibly valuable skill if it can be done consistently.

Aside from physical attributes, he has two massive things going in his favor.

• He is playing games in the Premier League at 18 years old.
• He is scoring goals in the Premier League at 18 years old.

Both of these things are unusual, but the second is extremely so. The very fact he is being selected to play PL matches at all at this age suggests he’s an elite talent, and the fact that he’s scoring goes a long way toward reinforcing it.

So what are the stats guys on about?

The problem is that Rashford doesn’t generate any real shot volume. 1.7 shots per 90 is well below the level of elite forwards, and because of that his goal return of basically 1 every 2 games is questionable.

Compare this to what I produced from a similar small sample size of Harry Kane games and you can see what might be worrisome.

Then again, I was poking around with the radar generator and remembered that this looked very similar to another player whose goal scoring has consistently surprised me at Lazio.

Klose has an amazing knack for scoring goals without generating a lot of shots, and it has been surprisingly sustainable in Serie A. Bas Dost is another guy who consistently generates amazing expected goals per shot throughout the data I have on his career.

Maybe Rashford is a shot quality monster without being a volume monster?

Or maybe not…

Rashford’s shot quality is solid for a center forward, but nowhere close to the elite levels of Klose or Dost. So yeah, he’s probably riding a bit of a hot streak, and maybe he was also fortunate to be chosen by Hodgson to go to Euros. I don’t have a problem with it – England always seem to take a teenage player to major tournaments anyway, and Rashford is this year’s mascot.

What Can We Infer About Rashford’s Future Career?
Short answer: not much, but he’s likely to be pretty good.

The reason behind this are the two elements I mentioned above.

It is damned hard for 18 year olds to perform against adults, and that’s especially true in the Premier League. Rashford has done that, so the null hypothesis – in my opinion at least – is that he’s pretty good simply by being selected at all and then scoring goals.

Okay, but what about the shot volume issue?

Well that is the tricky element that forces us to look more closely at player development, and how we think it occurs versus how it actually occurs.

For those of you unfamiliar with this topic, there’s a concept out there called the age curve and it suggests that on average, football players peak somewhere between 24 and 28. Now this doesn’t mean that all players peak in this period – some might peak at 22 and others strangely late at 30 – but across the population this trend holds very strongly to be true.

Marcus Rashford is 18, meaning he probably has another five to six seasons before we see his peak output. Add five or six years of shot volume to a trending chart and you’ll likely wind up somewhere pretty good.

On the other hand, don’t expect this to be a smooth curve – real player development tends to be anything but. This chart is taken from baseball velocity development (thanks @drivelinebases), but skills and output in football are similar.

If you are expecting a smooth curve, you’d get to week 14 or 15 and want to kill yourself. OH MY GOD WHY IS THIS NOT WORKING?!?

The human body, biomechanics, the sport of baseball (or football) are all incredibly complex things, so expecting an easy input to output relationship is a recipe for disappointment.

And calling the peak versus the plateau is almost impossible. Has Romelu Lukaku peaked yet? I don’t know – he’s looked like a grown ass man since he was 17 years old. I can give you a probability as to whether this has happened or not, but the fact of the matter is that I am not going to KNOW the answer to that question for another couple of years, and neither will anyone else.

This is why focusing on the process matters. You can control the process, even if you rarely control the outcome. This is true in player development just as it is true in the league table.

Back to our young  Manchester United player – with this small an amount of league data, we don’t know how Rashford will develop, so we have to make some guesses based on the aforementioned selection biases as priors.

18-year-olds who score reasonable amounts of goals in the Premier League tend to go on to have excellent Premier League careers.

That said, would I want to rely on Rashford to be United’s primary striker next season? Eh…

Can We Use Data to Evaluate Young Players?
This question came up at Science + Football a couple of times and the answer is yes, with some caveats.

• The first challenge is getting reliable data, and many years of it.
• The second challenge is making sure that data stays valid.
• And the third challenge is using that data to build trends where you can evaluate approximately how good those young players are and how good they potentially will be.

You are never going to be perfect with this. You might not even be able to get close. But you can probably get better than knowing nothing objective, which is an improvement on the status quo.

One thing I suggested to Midtjylland’s academy last year was that they get on the same data format that we use to evaluate first team prospects, so that we’re able to match up all the advanced metrics and provide them with similar analytical tools. Additionally, with enough information, we could start evaluating statistical development patterns in their best youth players. In order to do this, they would need to send off past seasons of video to be coded by Opta (the data company we used) at the U-19 and potentially U-17 levels.

With this information, we could then track a player’s progress through the development teams and into the first team (or other clubs in the data set), and understand what those players looked like at different stages in their development.

Another area where tracking younger player statistical output is potentially a huge boon is with teams that have a lot of loanees. If a Manchester City or Chelsea send all their loanees to leagues where they have data, they will gain an incredible amount of clarity about their own players’ performance. They can then use that information to better assess what the next loan should be, as well as which players are most likely to become good enough to make their first team, and which players are probably better to sell on now. With the right people working on this project, they can also develop an objective pricing model for those players’ future transfer values.

Given all the information above, perhaps the most interesting questions now are

• What should we expect from Marcus Rashford next season? and
• What would be best for the continued development of his career?

The new manager at United is Jose Mourinho, a genius, but also someone who has been remarkably stingy about handing out valuable playing time to young players. What likely will not be best for Rashford will be to ride United’s bench for the entire season, with only a handful of Cup appearances to his name.

The Jamie Vardy news came as a surprise. You knew there would be rumors of a move this summer, but normally sensible Arsenal? Really?!? That’s an unexpected source, but the details of a £20-30M bid and potential buyout clause were confirmed by a number of reliable sources over the weekend.

Today I wanted to investigate what Arsenal might see in the 29-year-old striker, currently of the English National Team, but playing non-league football as few as five years ago. On the surface, Arsenal are thinking of buying an aging striker who is at max possible value, which is anything but standard operating procedure.

Note: I am going to ignore the cultural issues here, but you are welcome to your own opinion. If I were doing this professionally, they would certainly factor into my evaluation and recommendation.

The Context
Before we get to the meaty analysis bit, we need to examine the current context of the Arsenal squad, since it’s going to give us some pointers on what the thinking might be behind the scenes.

• Welbeck is injured and his career as an elite forward could be over before it truly got started.
• Because of this, and also because Walcott had a sub-par post-ACL season, Arsenal’s attack lacked pace both centrally and wide. This was a problem and the attack suffered because of it.
• Arsenal probably needed another center forward this summer anyway. Giroud turns 30 in September, Yaya Sanogo is a bust, and Chupa Akpom is nowhere near good enough for Arsenal’s first team right now.

Add in uncertainty about Walcott in a central role and Arsenal are definitely buying a center forward now. It’s not optional like it was last year – it’s a mandatory purchase in order to be able to compete next season.

Vardy 15-16

Obviously this is good. Good enough to help Leicester City’s cinderella squad win the Premier League. Vardy’s shot map might just be the best in the Premier League this past year, and the number of throughballs in the box is ridiculous. Esteemed Managing Editor James Yorke offered up the following alternative as his visualization of Vardy’s shot map

17 shots off throughballs, 16 after completed dribbles – Vardy was getting a huge chance more than once a game. This by itself would be enough to bring scrutiny by a club in need of an elite striker, even with the age and personality concerns. Vardy’s expected goals per shot were exceptional, and he posted similar numbers in that respect in 14-15, though he played more of a hybrid role that season.

However, there’s another element of Vardy’s game that is massive for Arsenal.

Vardy creates goals for teammates.

If you can’t set up teammates for shots, you can’t play center forward for Arsenal under Arsene Wenger. Only an average passer across the rest of the pitch, Vardy keeps his head up in the box and as a result he has produced assists consistently for teammates at the Premier League level (.23 per90 in 14-15, .13 in 15-16).

A final factor that deserves note: Vardy drew 7 penalties this season, which was more than 18 of the 20 Premier League teams. Convert those into assists at a .78 rate, and his scoring contribution numbers look even better. He likely won’t generate as many penalties in the future, but it’s a valuable skill and one that is shared by another center forward whose release clause Arsenal tried to activate a couple of summers ago.

It also further highlights how miserable Vardy and Mahrez were to deal with in and around the penalty box.

But It’s Just One Good Season
Well actually… *puts on his statsplaining cap*

It’s just one elite season. (Though I agree with the general point here.)

This season Vardy was 21^st in expected scoring contribution (expected goals + expected assists) across Europe, and the six players around him were: Marco Reus, Alexis Sanchez, Aguero, [Vardy], Mkhitaryan, Cavani, Ozil.

That’s undeniably good. However, last season was still decent. In a bad team playing a couple of different positions, Vardy’s expected scoring contribution was still .48. A selection of the cohort around him yields Immobile, Mario Gomez, Keita Balde, [Vardy], Haris Seferovic, Danny Ings and Jesus Navas. We are still camping in the realm of mostly good players.

Oh, and amusingly, Riyad Mahrez was right there at .46.

But He Doesn’t Fit the Style!
Funny thing about that – almost no one does. There are very few elite possession teams in Europe these days, and even fewer that play anything like Arsenal. Fitting the style is always going to be an issue.

One thing that Vardy does do is fit the league, which is always at least a minor concern when bringing players from abroad. He’s been pretty healthy too, though obviously he will end up horribly broken the moment he signs an Arsenal contract.

Please, please please, tell me there are other options beyond Jamie Vardy!

Well, there are… they are just a lot more expensive. The reason Arsenal have likely landed at Jamie Vardy is a basic disconnect between price and value. Vardy at £25M is mispriced in the current HOLY SHIT EVERYONE IN THE PREMIER LEAGUE HAS CRAZY MONEY market. Remember, Arsenal are definitely buying a forward, and everyone knows that, so teams will try to extract max value because of it.

There’s an argument that if Wenger were truly thinking ahead, he probably would have addressed this issue a number of times over the previous 3 summers, taking small gambles on 20-22 year old players with big potential and hoping that one of them would grow into his center forward of the future. He kind of did that with Welbeck, but injuries wrecked the plan. Three summers ago he could have bought Aubameyang for 13m. Two summers ago it was Morata and Michy as standouts. Last year it might have been Santi Mina, Vietto, Borja Baston, or Sebastien Haller.

Arsenal have a good recruitment department and resources that dwarf almost every other football club out there. At some point you’d think they’d let them gamble a little on the future, especially when Wenger has been destroyed by poor market reads again and again (FFP never really mattered, and the EPL TV deals meant that money spent in 2013 and 2014 was way more valuable than current dollars).

ANYWAY, we are where we are, and unless he’s going to Looper into his past to fix things, Big Weng has to deal with the now, which means buying a forward.

Assume Vardy turns Arsenal down for whatever reason – where do you go next?

The obvious one that Arsenal were allegedly in contact about (both now and in 2014) is Alvaro Morata. The problem there is that Arsenal find themselves competing not only with Real Madrid for the player, but also with PSG and potentially Chelsea. It’s great to identify the player and all, but you still have to convince him to come play for you. Arsenal are rich, but they have never paid as much in wages as any of those clubs.

Aubameyang? Great, but probably not available and if he is, it’s for £60M+.

Higuain? He’s awesome, but same age issues as Vardy for twice the price.

Ibrahimovic? This would have been a fascinating move, but he’d take Arsenal’s wage structure and break it in half.

Lacazette? This would make sense and Lyon might be willing to sell at this point. There are questions about how well he would fit into Arsenal’s style, but he has pace and his expected scoring contribution was right there with Giroud this season. He also just turned 25, so the age doesn’t make me wince.

As you go further and further down the list, it gets harder to get excited.

Lukaku? 60m and style concerns.

Harry Kane?

Hahahahaha…

No.

If Arsenal strike out on the top targets, I wouldn’t be completely surprised to see them try to convert a wide man like Julian Draxler, or to take a punt on a mostly unknown from France (speaking of… they should have bought Ousmane Dembele to play wide, but whatever).

Anyway, it’s a complicated problem and one that is compounded by past mistakes. However, these facts should guide future decision making.

• Elite center forwards are rare and a luxury good, meaning prices will always be absurd.
• Unless the well of football money dries up in a black swan event (and the new PL deal technically hasn’t even started), elite CFs are unlikely to get cheaper in the near or medium terms.
• Unlike Chelsea, Arsenal do not have a pipeline of good CF candidates coming through the academy, so they can’t rely on that method for the future either.

Am I delighted by the thought of Jamie Vardy up front for Arsenal? Not really, but I can see the logic and he certainly fits a need. Basically, he’s the most cost-effective option on the market, and he leaves Arsenal a lot of flexibility for additional moves this summer.

My bigger concern is how Arsenal are going to source that future CF. The academy isn’t producing them and Arsenal aren’t dabbling nearly enough in potential future superstars in the transfer market to overcome the issue.

A Quick Note About Romelu Lukaku
I read someone say Lukaku was overrated the other day, and people are “misguided about his goalscoring figures.” Needless to say, I disagree with this.

xGxA in the Premier League
2012 (West Brom loan): .84
2013 (Everton loan): .53
2014 (Everton): .47
2015 (Everton): .65

He just turned 23, can be physically unplayable, and has spent the last 3 seasons playing for an Everton team that is tactically dysfunctional.

Rom’s production last season was basically the same as Olivier Giroud, Daniel Sturridge, and Harry Kane while playing for a much worse team. (Talk about your mixed bag of over and under-rated Premier League forwards!)

Verdict: Lukaku is very good and he’s just entering his prime. The only question is whether moving to a better team will continue his development, or whether last year is the best we’ll get.

We are coming up on the three-year anniversary of StatsBomb. During that time (and despite a lengthy absence due to that whole “working for football clubs” thing), I have published more than 200 items in the SB article database. Plenty of these are fluff, like gifolutions during the World Cup, or weekly follow-ups on basic predictive models from back in the day, but plenty of these are early prototypes for concepts I would later successfully apply inside of football clubs.

Given the fact that there are a lot of new followers on my Twitter account since I started writing, and the fact that so many people seem to have missed the early years of football stats writing, I figure now is a good time to review my recent past. I’m just going to do it on my own work for now, which will keep me out of trouble for criticizing others work, and probably keep this to a (barely) manageable load. This is also just StatsBomb based and skips over work I did for The Mirror, The Guardian, Opta, and various guest spots on blogs over the years.

Doing this completely chronologically is going to be a mess, so I’ll break them into subject headings and then work from there. I’ll also add some context about why pieces are included here, how I feel about them years later, and what stuff was just plain wrong about.

All of the material here is me learning publicly, and then writing about it on the fly. There is plenty in the early work that is just wrong. Given that knowledge, there is probably plenty in my current work that is also wrong, but hopefully it’s at least a little less wrong than I was before.

Fundamental Work

How Do Teams Create Better Chances?
Three years later, almost all the ideas in this piece still guide my thinking about football as a whole.

Pace and Margin for Error
Early on, there was a lot of application of hockey metrics to football, spurred on by really interesting work from Gabriel Desjardins, James Grayson, and StatsBomb co-founder Benjamin Pugsley. One of the primary metrics used was TSR or Total Shots Ratio.

As of this article, I was having a really weird time applying TSR to football outside of the Premier League and La Liga. There are a variety of reasons for this, but a big factor in that is this concept of pace. It’s around this point I stopped using ratios at all, even in basic shots work, and moved to differentials.

Building Better Defensive Metrics – Opponent Passing
I mention this one because I think I was the first to publish about it (though I suspect some clubs used it ages ahead of this), and also because it’s not defined as “pressing.”

Pressing is a set of actions designed to put pressure on the ball and yield [things]. Elements of success can be found in defensive actions, but not all successful pressure yields a tackle or an interception. Without tracking data, teams need to collect explicit data outside of the normal Opta event data set to examine pressing in detail.

Lower opposition passing percentages are a result or outcome, and can be caused by a variety of factors including tactics, player ability, pitch, weather, etc. It’s correlated to pressing, but it’s not pressing in and of itself.

If you want to examine team pressing beyond the occurrence of defensive actions in specific places, I would look at PPDA from Colin Trainor and Defensive Distance from Garry Gelade as well as opposition passing percentages.

Introducing Possession-Adjusted Player Stats
I still use these, though some find them controversial (and others pointless). There are probably better ways to go about it now, but it gets complicated pretty quickly and you need to be a data ninja to do the analysis.

Long story short, it’s one of the few ways you can make defensive actions apply to things you care about with per90 data.

Explaining and Training Shot Quality
One from the post-Brentford and Midtjylland era, this piece is actually a chapter from a book I will likely never publish. It took a year of working on the ideas to get to this final incarnation. It’s also based off the work of countless other people who went before me, and is not groundbreaking. The focus here was instead on clarity and brutal practicality.

If you didn’t understand the concept before, it’s a good introduction to shot locations and expected goals and covers a lot of the various forms of pushback I received on these concepts inside of football. If you already knew about expected goals and the like – which at the point of this writing is not nearly as widespread in football as analysts and even some journalists seem to think – it provides practical, real-world examples on how to teach these concepts to players in training and through what behavioral economics would call a nudge (the shot rings).

The Future of Football
Increased data use in football is inevitable. This piece uses a Big Short metaphor to explain why.

Data Visualization

Radar Love: The Three Best Players in the World

It started out with seeing an NBA All-Star poster by Ramimo. It ended with months of reading up on data visualization and learning Photoshop to finally produce player radar charts. This is the first, mostly awful piece that introduced them.

Iteration would then come fast and furious. I split the radars into positional archetypes and added two standard deviations for the boundaries (A.K.A. scienced the shit out of them), and voila – lovely little bite-size player evaluation pictures for the footballing world.

These have been improved in subsequent years, but the public versions are mostly the same as what I was making at the end of 2014. The new versions are only available to paying customers, largely because there are proprietary metrics in there and of which there are currently exactly none.

And if you hate them, you have my apologies, because they seem to have spawned a variety of imitators not only in football, but across various sports.

A guide explaining radars and how to read them can be found here.

MK Shot Maps
Called “MK” because Marek Kwiatkowski did a lot of the heavy lifting for these, and there are many different variations of shot maps out there. The design diary for how these were created is here. The link above is a more practical use demonstration for using them with teams. You can also use them in player evaluation.

In terms of taking stats and applying them to football in a useful, beautiful way, I think these are at least as successful as the radars, if not better.

Player Evaluation
Opening the Door to Player Analytics in Football
The first article I ever wrote about player stats and football. It all started with Max Kruse, who would go on to

a) Play in the CL and EL
b) Make a final table at the World Series of Poker
c) Leave £60,000 cash in the back of a taxi.
d) Allegedly get in trouble for his late night poker life style and eating too much Nutella.

Age and Value in the Transfer Market
This is hugely important and hugely misunderstood. I stand by taking Manchester City to task for their transfer buys in 13 and 14 not because of the immediate impact, but because it cost them heavily in the latter years of those contracts. Good thing FFP is irrelevant or they would be in a world of hurt trying to rebuild for Pep this summer.

The Suarez Conundrum
What if you wrote a piece that read like good analysis but was completely wrong? Well, I totally did that and it looks just like this one.

The reason why it was wrong was a fundamental misunderstanding of the game at this point on my part. You see, I had been sucked in by the “all shots are equal” mentality of hockey analysis. The problem here is that while hockey and football overlap in many places, shot quality is one where there is a massive divergence. I didn’t understand that yet, and because of that I thought Suarez kept killing Liverpool attacks by taking poor shots.

Not exactly…

The good news is that being wrong about this forced me to rebuild how I evaluate the game from the ground up. The bad news is that this mis-step blew up some of my credibility (especially among Liverpool fans), and I got to hear about it constantly both on Twitter and on the podcast from Pugsley. *sad trombone noises*

Midseason Transfer Shopping: Arsenal
It is January 2014 and Arsenal need a new forward. I poked around the data to look at Draxler (hot in the media), Griezmann, Lacazette, and… Aboubakar?

This sort of statistical shopping (but using more advanced, modern metrics) is immediately applicable at the club level.

The Danger of Predictions – Luis Suarez Edition
I am public with my work and I’m not afraid of being wrong. If you make a lot of bets, you will get winners and losers. If you make a lot of player and team predictions, you will get the same. However, when you are wrong in this big a fashion, you are going to have to eat it. It was a great learning experience, and obviously I would not make the same mistake again.

Life lesson: If you are going to have to eat shit, don’t nibble.

Statistical Scouting Young Superstars
Can we take statistics and use them to find young players that are going to develop into Champions League players? This research would consume the rest of my summer until I was hired by Smartodds, and to some extent still does.

A huge challenge, but hugely rewarding if you pull it off.

The Best Young Prospect in Europe 2014 – Alvaro Morata
I had Morata number 1 and Memphis number 2 that summer for very young players that would likely be future stars. Number 3 was Lucas Piazon, who has had some serious issues in his personal life and looks like a complete bust.

Trying to predict the future is tricky, and there are absolutely, positively going to be failures. On the other hand, something like half of all transfers of mature players “fail” as well, meaning you don’t have to raise the bar that much to improve a Premier League club’s transfer business enough to save tens of millions of pounds yearly.

The Death of Traditional Scouting
You would think someone who is a huge proponent of statistics would have strong feelings about traditional scouting. You would be correct. The article is adapted from a presentation I gave to Science + Football that encompasses two years developing a lot of the initial concepts you see written about above, but applying the theories inside the world of football.

It also explains why we almost never scouted players live at BFC, and how use of stats is pretty much the same as incorporating video services into your scouting, something that isn’t remotely controversial in the modern day.

The unexpected take away at the end (which is the fault of the clickbait title) is actually that good scouts are extremely valuable, but most football teams can apply their skills far better than they currently do.

Arguing About Marcus Rashford and Young Player Development
A synthesis piece about player analysis and young player development. The second half talks about what clubs can do to better evaluate prospects coming from their academy and into the first team, which is yet another area I think most football clubs can improve dramatically.

Tactics
Attacking Wrinkles – Manchester City and Barcelona

I really like these types of articles, though they are a massive time sink to produce. I think the reason I get so excited by them is because it felt like doing real football work, and it definitely paid off once I needed to do presentations to coaches and Directors of Football inside the clubs.

Here’s the transition from football fan to coach-analyst: Start to see games in sequences of possession. What do smart teams repeatedly do with the ball, immediately after they win it back? In the final third? What do they do immediately after losing possession? How can we further break that down into potential ways to train it on the pitch?

Thoughts on Football Clubs
Building a Better Football Club
Richard Whittall had written a piece for 21st Club about Directors of Football, and I wanted to apply some consulting knowledge to football clubs in general and see what turned up.

The essential logic is this: it’s nearly impossible to know everything you need to know and have enough time to accomplish all the things a “traditional English manager” must do in modern football. And this is especially true when you realize the average life span for this role last approximately 12-15 months.

In short, it’s a recipe for failure.

Merging Football Stats and Coaching
What happens when you goof around with ideas about how to better train players, at the same time grabbing their attention and imagination, while subtly trying to explain analytical concepts? You get this.

It might be too dumb to be useful, but I would love to have license to test it enough to find out.

Manager Evaluation

Does Your Manager Suck?

Introducing Manager Fingerprints

Both of these articles are the building blocks for me trying to find a better way to evaluate managers than results in the league table. This work got much bigger and better once inside of the football clubs, and I’m pretty confident that – much like for player transfers – the data we analyze now will produce a better population of potential future head coaches for clubs than current hiring practices.

Conclusion
I hope you have enjoyed this look back through material both old and new, correct and horribly wrong. Football analytics is just like any other endeavour – mistakes will be made. The hope is that you also manage to get a lot smarter in the process.

How do we learn a thing? If you are in any normal pursuit, you probably read a book, or take a course. Maybe you check out some peer-reviewed journal articles, should you have access to materials at a university. Possibly, what you want to learn has some expert sites on the internet, so you trawl through their material to get up to speed. In a few rare cases, maybe you are lucky enough to have access to a subject matter expert and you ask them for information.

That’s for normal subjects, which covers the vast spectrum of all things humans need to know.

Now… how do you learn if you are a coach?

This is a question that has fascinated me since I started working inside of football, not least because I needed to figure out the best ways for me to impart my knowledge to coaches for them to use. So I started studying the problem inside of our clubs, and also took the English FA Level 2 Coaching Course to see how new coaches learn from a personal point of view.

What I figured out is this:

How coaches learn is

1. an unbelievably important thing for people who work high up in football to know.
2. horribly misunderstood by almost every decision maker I have encountered.

It’s not really anyone’s fault – it’s just that picking up coaching knowledge is so different than how humans learn almost anything else, it’s easy to make assumptions that seem natural, but are quite clearly wrong.

The issue here is that unlike almost every modern profession in the world, coaching is really an apprenticeship. Instead of learning via reading or attending lectures, the vast majority of knowledge you need to do the job comes via observing and doing. Theory is still important, but the practical element is dominant.

Before we carry on, let’s break the job down further – what do coaches actually do?

Choose a style of play for their team.
All the potential styles of play under the sun are possible, both in attack and defense.

Design training sessions to impart knowledge to their players about the style of play and specific tactics.
Once you have chosen how you want your team to play, you need to teach that to the players through training.

Teach. Communicate.
These elements are huge. If you can’t teach and communicate your ideas in a clear and effective manner, then you aren’t likely to be a good coach. And the subjects you need to teach to players are potentially vast and hugely different, but cover all areas of technique, tactics, phases of the game, and dynamic situation analysis of yourself, your teammates, and the opposition.

Football is complicated. That’s one of the things that makes it so captivating.

Interventions.
So much of what a coach actually does in training is correcting things that are not quite right, or teaching players about the options they had available. A teachable moment occurs, the coach stops training, rewinds to what they want to discuss, and then corrects actions to how they want it done in the future.

Conduct meetings.
These meetings can cover a variety of topics including reviewing training, reviewing games, what to expect from upcoming opponents, teaching new tactics, etc. You only get so much time on the pitch each week as a coach, and then everything else you need to give your players comes outside that area, typically through video review. That means meetings, and at the professional level, potentially lots of them.

These are just the basic elements of the job, but there are plenty additional responsibilities I have skipped over for the sake of brevity.

Right, so now we know what coaches do – the next step is learning how to do it. In order to teach the material to players at an elite level, you have to master the material yourself.

Where does that mastery come from?

• Playing the game.
  It’s possible you picked up some coaching basics via osmosis when your brain and body were busy learning how to play.
• Learning from past coaches you played under.
  Most of these will not be role models for the modern game, especially if you played in England.
• Coaches you apprentice under as a lower level, or assistant coach.
  Most new coaches land at their early jobs not based on what those jobs can teach them, but based on the fact that those were the jobs they could get. How many of those will be great learning environments?
• Coaching courses and licenses.
  In many cases, you are required to go on these to maintain your licenses. Like many courses in other pursuits, some are useful, some are not.
• Internet resources.
  Useful, but a mixed bag of material and rarely comprehensive.
• Watching other teams play?
  With regard to this one, how do you go about seeing tactics in game situations and turning them into training sessions for players?

Without belaboring the point too much, coaching is a knowledge-based profession that is also a practical apprenticeship, and it’s incredibly hard to find a good place to learn how to do it well.

Let’s step away from coaching as a whole, and make this simpler… Say I want to learn how to train a single tactical element from top to bottom, and do that well.

Pick one item from the following list:

• Defensive pressure like Jurgen Klopp
• Generate great shots like Arsenal
• Execute set pieces like Atletico Madrid

Awesome, we have a topic… now what?

Uh… I don’t know?

You can’t exactly walk up to The Jurgen Klopp School of Football Coaching and get a degree in Rock and Roll Gegenpressen. And as far as I am aware, there is no Arsene Wenger MBA of Elite Attacking on offer at any university in England, nor Cholo Simeone’s Science of Set Pieces anywhere at all.

This is unfortunate, because as a student of the game and someone who actually needs to know a lot of this stuff to be better at his job, I would enroll in this as an Executive MBA program in a heartbeat.

It sounds like I am joking, but this is serious stuff – if you are a young British coach that wants your team to learn German-style defensive pressure, how do you do it? Where do you do it?

The basic unit of coaching is a training session. Where can I find 10 or 20 or 30 training sessions strictly on imparting the knowledge of zonal defensive pressure and gegenpressing, explained in detail?

And more importantly, where can I find the video of those training sessions, so that I can learn what right and wrong look like in training, and be able to make crucial interventions? Because that is what you need to have in order to learn the material well enough to teach it to players who are unfamiliar with the concepts. You need example after example of what is right and wrong, and an expert pointing these things out and explaining the difference.

This isn’t just a personal lament – I’m writing about it because it explains one of the incredible oddities of the football world: coaches almost never change styles.

This is weird, right? Coaches are typically smart, and football is a dynamic game that changes tactically on a regular basis. So why do so few coaches go on to incorporate other styles or develop new ones over the course of their career?

• As noted above, it’s hard to learn a new style in the first place.
• Where and when are they going to test out that style while learning it?

Successful learning environments are low pressure, where students can make and learn from mistakes while getting feedback. Making mistakes (and reviewing them) is fine because that is how we learn, especially in a hands-on, process-oriented job like coaching.

All first team coaching jobs in pretty much every professional league in the world are high pressure environments. You’re a first team coach – your job is to win matches. If you don’t win matches, you will be replaced. Period.

These two things are wholly incompatible. Being a first team coach means you exist in a terrible learning environment.

Additionally, when pressure increases, we tend to revert back to what we know and think works best. Which in coaching terms will be the tactics you are most familiar with from your historic learning journey.

Thus is it any wonder that we rarely see professional football coaches learn new things?  For most of them, their job makes for an environment totally inhospitable to experimentation, which is crucial in the pursuit and mastery of new knowledge.

THIS IS A HUGE PROBLEM!

Say you want to hire a new head coach because your old one was too successful and has been poached by a bigger club. You find a new coach whose personality works, who seems open to new things, but his past teams have only exhibited two of the four crucial components to your club’s style of play. What do you do?

“Well, [new coach] can learn what they don’t already know.”

Maybe.

Probably not.

Definitely not if this change is happening in-season, or if the job is a high pressure job – as pretty much all of them are. Even if they want to increase their knowledge, it might not be possible because the learning environment is toxic.

At the end of the day, understanding the problem fundamentally changes how we address it.

Instead of “[new coach] can learn what they don’t already know” decision makers need to ask the following:

“How do we enable [new coach] to learn what we want them to know?”

New coaches are what they are. Do not expect them to fundamentally change on their own – we have an overwhelming amount of evidence that indicates that doesn’t happen. Instead you need to think about empowering them to learn and provide subject matter experts to bolster their knowledge.

So How Can a Coach Learn New Things?

• Spend time interning with coaches who already know these things. This would presumably involve going to watch training with other clubs during the off season. The problem here is that most coaches are secretive about their training and tactical knowledge, and the off season happens at the same time for practically every club in Europe. Where and when would you do this?
• Hire assistant coaches that are subject matter experts. The obvious example here is hiring set piece coaches to coach your set pieces, but it can be true across the whole spectrum of coaching expertise. In American football, there are coaches for each specific football role (Quarterback, Offensive Line, Running Backs, Wide Receivers, etc), as well as coordinators who sit on top of offense, defense, and special teams and who all report to the head coach. These act like coach-analysts I have mentioned in my previous work, and can be more hands on with players about every aspect of their games.

  Want to implement a defensive press? Hire a bright, young defensive coach who has expertise in this area to work inside of your coaching staff. Hopefully the personality and linguistic differences work out fine, and everyone ends up happy. That last bit is tricky, but people need to make it work because it’s one of the only possible ways to add new knowledge to your club.

• Create training programs inside your own club to address these areas. As I noted above, there’s very little public learning material that can turn you into an expert in specific tactical areas, or even to give you the basic paths for learning the information. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible. If a club wanted to, it could go out of its way to create courses that teach the various elements of its style of play, complete with instructional videos, videos of past training, session plans, and written explanations that tie it all together.

  Make no mistake, it’s a lot of work to create something where nothing existed before. But if your club has taken the time to develop a style of play it thinks is important, doesn’t that deserve the investment necessary to make sure every coach inside the club can learn all of the tactical elements inside of that style to an elite level? Including incoming head coaches that may only have parts of the knowledge you need them to have?

It comes back around to this: football is a knowledge-based game. Smarter coaches and smarter players equal smarter results. And yet our ability to increase coaching knowledge is somehow incredibly limited.

Remember, it’s not just book learning we are talking about. It’s learning the material well enough to communicate it to other people. It’s seeing the situations in training and on the pitch, recognizing they are outside the ideal, and then correcting them in a way that the player can understand and that makes them better for the future. And it’s reviewing training and game performance to figure out what is missing, so you can implement and adapt future training sessions to address that.

There’s one more big thing that is missing, even from the points above: reps.

In any new learning, it’s important to be able to practice a skill repeatedly. The more you do it, the more situations you see, the broader the knowledge base you build for what does and does not work in those various situations. If you are a professional coach who wants to add new tactics to their bag of tricks, how do you get the training and game reps to improve your learning and cement the new knowledge?

I don’t actually know the answer to that question, but I do know it’s important.

Head coaches already have too much on their plates at most clubs, but maybe the assistants can also coach academy teams in order to gain experience in tactical evaluation and organization cycles? Regardless of my inability to provide an acceptable answer, it’s noted here because it’s another important element that needs consideration.

Conclusion

• Coaching is a different type of profession than most of the world’s occupations.
• How coaches learn is radically different than how most people learn to do their jobs.
• Decision makers need to understand these facts. If they don’t, they have expectations for what coaches can and cannot do that are unaligned to reality. This gets expensive when teams are constantly firing head coaches and bringing in new ones in attempts to fix perceived inadequacies.
• Resources for learning new tactics and how to teach them to coaches and players alike are scarce. This makes learning new things somewhere between difficult and impossible.
• If you want to have a coherent style of play from one coaching generation to another, then clubs need to make sure they take steps to enable and empower new coaches to learn their style of play at an expert level.

Some football experiments do not work out. The Mario Gotze/Pep Guardiola experiment is definitely one of those failures. It reminds me a bit of the feedback from fans when Pep bought Cesc Fabregas and then tried to shoehorn him into the false 9 role at Barcelona. Fabregas actually did admirably in a completely new role for him, but no one is Lionel Messi, and that was a perception problem more than a performance one.

Gotze is probably at his best as a pressing 10 who can occasionally fill in as a creative wide forward when needed. What he is not is a center forward, and at this point it’s probably fair to say that trying to make him one has made Mario miserable, and given him perhaps the worst two seasons of his career.

I don’t think he was bad last season – 3 goals and 4 assists in about 1000 minutes is a solid return, and he’s still an outstanding passer and dribbler. On the other hand, everyone at Munich seems to want him to go, and he’s allegedly pissed off and being stubborn about leaving.

It’s clear to me he needs to get the fuck out of Dodge. My only concern is that he needs to go somewhere he wants to be, with a team and a head coach that will support him. Klopp might be the best option, but at a club level Liverpool is certainly a step down from mighty Bayern (don’t @ me).

From the perspective of a buying club, you know he’ll be on big wages and has been a disappointment this move, so you’d negotiate aggressively for a lower fee while telling the player how much you want him. I think he’s a good buy if you can get the fee down to say £20-25M, provided he’s excited to come to your club. If he ends up at a port of last resort…

Probably £10 million, but it still depends on club. Arsenal could make a lot of £10M gambles and only wince a little when none of them pay off. A club like Burnley can only make maybe one before it really starts to create problems if they bust.

I was talking to another analyst recently, and we theorized that it might be impossible for Premier League clubs to get player deals with any “value” in them any more, strictly due to the fact that selling teams will hold out for much larger fees since they know everyone has money. Thus an objective value deal in real world terms becomes hard to find, but you can still find heavy “value” relative to the rest of the league, especially if you sell them to bigger PL teams down the road.

With that squad, I would probably not sign Nolito. People forget that money (in terms of fees and wages) is not the only scarce resource at a football club, so are minutes. I quite liked Nolito for the past couple of seasons at Celta, but City are O-L-D.

Aguero? 28. Bony? 27. Navas? 31 in November. Nasri? 29. Silva is 30.  That’s just in attack and most of those guys have had injury issues in recent years. Kelechi, Sterling are young, KDB is peak, but as it’s composed right now, the majority of team minutes will come from players who are 28 or older. It’s tough to do that in the Premier League with CL and Cup commitments and succeed.

On the other hand, City just don’t care about the funds spent and if Pep wanted him, the price is low enough to just splash the cash and assume he’ll deal with any other issues. Nolito is a clever player and should end up as an outstanding super sub for the next couple of years, regardless of whether he’s good enough/young enough to spend a lot of time in a starting role.

I expect to see a staggering amount of money spent by the time City are done buying this summer. Pep’s worth it, but this would have been a lot easier if more forethought and planning had gone into squad composition in the previous 3 seasons.

Andre Gray was bought last season for a base of £6.25M (with good add-ons) and he’s probably PL quality. The new TV deal will inflate prices paid, but up until last summer, you could probably find players dotted around Europe who could play striker for you at £5-6M and expect reasonable success. Now that figure £8-10M, and there will be fewer undiscovered gems.

Recruitment is hard. Every team has similar needs and a lot of money now. This is why it pays to invest in being smarter about it instead of simply throwing more money at the problem and hoping you succeed.

This is quite difficult, and most clubs are naturally risk averse in this situation. If you don’t see the player play in a similar system to the one your club plays, the natural instinct is to assume they can’t do it, especially at the back. It’s a safe assumption, and I completely understand the choice, but it’s not always the best one.

Some clubs will break this assumption for special players or when their options are dwindling and they are forced to make sub-optimal choices. The point here – like I mentioned above – is that this is hard, and it actually makes sense to be cautious because if certain players fail tactically, the whole system can fly apart.

I started doing this work back in summer of 2013 with Manager Fingerprints because I wanted to start profiling managers in a similar way to what I was working on for players. Since then, the process and KPIs have been improved dramatically, to the point that we can identify tactical style, strengths, and weaknesses in the data for each manager/head coach and give some advice on whether they will succeed.

Manager failures are EXPENSIVE. Not only do you need to worry about paying out the rest of their contract, you also have to pay off all the staff that each new manager brings with them. Doing as much objective due diligence as possible before each hire just makes sense.

At the very least, this information highlights some very interesting interview questions you would want to ask every coach as part of your hiring process.

I asked a couple of follow-up questions to Bobby to give me more information on this one.  He says we’re probably looking at a possession-based 4-2-3-1 with Gylfi playing behind the striker, so ideally you want someone with some pace, who can hold up the ball and pass reasonably well, and who won’t get destroyed by PL centerbacks. Tricky stuff, especially trying to fill two positions for only £25M, but we’ll see what we can come up with.

Two guys that I would have included, but whose price tags skyrocketed recently are Vincent Janssen (off to Spurs for 22M Euros) and Manolo Gabbiadini (West Ham allegedly in for him at £20M). Money still matters for at least part of the Premier League.

Most of the ones that I propose below are low risk type buys. There are others that are higher risk, but a) they are less known and b) your scouting department would have to be really happy with them before you make the leap.

Option 1 – Borja Baston
Current Owner: Atletico Madrid
Age: 23
Estimated Price: £12-15M

I spotted him in Segunda last summer, but the price tag was north of 5M Euros, which was not a fee my previous employer was willing to pay, and he wanted to play in a top league anyway. He did that last season on loan at Eibar in La Liga, banging home goals exactly like he did a league below. La Liga is the toughest league in the world right now – if you score there, you are definitely talented.

Age is right, production is right, body style is right. I suspect the only real question is whether Atletico want to keep him in the fold for next season.

Option 2 – Sebastien Haller
Current Owner: Utrecht
Age: Just Turned 22
Estimated Price: £8-10M

A bit less heralded than Vincent Janssen, he played on a slower-paced team than AZ, but still put up impressive goal and assist numbers the last two seasons in the Eredivisie. Pace is solid for a big man, and I love his ability to pass around the box. He had two assists late in 14-15 that were jawdropping.

The usual stats might not look amazing this year, but I have pretty strong reasons I can’t explain for why I am still high on the player.

His highlight reel is exceptional.

Option 3 – Andrej Kramaric
Current Owner: Leicester City
Age: 25
Estimated Price: £12M?

An elite scorer in Croatia, Leicester snapped him up for somewhere around £7.5M in January 2015. Kramaric did quite well at Hoffenheim on loan last season after struggling a bit at Leicester. I think they pulled the trigger on him too quickly though and…

What do you mean already Leicester SOLD him to Hoffenheim for a tiny profit on what they paid?

Goooooddammit.

NEXT!

Option 3.1 – Luuk de Jong
Current Owner: PSV Eindhoven
Age: 25
Estimated Price: ???

“Didn’t he fail at Newcastle and Gladbach?”

Sort of… hear me out.

Newcastle have been highly dysfunctional behind the scenes for years. They seem to destroy good forwards on a yearly basis, meaning they either have huge flaws in their recruitment process OR the club itself has systemic issues. Seeing as how they have been relegated again this past season, I’m going to go with the theory that it’s more Newcastle and less Luuk.

Meanwhile he has been fucking great at PSV, winning back to back titles and making the knockout rounds of the Champions League. He’s averaged 23 goals and 9 assists the last two years and totally deserves another shot if you can negotiate a reasonable price for him.

Maybe he’s happy in Holland, but I think he’s good enough to play in a better league, on a stable, more supportive team.

Wissam Ben Yedder
Current Owner: Toulouse
Age: 25
Estimated Price: ?? Figuring out what Toulouse will sell anyone at is difficult and I have zero guidance on this aside from saying he only has 1 year left on his contract. Definitely less than £10M.

Ben Yedder was on the original list of attackers I reviewed way back in summer of 2013 and he’s been a great little value forward ever since. Goal scoring is consistently decent to good in a team that has been almost relegated two seasons in a row. One of the things I love is that he averages about .2 expected assists a season, which means he probably won’t screw up a possession game around the box.

If you are looking for a solid performer, especially as a PL backup, I think you could do a lot worse than Ben Yedder.

What a difference three years makes.  Starting as a place to simply host good stats writing, the site still does that, but has become possibly the most respected place for football analytics on the internet.

That’s not hype, it’s just truth.

There isn’t anywhere else like StatsBomb.

One of the things that makes the site different is we don’t publish data, we do analysis of the game. Often painstakingly detailed work that is unflinching in the level of reader it requires. It’s not Popalytics or bullshit infographics (okay, mostly not) – it’s always quality work. Articles published on the site are good enough to be used by professional clubs, while still hopefully being fun and readable enough for a widespread audience.

If you had the real names of all the followers to our Twitter account, you’d find an awesome collection of smart people working in and around professional football who follow the site. Teams initially intrigued by many of the ideas published here have now copied them and made them their own. Professional football clubs have also hired a number of contributors for jobs over the last three years, which might be the thing I’m most proud of. Giving people a chance to live their dream of working in football is pretty special, as I know from personal experience.

It’s not just football StatsBomb has affected, it’s also the media. Back when we started, non-penalty goals were not a thing. To my knowledge, Per 90s didn’t exist anywhere outside of a rare Opta piece. We wrote about better ways to analyse the game while learning to do so ourselves, the public responded, the data sites made changes, and the media ever-so-slowly followed suit.

First a thank you to all the writers that have contributed over the years, without you the site obviously would not exist. We have never monetized the site because if we tried, our use of data would suddenly become very complicated, and honestly there are few effective ways of monetizing websites now that work .

Guys who write here do it for free. They do it because they want to challenge themselves and ideas about football in ways almost no one else does in public. So many man hours have been spent gathering and studying data prior to writing anything on this site, it’s impossible to consider what is produced here as anything other than a labour of love.

Except, very occasionally, when they are an equally motivated labour of hate.

Also thank you to the fans that have helped us out, especially with technical insight and programming work over the years.

A very special thank you to James Yorke, without whom the site probably would have died when Colin Trainor and I disappeared inside of clubs. James’s work makes me very happy I left the site and all the work up when I was hired, which often didn’t happen in other sports when people went professional.

Finally, a thank you to all of you readers, whether you were there at the beginning, or have just become a fan of the site in recent times. There would be almost no point doing any of this without people who were excited to engage with the material.

Further Thoughts
The world is different now than when I started the site three years ago. I feel like we used to get a lot more social media shares from bigger accounts that would push us along. Those accounts were rewarding quality work with wider publicity. For some reason that seems to happen a lot less often now, and I don’t know how to change it.

In terms of audience, our Twitter followings have grown immensely over the years, but the actual average readership for an article has not. Maybe that’s a problem with the choice of material – I was writing a lot about transfer prospects back in summer of 2014 before it became my actual job, and I’m a bit more reticent to give that away now, so that clearly has an effect. But maybe we just stopped growing at some point and neither James nor I am aware of what to do to plug us back into the machine while not sacrificing quality of content for hits.

Some work on the site will always appeal to a niche audience, but it would be nice if our trending suggested we were consistently less niche than before. In most cases, the only thing anybody gets from publishing here are kudos and maybe a touch of popularity.

If you like someone’s work, tell them, but also nudge it along to other interested parties if you can. Post A LINK to Reddit, or to the Football365 forum, or some other high traffic venue that brings people to the site. DO NOT, if you can help it, post whole swathes of articles to anywhere because that traffic never hits us.

Less traffic = less impetus to write = less content = eventual death of the site because what’s the point?

It costs you nothing to read us. If you like the content, please give back in whatever way you can.

I was also entirely sincere in the podcast today about wanting to hear from people in what they’d like to see more of from the site. No ideas are bad ideas, and after 3 years, maybe some of your ideas will add a new impetus to material for the coming season.

All the best,

Ted Knutson
Owner, StatsBomb.com
July 15, 2016

mixedknuts@gmail.com
@mixedknuts

Postscript – Honest Personal Stuff
Working in football is an addictive drug. It’s especially so when you think that you have an edge, and believe you can dramatically improve whatever club you work for. Right or wrong, that’s where I am at right now.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter can probably sense my frustration recently at the fact that I don’t have a club to work with this season. This is especially painful when I see mistake after mistake in the transfer market fly by on my Twitter feed.

It sounds arrogant to put it in writing, but at this point it’s based on years of hard work and data: I am literally one of the world’s experts at using statistics in football, and especially in recruitment. With my skillset, I can

• Find a club better players.
• Make a club money in the transfer market.
• Create actual goals on the pitch via tactical improvements including something I have avoided talking about much at all, but had amazing success with at Midtjylland: SET PIECES.

How much is a single goal worth in the Premier League? In the right environment, my approach can generate lots of them. Sadly, I am once again on the outside looking in.

The problem is that football is football, and it takes someone pretty special to trust the word of a relative outsider that things can be done better in almost every club in the world, across the board.

You see, football is a traditional industry. The way things have been done is generally assumed to be the best way, often with little critical thought being given to WHY this belief exists or whether it is even correct. Knowledge is passed down from master to apprentice, again often without reflection on whether it’s the best way – it’s simply the way they know how.

What we’ve learned about traditional industries over the last 30 years is that they are incredibly ripe for disruption. Add data and technology to traditional industry and BOOM, you suddenly have something much more efficient and effective than before. In certain cases, basic disruption creates wildly unexpected positive benefits the traditional approach never imagined.

Football is in that spot right now. But in order for that to happen, people at the top have to first be convinced the problems exist. Then they have to realize traditional football gurus are unlikely to know how to solve these issues, and often don’t notice the issues exist in the first place. And finally, people with solutions need to be empowered to make change. This isn’t an “advisory capacity” approach. It requires decision making power and ability that is rarely seen on the football side of clubs.

From my experience this summer, it still feels like the football world is a long way from being ready to do that, even with strong evidence backing up the arguments.

The issue isn’t isolated to football – we’re still seeing it crop up constantly in hockey, and we saw it for ages in baseball until eventually everyone basically admitted the stats and technologists were right too damned often to ignore any more. NBA was probably the sport that modernized the fastest, but even there you still see media dinosaurs peddling the same old wrong information, week in and week out – information that is often directly refuted by the actual data and decision making from the front offices themselves.

In modern media, the universal rule is: Talking heads gonna talk. TV requires content, and a bit like politics, you can lie all you want as long as you get a reaction.

Combine all of this with the feeling I’ve had recently that any innovations you release to the public are simply going to be copied and iterated by others in no time at all, with little or no credit going back to the person who did the hard work, and it’s a bit of a downer.

Original thinking and innovation take a tremendous amount of effort before you can achieve results. Seeing that immediately copied and spun into the ether makes me question what the fucking point of innovating is in the first place.

I’m on holiday the next two weeks and will take some time away from the site and football and see if my mood lightens. Maybe a grumpy disposition is causing me to misread the signs, and that the football world is ready to evolve and improve.

My worry – based on my own experience and that of plenty of others – is that even after three years of hard work and a lot of success both on and off the pitch, we’ve barely moved the needle at all.

There are only so many times you can stubbornly bang your head against a wall before you start to ask yourself whether that’s a healthy thing to do in the first place.

Yo. Mailbag time, ya’ll. You guys ask the questions, I answer. I’m short on time this week though, so no lengthy stories or rants or screeds. Unlike every other mailbag, I aim to keep this one tight.

Here we go!

Whu…? Let me see that.

Ah, I see what happened. You want Spielverlagerung, not Statsbomb. They are a few doors back up the S block.

Buncha German and Austrian lookin’ dudes, you can’t miss ’em.

*waves*

Nope. There should be, but thus far we have absolutely nothing. Nada. Bupkiss.

It’s time for the Premier League, the data companies, and the websites who pay to publish this stuff to sort it out and be more fan friendly, because interest is higher than it’s ever been and continues to grow.

Whether that will actually happen any time soon… not my department.

Burke looks like a huge talent. Red Bull as an organization are exceptional at developing talent, and have one of the best youth pipelines in world football. I think it’s a great move and look forward to seeing how he does in the future.

Menace at the moment. I know people are trying to increase their follower count and graphical work is one of the best ways to do this, but we’ve crossed a bombardment threshold this season. It would be better if specific Twitter accounts were setup to host the bulk of the graphics and people just highlight the really interesting stuff on their own accounts, where they add the insight I started following them for in the first place.

And yes, I say this as someone with a noisy Twitter account already who is fully aware that I probably drive some people away when I tweet too much. In a related note, you’ll see a new StatsBomb account in the coming months strictly to host radar images.

Pot, kettle, STFU.

Anyway, that’s just my opinion. YMMV.

Reading between the lines, someone has been less than impressed with Vincent Janssen’s Premier League start. Give him a season and see how he does. Since it was Daniel Levy doing the negotiating, Janssen should actually be easy to shift somewhere else at the end of the season if he doesn’t work out.

Remember though, Janssen just turned 22 in June, meaning he still has a couple of years of development time before he hits his peak and now has to adjust to a much tougher defensive league. Spurs didn’t buy a finished product here and it’s a bit harsh to expect him to perform like that right from the start.

He is a legitimately great dribbler. So was Bolasie. Neither of them managed to translate that particular attribute into much scoring while at Crystal Palace. Whether that is the fault of Pardew’s system or some hole in their games, I do not know. We’ll find out more from watching how Bolasie does at Everton.

I thought Zaha’s move to Manchester United would be good for him, as it would give him a great teacher to add the final polish to his game in Alex Ferguson. That never happened and I honestly think Zaha’s development has suffered for it.

This is practically a follow-up question on Zaha’s development. The first part of it, I don’t know the answer to, but we know for certain that elite managers have huge influence on player stats and development.

Picture it like this. Clone a smart person. Now send one of your clones to Oxford and the other to local community college. Which one do you think is going to have the better development trajectory?

The same thing happens with footballers. If you listen to what they say, time and again you hear how incredible it is to work with top coaches because they teach you so much.

Important realization: Most of football is community college at best.

I keep reading articles by allegedly smart people saying the impact of top coaches will shrink in the Premier League. In reality, it is THE EXACT OPPOSITE. As talent levels equalize, the marginal impact of top coaches increases dramatically.

However, it’s all relative to the level of talent inside of a league. If everyone has a great coach, then you might barely notice. But if half the league has top coaching talent and the other half does not, the bad coaches and their team performance will stick out like sore thumbs.

Coach influence actually looks like this:

Most of the population exists in the center of the curve, so it’s hard to notice what they do. If you change out one average coach with another average coach, you end up with similar performance. However, as you move along to either side of the curve, you get massive effects.

Particularly bad coaches will send good players and teams spiraling into awful performance, while top coaches can turn average players into league winners. (‘Sup Claudio.)

Systems matter.
Styles of play matter.
Communication matters.
Attention to detail matters.

The problem with most statistical analysis is that it tends to view outliers in populations as something to be discarded, whereas in elite sports you really really care about outliers as long as you can explain why they are outliers in the first place.

Center backs and goalkeepers.

A tremendous young creative player who is already very good in the world’s toughest league.. He’s actually one of the first guys I flagged up at Brentford when I got access to Segunda data as a top young player we should be interested in. A week later Real Madrid bought him for 4M euros. A season and a half later, and he doesn’t look out of place around Bale and Ronaldo, which tells you exactly how good he is already at age 20.

From a personal perspective, I would love to see both Yoann Barbet and Maxime Colin from Brentford play in the Premier League. Colin was the best right back in that league last year and ready right now. Barbet is still developing, but has pace, is left-footed and might be the best passing center back in the Championship.

I think the quality striker list went: Morata, Lacazette, Draxler, … Perez. We got to Perez because Vardy chose not to move, Morata was never really available and Lacazette and Drax both look like they will cost over £60M each. That’s just not Wenger’s style.

Maybe Asano is amazing, we’ll see a lot of that at Stuttgart this season. The market for center forwards turned completely stupid this season and it might stay that way forever, which means undervalued guys will be few and far between.

My view is that Wenger has misread the transfer market for years now. First he was wrong about FFP. Then he was wrong about player price inflation, meaning assets bought one or two years ago even at what he thought were inflated prices were actually tremendous value because all the new PL TV deal money had not been pumped into a system with an extremely limited supply of elite forwards.

On the other hand, we know Wenger is stubborn enough to just keep at it and eventually – JUST MAYBE – he’ll end up being right in his contrarian stance. At that point he’ll sit back, give you that coy smile, and wait for everyone to acknowledge that he’s always been a genius. Meanwhile, a decade will have passed since Arsenal actually had an elite center forward in the lineup, and fans will still feel like they live in perpetual Arsenal groundhog day.

Or more likely, he’ll retire, having continued to read the market wrong, and also having missed his window where the league was soft enough to win if he would have JUST

Mustafi I like, but don’t love. Solid passer, good game reader, and very good in the air. Last year at Valencia was one of his worst seasons and he was still decent, but Valencia were a bit of a catastrophe overall. I’m not sure he’s a better outright defender than Gabriel Paulista, but he’s far more likely to be able to start play from center back, which eases the burden on Xhaka and Cazorla in bigger games.

Speaking of Arsenal players, I watched a lot of Alex Iwobi last year. Like a lot a lot, including a ton of academy games for [reasons]. I liked what I saw, but even I did not think he would be quite this good at his age.

Kieron Gillen’s Darth Vader stuff (SO GOOD)
Teach Like a Champion 2.0 by Doug Lemov
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

Recently Finished
Prince of Fools by Mark Lawrence
A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab
Brubaker’s Velvet (really good)
Brian K. Vaughan’s Paper Girls (really weird)
Rat Queens (also really good)
Rick Rememder’s Deadly Class (both weird and good)

Next to Start
The Inner Game of Tennis

Dusan Tadic would have been fairly high on the list. I’m not sure either guy fully fits with Pochettino’s philosophy though, nor am I sure Spurs actually get the most out of Eriksen.

Abdel Barrada looked really interesting statistically at Marseille last year. He somehow ended up at Al-Nasr this summer for a pittance. After that, maybe Alexandru Maxim?

The short answer is that elite creative passers are hard to find, and that goes doubly for those who know how to press and are willing to work as hard as Poch wants.

Does this center back have a good injury history? If yes, then I overpay. If not, things get awkward.

He was decent at Malaga, decent at Vitesse, and couldn’t get on the pitch at Everton. Somewhere along the way his development seems to have stalled. Should still be pretty good against Championship opposition, but no longer has the profile of a guy who is good enough for the Champions League.

For those of you who have never seen GPB, stop reading this right now and go watch the movie. It is in my top 10 favorite movies of all time, and your life is worse for not having seen the movie.

Strangely, it is also one of the most underrated comedies of all time. I don’t know if that’s because the concept of a comedy centered around an aging assassin who heads back to his home town for his high school reunion is difficult for people to engage with or what.

Is it Cusack’s best movie? Man, that’s hard. He’s had an awesome career, studded with medium and low profile gems (Better Off Dead, The Grifters, Eight Men Out, Say Anything, Bullets Over Broadway, Being John Malkovich, High Fidelity, etc). It’s almost certainly Minnie Driver’s best role, and she’s basically perfect here. It also deserves noting that she was Debi Newberry before she was Skylar in Good Will Hunting (also released in 1997), and she stole my heart here before I ever knew she was born with a fancy English accent.

ANYWAY…

I guess it never had a sequel because they couldn’t figure out a good way to continue the story, and John Cusack has definitely aged past the point where he’s a believable 30-something. Or maybe Cusack simply felt it was a perfectly self-contained movie (it is) that didn’t need a continuance. Plus main screenwriter Tom Jankiewicz died in 2013, which is just sad.

While on this topic, Con Air is another Cusack movie (also from 1997, oddly enough) that absolutely, positively should have had a sequel, and certainly would have if it had been made in this decade.

Gayle, Yedlin, and Isaac Hayden I liked. Everything else… bleh. Rafa was a lot better when he was plucking underpriced Spanish gems out of La Liga than this motley collection of Championship retreads. He’s still a good enough coach to easily get them up, but their recruitment is probably a C at best, especially given the wages a lot of these guys are going to be on.

And with that, I am out of time. Check for a podcast from James and myself on Friday. Until then, I hope your transfer window is filled with players that fit your team’s needs.

Football Analytics has a learning curve. That’s great, because learning is a fun, though occasionally painful process. This summer I did a review of my past work, and there’s some cool stuff in there from the early days along with some really boneheaded mistakes. It doesn’t matter how smart you are – your work is not going to be perfect when it comes to something new. The trick is simply to get over it and do better next time.

Today, I wanted to talk a little more about what I learned regarding player evaluation while going from zero knowledge in 2013 to running worldwide recruitment for two clubs in 2015. As part of that, I’ll introduce the new attacker radars in print for the first time, and I’ll talk about three of the most famous players in the world: Neymar, Eden Hazard, and… Andros Townsend?!?

Learning Curves
One of the first things you do when looking at a new data set is immediately boil it down to the important stuff and focus on that:

What is correlated with [important stuff?]

What causes [important stuff] to happen?

In football, we care about goals. In fact, for some pundits, that’s all they care about. The only number that matters is the score.

Imagine a classroom of ten-year olds talking through the data.

Alright children, today we are going to talk about football. Match of the Day and legendary England striker Alan Shearer said we care about goals more than anything else.

So the first thing we have to ask is, what causes goals?

“Shots, shots cause goals!”

Excellent, Timmy. You’re too young to remember, but Alan scored an awful lot of goals back in the day.

Now if we take a step back and say we care about “scoring”, which is actually a superset of goals, what else might we care about?

“Assists! Assists are passes that created a goal. They should count too.”

Great. Now we have goals and assists. And let’s find one more element to look at here – what do exciting players do a lot of when they attack?

“They uh… elbow people in the head?”

I know you like Diego Costa, David, but that wasn’t quite what I was going for.

“They dribble?”

Outstanding Samantha. So lets see if shots, assists, and dribbling are a great start to finding players who score more goals.

End Scene

It’s a bit forced, but this is literally what most people do when they start analysing football, which is great, because it’s an excellent, logical process. There’s one missing step in here going from assists to key passes, which is the functional equivalent of going from goals to shots, but that’s it.

Want to find interesting attackers? Look at shots, key passes, and successful dribbles. Do this and good players start to magically show up at your doorstep.

For instance, take the numbers for these two guys…

We’ve isolated what we care about in attackers, and these two young guys stick out like sore thumbs. They are similar ages, and even play for bigger clubs in good leagues, so there are no worries about league translation or anything like that. Indicators are that Andros might actually be a slightly better player than Neymar, but they are both very good for their age.

Plot them side by side on the original forward radars and you get this.

Given our earlier conclusions about certain stats driving scoring outcomes, this begs the question…

Looking at this objectively, there might be a flaw in our process. These two players have a lot of similarities in driver stats, but the thing we actually care about – scoring – is massively different. Were either of the players lucky/unlucky in their output? Is it a teammate problem? A coach problem? You can think of a million different possible reasons why scoring might be different, but guessing is unacceptable.

So we now go back to the drawing board to find more clarity. There are lots of ways to do this, but one of the simplest, most effective ways of going about it stems from one of the most important lessons you learn as a data scientist.

Always plot your data.

Here we take locational data for shots and add it to the MK Shot Map format… and you get this.

(click to embiggen. Made with Opta data)

Oh.

Oh my. That’s…

I mean…

It’s as if someone put a force field around the danger zone shooting ring for Townsend, and he’s not allowed to have the ball in that area. Meanwhile, almost every shot Neymar takes is from prime real estate.

The reason for potential problem we flagged up earlier immediately becomes clear.

So using numbers and visualizations, we have gone through a three-step advancement in the player evaluation process.

Step 1: These are numbers we care about. Let’s look at those and see what happens.

Step 2: Visualizing them on the radar charts while normalizing them for the population shows that we might have a hole in our basic process. Was Townsend unlucky not to score from all those shots? How do we get more clarity on this?

Step 3: Visualizing the data on shot maps makes the problem crystal clear. Neymar takes great shots. Andros takes terrible shots. In fact, Neymar’s expectation of scoring on an average shot is more than five times greater than Townsend’s. This in turn has an absolutely massive impact on their probability of scoring a goal from any particular shot.

Other Holes in the Process – The Eden Hazard Problem
Obviously with attackers we care about scoring, but what about players we know from watching have a huge impact on the game, but for whatever reason don’t show up very well in traditional scoring stats?

To put it another way, how do you find players like Eden Hazard? Hazard might have been the best attacker in the Premier League in 14-15, but his scoring stats weren’t close to overwhelming.

What can we do to tease out more data and find elite players who don’t always directly contribute to goals or assists?

For me, the answer was to take another step back in the process. We look at key passes and shots and they matter, but what about the ability to generate successful touches inside the box? And since football is fundamentally a passing game, what about players who are able to make successful passes into the penalty box, which might be one of the rarest skills in the game?

So I created two new metrics:

• PINTO = Successful passes in TO the box
• TINDA = Successful touches inside ‘DA box.

It turns out when you start to isolate players by this particular combination of skills, you get a useful additional perspective on players who contribute to scoring, both directly and indirectly.

Thus a new format of attacker radars was born.

I called the new template “predictive” because at this point in my head, I was thinking of the old template as “narrative.” The new template took a step back from narrative stats about what happened (goals, assists, goal conversion, etc), and started to use a few of the advanced, more predictive measures we’d developed since I created the early versions.

The new format more clearly illustrates what a monstrously talented creative player Eden Hazard was that season compared to the population of attackers.

(Note: OP stands for ‘Open Play’ which I get asked constantly on Twitter)

Finally, circling back to our initial comparison, this is what those Townsend and Neymar seasons look like on the new template.

Conclusion
Learning how to use football data better is a process, but it’s a worthwhile and rewarding one. The new radar format came about from continually asking questions on how to analyse the data better. Can we iterate and improve on old metrics?

The old format was good as a starting point, but the new format shows player value much more clearly. It also contains years of work and improved understanding about how both the data and the game operate.

It’s also worth noting that even this “new” tech is 18 months old. If you are a club and interested in seeing some of the new stuff we’ve developed in the intervening months, drop me an email at mixedknuts@gmail.com.

The latest tech is both cool and extremely useful in helping your club make better decisions, both on the pitch and off.

–Ted Knutson
@mixedknuts

I caused a bit of a kerfuffle on Twitter yesterday with my comments about football commentary, so much so that I thought it worth the time to explain it in longer format here.

For those who are blissfully unaware, this is what I said:

That last part was the real impetus for the complaint. My son watches Match of the Day religiously. Every Sunday morning, he sits captive in his pew, listening to the wisdom of the commentator pastors preach about football.

Sitting there together Sunday morning, watching the Arsenal highlights, we heard this from Phil Neville:

“Walcott should have scored 4, or at least 3…”

MotD then walk through the first two goals, the first made via graft from Theo, the second mostly by being in the right place at the right time (though it’s a beautiful knockdown and turn). Then we get highlights of the next chance…

“He’s GOT to score. It’s a simple chance.”

The shot is 7-8 yards out, off a headed pass. Walcott hits it cleanly, on the volley… WITH HIS LEFT FOOT. Now granted, it went straight at the keeper, but the problem here is this is anything but a simple chance.

Let’s break it down by layers.

First, it’s a shot with feet, 7 yards out. That’s between a 40-60% chance of scoring.

However, it’s actually taken out of the air on the volley/half-volley from the side, which makes it closer to a cross. Now we’re in the 20-40% probability range, and probably at the lower bound because it’s a volley.

And finally, it’s with Walcott’s weak foot.

I’m an Arsenal fan and have been for about two decades now. There was definitely a period of time where I wasn’t sure Walcott HAD a left foot.

Now this is a guess because the sample size is too small to actually calculate it, but let’s say Walcott is probably half as likely to score from there with his left foot than his right.

We have now gone from Neville’s “simple chance” (which was never actually simple) to at most a 20% likelihood of it being a goal.

And this is my problem with commentary like this: It’s wrong.

Not just off-by-a-little-bit wrong, or yeah, mostly-in-the-same-range-but-imprecise wrong. This is completely-misanalysed-what-happened-on-that-chance wrong. It would be more fair to say Walcott did well to keep the ball down and get it on target with some power than it is to say he missed an easy chance.

The bigger problem here is that this happens all the time. We have commentary on football that doesn’t understand how the game actually works. I have heard commentators say goals should be scored off headers 12 yards away from goal. They must watch most of their football on some other planet, because that’s not how football here on Earth actually works.

Neville told the audience a very difficult chance was simple and that Walcott should have scored, neither of which is actually true. This is an opinion that is then easily refuted by data.

Lest you think I am cherry picking, let’s fast forward to the analysis of the WBA v. Spurs game in the same show.

Talking about Dele Alli, Shearer says, “I love the way he gets into the positions. He’s not afraid to miss them” (referring to shots).

*nodding along* Cool. Me too. Dele is such a clever midfielder in and around the box and I really love his sense of spa…

Shearer: “He’s got to work on his finishing.”

Wait, what? Why? Why would you say that? Aside from the fact that Alli is young and all football players presumably work on their finishing in some way, why would Shearer explicitly say this about Alli?

Unfortunately, we never find out. The show then cuts to show Alli’s goal, which just happens to feature an insanely good finish.

Nine yards away, outside of the boot, across his body, in the corner and away from both the keeper and a defender on the line. The level of difficulty on this is incredibly high.

Funnily enough, if you look at both Alli’s and Walcott’s goal scoring stats, you see that they actually score more than we expect them to versus expected goal models. This is a pretty reasonable indication that both of these guys are at least above average when it comes to finishing chances.

But the Match of the Day analysts are telling us Theo missed a simple chance and Dele Alli needs to work on his finishing.

We Can Do Better
I don’t think Match of the Day or general football commentary needs to become a bastion of precise statistical analysis. It’s possible you could post the expected goal of a shot as a pop-up graphic on the screen, but it’s probably not necessary, and I certainly don’t want Alan Shearer saying a shot from a certain location is normally a 43% chance of being a goal.

However, I do think our commentators need to be less wrong.

Telling kids that the Walcott chance was simple and “should” have been finished is incorrect. This happens constantly, and I think the reason it happens is because so many of our ex-footballers who are now commentators were poorly trained in what should and should not be a goal.

The only way to overcome this is through education, and the best way is teaching via example. Get the data from their own finishing, or from that of their teammates, or current favourite players, or whatever, and walk them through the actual probabilities. I have done this myself with both footballers and coaches, both of whom have found the concepts very easy to grasp.

Additionally, telling the audience that Alli needs to work on his finishing might be fine, but you need to justify it with actual logic and example, and not just use it as a throwaway line.

The great part about having guys like Shearer on Match of the Day is that he was an amazing goalscorer. Leverage his knowledge to talk about what he thinks players could do better in front of goal, but in specifics not clichés.

Why do you think Alli’s finishing needs to be better beyond the fact that every shot he takes does not turn into a goal?
How does Alli make his finishing better?
What part of a technique does someone need to improve to allow them to put away these allegedly simple chances? Or did the goalkeeper simply close off all possibility of a chance becoming a goal by good anticipation and positioning?

So many times there are coaching badges on the couches that go completely unused as part of the commentary, but these little elements are the actual expertise the analysts bring to the show. Segue into past video analysis of Alli’s poor technique and suggest how Pochettino could improve that via drills going forward.

And while on the topic, maybe producers need to stop assuming that these ex-footballers actually know everything there is to know about football. It’s now clear to the general audience that they don’t, but somehow that never stops them from being both overcritical and constantly speaking in cliches that lack insight.

Story Time
The models for expected goals aren’t perfect. They never will be. That is an up-front admission that doesn’t remotely limit the impact of using them.

Right now the models are so much better than the pundit estimations it’s farcical.

It doesn’t have to be that way, and with some experts it’s definitely not.

Last summer I sat in a room with Bob Bradley – you may have heard of him – and I talked to him about how our models work in evaluating chances. His reply to me was that there are plenty of instances where a chance is either better or worse than the model thinks it is, because someone is blocking a player’s shot, or because “two of my guys have a body on a player trying to make a header” close to goal, or any number of other reasons.

And he was totally, completely correct. Without tracking data, we lacked the appropriate info to evaluate the different factors he throws into evaluating his own team, and even with tracking data, we couldn’t see everything with his expert eyes.

On the other hand, Bob’s eyes can’t evaluate every touch in every game across 27 different leagues. And no one in the world could sell us tracking data to go along with it. We could neither clone/scale Bob’s expertise, nor buy data that would let us make the dramatic improvements he wanted, so we simply did best with what we had.

Which, at that time, was probably better than 95% of other clubs in the world in using and evaluating data.

Expert eyes plus the data is far better than the data by itself. But right now, data is dramatically better than the “experts”, or at least the ones we see regularly on TV.

At some time in the future, it will be commonplace for experts to leverage data models and tell us why something was a better or worse chance than we might think based on the specific game situation. Unfortunately right now, using data at all is still a scary thing.

No One Will Watch/Read That
Back when I started writing about football stats in 2013, penalties were lumped in to all goalscoring stats, and no one in media ever used rate stats like per90. Nowadays we see some level of sophistication in both of these topics, even in mainstream outlets.

Basically, we are three years down the road, and a small proportion of the media talks about football in the way we started to back in 2013. Should we be satisfied with that? Hardly. The advances made in the last three years in public football research and knowledge about the game dwarf anything we knew back then.

The two things that haven’t changed at all are the older generation of newspaper writers and the entirety of television punditry. Columnists like Martin Samuel and most of his generation are a lost cause, which is fine because I’m not sure having them as champions for new things is a comfortable fit anyway. Television though…

Here’s the thing – the audience for football on TV is changing rapidly. Consumers have more football knowledge at their fingertips than ever before, but somehow almost none of that makes it through to broadcasts. Meanwhile, nearly every other sport on the planet is rapidly pushing forward with ways to add insight to their product.

The combination of these two elements makes football look like the kid wearing a dunce cap in the corner of the classroom.

It’s really not hard to talk more intelligently about the game. A lot of the work done in analytics is easily explainable to footballers, which means it’s both useful and digestible for a television audience.

Arsene Wenger mentions expected goals in a press conference. Do we think that’s by accident, or because he uses that as a tool to determine how well his team and individual players are executing on the pitch? And IF the concept is completely embedded at Arsenal and other teams in the Premier League, maybe it deserves to be broadcast on television?

Instead we get “distance run” stats, which to my knowledge have never been proven as relevant to anything in football other than telling us who happened to run further in a match. Which must be interesting for reasons that are completely unknown to me, because I have always been the type of person who wanted to figure out how to get the best results from the least amount of work, not the other way around.

I had a throwaway comment yesterday that we should take the Sunday Supplement panel and privately ask them how likely they thought a number of different shots were to turn into goals, then discuss the results. This sparked a lot of ire from certain members of the journalistic community. To me it’s an interesting experiment because again, I don’t think the actual difficulty of chances is very well understood, even among people who cover the game on a daily basis. To some journalists, I had clearly profaned their own Sunday morning church of aspirations with the prospect of making their elders potentially look silly.

My point was not to make people look bad out of ignorance. My point was that I want our press to speak more intelligently about the game, at least in this respect, and the only way you can do that is via education.

I am a huge, avid consumer of sports media. I subscribe to both Sky and BTSport. I am a Guardian member. I have been paying for ESPNInsider nearly constantly since 2002. I have also written for the Daily Mirror and appeared (briefly) on Sky, TalkSport, and BBCRadio 5Live. When I say we can and should do better, my criticism is both as a paying customer and as a producer of media content.

Back when Monday Night Football first started, there was a clear common belief that the average football fan probably wouldn’t be interested in smarter television about tactics and analysis. MNF blew that idea out of the water, but strangely we haven’t seen a flotilla of clones try to copy the formula.

I’ve heard the argument that people won’t watch or read more smart statistical analysis with their football either. They might be right, but it’s not as if anyone has really tried.

Meanwhile, Fantasy Football is one of the fastest growing ways to interact with the Premier League. There are literally tens of millions of unique players who take part in fantasy football leagues every week – a game that is entirely driven by statistical output of players.

This is to say nothing of the legions of Football Manager and FIFA Ultimate Team fanatics who also deep dive into games that are also entirely driven by player stats.

Hmm…

Meanwhile, in an age of media cutbacks, the world’s largest sports media company ESPN just launched a stats and analytics vertical because they thought there was a rabid audience out there who want to read smarter analysis of all sports, so it made sense to collect that information into one easily accessible place.

Hmmmm…

Oh my god do people gamble every week on the Premier League. With odds. That are probabilities.

Hmmmmmm…

OptaJoe has 852K followers on their English account alone. WhoScored and Squawka nearly 600K a piece.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There is an audience out there. Leveraging their interest while making a workable media property is the tricky part, but some combination of fantasy sports, gambling, statistical analysis (especially visualizations) and tactical insight probably makes sense.

Conclusion
I want smarter football commentary.

I want it so that my children, who are rapidly becoming football consumers themselves, can understand more about the game they are learning to love without me having to fact check every step of the way. And I want it so that I don’t want to simply turn off the sound or fast forward the analysis section every single time I watch your program.

The bar here is pretty low. I have personal experience teaching a lot of these concepts inside of football, and they are honestly not that hard to grasp.

I also want to listen to experts who clearly have something unique to contribute, and see them show their expertise in a way that teaches me new things. And I want to hear far fewer cliches from guys who are paid significant sums of money to appear on my TV and contribute knowledge and insight while doing anything but.

I will take insightful, lesser-known commentators and analysts on my football every time versus well-known, cliché-spewing sound machines. The vast majority of people I talk to will too.

There is an audience here. If you build it, they will come.