One of the things I think a lot about is player development. Part of this is because my kids are right at the beginnings of their football journey (and my son especially, is football mad), and part of it is because I think it’s an exceptionally important topic to understand in building a professional football team.

The dichotomy of this is fascinating. When out with my kids, I literally see the genesis of their skill set starting from nothing. When working professionally, I review players who are many zeroes away from the Top 1% in how good they are compared to the rest of the world.

Today I am going to outline coaching hacks I believe are huge keys to developing better players. Some of these are appropriate to the very young, and others need to wait until you start imprinting tactical knowledge on players. I think some of these are fairly well understood in other countries, but I rarely see the whole package together, nor have I seen it explained at a level I was happy with.

Some caveats before we get started:

1. These are not validated research on my part. Much of my work is on statistics, and I only write about things I have researched well enough to be fairly certain are correct. This ain’t that. Where there is validated research I am aware of, I will link to it. However, I will freely state these are my learned opinions on what is better and why.
2. Most of the material in this chapter is not unique or original to me. Unfortunately I don’t know where it started, and so can’t appropriately credit it either. My apologies.
3. Plenty of it might not even be new to you. If so, you are likely already doing a great job at developing players.
4. Finally, this isn’t comprehensive. While I think dribbling skills and first touch are incredibly important to teach players, I also think those are generally well emphasized in good programs.

Balance
What happens when you take a five-year-old out to the park and have them lift up their foot to trap a ball?

They fall over.

Then as they progress to being able to trap a ball, we start asking them to strike it. When they try to strike it hard, they fall over some more.

Everything we do in football is based on balance.

Juggling? Balance.

Striking a dead ball? Balance.

Dribbling? Balance.

First touch? More balance.

Running? Cutting? Jumping? Balance.

This particular element of skill and strength is woven through every single motion in the sport, and might be the one overarching thing that ties it all together.

I played five different sports when I was a kid in the U.S. How many of those explicitly taught me balance by itself?

Zero.

It wasn’t until I started learning MMA late in my 20’s that I learned balance could be taught, and not as part of doing activities inside of a sport. Once I learned how to balance myself and apply the strength that came along with it, I suddenly became better at every sport I did. Funny how that works.

Now some of you might suggest that the current methodology is fine. Learning through doing is a tried and true methodology, and in many cases it just works. I disagree.

What happens if you teach children balance first?

The short answer is that every single thing in the game of football becomes easier for them to accomplish. The long answer is that you produce better football players, because the ones you are now working with are more able to focus on explicit techniques and adjustments without the constant fear of falling over.

How do you teach balance?
This is one area where a tradition of thousands of years has probably got it right: kung fu. There are legions of internet resources on this not to mention books and videos, but this one highlights the major stances I care about.

In the martial arts I learned, we worked through stance progression on both feet. The progressions are crucial because that’s where you build dynamic balance between the static movements. When initially learning the technique yourself in order to be able to teach it, it’s probably useful to get together with a martial arts expert to learn properly, as much of this is fairly subtle.

But it’s boring!

It is, a little. However, you can get kids doing these on their own with the right video/email nudge to the parents, and it literally only takes about 15 seconds per stance plus a slow transition between them to start to see the results. If you have attentive kids (do it post-warmup, after they have been running around a bit), it can be done in about 3 minutes.

Black belts in various martial arts can literally spend hours working through stances and body mastery, so the time progression here goes as far as you want it to. (But preferably at home and not during your incredibly valuable training time.)

Looking to create a little extra buy-in? Conveniently stance mastery is a key component of both jedi and ninja training. Let your kids know.

Here’s another reason why I thing this topic is hugely important: Balance is absolutely crucial for smaller players.

A major problem we have in player development is that smaller players are constantly weeded out. Not for lack of skill – in fact, often they have better technical skills than their bigger counterparts – but generally for a lack of strength and “ability to compete.”

Now picture the small players who are in professional football. Almost all of them have amazing balance. You often hear them described as having a “low center of gravity”, which makes them difficult to knock off the ball, easier for them to tackle big players, and generally just annoying as hell to play against. This is really just another way of saying they are short with great balance.

Balance, and the strength that comes with it, is the key when it comes to enabling smaller players to compete with bigger ones. If you don’t introduce this to your youngsters and give them a methodology to improve, you are failing them.

At the Pro Level
I was lucky enough to present at Science and Football this year with Grant Downie, Head of Performance at the Manchester City Academy. Grant is tremendously thoughtful, and the attention to detail he described City as paying to their academy was jaw-dropping. He told us that Manchester City have playgrounds for their academy kids, and those playgrounds intentionally feature plenty of balance-related elements. He also mentioned that their first team regularly does light wrestling, to learn to use balance when in contact with another person, which is especially useful when attacking and defending set pieces.

I was talking about this with Jim Pallotta, owner of Roma, in 2015 and he said they were doing balance tests in preseason and had a backup goalkeeper who kept falling over when asked to stand on one leg. Everyone in the room was shocked that something like this could still happen at the pro level. You know for a fact that if it is happening at Roma, it’s probably happening everywhere.

Here’s a blurry photo of Berndt Leno catching balls while kneeling on a balance ball as part of a warmup that I absolutely love.

Balance and core strength is hugely important for GKs because they constantly find themselves in odd positions that they have to make explosive motions out of in order to make saves. Better balance also helps you become faster at making these dynamic motions, even when something has happened to mess up your initial positioning or footwork.

Also check out some of the sand pit work (around 1:35) in this video from the Ajax academy for some funky, creative ways to continue training balance at elite levels. Forwards are constantly getting battered by other players, and being able to continue executing while withstanding that sort of assault makes a huge difference in end product.

Two-Footedness
This is probably the most obvious hack on my list, but it happens far too infrequently. I think one of the major reasons is that is has to be trained young to take full effect, and professional academies rarely have access to children at this age. Because of that, the responsibility falls to parents and community coaches.

Having two good feet completely changes how a player can approach the game. It’s hard to quantify, but it opens up the other half of their body, which in turn makes vastly more options available with every touch of the ball. More good options = more opportunity to succeed and maximizes good decision making ability.

Think of it from the perspective of the defender. If I know a player only has one useful foot, I can always key on that when trying to defend. It makes my life easier. On the other hand, if a player is running at me or likely to shoot, and he or she can use either foot with equal alacrity, my job is infinitely harder.

Having a second good foot also makes life easier for a player’s teammates, since they suddenly have a much larger margin of error when passing to that player.

I’ve run into two major difficulties in my own training of U7s and U8s in this area.

1. You have to make the kids aware of the need to use both feet. It’s also good to attach it to a player they really like and talk about how hard they worked to make sure both feet were good. (Santi Cazorla is my son’s example.)
2. You have to reinforce this need constantly.

Kids want to succeed. As their dominant foot starts to get good, working with their weak foot feels like constant failure. Thus you have to talk about it in the same way as any other skill, but you have to mention it frequently, regularly, for years.

“Use the other foot! Now try it with your left! Pass it to the right, control with a touch, then shift it to your left to pass it back. Okay, now control with your left and shift to your right for the pass.”

It is a long process, but…

If you stick with it, you see your kids start to gain comfort. My son, who is an able U8 player but possibly nothing special, passes and shoots with both feet regularly during his games. He doesn’t think about it either. He’s probably scored five goals over the last two years with his weak foot (his left), which never ceases to make me smile.

We talk about why we train both feet fairly hard so that he understands it. One of the easiest paths to understanding was showing him how he could cut central much easier for better shots if he used his left foot as well as his right.

If you want to develop better footballers, you must impart the knowledge that this is important to your players, and find subtle, constant ways to bring it into training.

At the Pro Level
I was helping Flemming Pedersen (now technical director at Nordsjaelland) set up a Brentford B session last year and watching some players warm up. One guy, who was fairly well regarded, was only warming up with his right foot. I noticed and jokingly asked how many feet he had.

“Two.”

At that age, if he’s only warming up with one, the hope that a player can use both feet equally is probably dead.

Start early. Reinforce it regularly. Constantly work it into training as a nudge.

Scanning
Scanning is the act of constantly looking beside and behind oneself on a football pitch. (Some coaches call this “shoulder checking”, but it’s a more comprehensive activity than that.)

To me, scanning is the single biggest skill that separates average from elite players.

It has also been heavily validated, so before we go too far, check out this link and this presentation + paper from the Sloan conference back in 2013.

“The results show a clear positive relationship between visual exploratory behaviors (scanning) that are initiated before receiving the ball and performance with the ball. The best players explore more frequently than others and there is a positive relationship between exploratory behavior frequency and pass completion. The impact of exploratory behaviors is the largest for midfielders performing forward passes.”

The first place I ever saw this highlighted was a video from AllasFCB about Xavi. I still get chills thinking about it, because in my mind it was truly this HOLY SHIT moment of new knowledge.  (See also: football epiphany.)

In the video, Allas shows just how often Xavi is looking around the pitch, without the ball. It is an insane number of times, like every other second for an entire game. However, this activity is what powers Xavi’s game. He had an almost otherworldly ability to see the pitch, find open men, find his own space, escape pressure, and complete impossible passes most players would never even see.

He could see these things because he was constantly looking around.

When I first watched this video, my heart stopped. I had been watching football for 15 years at that point, why had I never seen this? It literally changes how you can see and play the game.

One of my all-time favorite examples of this came during a Bayern Munich match from last season. Watch Xabi’s head look to his left just as the right back receives the ball.

As part of his scanning, he spots Costa in space with only a fullback near him. It’s an amazing pass, but that pass is created because his scanning made it possible.

Here’s the thing – scanning is important everywhere on the pitch. Forwards need it to see who is around them, whether they can turn, where the space is, where they should run, etc. Midfielders need it for absolutely everything, since they are surrounded by opponents at almost all times. Defenders need it to know not only where their nearest opponent is, but where their helping teammates are, where additional runners may be, and as you see above, where their potential passing outlets are once they recover the ball.

You want to teach your players to play one step ahead of the opponent? Teach them to scan.

How best to train scanning?
I don’t know. This was high on my list of things I wanted to learn when visiting elite academies, but I never got to make that trip. I have some ideas on how to go about it, but have done zero work on best practice.

I asked a high level English coach how he would go about training it once and got the following answer:

“I learned to look around when they threw me into training with the big boys, because if I didn’t, they’d kick holes in me. Teaches you right quick, that does.”

We may have some issues with pedagogy in this country.

Please leave links in the comments if you have information on how to train this at different levels, and I’ll review them and gradually move the best of them up here as recommendations.

Cover Shadows
In my head, this is the inverse of scanning for the defensive side of the ball. It requires scanning to do well, but understanding cover shadows will help players dramatically limit passing options for opponents.

Think of the ball as a light source. Bodies of defenders are solid, and they create shadows behind themselves. Here’s an image from Rene Maric that clearly illustrates the concept, and the grey shaded area are covering shadows for Iniesta and Xavi.

Why does this matter? Because it is a key to defending, particularly to pressing defense. It allows a player to not only press the ball, but also to limit a passing option at the same time. And it is a concept your attackers need to understand in order to work through a press from their opponents.

Unclear? Check this out.

Watch Aubameyang’s sequence of presses here and in particular, look at how he cuts off a passing angle with a curved run each time.

Then notice the creep (or sprint) on the other Dortmund defenders as they move forward and further cut off lanes like some sort of pressing python, strangling possession. The result is a long pass into the distance, and likely Dortmund regaining the ball.

I also like the explanations from Spielverlagerung about Atletico’s press, which has a different flavour than Tuchel’s, but the underlying concepts are similar. That piece is crazy long, but example 1 is enough to get a sense of what I mean.

How do you train it?
It goes hand in hand with scanning and pressing. How do you train elite level pressing? What are the sessions? What does the knowledge progression look like?

Sadly, I once again don’t know. As I mentioned in my How Coaches Learn article, coaching knowledge is very much an apprenticeship, and I have not been able to learn how to teach this to players from experts yet.

That doesn’t change the importance of the skill with regard to player development. It just means my ability to convey further knowledge to you is currently limited.

Think of the following things slotting into place for your players:

• Scan the whole pitch in attack.
• Scan the whole pitch in defense.
• Work covering shadows aggressively.
• Form Voltron.

That’s almost how it works.

First you make one phase of the game far easier for yourself. Then you make the next major phase easier as well, and you make your transitions better in the process. Finally, you make attacks for the opponent far more difficult. The result should be a massive improvement on a possession by possession basis.

Wrap-up
To me, the four elements discussed above are the fundamental building blocks for developing better, smarter players. I don’t know how to train the last two well, because they are specialized knowledge that I have yet to unlock, but I am absolutely certain of their value to modern footballers.

Thanks for listening.

–Ted Knutson
@mixedknuts

Post Script
This is another chapter in a book I have gradually been developing over the last year. It touches on all sorts of topics, but the main purpose is to explain how I view the game of football and why I think the way that I do. I don’t approach the game from the standpoint of someone who played – that wasn’t an avenue that was available to me where I grew up. Instead I approach the game from a standpoint of examining what matters, how do we prove that, and how do we apply these lessons to teams on the pitch?

Currently finished chapters are linked below (and are all free), so have a poke around if you are interested in more.

Explaining and Training Shot Quality
The Future of Football
How Do Coaches Learn?
The Death of Traditional Scouting
New Tech
Marcus Rashford and Young Player Development

I try to do a monthly mailbag. Checking my archive, it appears I have failed to produce mailbags for September OR October, so it’s time to super-size this one.

It has been a long, looooong time since this was relevant, but in honor of the new Tribe album…

Can I kick it?

Great question, and one whose answer may decide the title this season.

They are awesome at constraining opposing shots, giving up less than 8 a game, and way out there in terms of performance among top teams. This is huge. On the other hand, the quality of shot they do give up is in the bottom 5%. This is an issue with aggressive pressing systems. Break the press, get good shots. Save the cheerleader, save the world. You know how it goes.

It’s interesting to compare this to Conte’s Chelsea, who also only offer up about 8 shots a game, but manage to keep the quality of shots against them below average.

One thing I found interesting is that their PPDA (passes per defensive action) isn’t at elite levels yet, which to me indicates the press still isn’t perfect for various reasons.

Anyway, the combined math means Liverpool are good, not great in defense coming in at just under a goal a game in xG. I think in open play, Liverpool might actually be elite (though they could still use a mobile DM for harder games), but their set piece defense has issues.

The two questions that come out of this are

1. Can Klopp fix the set piece defending? This is actually fairly straightforward, so I’m going to lean yes.
2. Can Liverpool keep scoring enough that a good, not great defense is good enough? We’ll find out.

Do you live in a deeply religious, judgemental country? If so, they might deem your love for another man – even a left back as fine as Nacho Monreal – to be wrong. This, mon frere, is a judgement free zone, so you do you.

Ha, who am I kidding? We judge things all the time! It’s practically the purpose of the site. That said, we are totally cool with man love and it’s fair to say you are with friends.

Back to Monreal’s quality as a left back, he has been one of the better defending left backs in the Premier League for quite a while. An excellent game reader, he’s also been quite good in the air. On the other hand, he doesn’t bring that much to the attack, but that isn’t really his job.

About 18 months ago, we were looking at Arsenal on a new defensive activity vis we’d designed and there was a very clear high intensity spot out on the left wing. @StatLurker dubbed in the “Nacho Monreal Zone of Death.”

I just smiled.

They say game recognize game, and I don’t think Leipzig really need me. They have an amazing player development pipeline, a great coach, and their Director of Football Ralf Rangnick has so many edges figured out, his team has gone from promotion to the top of the Bundesliga in no time flat. It’s possible their external recruitment could get a touch better using our tool set and methodology, but I’m not even sure of that. They execute extremely well.

Top 5 Bundesliga Coaches (no order):
Tuchel
Hassenhutl
Ancelotti
Schmidt
Nagelsmann

Craft beer is complicated because availability across countries is miserable. The Reservoir Dogs line from To Øl in Denmark is great. Everything coming out of the Stillwater Artisinal (like Vielle) is awesome but impossible to get. Siren is doing really good stuff, and pretty much anything by Jolly Pumpkin is mind-bending and both tasty and weird at the same time.

My mind on this changes practically every week. I could/should finish the book and publish, but in order for it to be as good as I want it to be, I’d have to write about all sorts of edges that are not public right now. That means giving away at least some future utility if I were to go back inside a club, which isn’t a particularly comfortable thing.

On the other hand, it might be years (or never) until I work completely inside a club or set of clubs again, which is why you see me publishing single chapters from time to time. It’s not really a coaching book though, it’s just a book that explains how I think about football and why I have come to those conclusions.

The hacks from the coaching article this week (link) should be universal.

At the risk of pissing off an entire profession, I don’t understand the purpose of the performance analysis degree. It’s not sports science. It’s not stats and data. It’s not medical. It doesn’t often entail programming. And yet people often get a Master’s degree in it.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I didn’t grow up here, so it might be a cultural thing, but having been around football clubs for a number of years now, I genuinely don’t understand it as a degree you would spend years at university to learn.

Just a touch below that right now, but definitely top 20. The question is how many concessions your style of play has to make in order to accommodate his weaknesses. He’s been great this year, and this is probably his true level going forward.

Fun fact: Did you know Lukaku is completing more than 2 successful dribbles a game? Given his size, this should be physically impossible. How can a man that big and explosive also be… nimble?

I wasn’t there, but I heard Ian Graham, head of research at Liverpool, did a presentation at a big conference discussing their validation efforts across a wide range of tracking and GPS data, and some companies fared dramatically better than others. This is something that is absolutely necessary to get the most out of data going forward. The problem is that devoting resources to it is not cheap.

However, if your organization is up to snuff and cares about these things, validation of current and new equipment should be going on all the time. Whether it actually does…

I am always open to interesting opportunities, and to be honest, the chance to teach and shape future coaches and analysts as part of a broader education program at the country level would be intriguing.

At the moment though, I’m enjoying building things related to football but not immersed in the day to day, so I don’t feel any pressure to get stuck back in unless it was something really special. Life is good right now. It’s also not incredibly stressful. I’m going to keep doing this for a while and see where it goes.

We’ll cluster the next two together, because they have similar themes

It depends on whether you can obtain accurate data or not. If you can, adding a useful tool set on top of that is less than the cost of another performance analyst. If you then bring in someone smart, but young, to help you execute current research and evaluate how well the team is doing, you can probably get a nice boost.

My guess is data + tool set + analyst is less than half your average League One player salary. What’s interesting is that MLS clubs are starting to invest significantly in this area, and their budgets feel far more constrained than even English League One in some cases. I suspect this is happening because adding stats to sports at this point is a very easy cultural thing to accept in the U.S.

(Note: This may sound like a sales pitch. It is not. This is my genuine opinion, whether you use StatsBomb Services as the consultancy or someone else.)

This is a really interesting question because it hits on a few critical points in the current environment.

1. Can and should clubs hire data analysts to work inside the club with coaches/technical directors/heads of recruitment, etc?
2. Does the population of analysts they would be hiring have the skill set and knowledge to dramatically improve club processes and execution on and off the pitch?
3. If they bring on consultants to help, what can they deliver? Does the club lose anything in the process?

The answer to question 1 is yes, if they are open to change and improvement. If they aren’t, money is probably better spent elsewhere.

2 is a fairly serious issue. The number of analysts out there who have enough knowledge and experience to make dramatic improvements is relatively small because the field is pretty new, at least in football. If you hire kids – even bright ones – you are essentially paying for them to learn. Learning takes time and time, perhaps more than any other resource, is scarce in football. They are less likely to have an impact simply because they are young. It takes a special club to empower young people to help them change.

The other issue here is that there is simply a ton of poor analysis out there, both public and private. Undergoing massive change because of conclusions reached by bad analysis could be both expensive and have dire consequences.

Want to get the most out of smart, young hires? They need a mentor. They need someone they can talk to about ideas who can point out easy mistakes and pitfalls, and someone who is capable of evaluating their work and communicating what is just plain wrong. This is true for coaches, it’s true for programmers, and it is especially true for analysts. Analyst work inside clubs will typically be secret, which means they miss out on any and all public review to help them learn.

3 is the alternative. The issue with 3 is that consultants presumably aren’t developing IP that is unique to your club, so you boost your short- and medium-term knowledge and execution, but potentially sacrifice long-term improvements and institutional knowledge. On the other hand, consultants should be bringing a high degree of competence, knowledge, and outside information that the club does not have currently, and doesn’t have to wait/pay for it to develop.

I think the best way for clubs to bridge this gap is to hire someone younger, but very bright who can be the internal operator, and then layer in a consultancy to quickly ramp up the knowledge and act as a mentor. This way the club retains the knowledge gain, potentially has the ability to start creating long-term edges for itself, and gets an immediate boost to performance in different areas.

It’s a bit like paying for a transfer to give your young, talented player more time to learn and adapt to the rigours of first team football.

(Note: There will be official news about the launch of StatsBomb Services on December 1st. We have our own custom analytics platform, and offer bespoke consulting for player and manager recruitment, team evaluation, financial valuations, and set piece coaching and execution. If you want to know more, send an email to mixedknuts@gmail.com.)

Our numbers have his xG per90 at about .38, so he’s good but not amazing. He’s a ridiculous athlete though, and that aids everything he does while making him extremely difficult to mark. You’re right though, if he had the ball skills of say your typical Spanish player, he’d be unstoppable. As it is, he’s getting by on some elite athleticism, but we’ll see how long that’s sustainable.

They are both right now. Their league stats are average, though to be fair they have faced a very difficult schedule thus far. Meanwhile, their style of play is conducive to Champions League style football. Ranieri also has vast experience in the competition (and he’s a very good coach), so he’s setting them up to succeed without making big mistakes.

To be honest, I don’t think Leicester really care about the league this year. They won it last year against all odds. This season is about a respectable finish and the best CL run they can possibly make. If those are the goals, the season so far looks just fine.

*tries to figure out a way to answer this that won’t get him blackballed from the industry*

In five years, Tim will be… *struggling* entertaining(?) fans…. *still struggling* likely as a *whooboy* commentator.

*sweating profusely*

Yes, I made it!

Let me tell you though, his involvement with the rumoured takeover of Swindon by Red Bull is just plain weird. Red Bull have proven extremely competent in their football operations across a number of clubs and countries. Tim Sherwood has been anything but.

*looks up*

Shit.

Time to go.

I hope you enjoyed the show, and even if you didn’t, you can now rejoice in the fact that we don’t have another international break in football until 2017.

Peace.

–Ted Knutson
@mixedknuts

The Premier League has transformed from a very good football league into one of the world’s greatest soap operas, and perhaps my favorite storyline right now is the struggle of Pep Guardiola.

• Take the world’s greatest current manager.
• Add him to one of the world’s richest teams.
• Profit.

Before the season, most people thought it would be that simple. Halfway through the year, it is clear it has been anything but. The question is why? Pep didn’t struggle like this at Barcelona, nor at Bayern Munich. What makes Manchester City – just two seasons removed from the title when he took over – so much harder?

For the answer to this question, I want to briefly cast back to some stuff written at the start of StatsBomb’s existence in 2013 by myself and Benjamin Pugsley. That summer City recruited Fernandinho, Jesus Navas, Stevan Jovetic, and Alvaro Negredo at the top end of the scale, aged 28, 27, 23, and 27 respectively. The problem we flagged up at the time was that these were clearly “win now” transfers that would have a stonking replacement cost down the road. You can’t sign guys in their late 20s and expect them to contribute at the same level as players in their prime at the end of 4- and 5-year contracts. It just doesn’t happen. Add in 32-year-old Martin DeMichelis for salt and City had signed fairly old.

The next summer saw the arrival of Mangala, Fernando, Willy Caballero, and Bacary Sagna. Now Mangala was 23, but ended up being a disaster. This happens, especially with center backs. Fernando was 26 and has hardly contributed at a level commensurate with his fee. Caballero is a backup GK, and Arsenal fans will tell you that as much as they loved Sagna, he was already approaching washed up as a two-way fullback when City signed him at age 31. In his last season in North London, you could have Sagna attack. Or you could have him defend. Do not expect both.

Two years, lots of fees, and no players in their prime that stuck. This is a problem for a club that wants to contend for titles every year.

Last summer, City spent about £150M on Sterling, De Bruyne, and Otamendi to start digging out of the mess, and all three have proven to be good/great additions. Unfortunately, this equates to “normal” turnover spending for a super club. It didn’t improve the spine much, nor solve the growing geriatric issue.

Fast forward to this summer, and the great master arrives along with John Stones, Leroy Sane, Nolito, Gundogan, and Claudio Bravo. Nolito and Bravo are 29 and 33, and neither one of them is a fullback. Gundogan is a world class talent and midfielding brain packed into a Mr. Glass body. Sane provides good depth and youth, but probably a year away from being good, and John Stones is a center back project that Pep desperately needs to succeed.

The point of all this is that yes, Pep’s system might be the most fundamentally superior tactical system we have seen in modern football. And yes, Pep Guardiola is still a goddamned Footballing Jesus. But even Jesus was going to have a tough time resurrecting this squad and romping the league this season because of the issues created by years of ineffective squad planning before he ever got there. And all of that was before the entire league chose to collectively get their shit together on the manager front, giving the Premier League probably the greatest collection of coaching talent it has ever had at one time.

City might have the best manager in England, but they could spend £200M in January and still need to stump up more in the summer in order to have the best squad in the league.

It is great to see Guardiola struggle, and try to adjust his tactics to both the league and his squad at the same time. That very struggle has not only created a great story for this season, but it’s also enhanced the reputation of the Premier League by proving to be a tougher title to take than anything Pep has faced in recent times.

Young Rash and Tam Tam
I was asked this week on Twitter whether I would pick Marcus Rashford or Tammy Abraham as the bigger talent. This came out of a broader discussion on what “the analytics world” thought of Rashford this summer, after a fiery debut season.

My point then bears repeating: there is no such thing as “the analytics world.” There is no monolith of opinion with regard to stats and football. There is a loosely-connected community of people who work with stats, but that’s about it. The site you are reading this on right now is not called TedBomb, and even here on StatsBomb you will see differing opinions and analysis of the exact same data by different writers. Lumping all analysts into a group sells the great work everyone does short in the same way lumping all journalists into one misguided, monolithic opinion group would.

We are all unique snowflakes, dahling.

My opinion from this summer on what Rashford was and what he could be is largely unchanged. The fact that he is scoring goals regularly in the Premier League at his age is notable by itself. Add to that a serious commitment to run at defenders this year and a bit more creative passing, and he looks like one of the best prospects to come out of Manchester in ages. He’s clearly still learning, but also good enough to start for most teams in the league right now, either as a center forward or as a wide forward.

Tammy Abraham may be a less common household name right now, but he has been lighting up the Championship at Bristol City this year in his first season of senior football. The Chelsea loanee is only 19.

This is extremely unusual for a young forward, and looking backward one of the most similar profiles I can find at this age is another Chelsea loanee: Romelu Lukaku. Yes, Lukaku’s season came against Premier League competition and TamTam’s is in the Championship, but Lukaku certainly looked a bit more physically mature when he did it while Tammy still has some teenager left on those lanky bones.

Back in February, my group at Brentford produced a list of young forwards that we thought would contribute to our club this season, and Abraham was at the very top of that list*. He is a breathtaking talent who is producing incredible numbers without being surrounded by particularly good teammates at Bristol City. So you know I’m legit on this, here’s a tweet from the first day of the season in August.

(* The previous season we flagged up Sergi Canos and John Swift as good loanees, both of whom were excellent contributors, so pretty happy with the process there.)

Anyway, back to the actual question: say for the next five seasons would you rather have Rashford or Abraham?

The statistician in me leans Rashford. Obviously he’s performing against better competition, and the success he is having as a wide forward at his age is more rare and unusual than Abraham’s profile. Yung Rash is the real deal already, and who knows how high his ceiling is?

The scout in me leans Abraham. He’s killing it week in and week out, in a very physical league, without the help of United’s amazing squad around him. His passing as a CF is probably better than average, and he has pace, strength, and surprising technical ability for a player his size. He’ll be in the Premier League next season and will likely not look at all out of place.

Both of these guys are part of the English National Team setup, and England is absolutely spoiled for choice at the attacking positions for what looks like a decade to come.

Oh, and before we change topics, Kelechi Iheanacho at City still looks really special.

The Premier League Cliff
Some years the relegation battle is all we have left for excitement by the end of the season. Others, it’s the race for the final Champions League spot. Once a generation you might get “AGUEROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” This year, the entire table seems to be in motion every single week, but I find the bottom of the table particularly intriguing.

Two early, improbable wins disguised it for a while, but Hull have been the worst team in the league since the start. They have a squad stuck between Championship and Premier League calibre and though they were probably improving a bit in recent months, they still hadn’t beaten anyone since

*scrolls through fixture list*

*still scrolling*

Uh… Jesus, November 6^th against Southampton. Even that was *ahem* a bit fortunate.

So yeah, change was needed and Hull went way off the beaten path to hire former Sporting Lisbon and Olympiakos boss Marco Silva. I like this appointment for lots of reasons, not least that it should give them an actual chance to survive pending additional recruitment this month, and it doesn’t recycle old names. They are 4 points off safety with 18 games left. It’s an ask, but I am saying there’s a chance.

Moving up the table, we have The Swansea Debacle. A club that can’t stop shooting themselves in the foot has named Paul Clement as a perfectly reasonable head coaching appointment that also gives them a shot at survival. Like Hull, their squad is also a mixed bag of talent, with two solid forwards, some decent pieces dotted around the pitch, and yet huge need for upgrades in about five positions. Like we discussed above with Manchester City, if you recruit poorly for a couple of seasons in a row, you will eventually pay a price. Swansea’s Premier League dreams will live or die on Clement’s ability to solidify the defense while still allowing them to create enough goals to get 3 points on a regular basis.

One simple barometer of doom that I discovered a couple of seasons ago is the 16 Shots Rule. If your club is giving up 16 shots or more a game, you have a strong probability of being relegated. Burnley are defying this metric this season because Sean Dyche has somehow crafted a Jekyll and Hyde tactical team who are surprisingly good at home – 5^th best in the league right now with 22 points – while being the worst team in the league on the road. Their home return means they are almost certainly safe this year, and if Dyche can figure out how to bring similar output to Burnley’s road performances, they may become mainstays in the PL, at which point the media will suddenly appreciate him more and begin referring to him as Dutch tactical mastermind Jan Dijks. (Shout out to @noverheul for the nickname.)

The doom clock doth toll, and it tolls for Sunderland. David Moyes’s team are giving up nearly 19 shots a game, and circling the Premier League toilet bowl, waiting to be flushed. We know Moyes’s Everton teams were difficult to beat, but Sunderland are tied for most losses in the league with 13. Something is clearly lacking at the Stadium of Light beyond funds for additional transfers. That said, given Moyes’s history, it’s tough to completely rule them out either.

Directly above Sunderland, one point away from being flushable, are Crystal Palace. The complicated reign of Alan Pardew is now over, and The Great Allardici has been tasked with his usual magic act of keeping a struggling club up. Their underlying metrics were actually pretty good even before Pardew was sacked, but the table position is precarious enough that a bad run will cause normally sweaty Big Sam to look like he’s managing in a sauna. Who doesn’t want to see that?

Finally we get to the clubs that appear in relative safety. Aitor Karanka’s Middlesboro are dreadfully boring to watch, but are also 4 points plus strong goal difference away from the drop. They could get sucked down to the bottom, but it would take a strong final 18 matches from two clubs below them to cause any real trouble. Every other club from Leicester on up should surely fight on for another season and another massive injection of TV money.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m kind of looking forward to the relegation run-in of nearly competent teams desperately hanging on for another year.

It’s SCRABBLING FOR SAFETY SUNDAY, AND IT’S LIVE…

Random xGChain Trivia
I teased a new metric that Thom Lawrence has developed for StatsBomb Services on the podcast this week. I’m not going to steal Thom’s thunder – he will write about it in detail next week, and then I will follow-up with more analysis after, but I am going to provide random historic trivia with absolutely zero explanation right now.

I will say that we’re currently breaking it into xGChain/90 and what I refer to as xGChain Residual, but Thom may end up calling Pre-xGCh**. Either way, please enjoy.

• Arsenal’s highest xGChain player in 14-15 was Santi Cazorla. He was also Arsenal’s highest player in 15-16. Pretty interesting, given their struggles without him.
• I knew Atletico Madrid’s Angel Correa was good, but he has the top xGCh value for them so far this season, above Gameiro and well ahead of Antoine Griezmann.
• Neymar actually had the highest xGChain/90 at Barcelona last season, and not Lionel Messi.
• Xavi 10-11 has the highest residual xGChain score in the data followed closely by Jerome Boateng at Bayern last in 15-16. Yes, a center back.
• The highest non-Bayern, non-Barcelona players in residual xGChain values are Ozil at Real Madrid in 12-13, Cazorla at Arsenal last season, and Gundogan at Dortmund also in 15-16.

Oh, and back when I first started toying with Manager Fingerprints in 2013, I described Mark Hughes as a bang average Premier League manager. Stoke are currently 11th in the table, having finished 9th, 9th, and well… 9th in the previous three seasons. Some times “average” really is a bit of a compliment.

Have a good weekend!

–Ted Knutson
@mixedknuts
mixedknuts@gmail.com

** If you want to complain about names, feel free to develop your own metrics instead

The first project I officially worked on inside football didn’t involve statistics, but it did involve analysis. My task was to take all the video for teams we knew were unusually good at set pieces, analyse what they were doing, and build a guide of best practices. Needless to say, we had some success.

What follows is a translation of two presentations I typically give to teams about this topic. I believe my work here remains fairly unique in the football world, and it has certainly benefited from working with top coaches like Gianni Vio and Brian Priske.

I can also assure you that when it comes to set pieces, we are just barely scratching the surface of what is possible.

The Why Of Set Pieces
The traditional view of set pieces seems to go something like this.

These two guys

use set pieces to help their thuggish, under-technical teams avoid relegation. Take some big, strapping lads. Toss a bunch of them in the box. Throw it into the mixer, and voila! It’s a valid, proven strategy that they have executed time and again.

But what if a talented team started to take set pieces seriously?

Then a team lead by this guy

could beat out these two guys

to a league title, despite a huge gap in wages and transfer spending.

Funnily enough, something like this happened in England as well.

Sir Alex Ferguson clearly started paying more attention to Manchester United’s set piece execution his last two seasons in charge, to the point that their data looks more like Stoke then and less like historic Fergie. Patrice Evra started scoring off headers for the first time in his career, and Wayne Rooney and Robin van Persie – two clear strikers – were relocated outside of the box to provide the best delivery possible on corners.

It’s not the only reason United performed well in those final Fergie seasons despite an aging squad and very little transfer spending, but it certainly helped move the needle.

And finally, an emphasis on better set piece execution can help even small budget teams win titles.

I hate to talk about this next part publicly, but now is the time.

It’s not just corners where teams can gain a significant edge in execution. It’s also free kicks and…

Most clubs get nothing from throw-ins. As a matter of fact, for most teams a throw-in is worse than a normal possession in terms of goal expectation. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Atletico Madrid toyed around with long throws back in 14-15 and created three goals from them. As you can see from the video above, FC Midtjylland obviously started creating goals from throw-ins themselves. Meanwhile, trailblazing tactical pioneer Tony Pulis and Stoke in 08-09 created 53 shots and eight goals off long throws alone. This is a phase of play where the vast majority of teams produce nothing. Stoke produced a shot and a half a game (which was like 15% of their total shots) just from throw-ins during the Rory Delap years.

If you are able to build and execute a long-throw program, it’s the equivalent of magicing free goals out of thin air.

But what does it cost you?

Well first of all, it costs coaching expertise. There are very few coaches or analysts in the world who are capable of building a set piece program from scratch and executing it at a high level.

It also takes hard work. Players need to know that this phase of the game is important to the team, and they need to concentrate on executing it correctly, every time.

I have a video I like to show of the guy who finished third in the Ballon d’Or voting this year busting his ass to learn better set piece technique. Think you are too good to work hard at perfecting this area of your game? Antoine Griezmann says you’re wrong.

Finally, it takes training time.

Now this may sound like a weird point of emphasis, but I cannot tell you how many clubs I have walked into and asked this simple question:

How much time do you spend training set pieces?

The answer is usually between five and fifteen minutes.

A week.

Now set piece goals typically account for between 25% and 33% of all goals scored in the course of a season. It would be more correct – but still under representing the percentages – to spend fifteen minutes a day on set pieces. Yet most teams barely pay attention to this phase of the game.

Most clubs average around .3 goals a game off set pieces.

Elite clubs can push this number up to .75 or .80 goals from set pieces alone. That’s not an exaggeration – the keys are in the data.

What is the value of adding 15-20 goals a season to your club without having to pay the transfer fee or wages of a 15-20 goal a season striker, which in the modern day is likely to cost 100M all-in?

How can clubs afford not to concentrate on this area of production?

But I see you, you are skeptical.

It is totally natural to disbelieve when someone claims they can do magic, even if they perform the trick right in front of your eyes.

How about some practical application then?

Designing and Executing Set Pieces from Scratch
We talkin’ ’bout practice…

This stuff operates from a single fundamental principle.

Goals from set pieces are not luck.

• Through studying historic successful teams, I created a program that dramatically improved set piece performance and execution.
• The principles the program is based on are simple, but like anything in football, it takes time to teach players and coaches how to execute at a high level.
• Many times people in football will claim something is obvious once you have pointed it out to them. However, the number of clubs not doing these supposedly obvious things is staggering. Knowing the edges are there in the first place is massive and unusual.

What follows is a real world workflow of analysing the problem, creating the solution, training the solution, and then executing it on the pitch for [redacted].

Step 1: Identify the defensive scheme.

Here you see the defensive corner setup for the next opponent. Their structure is a 3-man near post zone plus hybrid man marking.

Step 2: Figure out how to break the scheme.
Looking at the defensive scheme above, I thought a bit about how we might cause them some problems. There are a number of different things you could do, but my first thought was what would happen if we place a man in the box like he was screening the GK, but have him run out of the box to the corner flag as if he were taking a short corner?

Something like this:

My guess was that at least one of the zonal markers would come with our player, thus weakening the zone in a crucial area. Alternatively, if none of the markers follow our player, we now have a 2 vs 0 in a wide area with a good dribbler on the ball to create havoc.

There are a lot of other coaching points involved here for the players, and explanations of why the setup looks this way, but the basics are all here. I will also note that this is literally week 1 for the team, so keeping things simple is absolutely crucial.

Once we have the play designed, we then produce route assignments for the players to memorize. This behaviour becomes completely natural over time.

You can tell this is real because it was the first time I had produced these on the fly and they are really ugly due to time crunch. Modern versions are a bit cleaner and more attractive.

You then also have the animation for the play, produced here in GloballCoach.

Step 3: Train the play.

There are some minor orientation elements I would correct here, but overall it’s not bad for a first try.

Step 4: Execute in the game.

A few notes on the video below before you watch it.

1. Pay attention to the player near the GK and what happens when he moves.
2. Pay attention to what happens to the zonal defense around the box.

3. One of the players on the attacking team forgot to execute their run, in this case to the far post. This likely cost us a goal.

As you can see, the movement by the “screening” player completely obliterated the near post zone the defense had constructed. Because of that, we had a free run at the near post (near miss), and should have had a free runner at the far to clean up the ball and score. Even if the ideal result didn’t occur, the process was a big success.

Conclusion
I don’t think I am overstating it when I say set piece execution is one of the most misunderstood, undervalued, and underexploited edges in the game of football.

A single goal in the Premier League right now is worth approximately £2.5M. The ability to conjure these extra goals out of nothing but time and hard work has enormous value, but almost no teams in world football are executing set pieces at a consistently high level.

What I showed above only scratches the surface of the potential expertise in this area can have on results, in almost any league. Add in route concepts, long throw programs, packaged plays, and skilled delivery players and it’s possible teams could create over a goal a game from set pieces alone. The possibilities for someone with a clever imagination are limitless, which also means you become extremely painful to mark because the opposition never know what your players are going to do.

Obviously the inverse is true as well. Skilled practitioners can also design better defensive schemes on a game by game basis (if necessary) to stop other teams from scoring against you.

I don’t talk about the details much in public because I generally subscribe to the belief of never talking about your edges to the outside world. The media campaign FCM did about their set piece success during the title season was painful and I am certain it cost them easy goals in subsequent years. On the other hand, now that I don’t work there, I’m happy they did, because it means you all know about the details.

If you work in football and want to know more about what is possible in this area, send me an email at Ted@StatsBombServices.com

Ted Knutson
@mixedknuts

Mailbag time. This is when readers ask me burning questions and I attempt to answer them without being too sarcastic, mean, or using the word [REDACTED] everywhere. We’ll see if I succeed this month.

The short answer is to write and apply the shit out of the stuff you are working on. 98% of the people that will read your work DO NOT CARE ABOUT YOUR METHODOLOGY. This is not grad school, so don’t spend your audience’s entire attention span explaining all the little things you did as part of your study. Slap them in the face with your results. Explain why these results are interesting/relevant/just plain wrong, and then way down at the bottom in the Appendix, that is where you include all the gritty details for the methodology wonks.

On the other hand, feel free to completely discount my advice in this area. I have only had the one permanent job with clubs, and the rest of my paid work has been consulting, so I’m not exactly an expert in the How Do I Get Employed By Football Clubs genre.

I thought Conte would be a really interesting change of pace/palate cleanser, but obviously he ended up across London.

I think the most obvious candidate out there is Tuchel. He’s switched on toward analytics and knows that he doesn’t know it all, which means StatDNA’s work should get incorporated reasonably well. Tuchel also brings a combination of attacking style that isn’t a total break from Wenger’s legacy plus he brings a pressing expertise that Arsenal desperately need at this point. The question is how much do they have to re-tool the squad to play his style?

Slightly further off the beaten path is Julian Nagelsmann at Hoffenheim. I think he would need a couple more years of seasoning for Arsenal to make that leap though. Luciano Spalletti has done a great job at Roma since coming back to Italy and would be another interesting candidate with a fun, high tempo attacking style.

Then on the other end of the spectrum you end up with guys like Jorge Sampaoli and Roger Schmidt. VERY different managers stylistically who are bright and have had past success, and might potentially be available under the right circumstances.

I think Arsenal will be fine in the post-Wenger years. They actually have a lot of infrastructure set up behind the scenes that already helps Wenger in various areas, and is ready to completely take over when he decides to move on.

The same thing everyone else does: figure out how to marry it to my event data. Tracking data is super useful, but if I have to choose either tracking or event, then I’m taking the richer event data set. The marriage between the two in a way that doesn’t throw bugs everywhere is a big deal, and important to move the sport forward.

I thought they would be better at this point. All is clearly not sunshine and rainbows behind the scenes, and they’ve definitely missed Jedinak. The fact that Amavi has really struggled post-ACL tear is also a long-term worry because he was so good before then, and is a tough position to replace.

On the other hand, and I know this sounds weird, Steve Bruce is an actual expert in getting clubs promoted from the Championship. This season is a write-off, but they probably stand a good chance next year if Bruce gets a chance to make moves in the summer.

One of the things working at Brentford and Midtjylland gave me was a looooooot of experience looking for centre backs, and I think we did pretty well in that area. One big trick is knowing what you can and cannot use the data for re: the position. Once you do that, you then chuck everyone into a big scouting queue with the traits you are looking for clearly defined, and watch a lot of film. It’s not terribly sexy and it takes a lot of work, but it is effective if you have good scouts.

The only way Kitchen is anything more than a fringe USMNT player is if someone makes a horrible mistake and then keeps making it. I have him as an average MLS midfielder and nothing more.

Baseball, definitely. The NBA now as well. Beyond that, everyone else has teething issues.

It’s funny because people look at my work and think that I am a huge stats guy, and I guess that’s true, but it would be far more accurate to say that I’m a data champion. This includes a lot of qualitative work like the entire set pieces program, or video technical analysis. I am holistic about this because it’s the right way to run a club and a business.

Take a look at what Driveline Baseball is doing to integrate technology, biomechanics research, and technical improvement in baseball and you get a glimpse of how I see the future of football training.

The vastness of what we don’t know about technical training, coach training, medical diagnosis and recovery, set pieces, youth development, WHATEVER in football is incredible. This is what you need an R&D budget for, and you need this to be guided by people who understand the sport and how to guide the application of the research back into the real world.

Maybe there are some smart clubs out there already doing this and we just don’t know about it. Southampton is leading the way in some areas of youth development for certain. However, the pool of potential knowledge is enormous, and my experiences around football make me doubtful anyone is really pushing the boundaries much across the board.

Basically, if I were Director of Football at a Premier League club, the organization would get a lot smarter, faster, and you’d end up with a practical university environment around the club as part of the process. The trick, however, would be lasting long enough for all of that to pay dividends.

Would StatsBomb ever accept unpaid summer interns? – Einar
Tricky because there are strong social reasons that make me really dislike the concept of unpaid internships in general.

If StatsBomb Services succeeds, then we will likely start an internship program, potentially as early as the end of this summer. However, my condition there is that people would still need to be paid for their time. My other condition would be that someone else would need to run the internship program, because I am unlikely to be around enough to be useful.

The answer the world seems to agree on is Kante plus anyone is good enough. Add Cesc when you need to unlock a defense, while Matic is pretty much an all-purpose midfield battleship.

I think Baker is decent, but not anywhere near the level required to break into the Chelsea squad right now. He’s probably ready for a loan in a tougher defensive league than the Eredivisie next year, but I’m not sure he’s even good enough for lower PL right now. (And to be fair, he’s still very young.)

The Red Rising series by Pierce Brown. Brian Staveley’s finale The Last Mortal Bond was pretty good. The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis. Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London is good pulp. I also thought Richard Morgan’s fantasy that starts with The Steel Remains was weird and pretty enjoyable. And the long way to a small angry planet by Becky Chambers was really quite lovely.

Sir Bertrand of Traore, lately also of Ajax.

TamTam Abraham, currently on loan at Bristol City.

I like them both, and I’m pretty sure I like them both as center forwards, which isn’t exactly what Traore has played this season at Ajax – he’s mostly been playing wide right. This explains the shot locations a bit.

Both players are extremely quick, but Tammy is much taller and stronger, despite also being the younger of the two. I think Abraham’s ceiling is clearly higher right now, though I wish Traore had gone to a more defensively stout league and played CF so we’d have a better data point. Can he put up top 5% dribble numbers as a center forward? That would be incredibly valuable.

As it is, both are big assets for Chelsea, but the only one likely to make their squad regularly is Abraham. I suspect Traore will need a restart somewhere else, but could still end up being good enough for the Champions League.

This seems like a good spot to wrap it up. Until next month, please enjoy your Pee-not No-ir.

For 2017 I was invited to attend the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference as a panelist on their soccer panel. Despite being a huge fan of the conference, I had never attended before as a combination of busy work period and frequent child births meant this was a really complicated time of year. For 2017 I had intended to go anyway, as two of my friends castigated me for not attending the year before, but it was great to be invited on a panel.

What follows is a report of my trip. It will likely end up a bit fanboy, a bit analytical, and a bit reflective on how far the world has come since I originally got involved in sports stats back in 2005. What it should not come across as is a humblebrag, as I know exactly how fortunate I have been to get to where I am, and I understand exactly how tiny my own contribution is to the greater sports + stats universe. Aside from eSports, soccer is the sport that makes up the tiniest proportion of the conference agenda, and I was very lucky to be along for the ride.

Thursday 

This is me at 7 in the morning on my way to Heathrow. It’s a follow-up from a joke I made that we should be able to dress like Bill Belichick as an homage to his greatness, since the conference is held in Boston. Morey is a) one of the pioneers in basketball analytics, b) one of the two co-founders of the conference along with Jessica Gelman, and c) a charismatic ball buster who happens to also be the long-time GM of the Houston Rockets, a team whose current style clearly illustrates the dramatic shift in how analytics has changed how teams play basketball.

Anyway… the reason why I’m showing this picture is this. While working on an interesting tracking data in football/soccer problem that came from an email from my panel moderator Andrew Wiebe, I left my suitcase on the train. And I didn’t realize until the doors were locked on my next train to the airport. Which meant the only clothes I had for the trip at this point were ones that would have left me dressed like Bill Belichick. Awkward.

Fast forward a bit and I am half awake and about to board the train to my terminal at Heathrow and I see this person, very confused about which side of the train she should use to go toward immigration.

There were many celebrity sightings at Sloan but none of them were professional models.

Boston
Yay, Boston! Oh shit, I have no clothes. I may have to go to my panel dressed as mighty Bill.

So the first thing I go do is buy a weekend’s worth of clothes, and then I grab some food before heading to the speakers’ networking event.

I am not a great networker, especially when it comes to a room of people I have never met before. Guy who is good with numbers and data is slightly uncomfortable in a room full of strangers? Complete shock, I know… So I mostly stood around and people watched, which is also a fun activity. Shane Battier and Luis Scola were in attendance, which was amazing because they actually tower over everyone they might talk to.

Puny humans.

I briefly said hi to Daryl Morey, but since I was not dressed as Belichick, I assume he had no idea who I was. I did know Hendrik Almstadt though, since we’d talked before and he was on my panel. He has fascinating stories about his time both at Arsenal and Aston Villa. We mourned a bit of Arsenal’s season and considered what would be interesting to discuss tomorrow on the stage. I went to grab another water, as I am not drinking at this point because I am desperately trying to stay awake, and when I came back he was talking to someone else.

“Ted, this is my friend Sam. Sam, Ted.”

“Sam…?” I instinctively reach down to flip his name tag over since it was facing the other way. “… Oh, Hinkie! Uh, yeah, wow. I didn’t know what you look like in person, somehow, but I’ve been following all your work for basically ever. Nice to meet you.”

I am nothing but awkward social interactions.

I also talked a bit to Sam Ventura, who is a professor at CMU, a Stanley Cup winner with the Pittsburgh Penguins, and who also does some cool stuff with modelling NFL play-by-play and R. Sam teaches data visualization and is not exactly a fan of radar charts. He gave me some stick about that – mostly fair, though I did actually study data vis pretty deeply before developing these and I know they have weaknesses – and we talk a bit about how he remains so impossibly productive. Hockey Sam is good people.

Since I don’t know anyone else and am now terrified of alienating everyone I look up to in the sports world, I bounce off to the Soccermetrics meetup Howard Hamilton organizes every year. It’s a great place to meet and/or catch up with dorks from the soccer/football stats world. This year’s crowd is loaded with luminaries that you may or may not have heard of, but who I keep fairly close track of because they are generally really fucking smart. Guys like Chris Anderson, David Sally, Blake Wooster, Devin Pleuler, William Spearman, two guys from Second Spectrum, Ian Lynam, Mitch Lasky, Daniel Stenz, Padraig Smith, and Sloan rock star Luke Bornn (plus many others I am assuredly accidentally omitting).

Luke might be a guy you haven’t heard of, but every year he and his graduate students churn out amazing papers here at Sloan, including what remains to me one of the coolest pieces of sports research I have ever seen, and one of the main paradigms for how I view both basketball and football. As if being an actual genius weren’t enough, he’s also incredibly nice, funny, and good looking. In other words, he is utterly hateable. He is also Canadian, which makes that impossible. Some people…

The Conference – Friday
Expected Attendance: 3500 people.

For a Sports. Analytics. Conference.

In America, the nerds have won.

Coming to Sloan as an American is likely a very different experience to coming here if you are European. As an American, there are sports and media celebrities absolutely everywhere, to the point that it’s almost overwhelming. This was amplified for me because I was lucky enough have a pass to the Speaker’s room. This is a quiet place away from the crowds in the halls and presentation rooms where speakers can have some quiet time to chill out, talk to friends away from public ears, or review their notes in a panic.

It’s also almost constantly filled with celebrities. At one point there was a table of guys shooting the shit about NBA that included Morey, Zach Lowe, Celtics AGM Mike Zarren, Tom Haberstroh, and former MIT Blackjack Team and current Twitter head of analytics Jeff Ma. (Ma is the basis for the main character in the book Bringing Down the House and the movie 21.) So much fire power.

I saw a few panels on Friday and managed to catch three really great talks, including Seth Partnow’s Truth and Myths of the 3-Point Revolution in Basketball, an awesome Sleep Science talk, and Ian Lynam’s highly entertaining talk about ridiculous incentives in English Premier League contracts. I missed the Silver Asks Silver panel because it was on at the same time as mine and Moneymind: Overcoming Cognitive Bias, which I was told was awesome. Thankfully both of these will have video posted at some point in the future.

The Soccer Panel: Hendrik Almstadt, Daniel Stenz, Padraig Smith, Ted Knutson, Andrew Wiebe (Mod)

Hendrik and Padraig either currently are or used to be Sporting Directors. Daniel has worked for Koln, Union Berlin, Vancouver, and the Hungarian National Team. Wiebe works hard in media for MLS, and has moderated this panel before.

Feedback from the panel was really strong. One of the dangers of putting people currently employed on this panel is that they don’t say anything. So they might know a lot of cool stuff, but are terrified to answer questions with any insight. That didn’t happen here. I was really impressed with the level of detail both Smith and Stenz discussed recent or ongoing projects, including how Colorado uses data in recruitment. Hendrik and I were happy to talk about these things (Hendrik currently works for the PGA), so maybe that gave Padraig some freedom to express himself, but that often never happens on other panels.

Some key points:

• The marriage of tracking data and event data will be a key to unlocking the future. We need both data sets and we need to be able to analyse them as part of the complete picture of what is happening in a game. I also feel very strongly that we need it not only for games, but for training data as well. The reason for this is that football games only produce a moderate sample of data for us to analyse, but training happens constantly. You’ll have to be careful about what training data you include as having valid incentives, but it will dramatically increase the sample size and our ability to evaluate player skill sets as a result.
• Right now data analysts work for clubs but often are wedded to the coaching staff. Their direct line of report is to the manager, which means if the data is starting to say uncomfortable things about performance, or the coach disagrees with it, it often gets muted or is considered wrong. That’s definitely not how it should work. That’s especially true because analysts tend to build a large store of institutional knowledge that is valuable to keep inside of a club, and not be chucked out every time the club changes a manager or a head coach.
• A combination of football people asking questions and quants then finding the answers, then sending them back to football people for a sense check, is another key to unlocking useful things in the sport. One of the problems we see again and again when researchers without game expertise get involved is really brain dead studies like the one Garry Gelade discussed at the OptaPro Forum, or mistakes made in interesting studies that ruin their credibility. Tyler Dellow flagged one from this past weekend in a hockey research paper where it had inverted which side certain players play on – an extremely easy mistake to make in programming. Unfortunately this type of mistake means the study would be blown apart the moment you brought it to a coaching staff, regardless of how good it was.
• There is still plenty of low-hanging fruit out there for football clubs to take advantage of, they just need to open their minds and talk to the right people. It’s very straightforward to create the edge in recruitment, and the money it saves by avoiding mistakes is massive. If I can figure out the set piece edges, so can plenty of other people. I’m not that smart, and it’s not that difficult, which is why I have historically avoided the topic. The same is true in so many other areas. Football is too big and too complicated a sport for one person to be an expert in all the different facets of the game. Because of this, clubs need to constantly seek out new information and perspectives.

I thought Wiebe did an excellent job moderating, and feedback from the audience and Twitter was that people were genuinely excited by what we said. I guess that’s a success.

Friday evening I hung out with more soccer people including seeing some of the guys at US Soccer again. Federation challenges are really interesting, and there’s only a moderate amount of overlap with what we do at the club level, so it’s always intriguing to discuss what their future might look like.

Saturday
When I go to the U.S. these days, my body never adjusts. Too many years of children and 6AM wake ups mean I never sleep past 8:30 here in England, which means I rarely sleep past 4AM when I visit America. Thus I had breakfast early and was chilling in the speakers’ room waiting for the gambling panel to start.

While most of you probably know me from my work on football analytics, my “real” expertise is gambling. I have spent the vast majority of my time since 2005 in and around the world of sports betting, including 8 years at PinnacleSports.com, and two years inside of Matthew Benham’s Smartodds operation. (We worked on football and for the football teams, but we sat in the middle of a giant gambling operation.)

I started at Pinnacle in early 2007, just after they left the U.S. market. While I was there, we either created or completely rebuilt all of their non-U.S. sports departments, and I fought for a year to create the Live Sports department, which means I was overseeing development and application on the initial models for Live MLB, NBA, Soccer and Tennis. I am likely one of the only people in the world to work for a long time inside one of the giant discount books as well as in and around one of the world’s biggest betting syndicates. In gambling, unlike in football stats, I’m a strange sort of unicorn.

The funny thing is, no one knows this. Pinnacle people rarely travel, and we never have a forum to talk about our work. Thus when you sit down next to even seasoned gamblers like Ma and introduce yourself, you can expect a deluge of really interesting questions.

Example: How much volume and profit did Pinnacle have the year before they left the U.S. Market?
Example2: Why did the stupid owners get arrested?

I also talked a bit to ESPN vet Chad Millman and Joe Brennan Jr, who is apparently a fan of the StatsBomb podcast.

My takeaways from the gambling panel

• Sports betting is a game of skill. This is especially true when the vig is low. (My words, not theirs.)
• The U.S. still has no idea when/if/how they will legalize sports betting. This remains baffling to me since the NFL spreads are talked about in every major news organization in the country, but you still can’t bet on them outside of Vegas.
• Because of the above, the probability that they legislate in a way that makes it possible for a discount (translation: low price like a Pinnacle, IBCBet, SBOBet) sportsbook to exist is fairly low. Margins in Vegas are 5% on average (-110/-110 in American odds). Margins at discount books are often 1.5 to 2.5% and they take all action, which means they tend to earn considerably less than that per dollar wagered. Because of this, if you tax them in the way of sin taxes and take a percentage of gross revenue, you make it impossible for them to exist in your jurisdiction without a dramatic price hike.

  Europe is a mess of disjointed gambling laws that typically screw customers in favour of tax receipts, which in turn drives them toward better priced options which are quasi-legal where the government then does not get tax receipts. Because Vegas exists already, there’s a chance the U.S. may end up with something sensible that allows competition, innovation, and is customer friendly, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

• Because the U.S. doesn’t have legal sports betting, the sports data feeds are pretty poor. The reason behind this is that there is no value equation available to them to make it real-time. Gambling would fix that because the amount of money books can lose from past posts to people with better/faster TV feeds is stupidly large.
• Internet sports betting is a tech industry. There is no other tech industry where the U.S. has simply chosen to be absent.
• In-running betting typically increases fan engagement. In Asia, in-running volume can often be 3-5 times what the volume is on pre-game (they didn’t say that but I know this from experience). Worried about falling viewership numbers on TV for various leagues in the U.S.? That could potentially be halted or reversed with legalized gambling.
• The other thing that legalized gambling would do is drive massive amounts of advertising dollars straight to the networks and sports teams/leagues themselves. We saw it briefly with Draft Kings/Fan Duel, but that would be a drop in the bucket compared to what would happen with an open U.S. market for sportsbooks.
• No one realises how massive eSports gambling is just now in the rest of the world, or could be in the U.S. if it goes legal. The audience for these events is already huge, and it crosses over to people traditional sports often don’t, which is a new market segment for sportsbooks.

Maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll get to go back to Sloan next year and be on the gambling panel and tell stories about painful, sometimes expensive lessons in modernizing on of the world’s biggest sportsbooks for the digital age.

So yeah… I started the day shooting the shit with Jeff Ma, which was very cool.

I also had the briefest chat with Boston and U.S. sports media legend Jackie MacMullan. Jackie’s one of the few female voices we saw on sports TV in the early days, and was on ESPN and at the Boston Globe even when I was a kid. Her work has always been superlative. Now that I have some perspective, I appreciate her even more than I did when I was younger, since I suspect she had to go through a lot of miserable bullshit along the way simply because of her gender. It’s hard to convey what these people mean to you in a five-minute conversation, but I feel lucky to have talked to her at all.

The same is true for Brian Kenny, one of the journalists who pushed baseball stats constantly throughout his career. He’s a voice I listened to for so many hours watching Baseball Tonight on those long, hot summer nights, and I got a high five from him in the green room. Shortly after that, Mark Cuban walked through the halls literally hushing conversations as everyone whispered, “OMG is that Mark Cuban!?”

I was also able to converse with contemporaries like Bill Barnwell, Bill Connelly, and Tyler Dellow (mc79hockey), who I was told is the only panelist on the weekend who definitely had a higher usage rate than I did.

Sloan is a smorgasboard for meeting cool, smart people from the students through the titans.

When I was in high school, I was not one of the cool kids. I was a good athlete, but also sang, acted, competed on academic teams, liked comic books, science fiction, and had an odd, goofball sense of humour. It was fine, but there were very few people who just “got” me. I went to a high school out in the country, and at some point I wondered if this was what the rest of life was going to be like.

Then I visited the Naval Academy for a week as part of a science camp/recruitment visit. There I met so many other bright, funny, allegedly weird people that I stopped worrying that I’d never fit in. I now had proof that I’d likely find a comfortable social group when I went to college, and I did.

As odd as it sounds, Sloan was a lot like that for me. It’s filled with like-minded people who love the application of stats, data, and sports. It’s also filled with incredibly smart, eloquent people talking about their research in these areas. Many of these people tell war stories about the difficulties they faced bringing their research to their game. They (generally) overcame.

In American sports, baseball is largely viewed as being mature from a stats and data perspective. The big topics have largely been solved, and the edges are mostly in the margins and application now. Basketball is more complicated from an analysis perspective, but they are tackling fascinating tracking data problems and hoovering up some of the brightest minds from Harvard and MIT every year. American Football and Hockey are slower on the uptake and more challenging from a cultural perspective, but they are moving now as well.

Football/soccer is very much in the difficulty phase. It’s hard to get in the door. It’s hard to get past the skepticism to even have a conversation. Football lifers look for any possible reason to pick things apart because they don’t want to have to deal with this different perspective on the game, because they don’t understand it and they don’t want to understand it.

Not everyone is like this, obviously, and the times, they are a’ changin’. But change has been surprisingly slow in the last five years when the value of the work is almost slap-in-the-face obvious.

That’s why this trip to Sloan for me was absolutely amazing. Talking, arguing, sharing stories with bright people in other sports once again showed me that things will be okay.

Eventually.

Talking to Seth Partnow and @causalkathy about data versus theory paradigms was great. Finally getting to meet Dellow and hear stories from inside hockey and bleeding on stage during his panel was also great. Hearing from Devin Pleuler about some new initiatives Toronto FC have in the off-season, and then having Devin walk into the bar with his Sloan Hack-a-thon trophy for NBA tracking data was genuinely special.

I had one of the best weekends of my life in Boston, and I fell in love with sports analytics all over again. Thanks Daryl Morey, Jessica Gelman, and all the students at Sloan for creating and producing a fabulous conference that I hope to attend over and over again.

–Ted Knutson
@mixedknuts

Post Script
I was walking to dinner with my friend Worth Wollpert and we saw Mike Zarren from the Celtics getting ready to the leave for the day. Zarren is one of the most generous guys in the analytics sphere when it comes to lending his time and expertise to people – even weirdos from completely different sports – and no one I have ever met has had a bad word to say about him. In fact, a lot of people you never expect are connected to Zarren because he helped them.

In short, Mike Zarren changes lives.

So, we stopped and I went out of my way to mention that to him, even if it made him feel just a bit awkward at the time. Sometimes you have to make a point to tell people they are a good egg, and to keep up the good work.

Sorry Mike!

PPS
Special thanks to Paul Carr for helping me get on the panel in the first place and also for guiding me through all the stuff he does at ESPN. It was great to meet you and all your hair.

I mentioned on Twitter recently that while I try to avoid disagreements when I am in a room with traditional football people, the one thing that is most likely to set off an argument is the topic of men on posts. Today I want to explain why that is the case, while covering a variety of other topics along the way.

Men on Posts
I swear to you, this topic comes up almost every week on highlight programs and game commentary. It is perhaps a bit less prevalent than discussion about the failings of zonal marking here in England, but it’s an old favourite for the back-in-my-day commentator crowd. In 99.99% of the cases, it is also nothing but dead air and might as well be replaced with any other cliche that also gets spouted by the same commentator crowd. (We need better, smarter commentators, but that was a topic for a different day.)

My perspective on men on posts is that I almost never use them for defensive set pieces. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the basic principle is that I prefer active defending to passive and this takes one or two players completely out of the play where their only job is to act as last resorts. Now this isn’t to say that I would never put men on posts. There are specific teams and situations where they are beneficial, but those are fairly unusual.

However, my preference for set piece defense isn’t usually what starts the argument. Once the subject is broached, the conversation usually goes like this.

Me: “How do you feel about men on posts when defending set pieces?”

Traditionalist: “Oh, I would always have a man on [near¦far] post and sometimes a man on the other one.”

Me: “Why?”

Trad: “Because [reasons].”

Me: “Okay, but how do you know?”

And this is where things invariably get awkward because usually they “know” because someone taught them this was the correct way to do things. Or possibly some anecdotally negative experience like, “we didn’t have men on posts in this game, and the opposition scored a goal in the corner,” changed previous behavior and now they protect against that scenario.

The problem here for someone like me is that when analysing most topics in football, I start back over at base principles. How do I know something? Well, I studied it. I typically take a large amount of qualitative and/or quantitative data, break it down, and then look at the outcomes to see what’s there. Then I ask follow-up questions and pick at the results some more until I am comfortable I understand what I’m seeing.

This doesn’t mean I am right. It’s not about being right. It’s about being knowledgeable in an area that is important*. And it means I have a foundation upon which to have conversations. Conversations and arguments tend to illuminate what you do and do not know, and highlight areas for further investigation. This is important, especially in football which, if we’re being totally honest, is a game that we really don’t understand very well right now. This includes most of the ranks of professional coaches around the world.

*important to the performance of your football team, at least. In the greater scheme of crazy world events, understanding set piece defending matters not a nip.

It also doesn’t invalidate knowledge learned from years of working on the pitch. It just means that if you believe a thing to be true, you need to explain how you came to those conclusions, and the reasons need to hold up to scrutiny. If they do, great. If not, let’s study the issue and see if the accepted wisdom the you believe to be true is correct.

So yeah, when you ask questions about how someone “knows” a thing, and maybe question the validity of that knowledge, you can cause problems. But the fact of the matter is, we should be doing this constantly inside of clubs because it leads to valuable research that can change behavior and develops more effective styles of play.

A goal in the Premier League is worth something like £2M. How many of those do we leave on the table because someone’s knowledge is outdated or just plain wrong?

(For what it’s worth, on defensive corners, my players have shit to do instead of loafing around, leaning against goal posts. We save that sort of behavior for useless analysts, as it’s the footballing equivalent of mooning the queen, donchaknow?)

A Good Question?
Someone noted over the weekend that Manchester City seem to prefer outswinging corners these days to inswingers. This is notable for two reasons.

First, a few years ago under Roberto Mancini we were told that City started using only inswinging corners because someone in the team had done a study and found that inswingers were more effective at generating goals.

Second, this switch to outswingers seems a direct contradiction to research previously done by this exact same team.

Odd, no?

James Yorke started poking around the data a little bit, as we tried to figure out what data they looked at to come to whatever conclusion it was that changed their behaviour. This lead back to a far more important problem that is often overlooked:

What question were they trying to answer?

It certainly doesn’t seem to be “which delivery is more likely to score goals?” since that either leaned toward inswingers or was inconclusive, depending one what data was used.

However, what James did find was that outswingers were far more likely to be completed to a teammate. So if they were trying to answer the question of “which delivery is more likely to let us keep possession?” then outswingers would make a lot of sense. Given this is a Guardiola team, maybe that’s what he wanted to know, especially since he is typically far more concerned about defensive shape when attacking than corner production.

Is that a very valuable question to bother answering is another issue entirely. Given elite corner execution can produce expected values per corner of .06 to .08, while average corner values are .025 and average possession values for most teams are in a similar or even lower range, I’m not so sure.

This is where the difference in counting and percentage stats comes into play versus stats that attach value (like the xGChain passing networks from StatsBomb Services). As football analytics matures, it moves more and more toward the value end of the spectrum, since that uncovers behaviour and strategies we really care about. Failing to incorporate these elements into team research can result in suggestions that actually makes team performance worse.

I’m not sure this is what happened at City – as I said, we’re guessing at literally everything while we wonder why they are doing what they do. It’s just a concept to keep in mind when generating research projects and then applying them to team behaviour in the future.

English Coaching and Commentators
Circling back to the commentators we hear on Sky, BT, and BBC every week, it frustrates me that the people talking about the game now were generally players that grew up in and played a style that has been completely refuted by the modern game.

The traditional English style of play Does. Not. Win.

If it did, we’d see far more English managers present in the Premier League, and dotted around Europe’s elite. What we actually see is a complete dearth of English managerial talent throughout the ranks of the football league. The Premier League gives zero fucks about this, but it is worrying to the FA and generally to the lower tiers of the football league as well.

I’ve asked questions about how coaches in England are supposed to learn more successful styles of play, and the only real answer seems to be to beg, borrow, and steal internships either at teams with successful foreign managers (extremely difficult to do, even with elite contacts), or learn a language and do your coaching education abroad. Good luck with that in a post-Brexit environment!

This circles back to FA coaching courses, which have been revamped (again) in the last year. I did the class days for England level 2 badges almost exactly a year ago, and while I generally liked the process they used to teach you how to think about coaching, I thought they were also lacking in certain areas. The section on pressing was largely ineffective and dismissive, where the instructors were telling us it was fad-ish and existed before. Technically this was true, BUT

• That ignores the fact that the current iterations of pressing come in many varieties and are substantially different than what you saw from the 70’s through the 90’s
• Pressing variations really matter for evaluating top level tactics and play, which means they really matter for top level coaching
• The instructors, who were otherwise quite good, displayed no real understand of this particular topic. Or really of shot locations and effectiveness. Which, if we’re trying to train and develop better coaches and in turn better players, is probably a big deal.

Maybe this type of subject material doesn’t matter at level 2, and I was expecting too much, or maybe English coaching education is still struggling dramatically to overcome decades of ineptitude to catch up with modern times. I honestly don’t know.

Which finally leads me back to the current crop of commentators. Aside from Carragher and Neville, who clearly put a lot of research and work into their craft, the commentators currently discussing football on television generally don’t understand modern tactics. How could they, when the tactics they were brought up playing were bad, and the coaching education failed to correct for that?

Nor do they have an analytical mindset, which would help to educate viewers on the reality of the game versus the perception. They commentate on games in 2017, but were almost exclusively trained in England, and brought up playing a style that almost doesn’t exist any more at the top levels of play.

So what are they there for? The occasional interesting anecdote about mentality and what players feel like before a big game? To provide a constant stream of footballing cliches that provide no insight and are rarely relevant to the moment at hand?

We get nothing of interest from so many talking heads on television. No funny anecdotes about current players or managers. No tactical insight. No statistical insight. No points about technique and detail about what a player could or should have done better.

Half of the matches I and many other viewers watch each week have foreign commentators. I almost never feel worse off because of it. And THAT is a take away that should shake everyone involved in the production side of football, right up to the top levels of Sky and BT Sport.

Around football right now, we seem to be hearing that Arsenal are basically the same as every other year, but all the clubs around them have improved. Our numbers suggest that’s not the case, and Arsenal’s performance on both sides of the ball has fallen off this season.

Let’s start with the obvious ones, the expected goals numbers.

Attacking xG 15-16: 1.97
Attacking xG 16-17: 1.67

Defensive xG 15-16: .95
Defensive xG 16-17: 1.09

So the attack is generating .30 xG fewer per game, while the defense is allowing .14 xG more. Combine the two and you get -.44 in expected goal difference, which is a huge whack when it comes to performance in the league table.

Where’s that coming from? Well shot generation is down a touch on the attacking side, 14.6 to 15, but open play shot quality has fallen from .135 to .115 per shot, so the drop in attacking output is almost all down to the quality of shots Arsenal are generating this season.

On the defensive side of the ball, Arsenal are actually giving up FEWER shots per game – 10.64 this season vs 11.82 last year. Again, the reason for the swing in xG Conceded is down to shot quality. In 15-16, Arsenal’s average open play shot against was worth .075 xG. This season? .105.

Arsenal’s opponents are generating forty percent better shots than they were last season! What happened to all the long range pot shots?

In previous seasons Arsenal have gamed xG by generating 40-50% more shots than their opponents while having a huge quality differential between the shots they take and the ones they concede. This year the quality difference is almost completely gone, which has dramatically affected their expected goals numbers at both ends of the pitch.

This feels like a strategic change on the part of their opponents, but maybe I’m reading too much into it.

How Do You Fix It?
This is a massive question and one that I don’t really know the answer to. Are Arsenal defending badly? Have teams solved their defense, and because of that know how to create better chances against them?

Arsenal’s attack is probably the best from a personnel perspective that it has been in ages, and yet that isn’t exactly firing on all cylinders. Would Cazorla’s presence magically heal all wounds? He only played 15 90’s last year and the Gunners were much better then, so I’m not sure his absence again this year has enough explanatory power.

Average shot quality in attack is still better than the 14-15 season, but this has always been Wenger’s special sauce that he brings to teams. This year it’s still good, but it’s no longer among the elite, and it needs to be for them to have a shot at winning the league. This year, it’s just barely good enough to give them a shot at finishing 4th. This is also true because despite generating plenty of set piece chances, Arsenal are dead average in number of goals scored from them at 9.

Most worrying has to be the change in the defensive numbers. Arsenal tend to play a more passive style of defense than most of the top teams, trading shot suppression for forcing the opposition to take worse shots. However, this year they are giving up far higher xG shots, but doing it at nearly the same rate as before and basically at league average numbers. That’s not gaming xG, that’s just losing more games.

The question of why this is happening has lots of moving parts that seem to add up to a big problem. Monreal is finally showing a bit of age, and is no longer the elite defender he once was. though talented, Mustafi has had some issues bedding into the Premier League. Gabriel perhaps isn’t as good as Arsenal thought when they bought him, and he’s been forced to play right back when Bellerin is out.

Meanwhile in midfield, the aforementioned Cazorla may never be fully fit again. It’s like Defensive Midfielder Groundhog Day Part 2, except instead of starring Mikel Arteta and his hair, we now have a different diminutive Spaniard playing the lead. Welsh hero Aaron Ramsey has played about the same amount as Santi, leaving Wenger to choose the so-called Dumb and Dumber axis of Coquelin-Xhaka as a double pivot, while occasionally adding El Neny, Oxlade-Chamberlain, or Alex Iwobi into the mix.

Last year’s Arsenal looked like the best team in the league in the numbers, and a club that was close to taking the next steps in regularly competing for league titles instead of fourth place. This year’s Arsenal looks almost exactly like their league position – likely to miss out on the Champions League for the first time in ages.

At least we know who to complain about all of this to. Unlike almost every other club in the Premier League, Arsene Wenger has full control at Arsenal. The question is whether he understands what the causes of the problems are, and whether he’s adaptable enough at age 67 to rebuild this team for future title runs.

Despite a generation of good years together, Arsenal fans no longer seem convinced he’s capable of anything other than 4th place trophies and Champions League knockout rounds, but they’ve certainly started yearning for something different.

I have talked on Twitter pretty regularly about using data to profile managers, both from a performance perspective and to detail style of play. However, what I have done very little of since I first started writing about Manager Fingerprints back in 2013, is practical public analysis. Let’s change that.

Coaching a football team is a funny thing. Amidst all the media appearances, press conferences, and televised games where your body language on the sideline will be scrutinized like the Zapruder film, coaches are also responsible for making strategic choices about how their team are supposed to play. What do they do when they have the ball? When the opponent has the ball? How do you transition from attack to defense and back again?

Then, once you have the strategy bit, you have to teach your players how to execute that at top speed, against the best players money can buy. This requires excellent analytical and communication skills. What went wrong? How do we fix it? How can I explain to each individual player what they need to see, how to understand that, and how to do better in the future?

It’s no surprise then that like tigers, coaches almost never change their stripes. They typically stick with the same style of play, year after year, and because of that produce similar statistical output. As I’ve explained before, coaching is an apprentice-based learning process. Unlike book learning, where you learn by reading, coaches learn by doing. They learn from mentors they have worked with before, and perhaps by explicitly seeking out other coaches who coach a style they want to learn. And not only do they have to learn how to create the style, and evaluate it in motion on the pitch in training and in games, they also have to learn how to teach it. Coaching well is an extremely difficult job.

With this in mind, it should come as little surprise that coaches whose teams don’t currently display certain tactical traits (like an aggressive zonal press without the ball) are unlikely to be able to coach that style in the future. The same is true for coaches whose teams don’t currently generate high quality chances inside the box. If they don’t already know how to create this, it’s unlikely they will magically learn it by taking a new job, at least not without supplemental learning or bringing in help from assistants.

If coaches rarely change styles, this means that data suddenly becomes a great way to profile what you can expect from various head coaches when they change jobs. Player quality can vary wildly between teams, but the style is likely to remain the same. It also means that searching for coaching candidates via data is now at least as interesting as searching for players in the transfer market. Both are expensive endeavours, especially when you make mistakes, so it makes sense to gather as much information as possible before making decisions.

Today I’m going to use these principles to look at how manager changes have impacted the relegation battle in the Premier League.

Hull

The headline number here is that Marco Silva came in at midseason and improved Hull’s expected goal difference per game by .59 goals a game, from -.95 to -.36. This translates to a goal difference of -14 throughout a whole season, a total that hasn’t seen a team get relegated in at least the last four seasons*. Silva hasn’t made Hull a great team, but he’s at least given them a fighting chance. They were relegation certainties under Mike Phelan.

(* Middlesboro are testing this number right now, mostly because their defense first policy under Karanka resulted in output that gave up very few goals but scored even fewer.)

It’s all well and good to say Marco Silva has made Hull dramatically better, but we care about the details as well. HOW are they better?

In attack they take about the same number of shots – a touch over 10 a game, but Silva’s managed to boost the quality of these significantly, from a putrescent .075 under Phelan (Hull would score an average of 7.5% of their shots) to .106. On the defensive side of the ball, we actually see the average quality of opposition shots has gone up a touch, which would seem bad at first until we look at the volume numbers. Phelan’s group were giving up 18.6 shots per game. Under Silva (as of this writing) it’s 14.2, which is a huge swing.

Beyond the headline expected goal numbers, there are subtle differences. Silva’s tactics have them defending a bit higher, and destroying the central block of opposition attacks more consistently. Average shot distance is now inside the penalty box, even from open play. Under Phelan, distance from open play was nearly 3m outside the box, which is baaaaaad.

Would Silva’s tactics be the same with a better group of players? Possibly not, but his output here is a classic recipe for what you can do to improve a seemingly doomed team, and give them a shot to avoid relegation. He seems like at least a safe pair of hands to hand any Premier League club to in the future, with a lot more potential upside.

Swansea

Swansea’s battle against relegation this season has included three different managers, all with different preferred styles. What’s interesting to me is that Guidolin’s 16 games in 15-16 produced far better underlying numbers than his stint this year, but I think a lot of that is down to strength of schedule. Sure, Swansea started the PL season with Burnley and Hull, but then faced Leicester, Chelsea, Southampton, Manchester City, and Liverpool. Good luck surviving that run with non-relegation numbers.

The killer for Guidolin is the shot quality numbers in attack. Shot differential of -4.4 isn’t terrible, but cross that with a huge gap in shot quality and you’re likely to struggle. Would that have improved as they progressed into a softer schedule? Possibly. I said at the time I probably would not have changed managers at that point, and I still mostly think that, though it depends a bit on whether Guidolin had input into the poor quality of the squad coming out of the summer.

Bradley’s issue was the catastrophic defense. The style he played at Stabaek had elite athletes with pace that destroyed the midfield and then counterattacked. Swansea’s squad is the exact opposite of that – highly technical and slow. They destroyed better than under Guidolin, but the cost was a 50% increase in shot quality conceded. Bradley’s done well with existing talent in the past, but this squad was troubled and proved to be a poor fit for his tactical preferences.

This is something that can be teased out with proper manager candidate evaluations, both from a statistical perspective and from video scouting.

Finally we get to Paul Clement. On our podcast about a month ago, I cautioned that I thought Swansea’s performances probably weren’t as good as their results. Since then, they have lost five and drawn one, plunging straight back down into the relegation zone.  On the surface, it looks like Clement has righted the ship. The defense is far less leaky than under Bradley or Guidolin, but it’s come at the cost of attacking numbers.

It’s all gone a bit Karanka, if we’re honest. They are defending and attacking well enough… to draw or regularly lose 1-0. The problem here is that draws won’t save them – they desperately need three points from as many matches as possible, and you only get 3 by scoring goals. The numbers are remarkably similar to what Silva is producing across the country. But… there’s a catch.

The last seven matches are one of their softest runs of schedule on the year for Swansea, playing Burnley, Hull, Bournemouth, Boro, Spurs, West Ham, and Watford in succession. The home game against Burnley is the only one where they won the xG race. You expect a bit of luck here and there, but being worse than your opponents every single week is still a recipe for relegation, which is why they once again find themselves in the bottom three.

The fact that Hull beat Swansea in a close match (and also Boro) is the major difference in survival right now. Maybe across a whole season with Clement, Swansea would have been fine – the numbers certainly suggest he’s improved them. However, with five matches left, Clement has to find some way for his guys to get a couple of wins or Wales will lose their Premier League representative for at least a season.

Conclusion
This was a brief look at the impact different managers have had on two of the teams fighting for Premier League survival. By using a variety of different key performance indicators, we can start to evaluate manager impact on squad output and to profile their styles of play. I didn’t touch on it here, but we can profile how teams attack and defend, whether they are good at set pieces on both sides of the ball, what their possession tendencies look like, and a whole lot more. With some higher-powered maths, we can also adjust performance by strength of schedule to correct for things like Guidolin’s tough run at the start of the year, to better evaluate how the team is actually doing.

Hiring and firing managers and their staffs is expensive. Data provides a much clearer picture of current and future performance under different managers than league table results, especially mid-season. We can use it not only to predict likely future performance, but we can also use it to profile coaching style and then help clubs find coaches that match their preferences for the style they want to see on the pitch.

Next week I’ll take a look at a manager change that happened a bit further up the table, and we’ll talk about the difference different big names can have on one of the super clubs.

If you want help evaluating your current manager or in finding your next one, get in touch.

Ted Knutson
ted@statsbombservices.com
@mixedknuts

Last week I took a look at how changes in managers have affected the relegation chances of Swansea and Hull. Today we’re going to look at team performance through the lens of managers again, but at a much larger club.

A Few Words About Louis van Gaal
We need to be honest about what Jose Mourinho walked in to with this Manchester United team.

United under Louis van Gaal were one of the worst-managed super teams possible. I have mentioned this on our podcast at various times, but this remains a staggering factoid:

In van Gaal’s last season, with a fantastically expensive squad, they took fewer shots per game in attack than 17^th place Sunderland.

For reference, United took 11.3 shots per game in 15-16. A year before, Burnley and Hull both averaged 11.3 shots per game. And were relegated.

If your attack is posting the same shots numbers as relegated teams – when you are Manchester fucking United – you have problems.

Yes, United managed to finish 5^th. With a +14 goal difference. The same goal difference as perennial Premier League titans West Ham. +14 was considerably less than 4^th place Manchester City, who happened to have finished on the same points total as United (66), but backed into 4^th place with a far more typical +30 goal difference.

It’s not like they didn’t have shot volume guys in the squad, either. Rooney, Depay, Martial, Mata, even Lingard have all had substantial shot output in the past. Clearly, the lack of shots was via tactical instruction, which means van Gaal was to blame.

The most shocking part of this to me is that even shooting less often in exchange presumably better shots, they barely moved the needle on shot quality. That last season under LVG they came in just above league average, at about 10.5%.

All of this is a lengthy way of saying that despite van Gaal’s big name and pedigree, Jose Mourinho inherited a bit of a mess.

The Numbers

(Note: the United numbers are a week old and pre-Ibra injury, but I doubt they change much between now and the end of the season.)

Looking at the numbers above, it’s very clear that Mourinho has had an enormous impact on United’s underlying numbers, even if the league table position looks the same. United under LVG were a decaying team that were lucky to finish 5^th. United in Mourinho’s first season have numbers consistent with a top 4 team.

United have improved on both sides of the ball, seeing a big boost in both attacking and defensive xG. They take nearly six more shots per game than the same team last season, while limiting the opposition to two fewer shots as well. That’s impressive and a radical change that is largely down to improved coaching.

The increase in shots has a small caveat in that average shot quality is worse overall, but they are forcing opponents to take worse shots than last year as well.

Plotted via time sequence across a match (thanks James Yorke), you can see the troubled production under LVG compared with the huge gap Mourinho’s team is creating.

Beyond the scoring numbers, what else has changed? Well, Mourinho has De Gea playing the ball longer out of the back, and more regularly. The press has also improved slightly, which is a bit odd because Mourinho employs a middle block press, while LVG was generally known for more man-oriented pressing work. United give up about half as much xG per game from set pieces now versus under the Dutchman.

In relative terms, the defense is good enough to win titles. The attack isn’t quite there yet, but the difference between LVG’s numbers and now is so substantial that United fans should be delighted.

What Can Be Improved?
So United are good. But how can they become good enough to once again sit at the top of the table?

For starters, they need to take better shots.

(click to embiggen)

This is all United shots paired with all United goals this season. Interestingly, there’s a lot of joy from the left channel, presumably from an inverted forward curling in goals, but almost none from the right. There is also a LOT of chaff from range. Shot volume in general skews heavily to the left, which is something opposition scouts would want to be aware of.

In aspirational terms, this is where Barcelona 15-16 scored their goals from. Want to be a super club in attack? Take some luck and variance out of the equation. Figure out how to create more of this.

Another huge area for improvement in both United eras is set piece goals. Under LVG it was about .18 xG a game. Under Mourinho, it’s up fractionally to .22. With this personnel, plus how often they generate shots and fouls around the opposition box, a good set piece coach could likely improve that by .3 or .4 goals a game. That by itself is good enough to push United near title territory.

Hey, Manchester United… I can help with that. Call me.

Europe and beyond
Despite never really having been in the top 4 all season, United still have a great chance at playing Champions League football next year. According to Paul Carr at ESPN, United are 58% to win the Europe League, and 35% to secure a top 4 finish in the Premier League. The combined probabilities make them about 73% likely to play in the CL for 17-18.

As you can see from the analysis above, Mourinho’s arrival on Manchester has improved them massively. Part of this can be credited to the poor shape that LVG left them in, but most of the credit has to come back to The Special One and the superstar squad of players up at Old Trafford. They are much better than they were last year, and generally a lot better to watch as well.

The underlying numbers this year will put them in the hunt for a Champions League place every season. With some minor improvements as noted above, Mourinho could return the red part of Manchester to title hunting next year, territory they have not occupied for quite some time.

–Ted Knutson
ted@statsbombservices.com
@mixedknuts

Bonus Radars Section

In statistics, you rarely care about the outliers. If the data set is big enough, these are naturally occurring, but generally we want information about trending in the population as a whole. Outliers are something to be discarded.

In sports, outliers are everything.

In summer 2015, I was lucky enough to head up recruitment for Brentford football club in West London. We had to rebuild everything that McParland and Warburton took with them, and we had to do it from scratch, which meant scouting, market knowledge, player fit, etc. It was a monumental task, but we ended up with a really good recruitment team of Ricardo Larrandart, Nikos Overheul, Mark Andrews, and Robert Rowan, and a couple of part-time scouts including tactical superstar Rene Maric.

From the point we knew Warbs was leaving until the close of the summer transfer window was one of the craziest and most exciting times of my life. We were both researching and applying statistical football theory to the transfer market on the fly.

How well would players from various leagues translate to the English Championship?

What was the lowest price we could pay for players and still get them?

Could we rebuild an ageing squad into something that could potentially challenge for a promotion place again while playing an attractive, positive style?

This is one of the stories from that summer…

We knew we definitely weren’t getting Alex Pritchard back on loan. After finishing in the Championship Team of the Season in 14-15, Spurs wanted to keep him in training camp and then likely loan him out another rung up the ladder. There was the briefest chance we could get Dele Alli, but that quickly dissipated as he wowed Poch in training. This left a big hole for us in the 8/10 position.

Our first choice was to get Arsenal’s Jon Toral back on loan. Toral was tremendous in limited minutes for Brentford in the playoff season, and his profile was unlike anyone else we could get in our price range. I sat next to him and talked him through what I saw from the numbers and what his age corollaries were in the data set. He seemed smart and interested.

Unfortunately, somehow [former head coach] Marinus dragged his feet on whether Toral was the right fit. He was slow to make up his mind or get in touch with the player. Jon apparently was guaranteed starter minutes at Birmingham, and POOF! What seemed like a great fit flew right out the window, leaving us without a first-choice AMC. Owner Matthew Benham had negotiated to bring in Andy Gogia from Bundesliga 3’s Hallescher on a free in the spring. He could fill the role, but a bit like Alan Judge, we thought he would be better as a creative passer and dribbler out wide. (We also had Judge as a potential 8 because his defensive numbers were so good, but that never quite worked out.)

We could not get Pascal Gross or Ziyech, and no one else was super exciting.

Faced with a ticking clock and a very low budget that we would prefer to spend elsewhere, I put this Austrian guy no one had ever heard of back into the scouting queue.

The data suggested he was a solid attacking midfielder who could dribble and had the great ability to create shots for teammates. He also had reasonable tackling stats for a guy who primarily attacked, and scouting agreed that he was decent at pressing.

Now this was clearly a risk. At no time did we ever think, “Yes, this guy will be great in the Championship.” Instead we thought, “For the right price and in the right role, he certainly shows enough potential to be a solid performer in England.”

Everything in transfers comes down to money. Are you paying the right price for the talent and the risk involved? In Brentford’s budget, half a million pounds is a big deal, and a difference of £500K in valuation will kill a deal. In a Premier League budget, half a million pounds is chump change, and you’d be an idiot for missing out on a player for that small an amount.

The numbers lined up and scouting was positive, so we needed to get in touch with his club and his agent to find out if we could afford him. That’s where the Chris Palmer story came from. [Scroll to the bottom here.]

An eventual deal was sealed for low six-figures, and we had ourselves a low-cost wildcard of a 10 with potential upside. Even if Kersch was a bust, he was still probably cheaper than anyone we could have signed from League One, and for a club like Brentford, that mattered.

The Real World
Kerschbaumer showed up at training camp in amazing shape, and tested for the highest vO2 max in the group. Dude could run for days. It was all very exciting back then.

Unfortunately, things in football go weird sometimes. Brentford went through three head coaches that season and by the end of it no one really knew he was supposed to play 10 except the recruitment guys. He basically never played at AMC until the dead end of the season in 15-16.

Brentford had a horrible winter run, and things looked very grim. The club announced the closing of the academy and also the Football Analytics Team – my group – was made redundant as part of cost-cutting efforts. We had already finished most of the recruitment workload for the 16-17 season, and the perception was that the squad we had recruited was struggling mightily.

Now the truth was that we intentionally built a youngish squad with the blessing of the owner because that is what we could afford, and also so that they could potentially grow and improve together. As long as your recruitment is good, this is a good plan.

Then a funny thing happened. Brentford had an amazing run-in. From April 2^nd at Nottingham Forest until the close of the season, they only lost one match, against eventual promoted side Hull. They also won six and drew two, most of which was without player of the season Alan Judge, who broke his leg in a nasty tackle at Ipswich. Scott Hogan finally came back from two different ACL injuries to be the hottest scorer in the league. Yoann Barbet started regularly with Harlee Dean in central defense, displaying an impressive passing range from his left boot, and a team that could not win a match from Christmas through February suddenly could not lose.

Brentford finished 9th. Without the poor start from the Dijkhuizen era, they might have been right back in the playoff mix. Additionally, they did it with a massive surplus of transfer fees. Worst case scenario, performance suffered a little but the club was now making big money in the transfer market.

Lost in this was Kerschbaumer’s performance. He subbed on when Judge broke his leg at Ipswich and set up Sam Saunders for the first Brentford goal. He also created an early goal for Hogan against Fulham, and two more in the final match of the season at Huddersfield.

Then the summer came and seemingly Brentford once again forgot about Kerschbaumer. This wasn’t unfair – Brentford had a lot of competition for the midfielder roles, and Romaine Sawyers, Ryan Woods, Nico Yennaris, and Josh McEachran shared the bulk of the minutes. Injuries bit throughout the season though, and Kerschbaumer finally started to see more playing time, once again in the spring. Since March 18th, Brentford have lost once, drawn twice, and won five times. And once again, KK is out there racking up assists.

Why the long story about a bit player in a small Championship team?

The answer is because Konstantin Kerschbaumer is a major outlier. Combine his minutes across two seasons and you get the following:

2320 minutes, 1 goal, 12 assists.

That’s an assist rate of about .47 per 90, which is in the top 3% of footballers. Kersch also doesn’t take set pieces, meaning nearly all of his assists come from open play. To give you an idea of how unusual this is, in the last four seasons in the Championship nine players have posted 12 assists or more, all with more minutes and nearly all of them taking set pieces.

Assists are really valuable – I view them basically the same as goals. Fans still have a very different perspective if a player scores half a goal a game than if he creates half an assist a game, there’s a decent case to say they shouldn’t. The bulk of Kerschbaumer’s minutes also came during that first year, many of which were not in his natural position. That’s a tough situation to succeed in, but his numbers in this one particularly valuable area continue to be crazy.

Is Kerschbaumer a success? I have no idea. It would be hard for Brentford to lose money on his transfer should he leave the club, so if that’s how you grade success, I guess it’s a check mark. He’s also produced exactly what I thought he could when we recruited him. But… there are questions about whether he does enough on the pitch when he plays, and I can certainly see why those exist. I think he’s still learning, and I hope he ends up with starter minutes next season, preferably in a system that plays him in his natural AMC spot. Like most data scientists, I want more data and preferably a lot of it.

Part of me roots for the players we recruited like they are my children. I want them to succeed no matter what. There’s also a part of me that is scientifically evaluating their successes and failures to see what worked, and what I need to do better the next time I have a chance to dabble in the transfer market.

Anyway, the combination of Kersch’s crazy assist rate in the run-in and Fabregas’s continued creative skills for Chelsea made me think back to four years ago, when I first started writing about player stats. So much has changed in my approach, but remarkably, so much is still similar. I think a lot of the early ideas I latched on to as mattering ended up being very valuable. That said, I have made plenty of mistakes along the way, both inside and outside of football.

Making mistakes – and learning from them – is most of the fun.

Ted Knutson
@mixedknuts
ted@statsbombservices.com

*Thanks again to Matthew Benham for the chance to do all of this while learning on the fly. Looking at the quality in the squad right now, I think we did pretty well.

Transfer rumours are hot and heavy on Monaco’s Kylian Mbappe this week. Some might even call the speculation “furious”. Manchester United have allegedly tossed £72M at Monaco. Real Madrid today are rumoured to be on course for an £85M move (which presumably means Benzema or Morata are leaving, and half the deal will be recouped through selling one of them).

Mbappe is 18 years old. He has also had a torrid – but somewhat lucky – season at Monaco this year. Today I want to briefly walk through his underlying numbers and discuss what valuation I would put on him in the transfer market.

Previously I helped on a couple of real world deals for high profile players that were negotiating new contracts, and this type of valuation process proved very valuable and lucrative there.

The Stats

Mbappe is already an outstanding scorer, and the fact that he’s well-rounded and not just a poacher is hugely impressive. On the other hand, he’s currently scored double his expected goals. If you think he’s going to score a goal a game, you will likely be sorely disappointed.

However…

Half a goal a game of xG is excellent. MBappe is already a significant outlier for players under 23 across Europe. Don’t be disappointed he’s not the greatest player in the world right now. Be very very excited that even without the overperformance, he’s already one of the better scoring forwards in Europe at age 18.

The Eye Test
Mbappe plays in a good-but-not-great league, and he’s shown the ability to terrorize some of the best defenses in the world in the Champions League. In the first 25 minutes against Juventus, he gave the entire Juve back line fits with pace, power, and movement. 

Having watched quite a few Monaco CL and league matches this season, I can also tell you that Mbappe regularly produces exciting moments of skill that would be fantastic from a 25-year-old. The fact that he’s out there doing it at 18 against grown men is staggering.

Oh… and he’s So. Damned. Fast.

Valuation Discussion
Given what we know above, the question now becomes what value do you think Mbappe should have. Ignore for a second that we only have this one season of data. Assume Mbappe’s baseline stats are rock solid, and we can expect him to produce .5 xG per90 for the next 7-10 years.

The value on that is at least £50M. Factor in the fact that he has a lightning first step, can dribble, and also knows to keep his head up for a pass and now we’re past 60M.

Then there’s another factor. What if Mbappe really is Thierry Henry Mark II? Or Ronaldo (either the Brazilian or Portuguese one)? He’s still maturing, but player development is uncertain. Maybe right now is Mbappe’s peak but – just maybe – his peak is legendary.

Well we know for a fact that Ronaldo and Messi and Henry in their prime would be valued somewhere between 150M and You Can’t Buy This. Let’s estimate an approximate fee in those situations to be £200M. Subtract the 60M mark we already have and you get £140M of “potential pricing.”

The question then becomes what probability you assign to him reaching that legendary status.

Say your scouting group loves Mbappe as he is, but it’s only 20% likely he’ll become a Ballon D’or winner. The calculation is then 60M (actual) + 28M (legend potential) = 88M. If you are able to buy him for 88Mish, you are in good shape.

Now there are other factors at play that change the price equation, like Mbappe is SO YOUNG that even after a 5-year deal, he’s still only going to be 23, meaning you might not need to spend another 100M then, so maybe that moves the price up.

But maybe you are really concerned that we only have one year of data for the kid, and Monaco are a bit weird and overperforming expected goals massively, and he’s playing for a super team and…

Then maybe that increases your risk assessment and you drop the price you are willing to pay because of it.

This skill set from a fully grown player is rare. This skill set from an 18-year-old is absurd. Given the fact that Mbappe could produce .8 or .9 xGA a game for the next decade, it’s not unreasonable to put a £100M tag on him right now. Preferably the base fee is a bit lower with huge add-ons, but unless there is a release clause in his contract, Monaco have a very strong hand to play in negotiations and can demand an awful lot of cash up front.

Anyway, I thought this case was really interesting to analyse through the context of how I would think about it inside of club recruitment. I hope you enjoyed it, and if you find yourself needing professional help in this area, get in touch.

Ted Knutson
ted@statsbombservices.com
@mixedknuts

As you may have seen, Luke Bornn set Twitter on fire yesterday (to the tune of nearly 500 RTs) re-posting something that Sam Ventura mentioned previously on why radar charts are bad.

A reminder, blatantly plagiarized from @stat_sam, of why radar plots are misleading. Eye focuses on area, not length. pic.twitter.com/Dk3gcn1GD1

— Luke Bornn (@LukeBornn) May 17, 2017

Obviously, a lot of eyes turned toward me, since it is probably my fault they exist at all in soccer/football, and possibly my fault they have crept into other sports.

Daryl Morey then managed to do a drive-by on my career so far, posting this tweet

@LukeBornn @stat_sam No analytics person worth his salt uses radar plots or pie charts or 2 Y axis. Probably more if I think on it. All super misleading.

— Daryl Morey (@dmorey) May 17, 2017

Which I don’t think was calling my entire analytics career into question, but could be interpreted as such. THANKS DARYL. I am pleased to note that at least I don’t use pie charts or 2 Y axes. Anyway, none of this is personal to me and please don’t assume I took it as such. I do have incredible respect for Luke, Daryl, and Sam though, so I thought this topic was actually worth revisiting.

In addition to hot takes, that thread under Luke’s tweet generated a lot of great discussion. The fact that lots of people have reactions to this type of work is a good thing, not a bad one.

Anyway… many smart, analytically savvy people hate radars mostly for the reasons explained in that thread. They can be misleading. Ordering of variables matters. There are more precise, accurate ways to convey the data.

The thing is, I knew all of this before I started down this road. My stuff used to just feature tables of numbers. Then I spent the better part of six months doing a deep dive into data vis before I ever spat out a silly radar. And yet, some might say despite my education, I still did it. Why? It’s obviously the result of a choice, not of ignorance.

Before I’m tried and hanged for data visualization crimes against humanity, I’d at least like a chance to mount my defence. Often when someone allegedly smart (that’s me) continues to do something somewhat controversial in the face of some serious criticism, there are things we can learn.

Learn to Communicate
I have been to a lot of analytics conferences at this point, and the biggest point of emphasis on the sports side is always communication is key. You need to understand your audience (usually coaches, sometimes executives), and take steps to deliver your analysis in a form and language that they can accept.

Rephrase that a bit, and you end up with: Audience. Dictates. Delivery.

In order to succeed, you need to take account of the audience you are pitching to and give them something they can understand. Even better, give them something they want to understand. (It helps if it’s pretty.)

In soccer/football circa 2014, the fanbase had no real statistical knowledge. The media was just glomming on to the idea that maybe stripping out penalties from goalscoring stats made sense, assists might be vaguely interesting, and the concept of rate stats wasn’t completely insane. I’m not being glib here, this was how it was. “xG” (or Expected Goals) was seriously weird and controversial and people seemed to think, presumably via the result of someone else’s misguided analysis, that possession had something to do with the probable final score.

In situations like this, visuals go a long way toward opening the conversation. If you show a table of numbers to a coach who isn’t already on board, you’re dead. Bar charts? Only mostly dead. Radars? Interesting… Tell me more.

The same was true of the general public. Radars grabbed people in a way almost nothing else did. I think part of that is related to the fact that various soccer/football video games had used spider charts for a long time already, so they were somewhat familiar.

Math = bad.

Familiar = less scary = good.

Right, we have a vis style that grabs attention – can I fix the flaws?
Rewinding, when faced with a cool visualisation framework that would allow us to talk about player stats in an accessible way – something ALMOST NO ONE WAS DOING IN SOCCER at the time – I set about seeing if I could correct radars for some flaws.

Major flaws with radars:

• Order of variables matters
• Area vs length issue means potential misinterpretation
• Axes represent different independent scales

So what did I do?

• Added the 95^th/5^th percentile cutoffs to normalize for population. Suddenly axes weren’t really on independent scales, even if it seemed like they were
• Broke the stats we care about for different positions into their own templates
• Clustered similar element stats together. Shooting over here. Passing over here. Defensive over here, etc.

One thing I was also clear about up front was that I wanted to include actual output numbers, not just percentiles. This was another choice about audience impact.

Sports quants mostly care about percentiles. Normal fans barely cared at all about numbers, so percentiles would be even more abstract. Plus no one had ever done percentile work for most of the stats in football. What is a high number of dribbles per game? No one knows. Putting percentile info made even less sense then, because we were just starting to have conversations about basic stats.

Going back to my youth collecting baseball cards, I wanted people to be able to talk and argue about Messi vs Ronaldo from a stats perspective, and the only way to make that happen was to have some actual numbers on the vis. I don’t even know if this was successful, but it was a design impetus that was constantly in my head.

Impact vs Accuracy
Most of the people ranting about radar charts on Twitter yesterday are pretty hardcore quants. To many of them, sacrificing precision for anything is strictly verboten. The problem with this perspective for me was: radars aren’t for you. Hell, radars aren’t even for me.

I work in the database, and my conclusions are largely drawn from that perspective. The minor inaccuracy issues of radars don’t affect my work. BUT I wanted to talk to a resistant public about soccer stats, and this enabled discussion. I needed to talk to coaches about skill sets and recruitment, and this was a vital way of bringing statistics into that discussion while comparing potential recruits to their own players.

As I designed them, radars exist to help you open the door with statistical novices, and from that perspective they have been wildly successful.

Even in 2017, football/soccer doesn’t have the volume of knowledgeable fans that basketball and baseball have in the U.S. We also don’t have coaches who are comfortable with almost any statistical discourse, although that is definitely changing in the last year.

Actual, practical feedback
So a funny thing happened on the way to the boardroom: In football, radars became accepted as a default visualization type. I’ve visited a number of clubs who just incorporated the work as part of a basic suite of soccer vis, only occasionally to my chagrin.

“My coaches love these. They want us to do physical stats in this form because they feel like they are easy to understand.”

“This is cool. I like the way the shapes become recognizable as you use them more, and clearly indicate different types of player.”

At Brentford, we took two non-stats guys, taught them the basics of interpretation, and churned through over 1000 potential recruits in a year. Football isn’t like American sports. Players can come from a ridiculous number of vectors, and radars were the best, most easily understandable unit of analysis I could find. Combine no money, huge squad needs, and limited recruitment personnel, and the only way we could hope to succeed was via efficiency and volume.

They were not the end of the analysis. In fact, for recruits we liked, they only comprised a tiny portion of the evaluation cycle. From a volume perspective though, radars were the most used form of evaluation in the process.

On StatsBomb IQ, our analytics platform, even non-recruitment people seem to be taking a deep dive in a way they never have before. One person researched nearly 1000 players and teams over the course of the first two weeks, just because they liked learning about the game and the stats in this way.

In my own opinion, having researched many alternatives, I feel like radars are the fastest way to get a handle on what skill set a player may or may not have, and include some basic statistical context.

You can’t prevent misuse of statistics
This tweet from Luke yesterday made me laugh

@stat_sam In case people think this is well-known, last month I met a pro soccer team using radar plot area as a global metric to value players…

— Luke Bornn (@LukeBornn) May 17, 2017

Two words: competitive advantage. If you’re going to take the research for free and apply it while failing to understand how to actually use it, you deserve what you get. I’m 98% certain this club never talked to me, or else I would have forcefully steered them away from that type of analysis.

And the problem is, you can’t prevent people from doing bad analysis on any type of stats. Single numbers? Mostly useless. Thinking the wrong stats are important? Happens all the time, even from smart, highly educated individuals. Bad interpretations of basic visualizations? Check newspapers almost every day. Bad/useless visualization? So many, it’s a surprise we don’t all walk around with our eyes bleeding.

Look, everyone makes mistakes in their jobs. We try to be objective, but everyone in stats and analytics also makes mistakes. Daryl Morey drafted Joey Dorsey, even though understanding age curves and competition cohorts is a pretty basic concept. Soccer stats once thought possession% was important. Pep Guardiola apparently thought he could win a Premier League with a bunch of fullbacks over 30. I said nice things about Luke Bornn. It happens to the best of us.

The fact of the matter is, unless you are there talking to the users every day, you can’t prevent people from taking your work and potentially using it poorly. It doesn’t matter if that work is in tables or numbers, or bar charts, or radars, or fans, or code, or in a shot map, or whatever.

The interpretation, application, and execution of analysis will remain more important than simply having the information from now until the end of time.

What next?
The bashing of radars is almost a yearly event at this point, and like I said at the start, I concede that there are flaws in the vis style that even my adjustments haven’t completely overcome. With that in mind – and despite the fact that customers actually seem very happy with our current style of vis – we will probably add an alternate form of player data vis to StatsBomb IQ by the end of the year. I’m not sure exactly what it will be, but as football clubs move from novice to intermediate to advanced statistical analysis, precision will become more important and I want us to stay ahead of that curve.

In the meantime, I hope my defense of radars above has at least explained why I made this horrible, unforgiveable visualisation choice in 2014 and continued to stick with it over the years.

Communication and opening doors to talk about stats in football with coaches, analysts, and owners remains the most important hurdle we have to overcome. Radars start a conversation. They get a reaction. And for whatever reason, football people are often more comfortable talking about and digesting them than almost any other vis type I have encountered.

Maybe that will change in the future. Until then radars remain a pretty damned good visualisation for displaying most of the different elements in player skill sets*, which is the most important conversation topic we have in player recruitment.

Ted Knutson
ted@statsbombservices.com
@mixedknuts

*In my opinion at least, and provided you correct for their flaws and educate your users.

For years, we’ve used percentage of passes completed as an evaluation tool for how good a passer a player is. The problem is that basic passing percentages are meaningless for player evaluation.

This creates a difficult situation for clubs looking to recruit excellent passers from a data perspective, especially since football is a passing game that just happens to have goals at the end of it.

Think about it… Your average football match features 3 or fewer goals.

And about 25 shots.

And around 1000 passes.

And yet we have very little information about the quality of a player’s passing, especially outside the final third.

Here at SBS we think about passes in the same way that everyone now thinks about shots and expected goals.

A team can pass between their centerbacks all day long against no pressure and put up big numbers and high percentages, but that doesn’t tell you anything. Prior to now, passing ability among players was actually one of the most difficult things to assess statistically, so teams were forced to rely on scouts for this information.

Our new model changes all of that.

The Basics

• Long passes are harder to complete than short ones
• Vertical passes, especially in the opposition half, are harder to complete than most horizontal ones, though this rule gets a bit squishy around the box.
• Passes from outside areas to central areas are harder to complete
• Passes as a whole become far more difficult to complete as you approach the goal.

“Duh… this is obvious.”

Alright smart guy…

How Do You Quantify It?
To better assess player passing ability, we have taken a two-stage approach. The first thing we have done is to take 20 million open play passes from the Opta data set and create baselines for all passes attempted from one location to another location on the pitch. We include factors like time, distance, where on the pitch it occurred, the type of pass, player position, and a few other elements we think are important to produce a general pass expectancy.

The second stage of the model then adds in the players. How difficult are the passes they attempt? Do they complete them more or less than expected? We then take that information and roll it into a rating

The explanation is simple, but the data work and computational power required to crunch all of this information is massive.

History
We’re not the first analysts to think about doing this. Back in 2012, the current Head of Analytics at Toronto FC (Devin Pleuler) produced a piece on the main MLS site raising the bar on how we evaluate player passing.

The first active model that I knew about was produced by Łukasz Szczepański at Brentford/Smartodds. I had this idea that passing could be evaluated differently and mentioned it to Phil Giles one day in 2014, and he said something like, “Go talk to Lukasz, that was his thesis topic.” My brilliant, new, “original” idea had already been worked on for years by someone else. Welcome to sports analytics, kid.

Looking backwards through transfers and players they have been linked with, it seems fairly likely that Arsenal and StatDNA have had something like this active for years. Jaeson, Sarah, Fran and the crew are all incredibly bright, and this is a moderately common theme that most football analysts will twig upon naturally in their learning journey…

And then not talk about publicly ever again.

We operate a bit differently. I’m vocal about wanting to continue moving football stats forward, and part of the reason StatsBomb exists is to do exactly that. StatsBomb Services is a separate entity, but in my head it shares a similar mission. I continue to write about what I have learned over the years inside and outside of football. While we’ve been creating a lot of IP that is only available in private, Passing Ability score is a big enough deal that I wanted to bring it out front and say, “Hey, we think this is really important and have for years, but now it’s time to talk about it.”

Paul Riley has been publicly discussing his work in this area since the winter, and deserves credit for taking some computationally heavy modelling work and simplifying it to where it’s easily understood and possible to replicate in other places.

Implementation
This information is currently widely available to customers on the StatsBomb IQ platform, and as an extension it’s also available to our fans via radars we tweet (and on the new StatsBomb Services Instagram). Since passing accuracy doesn’t really deliver useful information, Passing Ability score has been swapped in on those radar spokes, and it’s being listed as a percentile rank in the population.

Toni Kroos is 100 – the very best rated passer out of 22000 in the data set we have, while Romelu Lukaku is 0.16 (or one of the worst).

It takes about 1000 passes before scores begin to stabilise, so be aware that players with smaller sample sizes may see more change over time than established players.

In addition to the percentile rank, we are going to gradually release more passing profiles for players and teams throughout the next year. I don’t want to say too much as this is still in the design phase, but our aim here will be to offer clarity in the most important and frequent tendencies at both the player and team level, and to add easy to interpret visualisations for club personnel.

I don’t see this discussed very often, but when recruiting players for football, you do not care about single number evaluators. What you really care about are skill sets. Passing Ability rating adds new information in an area that hasn’t been widely available previously. However, this is just the beginning of where I want to take this analysis.

There are certain types of passes that are more valuable than others, and some are requirements of specific roles in tactical systems. What if you could sift through the data and find guys who can make those passes? What if we made that easy for you? What if I could show you detailed information for every pass that a player makes from different areas he’s standing on the pitch AND show you whether he’s good at those types of passes or not? That’s where we’re headed.

Below is a list of the top 5 active players per position in Passing Ability in the Big 5 Leagues

This largely passes the smell test. It also flags up Tom Cairney as one of the best passing midfielders in England right now (not listed above because he plays in a lower league). Can Fulham hang on to him for another run at promotion?

What’s fascinating is that you also get very clear bands when you separate guys by position just looking at average difficulty of pass. This graphic is massive and needs a big screen to tuck in (sorry mobile users!), but a couple of points about it below.

(click to enlarge)

• The average difficulty of passes attempted and completed by Messi is insane (he’s the pink dot to the far left), especially when you consider the volume. It’s yet another example in an endless stream of how completely unique he is as a player.
• Ruben Aguilar is on here as one of the best passing fullbacks. I quietly flagged him to a couple of friendly teams two months back. He moved on a free to Montpellier.
• Ludwig Augustinsson is also on here and has also already moved this summer. As I mentioned on Twitter, I’ve been a fan of his for pretty much his entire time at Copenhagen.

How Should You Use It?
It’s just another data point in the player evaluation process. Possession heavy teams may want to weight this a bit more than normal, especially in midfield, but there are plenty of notable players that evaluate as fairly poor passers who excel in other areas. (Romelu Lukaku and Shane Long among them.)

On the other hand, look at Real Madrid, who have won the Champions League three out of the last four seasons. Midfielders Toni Kroos and Luka Modric are in the top 30 players in overall passing ability out of 22,000 players in the data set. There might be some value in packing your squad with as many elite passers as you can afford and letting them run the show.

From a practical perspective, I thought this was one of the most valuable tools we had available to us when recruiting players for Brentford and Midtjylland. We didn’t always let the model numbers rule our evaluations, but it was certainly a useful guideline, and helped us better rank the targets that we wanted to recruit.

How Can This Be Improved?
It’s important to remember, what we’ve produced is a model and not a perfect reflection of reality. There are a couple of players that I would personally quibble with, but on the whole, the vast majority of ratings definitely pass the smell test.

However, tracking data would make a huge difference on how we evaluate both the baseline expected passing numbers and how we evaluate players from an ability and decision-making process. (At the moment these two things are baked into the same cake.)

On the flip side, I fear you’ll need a couple more years of hardware development to start coping with tracking data, or your model fitting time might be measured in years and your club will need to be owned by a billionaire just to pay your AWS bill.

What’s interesting is that I’ve seen outputs from a couple different types of xP models now and they all have various bits you can quibble with. One model I saw probably didn’t penalise players who constantly chose easier options quite enough when it came to the final rating. Others likely don’t credit players who succeed at pulling off truly valuable chance creation enough – the type of players that are high risk, but high reward in their passing. Thankfully, we have other metrics that we use to help in those areas.

We could also use more data. As I mentioned above, we have about 20M open play passes we have crunched to end up here, but one of the issues is that we have a real breadth of information (30 leagues), but not nearly as much depth as I would like (only 4 seasons). More data throughout player lifespans would teach us about how this ability develops as players age, and how much time can affect rating volatility.

What’s fascinating to me now is that there is so much information here and so many ways to use it that almost no two independent passing models will ever be alike. People think different expected goals models is an oddity, but as more people/companies develop their own, you simply will end up with different passing ability ratings from different models.

This one is ours, and though I know we’ll improve it in future iterations as we do everything, I’m already using it in player evaluation and recruitment.

How Does This Impact Fans?
I’m writing this post is because I got a host of questions about it when I was testing radar output last week.

“What is this rating?”

“Why bother?”

“It’s all a bit Squawka, isn’t it?” *blocked*

One of the reasons I often trial run things on Twitter is because it flags up problems very quickly. The first problem that I knew was an issue but hadn’t resolved was the ratings output. It was just very abstract. A German friend of mine saw the new output and said, “Why don’t you use percentiles?”

*lightbulb*

*head desk*

OF COURSE we should just use percentiles for this completely unapproachable model output number, why am I so stupid? So we did that, and then we adjusted the boundaries for positional cutoffs again, and here we are.

Beyond that, this is probably the start of where football analytics moves beyond what the average fan can reproduce with any fidelity. Thankfully, it’s still easy to understand and use. Whether it will be widely available information is another question entirely. As much as I would like to take what we’ve built for StatsBomb IQ and make it available to fans, the data license for doing so would be exorbitant. I could, however, see a league doing this type of thing on their own site as a fan engagement project – YO, PREMIER LEAGUE… call me – but that’s about the only way it’s likely to be financially feasible in the near future.

In the meantime, hopefully you now understand why I think passing completion percentages are pretty useless for players, where our Passing Ability ratings come from and why I think they matter.

Thanks for listening!

Ted Knutson
ted@statsbombservices.com
@mixedknuts

At one point in the 16-17 season, I posted a radar featuring Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s xG stats and basically exclaimed that his output so far was exceptional and that goals would come.

This was… controversial. And as with almost anything that’s controversial on Twitter, I took a bit of a battering.

We’ve recently added date filters for radars to the StatsBombIQ platform, and Zlatan’s Manchester United season is a fantastic case study for a boring old stats concept called “reversion to the mean.” Applying the concept to Zlatan, despite the fact that he scored few goals for United in the first three months of the season, I was predicting that his future output would revert toward the mean expected output, and he’d start scoring a lot of goals.

The first image below is his actual output vs predicted output from the start of the season until November 1st.

The formats here are slightly different, but from a stats perspective, my contention was that his scoring output was going to move toward to his expected goals (xG) and expected assists (xA) at some point in the future.

Here is Zlatan’s production from November 1st onward, the left side representing real world output, and the right side containing the xG info.

So from November onward, Zlatan actually outperformed his xG numbers by scoring more goals than expected. As my colleague DOCTOR Kwiatkowski might say, “Welcome to the world of averages and variance!”

The final Zlatan radars below are his output for the full season, which was unfortunately cut short by a brutal cruciate ligament tear.

And BEHOLD, actual production and expected production ended up being very similar to each other, which was what I was suggesting would happen in the first place.

Now this happens in football all the time. A hot scoring streak that isn’t backed by high xG numbers should not be expected to continue indefinitely. On the flip side, players with strong output like Zlatan above might be very good candidates for a discount transfer move, assuming you can’t find obvious flaws in their game.

We actually had a situation like this happen at Brentford with regard to Alan Judge. Coming into the 15-16 season, our group really liked him. He had a great defensive work rate, some very good assist numbers, and he was pretty good with the ball.

On the other hand, by midseason, he was viewed as Brentford’s only really good player. The reason for this can be seen in his shot maps.

In an amazing piece of serendipity, the point that I pulled Judge’s shots for a shot location presentation I was giving was within two shots of his previous year’s output. One of the things I wanted to talk about was yes, Judge was playing very well, but don’t expect that level of output to continue. There was also a subtext there of, if he didn’t want to sign an extension and good offers came in, maybe we should consider selling him.

The cool part about the Judge shot maps is they cut through a lot of the usual arguments you get into about player over/under performance. This was in a player

• in the same team
• in the same league
• with mostly similar teammates
• only one year older
• With IDENTICAL SHOT QUALITY from similar locations overall

And yet one season he scored three goals and the next he scored 10 + 2 penalties, which was completely changing how everyone thought about the player, including our own club personnel.

Unfortunately, shortly after I gave the presentation, Judge suffered a horrible leg break and hasn’t played since, so the concern about a reversion was replaced with an entirely different set of concerns.

In practical terms, reversion to the mean combined with not all shots being equal is exactly why we moved from using actual output to analyse players and started to use expected output. Both of the examples above are practical use cases that happen thousands of times across football every year, and when used correctly, stats help you see likely future performance far more clearly than you ever would via traditional methods.

Ted Knutson
@mixedknuts
ted@statsbombservices.com

After years of predicting it, The Guardian football writers finally got it correct – Arsenal finished the 2016-17 Premier League season in fifth place. And it wasn’t an unfair fifth either. Though they were only one point behind Liverpool, Arsenal scored fewer and gave up more goals than any of the teams who finished above them.

As James Yorke pointed out last year, six of the clubs will be looking to make the Champions League every season. Even if one of them wins the Europa League, like Manchester United did this year, only five of them can possibly qualify.

Relegation to Thursday Night Football (translation: Europa League) finally happened.

At most football clubs, after years of sustained Champions League appearances this finish might yield a change at the top. Not at Arsenal. Barring unforeseen circumstances, Arsene Wenger and his entire coaching staff will be back for another two seasons at least.

What Arsenal face now is a better coached Premier League than at any point in history. The other big six clubs have more money than ever, and seem to make (mostly) smarter decisions. The rest of the league has enough money to buy serious talent from around the world. There’s even a reasonable case to be made that the other big clubs also have better, more productive academies.

So I found myself asking: How can Arsenal rebuild themselves to compete and win a league in this environment? Today I’m going to explain what positions I think need replacing or upgrading, and identify talents I would go after if I wanted to rebuild Arsenal for the future.

Assumptions

Rule 1) Coaching stays the same for now.
This means tactics also likely stay the same, so unless Arsenal magically adopt a destructive middle block or an aggressive high press, the defensive output is likely to be high variance. This is an unfixable flaw that would have been solved by hiring someone like Thomas Tuchel.

Rule 2) Alexis is leaving. Mesut stays. Ox…?
We have to make SOME assumptions on who stays and who goes, and this is my guess. This means we have to find a way to replace a flexible wide forward/center forward who can dribble, pass, and scored 24 league goals last season.

Simples.

(Note: this is a lie. This is NOT simples.)

Rule 3) Money is available.
Look, I’ve heard the rumours that Arsenal could run afoul of the new Premier League money rules, but let’s be honest – if Kroenke really wants to support Arsenal financially, he can. He could sell to Usmanov. He could make ASDA (owned by Walmart) the official grocery partner for Arsenal to the tune of £60M a year and pay them back out of pocket. He could plant a magic commercial money tree in the center of Emirates stadium and use the fancy pitch lights to make sure it continues to produce exactly as much money as the club needs to rebuild.

(Note: If you are looking for precise monetary and cash flow realism, I recommend reading someone else’s piece where they personally rebuild Arsenal’s squad via the transfer market and not this one.)

Rule 4) We’re still being realistic.
Wait… didn’t he just say…?

This rule means that we can’t just buy awesome players for infinite money from whatever team we feel like. Kylian Mbappe is vaguely realistic. Messi, Ronaldo, Pogba, etc are not.

Excellent, now that we have lost half our audience via rules lawyering, we can continue on to discuss what we’re actually buying.

The Needs
Starting CF
Starting LWF
Starting RWF
Starting CM/DM
Starting RB (sort of)

Remember, Alexis is leaving. This leaves Arsenal with Danny Welbeck and Olivier Giroud at center forward. (We’re assuming that Lucas is leaving as well.) Giroud turns 31 in September and isn’t getting any faster. He is genuinely great as a sub and has had a very good Arsenal career, but not starter material in this league any more. Welbeck hasn’t played 2000 league minutes since 2011-12. The last two seasons combined he’s around 1300. A center forward is needed.

It leaves Alex Iwobi as your starting left wide forward. We love Iwobi but um… yeah. We’re also not entirely sure Iwobi is a wide forward, but we are definitely sure he’s not Alexis.

It leaves Theo Walcott as your starting right wide forward. Walcott turns 29 next year and unsurprisingly, is showing signs of decline. He’s still good, but he never plays a full season due to constant injury issues.

Interlude: The Funny Thing About Arsenal and Injuries
As someone who has studied this professionally because we really care about it for transfers, I don’t think Arsenal actually have an unusual number of injuries at the squad level. I do think Arsenal have a lot of injury-prone players who keep getting signed to new contract extensions. For whatever reason, Wenger almost never cuts his darlings. He keeps players that he likes around for ages, many of whom have had serious injuries at various points in their Arsenal careers.

Rosicky. Diaby. Arteta. Wilshere. Walcott. Ramsey. Cazorla. Oxlade-Chamberlain. Now Welbeck. Broken legs, ankle issues, Achilles issues, ACLs… when players suffer those, they tend to get injured after at a more frequent rate than before (especially withbroken legs and Achilles problems), and they never go back to a normal injury profile.

The question can be asked whether Arsenal broke them in the first place, but the truth is that when you keep injury-prone players around as long as Arsenal do, you need to just expect that they will stay that way. This unfortunately creates a huge squad drag where your best players seem to only be on the pitch 60% of the minutes in a year, and often not at the same time. Compare that with what Chelsea and Leicester and Chelsea again had going the last three seasons in terms of squad continuity…

We now return to our story.

Ox is the wild card here. I think last season was the first time he’s truly come into his own. His best position seems to be as a wing back, but he’s also a good center mid in more of an 8 role. He is one of the fastest, best dribbling players in the league. So what’s the problem?

Well, he only has one year left on his deal. He’s also just coming into his prime, knows he can command a good salary on the open market, and probably wants some assurances on playing time and position. The other question is: can he score goals? His output looks like a creative midfielder. Arsenal need goal threats from their wide forwards and for all his good traits, Ox has never really shown that, so even with Ox around, Arsenal need a scorer from wide.

Next we hit the midfield issue. We are not taking any wagers on whether Cazorla will be healthy enough to perform next season. This leaves Arsenal with some combination of Xhaka, Elneny, Ramsey, Ox(?), Coquelin, and Iwobi in the midfield 2. Xhaka is a talented passer, but a bit slow and a brainless tackler. Coquelin is a very busy defender, but not versatile. Elneny is still a bit of an unknown – our passing model loves him but Arsenal fans have barely seen him play across 18 months at the club. Iwobi is a great young passer, but probably not a CM and not ready to dominate games defensively. And finally you get to Aaron Ramsey…

I like Ramsey. I also have strong criticisms of Ramsey that I think are valid. These two viewpoints can exist at the same time. Aaron Ramsey is an excellent attacking passer. He is also great at getting himself into good shooting positions.

The problem? He can’t finish.

“One of these things is not like the other… one of these things is not the same.”

So his greatest strength is getting into excellent finishing positions. And his biggest weakness is being a poor finisher. That’s a pretty cruel tradeoff. If this were a role-playing game, you’d just say fuck it, and re-roll.

The other issue with current Aaron Ramsey is the defensive output. I’m not sure he’s a two-way player any more. Part of this may come down to role – he has played wide or more as a 10 in recent seasons – but the Ramsey that everyone fell in love with were the 12-13 and 13-14 versions that had him blowing up play constantly in addition to attacking. Modern Rambo does not do this. If he’s not capable of doing that, then Arsenal need a different option to be able to play Wenger’s midfield 2. If he is capable of doing this, then Arsenal desperately need him to start doing so again, because a midfield that only has Xhaka or Coquelin doing the defensive work is unlikely to win the league.

Finally we get to right back. Pop quiz!

Please match the following players with the number of possession-adjusted tackles they made per90 last season.

1. Bellerin
2. Pedro (Chelsea)
3. Victor Moses

1. 2.25
2. 1.80
3. 1.04

After a lot of study, I think Hector Bellerin is an ideal wing back. He’s very fast, pretty good at attacking, and uh… well, that was pretty much it last year. In previous seasons he had more defensive output, but last year was very low. This is weird, as fullback is a position that needs to defend. Whatever you think of them, accumulating tackles and interceptions – especially at fullback – is usually a solid indicator that “defending is occurring.” Even as a back 4, Hector didn’t do that much. Maybe that changes this year?

Regardless, beyond Bellerin, the right back options in the new season are currently Jenkinson, who is probably a below average PL fullback, Callum Chambers, who everyone feels is a center back, and The Interminable Contract of Mathieu Debuchy.

You could be forgiven for thinking Debuchy had changed clubs last season. Or gone out on loan, like he did in 15-16. According to Transfermarkt he had 266 minutes in all competitions last season, which includes 250 in… Premier League 2.

And somehow, impossible as it may seem, Debuchy still has another TWO YEARS left on his contract! 2019!!!!!11!1111!

*head explodes*

The answers to the earlier pop quiz are

Pedro = 2.25
Moses = 1.80
Bellerin = 1.04

Confusing stuff, I admit. Antonio Conte is a fucking magician.

Even if you think Bellerin is god’s gift to right backs, Arsenal still need a viable backup option in case he gets injured, and none of the current options are good.

And So It Begins
Let’s start with center forward, since that one gets all the headlines.

The two best guys on the board are Mbappe and Alvaro Morata. Like I said in the Valuing Mbappe piece, I don’t think £100M is wholly unreasonable for the young Frenchman and apparently neither do Arsenal.

Morata is likely to be a bit cheaper – probably in the 70-90M range with add-ons – but despite my long-term love for the Real Madrid player, at this point I think Mbappe might actually be the better option.

After those two guys, things completely fall apart. None of the big names are gettable or fit the age profile we want. If Arsenal are spunking big money on a top tier forward, he needs to be able to lead the line for the next five years. Additionally, they don’t need another good backup forward, which is what Lucas Perez was for them last year.

Lacazette is the next biggest name on the rumour mill, and I suggested him for Arsenal back in January of 2014. 3.5 years later, Lyon have had the best of him and Arsenal are still sniffing around. I still think he’s good, but at 26, I have concerns about what an elite pace striker will look like on the back half of a five-year contract.

The next two best targets, at least in my mind, are both players owned by English clubs. The funny thing is, the big clubs almost never sell to each other. They all buy from Southampton, they all sell cast-offs lower down the league, but they almost never make deals between themselves. However, in terms of statistical profiles, Kelechi Iheanacho stands out by a country mile.

The above is a combined plot across the last two seasons of Iheanacho at Manchester City. He’s really quite good.

The other player owned by an English club that I would go after is Tammy Abraham. He had an awesome season last year in the Championship on a pretty bad team, he has great size, pace, and strength, he can play both wide and central, and he can pass. Would I pay £30M in the current market for Abraham? Easily. £40M? Probably. £50M? Eh. As long as there were no buybacks and the sell-on clause was reasonable I would think long and hard about it. Yes, it would be a gamble, but I think Abraham is a more versatile player than Lukaku at the same age, and his upside is probably even bigger.

No way Chelsea sell him to Arsenal, by the way, so it’s all just pie in the sky.

On the other hand, I pitched a Traore and Abraham for Alexis swap to Chelsea super fan Jake Cohen two months ago, and he got visibly excited by the deal, so maybe Arsene should call Emenalo and get busy.

If all of those fall through, you end up with even more risk for what are likely to be big prices.

• Alassane Plea probably would have been on this list before the knee injury.
• Diogo Jota is certainly worth scouting.
• Belotti is going to cost a fortune and would be moving from a weaker league.
• Modeste is too old and doesn’t play the right style.
• Werner and Kramaric are both staying in Germany and playing the Champions League.

In short, finding a top tier center forward for anything approaching a reasonable price is nearly impossible these days. Yet you’ll still find plenty of talking heads out there both castigating teams for the prices they pay while eviscerating teams because they didn’t manage to bring quality players in during the window.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Verdict: Any one of Mbappe, Morata, Iheanacho, or Abraham would be great. Lacazette (guide price: £50M) still makes sense, but is the least exciting of the lot. After that, you’re gambling and hoping you win.

Central Mid/Defensive Mid
Last spring, I told everyone that Naby Keita would be the one midfielder in the world I would pick for Arsenal (or Liverpool). A fantastic athlete, he’s great at both ends of the pitch and exactly the type of midfield dynamo Arsenal needed.

The world responded with, “Who the fuck is Naby Keita?!?” which at the time was a pretty fair question.

One year on, Naby finished 2^nd in the German Bundesliga with RB Leipzig in their first ever season in the Bundesliga. From what I hear, there is no chance he’s moving this summer.

My second choice for midfield dynamo would have been Corentin Tolisso of Lyon. Unfortunately, last week Tolisso made a €50M move to Bayern Munich. Du schnoozen, du loozen, ja?

After those two guys, things get complicated. There just aren’t that many players in the world who fit the “ridiculously well-rounded midfielder” skill set that Arsenal require, so you start to make hard choices. My opinion is that we can sacrifice a bit of attacking output in exchange for guys who defend. Longer term, maybe we are looking for more of a Santi instead of a Ramsey, but honestly we’ll be perfectly happy with someone really good.

Three names…

I don’t think Arsenal can get a Rabiot or a Kovacic, but one of these three guys might be possible. Jorginho is probably the best right now. Torres might be the best attacking player of the three. And Neves is still young, but almost certainly a midfield prodigy.

Verdict: I have no clue. I think the most likely scenario is that Arsene chooses to continue on with his current midfield and focus on other areas of need.

La Pausa
This is already long, so I’m going to break it here and continue next week with suggestions for the two wide forward positions, a right back, and some tactical discussion to wrap it up.

Thanks for reading!

Ted Knutson
@mixedknuts
ted@statsbombservices.com

Imagine for a second that you had an enormous early mover advantage in the world’s most popular sport. Through buying a data company that had better data and better people than all of your competitors, you could suddenly see with clarity into a market worth billions every year. It would now be possible to find the best young gems for discount prices and turn them into superstars. It would also be possible to find +EV ways of playing football, which in turn should bring more success than ever before.

Now imagine that for whatever reason, you did basically nothing with this advantage, allowing your rich competitors to catch up to you – and potentially surpass you – because they actually execute on the information.

Welcome to Arsenal!

Catching Up
When last we left our intrepid rebuilding project, we had identified a number of useful-though-expensive center forwards, and we also suggested a few young midfielders, an area where Arsenal still have needs in spite of recent investment.

That was before the rumour came about that Naby Keita wanted to leave RB Leipzig.

The rule is simple: If you can get Naby Keita, you get Naby Keita.

Period.

And especially if he costs considerably less than Paul Pogba. Ignore what I said earlier and focus on Naby. If that falls through, as our hopes and dreams always do, then go back to the aforementioned list of midfielders and make it happen, but not until!

And now… on with the adventure.

Wide Forwards
As noted in the earlier piece, if Alexis leaves, Arsenal have Alex Iwobi as a starting left forward and Theo Walcott on the right. Meanwhile, Liverpool will now have Mane and Salah meep meeping all over the place. This would be… suboptimal.

As a result, I started squinting at this, which is either a modern art exhibit about circles and bubbles, or it’s the entire data set of players last season on a scoring scatterplot.

Wide forwards on a team with league title aspirations need to do three things

• They need to be able to score goals
• They need to create for their teammates
• Some meep is required.

Because it’s Arsenal, they also need to be good passers.  This is a huge ask, and in reality there are few players in the world who fit the requirements exactly.

The first name that comes up on the list is Memphis Depay.

*audible groans from the audience*

Look guys, I’m just analysing the data and it says Memphis is very good and has a very rare skill set.

*more shaking of heads. someone throws a tomato*

AHEM! Given the inevitable complaints on this line of analysis from people who think he was bad at Manchester United despite the fact that as a team, they only took as many shots per game as Big Sam’s Sunderland, we’ll fast forward to other candidates.

Salah? Taken. Marcos Asensio? Ha! Emil Forsberg? Not happenin’. Kingsley Coman? Just arrested on a domestic assault charge so maaaybe not.

Bertrand Traore!

Just moved to Lyon for a price that was scarcely believable when reported.

Unsurprisingly, this is hard. How about this guy?

Can play left forward and center forward. Physically awesome. Ran hotter than his expected goals numbers last season, but the underlying numbers were still quite good. Plenty of meep and an absolute handful physically. Also only has one year left on his contract, so won’t be as expensive as other targets.

I feel like this kid gets zero headlines, but his stats are amazing. Plays everywhere behind the striker and almost fully two-footed. Excellent dribbler, and good strength for a smaller guy. Only has two years left on his deal at Atletico, so maybe now is the time to turn his head for bigger money. Atletico are a great team, but the Premier League can certainly pay him far more.

The Dortmund Crew
So Dortmund actually have three young players that would interest Arsenal. They probably won’t sell any of them, but Ousmane Dembele, Christian Pulisic, and Emre Mor all look like they are right on the cusp of being world class wide men (although Mor kind of plays everywhere).

Dembele is one of those players where I don’t fully agree with the passing model. His high risk-high reward style is hard to credit properly, but he is lightning in a bottle on the pitch and already one of the best creative wide men in the world at age 20.

Mor gets less hype, but his style feels inherently more Arsenal. Small sample in Bundesliga last year – he turns 20 in July – but he also completed nearly 6 dribbles a 90 last year in Denmark and passing ability is top notch.

Finally you get The Great American Hope.  Like with Dembele, Pulisic spoofs the passing model a bit by being another high risk-high reward player. By signing Pulisic, Arsenal would not only get a great young player that fills a need for the club, they would also dramatically increase American media attention for the club.

All good, all slightly different, none very likely to move. Sigh.

Now we hit the squiffy bits. This is the problem with transfer shopping in a busy market without the buying power that Manchester United or Real Madrid have. Many years you actually need to take risks. Perfect players for your squad/system/needs are not available. Thus you end up making calculated gambles – often with younger players that have good baselines – that they may develop into something special.

This is exactly what Dortmund are doing right now and it is absolutely the right strategy. It’s also what Arsenal should have been doing since the moment they bought StatsDNA, but they have not.

And the thing is, so many of these risks are easy to justify. Mane, Sabitzer, Timo Werner, de Bruyne, Depay, Eriksen, Dybala… all young players who had clear stats profiles that they were likely to be good to great in the future. Yes, some don’t work out – that’s why they are risks – but if you can’t afford to buy elite players any other way, then you need to take some gambles just to continue competing.

The following guys have more risk involved and might be less obvious targets, but they do have interesting output.

Two from Brugge

One big man, one small. Wesley is a CF who used to be at Overheul-favorite Trencin, but posted big numbers in a half season at Brugge. Izquierdo is a tiny Colombian whose game scouts a bit like a discount Alexis. He’s been on the “Interesting” list for a few years now. Shooting locations could use some work, but the rest of his game is probably good enough for a move to the Premier League.

(Yes, they are both South American so there may be some work permit struggles, but grease the wheels already!)

Eredivisie
The most divisive talent league in world football. When the average age is this low, players at full maturity have an easier time. Defending isn’t great overall. The quality of the top of the league is very different from the bottom, and that also causes issues when evaluating talent who is effectively beating up on League One players instead of Europa League finalist players.

THAT SAID… there is talent in the league and it is undeniable.

There are four guys that Arsenal should take a long, hard look at right now and hope that they turn into something special for the future.

The first three are from Ajax. Dolberg isn’t ready to lead a Premier League line, but he is already special. Teammates David Neres and Justin Kluivert also look very interesting, despite their best games coming against teams that were… uh… (BE POLITE)… not great, Bob?

I usually hate big fees paid for Brazilians, but Neres – like countryman Gabriel Jesus – looks like he could end up being an astute purchase.

I’m not saying definitely try to buy him. What I am saying is do a whole lot more scouting and research and THEN make a decision.

The last guy I find super intriguing is Steven Bergwijn at PSV. Some of the same caveats as above apply, but his output is interesting enough that once again, you should take a very long look and see if everything else adds up.

Thomas Lemar
In lieu of boring right back recommendations, I wanted to just take a quick moment to give my feedback on Thomas Lemar from Monaco.

He’s excellent, and I’ve been interested in him since his Caen days.

Passing ability matches up with what we’ve come to expect from Arsenal, he’s good in space, and he’s fast. The problem – if you want to call it that – is the bulk of his assists last season either came via set pieces or on crosses to the far post on the break. I’m not sure I would let that stop me from signing him. He’s a lovely player. But I’m just not sure Arsenal’s style of play or general indifference on set pieces really maximises his skills.

Conclusion
The reason I started writing this was general frustration. I wanted to map out what was possible this year in terms of Arsenal upgrading the squad enough to contend for a title. To me, Arsenal feel a bit like Manchester United as we entered the end of the Fergie era, except without the Fergie bit (or the Pulis-like set piece execution from Fergie’s last two seasons).

The squad has aged in a number of key positions. The academy no longer provides talented replacements. More money has been spent from time to time, but overall quality seems weaker than a number of competitors, including (and unusually) Spurs and Liverpool.

Manchester United spent something close to £500M in the last three years to try and rebuild that old Fergie squad to a title-contending standard, and while they probably paid too much and had some notable misses, the fact remains that the investment in new players was necessary.

With Arsenal… who knows?

A couple of scenarios to ponder

Max Money(£)
Mbappe – 110M
Naby Keita – 70M
Memphis – 55M
Ousmane Dembele – 70M
Right Back – 40M

More Sensible But Good (£)
Lacazette – 50M
Keita Balde Diao – 35M
Angel Correa – 45M
Jorginho – 45M
Right Back 25M

Please God, No (Hauntingly Likely)
Alexis Leaves +60M
Ox Leaves +35M
Ozil sees out contract – 0
Joel Campbell Comes Back – 0
Theo – 0
Welbz + Giroud – 0
The Interminable Contract of Mathieu Debuchy – 0
Thomas Lemar! – 25M (release clause)

Regardless of how it works out, Arsenal’s summer is wildly complex. Two of their best players are pushing for new, big-money deals toward the end of their careers and with one year left on their contracts. The outcomes there have knock-on effects for every other piece of business Arsenal will do this summer.

As a long-time fan, I have been conditioned to hope for the best but to expect the worst. As someone who does transfer evaluations professionally, I have to say that the possible outcomes are certainly better than I feared.

I doubt we’ll see any of the high end deals happen at either North London club, but Arsenal could still do a lot of good business despite seemingly being quite late to the party.

Or… they could sit on their hands, penny pinch on prices and wages, and end up with pretty much nothing, just like the olden days.

Thanks for listening!
Ted Knutson
@mixedknuts
ted@statsbombservices.com

One of the things we’ve been doing with StatsBomb IQ since we started is incorporating almost all the analysis tools that we use on a regular basis for teams and players into a simple, attractive interface.

Want to pull up radars of every player across your entire data set? We can do that.

Want shot maps with active filters for 34+ leagues? Already done.

A guided wizard that helps you choose your own metrics, including xGBuildup and our passing ability score, to find the best players to scout? It’s called IQ Scout and we released that early in the summer.

The new vis set we’re releasing this week is actually one of the simpler ones we’ve done but also one of the more powerful: trend lines. The wow factor here is less about the vis itself, but more about what you can do with them and why they are incredibly important.

Why Do I Care?

What you see above is Sunderland’s 3-year trend, with 15-game rolling averages. xG in attack is red and xG conceded is in gold.

Why expected goals (or xG)? Because xG Difference is one of the stronger metrics in the public sphere for predicting future performance. There are plenty of other potential metrics to plot, and we will be incorporating them gradually, but at the team level xGD is something we really care about.

Plotting attack and defense here also gives you an idea of how the team is doing in each aspect of the game.

Now if you manage or own a football club, you want this information. You need this information. This information is one of the clearest indicators of how your club is performing currently and the long-term trending of team output. If I were Ellis Short (or Chief Football Officer Simon Wilson) looking at my team trends, I breathe a huge sigh of relief that Sam Allardyce finally managed to stabilise the team after years of teetering on the brink of relegation.

Then Allardyce goes to England and they need to find a new manager. On the surface, Moyes is a perfectly sensible hire. He speaks the language, knows the league, and did a great job at Everton.

Then you watch the trending and concern sets in. By mid-October, I would be worried that there is a problem. By late November, it’s clear that all the good work that Allardyce had done has been unwound. Our results haven’t been “unlucky” – we deserve to be at or near the bottom of the table. I am almost certainly looking for a new manager because it’s now clear that, if we perform like we have the rest of the season, we’re strongly likely to get relegated.

Sunderland were interesting because of the massive change in team performance compared to every other manager they had previously, but think about bad teams that had lucky starts in recent years that were clearly relegation candidates in the numbers. Paul Lambert’s horrible extension at Aston Villa comes to mind, as does the initial start of Hull under Mike Phelan. Making change early to avoid disaster, or reviewing objective data before extending a coach on a “lucky” run can save teams tens of millions of pounds.

Single game results can certainly be lucky. Long-term trends make real performance of the team much more obvious.

Meeting Team Goals
Obviously you care about this type of thing to make sure you aren’t getting relegated from the Premier League, but what about teams with clear aspirations, like clubs that have been recently relegated and are looking at automatic promotion?

Now we know that in order to try and guarantee promotion from the Championship, teams need to average a .75 xGD or better over the course of a season. Teams can and do go up with less, but if you are a yo-yo club that wants to make certain you go right back up, this is the goal you are aiming for.

This is Norwich City last season, on a 10-game rolling average. It’s clear at the ten-game mark that the performance isn’t really meeting the goals for the season and suddenly automatic promotion might be a long shot. That doesn’t mean you have to change head coach at that point, but you certainly want to take a closer look to figure out what the problems are and how to fix it.

Though fairly basic, this type of information is crucial in running a football club.

Tottenham

What you see above is a 36-month plot of expected goals in attack (blue) and conceded (gold) with a 15-game rolling average to smooth everything out.

What’s interesting with Spurs is that this plot shows a) how rough that first season under Pochettino was – they were actually negative for a while in xGD, and the press was shambolic – and also how good they have been since. Poch’s teams seem to have a tendency to outperform normal xG metrics as it is, but even with that caveat, the trending is quite clear here.

Want to see just home or away performances? We’ve added easy filters for that as well.

Arsenal
There are so many interesting storylines around Arsenal in the last year, it’s almost hard to know where to start.

Here’s the one-year plot with 10-game rolling averages. Note the point where xG conceded actually ends up above xG in attack. In most big clubs, that’s a strong indicator that manager change is coming, but Arsenal is Arsenal and Wenger is back for another two seasons. I’m not saying he doesn’t deserve to stay – I’m just pointing out what happens almost everywhere else.

That particular dip in the trend is also interesting because it doesn’t exist in the previous 36 months and it coincides with the early part of the switch to a back 3.  From an xG perspective, Arsenal’s April and early May was one of the worst in the data set. They were absolutely clubbed by Spurs and Palace, Boro lost but 55% of the time they win that one, and then Leicester and Man United were virtual standstills. The trend shot upward from late season trouncings of Sunderland, Stoke, and Everton, but despite a lot of spending recently, Arsenal look far from the ranks of an elite team.

Non-xG Trends
There are plenty of stats in football you might want to track, but the vis below shows one I think certain head coaches care about deeply.

The green line here is Defensive Distance, the purple one is Passes Per Defensive Action or PPDA. Both of these combine to make a fairly robust look at team pressing, which for some coaches is the lifeblood of both their attack and defense.

This is Bayer Leverkusen’s output over the last three seasons, most of which was under Roger Schmidt. It’s interesting to contrast the output of the first two seasons where they finished in Champions League places, and the final season where results went south and Schmidt eventually left.

At a coaching level, this provides a very clear data indicator of what is or is not working to use alongside your own eyes, which in turn probably helps dictate the agenda for what to work on in training. This is pure game model analysis. Data informed coaching is a useful next step in football tactics, and trend lines help in surfacing problems quickly.

Conclusion
Trend lines aren’t groundbreaking visualizations, but they are one of the most useful, powerful ways of displaying recent team performance across a wide array of metrics. If you run a football club and don’t have access to this sort of information at your fingertips, you are missing an important piece of information on which to base decisions.

–Ted Knutson
ted@statsbombservices.com
@mixedknuts

It’s been ten months since I wrote xCommentary, which came out of frustration from hearing my 7-year-old, who is fully addicted to Sunday morning Match of the Day binges, parroting factually wrong commentary.

I don’t want to repeat what I said there because I think the piece stands on its own quite well. However, with the announcement that Match of the Day will now be using expected goals as part of the program combined with what is a clear push for Sky to move forward in this area, I did want to cover a bit about how to use these silly numbers in the first place.

The short answer, at least at first is: with caution.

First of all, this move is a good thing.
The fact that broadcasters in the UK are willing to move in this direction is a positive for analytics in the sport. Period.

Huge credit to Opta, Sky, and the BBC for making this possible. I’m still quite staggered that it is happening at all, and using and explaining these numbers daily has been my job since 2014.

Yes, there may be rough patches to start, but everything new has those.

Yes, there may be quibbles about the precision of the model(s) used, but the remarkable fact here is that a model is going to be used at all. I have barely seen the numbers, but if there is a backlash about general discrepancy, then presumably there will be a push to improve the error of the models. That’s part of the natural process of data science.

Yes, expected goals discussion might be best served by having a smart stats guy on air to explain them clearly and concisely, but let’s give all of this a chance before we kill it.

Second of all, please be gentle…
Okay, so we’ve got an expected goals model. What do the numbers it spits out actually mean?

This is where you have to be really careful in making claims about what single shot xG numbers do and do not convey. The analytics community are all guilty of treating these as defaults, largely because the venue where we usually discuss these things is limited to 140 characters. That doesn’t allow much room for caveats. In reality, every tweet about xG values of single shots or even single games comes with a whole host of legal fine print that no one really cares about except the data scientists.

However… since this is going to be on TV, some caution is advised.

An xG value like .40, means that 40% of the time a shot with these qualifiers from this location has been scored. This means all previous shots are factored into that number, which will include a whole range of very simple chances as well as insanely hard ones.

So why do we care about this?

Because it doesn’t actually say much about this particular shot we are discussing right now. It’s more like “in the past, this has happened.”

Now the reason we’re here at all is because most TV commentators have previously been really bad at estimating historic likelihood. (This is a verifiable claim.) For some reason they seem to think the modern incarnation of football is a much easier game than when they played, which makes them far too critical of whether any particular chance should have been scored. I don’t know why this is, but it’s an epidemic across the entirety of European commentary and there isn’t a way to change it without some sort of objective information.

This is where xG shines, because it provides an anchor point based on history. All the players in the data set taking these shots are/were professional footballers. It’s not like we’re comparing the expertise of children against the Sergio Agueros of the world – these are mostly like for like comparisons.

And this is where the commentators get to apply their expertise…
Because as noted above, xG models have very little information about the particulars of any one chance. Commentators, on the other hand, have all the information, including expertise in knowing what it’s like to be on the pitch trying to score those goals.

They can then apply their expertise and tell us why a single shot is likely easier or harder than all the other shots from that location. It won’t generally turn a 9% chance into a 90% chance (see also: wide angle headers from 10 yards out), but it could easily be double or treble what the model estimates.

I stated in my article last year, I feel like the commentators don’t get enough chance to apply their expertise in place of cliche. Adding an underlying xG model gives them exactly that opportunity.

My show pitch
Opta have a lot of data from the entirety of the Premier League at their disposal. It would be brilliant to see someone walk ex-players back through the stats and data from their own careers and discuss it, especially when paired with video highlights.

It could also potentially be a huge conversion point for players and coaches on the value data represents to the game.

Example: Alan Shearer is easily one of the best forwards ever to play in the Premier League. This isn’t a claim anyone will argue with. However, as good as he was, Shearer probably only scored about one in every five shots he took. 20%. Maybe less.

If one of the PL’s best ever forwards only scores at that rate, and you prove this info to him with his own stats, maybe it will soften/improve his commentary when evaluating others?

Football has changed.
I’ve been saying this all summer, but even compared to 12 months ago, I am seeing massive differences in how interested clubs are in adding data analysis into their football process. The fact that media are picking up on this and moving forward is a clear sign that football itself is in transition. Whether certain groups of fans like it or not, the world is progressing from viewing data analysts as “xG Virgins” (as someone recently tweeted at me), into people that work inside of football clubs and have their analysis appear regularly in the mainstream.

My suspicion is that this transition won’t be an entirely smooth one, but it is unequivocally positive. It’s also going to create an entire new generation of highly educated fans and coaches who view the game itself in a more knowledgeable light.

In the meantime, my only request is please, be gentle. With feedback, with drawn conclusions, with criticism. With everything.

Ted Knutson
ted@statsbombservices.com
@mixedknuts

Managerial recruitment is possibly the most important thing a football club does on a bi-annual basis. Hiring a poor manager or a bad fit can set off a chain of events that could see a club plummeting through multiple relegations. Hiring a good manager can take an average team and catapult them into title challengers.

However, at the club level managerial hiring is also the activity that might have the single most chaotic, backwards process of anything in football.

Here’s an example a friend of mine relayed to me a couple of years ago:

We got down to the final list of three candidates and something struck me as incredibly, almost impossibly strange…

I looked at the Sporting Director and I asked him, ‘Has anyone actually watched these teams play football?’

*crickets chirping*

No one had. Verifying that what these guys were telling them about their teams and what style they preferred them to play somehow wasn’t part of the process.

What’s fascinating is that nowadays you can get video on almost any professional football team in the world. You can even find video down through U18s at a lot of top clubs that’s readily available online. Given the preponderance of potential evidence weighing in either for or against a candidate, not watching their teams actually play football is a baffling choice.

But my point earlier is that recruitment of managers and head coaches is filled with one baffling decision after another. Way more so than modern player recruitment. This is despite the fact that firing a manager and his staff costs millions to tens of millions in compensation costs, and can have serious knock-on effects for the club as a whole.

Because of this, today I want to discuss what teams are getting when they hire a new manager and why that matters.

What do you get when you hire a new manager?

• The Person

This seems obvious, but it’s often overlooked in the same way that footballer’s personalities are overlooked or brushed aside. This is the guy that sets the stage for every discussion you have within your club for the life of their contract. If they are closed off to new ideas, then that will have ripple effects for years. This is especially important to know for clubs that have undertaken a project to become more modern.

It sounds like a cliché, but man management matters. If you have a big squad to cope with things like European competition, you’ll have fringe players that are mostly there as cover in case someone gets injured. Some managers hate having big squads and that can cause huge issues if they aren’t also able to handle squad personalities well.

That said, sometimes a new manager is so good that you are willing to accept possible personality clashes in exchange for better performance. This is exactly the type of thing you really want to know ahead of time. What are the trade-offs we have to make when hiring this person and is it worth it?

Is your new coach a good teacher? A good communicator? A good leader? All of these things matter in general, but they become very important if you have a young squad, your club coaches need to learn their style to train academy players in, or if you have a lot of big personalities in the squad that need managing.

The person you are hiring deals with other people constantly. You really want to know before you hire them how that is likely to impact your club as a whole.

• Their Staff

This one can be strangely overlooked, but the staff that comes with a head coach can be very important in executing their style, and they can also fill certain roles your head coach as an individual might not be very good at (like man management, logistics, etc).

Here’s an example: some clubs allow new managers/head coaches to only bring two staff members with them when they join. The theory is that institutional knowledge inside the club is important and they want to maintain that, so instead of losing knowledge every time they have to change coaches, they limit potential change. This also forces the new coaching staff to communicate more with club staff as a whole, which generally should be seen as a good thing.

The problem here is that every coaching group is different. In some groups, the most important person after the head coach is the guy who does the fitness training. In others, you have explicit roles and subject matter expertise. (Like the head coach, an attacking coach, a defensive coach, a set pieces coach, the GK coach, etc.) Breaking that when you don’t have ready made roleplayers to fill the needs of the tactical style is a problem.

Finally, over the last few years we have heard of certain coaches waging war on their medical staffs. In some cases, having a trusted physio on staff is a hugely important dynamic because it means new managers get more comfort and clarity about player injuries and when they are likely to return to performance. In the high pressure world of football, a second trusted medical opinion for important players absolutely matters.

I generally agree with minimising change at clubs and at providing a good way for new managers to impart their knowledge to long-term club personnel. However, you need to be sensitive about breaking a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

• Their Style

This is perhaps the most important, obvious thing you get with football coaches but also the most misunderstood.

The common myth: Football coaches can change/learn new styles.

I covered this last year, explaining that how coaches learn is very different from how most of the population learns, and therefore it is difficult and time-consuming for them to take on new things. Expecting wholesale stylistic change is a near impossibility. Coaches can’t learn almost any of what they need to know about new tactical styles from books, so where is the information and execution coming from? Who is teaching it to them? What training sessions are they using to impart this knowledge to the players?

To be fair, some coaches are far more adaptable than others. Part of the education at Italy’s Coverciano is to learn to adapt your tactics and coaching to different requirements and not to be too married to one style. Italian coaches often seem more pragmatic and adaptable precisely because of how they are educated for their licenses. Most coaches can’t do that and expect any degree of success. On the other hand, plenty of people criticise Italian coaches for being too adaptable and too willing to change – the criticism cuts both ways.

So yeah, the vast majority of coaches are strongly married to whatever style they have displayed in the past and are unlikely to change much after you hire them, no matter how hard you wish it were otherwise.

With a particular style comes a whole host of other things including the most pressing and expensive concern: recruitment.

Tactical styles require players that fit the style. It’s easier if they also understand the style, but you need players with the right skill set for any chance of success.

The recruitment team needs to know the tactical style the coach wants to execute. Then they need to talk to the new manager and pull out specific role requirements for each position on the pitch and compare those needs to current playing staff. Once they do that, you can construct a recruitment plan based on the new requirements compared to squad weaknesses.

There is no generic football style. Different managers require different players. This is what makes changing managers regularly almost catastrophically expensive for clubs, especially if you let those managers also run recruitment.

Some tactical styles require pace and endurance at every position on the pitch. Size is a “nice to have,” but you will take a smaller, faster guy over a bigger one every time. Tony Pulis’s requirements are basically the opposite. Pace matters up front, but everywhere else you need beef.

Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola’s teams both press. But their positional requirements for who they can recruit are almost surprisingly different.

Conclusion: Your recruitment team really needs to understand the style of play of your new manager in order to succeed.

Conclusion 2: If you do not recruit for your new manager’s style, you will fail. Especially if it differs significantly from the style that your team has played in the past.

The Case of Crystal Palace and Frank de Boer
In practical terms, the part about style circles immediately back to Crystal Palace’s situation this summer and the hiring of Frank de Boer.

As a manager, I think de Boer is actually pretty decent. He has proven he can coach a defense over the years, and though his attacking style is often regarded as boring, given the right players he has been successful. Palace hiring FDB was a bit of a risk, but also a decent shout if they wanted to raise the ceiling of the club. De Boer is perhaps not as good as hiring Marco Silva or Roger Schmidt might have been, but those guys went elsewhere, and Schmidt at least would have had even greater recruitment needs to succeed.

What de Boer also brings to the table is a very clear tactical style. His clubs are going to play a variation of Dutch/Ajax press and possess football. To pull this off, you need players who are understand how to execute this style, especially in the center of the pitch. And unlike the German zonal style, individual players probably have higher style-IQ requirements because it’s largely a man-marking system.

Right, so clear tactical style. Very unlikely to adapt it. Data analysis also shows zero indication he’s capable of tactical variation. Because of all this, you need to provide him players that can succeed and PROBABLY quite a bit of time to teach the team his system.

Remember, Pochettino’s first season at Spurs was bad defensively. He needed a year to imprint the learning on the squad and also multiple transfer windows to get players capable of playing the system at a high level.

So to support their new style that comes packaged with their new coach, Palace bought Jairo Riedewald (age 20), and loaned Timothy Fosu-Mensah(19) and Ruben Loftus-Cheek (20). They also added Mamadou Sakho on deadline day.

This is a complete and utter failure to recruit for the stylistic needs of a new manager/head coach. They also brought in Dougie Freedman as Sporting Director this summer, which was nearly as interesting/baffling as their recruitment when it comes to joining up style/head coach/club needs.

This is why clubs need to clearly understand the impact their choices on head coach/manager have on their future. If Palace weren’t going to do a lot of recruitment this summer because they didn’t have the budget, they should have gone a different direction with their coaching hire. Save the money you’re going to have to pay from sacking FDB and his staff in the first half of the season and use it in the next transfer window.

Hiring FDB and not recruiting for him is basically lighting money on fire.

To be fair to Palace, the squad as a whole is decent. There’s just this huge problem in that it doesn’t fit de Boer’s tactical needs at all. This is something every single football club needs to be aware of when making new managerial hires.

Later this week, I’ll discuss an improved process we’ve developed for coaching hires that delivers a better chance of immediate success and a brighter future.