Open wide for some (more) Soccer (Analytics)!
There's more in store!
I started this thing…god…when was it now? In March.
Things were going great until June, and then…life happened. I’m no longer full-time in the game, and work took over.
But old habits died hard, and I thought the best way to ensure (ahem) greater regularity and to post more often, would be to offer a subscription option.
So that time has come. This month, I’ll start publishing 2-3 times a week, and then come November 1st, you’ll need to subscribe in order to get the full enchilada.
What you will get
You’ll get me talking about the good, juicy meta stuff I’m sure you all crave. Think fewer scatterplots and more general talk on strategy. I’m the guy who instead of asking ‘Should I buy a Chrysler,” asks, ‘Is it right to buy a Chrysler?’
For me, no statistical questions are settled, no answers are obvious, and the fun part of talking analytics is throwing a wrench into the works, no matter which side of the analytics firefight (that’s not really a firefight anymore) you’re on. So if that’s your bag, you can:
If it’s not your thing, no matter, I’ll still be publishing a free post every week. Probably one with fewer swears. Alright, onto the good stuff.
We did it Reddit!
I LOVE these sorts of threads, in part because there are fewer tangible ways to look at the growing influence of basic analytical thinking into the sport:
The lowest of low hanging fruit in the early analytics era, about the time when this trend begins to emerge, is the idea that shots from outside the box are just not worth the highlight reel payoff.
As soon as the first online nerd calculated the likelihood of shots going in from that distance and posted it, the writing was on the wall. Because in what situation does it make sense to make a play with a lower likelihood of going in with an almost guaranteed ceding of possession?
You can literally see how this analytics bugbear has lessened over time. Midfielders rarely tee up from outside the area anymore, and wingers are (seemingly) crossing closer and closer to the line (I’d love to see a proper study on this). That long, looping early cross from just over the halfway line of yore seems to have died out as well.
This is all fun and good, but it basically only shows a basic bare minimum concession to common sense on the part of Premier League clubs. And of course, there’s the question of where, tactically, clubs go from here with the aid of week-to-week analysis? When they’re all basically being smart and looking to focus on high-conversion opportunities?
A lot of this will depend on the particular insight of the particular analyst, but it seems the age of big returns on simple gains could already be drawing to a close, even before the influence of analytics on modern football tactics has been acknowledged by the wider public.
VAR and why philosophy is bullshit
Philosophy PhD James Darcy wrote what I’m sure many will come to view as the definitive philosophical case against VAR, even though he’s mostly concerned with video replay in NFL football.
Which is a shame, because it’s mostly nonsense. I mean, the article isn’t nonsense, and certainly the argument isn’t nonsense (at least on its own terms), but it’s a good reminder of why analytic philosophy can be absolutely infuriatingly obtuse.
There’s no real pull quote I can use to sum the thing up, but essentially Darcy uses the old “when is a chair not a chair?” problem (is it when you remove one leg? Two legs? the back? When you can’t sit on it at all? etc.) to illustrate why systems like VAR are essentially useless and won’t give you any added insight into whether a call was ‘right’ or not.
Actually, and I’m going off topic here, the Sorites paradox (when does a pile of sand become a heap?) plays into a lot of things that happen to be important to analytics as well.
When does a dribble become a takeon? How bad does a bad touch need to be to render a ‘forward run’ into ‘off the ball movement’?
I suppose these things are important if your model or whatever requires discrete, isolatable events that you can count up and analyze. But practically speaking, it’s not a philosophical problem.
Because things like chairs, heaps, forward runs—these are all ephemeral, conventionally agreed-upon concepts with messy boundaries that live entirely in our brains to act as linguistic signposts pointing to a world that is impermanent and entirely made up of bits of jiggly particles that we can’t see with the naked eye.
The quest for a clean bivalent world is the quest for something that does not exist (unless we’re talking about the offside rule), nor does it need to for language to function or for VAR to make basic sense to most normal people. VAR is just another way for a referee to get a second, better look at a foul to make as a basically subjective decision about whether or not it constitutes what most reasonable people would consider a foul. That we yearn for bivalence is the problem, not that bivalence is impossible.
Some things
While I agree we shit on English managers even though a lot of the bad ones have been driven out of the game, I’m not sure I agree with Ollie here that we don’t think Brendan Rodgers is good at Leicester City. I think it’s more we remember what a weirdo he was at Liverpool. But I don’t think we can argue he hasn’t got the best out of some of his better players.
Fellow Canuck Sam Gregory’s NESSIS presentation on off the ball runs is up and it’s pretty neat!
I’ve known Ted for a while (in an online way) and it’s cool to see Statsbomb scale up. Just don’t go Adam Neumann on us.