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Fat Stu
25-08-2009, 03:01 PM
I have just finished reading Moneyball for about the third time and was wondering if their are any attributes in football that are over/under vauled.

For those of you that don’t know moneyball is a book about how the Oakland A baseball team Drafted and signed players that nobody else really wanted because other teams overvalued things such as power(home runs, pitch velocity), speed and fielding and undervalued things such as on-base percentage(how often a player reached base).

Basically because of this the A’s were able to compete with teams such as the Yankees and red sox during the regulaur season even though they had a budget 3 or 4 times the size.

Some parts of it remind of me of being at football games especially when the GM is arguing with scouts about stats and all the scout can come back with is that the player doesn’t look like a baseball player. Considering this only happened in 2001 are we as football fans looking at the same attributes in players we always have or are we missing something?

I know OPTAMA (??) used to provide stats on every single player in the premier league and awards points for various things, don’t know if this is still happening or how it really worked TBA.

I personally feel that work rate over inflates a players value(it’s something that’s banded about a lot on someone like Kenny Miller for example, it’s very much an opinion rather than a fact) and that players who retain possession(ie don’t make needless passes) are under-rated, although good ones are hard to come by. would need some stato to provide evidence of player passes attempted to completed ratio to see what players come on top.

Thoughts?

heretoday
25-08-2009, 03:24 PM
I'd like to see stats on the players who hit the target when they shoot.

I'm fed up with poor shooting, especially from free kicks outside the box which always seem to go over the bar - excepting Deeks.

It happens in the Prem as well. The teams take an age to get lined up for a kick only for the ball to end up in row Z.
What happened to clever moves from free kicks instead of just hammering it?

Bring back Willie Hamilton!

dublinhfc
25-08-2009, 04:40 PM
i just felt ma heid battering of the table as i had fallen into a coma after i read baseball and stats......:wink:

H18sry
25-08-2009, 06:32 PM
I have just finished reading Moneyball for about the third time and was wondering if their are any attributes in football that are over/under vauled.

For those of you that don’t know moneyball is a book about how the Oakland A baseball team Drafted and signed players that nobody else really wanted because other teams overvalued things such as power(home runs, pitch velocity), speed and fielding and undervalued things such as on-base percentage(how often a player reached base).

Basically because of this the A’s were able to compete with teams such as the Yankees and red sox during the regulaur season even though they had a budget 3 or 4 times the size.

Some parts of it remind of me of being at football games especially when the GM is arguing with scouts about stats and all the scout can come back with is that the player doesn’t look like a baseball player. Considering this only happened in 2001 are we as football fans looking at the same attributes in players we always have or are we missing something?

I know OPTAMA (??) used to provide stats on every single player in the premier league and awards points for various things, don’t know if this is still happening or how it really worked TBA.

I personally feel that work rate over inflates a players value(it’s something that’s banded about a lot on someone like Kenny Miller for example, it’s very much an opinion rather than a fact) and that players who retain possession(ie don’t make needless passes) are under-rated, although good ones are hard to come by. would need some stato to provide evidence of player passes attempted to completed ratio to see what players come on top.

Thoughts?

Ineresting post :agree: but what has Gordon Marshall got to do with it :duck:

Third Nipple
25-08-2009, 07:42 PM
Stu - you might find this link interesting. It appears Wenger uses this in his analysis of players

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/columnists/matt_dickinson/article3479458.ece

Winston Ingram
25-08-2009, 07:51 PM
This (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-England-Lose-Phenomena-Explained/dp/0007301111) would be a great book to follow it up with Stu. Reading this at the moment and refers alot to Moneyball. I'm 100 odd pages into it at the moment and its tremendous:thumbsup:

Cropley10
25-08-2009, 08:58 PM
i just felt ma heid battering of the table as i had fallen into a coma after i read baseball and stats......:wink:

Open your mind...:wink: It demonstrates the fact that the stats used in baseball traditionally to judge and sign players were faulty and set about looking into new ways to analyse whether a player was any good. Guess what - it worked.

It's a great book and great read if you like sport.

wee 162
25-08-2009, 09:13 PM
It's really difficult to quantify football players in the way that baseball has. With baseball, stats are turned into an art form. Everything is measurable as there are only limited numbers of outcomes possible. If you can quantify everything, and you can work out something which is important in winning games which is undervalued by everyone else, then obviously you do gain an advantage vis a vis the opposition. But football is art and baseball is science.

Of course, the other problem in football is that you don't only have 29 competitors as you do in MLB, you have literally hundreds of clubs internationally who can outspend you for players. You don't have the false restrictions designed to keep competitive balance such as a draft system.

The only way that you can gain a competitive advantage in football to achieve beyond your resources is developing young players who you couldn't afford otherwise afaic. We already do that imo. The only other route that I could see would be to develop a new tactical system that no-one else uses, and if that's succesful it just gets copied (ie Arrigo Saachi when at AC Milan used a system for pressing which was considered novel, but he simply refined what Dynamo Kiev had been doing, except he had better players to do it with).

I'd also add that in the draft followed in Moneyball, the only position player who has became a decent player in professional baseball is Nick Swisher. The one who "looked like a baseball player" and who was the number 16 pick in the draft (ie 16th best amateur player in North America). The rest flamed out pretty much. Joe Blanton has done okay as a pitcher. About the same as Jeremy Bonderman who was slated as a waste of resources.