Moneyball Analysis
"If Moneyball does eventually succeed there can be little truck with it, but there are obvious problems. Cricket and baseball have set plays, repeated to the point of statisitcal value. In football, the game is more fluid, with less easily dissected events, exposed far more often than subjectivity in interpretation."
Bromantic - this one is for you.
Good read, could the Billy Bean Moneyball scheme backfire for LFC. I would say based on the first 6 months of the scheme it appears so.
4 months ago
NC Nole
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I don't get this at all
Liverpool and moneyball have nothing in common except for the baseball ownership. Moneyball was about exploiting market inefficiencies. I don’t look at the FSG transfer history and see anything resembling that type of pattern. Liverpool have been elite spenders since FSG took over, kind of the opposite of the Oakland A’s.
by Stephen Schmidt on Jan 21, 2012 7:47 PM GMT reply actions
They talked about doing so with chance creation...
which could be considered a “market inefficiency”, as scoring is valued more than creating the chance for the score. As Liverpool have shown, there’s something to be said for finishing the chances you create. And also, that some of the “chance creation” numbers can be distorted by who takes set pieces.
http://sportsandgrits.com/
This...
… LFC — like the Red Sox — have been very big spenders since FSG took over. You can be a big spender and adopt a Moneyball approach, but in that case it mostly means trying to get value for money. LFC did that by spending big on youth that will count as homegrown, with a few mid-career guys to try to stabilize and improve the team now.
Has it worked? Certainly not perfectly, but it’s really impossible to judge something like that after half a season. This is a long-term strategy. Even still this team has a decent chance at the top 4 and are in advanced stages of both domestic cups. And I bet this team would be at least a few places higher if Suarez, Gerrard, and Lucas had all been on the field together the whole season. Hell, the team might be in the top 4, or just outside it, had we made our penalties at a normal rate. You can’t blame Moneyball for that.
I do agree
The injuries/suspensions have really hurt. Post and crossbar have been fantastic in defense against Liverpool this season. The penalty taking has been just ridiculous. You are definitely right, we are only a few inches and a couple of penalties from being 3rd or 4th, at which point no one would be talking about this. I believe Liverpool have struck the woodwork 18 or 19 times now this season.
I do believe that everyone would still be talking about Carroll being a flop though regardless of Liverpool’s position in the table.
"The trouble with referees is that they know the rules, but they don't know the game" -Bill Shankly
It is well documented that Comolli is a huge admirer of this way of thinking
and that he seemingly tried to model his approach to spending in football this way. I have argued before that it cannot be applied the same way that it is to baseball since statistics in soccer are far less telling than those in baseball. I believe that he has stated before that he is even friends with Billy Beane.
Whether or not they have applied the principles correctly is another debate altogether, but I do believe that they did model their spending with a similar train of thought. However, it clearly only worked with Enrique and Suarez. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
I’m not going to give Mr. NC Nole the satisfaction though…well at least not right now.
"The trouble with referees is that they know the rules, but they don't know the game" -Bill Shankly
I love statistics
But agree with you. There are too many intangibles on the pitch. Chance creation and passing accuracy are stats that are often cited but cannot be used in the same manner as the moneyball scheme.
We need some creativity and pace on the wings and some attacking prowess infront of the goal.
That being said we have been on the wrong end of the crossbar 19 times as you mentioned. I mean even the law of averages says that we will get perhaps one in ten crossbar deflections. I would take two more goals this season, probably translates into 2-3 more points in the table.
Not to mention
Moneyball didn’t do so great for the A’s either. They didn’t win because of market inefficiencies and finding 1 WAR players off the AAA scrapheap. They had three of the best pitchers going and true offensive MVP caliber threats.
Later, Beane traded those Aces for good packages of players, but he rarely ripped anyone off, and even passed along some great players. And he had a few hits in mining the old player scrap heap.
During their playoff heights I was able to walk in to a game and buy tickets. Seat sections were still tarped off. The upperdecks mostly empty. They haven’t sustained a reasonable fanbase and ownership wants to move.
The movie has a chance at more hardware then they ever actually got on the field.
Statistical analysis never supplanted scouting in baseball, it just added to it.
Real benefits to sabermetrics in football will come when they develop some kind of UZR or TZ – corollaries of defensive metrics in baseball that are still problematic. But they talk about range, coverage and completing plays, but take a long time (seasons) to normalize or form a base of comparison. There might be enough data in a career to do something with shots/chances converted into goals, but not in a season or a a stretch of games. There just won’t be enough data to get through other noise (like all goalkeepers playing out of their minds versus Liverpool this season. Well except DeGea.)
Bye Travis and thanks for 2010! Good luck with the Brewers!
Actually, he didn't trade them for good packages
Zito walked as a free agent, Hudson went to the Braves for 3 players that were awful, and Mark Mulder at least got Dan Haren in return along with two scraps. So 3 aces, returned one player who wasn’t below average.
http://sportsandgrits.com/
I was thinking of Haren, I guess. Zito got them Sean Doolittle in the draft! Hasn’t appeared in the big leagues. I thought he had flipped some of the players he got for Mulder/Hudson for later players, but I pretty much just see Haren (and Barton).
Bye Travis and thanks for 2010! Good luck with the Brewers!
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