New soccer book using sabermetrics

This is why sabermetrics is a joke.

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This is why sabermetrics is a joke.

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In soccer or baseball?

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Soccernomics is as convincing an argument as a 12th grade term paper.

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Absolutely disagree. Loved that book.

it is certainly things like that which don't do sabermetrics in soccer any favors. or, in your experience, comolli...

Totally disagree. Brazil winning the confed cup is prime example that home field advantage is worth a lot in soccer and that is a main point in that book

No, but it "factualizes" why this is the case, which I thought was pretty fascinating.

I don't know if Soccernomics was intended to be anything other than a cursory introduction of a relatively new way of understanding the sport. It's certainly not thorough, and I don't think it pretends to be. It's a light read in the style of pop social science that tries to make dense subject matter simple, interesting and engaging for the masses.

That said, I definitely do think there is a place for statistical analysis in the sport, but it needs to be contextualized so that it has meaning. The real problem with the way we read stats right now is that they help us understand why events happen after they happen; they don't seem to be able to predict future events with a greater accuracy than before, at least to my knowledge. Someone out there will figure out a way of distilling that knowledge, but they will have to account for a wide variety of variables, from pitch condition to weather to tactics to formation to style, etc. In that sense the data of the future might read something like: Team A's chance creation rate increases when player X moves into quadrant Z, etc, etc. If over the course of a season you develop a metric of events (for lack of a better word) which more or less happen in the same fashion, you can determine what variables are important and give them more weight.

I think soccer has a game complexity that is equal to chess, because of the wide variety of options a player has when he is with the ball. I'm sure someone good at math could develop the specific number for how many options a soccer player has. So let's say that someone develops a number similar to chess's Shannon number. In this sense you could say that the moves in a soccer game always tend toward originality, as the longer the game is played, the more likely it is that an event will occur which has no precedent (I think in chess they call this an "out of the box" moment).

In soccer, unlike chess, a player isn't limited by directional movement, thus he is free to move the ball anywhere he pleases, theoretically. In a realistic sense, a player is limited by some very specific options.

Let's say a LB wins the ball from a RW, and attempts to recycle play. His most likely options are to clear the ball down the line toward the opposition zone, or recycle the ball, play out of the back, and help move the ball up the field in a manner which minimizes the chance that possession is lost. While these are his most likely options, I, the observer, am only guessing based on prior experience watching other LB's in similar positions behave. He could do the unwise thing and attempt to dribble out of the back, but that seems statistically improbable. So he passes back to the GK, who moves the ball to the RB. Now the options that are presented to the RB are entirely dependent on the formation of the team, the tactics of the moment, the style of the team, the abilities of the players in his team, the abilities of the players of the opposing team, the weather, the pitch condition, the score, the time of the game, his position on the pitch, his team's position on the table/place in the cup/place in the tie. All these variables, and some I probably haven't accounted for, can play into the decision he makes with the ball, or they can be completely ignored. If one was thorough enough, you could account for every decision in a match this way, with the hope that you could glean some number or algorithm that would reduce the complexity of the game to a manageable number, and thus make the statistic which corresponds directly to a specific event, unrestrained in its application.

I hope this makes sense.

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I don't know if Soccernomics was intended to be anything other than a cursory introduction of a relatively new way of understanding the sport. It's certainly not thorough, and I don't think it pretends to be.

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Well that one's on me then. I was led to believe it was supposed to be an intellectually engaging and encompassing read. I was disappointed when it turned out to be much less engrossing than I thought it was supposed to be.

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That said, I definitely do think there is a place for statistical analysis in the sport, but it needs to be contextualized so that it has meaning.

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I think this is the core problem with the "science." Contexualization misses the mark more often than not. I agree that it can be used effectively if someone tailors it properly to a system and its players. I just find more often than not, any attempt to do so is ineffective.

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In all honesty, I don't see where/how that knowledge/metric would be either useful or applicable. The sheer scope of a contextualized metric like you suggest simply seems impractical to me.

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Ha, I didn't mean to I imply my example was meant to be applicable. I was simply thinking through a process by which you could account for variables and determine which are the most important.

I also agree on the instinctual part. Since the game is fluid, muscle memory and instinct are paramount in the sport. But people who insist upon statistical analysis will still break down decision making. I'm actually on your side with this, as I don't believe you can actually develop a comprehensive metric for the sport that reinforces what you see and accurately predicts the future. Again statistical analysis in soccer can tell us why things happened in the past but not in the future.

If we want to really understand future events, we would have to study decision making processes and no Economist is really interested in that.