[mpruitt]

not sure this is the right forum to post it in, but after reading Micheal Lewis' Moneyball, i've become fascinated that sabermatic principles could be used to help find undiscovered talent in soccer and there by helping MLS succeed. it occured to me that there are pathetically few usefull statistics available for soccer players. i happend to stumble upon this site right here and the stuff that they're doing is phenominal. i just wish there was more of it.

http://www.matchanalysis.com/

[kenntomasch]

Sabermetrics, but I echo the sentiment.

[mpruitt]

Ken your pm inbox is full.

A lot of the things about the problems of applying it to soccer are obvious. My thought was though that if it works in hockey and basketball, there has to be a better way of tracking individual performance of soccer players. So I did a little bit of research and found these guys. http://www.matchanalysis.com/

I emailed them and one of the guys got back to me really quickly. He said some interesting things, a lot of which were echoed in Moneyball. Foremost that coaches with a traditional upbrining have been reluctant to incorporate statistical analysis but have more accepted some of the video analysis that they have done. However, if you look at the way that they've broken down individual players, much of that stuff is pretty brilliant, but unfortunately a lot of work. Consiquently, he said that they have not done much of the statistical analysis recently.

There in lies the biggest problem. There's not this wealth of information available to go back and look at. And while record keeping in baseball has improved with companies like Stats, Inc. and the internet. I wouldn't imagine it's simply not there with soccer. (those types of records)

So the question would be how to collect it. Matchtracker, with a quick glance in my mind has a pretty good model of what to be looking at, at least as a start. Then the question only becomes testing hypothesies as to what are the most important attributes of an individual soccer player or position, and what their corrilation is to their team, and their team's record.

[NGV]

A couple reasons why stats are less useful for measuring player performance in soccer than in baseball:

First, offensive contribution in baseball can be measured for players independently of the rest of the team's contribution. Not the case in soccer, where a forward's goal scoring may depend on the quality of service from the midfield and a midfielder's assists may depend on the quality of finishing from the forwards.

Second, in baseball, offensive contributions can be measured identically for every player, regardless of their position or the team's "style of play." It doesn't matter whether a player is a shortstop or a right fielder, their hits are worth just as much. In soccer, even just at a single position like forward, you can have several different types of players - Brian McBride type forwards, Landon Donavan type forwards, Taylor Twellman type forwards - and the contribution each type makes may not be measurable by the same standard. Also, what you want from these players may vary depending on what formation or tactics a team is using. It's not clear how the value of different players could be reliably and consistently compared.

Third, baseball consists of many discrete events (hundreds per player per season), each measurable as a contribution to run scoring. In soccer, the relevant events are goals, but they are rare. And, for more common events, like "passes completed," the exact contribution to goal scoring or goal prevention is often not obvious. A lot of possession can be a good thing, or it can be not such a good thing - I think the USA had something like 65% possession against Poland in the World Cup. So, there may be a shortage of meaningful data.

Basically, while resistance to statistical analysis in baseball is usually unfounded, in soccer I think there may be good reasons to be skeptical. That said, I also think that statistics could be used more than they are now, and I was really interested in the reports that Match Analysis used to post on US national team games. I think that trying to measure what happens during a soccer game with precision and objectivity is worthwhile, even if directly using that information to evaluate player performance is difficult.

[mpruitt]

That's sort of my point, while it may not lend itself so easily to soccer, there's definately more that can be done and should be done. However, to simply say that it wouldn't work with different styles of play, and that possesion sometimes ins't key is simply just an assumption. With numbers there could be more accurate breakdown even within a given team of what went wrong and what went well, and putting those out over a timeline you could there find the crux of what actually causes people to win succer games. Obviously luck is a very big factor but I can't help but think with some of the things like Matchanalysis provides could help to break down strategies with a forumlaic precision.

[TomEaton]

This is the best thread I've seen on here for awhile.

Good post, NGV. You made a lot of the same statements I was going to make. I will nitpick a little bit, though, and say that in baseball the offensive contributions of each player are not ENTIRELY independent of the rest of the team. For instance, if you are the leadoff man, most of the time no one will be on base, and batting averages always increase with runners on base (particularly with a runner on first base, which opens up a hole on the right side of the infield and has the middle infielders playing closer to second base). If you're batting behind a great base-stealer, you often have to take pitches so they can try to steal, and consequently get behind in the count, hurting your own chance of hitting safely. And it's pretty difficult to have a high RBI count if no one is getting on base in front of you.

Getting back to soccer, your main point was correct that each player's performance is VERY dependent upon the team around him, which explains in part why statistical evaluation hasn't had really any emphasis in soccer up to now. On the other hand, you still find a few hard-line baseball people who insist that statistics are useless in evaluating baseball talent, which is absolutely astonishing.

Whether soccer stat analysis is truly useful will be determined when someone can show definitively that certain statistics correlate highly with winning AND that the relationship is causative. For instance, if someone can show that the higher percentage of passes your center midfielder completes, for instance, the more often you win, and that's the reason, then people will start to pay attention to that information.

I once ran a study on the MLS possession statistic to determine whether having more possession correlated with winning (the article was in the 2001 American Soccer Analyst). Out of the 170 games I studied, the team with more possession had a record of 75-67-28, slightly better than .500. The interesting thing, though, was that where possession was really lopsided (one team had at least 56% of the possession), the team with more possession was only 18-24-10. I have some theories as to why this might be, but I won't bore you with my opinions. The point is, there is a correlation, but not a particularly strong one. I would have liked to have looked at some numbers for other leagues to see if the results were similar, but I didn't know where to get the numbers. I hope the Matchanalysis people can keep track of stuff like that.

[kenntomasch]

A baseball player's contributions are not independent of the team, but we have much more information about the relationships between individual players' performances and each other, and that of the team. Or at least we can quantify it better.

There are more big-picture things we can use analysis for. It tends to break down a bit at the player level. But we're getting closer.

The biggest obstacle is the backward-thinking "soccer and statistics don't mix" sentiment.

[NGV]

Originally posted by kenntomasch

The biggest obstacle is the backward-thinking "soccer and statistics don't mix" sentiment.

Well, I think some of the other obstacles are pretty big too. But, there definitely is a potential for interesting and useful work - and long as you still have people saying and believing things like "2-0 is the most dangerous lead in soccer," there's clearly a lot of room for improvement.

[kenntomasch]

You're right, the other obstacles are big, too.

Perhaps attitude is the biggest obstacle to getting the work accepted, not getting it done.

[beineke]

Originally posted by NGV
...long as you still have people saying and believing things like "2-0 is the most dangerous lead in soccer," there's clearly a lot of room for improvement.

... unless, of course, they're associated with the Revs.

By the way, even the most basic tracking can lead to strong conclusions. Since the start of the 2001 season, Simon Elliott has attempted 106 shots, of which only 36 of which were on goal, and only 2 of which went in. It doesn't take a genius to realize that he shouldn't be winding up on these balls.