Soccer metrics to evaluate players

Discussion in 'San Jose Earthquakes' started by mjlee22, Dec 26, 2009.

  1. hc897

    hc897 Member+

    May 3, 2009
    San Jose, CA
    Club:
    San Jose Earthquakes
    We don't really know very much at all about how the Quakes scout players. We know they've been trying to come up with a profile of good MLS players to help identify other players that might fit the same mold, but we have no idea what is in that profile. I would be surprised if there was nothing about their behavior or personality in there as part of the assessment, but judging that kind of stuff is not easy. It's even harder if you have limited ability to go look at players in person and just observe their habits.

    One of the big takeaways I had from reading The Only Rule is It Has to Work (a really fantastic book about managing an indie league baseball team) is that you always need to ask "why" when you're looking at players. The Quakes are certainly a step above an indie baseball team trying to cobble together players who went undrafted from college, but if you think you have a reasonable chance of acquiring a player, you still need to ask yourself why their available to you.

    In the Quakes' case, we're seeing players come in who haven't been able to stay on with one team for very long, or maybe who just aren't playing for the clubs that they're currently under contract with. Why is that? Are the answers to those questions things the Quakes think they can work around or help rectify?

    Given the Almeyda hire and his emphasis on working with the players available to him to get the best out of them, I would guess that the Quakes are pretty conscious of player mentality and how they can help push players to be the best version of themselves. Think about how bad the mentality of all the players must have been after the end of last season. Fioranelli had to be hyper aware of what that could do to a player's motivation, their willingness to stick with the organization, etc.

    So no, I don't think Fioranelli is necessarily over-reliant on analytics at the expense of other factors. I just don't see much evidence that it's the case. But again, we really don't know since we will likely never know exactly what their methodology is and it's very likely to change over time.
     
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  2. don gagliardi

    don gagliardi Member+

    San Jose Earthquakes
    Feb 28, 2004
    san jose
    Club:
    San Jose Earthquakes
    Swedish coach and an influx of Swedish players, followed by an Argentine coach most recently in Mexico and they bring in bunch of Latin-American players. You're right, we're going to need an Enigma machine to crack this code. :)
     
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  3. falvo

    falvo Member+

    Mar 27, 2005
    San Jose & Florence
    Club:
    San Jose Earthquakes
    Nat'l Team:
    Italy
    The Argentine coach actually made the Swedish player in Magnus, much better.

    He is the complete opposite the player this board (myself included) thought he was. Same goes for Espinoza.
     
  4. don gagliardi

    don gagliardi Member+

    San Jose Earthquakes
    Feb 28, 2004
    san jose
    Club:
    San Jose Earthquakes
    Agree on Eriksson. But I didn't have any thoughts on Espinoza before Almeyda arrived.
     
  5. falvo

    falvo Member+

    Mar 27, 2005
    San Jose & Florence
    Club:
    San Jose Earthquakes
    Nat'l Team:
    Italy
    #505 falvo, Aug 9, 2019
    Last edited: Aug 9, 2019
    I didn't know Espinoza but he, maybe Vako and Eriksson.are a cut about the rest of the team in skills. I can't believe their turnaround from 2018.
     
  6. mjlee22

    mjlee22 Quake & Landon fan

    Nov 24, 2003
    near Palo Alto, CA
    Club:
    San Jose Earthquakes
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I was listening to a podcast (I can't remember which one) that mentioned the website smarterscout.com. The website says you can get a free account that will let you see the stats for a player and compare to another. They claim to have data on many many leagues across the world.

    Has anyone used this website? I don't want to register for an account unless someone here can vouch for it. The website doesn't give any real info on how to use it; maybe that info is provided after you register?
     
  7. hc897

    hc897 Member+

    May 3, 2009
    San Jose, CA
    Club:
    San Jose Earthquakes
    Haven't had a chance to listen yet, but the Effectively Wild podcast is going through sabermetrics for various sports (including some I wouldn't have considered). Here is the one on soccer and rugby https://blogs.fangraphs.com/effecti...sport-sabermetrics-exchange-soccer-and-rugby/.

    I highly recommend this podcast if you're at all interested in data analysis in sports. It covers the what and how, but also they frequently go into the ramifications of these things, which is many times a lot more interesting than the analysis itself. It's focused on baseball the majority of the time, of course, but they do tend to dip into other sports at times and a lot of the cultural things they discuss I think translate across multiple sports a lot of the time.
     
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  8. hc897

    hc897 Member+

    May 3, 2009
    San Jose, CA
    Club:
    San Jose Earthquakes
    Been too long to edit my earlier post, but there's a huge chunk of the interview dedicated to talking about the guest's work with Billy Beane and the A's owners. It's a bit of cognitive dissonance to hear the interview and face the reality of the Quakes' performances over the last decade. Very interesting and well worth a listen.
     
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  9. mjlee22

    mjlee22 Quake & Landon fan

    Nov 24, 2003
    near Palo Alto, CA
    Club:
    San Jose Earthquakes
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Someone named Devin Pleuler has put together a Soccer Analytics Handbook

     
  10. bsman

    bsman Member+

    May 30, 2001
    MadCity
    Club:
    San Jose Earthquakes

    Remember, there is a 79% probability that @don gagliardi doesn't believe in statistics... ;)


    :ROFLMAO:
     
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  11. don gagliardi

    don gagliardi Member+

    San Jose Earthquakes
    Feb 28, 2004
    san jose
    Club:
    San Jose Earthquakes
    It's probably higher. :)
     
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  12. mjlee22

    mjlee22 Quake & Landon fan

    Nov 24, 2003
    near Palo Alto, CA
    Club:
    San Jose Earthquakes
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    This Football Today podcast was an interesting 19-min episode in Dec-2019 with the guy who writes about analytics for The Athletic. They discussed ManU's announcement of putting together a more serious analytics department.

    What I found interesting was that the guest pointed out that analytics is not that useful for improving players, because improving a player only results in like 1 more point per season (I think he said 1). The real value is if analytics prevents you from making a $40M bad signing. So it ought to help you predict if a player will fit into your system.

    Another interesting F/T episode on Gio Reyna included an interview with his NYCFC academy coach. The coach played Gio as a forward and said that Gio's strengths were that he was very fast, skillful, big for his age, a game changer, had a hard shot, and could dunk a basketball by the 8th grade. I haven't watched him play, but in photos I thought he was small, the same size as his dad.

    They were playing him 3 years up at 14 yo and winning championships, and he told the parents that Gio needed to leave the USA to get better competition. (As my hubby says, success has many fathers.)
     
  13. NedZ

    NedZ Member+

    May 19, 2001
    Los Gatos
    Club:
    San Jose Earthquakes
  14. hc897

    hc897 Member+

    May 3, 2009
    San Jose, CA
    Club:
    San Jose Earthquakes
    I don't like to believe that teams would forego using analytics to try to help improve individual player performance, but it does make sense that you'd emphasize trying to sign the right player from the get go.

    That's how baseball's analytics drive started. Find the players who can contribute but are overlooked. But now, baseball has undergone another major change in development, including helping players change what they do to be more successful. It would be a shame if it took soccer twenty more years to learn the same lesson other sports have already learned.
     
  15. mjlee22

    mjlee22 Quake & Landon fan

    Nov 24, 2003
    near Palo Alto, CA
    Club:
    San Jose Earthquakes
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    From what I’ve read, the biggest obstacle to adopting analytics has been convincing the coaches to listen.
     
  16. Earthshaker

    Earthshaker BigSoccer Supporter

    Sep 12, 2005
    The hills above town
    Club:
    San Jose Earthquakes
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    What?










    :D
     
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  17. hc897

    hc897 Member+

    May 3, 2009
    San Jose, CA
    Club:
    San Jose Earthquakes
    Also not a surprise. I would have to guess that there's room for analytics work to help improve players individually that don't cramp on a coach's particular style, but if you're using analytics to find players first, theoretically the coach doesn't really have a say in those decisions, anyway, so you avoid the problem there.

    Still, coach's thinking they know best, regardless of what they actually know or don't know, is nothing new. But my opinion is if you're the coach of a losing team and you're not exploring every avenue you can to help improve that team because you think you know what you're doing, then you don't deserve to be coaching. The game is ever-evolving, and we've seen how brutal it is when coaches refuse to learn anything new while the game at large quickly passes them by.
     
  18. mjlee22

    mjlee22 Quake & Landon fan

    Nov 24, 2003
    near Palo Alto, CA
    Club:
    San Jose Earthquakes
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    OK, so now I have to reveal a secret someone told me a couple of months before Stahre was canned.

    When Stahre was coaching, the Quakes would bring in the stats guy at HT and on a big screen, he would tell the players what they needed to do.
     
  19. tvromero

    tvromero Member

    Jun 2, 2018
    I think soccer might be one of the most difficult sports to lend to analytics, or at least in the way we tend to think of them.

    Many sports teams are very individualized and very well structured so that you can "define" qualities and then find a fit. Baseball for instance in really just a series of individual actions that are tied together and supports singular individual talents, like a lights out pitcher or a home run hitter. Soccer on the other hand cannot be dominated by any single player, a successful soccer team needs complete cohesion and trust to be great.
     
  20. mjlee22

    mjlee22 Quake & Landon fan

    Nov 24, 2003
    near Palo Alto, CA
    Club:
    San Jose Earthquakes
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    MLS ExtraTime had a TOR analytics guy on their podcast recently. He repeated the part about how tricky it is to get coaching staff to listen to an analyst’s ideas, and it really helps if the analyst can talk to a coach on a coaching level. He says you have to learn how to grab your opportunities for a teaching moment. He also said that the NBA has gone heavily into analytics and is way ahead of MLS, where the NBA teams are doing it. I think he said that about half the NBA teams are into analytics, and he thinks half of MLS teams have at least 1 person or a department for it. But he thinks MLS is more into it than say England clubs.
     
  21. hc897

    hc897 Member+

    May 3, 2009
    San Jose, CA
    Club:
    San Jose Earthquakes
    This could mean a great many things, but I suspect it's mostly a combination of the analytics department being ill-equipped to provide genuinely valuable information, and a large number of players simply unwilling to make adjustments.

    You have to present information to players in a way that encourages them to make adjustments. Stahre never came across as a guy who could get anyone excited to do anything, hence the team's performances. If he was literally just leaving it up to the analytics person/people to tell the players what to do, then it's really easy to see why the team was awful.

    But the players were willing to change (well, sort of) for a coach who actually motivated them. I don't know what kind of analytics work is being done under Almeyda, but whether because of data or not, the players were convinced to make adjustments.

    That's really what it comes down to. You hope that you can put together evidence for why it's in a player's best interest to change how they play, but it doesn't matter how good the data is if you absolutely suck at getting people to buy in.

    I also wouldn't bet the farm that Stahre's folks had good data, either. Fioranelli has talked a decent game about becoming a more advanced organization, but we've yet to see evidence of this.So if you can't get players to buy in, and the information you're giving them isn't good to begin with, you're really sunk.

    Ultimately, I wouldn't consider Stahre's failure an indictment against using analytics to help gain a competitive edge, either at the player acquisition level, or the player development level. Soccer is a complex game, mechanically, and it takes way more data points that a typical MLS season will give you to be really sure of anything. Doesn't mean trying to find that evidence isn't worthwhile, because if you do come across something that the other teams aren't doing, you can get a nice run at beating them. Plus it's just good to have a better understanding of how the game works, regardless of its applications.

    I very seriously resist the idea that the magic of a sport is lost when you can quantify it. If anything, it should increase our amazement.
     
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  22. hc897

    hc897 Member+

    May 3, 2009
    San Jose, CA
    Club:
    San Jose Earthquakes
    It's obviously remained an issue for leagues world wide so far. That's what makes the push toward trying to find out more about the game through analytics quite exciting. We know a lot about baseball. There are still things to learn, but we seem to be at a place where a lot of the fundamental truths about the game are now pretty widely known. It's one of the reasons why player development has become such an intense focus (aside from crime against all that is good that is the MLB exemption from having to pay minimum wage to minor leaguers).

    But I think that's at least partly why there's been a momentum shift toward soccer. I see it as there being a lot of things we kind of intuit about the game, and some stuff that just makes sense in a general sense, but we don't have a ton of the evidence that demonstrates why things are the way they are.
     
  23. tvromero

    tvromero Member

    Jun 2, 2018
    MA just benched them into submission, ala Vako.

    I was thinking about this some more and it just occurred to me that the MA system can be really good at defense but I don't think there is much for offense. His man converge can kill drives but is useless on scoring so that makes me think, what it MAs scoring philosophy?
     
  24. mjlee22

    mjlee22 Quake & Landon fan

    Nov 24, 2003
    near Palo Alto, CA
    Club:
    San Jose Earthquakes
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I thought after the first 5-6 games, that the scoring philosophy was everyone feel free to take a shot. Weren’t they taking lots of shots for awhile? And then things dried up in the last 5-6 weeks of the season as it seemed the players got fatigued and lost confidence and stopped taking shots. That was how I saw it anyway.
     
  25. hc897

    hc897 Member+

    May 3, 2009
    San Jose, CA
    Club:
    San Jose Earthquakes
    Pretty much. In that last month+, the team regressed back to about where it was at the beginning of the season.

    And the beginning of this season things didn't look all that different. Makes me think some players just aren't able to adapt long-term. Not a surprise really. But it's frustrating to have seen huge leaps forward, only to watch them go back to square one and become an unwatchable mess.

    Doesn't help that the defensive line has been one of the least organized I've ever seen in a pro team.
     
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