Thetownend.com

Found this article interesting

https://decorrespondent.nl/2607/How-data-not-humans-run-this-Danish-football-club/230219386155-d2948861

Brentford are doing it, wouldn't be surprised if that's what we're attempting under the radar, or a variant of that system anyway.

Its and interesting way of looking at things, no idea from the article what the basis for the model actually is, and I've no idea whether it will continue to work mind.

Time will tell.

What was the original model? I've forgotten and I've seen the film, was it NY or Boston rounders team?

Oakland A's

The Boston Red Sox then adopted the same philosophy and won their first title for 80 odd years.

FWIW I don't think it can really work in football. Baseball lends itself heavily to statistics and they are a good way of measuring player performance, arguably better than the eye test. Stats can only be a minor way of evaluating a football player, the eye test will always be the best way.

Agree  as baseball is basically 1 on1, football isn't.

Oakland A's, watched a short documentary about baseball sastistics the other day (honestly once you understand it, baseabll is an absolutely great game to watch) and a manger was saying how a guy in the office looking at statstics told him to move a player from right field to centre field for 10 games, manager told him it would never work but did it anyway, long story short, manager was right, purely because of how long he had been around the game and the players and could asses the players skills such as they way they ran and read the game and knew where they fit and would do well, which is something statistics can't tell you, will be interesting to see how they try and adapt it to football but can't see it working.

Seemed to have worked at that Danish club in the article.

There are now a huge number of stats for individual footballers performances available and it will be interesting to see if Brentford keep improving from following the model - although, having a mountain of spondoolicks always helps!

Somewhere in Sheffield, David Prutton is reading this article and contemplating his immediate retirement before it's too late

I think some underestimate the amount of data that modern machines can handle and process of they think football can't be broken down as baseball can. That was once true but there are Prozone videos around which show every single player being tracked and every pass being assessed for weight, speed, relative position of the defence etc in real time. It can be done even at the monent, it can't be done and packaged up for half-time.

 Break every player decision down to each moment and suddenly football is a very simple game and computers find that very, very easy.

This is one of the Prozone videos which demonstrates the next steps https://vimeo.com/124521118 it is long though.

I watched the film the other month and quite liked it for the geek factor.

I think you can use stats to determine future performance in football or practically anything in sport, business etc.

The reason that it has 'worked' in baseball but not (yet) in football is not really because it is easier to do in baseball (although as already mentioned it helps to have a primarily 1-1 confrontation game rather than football's 11-11).  The real problem for football is that what this analysis does is to make relatively small adjustments that only pay off over the long term.

In the short term the 5% (say) improvements are swamped by the luck factor in every game and the massive disparity between the wealth of clubs in any football division never mind the whole league.  As a result it is very difficult to really establish a trend unless you are prepared to persevere with the model for a lot of years in some clubs and ignore the model entirely in the rest.

By contrast baseball has two distinct features that lend itself to recognising small improvements.  The nature of the game means that the disparity between the clubs is far smaller than in football.  Baseball teams rarely win less than 40% or more than 60% of their matches over a season with most teams winning 45-55%.  Very different to football, or even more so rugby, where the big clubs beat the small clubs with monotonous regularity.  Even more importantly, baseball teams play 162 games in a season with teams in the same division playing each other 19 times.   As a result, small improvements stand out far more in just one season than they ever could in football.  Hence the apparent paradox that the Oakland A's were hugely successful in the long regular season by using their model when no-one else was, but much less successful in the relatively short playoffs where luck and one-off individual brilliance swamps consistency.   

interesting stuff.

I'll have to sell out the film for a rainy Sunday

Brentford have just signed Josh McEachran from Chelsea, that's less Moneyball, more throwing money around.

He must be on a fortune.

Someone must have fiddled his stats, because he aint very good from what i've seen.