Since publishing my experimental analysis of managers yesterday, I’ve received some questions about luck and positions in the table. Earlier today I clarified the post to explain why, in a table fixed at twenty positions, it’s hard to be both very lucky and very good or very unlucky and very bad. I thought it would be worth showing what happened when I relaxed this constraint. A club’s performance in terms of points isn’t quite as restricted, since few teams get close to the minimum (0) or maximum (114). Of course, going from points to positions in the table requires a…
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Month: June 2015
How good is your manager?
What makes a good manager? The answer depends in part on his job description. Some managers are in charge of recruitment, while others must leave it to a director of football or a transfer committee. Most managers take charge of tactics on the field, but a few give their coaches minute-to-minute control. All managers, however, try to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts, bringing players together in a lineup that works. And that’s what I’ve tried to measure with these new ratings. As any student of the game knows, a club’s results can depend on both…
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2015 EPL top prospects redux
Recently I published a list of my top young prospects from the English Premier League’s 2014-15 season on the OptaPro blog. As I wrote there, the idea of the list was to cast a broad net, so that players of great potential would be identified as early as possible. This approach works well for clubs that can afford one or two false positives – supposed stars who turn out to be duds. But what about clubs that can’t afford to make a mistake? No model is absolutely foolproof, but I thought it would be interesting to look at a slightly…
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