In the background of Euro 2016 and the Copa América Centenario, the summer transfer season is well underway. This is the time for sporting directors and other club executives to shine, filling in gaps in their sides and unloading unwanted baggage. In NYA’s work with clubs, a number of useful strategies have come to the fore. Below is an inevitably incomplete list focused on just one part of the sporting director’s job: recruitment. These strategies may be obvious to some, but hopefully a few will be worth remembering. 1. Do your biggest business early. Being the first mover in the…
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Month: June 2016
Don’t be fooled by a cold streak
Anyone who watches soccer knows that even the world’s best strikers may sometimes fail to score for a few matches in a row. But not every club has the luxury of employing one of the world’s best strikers. Let’s say your club has a fairly average striker. What will his cold streaks look like? To answer this question, let’s create an imaginary striker who takes four shots per match in 25 league matches per season. Two of his shots in each match have a 5% chance of scoring, one has a 10% chance, and the last one has a 40%…
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Diversity in analytics
For the past several months, I’ve been thinking hard about how to correct the diversity deficit in English-speaking soccer analytics. This is overwhelmingly a white male field, and – to my eye at least – poorer for it. Can a white man do anything to improve matters? There is some irony to this problem, as diversity in disciplines is actually one of the great assets of soccer analytics. Climate scientists, evolutionary biologists, computer scientists, marketing experts, and hobbyists with any day job you can imagine have all brought their unique abilities to the field. They’ve also imported ideas from many…
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