When I talk about ways of evaluating players, I often add that metrics for players can be combined in meaningful ways for teams. Here are two quick examples. First, ratings from different models can be combined to show who’s most important to a team. The graph below shows 2014-15 ratings from two of my models (explained here) along with Shapley values for the club I support, Newcastle United. Shapley values aren’t as persistent from season to season as the other models’ ratings, but they can help to suggest who’s a misfit on a team and who’s pivotal. The diagonal lines…
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Another look at managers
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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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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