Almost two years ago, I wrote an article for Bloomberg Sports about the common traits of ideal soccer/football metrics. Given the recent proliferation of metrics for players and teams, I think it’s worth adding a few ideas about what makes some metrics valuable and others almost worthless. Winning versus style. The biggest question about metrics is whether they measure something that leads to winning. If a metric isn’t correlated with results, then it’s probably answering a question about style. Style can be important – some teams are known for a certain style of play and want to maintain it – but…
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Analytics and the market for lemons
George Akerlof shared the 2001 Nobel prize in economics for his work on asymmetric information, which describes the situation when buyers don’t know as much about a product as sellers do. His most famous example of this situation is the market for used cars. Sellers know a lot about their used cars, but potential buyers don’t. So it’s hard for buyers to tell a good car from a bad one, popularly known as a “lemon”. As long as there’s some chance that a used car will turn out to be a lemon, a buyer will never pay full value for…
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Home-field advantage on throw-ins
I’ve always been fascinated by the things clubs do to give their teams an extra edge. It’s not just in soccer; there are numerous examples of baseball, basketball, and American football clubs using everything from locker room heating to air flow in the stadium to hamper the opposition. And so I came to consider that humblest of soccer moments, the throw-in. A throw-in is, of course, just another kind of pass. Opposing teams defend them particularly avidly in their own half of the field, but attacking teams usually have routine to ensure a completion. If an attacking team is particularly…
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