Month: July 2018

One of the key benefits of forming a football data company is that you can choose which leagues to collect data for. As such, StatsBomb have added English League One to the roster and collected data for 2017-18, and will continue to do so going forward. Having high quality data for a league that has been under served in the past is a fascinating starting point for analysis, so let’s dive in, identify some players who performed well and discuss their game. This will be the first of two articles written discussing League One via data, so be sure to keep an eye out for the second one next week.

A relevant disclaimer: StatsBomb endorses data use as part of a fuller process that involves traditional scouting methods too. Data has an important role in refining ideas but cannot be the sole driver towards a complete analysis. The profiles here can act as a start off point and show how data can help refining multiple leagues worth of players towards a far more efficient process.

Jack Marriott (Peterborough)

Marriott’s 27 league goals led the division, and his move up a division to Derby appears well deserved. While the league’s top scorer might appear to be an obvious pick, when evaluating players, it’s important to understand the inputs that went into a performance to get an idea of whether or not it’s intrinsically likely to recur.

A look at his shot chart shows how the Peterborough man accrued his impressive total:

Chiefly impressive here is the sheer variety of his goals. He scores from set pieces, he scores from crosses, he scores from through balls. He scores headers, he scores from outside the box, from wide and from close in. He’s also matched expectation: 26 goals from an xG of 25.7. His rate of over four shots per game ranked second only to Wigan’s Nick Powell and his rate of shots related to all touches was over 7%, nearly 2% higher than anyone in the league; he’s a pure striker. Without even going any deeper we can see that his season has been an accurate reflection of the chances his teammates have created for him. If we are to be critical, the volume of wider shots he took, particularly from the right side, is probably too high, but he’s not intrinsically wasteful, and this is a good shot chart for a striker.

He did not manage to score after a dribble, but he showed an ability to carve out his own opportunities in that manner, ranking second in the league for shots inside the box after a dribble with ten. We can see here his next actions post-dribble, and those wide shots crop up. The ability to generate his own shot should not be undervalued though, as it’s likely that this type of chance allows his team to relieve pressure, and lightly implies a good workrate.

Something that more strongly implies workrate are pressure events, and Marriott scores fairly well here. His rate of around twelve opposition half pressure events per 90 puts him in the top 10% of players and fourth for those with over 3000 minutes registered. Like many pure strikers, he doesn’t possess the ball to any great volume, but he does put work in to retrieve it.

Callum Styles (Bury)

Sometimes a young player can raise interest from a brief first team spell and while you would like more minutes to evaluate, what they have done in a short period of time is enough to merit further investigation. Callum Styles to date is chiefly known as the first player born in the 21st century to play in the Football League, which he did for Bury back in 2016. Still just 18, Styles got 900 minutes for Bury in the back half of 2016-17 but then figured only sporadically for Bury during the majority of their dismal 2017-18 season that eventually saw them relegated after finishing rock bottom by nine points.

Styles' time in the team this time round started in March 2018, and from there on in he completed the full 90 minutes in Bury’s last eight games. Bury were all but doomed at this point, but given the chance to contribute, Styles certainly did just that:

Via the pressure data we record at StatsBomb we can see that in the ~850 minutes Styles played, he led the league for pressure events recorded, with 25.6 per 90. We can see from the chart here the areas that he covered (where grades of red equate to exceeding league average). Pretty much the whole midfield band.

Related to this, he also led the league for pressure regains--defined as occasions in which his team regained the ball within five seconds of the player’s pressure event--which suggests that he targeted his pressing effectively within the team. Beyond that, of the 25 players who recorded 20+ pressure events per game Styles ranked second to another young player who played limited minutes, Aidan O’Neill of Fleetwood, for the volume of which turned into pressure regains--around 19%.

The caution here is the small sample of games but this is a good example of where data use can point towards player performance, and start the process towards fuller evaluation.

Cheyenne Dunkley (Wigan)

In truth, this whole article could have been about Wigan players. They won the league and were never out of the top three from the end of September onwards and though Blackburn Rovers pushed them hard to secure the second automatic promotion slot, Wigan were top scorers and had the best defence too.

Nick Powell was a contender for the best player in the division and was joined by defenders Dan Burn and Nathan Byrne and forward Will Grigg in the PFA Team of the Year while Sam Morsy was a stalwart in midfield.

However in a post-World Cup environment where Harry Maguire is one of the most important attackers in world football, the performances of Cheyenne Dunkley were notable. Signed on a free transfer from Oxford United in the summer of 2017, last season was only Dunkley’s second in League One having battled his way up from non-league. He scored seven goals and it’s fair to say he had a method:

A striker would be proud of a shot chart like that. Dunkley’s success here once more represents the value in using set pieces as part of a mixed attacking strategy.

Jay Dasilva (Charlton)

League One is a division that is still used by top clubs as a breaking ground for their young talent, and one unarguable success story last season was Jay Dasilva during his time at Charlton. The young Chelsea prospect rejoined Charlton after a spell there during 2016-17 and after captaining England’s side that won the UEFA Under-19 European Championships during the following summer. He started 34 games for Charlton last season, won their Fans Player of the Year award and graduated to under-21 honours.

Out of possession, left back Dasilva did his job:

At the other end of the pitch, Dasilva showed signs of being well capable of playing within a possession-oriented team. He led his team for final third passes completed (17.2 per game, and ranked tenth within the division) of which 30% were forward, enough to rank second among the top twenty players for final third volume. And these number weren’t padded by crosses, he scarcely attempted them.

He was also able to contribute to chance creation; 1.3 key passes per game (with a value of 0.15xG Assisted) ranked third for Charlton, impressive from left back. He’s also a capable dribbler and ranked second in his team for the percentage of pressure events that led to a regain of possession (21%).

It appears likely that Dasilva will once more head out among Chelsea’s loan army this summer, and his general progress in League One implies that he will be capable of performing at a higher level. His time at Charlton is the ideal representation of how the selective loan of a young player can benefit the player’s owner and the loan club to an equal degree.

That's just a flavour of what you can pull from via StatsBomb's League One data.

Ahead of the new season starting next week, we will return with a further post, and as the season progresses keep checking our social media for updates.

Header image courtesy of the Press Association

Whether it be with a pass, shot, or celebration, Paul Pogba’s ability to send the footballing community into hysterics remains unprecedented. As one of the most polarizing figures in football, his dab with the world cup wasn’t the first time he’s sundered opinion and it certainly won’t be the last. But Pogba’s divisive nature comes down to much more than a dance or how he styles his hair.

As the star of an ostentatious marketing campaign, the expectation for the Frenchman to be an offensively minded midfield dynamo stems from his time at Juventus. With the Old Lady nearly conquering Europe, Pogba’s talents as a supremely gifted technical and physical specimen shined bright in a system that elevated his gifts, ultimately earning him a move back to his boyhood club, Manchester United. A few years down the road, however, and the story isn’t as fulfilling as fans and Adidas executives alike, would have wanted it to be.

After two drab seasons of Mourinho-ball, Pogba’s stock plateaued. While flashes of brilliance as a press-resistant star have kept people believing in the astronomic height of his potential, the lack of end product in an offensively conservative system also made believers into doubters., And, much like the more unforgiving assessments of Pogba, France’s display at the World Cup was rife with an overwhelming sense of underperformance. Though the majority of their games were justifiable wins, the expectation that came with such a star-studded team sheet  made people feel like the defensive approach Didier Deschamps favored was a misuse of immense talent. Outside of games against Sampaoli’s certifiably insane Argentina and a freakish final, there was no palpable explosion of French attacking play.

But, that wasn’t Pogba’s fault.

Though France’s tournament  wasn’t the summer blockbuster hit featuring Pogba some that hoped it would be, the Frenchman’s contribution to the eventual champions was indispensable. As a deep passer of the ball that excelled at progressing possession in meaningful ways, Pogba quietly thrived in a system that really only provided a stage for Kylian Mbappe and some of the other forwards to shine. However, his success, regardless of how known or unknown it was, presents the problem Pogba has faced since joining the red devils: his ability to be proficient at the things many would typically suggest a “6” does in football plays into Jose Mourinho’s tendency to deploy the Frenchman in deeper midfield. And yet, not only is it a contrast to what the footballing community, marketing executives, and possibly Pogba, wants, but his deployment under Mourinho vastly differs from his role with France. Though at a cursory glance they may appear to be similar, there are quite a few reasons why it differs. There’s more than one way to be constrained by a system.

First and foremost, international football is entirely separate from club football in format. Though a team like France may have had the option of possession versus counter-attack in stylistic choice, club teams don’t have the same luxury. Playing a more complex, possession-oriented style of football is a requirement for teams with access to talent in the club game, not an option. As the chart above shows, much of Pogba’s talent as a passer was used to fuel the effectiveness of France’s counter-attacks. Mourinho may forever see himself as the quintessential counter-attacking manager, but the nature of being Manchester United means the vast majority of your opponents will take a reactive approach to the game. With little space to move into, Pogba’s current role at United nullifies the progressive passing numbers that made him so effective this summer.

Second is personnel. Long has the debate surrounding Pogba been about those surrounding him. Nemanja Matic was the player intended to finally free the Frenchman from the defensive duties that shackled his brilliance going forward, and while the Serbian is a more than adequate midfield partner for just about any player, the relationship Pogba was able to strike up with N’Golo Kante this summer has been so much more effective. With the Chelsea man making the tackles and Pogba moving it forward, Deschamps was able to forego playing a traditional attacking midfielder in their 4–2–3–1 formation since much of the creation stemmed from the transition created by their midfield duo.

Any discussion of what Pogba’s game with United should look like needs to start with an understanding of why it won’t replicate what he did this summer. His relative ‘failure’ at Manchester United is down to his ability, or lack thereof, to fulfill a role few can even define. Somewhere between the player he’s marketed as and only making sideways passes lies the role he’s supposed to play. We know he has the ability to be the number ten the shirt selling giant wants him to be because his strong numbers at Juventus, though over two years old, are still relevant. We also know that his ability in a deeper position could be of use as well. What perhaps needs to be allowed is a redefinition of what Pogba’s success looks like- something beyond what our current mental construct of Paul Pogba allows for.

The most frustrating reality United fans have experienced under Mourinho is that there seem to be so many avenues for their marquee signing to thrive, and yet he’s experienced none of them. Whether it’s a re-imagining of his attack-minded form at Juventus -something that’s all the more probable with the addition of Fred- or letting go of the idea that he should be whatever this is, and allow him to flourish as a deeper midfielder, Pogba, like any player, requires direction.

For the media, much of the blame is easily lumped on a player that seems all too distracted by hair-dye and Fortnite celebrations, but it’s clear that the downturn in attack isn’t entirely his fault. No one in Jose Mourinho’s United has thrived offensively, and most of the team’s underlying attacking numbers pale in comparison to players of similar positions in the top six. In his final year at Juventus, Pogba ranked 7th in Serie A in both xA and xGChain. At United last season, he ranked 42nd and 37th respectively. The massive drop-off in production isn’t all him, and a World Cup winning summer in Russia all but proves that. Pogba can still be great; he just needs to be allowed to.

Header image courtesy of the Press Association

Argentina are out of the World Cup, and all eyes are unsurprisingly on one man. The tournament is over, and now it’s time for the quadrennial tradition of arguing about whether it’s all Lionel Messi’s fault.

Messi generated the most expected goals of any Argentina player at the World Cup. He had the most open play passes into the box while still managing to get into the area for the second most touches in the box. He managed the most dribbles and the most shots of anyone in the squad. He had the most key passes and assisted the second most xG. All of this led to him reaching the joint highest total xGChain in the side. Yet, all it got him was a single goal, two assists, and an early flight home to a furious Argentine public.

To the shock of no one, there has been a strong reaction both in support of and critical of Messi. Inevitably this is heavily driven by club loyalties, with Real Madrid fans keen to attack him while Barcelona supporters desperately defend their man. But what exactly did Messi do in the World Cup? Were there choices he could’ve made to improve the side, or did his teammates simply fail him?

Game One - Unable to Break the Ice

Iceland had a plan for stopping Messi and Argentina, one that certainly seemed to frustrate him. The main man registered ten shots in the game, more than half of his attempts in the entire World Cup. None managed to pose a serious threat, however, and he produced a shot map that matched the colours of La Albiceleste’s home kit.

How Iceland managed to do this is not complicated, but it was still impressive in execution. Their low block 4-4-2 system was able to pack an abnormally large number of players behind the ball at any one time, not unreminiscent of Sean Dyche’s Burnley. When looking at a heatmap of Iceland’s pressure events, the gameplan becomes obvious: frustrate Argentina in deep positions around the edge of the box, making it extremely difficult to break through.

We can see this plan on the pitch too, with a full eight Iceland players behind the ball as Messi attempts one of his many shots from range. What’s even more notable is that this is at 0-0, long before a side would typically be settling for what they have.

While  Iceland played well, their style wasn’t a surprise to anyone who had seen them at Euro 2016, and it’s not clear what manager Jorge Sampaoli’s plan was to break them down. Messi was nominally playing as a number ten behind Sergio Aguero, but he would often be seen drifting to his familiar right sided role or into a deeper midfield position to compensate for the lack of progressive passing from central areas. Giving one of the best players in the history of football licence to roam isn’t in itself a bad idea, so long as there is a clear structure around him. As it was, Maxi Meza and Ángel Di María in the wide roles were themselves often coming inside. Had they held their positions on the flanks, this could have stretched Iceland’s compact block and created some space for Messi in central areas. But they didn’t, so the whole thing was without structure and this allowed Iceland to easily keep their compact shape.

Messi was extremely isolated in this game, a number ten standing between the lines alone, surrounded by two Icelandic banks of four. Argentina’s only thought to break down the deep block of Iceland was to give the ball to Messi and let him figure it out, which, yes, he was unable to do, but there really should’ve been another idea.

Game Two – Pressed by Croatia

Considering the structural problems in the first game, it wasn’t a huge shock to see Argentina change formation against Croatia. The new system was a 3-4-3 in possession (though it often looked more like a back four without the ball), seeing Messi and Meza both take up number ten roles behind Aguero. The idea behind this appeared to be an attempt to fix the structural problems against Iceland, with Marcos Acuña and Eduardo Salvio taking up wide positions as wing-backs to stretch the play and free up Messi.

There is one obvious problem with this approach, however. Croatia’s style could not be more different to Iceland’s. If Messi’s first game was best understood by shot quality, his second can be seen through the lens of volume. After ten shots against Iceland, he managed just one attempt against Croatia.

Yes, you read that right.

One.

A fairly basic idea about defending in football is that a deep block will look to blunt the opposition’s shot quality, forcing them into attempts from range, while a more aggressive high pressing system will attempt to stop the problem at the source and limit the number of shots conceded. Looking at a heatmap of Croatia’s pressure events, it becomes obvious that they were much more interested in causing problems for Argentina in midfield than Iceland were, trying to prevent the ball from even reaching the final third.

Meanwhile, Argentina’s approach seemed to be to press Croatia most aggressively in wide areas and allow them to play through midfield. You know, the midfield with Luka Modrić and Ivan Rakitić.

Whether this was a deliberate strategy, or simply the result of Croatia’s midfield taking advantage of Argentina’s ageing legs is unclear, but either way it was obviously suboptimal. One of the central themes of the game was Croatia winning the ball in midfield and using Modrić and Rakitić’s excellent passing range to quickly get the ball to the attacking players. That Croatia’s front three effectively got to have a 3 vs 3 contest with Argentina’s back three was also not ideal.

The kindest thing to be said from an Argentine perspective is that expected goals saw it as a much closer contest, with StatsBomb’s model evaluating it at 1.74 to 1.35 in Croatia’s favour (though the game state must be noted here, with Argentina continually having to create new attacks while Croatia were in a comfortable position for most of the game). In fact, the two sides were neck and neck until Rakitic’s excellent 91st minute goal to make it 3-0. The other two goals were from a brilliant Luka Modric strike from range and a terrible mistake by goalkeeper Willy Caballero, hardly systemic issues. Messi himself had the highest xGChain of any player on the pitch, showing that he was involved in Argentina’s gameplay, even though he wasn’t able to make many decisive contributions. Even if there were unheralded positives from this game, the manner of defeat again led to Argentina throwing everything out and trying a completely different system.

Game Three – Just About Good Enough Against Nigeria

For the final game in the group stages, a match that Argentina absolutely had to win, the side switched to a 4-3-3 formation. Whether this was purely Sampaoli’s decision or it was heavily influenced by the players is something we’ll never know, but it had several effects on the team. Obviously this system gets an additional central midfielder into the side, which may have been another reaction to the problems in the previous game.

It also helped that said extra midfielder was Éver Banega, one of the best progressive passers in European club football. The other notable shift was that Messi himself now played on the right of a front three, a position he has played a lot for Barcelona. This allowed him some more space, and the new position along with Banega’s ability to find him let him take a very involved role in the proceedings. Looking at the passmap, it’s obvious how much of an emphasis there is on getting the ball to Messi down the right flank.

And so It followed, Messi scored his first goal of the tournament, Argentina got a 2-1 victory and made it into the knockout stages. It worked!

About that…

Argentina were able to generate very little against Nigeria, and when one includes the penalty they conceded, expected goals has them as a clear second best.

And the penalty itself was the crucial factor in the game. While the incident itself against Javier Mascherano was a debatable one, it allowed Nigeria to focus on defending in more of a deep block that Argentina would need to break down. And in switching to this, they limited Argentina to just 3 shots over 40 minutes, with a total xG of 0.10.

That Marcos Rojo happened to connect well with a cross should not cloud what a poor attacking performance this was. One of the most frequent images of the game was of Argentina players with no genuine passing options, thanks to the extremely poor structure of the side. This was just enough to get through the group stages, but it was obvious that any side of higher quality would put them at serious risk of elimination. Which brings us to…

Game Four – Beaten on the Counter by France

There was only a single tactical change for what proved to be Argentina’s final game in the competition, but it was a significant one. After looking fairly comfortable on the right of a front three against Nigeria, Lionel Messi started as the central striker against France. As anyone who watched Barcelona in the first half of this decade will remember, Messi interprets the striker role very much as a false nine, dropping deep and looking to play short passes with the central midfielders.

This is fine and can be a very effective tactic providing other players are making runs beyond the striker and into the box. Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona side exemplified this with wide players such as Pedro and David Villa positioned narrow in order to exploit the space Messi vacated. Sampaoli’s side, however, opted to have Ángel Di María and Cristian Pavón take up very wide positions on their natural sides, as is visible from the passmap.

Throughout the game, Messi would drift around the halfway line, looking to receive the ball, while Di María and Pavón would stay wide waiting to cross the ball to… no one. A further indictment from the passmap is that, despite often moving into midfield areas, Messi made almost no decent connections with Éver Banega, Enzo Perez and Javier Mascherano. Despite specialist passing midfielder Banega being in the side primarily to get the ball to Messi in dangerous areas, the strongest passing link Messi had was with right back Gabriel Mercado.

What lost this game for Argentina was an inability to deal with France’s pace on the counter. Much was written about how this match represented a changing of the guard, with Messi looking past his best and Kylian Mbappé rising as football’s new superstar. What the French side understood was that the most effective way to use Mbappé in this game was to have him running into space, with balls over the top putting him in a footrace against Argentina’s ageing defenders and midfielders. Argentina, however, had no real idea of the best way to use Messi in this game. It seemed as though he was playing the false nine role mostly because it’s a position where he has done well in the past, but the rest of the team seemed to be built as though a true striker such as Gonzalo Higuaín or Sergio Agüero would be playing there.

Conclusion

Argentina played four games at the World Cup and managed to pull out four entirely different systems. Astonishingly, none of these systems actually seemed set up to deal with the problems that the opposition of that day would cause, and it often just felt like the lineups were attempts to fix whatever the problem was in the last game. That they kept changing strategies without ever addressing one of the core issues of ageing legs in midfield is quite odd, though may speak to the dressing room dynamics rumoured to be at play in the squad.

Messi was central to everything Argentina did, but almost by default more than any systematic plan to get the most out of him. Having a star in your side with such a rich and varied skill set can often pose problems about how best to use him, but one can at least attempt to create familiarity with a coherent side. Messi failed to deliver the decisive moments his country needed to progress further in the World Cup, but it is almost impossible to argue that he was given the best platform to do it.

Header image courtesy of the Press Association

It’s mailbag time! The World Cup is over, the European domestic season will be here again in just a few weeks. Just enough time to fit mailbag questions into the interim. Let’s get right to it.   https://twitter.com/sammcbride19/status/1020029531510509569 https://twitter.com/OmVArvind/status/1019416596178178048 These are two similar questions about expected goals and goalkeeping that get at an important point. It’s really hard to evaluate goalkeeping. So, the first part here, how useful is the difference between goals allowed and expected goals allowed in measuring keeper performance? Well, it’s not useless. If there’s a large gap between the two it means there may at least be something worth looking at. It’s useful as a flag for further investigation, but not much more than that. Question two gets at why. Without the kind of post shot information that expected goals doesn’t include, it’s impossible to tell just from the numbers how much to credit or blame a keeper. A keeper who concedes a few shots with low expected goal values might do so because he had the misfortune of finding the corner, or he might do so because he was caught flatfooted and left an entire side of the goal open. Traditional xG won’t differentiate. Expected goal models that take post shot information into account will certainly be better judges of what’s happening on the field. They’ll better pinpoint the degree to which keeper’s just get unlucky and face a string of shooters aiming for the corners or are bundling more mundane shots. But, even there we should be careful. We simply know very little about the causal mechanisms of goalkeeping. In theory modeling involves testing outcomes against prior assumptions, and when it comes to keeping we should be very careful about giving our prior assumptions a lot of weight. This cuts both ways because as the question points out, the conventional wisdom on evaluating keeping, at least in the public sphere, is awful. Generally speaking, analysis starts from whether or not the ball ended up going in the back of the net and works backwards. That’s not how you want to do things. An expected goal model with post shot information is certainly helpful against that baseline, but it’s an exceedingly low bar to clear. Ultimately, whether we’re talking about using analytics or our eyes to evaluate keeping everybody should be very aware of just how much they don’t know.   https://twitter.com/edpham/status/1020037974166200320 Why even run a mailbag if you don’t take at least one question to be self-indulgent? I’ve had a weird and somewhat peripatetic career path. I graduated college during the height of the online poker boom and was a professional poker player for a couple of years. I left poker to work in finance (literally on Wall Street, right above the New York Stock Exchange) for a couple of years, and then left that job when my now wife joined the United States Foreign Service. I needed a job that was portable and I could do from almost anywhere so I started writing, about finance for money, and about soccer as a hobby. Writing about soccer is the first thing I’ve done professionally for more than two years in a row. The unifying factor through all of this is that in some way I’ve always been interested in explaining technical ideas to a broader audience. In poker, the online boom meant that a field that had been mostly based on conventional wisdom and some very basic math all of a sudden became an incredibly data rich environment. Some conventional wisdom turned out to be very wrong, though a lot turned out to be pretty accurate, and the devil was in the details, the edge cases, the places where understanding the rule of thumb meant figuring out what the exceptions were faster than everybody else. In finance I happened to work for a youngish boss who was a natural with numbers, and grew up staring at as many computer screens streaming numbers as was humanly possible. His boss, however, was an old school stock exchange floor broker, a world built on relationships as much as math. Lots of my job involved making sure the two of them didn’t strangle each other. I view my work in soccer analytics in a similar light. Around five years ago when I started doing this as a hobby I saw a world which was both highly technical, but conceptually not very far away from what most fans were used to. Lots of very smart people were bringing a new set of tools to the game, but they were trying to answer the same questions that football fans have been wondering about for time immemorial. I was drawn to the challenge of bridging that gap. Taking the tools that people were using and making the things they were learning accessible to a broader audience. I’m still pretty obsessed with that challenge.   https://twitter.com/releaseclause/status/1020023009002762241 Stats are useful immediately. The question is can you get good and reliable stats? It’s certainly true that lots of players, even ones that show up as promising statistically, will flame out. It’s also true that lots of players that scouts flag as promising will miss the mark. There’s no magic bullet to projecting talent. There’s only making the best decisions you can when faced with lots of limited information. Even very early on stats can help in a number of ways. Most teams have limited budgets for scouting. It’s important to scout players, but figuring out who to spend limited man hours chasing down and watching is a huge part of recruitment. Also, scouts need to be able to set their expectations. How likely is it that the player they’re seeing is having an off day, or a spectacular one? What specific traits are they looking for? Historically, these kinds of decisions have been made by networking. Sometimes that works well, and sometimes it works in the favor the agent of agency doing the networking. Stats are simply another tool to use to help make decisions in the face of imperfect information. That said, especially at young ages, it’s simply hard to get good numbers. Kids don’t play that many games with the senior team, and when they do it’s almost always against skewed competition (weak sides in cup games for example). So there’s an extreme sample size problem. Numbers can help set your expectations but it’s important to maintain a willingness to change as the evidence evolves. Still, you’d certainly rather have numbers, even a small set of them, to complement what an agent or scout has, than not have them at all. One last point here is that teams themselves can use numbers within their own development system in all sorts of creative and effective ways. We talk all the time about just how hard it is to tease out finishing skill from the numbers. Well if you have players at your disposal for years on end, and you can track and record and compare all of their shooting in practice, and even design drills meant to provide information, then it becomes a lot easier to figure out who is better at what. That gives a team added information when it comes to both developing, and valuing their own players. It’s a great piece of private information that can help teams separate the signal from the noise among their own players and give them a leg up over the competition.   https://twitter.com/George_ymb/status/1020035964721336322 They would not. Because I am terrible beyond terrible. There’s actually a real point to be made in here. Part of the reason that analytics works is that sports operate in a relatively closed environment. Players that are too terrible to play in a league don’t end up playing in that league for long. When analytics people say that “shooting skill doesn’t exist” (a position which I don’t endorse but is still closer to being right than wrong) what they mean is that at the top of the football pyramid everybody is close enough to being equal that the differences don’t matter. They don’t mean that I, Michael Goodman, am equally as good at kicking a football as Sergio Aguero. The reality of professional sports is that at some point everybody who steps on the field is really really good, and that the differences between them dwarf the differences between professional athletes and everybody else. That’s the world analytics operates in. Players that are significantly worse than the general standard of the league they’re playing in by and large get found out quickly and nailed to the bench. The differences between players that football teams or scouts, or analytics nerds, or supporters are looking at are extremely minor compared to the differences between the set of professional players and the rest of humanity. It’s worth keeping in mind for two reasons. The first is that it properly contextualizes the work that’s being done, and the second is that it’s helpful in dealing with outliers. Sometimes a really unlucky seeming player is just so terrible that the they fall outside the context that analytics provides. Not always, sometimes they’re just very (very very) unlucky. But doing thorough analysis means allowing for the possibility that an outlier of a player is just, simply, a terrible player.   https://twitter.com/Classlicity/status/1020023913420554242 I was, um, surprised by the number of relationship questions I actually got to fill this slot. I’d really love to answer all of them. I also like my job running a soccer analytics website, so one question it is (although if you happen to be an editor in the market for a totally unqualified advice columnist who is reading this because they just happen to love soccer stats and stumbled on my fun little gimmick but now wants to shower me with money to write an actual advice column you know where to find me). Ok, enough preamble, advice time. Dear Carolyn (I will absolutely not call you DD in D), You seem like you’ve got a pretty good life going on! You’ve got friends, and family and a cool job and are writing a novel (some of these things I happen to know because we are twitter friends and you tweet about them). As you say in your question 90% of your free time is taken up by hanging out with friends and family. Honestly that seems to me like it’s a lot of fun. So, I guess what I’m kind of wondering is, how much do you actually really want to be dating? It doesn’t strike me that you are having trouble dating, it strikes me that you are having trouble wanting to date. You are prioritizing things other than dating, and honestly seem pretty happy about it. Look, nobody reads a fake advice column for bullshit pseudo economic buzzwords, but it sure seems like we’ve got a case of revealed preferences going on here. Because the easy answer to your question is if you want to date more and meet single people, then you need to juggle around the priorities in your life so that you aren’t spending 90% of your free time with friends and family and have more than the exhausted 10% left for thinking about dating before reasonably deciding that sleep seems more appealing. There are of course ways this can be bad. If you were, say, secretly pining away for love at all hours and only deigning to show up at happy hour or nana's birthday as a way to distract yourself from your misery, that would be a problem. Or, if you decided to give up on love because you talked yourself into believing it was impossible, and viewed your social life as a consolation prize, I’d say that that’s probably not healthy and something that you should go ahead and work through. But, like, there’s nothing wrong with living a happy fulfilled life with dating as a deemphasized part of it. Maybe at some point your priorities will change and you’ll shift your time around and choose to skip the occasional hang in favor of dabbling with a dating app of your choice or doing those corny singles activity nights (is speeding a thing still? It is on bad network TV dramas, but I am old and married and sit at home and watch bad network dramas and don’t do things like speed dating.). Or maybe something fun will happen when you least expect it. Friends and romance aren’t mutually exclusive of course, and entirely walling off the two from each other seems, at the very least, impractical. For now though, there really isn’t anything wrong with not dating because you’d rather be doing other things. If you want to date more, you can always reprioritize your time and go do it.   Header image courtesy of the Press Association