A Beautiful Numbers Game

All-Time Best Managers Versus Transfer Expenditures

2012-02-15T21:08:00.000-08:00

My latest post at the Transfer Price Index blog was posted yesterday. It takes a look at the top managers in the English Premier League when their transfer resources are accounted for. It's a comprehensive study that will be used for several smaller posts at this blog, so if you have 10-15 minutes to spare I would suggest having a read of the post at the TPI.

The results at the top did produce a few surprises along with the usual suspects. The top five overall managers are:

Alex Ferguson
Arsene Wenger
Jose Mourinho
Rafael Benitez
Gianluca Vialli

More recent converts to the Premier League may not recognize the manager in position 5. The post at the TPI spends some time explaining how Vialli overachieved versus transfer expectations, but readers can certainly find other resources on the web to learn more about this Pre-Abramovich Chelsea success story.

Readers will note that only two of the top five managers are still active (and after today's 0-4 thrashing of Arsenal at the hands of AC Milan, it may be narrowed down to only one). Of active managers, the following are the top five.

Alex Ferguson
Arsene Wenger
Kenny Dalglish
Roberto Mancini
David Moyes

David Moyes also occupies a key spot in the list, being the first manager of the three most commonly listed over performers - him, Sam Allardyce, and Martin O'Neill. I've already written plenty about Moyes and O'Neill, so I gave Allardyce the majority of the space reserved for the three men. Such respect for Allardyce is well deserved given what he's done at West Ham this season.

Finally, Harry Redknapp gets a brief profile in the post that I may expand upon once this season wraps up. After writing my comprehensive piece on Arsene Wenger's performance versus the model I swore I wouldn't do such a profile again. To do such a long career justice requires dozens of hours of research and writing, all uncompensated (as of now). At the time of the Wenger writing, the next obvious candidate was Alex Ferguson given his success at Manchester United. I may do such a profile of Ferguson some day, although I think there is less of a question about his success versus transfer expectations. It's been so consistent and steady that I question how much we'd learn from such an analysis. Redknapp is the opposite situation - he's managed the third most matches in Premier League history, and has what I would call a "parabolic" record at each club he's managed. He starts with a deficit to the model, by the middle of his tenure he's well to the good side of the model, but then his clubs regress back towards expectations by the time he's exiting them. Such a track record seems more worthy of a study of his transfers to understand why his clubs perform in such a manner over time.

A complete list of manager rankings is available in the post, so be sure to check it out and let me know what you think.

Sloan Sports Analytics Conference: Putting a Human Element to Soccer Analytics

2012-01-26T06:00:00.000-08:00

The following is a review of the two previous soccer-specific panels at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (SSAC) as part of my coverage of the 2012 conference for Howler magazine.

The genius of the Oscar-nominated Moneyball isn’t in the numbers or the Oakland A's resultant success. That part of the story is well understood. The genius is in the story the numbers help tell, one filled with the personal emotion and organization turmoil that change sports analytics can bring with them. The fear of personal and organizational failure, of isolation by both the analytics practitioners and the scouts they’re trying to replace, and the trust that must be built between the team’s management team and the analyst. It’s the deep human and organization insight that makes this story different than a story simply about the numbers. There is a moment about twenty-five minutes into the movie where all of human themes come together.

Billy Beane is sitting in his dining room late into the night, struggling to determine whether or not he is going to bet his professional reputation and the Oakland A’s entire season on the theories of a classically trained economist with zero professional baseball experience. Knowing that he and Peter Brand will be challenged at every turn due to the unconventional approach they would take, Beane needs to understand if Brand will be a change-agent even when it is not convenient. Beane picks up the phone and calls Brand so late into the evening that neither of them even knows what time it is.

Once pleasantries have been dispensed, Beane decides to immediately test his potential assistant’s mettle.

“Would you have drafted me in the first round?”

Caught off guard, Brand responds with the platitude.

“You were a good player...”

The response does not impress Beane. He’s not just looking to be patronized, having washed out of the big leagues after a promising high school career. He wants to see if the potential assistant GM, who confirms he’s looked up Beane’s stats after their initial run-in at the Cleveland Indians’ headquarters, has the ability to quickly analyze a situation and provide a cogent answer.

“Cut the crap, man... Would you have drafted me in the first round?!?”

Brand now understands this isn’t a courtesy call, and responds to Beane’s probing question.

“I’d have taken you in the ninth round, no signing bonus. I can imagine you would have passed and taken the scholarship [that you turned down from Stanford].”

At that moment the personal connection is made. Beane cannot only count on Brand to be honest with him, but that his analysis will be spot on while not sacrificing the human element. He offers Brand the job, and the rest is baseball history.

Moneyball may be a movie about how analytics changed the baseball world, but the themes within the movie are replicated in the soccer analytics world. Sifting through piles of data to find the numbers that matter to an individual club. Requiring every facet of a club to buy into the overall team vision shaped by what the numbers tell the management team. Balancing the human intuition of a manager/coach with the computationally intensive models from the analytics department. The inevitable success at poorer clubs leading to bigger opportunities at richer clubs. Similar themes are present in soccer, with unique twists due to the differences in the two sports' financial and organizational structures.

Soccer analytics doesn’t have its equivalent of Moneyball. No disrespect is meant to the very good book Soccernomics, but it has little of the human insights that Moneyball has. In an interview I conducted of Simon Kuper late last year, he pointed out that we have yet to see concrete examples of where soccer analytics has made a difference yet we know clubs are using data to make decisions. Thus we have no obvious success story about which to tell a compelling human story. Without a Moneyball for soccer, where can soccer analytics enthusiasts turn for the personal stories and latest theories from the club’s practicing soccer analytics? One outstanding resource is the annual Sloan Sports Analytics Conference hosted each March by MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

On March 2nd and 3rd, 2012 nearly 2,000 people will descend on the Hynes Convention Center for the 2012 edition of the conference (tickets are still available). It will be the sixth iteration of a conference that started with 175 participants and 11 panels, and has grown over five years to have more than 1500 attendees and 20 panels. Closely following the explosion in attendance has been the role soccer analytics has played within it. The Sloan Conference hosted it’s first soccer-related panel in 2010 as part of a joint presentation with American football panelists on emerging analytics. In 2011 the sport moved to its own dedicated panel, and the 2012 conference will have yet another soccer-specific panel. The move from side show to a stand-alone panel that is now the number six most viewed SSAC video is no coincidence.

What was once the exclusive purview of the likes of the Milan Lab and a certain French manager in the Premier League exploded into the soccer literary world in late 2009 with the publication of Simon Kuper’s and Stefan Szymanski’s Soccernomics. With clubs looking for unique insights due to competition for limited resources, the field of soccer analytics has become a core competency of teams competing for league championships. The panels within SSAC provide unique insights on the challenges and opportunities presented by soccer analytics from the top practitioners in the game, with many of the themes seen in Moneyball also being present in their discussions.

Billy Beane is sitting in an Oakland A’s office with a whiteboard and computer screen full of data in front of him. Peter Brand, the recently hired assistant GM who produced all the data, is educating Beane on the analytics framework he is creating for the A’s. After overwhelming Beane with reams of data and even the computer code that generated it, Brand summarizes the theory.

“It’s about getting things down to one number. Using stats the way we read them, we’ll find value players that nobody else can see.”

The challenge of developing analytical solutions to soccer’s tactical options is well understood. Unlike games like baseball or football that have well-defined positions and a clear sequential nature to player contributions, soccer is a more fluid game whose continual action makes it tough to categorize individual contributions. The positional data is now readily available to teams, a point made repeatedly by the participants in the 2011 panel. In fact, Blake Wooster summarized that the common problem now facing clubs is too much data and not enough resources nor time to analyze it. The top teams who most need data analyzed are playing every three to four days when domestic and international cup competitions are included. Trying to turn around analysis on the previous match, provide insights on the opposition in the next match, and continually refining the basic models underpinning all of the analysis are tasks that take more than a few days to complete. One would think a natural solution would be to turn to the budding public soccer analytics community, harnessing the power of distributed resources in a way that baseball and basketball have already done.

There are two major barriers to such fan involvement in soccer. First, unlike North American professional sports where the leagues own the data and make it relatively available, the teams own the raw analytics data in European soccer. Gavin Fleig pointed out in the 2011 panel that there is no single league source to which all teams have access, nor is their a desire to share such data with the common fan. Any league wide data that is available has been monetized, providing yet another barrier to contributing to the sport’s numerical understanding by the recreational hobbyist of limited financial means. Second, given the fact that teams pay for much of the raw information themselves they are keen to keep it to themselves for fear of “giving away trade secrets”. The paradox is that the restriction that comes from such lack of sharing makes timely analysis nearly impossible. All of this means that utilizing the distributed resources of fans and supporters who are statistically inclined has found limited acceptance amongst clubs and leagues.

Even in the face of this resistance there is a growing number of analytically inclined fans getting access to data. Statistics groups like Opta will publish their data to users for a fee, and writers can find purchasing power in numbers. One such user is the EPL Index, who makes the data available to subscribers and site authors in exchange for defraying the cost of the data purchase. For a fee as small as £39.95 a year users can get access to a full suite of Opta stats via EPL Index. Writers interested in contributing material to the site can get access to the data for free. This model has led to 40 writers contributing 60 articles per month, with more than 150,000 site visits each month. Aggregators like the EPL Index demonstrate a growing appetite by soccer fans to describe the game they love numerically, even if the clubs are unwilling to engage them en masse. Soccer clubs and leagues would be wise to leverage such interests, especially given the sport's growth potential in the statistically inclined United States.

An unintended benefit of such fan involvement might be the wider agreement on the analytical measurements that matter within the game. In both the 2010 and 2011 conference panels the club representatives commented on the difficulty in player valuation across multiple leagues and varying data sets. Unlike US sports players are not traded in club soccer, but instead have their rights of employment transferred from one club to another via a monetary transaction. Clubs in the English Premier League are spending hundreds of millions of pounds (net) every season on transfers, and constantly desire better valuation methods to ensure a better return on investment. Compounding the financial problem is a cultural one. In the Premier League alone Mike Forde, 2010 panelist, observed that more than 50% of the players are not from the UK and hail from a total of 62 countries. Language barriers are the least of these club’s concerns when it comes to culture. Classification of shots-on-goal and passing data is not only defined differently, but the method of its recording and thus the quality of the data is questionable from league to league.

Even when data is available, translating a player’s performance from a mid-level league (the Dutch Eredivisie, for example) to a top-tier league (the English Premier League) can be difficult. Soccer is a game of eleven players facing another team of eleven players. An individual player’s teammates and the opposition greatly affect his or her performance. Finding robust metrics that can be compared effectively across leagues requires tens to hundreds of thousands of computation-hours and constant international interaction, something beyond the capability of clubs alone. Conferences like SSAC can provide a small bit of assistance in moving the soccer analytics community to a more complete and standardized understanding of the game.

Like any other multinational marketplace, standardization would greatly benefit the soccer analytics world. Where languages, emotions, and historical divisions can fail numbers may help. English may be the lingua franca of our time, but numbers are the true universal language. Standardization around an analytics framework and the factors that mattered to the game would help make transfer fees a bit more rational. It would provide teams with a more reliable way to evaluate players, and avoid the high washout rate seen today with transfers. At its heart, standardization requires public demonstrations of success and failure via analytics. The easiest way to do this is greater fan involvement in the analytics community, which will lead to a few bold clubs to use the theories and demonstrate success with them.

So if fan involvement isn’t currently a priority for clubs, what will drive a greater use of analytics within the game? It will be the business realities facing it.

Billy Beane is flown to Boston after the successful 2002 season in Oakland to meet with new Red Sox owner John Henry. Henry’s background in analytically-driven investment decision making makes him an early adopter of the revolution Beane is introducing to the game of baseball. While the Red Sox’s were not nearly as financially constrained as the A’s, they were looking for unique insights to finally break the Curse of the Bambino that had led to a then-84-year championship drought. Henry wants Beane to be his GM, and is willing to pay any sum of money to get him.

“[A’s owner] Steve [Schott] is offering you a new contract, so why did you return my call?”

Beane’s answer says it all.

“Because it’s the Red Sox. Because I believe science may offer an answer to the Curse of the Bambino. Because I hear you’ve hired Bill James.”

While managing the A’s payroll and talent has been fun, the prestige of taking a big club to its first championship in nearly a century may be more attractive. Beane then observes that Henry is going to anger the rest of the league by hiring an outsider like James. Henry then responds with commentary on the luxury of being a richer club and owner than most.

"One of the great things about money is that it buys a lot of things. One of which is the luxury to disregard what baseball likes and doesn't like"

Much like the Oakland A's in baseball, smaller soccer clubs have always had to find creative ways to match the superior financial resources and inherent attractiveness of bigger clubs. Ian Graham of Decision Technology recounts how fellow 2011 panelist Gavin Fleig’s tenure with Sam Allardyce at Bolton led to such creative team management and resultant over achievement. Graham’s analysis indicated that by most conventional metrics, Bolton was 17th in terms of team quality yet 7th overall in the table. This was because Fleig and Allardyce found players who were trained to take unusual advantage of corners and free kicks, normally low percentage goal scoring opportunities for most teams. Who else helped that Bolton effort? 2010 SSAC panelist Mike Forde.

While Fleig and Forde have backgrounds at Bolton and modern day success stories exist at club’s like AZ Alkmaar in the Dutch Eredivisie, the reality is that top talent on the pitch and in the analysis room eventually moves on to bigger clubs. Unlike Beane, the SSAC panelists couldn’t say no to the allure of taking their analytics insights to bigger clubs and being given the backing of deeper-pocketed owners. Overall, the Sloan Conference’s panel participants from the Premier League have been from two clubs not known for paying minimal fees for hidden talent - Chelsea and Manchester City. It is a bit ironic that representatives from such clubs are included in the panel, given that their clubs have set records for annual losses while amassing the two costliest clubs from a transfer fee perspective. It's not to say that investing heavily for rapid success is incongruous with an analytical approach, but it does beg the question as to how much analytics are being used for player transfer selection, valuation, and wages.

Large clubs are going pay more for the players they desire. They seek better players that are typically on multiple big clubs’ radars, thus raising the player’s transfer fee they can demand. Steven Houston from Chelsea FC admitted as much in the 2011 panel when he pointed out that analytics are for identifying roll players and early performers at his club, not necessarily how much they would pay for internationally renowned players. Managers like Arsene Wenger and the Arsenal board of directors may take principled stands to run balanced books by not paying expensive transfer fees and keeping wages under control, but it won’t win them a championship any time soon. The reality is that one must pay dearly to compete at the top levels of the soccer world.

There are financial reasons for even the biggest clubs to adopt analytics. At the 2010 panel the impact of the salary cap on the need for analytics in the NFL was explored. Such a cap means that that teams must search for ways to get more from the same expenditures as everyone else. Salary caps within each of the national leagues in Europe are impractical given the fractious nature of the multiple national leagues and the varying levels of income available to the individual clubs. Nonetheless, the risks associated with skyrocketing club debt within UEFA have led to the passage of the first set of comprehensive financial rules within the federation. An analogy between US salary caps to the UEFA Financial Fair Play rules was made at the 2011 conference by Ian Graham, suggesting that they may make analytics more valuable in terms of rationalizing player wages and transfer fees. Such rules may help, although authors like the Swiss Ramble have suggested that clubs like Chelsea and Manchester City may find enough loopholes in the rules to minimize the amount of change required of their current business models. More rigorous enforcement of the Fair Play rules will place greater emphasis on analytics, although the extent to which they’re enforced remains to be seen.

In the United States, the financial situation within MLS is a bit different. The league has been obsessed with containing player wage growth as part of an overall conservative business model since its inception. This is based heavily upon the NASL’s financial implosion in the early 1980’s. This has led the league to adopt a relatively low cap with few exceptions. The result has been steady growth in player compensation from year to year punctuated by large jumps in compensation whenever the collective bargaining agreement is renegotiated. This would suggest MLS is ripe for a statistical approach to maximize the value of limited resources. Unfortunately, the financial capabilities of most MLS clubs limit the ability to make such investments.

So if financial incentives may remain more prominent at the lower levels of a league rather than the upper echelons, what other incentives are their for the top performing clubs to use analytics? One reason may be to instill a cultural permanence to compensate for a constantly shifting collection of players and managers.

Early in the 2002 season the A’s are at the bottom of the AL West and the Moneyball experiment is not working. Beane has bought the players, but manager Art Howe won’t play some of them no matter what the numbers suggest. The numbers seem to go against every fiber of his intuition about the game. Without a few critical pieces on the field, the team is floundering. Beane confronts Howe in his office.

“[Art], it doesn’t matter what moves I make if you don’t play the team the way they're designed to be played!”

“[Billy], this is about you doing your job and me doing mine.”

“I didn’t assemble this team for you, Art!”

Similar potential pitfalls for soccer analytics were outlined in both panels - the concept of not instilling a consistent culture by the club’s ownership and management team. Football manager turnover has always been high, and can present a challenge for a club trying to instill a stable model of continual youth development supplemented by savvy purchases of players in the transfer market. Chelsea alone has had eight managers in the nearly nine years since Roman Abramovich bought them. A club without cultural stability in the face of such management change can face continual churn of players that always fit the last manager. These players, who don’t fit the current manager’s system, represent wasted transfer fees and wages and make success extremely difficult. Thus, analytics can be viewed as a way to mitigate player and manager investment risk.

The 2011 panel emphasized the concept of data as method for framing a club’s culture. Gavin Fleig from Manchester City emphasized the importance of recruiting managers, and not just players, that buy into the culture and style of play that the data is attempting to create for the club. Otherwise, a Moneyball-style clash between the manager and the boardroom is inevitable. At the same time, Gary Wooster of ProZone offered the balanced opinion that the analyst must recognize their supplemental roll to the manager’s intuition. Intuition can lead to faster insights into reasons for player success or failure - data is just there to confirm or refute them on a numerical basis. Data takes a long time to generate and analyze, and it is often a 70/30 split in favor of data capture over analysis according to 2011 panelist Bruno Aziza. Realistic expectations for data's use are key to ensuring the correct balance between human and data-driven decision making. Bias too much towards manager intuition, and the likely outcome is player and tactics churn. Too much bias towards data can lead to slow decision making and player or manager resentment. In Moneyball even Beane and Brand had to recognize the value inexpensive locker room soda represented to the players, and in doing so their statistical approach to baseball was softened with a bit of empathy. A club’s owners should desire leadership that strikes such a balance, an approach that is not slavishly driven by a manager’s personality nor an analyst’s data.

Like Brand’s assessment of Beane-as-player in Moneyball, one of the biggest benefits of analytics for club management is the power to say “no.” Owners and managers don’t reach their positions in life without having outsized personalities and opinions. Sometimes those traits can get the better of the manager’s or owner’s judgement, leading them to consider an investment that can’t possibly be supported by the numbers. The ability readily call upon and trust the numbers to refute an ill-advised transfer request can save a club tens of millions of pounds. Who now doubts that Chelsea would love to take back the £50 million they payed Liverpool for Torres, while Liverpool would simultaneously love to take back the £35M of the Torres fee they immediately invested in Andy Carroll? Perhaps there is no amount of data that would have convinced their management teams to act differently, but perhaps it would have at least caused them to pause and think before making such overpriced investments.

Mike Forde spelled out how Chelsea use this "power of no" at the 2010 conference. He pointed out that it is very easy for clubs to pay for a marquee player for which they are not ready. Forde and Chelsea’s approach is to put themselves in the shoes of the top five or six players already at Chelsea, and approach the player evaluation the way those players would. The questions asked of the player, his agent, and the former club reinforce that the team dynamic is key, and that buyer’s remorse in soccer is a bigger risk than many like to admit. Constantly thinking of the way an potential transfer may mess up team chemistry is one way to avoid making a costly mistake.

It is a club’s culture that matters most in attracting new talent. Whether it’s using analytics to build a team that outperforms its financial means or simply to maintain a club’s historical position at the top of the table, the personal connection between players, manager, and the club are what sustains high performing teams. The analytics groups at some of the biggest clubs in Europe are no bigger than six to eight analysts. In MLS, it may be a team of one for most clubs. Analytics plays a supplementary role rather than a defining one in soccer today. It’s presence is growing, being driven by an increasingly global competition for managerial and player talent. Ironically, it’s analytics that are trying to bring forward a clearer definition of the human actions that contribute to team success. It’s those human stories that we’re most interested in. Imagine the power of understanding what really makes Messi one of the greatest ever, why the Spanish national team is so successful on the pitch, or why Robin Van Persie is having such a good run of form lately. It wouldn’t subtract from the beauty of the game. It would only add to it, and would help us understand how such human or collective greatness is achieved. It’s that human element that makes the numbers so compelling.

As I write this article the insights from the last conference are already a year old, and analytics trends and theories change much faster than that. It will be interesting to see what themes and personal stories are brought to the 2012 SSAC soccer panel. Beyond the panels themselves, the conference offers participants an opportunity to get away from their analytical models and connect with other likeminded sports analysts and lay statisticians. The human element extends beyond the conference itself, and into the connections that are made and grown well after the conference ends. If the previous two conferences with soccer analytics panels are any indication, the 2012 edition will be full of things we won’t find in any soccer statistics book.

Changes Coming...

2012-01-22T20:58:00.000-08:00

I am in the process of making several changes to the blog. The first one everyone will be able to notice in the next day or so is a blog-specific domain name. I have registered www.abeautifulnumbersgame.com via Google Apps. They have stated it may take up to 48 hours for the domain to show up, but after that point all references to the current URL will redirect to the new one. All of the links on the existing blog posts will still work just fine, so the change should be transparent to everyone.

I am unsure of the impacts to anyone who is utilizing an RSS feed of the blog. The documentation I can find does not state whether or not your current RSS feed will still work in the future. The safest bet is to just sign up for a new one once the new URL has taken effect. It should populate with all of my prior posts as they carryover to the new domain.

In a few weeks I'll also be making some stylistic changes to the blog background and layout. It shouldn't be anything major, but it has been two years since I launched the blog and did any updates to its imagery. Hopefully everyone finds them agreeable.

An Alternative History of Premier League Champions

2012-01-20T05:30:00.000-08:00

A post long time coming has finally gone live over at the Transfer Price Index that re-orders all 19 seasons worth of Premier League tables based upon transfer fees. The model used to generate the data for the post is the same m£XIR model I used extensively in the second half of last year for posts analyzing Aston Villa, David Moyes, and Arsene Wenger.

Statheads should find the full alternative table by season very entertaining. They'll also find the number of m£XIR championships won by Manchester United, even when taking transfer fees into effect, to be a bit too much to believe. Readers should keep in mind that the majority of these came during the era of Beckham, Giggs, Scholes, and the Nevilles and that therefore they had an abnormally low overall transfer expenditure for their success. While United's total number of championships is reduced, they still remain the overall leader.

Liverpool and Arsenal fans will be pleased to see how well their clubs do when transfer spending is taken into account when evaluating success. The more rare Nottingham Forest fan will also find something to like in this post. Along with each season's rankings I've also provided a compilation of all time best single season performances regardless of which season they occurred within.

I'll follow up next month with another post in the m£XIR series where I look at each manager's overall PPM differential to the m£XIR model. This will allow for the evaluation of each manager's complete tenure versus others.

The Impact of Player Minutes on MLS Conference Semifinal Success

2012-01-12T05:00:00.000-08:00

I've been writing for nearly a year about how MLS teams that play in a greater number of competitive matches outside of league play end up paying a penalty when it comes to MLS's playoff format. It's a penalty that is unique to the conference semifinals that use a two-legged aggregate goal format, whereas the conference finals that were single elimination through last year do not see such a penalty for teams who play a greater number of extra-MLS matches. Several readers of those posts had asked that a more refined metric be studied - one that actually quantified the number of minutes played by each playoff team or the individual players within it. While more games can certainly be understood as more taxing on teams come playoff time, there is a difference in how clubs can approach such extra demands. Improved player rotation in non-MLS competitions can minimize the wear-and-tear on the preferred starting XI that are utilized in the playoffs. The key to such an analysis is finding a comprehensive database of MLS playing time statistics.

Just such a database exists via a publicly available resource. Climbing the Ladder's MLS Player Lineup Database has maintained a record of every match's scoreline, in which competition it occurred, the players who participated in each match, time of any substitutions, as well as goal scorers and those who assisted in the goals. It's a gold mine for MLS statheads, but it does require some post processing to make full use of the data that is contained in text strings within its Excel files.

Elijah at the Climbing the Ladder blog was gracious enough to provide me with a pre-release of the 2011 database so that all seasons from 2003 forward could be included in my analysis. I've partnered with Sarah Rudd at OnFooty.com to put the data into a more database-query friendly format as well as clean up a few misspelled names. Sarah's also written about the concept of playing time management and squad rotation, so it was only natural that she and I partner to explore the concept further via the CTL database.

Our post processing allows us to look at player minutes over an entire season with all extra competitions included (US Open Cup, SuperLiga, CONCACAF Champions Cup/League, etc.). This post will utilize the data on minutes played prior to the conference semifinal round to see if any additional predictors of playoff success can be realized. Subsequent posts will look at similar effects on later playoff rounds.

Methodology and Model

Like previous posts, a binary logistic regression (BLR) model was used to estimate the likelihood of a team winning in the conference semifinal round of the playoffs. The factors included in the study were:

Season Series PPM Differential
Seed Difference
Season Series Goal Differential
Difference in Coaching Experience
Total Number of Games Played Differential
Final 5 Games Point Differential
Difference in Season Goal Differential
Median Minutes Played Differential
Interquartile Range (IQR) Minutes Played Differential

The minutes played, difference in coaching experience, and total number of games played data comes from the CTL database. All other data comes from publicly available sources like the MLS website. The median and IQR values for minutes played from each club are used in lieu of the mean and standard deviation as the data associated with player minutes over a season is not normally distributed.

There's always the risk of introducing multi-colinearity when adding new variables to a regression model. This is especially the case when looking at the number of matches (or the differential in matches between two teams) and the number of minutes players accrue through the season (or the differential in minutes between two teams). It's intuitive to think there is a correlation between the two.

It turns out the median and IQR minutes played differentials are correlated to the number of games played (statistically significant with p-values much less than 0.05), although the relationship between the two is relatively week (see R-squared values in graphs below - click graph to enlarge).

This doesn't necessarily mean the model is co-linear and therefore of little value. In fact, the effect may be quite the opposite. It's quite conceivable that the greater spread of minutes (higher IQR) may lead to higher odds of playoff success, while it's already understood that a larger number of games is detrimental to those odds. What matters is testing the outcome of the model for multi-colinearity. Such tests showed multi-colinearity did not exist. The mild linear relationship between the minutes played statistics and the number of games played is an item of interest that will be explored further.

There are also two ways to look at player data that would produce very different estimates for the median and IQR values. One method utilizes data from all players who played at least one minute at a club over all competitions within a season to measure the overall effect of the matches on player time distribution. Another method utilizes only the data for players who appear in the semifinal round of the playoffs - a reduced data set from the first method that looks at the impact to only those players who featured in the playoff round. As the desire is to have a predictive model for future years of playoffs, the first method was used as it does not rely on a projection of starting lineups to make a prediction. It also accounts for things like mid-season trades, injuries, and player churn that may greatly affect the time a player spends on the pitch for a specific club prior to the start of the playoffs. This is key to understanding how much playing time a player may have had to work with the rest of his teammates.

In re-running the BLR model for all of the factors listed above, only the following three were found to be statistically significant (p-value > 0.05):

Games Played Difference
Median Minutes Played Differential
IQR Minutes Played Differential

The results of the BLR are displayed in the table below. The median and IQR minute differential factors have been divided by 100 to put them on a scale similar to the game difference factor and provide for a better comparison of odds ratios.

The results of the BLR model demonstrate that the game difference factor continues to have the biggest impact on conference semifinal odds. The odds ratio communicates the percent change in odds when moving one unit of measure up or down (game difference or every 100 minutes of playing time for a player). The odds ratio of each minutes played factor communicates that each increase in median and IQR differential units (in this case, every 100 minutes) leads to a 31% and 27% increase in the odds of winning the conference semifinal, respectively. Conversely, a unit increase in game difference leads to a 39% decrease in odds, or a 64% increase in odds for each fewer game played.

Now that the relative impact of different factors on the change in odds of winning a conference semifinal are understood, what is the impact on the actual odds of winning the conference semifinal? For such an analysis the complete BLR model, which simultaneously evaluates the impact of all three variables, must be evaluated.

The Impact of Club Median and IQR Minutes Differential

The BLR model is four-dimensional, which makes visualizing its behavior a bit difficult. A simpler way to view the data is to hold all other variables constant at a value of zero and then plot the changing odds as a function of the variable of interest. Such a plot is made below for the median and IQR minutes differential factors.

The graph puts numbers to the trends described above for the BLR model's odds ratios. The trend of increasing odds with increasing IQR makes sense. Increasing IQR indicates a bigger spread in the distribution of playing minutes to individual players throughout the season, which could be indicative of effective player rotation. The trend of increasing odds with increasing median minute differential may not be as intuitive given that it might correlate with the number of games played and thus make us think players are being overused. However, this neglects the reasons for the opposite effect of a median minutes differential deficit. Such a deficit would indicate a fewer number of minutes for a greater number of players, which may be due to trades during the season, a large amount of lineup experimentation trying to find a lineup that works best, or a number of injuries to regular starters a good bit of the way into the season. Either way, it is indicative of a team that has a greater number of players playing a lower amount of time, which affords less time for the team to gel.

Whatever the reason, the model indicates there is a sweet spot for squad rotation. Players need to be rotated through to encourage a distribution of work and raise the IQR, but a core group of players getting a greater number of minutes bodes well for team success in the playoffs.

A Comprehensive Model For the Conference Semifinals

While visualization is easier in two dimensions, the reality is that the BLR model for conference semifinal odds is actually expressed via four dimensions. Given that the coefficients for the median and IQR minutes played factors are relatively similar, a single three dimensional graph of the model's behavior against the game differential factor and median minutes played factor can express how odds change with the combination of factors. Such a graph is shown below.

The lessor effect of difference in played minutes can be observed at the extreme ends of the game differential axis . The graphical representation appears as a small droop as one comes forward in the graph at a game differential of -15, while a small rise in odds can be seen as the difference goes positive at a game differential of +15. Readers can imagine a compounding effect of droop/rise when both player minute factors are added into the equation.

As the game differential factor approaches zero, the effect of player minute differential on the odds of winning a conference semifinal become more pronounced. In fact, at a game differential of zero the odds of winning the conference semifinal collapse to the two dimensional graphs shown earlier in this post.

The result is that between 0 and either +15 or -15, the odds of winning an MLS conference semifinal matchup take on what may be best described as a "twisted S curve" shape. Again, the level of compounding of the twist in the S-curve is dictated by how far each factor's value is away from zero.

Conclusions

The BLR model for MLS conference semifinal odds has been updated to account for factors that take into account squad rotation, long term player injury, and squad churn. It now measures both overall team fatigue (number of matches) and squad management (player minutes). Such a comprehensive model allows for an evaluation of how well teams have done from 2003 onward given the fatigue and rotation with which they started their playoff run. Additionally, the single elimination BLR (2011 wild card + 2003-2011 conference finals) should be re-examined in light of the player minutes data now available. That topic will be covered in a future post that continues to focus on the factors that contribute to MLS playoff success.

Guest Post at The Ball Is Round: My First Game

2012-01-03T13:03:00.000-08:00

You Never Forget Your First Time

I recently added The Ball Is Round blog to my RSS feeds to get some non-statistical balance to my soccer blog library. They have a neat little subsite titled My First Game where fans the world over can submit recollections of their first live attendance at a soccer match.

The guys at the site were nice enough to post my recounting of my first Seattle Sounders FC match in October 2009. It seems so long ago with how much soccer I've watched and written about since then, but in reality it was only slightly more than two years ago. Writing about such an event helped force me to take stock of what I've witnessed over the last three years of watching the Sounders on TV and in person (my first match came after a full season of watching them on TV).

What started as an obsession my wife and parents thought would die out after a few months has pretty much become a lifestyle choice. I now read dozens of blog posts a week, write a few myself every month, purchase software to aid in statistical analysis of the game, dedicate hundreds of dollars towards Sounders tickets every year, and am attempting to add "published soccer writer" to my resume. Something this dominant in my life is approached with great seriousness.

While all of these changes in my life are things I appreciate every day, it is always good to be reminded why I dedicate so much of my time and resources to analyzing and writing about the sport. It's because I absolutely love standing for 90+ minutes in a stadium full of supporters observing a game that is simultaneously both simple and beautifully complicated. It's a passion I have been able to share with my wife and two daughters, one that bonds random people on the street into a family of 36,000 at each Sounders match. For Seattleites, it is a rare experience to behold given our awful 40-year relationship with professional sports.

Simon Kuper repeatedly reminds us to take the game a lot less seriously because that's what it really is - a game that doesn't really matter that much in the grand scheme of life. Sites like The Ball is Round and their My First Game subsite help provide a way for doing just that. Any words worth writing should be approached with at least a mild degree of seriousness, but providing a forum for recounting the child-like appreciation we had at our first match is a way to utilize such seriousness to enjoy the game for what it is.

I highly encourage you check out The Ball is Round site, and would love to hear recommendations as to other sites that provide similar outlets for writing.

An Existential Debate on the Meaning of a Club

2011-12-24T14:49:00.000-08:00

I haven't been posting much lately, mostly due to the amount of writing and data processing required for two larger projects on which I am working. The first is now largely completed - a final draft of an 8,000 word article on the soccer culture in Seattle that has been submitted to The Howler for publication. It addresses the unique relationship the city has with its professional franchise, Seattle Sounders FC, given the city's often strained relationship with its other professional sports franchises.

A discussion on the same topic happened between Jason Davis and the Sounder at Heart Twitter account on the same day as I submitted article to The Howler . It centered around the common conflict for North American soccer fans - to either call their local team they support a club or a franchise. This is due to the key differences between North American and European leagues. Teams in Europe are clubs because that's how they start out when they enter the lowest league in their nation's soccer ladder - an association of amateurs and semi-pros bonded by their love of the sport and the desire to create a sense of family within it. Teams in the US, whether they be a soccer team or some other major professional sports team, are a franchise. They are granted the exclusive permission to operate as a team within a closed league that determines who is admitted (and rarely contracted) and sometimes where team moves when the league and the team feel they're not getting a fair shake by their local fans. Just like franchises in the rest of the business world, the will of the individual team is subjugated to the will of the league to the extent that sales of franchises must be approved by the other owners.

Nevertheless, distinctions like these are not nearly as clear cut for North American fans, many of whom are attracted to soccer as a direct rejection of everything to do with American professional sports. The outlandish salaries. The threats of owners to move teams when the local population won't shell out $500M+ for a new stadium every twenty years. The garish broadcasts where the infographics and instant replays are often more important than the actual game being played. It all produces a feeling that the fans are lucky to have such a club, rather than the other way around.

Soccer fans in the US and Canada know that their local teams, whether they be in MLS or one of the lower tiers of the North American ladder, need them as much as the fans need the local teams. As the two grow with each other over the years, a local team takes on a virtual Schrodinger's Cat existence: it is both a franchise in a literal sense and a club in practice.

Such duality is tough for some to accept, and can lead to the types of discussions that Sounder at Heart highlighted the other night. That led to Jason Davis to make the following statement that perfectly sums up how we should look at the duality.

"The franchise is what the owner owns. The club is what the fans and players build around it." (click here for a more detailed discussion)

Some opinions not withstanding, it is a club atmosphere that we supporters in Seattle are continually creating. It's what every supporter wants, even if the desire is based upon soccer hipsterism. The reality is that a club atmosphere created by the supporters is what puts butts in the seats, fills lines in local newspapers, and drives bandwidth on blogs.

Franchises can become more like a club as years pass by. No one could ever imagine the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, Pittsburgh Steelers, or LA Lakers playing anywhere else in the United States. Their history is too deep, their identity to wrapped up in the cities they represent, and their fans too fervent. Save for the reality of each of them being franchises in their respective leagues, they've taken on the look of iconic clubs the world over because of the history created by the players, coaches, and fans.

I hate the US closed league/franchise model. I find that the players wages are suppressed more than other leagues, and the players are the ones doing most of the work and generating the bulk of the TV revenue. The fact that a team like the LA Clippers in the NBA or Seattle Mariners in Major League Baseball can fail for so long and still get their share of the league's revenue is absurd. It denies other people the ability to invest in the sport they love, and just as importantly it denies the fans the great team they deserve. More often than not, the focus is more on the league's success, and not creating a genuine bond between franchises, players, and fans. Save for the rare examples above, the reality is that whenever the relationship between the franchise and the city goes sour, the league simply looks to move the franchise. There is no loyalty to the local fans nor the club atmosphere they've created while the club was operating in or near the city.

This has real implications for newer leagues and expansion franchises. Passionate supporters get a league or a franchise started, and the large barriers to entry in the North American sports market make such a founding moment both an exciting and precarious event at the same time. What North American soccer fans need more of is a appreciation of true club atmospheres within their game when they do exist. The modern professional game is still young at only fifteen years old, and we quickly forget the league went through a near-death contraction only a decade ago. It's future is bright, but it's still a business where its franchises must be supported by fans who desire a club culture and eventually make money. We may not be able to get the same business structure as those found in other soccer leagues, but we can create a culture around our sport that rivals those found at the clubs in those leagues. We supporters, the league, and the franchises must give time for that culture to develop. The alternative is a league that really is just made up of faceless franchises rather than culturally deep clubs,

Academic Reasearch on Premier League Managers

2011-12-13T05:45:00.000-08:00

At the top of the managerial heap,

no matter how you cut it...

I came across an interesting research paper last week courtesy of fellow statto Paul Tomkins. It's entitled The Performance of Football Club Managers: Skill or Luck? and is authored by Adrian R. Bell, Chris Brooks, and Tom Markham. All three are attached to the ICMA Centre at the University of Reading's Henley school of business. In the paper the three examine which Premier League managers over and under perform when a number of factors (injuries, suspensions, extra games, transfer spend, wages, etc.) are taken into account. The paper is a fascinating revelation of managerial performance. If you can get access to the full text, I highly recommend a read of it. Some of the highlights include:

Based upon the researchers' model, managerial over and under performance can be evaluated by their tenth match in charge of a club.
The authors found that net transfer spending year-to-year is not a statistically significant predictor, but readily admit this is likely due to the fact that they do not account for the cumulative effect of transfer spending year-over-year. This was a criticism I made of the similar conclusion in Soccernomics, and one I've routinely addressed via models based upon the Transfer Price Index which doe take such year-over-year benefits in transfer spending into account.
The authors note that a team increasing their wage bill by £100M equates to an increase of 0.8 expected points per match. Given the 2009/2010 wage bills in the Premier League, only one team was capable of such a gap against more than half of the teams (Chelsea) as the median wage bill was £54M. Most teams competed with much less of a financial advantage within a match.
It turns out the total number of matches played is significant in one direction and insignificant in another (you'll have to read the paper to get the details). The authors observe several reasons for the dichotomy, and mention that "large number of non-league games are only an issue for teams that are successful in those competitions..." This is a similar criticism I have made of MLS's playoff format and how it penalizes teams that are successful in non-league competitions.
At the top of the managerial heap, even when factoring in the expectations that come with player wages, availability, and transfers are Alex Ferguson, Guus Hiddink, Arsene Wenger, Jose Mourinho, Rafa Benitez, Sam Allardyce, David Moyes, Steve McClaren, and Martin O'Neill. These men get/got the most out of what was available to them.
The authors identify Steve Wigley (Southampton 2004/05), Mick McCarthy (Sunderland 2005/06), and Aidy Boothroyd (Watford 2006/07) as managers who under performed early enough in their tenures that that should have been sacked much earlier than they eventually were.
There are also a number of other managers singled out as being sacked when such a sacking wasn't warranted by the authors' model. Included in this group are Glenn Roeder (Newcastle United 2006/07), Chris Coleman (Fulham 2006/07), Martin Jol (Tottenham 2007/08), Avram Grant (Chelsea 2007/08), and Sven-Goran Eriksson (Manchester City 2007/08)

Statistical models won't ever override the passions of the supporters or the demanding nature of owners who want trophies sooner rather than later. Perhaps they can at least inform decision makers as to when such passions are warranted or unwarranted, especially when the tools at a manager's disposal are taken into consideration. Sackings and constant changes in managerial direction can be very disruptive to everyone's end goal of championship glory. This paper contributes much to that understanding - I highly recommend giving it a read.

Considering a Switch to SPSS: What are Pitfalls and Benefits?

2011-12-05T12:00:00.000-08:00

My well worn 4 year old Compaq desktop, from which I do most of my statistical analysis, is finally getting slow enough that I need to get a new computer. The rest of the computers, phones, and tablets in my house are Apple product, so I am looking at getting a Mac Mini. I'll be reusing all the rest of the peripherals from the Compaq for now as they work fine and I am not hung up on getting their Mac equivalents. However, this switch in computer hardware and thus OS is presenting an interesting opportunity for me.

I have an older version of Minitab that I run for most back end analysis for this blog. I then export Minitab's results to Excel 2010 to make the graphical presentation of the data look a whole lot better. I've learned to use Minitab via my Six Sigma training, and it's very useful for what I do. The trouble is, I only have a Windows version of it and would really prefer to not have to constantly switch over to the Windows OS via Boot Camp on the Mini whenever I want to do analysis and/or blog. It kind of defeats the purpose of getting the Mini. I'd like to do the analysis and blogging while running Mac OS. Here's the trouble - a Minitab license for a Mac does not exists, so purchasing an update for my Mac is not possible.

Luckily, I can get a steeply discounted (and legal!) copy of SPSS for Mac OS or Windows. We're talking less than $100 for a package that retails for $2700! The package available to me comes with the following SPSS modules:

SPSS Statistics Base
Advanced Statistics
Custom Tables
Forecasting
Regression
Tables Original
Trends Original

A basic description of each module can be found here.

My concern is at a minimum maintaining the availability of analysis in Minitab. Losing functionality I use routinely today is not an attractive thought to have My most frequently used functions in Minitab are:

Descriptive statistics: normality plot and check, mean, median, standard deviation, quartiles, etc.
Normal Sample comparisons: two and one sample t and p
Correlation tests
Box-Cox Transforms
Non-parametric tests such as Mann-Whitney
Linear and Non-Linear Regression with ability to generate prediction (PI) and confidence interval (CI) data off of "new observations"
Binary Logistic Regression (with PI and CI data generation capabilities)
Ordinal Logistic Regression (with PI and CI data generation capabilities)

My read through of the module descriptions indicates that I'd have much, if not all of Minitab's functionality. Items (6) through (8) seem to be pretty clearly called out in the Regression module. What I can't seem to find much on is (4) and (5), which are critical given the non-normal nature of many data sets with which I work. Does anyone know if the SPSS modules I listed contain features (4) and (5)?

Finally, beyond the actually calculations available, I am interested in understanding the user interface for SPSS. My father used SPSS 30 years ago when completing his operations research masters. It has a good bit of legacy code associated with it, much like Minitab. That can sometimes limit the GUI overlay capabilities - Minitab can have some frustrating limitations due the legacy code. Having no experience with SPSS, I am concerned I might run in to different limitations. Does anyone know if SPSS's UI is as good as Minitab's or better?

Thank you to anyone who does provide feedback, and let me know of any other pitfalls or benefits I may have missed.

More on Manchester City

2011-12-01T04:00:00.000-08:00

The Red Devils Are Always Lurking Close Behind...

Yesterday's post on Manchester City's start to the season and its implications for season ending form prompted a good bit of discussion on Twitter, a few emails to me, and even the rare comment on my blog. I've responded to nearly every one personally, but there's just too much good data to not follow up with another quick post.

As I noted in my original post, my binary logistic regression wasn't very elegant and that there are far more sophisticated models out there for predicting City's odds of winning the league. Two of them put City's odds at much more conservative, lower estimates than my quick assessment.

As of December 1st, Statto.com has City's odds of finishing at the top at 1.67:1. Manchester United's odds are listed as 3.25:1. The next closest team according to Statto is Chelsea (15:1), although they're way off the point pace. This means that Statto.com sees City's odds of winning the EPL as nearly two times greater than United's.
Euro Club Index, which looks at things like future opponents' strength and a club's prior performance over time, rate City's and United's odds of finishing at the top of the table even at 44% a piece. The next closest club is Tottenham with an 8.5% chance.

Tommy Burke asked how Manchester United might respond in the final two-thirds of the season given City's early lead. Luckily, friend of this blog and fellow Soccer Analyst Omar Chaudhuri has quantified Manchester United's late season performances at his 5 Added Minutes blog. It turns out that Manchester United really turn things on in the winter months. In fact, they're quite pedestrian when it comes to the final 9 to 10 matches of the season (scroll down to the comments section of the linked post to see the numbers). So, if Manchester United is going to catch and pass City, they'll likely do it by the time we get to the beginning of March if history is any indication.

Finally, Syntese commented on the last post and wondered what kind of points lead Manchester City should have at this point in the season given their record breaking form after 13 matches. One way to look at this would be a regression of the PPM differential between 1st and 2nd place teams vs. the PPM of the first place team, both taken at match day 13. Unfortunately, the statistical test for correlation is failed for such a relationship. I have plotted the data below to make a graphical comparison between Manchester City and Manchester United as well as the previous 16 seasons' 1st and 2nd place pairs. A regression plot with an associated R-squared value is shown just to demonstrate how bad a fit it is.

Nonetheless, we can draw a few conclusions from the graph and associated data. Manchester City has the second highest overall PPM differential to the second place club (+0.38). Only the 2005/06 Chelsea squad, who started out the first 13 games with a +0.53 differential, would start with a bigger lead. There have been four teams who have had a 0.25 PPM advantage or greater after thirteen matches - 1995/96 Newcastle United, 1997/98 Manchester United, 2005/06 Chelsea, and 2008/09 Chelsea - and only two of them - 2005/06 Chelsea and 2009/10 Chelsea - ended up finishing first in the final table. The other two squads finished second each of their years. This is one of the reasons why a binary logistic regression model that uses PPM differential as the single input variable to predict odds of finishing top of the table at season's end results in the relationship not being statistically significant.

So, perhaps Manchester City is right where they should be - both in total points and gap to second - but they cannot rest as the perennial winter performers, Manchester United, are only five points back.

Quantifying Manchester City's Start to the Season

2011-11-28T05:00:00.000-08:00

We're now thirteen games into the 2011/12 English Premier League season, which means we're just over one third of the way towards crowning the Premier League champion. So far the season has looked like it's Manchester City's championship to lose, with the remaining teams left to battle for one of the three remaining Champions League spots. City's start to the season is certainly hot - 35 points from an available 39 (11-2-0 for a 2.69 PPM) and a +31 GD (2.38 GD per match) - and is tops at the 13 match mark in the league's 20 team/38 match history by besting the 05/06 Chelsea and 06/07 Manchester United totals for points (34 for a 2.62 PPM) and the 08/09 Chelsea total for GD (28 for a GD per match of 2.15). However, as that 08/09 Chelsea squad can attest, starting hot does not guarantee finishing at the top. In fact, of the 16 teams that led the league after thirteen matches during the league's 20 team era, only 6 of them have gone on to finish in that position at the end of the season. Five dropped to second, three dropped to third, one (2002/03 Liverpool) dropped to fifth, and one (1998/99 Aston Villa) dropped to sixth by season's end.

So just how hot has been Manchester's City's start when considering the variation in teams' performance that sit at the top of the table after match day 13, what does it mean as to the odds of them maintaining their torrid pace for points and goal differential the rest of the year, and what does it mean for their chances of finishing top of the table come May?

Quantifying City's Hot Start

Combing through Statto.com's historical archive of tables by match day, a comprehensive list of tables for match day 13 were compiled for the 1995/96 through 2010/11 seasons. The tables were then isolated for the teams at the top of the table for each season after the 13th match day. Luckily, the results for goals per match and points per match for these top-of-the-table clubs produce a normal distribution of data for each statistic, so a Z-score approach can be taken to quantify just how rare City's start is to this season.

Looking at goal differential per game, the next closest team to City's 2.38 GD per match after 13 matches is the 2008/09 Chelsea average of 2.15. The average GD of clubs at the top of the table after 13 matches is 1.45, while the standard deviation is 0.4362. This means that Manchester City's start correlates to a Z-score of 2.17, while Chelsea's 2008/09 start translates to a Z-score of 1.64. Those Z-scores can then be translated to percentiles, which communicate what percentage of teams in first place after 13 matches would finish with a lower goal differential per match given the variation we've seen in the first 16 seasons. Manchester City's percentile is 98.5, while the 2008/09 Chelsea performance was in the 94.9 percentile. That is to say that Manchester City's goal differential performance is better than 98.5% of the expected first place performances at the 13 match mark over time, and is 4.5% higher/better than the 2008/09 Chelsea start to the season.

A similar story can be told when it comes to PPM. Manchester City has started the season with a 2.69 PPM average, narrowly besting the 2.62 PPM start realized by the 2005/06 Manchester United and 2006/07 Chelsea squads. Taking into account historical average (2.37 PPM) and standard deviation (0.178 PPM) data, the corresponding Z-scores for City and Chelsea/United are 1.80 and 1.39, respectively. This puts City's percentile at 96.4 and Chelsea/United's percentile at 91.8. Manchester City's PPM performance is better than 96% of the expected performances by first place teams at the 13 match mark over time, and is 4% higher/better than the next closest performances on record.

Projecting City's Pace through the End of the Season

But will Manchester City be able to maintain this level of performance throughout the season? History suggests not.

Along with capturing Statto.com's data at the 13 match mark, similar data was captured for each season's final table. That final table data was then compared to the match day 13 data to examine what happens to PPM and GD per match pace by the end of the season. The results are the regression analyses captured in the graphs below (click on either graph to enlarge).

The solid lines represent the nominal regression equation based upon the black points from the previous sixteen seasons, while the dashed lines represent the bounds of the 50th percentile prediction intervals (PIs) given the variation seen in the regression model. Those bounds represent the range of the middle 50% of the data, while another way to interpret the lower bound is to state that a club only has a 25% chance of finishing with a PPM or GD per match total lower than that line given the same statistic's value after 13 matches. Manchester City's 2011/12 pace is represented by the light blue dot on each graph, with its y-value set to the projected season end value based upon the nominal regression line. Despite the lower R-squared values both data sets met the statistical tests for linear correlation, and passed the statistical tests for regression fits and residuals.

While the slope term of the PPM regression is slightly greater than one (1.0028), the intercept term (-0.3086) is larger than the resultant product of any match day 13 PPM and the slope term. This suggests there is a slight fall off to be expected by season's end when it comes to point accumulation. Based upon City's current PPM, the nominal prediction is a finish of 2.39 PPM and a 50% PI of 2.22 to 2.58 PPM. Manchester City has only a 25% chance of finishing with a PPM lower than 2.22, which is certainly championship material as it would put them right in the middle for PPM of clubs who have won a Premier League championship.

Far less sustainable is City's start in relation to GD per match. The slope term in the GD per match regression is much less than one (0.689) while the intercept term is only slightly positive (0.0598). This means there is a much bigger fall of in GD per match than in PPM. Based upon City's current GD per match, the nominal prediction is a finish of 1.70 GD per match and a 50% PI of 1.44 to 1.99. Manchester City has only a 25% chance of finishing with a GD per match lower than 1.44 - only four EPL champions have finished with a higher GD per match.

Projecting City's Odds of Finishing As Champions

So where does this put City's odds of winning the EPL Championship? Certainly more sophisticated models could look at strength of remaining schedule, odds of injury, distractions from other competitions, and many other attributes that contribute to a full season of results. Ironically, a far simpler model that looks at City's PPM can help quantify their odds of finishing at the top of the table.

Using the Statto.com data, a binary logistic regression (BLR) model was created. The outcome used in the model was "top of table" vs. "not top of table". Both the constant and variable (PPM) terms tested statistically significant. The plot below shows the nominal and 50% PI lines demonstrating the odds of winning the Premier League when the first place team at match day 13 has a range of PPM values. Again, Manchester City is represented by a light blue dot with it's y-value set to the projected odds based upon the nominal regression equation. Click on the graph to enlarge.

The BLR model's nominal projection is a 94% chance of City winning the EPL Championship. The 50% PI bounds are 85% and 98%, respectively. Manchester City's odds of winning the EPL in 2011/12 are very good based upon their start to the season.

Conclusions

While Manchester City's performance will certainly drop off as the season progresses, there is no doubting how good of a start they've had so far. They're not only off to the best start in the history of the Premier League, they're also off to a start that would be better than 96% to 98% of the all the teams that would be in first place after 13 matches. They're also highly likely to win the league. That being said, Manchester United is only 5 points behind and Tottenham is only 7 points back with game in hand. Things are far from over, and I will check back in at the 2/3's point in the season (26 matches) to see if City has kept up their fast start.

A Projection of the Points Needed to Qualify for 2012 MLS Playoffs

2011-11-26T07:30:00.000-08:00

Another MLS season goes by, another MLS season schedule and playoff format is published...

The league released a new schedule and playoff format for the 2012 season during the run up to this year's MLS Cup. The 2012 season will see the return of the unbalanced schedule, while the playoff format will see an expansion of the home-and-away aggregate goals format into the conference finals. First, a few reactions to the new schedule and playoff format before I get into the impacts I see in qualifying for the latter.

The Changes in Format

MLS has gone to the long anticipated unbalanced schedule for 2012, and made the following statement explaining why:

“We have established a fair and compelling format for the 2012 season,” MLS executive vice president Nelson Rodriguez said in a statement. “This regular season will include more games between regional rivals and less total travel than we have seen in recent years. Because of the wide geographic distribution of MLS clubs, this structure should improve the quality of play, while continuing to give every club an equal chance of qualifying for the MLS Cup Playoffs.”

I have long doubted the "travel = exhaustion" excuse in sports. It always seems intuitive, since jet lag affects most of us when we travel and we're not running for miles during each stop of our journey. It even makes more sense when MLS is compared to their European counterparts who all travel within countries the size of California or smaller when they play in their domestic leagues. However, when it comes to wins and losses the theory just doesn't pan out. Scorecasting did a great job of demonstrating that the vast majority of home wins can be explained by referee bias, and not fatigue due to team travel. Perhaps MLS would make the argument that the quality of play of both teams is poor due to so much travel, and that they're more concerned about the quality of the product on the pitch and less concerned about the home pitch advantage. Fair enough, although I don't think travel is the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to improving match quality. Rapid league expansion that has forced a dilution in the talent pool available to MLS clubs combined with continuing desires by players to join more prestigious leagues in Europe are likely the bigger culprit. Perhaps the league should take a breather from expansion, and let the league format stabilize for a while if they're so concerned about the quality of play.

This isn't to say that the league doesn't have a justifiable reason for taking this action, but let's just admit what it is about - money and setting up its future for more than 20 teams. Keeping cross country travel down means more savings for the owners, as does not expanding the regular season to the 36 matches required for a balanced schedule (although not adding matches may be hurting the national team). This is key in a league still trying to establish itself financially. Finally, if MLS really does desire to have more than 20 teams in the league and will avoid promotion and relegation like every other US professional sports league, there is simply no way to keep a balanced schedule when they reach that point.

So what is the impact of the regular season format? The biggest impact may be felt at the "regional rivalry" level that MLS seemed so concerned about. MLS strangely left Houston in the Eastern Conference, which means they will only face FC Dallas once per year and will be alternating the venue from year to year. Canadian clubs in the East (Montreal and Toronto) will only face Vancouver once as well. Yes, this isn't exactly local, but from what I am reading on line this presents a bit of a challenge for soccer fans in the north looking to better establish a vibrant, professional Canadian soccer community. For teams in the West who do remain in the Western conference, this arrangement presents a bit of a challenge for their local cup competitions. Given that Western Conference teams will play each other three times a season, one team will inherently have a home pitch advantage. That's not a very good format for a regional cup that relies on a balance in venues to minimize the effects of home pitch advantage. The new format will increase the number of local matches, but I don't know if the format will help the rivalries in the Western Conference.

I also suspect the Conference formats that rely upon three matches between each team will end up producing a bigger disparity in points distribution. This is due to the higher likelihood of better clubs taking advantage of an increased number of games against weaker clubs. Playing more games repeatedly against the same competition is a recipe for achieving the expected result over time rather than the upsets that can come with fewer matches. This will likely lead to increased disparity in points earned between the better and worse clubs. One also hopes that the league looks at the prior seasons' results to ensure teams from each conference get a balance of strong and weak opponents when playing in the interconference matches. A few years from now, when the 20th team is admitted to MLS, the disparity in the number of interconference matches played by each conference should disappear.

The changes to the playoff format have also provided a few new wrinkles. MLS has finally recognized that if they're going to go to the trouble of having a playoff, they need to provide some type of reward to the Supporter's Shield winners. Starting in 2012, the Supporter's Shield will host MLS Cup if they're able to make it that far.

The other major change - the expansion of the two-legged aggregate goal format to the Conference Finals - is not a good one. I've written plenty here and here about the penalty better teams who are involved in more competitions pay in such a format. Such a format makes sense for competitions such as Champions League where it may be the first time that season the clubs have met. It makes no sense as a playoff format that now can only include teams within a conference who have played each other three times already that season. The continued use and expansion of such a playoff format within MLS suggests to me that the league can't decide if it wants to cater to fans of European soccer or American professional sports. My contention is that if MLS is going to insist on a playoff format to determine its champion like other US sports leagues, it should use a single elimination format that rewards teams at the top of the table.

The Impact on Playoff Qualification

Regardless of the criticism, the playoff format is what it will be next season. With the changes that have been made, how are the odds of qualification impacted?

The challenge in analyzing MLS historical performance is the non-constant number of clubs in the league, the maximum number of points available, and the number of teams that qualify for the playoffs. Luckily, there is a method for translating historical table position data into a format that allows for comparison across seasons. Data from 2005 through 2011 was compiled for this analysis, with table position translated via the equation below and points earned converted to the percentage of total points available each season.

-LN[table position/(number of teams + 1 - table position)]

The transformed data was then plotted, and regression lines created along with the 50% prediction intervals (PI) associated with the data. Given the new playoff format and the lack of teams crossing over from one conference to the other for the playoffs, historical data was separated by conference. Plots for the Eastern and Western Conference data are shown below (click on graphs to enlarge them).

The fit of the regressions is relatively good - the Eastern Conference has an R-squared value of 0.80 and the Western Conference a value of 0.76. The main difference in those fit values can be attributed to the awful performances by Real Salt Lake and Chivas in 2005 where they earned 21% and 19% of the available points, respectively. Those data points are represented by the blue dots in the lower right hand end of the graph, just above the upper 50% PI line. If those two data points were removed, the R-squared value for the Western Conference would improve to 0.81.

An interesting comparison can be made between the conferences by examining the slope terms of the two regression lines (eg the number before the "x" variable). A higher slope term indicates that teams can achieve a particular table position with a lower percentage of points, while a lower slope term indicates that teams must earn a greater percentage of points to earn the same table position. To make the comparison easier, a plot of both conferences and their regression lines are shown below, along with a third plot of the regression line that would be associated with a single table of both Western and Eastern Conferences combined.

The graph demonstrates the difference between the two conferences. Looking at the right-hand side of the graph, once can see the separation between the upper table positions of the two conferences. The Western Conference line is lower than the Easter Conference line at those upper table positions, reflecting the difference in slope terms (10.0 versus 12.2, respectively). Based purely on the nominal regression line, one could argue that finishing at the top of the Western Conference is more difficult than accomplishing the same in the East.

Outcomes are never as deterministic as a single regression line suggests. Taking in to account the variation within the regression analysis, the reality is a bit murkier. The 50% PI lines quantify the expected outcome for the middle 50% of possible outcomes over time, which provides a way to quantify the expected variation over time. A similar interpretation is that 25% of the teams with a specific point total will finish above the upper dotted line, and 25% of the teams will finish below the lower dotted line. The regression study can also be flipped - points vs. table position - to produce 50% PI's for the point percentages required to finish in specific table positions. It is this relationship that is explored further.

Fifty percent of the teams finishing in the top position of a conference will earn between 56.9% (58 pts/1.71 PPM) and 62.8% (64 pts/1.88 PPM) of the available points in the East, while Western Conference teams will earn between 58.7% (60 pts/1.76 PPM) and 66.4% (68 pts/2.00 PPM) of the available points. It's certainly not a a statistically significant difference, but it is indicative of the mildly more difficult path to the top of the Western Conference.

Looking at the numbers close to a y-axis value of 0 helps identify the points required to simply qualify for the playoffs. The regression lines begin to overlap by the time they approach this y-axis value. Coincidentally, the single table regression line also overlaps the two conference lines at this point, suggesting that there is no real change in qualification odds via the league's move from using the overall 10th place finisher versus using the 5th place finisher from each conference. Utilizing the 50% PI data, the middle half of fifth place finishers in the East will earn between 43.0% (44 pts/1.30 PPM) and 48.7% (50 pts/1.47 PPM) of the available points, while those in the West will earn 42.3% (43 pts/1.26 PPM) and 49.7% (51 pts/1.5 PPM). The slightly wider variation seen in the Western Conference can be directly attributed to the slightly worse fit discussed earlier.

Interestingly enough, the data suggests it is completely reasonable to expect (via the 50% PI data) that teams with less than 50% of their available points could finish as high as the third playoff seed. Qualifying third would give the team a bye into the first proper round of the playoffs, avoiding the one game playoff required of the fourth and fifth seeds. If MLS got rid of qualifying the fifth team and simply qualified the top four for the playoffs, the 50% PI for percentage of available points in the East would be 45.5% (46 pts/1.35 PPM) to 51.2% (52 pts/1.53 PPM) in the West it would be 45.3% (46 pts/1.35 PPM) to 52.7% (54 pts/1.59 PPM). This would represent an increase of nearly 3% of available points, or an increase of nearly 3 points, to qualify for the MLS playoffs.

Conclusions

There is a good bit of historical precedent for teams earning less than 50% of the available points and making the MLS playoffs. Such an outcome is inherent to a league that qualifies more than 50% of the teams for such a playoff. Historically, 14 of the 28 teams that have qualified for the playoffs from the East have earned fewer than 50% of the available points, while 10 of the 30 teams that have qualified from the East have earned fewer than 50% of the available points. In both cases, the majority of these teams qualified in the 4th or 5th table positions. In the East, only four such teams have qualified as a third seed and only one in the second table position. In the West, four of the teams qualified as a third seed and two qualified in the second position. Such generous odds of playoff qualification shall continue until MLS admits a lower percentage of playoff participants via an increase in the number of teams in the league or reduces the number of playoff spots available.

A review of Simon Kuper's "Soccer Men"

2011-11-14T11:42:00.001-08:00

It's no secret that my foray into the realm of soccer statistics blogging can be directly attributed to my initial reading of Soccernomics. I had fallen in love with soccer during the Sounders' inaugural season, had picked my obligatory overseas team of higher quality later that same year (Arsenal), and was bound-and-determined to get some new reading material in early 2010 in preparation for that summer's World Cup. I stumbled upon Kuper's book, which combined a professional and personal passion of mine (statistics) and my new love for the sport. The rest is now history.

Since then I have read his first book about the sport, Soccer Against the Enemy, as well as Ajax, The Dutch, The War. Each of the three books looks at the sport through a different topic - statistics, conflict, and World War II. Kuper's latest book, Soccer Men, doesn't have such an overt theme as a method for examining the game. To be honest, much of the book's content has been published elsewhere. The book serves as a compilation of profiles and interviews Kuper has written over his 15 years of covering the sport. Nonetheless, in serves a very useful compendium for both those who have followed Kuper for all 15 years or those who are more recent converts like me. While the theme that binds all of these short chapters together is not as overt as in works past, there is one there. It is the idea of the professionalism of the men who play, manage, and make decisions within the sport.

Almost in a nod to the fact that much of this book is not original content, the book's introduction explains that the concept was not Kuper's idea nor was its name. Forty-three years earlier a British journalist named Arthur Hopcraft had published a book titled The Football Man. It was a book covering a different type of game, player, and manager, but the concept was the same as Kuper's. It was a time, as Kuper reminds the reader, when the phrase "soccer literature" might have been viewed as an oxymoron. As only a writer foundational to modern soccer literature could write, Kuper notes of Hopcraft's writing:

"He took [his subjects] seriously, not as demigods but as ordinary men and craftsman. His overly polished prose is a bit dated, and we no longer need his assurances that soccer is important enough to write about (quite the opposite: We now often need to be told that it isn't.)"

Few authors now writing about soccer have their words taken more seriously and studied so studiously as Kuper. Yet, in almost in the manner of Heath Ledger playing the Joker, Kuper asks "WHY... SOOOOO... SERIOUS!?!?" One can almost hear the wry smile cross Kuper's mouth as he was writing this entry in the book.

Then again, it's all in the subtlety of what kind of seriousness in soccer commentary Kuper is criticising.

As is all too well documented, the last few decades have seen a seriousness forced onto the sport and its players with the rise of its international business. The Deloitte Money League's top twenty clubs brought in €4.3 billion ($5.9 billion) in revenue during the 2009/10 season. A microcosm of the rise of the international game is the Premier League, which claimed 7 of the 20 spots on Deloitte's list. The EPL has seen a more than 8 fold increase in the average player transfer fee, and a similar if less-spectacular rise in wages. The clubs, the players, and the management are all treating the game like a business, and a serious one at that given the large sums of money involved.

Kuper's point at the outset of the book is re-iterated in profile after profile contained within the book's covers. It is a recognition of the fact that everyone treats the game seriously because their very large paychecks depend on it. Any love affair with a badge that causes a player to kiss it lasts only as long as the next outsized transfer or contract offer that rolls through their door. Profiles of Wayne Rooney, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, and others who had lifelong childhood attachments to clubs that they ultimately turned their backs on due to better offers demonstrates the rationality of following the money. The expectation that love for one's club, who is an employer, should outweigh one's love for their own material self interest is something only a supporter can foist upon a player. After all, as Kuper has repeatedly asked in interviews supporting this book, "Do you love your employer so much that you would turn down a much better compensation package from another employer? Do you love your bank so much that you wouldn't leave it if offered a much better interest rate elsewhere?" The answer clearly is, "Of course not!". Yet we take our love for the game and club so seriously that we scream and yell at any player who has the temerity to judge the grass is greener on the other side and look for rewards - trophies, money, playing time - elsewhere. It's the seriousness of soccer talk, which treats the most minuscule of events as do-or-die, and simultaneously denies the seriousness of the business reality of the sport that Kuper is criticizing (curious readers can read Kuper's expansion on this concept in an interview Sarah Rudd and I conducted with him in October).

Kuper's explanation of player-as-professional is perhaps no better displayed than in his five part series on England's golden generation - profiles of Jamie Carragher, Ashley Cole, Steven Gerrard, and Wayne Rooney built upon their mediocre-to-awful autobiographies. Here the reader gets a sense of the cocoon modern soccer players live within from age 12, and how they become ruthless businessmen who believe wholeheartedly in their abilities and the right to get paid for them. Reading this chapter helps one better understand the somewhat foolish vapidness of the interview with Nikolas Anelka elsewhere in the book, or why Kuper has repeatedly commented that he believes Messi is one of the greatest players to write about and likely the worst to interview. The pressure to be company men, to never say anything of consequence for fear of punishment, makes current players dull interviews.

It's that reality that makes ex-players the better interview, and perhaps my favorite part of the book was the lengthy recounting of an evening with Johnny Rep and Bernd Holzenbein in June 2004. Two men who played central roles in the 1974 World Cup final between Germany and Holland, and thus central roles in the Dutch attempt to re-fight World War II, couldn't have been more relaxed and entertaining. The two former players almost seem bemused by the importance forced on their match by the Dutch, and don't talk much of it except when forced to at a panel on the exact topic. Otherwise, Holzenbein wold rather talk about the Final in 1954 that the Germans also won, as he saw it as more formative to the nation's postwar sporting experience. Overall, we learn far more about these two men, their attitudes towards the game, and what's truly important to the players who create the sport rather than the fans who consume it. Kuper concludes the chapter with,

The history of soccer would read very differently if it were written by actual players, They would never organize a debate about a long-gone World Cup final, or if they did, it would focus on the postmatch banquet to which the wives weren't invited...

Indeed - things far less serious than the latest transfer rumor, or who did or didn't dive to earn a penalty. It would focus on things to which spectators have no relationship, because it never appeared on a television.

There is a good bit of fun in reading what Kuper thought several years ago, and whether or not his predictions panned out. Such predictions have produced a mixed bag of results. He predicted Drogba's relationship with Mourinho would lead him to leave Chelsea and follow Morinho to Inter - clearly, Drogba did not (although Kuper did take that as a sign that Drogba simply followed rational self interest over friendship - a common theme in the book). He wrote in 2005 about Michael Essien being the harbinger of a future filled with physically big players - a theory that small midfielders for Spanish club and national teams would end up making a false prophecy. Correctly foreshadowing Ruud Gullit's decade of management failure, Kuper provides a great profile of Gullit playing for Ajax's fifth string squad in the waning days of his playing career. The book is chock full of period writing that gives us a better understanding of how players and the game looked then, uncolored through the eyes of history.

While the book spends much of its ink on players, there are two other parts of it that cover managers and "other" soccer men. I am not a huge fan of the managerial section. It's hard to take a profile of Mourinho seriously now that we've seen that his rabid paranoia and hatred for Barcelona can devolve into eye gouging on the pitch. Kuper has a series of articles on Glen Hoddle, Sven-Goran Erikson, and Fabio Capello to tell the story of the thankless job of being England's manager. There are two good articles on Arsene Wenger in this section of the book - one in May 2003 and another in April 2010. Kuper makes the point clear that what was game changing for Arsenal in 2003 was simply average by 2010, and once Wenger's difference makers had been adopted by others in the league there was no way for the Frenchman to compete with clubs that consistently offered more in transfer fees and wages.

The far more fascinating section to me was the final part of the book that compiled articles on the "other" soccer men in the game. The profile of Jacques Herzog, a Swiss architect responsible for many of the modern soccer stadiums seen today, is a very interesting one. Herzog, at the risk of being too serious, treats building stadiums much like the seriousness with which cardinals must have treated building a cathedral during medieval times. Herzog draws much inspiration from English stadiums. Kuper writes:

What soccer fans crave in a stadium is communal emotion... "It's somehow an attempt to go back to the roots of soccer," says Herzog, "to take some of those archaic ingredients. The Shakespearean theatre, probably it was even a model for the soccer stadium in England - this closeness between the actors and the crowd. If you can achieve this proximity, the people become the architecture."

Herzog's attempt to build such a feeling at Allianz Stadium is captured exquisitely in Kuper's profile.

Kuper concludes the book with a profile of Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, an economics professor who has assembled the most impressive database of penalty kicks taken since 1995. The profile was published in the middle of the 2010 World Cup. Palacios-Huerta explains how his database can be used, and laments the number of errors clubs and national teams make that could be simply corrected by a basic study of the numbers. Ironically, Kuper had seen Palacios-Huerta's information related to the Dutch and Spanish teams for the World Cup Final and had even put the information in the hands of a Dutch coach. Kuper was literally minutes away from his and Palacios-Huerta's information being the key to a Dutch win on penalties when the 10-man side finally succumbed to the Spanish attacks. It's too bad that they did, otherwise this part of the book would have provided for an epic book in and of itself.

Overall the book is another outstanding read from one of the foundational authors in modern soccer literature. Kuper may ask each of us to take the game a little less seriously, and indeed we all should. Fewer chattering heads and bleating online that treats the sport less like a game of escape would make us all a little more tolerable to be around. However, our bookshelves and literary lives are far more complete due Kuper ignoring his own advice and taking such a serious literary approach to the beautiful game and the men within it.

Reactions to MLS Semifinals, Conference Final Odds, and an Update on Semifinal Model

2011-11-05T16:24:00.000-07:00

It Still Hurts...

Conference Semifinal Reactions

MLS's annual bastardization of soccer playoffs - aka the conference semifinals - is now complete. Sure, I'm a little bitter because my team dug a hole in its first leg that it couldn't climb out of even with an outstanding performance. I was at that second leg this past Wednesday, and the energy was electric until the final whistle. It's more that this league can't seem to figure out what it really wants to be - it wants to cater to the American sports fan via a playoff format, but then in a nod to every other knockout format by utilizing two-legged semifinals while not even implementing the away-goal rule. MLS would be better off picking one direction or the other and sticking to it.

Nonetheless, the Sounders and three other teams are out of the playoffs now, and we're down to the final four teams fighting for a spot in MLS Cup 2011 in LA. The format is what it is, so it's time to see how I did against it. I went 2-for-4 in my conference semifinal picks, with varying reasons for success and failure.

I got the LA and Kansas City wins correct. In LA, I correctly bet they were too good to go down due to the six match goal differential they had to the Red Bulls. In Kansas City, I correctly bet they would hold serve on match differential and were simply too hot to not win. Clearly, their 4-0 drubbing of Colorado over two matches demonstrated that superior form.

Honestly, the Philadelphia/Houston series was a toss up from a statistical prediction standpoint. It was the closest of the four using my statistical methods, but any statistical advantage for Philly came in that their coach had less experience than Houston's (they were even on matches played). Luckily, this year's results got rid of that silly "coach experience" anomaly as a statistically significant predictor (more on the adjustments to the model later). The matchup was really just a flip of a coin statistically, and perhaps I should have gone with the experience of Houston over the second-year improvement and first playoff birth for the Union.

In the Seattle/Real Salt Lake series I picked against my statistical judgement, giving in to supporter's optimism. In the closing weeks of the regular season I told any Sounders supporter I knew that I would rather the Sounders have faced FC Dallas in the first round than Real Salt Lake. RSL's skid at the end of the season was a false one - one predicated upon missing personnel they were getting back by playoff time. FC Dallas, on the other hand, was clearly a slumping team that continued to slump in the playoffs. The Sounders would have matched up far better against FC Dallas, would have likely been playing to finally get the LA monkey off their back in the Conference Final, and Real Salt Lake would have been tearing up the Eastern Conference Playoffs and be in that conference's final right now. They'd likely have won the East, and we'd be staring at an RSL vs. Sounders/Galaxy final in several weeks. For all the griping that would have come from a "Western Conference team winning the East", it would have been a just end to a season that saw those three teams dominate the Western Conference and largely the entire league. Ironically, one of the few just endings from the MLS playoffs in recent memory.

Rarely do things work out as desired, and Seattle faced RSL in the conference semifinals. As a supporter, I picked against the statistics, the Sounders' history of troubles in the playoffs (they had to end sometime, right?), and Real Salt Lake's playoff experience. I felt the Sounders and Galaxy would both overcome the statistics, and perhaps we'd be able to say the league had gotten to the point that its playoff format didn't determine champions based upon who had played fewer matches in a season. Watching the first leg from the couch of my living room, I immediately regretted the pick (side note: luckily an 8-hour exam earlier in the day and three beers throughout the match luckily made me too tired to throw anything at the television, or else I'd be out a couple grand right now due to buying a new television). The Sounders picked the worst day of the year to play what was their worst game of the year, resulting in a 3-0 deficit for them.

The return leg was the polar opposite. It was very clear that RSL was intent on parking the bus and earning a berth in the Western Conference Finals based purely upon the three goals they scored in the first leg. The statistics in the table below, which compares the change in different statistics from games one to two for each of the clubs leading after the first leg in the 2011 conference semifinals, bear this out.

Granted, the other three teams were heading home to defend their leads, none of them was as large as Real Salt Lake's, and none of their first leg performances had been as dominant as Real Salt Lake's. RSL said all the right things going in to the second leg in Seattle, recognizing the Sounders were a dangerous team - they had won eight matches during the regular season by scoring three or more goals, six of those wins were by two or more goals, and two of them were 3-0 shutouts. Still, watching the game live, re-watching highlights, and then looking at the statistics above I can't help but feel RSL went beyond parking the bus. Time wasting got so bad that Nick Rimando was issued a yellow card for just such an infraction. RSL simply hunkered down and was content to boot the ball forward. The starkest contrast could be drawn with Sporting Kansas City, who went home up 2-0 and came out with attacks in the second leg that netted another 2-0 result for them. RSL was the only team of the four to move on to the second leg and have a worse performance across the board.

Nonetheless, the Sounders fell short of their attempt to come back from a three goal deficit. What will likely haunt them the entire offseason is not the misses or blocks in the second leg - there's not much they can do about a Real Salt Lake defense that played relatively well against the 26 shots they faced. It will be the Grabavoy goal in the dying minutes of the first leg that ended up giving RSL their three goal lead going back to Seattle.

None of this is to say that RSL doesn't deserve the win. They played outstanding, attacking football in the first leg, and combined with the Sounders horrible performance they earned their three goal lead. The shame is that they didn't pursue the single goal in Seattle that would clearly put them through to the final, and instead played cynical, time wasting, park-the-bus soccer that helps fuel criticism of MLS's two-legged format.

Update to the Conference Semifinal Models

With the conclusion of this year's conference semifinals, eight new data points were added to the model that is based upon MLS playoff data from 2003 forward. Those new data points have helped to make the model a little more logical, as well as confirm one of the early trends.

On the logic front, losses by Philadelphia and New York, who had some of the shortest tenured managers in the playoffs, eliminated the odd historical anomaly of less experienced managers fairing better in the conference semifinals from the ranks of statistically significant predictors. Replacing it in the list of significant predictors was the difference in the teams' seeds. A plot of the effects of seed difference are shown in the graph below. Seeds are listed numerically, so top seed LA (1) playing bottom Western Conference seed New York (6) would produce a seed difference of -5 for LA and +5 for New York.

Based upon the graph and its associated equation, each unit difference in seed changes the odds of winning a two-legged playoff by 6.8%.

Despite the LA Galaxy becoming the first team to win a two-legged conference semifinal when facing a team that had played 6+ fewer games than them, the trend of teams playing more games losing their two-legged playoff continued. Two of the teams that lost - Seattle and Colorado - each played four and three games more, respectively, than their opponents. The net impact of the 2011 results is expressed via the graph below.

Astute readers who compare the exponent term in the equation to the same term from the 2003-2010 data will see that it is numerically smaller. The net effect is to lower the impact of the difference in matches being played: a 6.9% change in odds of winning the series for each unit change in game differential compared to a 7.5% change excluding the 2011 playoff data. The addition of the extra data points also tightens up the 95th percentile bounds. Data through 2010 indicated a 95th percentile range of .34 around the nominal (solid) line between game differences of -5 and +5. The increased sample size and results from the 2011 data have now tightened this range to 0.29. In statistical speak, the accuracy of the model's nominal prediction continues to increase, while the effect of increased matches seems to be a bit lower than originally predicted.

A Brief Prediction of the Conference Finals

Going in to the conference finals, the playoffs switch back to a single match, winner-take-all format at the higher seed's home pitch. As was shown in my earlier post on the history of MLS single-match playoffs since 2003, the only statistically significant predictor of success is the difference in the team's two goal differentials throughout the season (including playoffs). The table below provides a comparison of the conference finalists' goal differentials and their odds of winning.

I'll be sticking with the numbers. In the case of Kansas City, I think they're simply too hot to lose this match at home. A rough start to the season on the road has been rewarded with a second half of season homestand and outstanding play to go with it. I agree with Grant Wahl when it comes to LA - their season may go down as the single greatest in MLS history if they're able to to win the MLS Cup. The match with RSL will be close, but in the end I think they will prevail. I just think LA is too good to not win at home in the conference finals, and then win again at home two weeks later to hoist MLS Cup 2011.

MLS Conference Semifinal Odds: The Year the Game Differential Curse is Broken?

2011-10-28T06:15:00.000-07:00

Will Henry and the Red Bulls continue the game differential trend

of years past and have the last laugh on Beckham and the Galaxy?

The Conference Semifinals are now set, and it is time for a bit of prognostication guided by statistical analysis. I'll be using the model developed in this post from March, which examined which factors were significant predictors of success in MLS's two-legged playoff round format. As a reminder, it turns out the differential in the number of games played and coaches experience in MLS are the only two statistically significant factors in predicting the outcome of the two legged series.

An Update on My Philosophy

After the Red Bulls' win on Wednesday night there was a far bit of discussion regarding the "CONCACAF Champions Leauge Curse.' The curse - if there is one - says that teams that participate in CCL never win MLS playoff series. The idea is that MLS squads get stretched too thin, especially as CCL group play stacks up at the business end of the MLS regular season. By the time the playoffs start, these CCL clubs are sitting ducks for less successful clubs who eeked their way in to the playoffs and are better rested. Or so the theory goes...

I inserted myself in to this discussion on Wednesday night, and I wanted to clarify a few things as the 140-character limits of Twitter are a VERY poor communication medium on such a complex topic. Here are my somewhat-informed opinions on the topic.

If the idea of a CCL Curse is that clubs who participate in CCL have never won a playoff series, it's flat out wrong. As recently as 2009 this curse was broken. The Houston Dynamo participated in the 2009-2010 CCL group stages due to the 2008 Supporter's Shield, and promptly eliminated the Seattle Sounders in the first round of those playoffs.
What is correct is that an overall difference in the number of competitive matches played in a season (MLS, CCL, and US Open Cup) is a statistically significant predictor of the outcome of a two legged playoff. Yes, even with the small sample size (64 clubs over 32 matches) it passes basic statistical tests. The model developed in that March post showed that each additional match a club plays beyond their opponent's total number of matches lowers said team's odds of winning the series by 7.5%.
Historical data suggests that match differences of more than four mean the club with fewer matches is virtually a lock to get through. The 2009 Dynamo are the lone example of a team bucking that trend - they had played five more games than the Sounders when they won that playoff series. No other club with more than four more games played has made it through the two-legged round.
The occurrence of a large difference in the number of matches played between playoff opponents certainly has risen in the CCL era (2008+). The number of matches contested by teams with a game differential of four or more has doubled in the CCL era (see end of this blog post for the raw numbers).
Clearly, the game differential statistic is not deterministic and is bound to change over time, perhaps even this year. As Sarah Rudd at On Football has pointed out, LA, Seattle, and Real Salt Lake are all sporting some of the freshest squads in the playoffs given their superior squad rotation during the competitions throughout the year. Larger MLS roster allocations than in year's past have also helped. A minutes-played rather than a crude games-played metric would be preferable - perhaps it is something I can work on with Sarah this off season. Nonetheless, it's scary that so much of past performance can be boiled down to one crude metric.
Most importantly, none of this is deterministic. Teams beat the odds all the time, and the odds change with each passing year. MLS constantly tweaks their playoff format and who qualifies for it, and they change the economics of the game as well which is key to squad rotation and having the best shot at multiple competitions. The numbers only tell a story of what's happened in the past, and can only be one of many guides as to how things might operate in the future.

That being said, it's now time to move on to a little number crunching and predicting!

Semi-Final Odds and Predictions

First, here's a reminder about the model developed in April. Data from the 2003 through 2010 playoffs was used to create a binary logistic regression model of what factors predicted success in the two-legged format that was then used as the preliminary round of the playoffs. Factors such as seeding, season goal differential, and a difference in home/away performance ended up not being statistically significant. Only two factors were statistically significant - difference in MLS coaching experience and difference in number of matches played. The data from the eight teams in the four 2011 conference semi-finals have been applied to that model, and the results are presented in the table below.

There's a pretty big split in odds between the Eastern Conference and Western Conference squads, mainly due to the huge divergence in the number of games played. Keep in mind that previous analysis has also shown that more experienced coaches actually fair worse than those with less experience when it comes to two-legged ties - this may be due to those same coaches being tied to more successful teams who play more matches, a possibility I will explore this offseason as well.

I don't see any reason to pick against the numbers in the Sporting KC/Colorado Rapids series. Sporting KC has been in great form the second half of the season, and should use that form and rested legs to their advantage against Colorado. In contrast to the LA/NY series, this one has the shortest travel distance for the two participants - 600 miles - which may provided an even bigger advantage to the winner when it comes to weariness in later rounds.

I'm going with the numbers in the Houston/Philadelphia match up and say Philadelphia wins the series. To be honest, I don't have much individual information on either team, having not really watched them all season. Far more observant and intelligent commentators can break this one down for you. In the absence of my own observations, I'm sticking with the data.

The NY/LA match up presents an interesting choice for me. As a biased Sounders supporter, I'd love to see NY take out LA. To be honest, it might make the Sounders road a little easier if they were to make it through their semifinal round - the Sounders have only won a single league match against LA over the three years they have been in the league. Plus, if the Sounders were to make it to the final they would host that match (and maybe I would get that beer I am owed by a certain NYRB supporter...). Both teams come in to this match up a little banged up, but LA clearly has been the more consistent team all year long. They've also done a much better job at rotating players over the season as they've competed in multiple competitions, and will actually come in to this series with a more rested squad than New York. Perhaps the numbers make this a close series, but it's very hard to bet against LA with the season they've had. I'm going with the Galaxy.

The final match up - Seattle/Real Salt Lake - is a bit tougher to pick. Beyond my own bias, I also have watched nearly every Sounders match this season and have a good idea as to what makes them tick. The spark plug in their offense - Mauro Rosales - is out for the first game and will likely only play a minimal role in the second game if he's even fit for it. Without Rosales, the Sounders can look flat at times. They'll also be coming in to this series with a heavy playoff history on their shoulders - one goal and no wins in four playoff matches. For all their success, they've largely fallen flat in the playoffs. It will be interesting to see if Sigi Schmid puts Sammy Ochoa in the starting lineup given his solid performances and several goals scored the last few matches. The real question will be whether Seattle can produce enough offense without Rosales to win the series, and then get him back for the Conference Finals. As is the case in the NY/LA match up, the match count is a bit deceiving in this one. Seattle has done a good job at squad rotation as well, and thus comes in with a slight advantage versus Real Salt Lake (although it's much smaller than LA's advantage vs. NY).

I also think Real Salt Lake is a bit of a dangerous team. They're playing with a chip on their shoulder, looking to continue to prove 2009's MLS Cup and this year's run to the CCL championship match weren't flukes. This series may just be the best to watch out of the four. I'll be at the second leg, and I narrowly believe I'll be watching the Sounders win their first playoff series in their three year existence. If I'm right about this series, and LA wins their series, we may just see the whole match differential metric become statistically insignificant and finally stop talking about the "CCL Curse".

I'll check back in a week from now with odds on the Conference Final match ups. Enjoy the semifinal round!

MLS Wild Card Odds: A Historical Look at the Factors that Affect MLS Single Game Playoff Matches

2011-10-26T07:59:00.000-07:00

The 2011 MLS Cup playoffs start tonight, and I thought it might be worth taking a statistical look at what it might take to get through the new Wild Card playoff round.

For those who don't follow MLS regularly, a bit of background is in order. Unlike other soccer leagues, MLS does not use a top-of-the-table format to determine their champion. In a nod to other US sports, they use a playoff to determine the champion, and yet in a nod to the global soccer community they don't use a single elimination model for the entire playoffs. Since 2003 they've used a hybrid that has a two-legged tie in the first round, then a single elimination match at the higher seed for the second round, and then a championship match at a neutral site for the final.

This year they've added a single elimination wild card round for the bottom four teams in the playoff seeding, and the winners of those two matches will then move on with the top six seeds in the playoffs into the aforementioned proper first round two legged tie. The playoffs then proceed as in years past - single elimination second round, then a neutral site winner-take-all championship. If you're confused as to why the American professional version of the sport takes such a convoluted way to crown a champion, you're not alone. I've already written plenty on how the playoff system needs to be changed, but it is what it is so we might as well analyze it.

The focus of this post will be on the factors that impact single elimination games given that the Wild Card matches are first up. I'll return later this week with a post looking at the two-legged tie odds that come out of the Wild Card matches.

Like my previous posts on the MLS playoffs, I utilized a binary logistic regression model to determine which factors were statistically significant predictors of MLS single match playoff success. Just like the previous series of posts, I only used data from the 2003 season forwards (data used within this analysis came from Climbing The Ladder's excellent player lineup database). This presents a bit of a challenge in producing enough samples to identify statistically significant factors - each year of playoffs only had two matches of single elimination games, compared with 4 two match series in the first round of each year's playoffs. To put things in perspective, the fact that we will have two rounds of single elimination matches this year (Wild Card and proper second round), the total number of single match playoffs will actually increase by 25% (20 samples at year end vs. 16 at start of 2011 playoffs). Nonetheless, the 16 match samples are what's available today, and there was one statistically significant factor that stood out from my analysis of those matches.

The list of factors considered in the analysis are shown below, in order of least significant to most significant factors. Only the last factor, the difference in the two teams' season goal differential, actually met the criteria of being statistically significant (factor had a p-value < 0.05).

Season Series PPM Difference
Seed Difference
Season Series GD
Difference in Coach Experience
Games Played Difference
Final 5 Games Point Difference
Venue Point % Difference
Home/Away
Difference in Season Goal Differential

In some ways, this list is a bit more reassuring than the similar one for the two-legged tie. Notice that factors that intuitively should be more significant - home pitch advantage, the difference in percentage of available points earned by the home team at home versus the away team earned away, the difference in the number of points earned the final five games of the season - are more significant. One wonders if an increase in sample size will be enough to make them statistically significant?Additionally, the data suggests we should ignore the two teams' regular season meetings - statistics quantifying such events take two out of the three least signficant factor positions. Either way, it seems there is a bit more justice to the single match format given how hard teams work throughout an entire regular season to earn points (especially at the end of the season) and thus get home pitch advantage for the playoffs.

A plot of the one statistically significant term, difference in season goal differential, is plotted below. The range of differences considered was constrained by the maximum difference seen in the data set, which was seen in the 2007 playoff match between the Houston Dynamo and Kansas City Wizards.

The effects of low sample size show up in the plot via the wide gap between the dashed lines, which represent the bounds of the 95th percentile prediction interval for the odds of winning a match for a given difference in goal differential. These lines will come closer together over time if current trends hold as further MLS Cup playoffs are contested. The key takeaway from the graph is that for every unit increase in the Difference in Season Goal Differential between -10 and +10, a team's odds of winning a single playoff series increases by roughly 3%.

Applying this model to the teams in the 2011 Wild Card matches yields the table below.

I wouldn't necessarily take these odds to the bank given the wide gap in the 95th percentile prediction interval on the graph. But with FC Dallas slumping as of late, it's not unreasonable to expect the Red Bulls to pull off a win. The same could be said of the Rapids, who are looking to validate last season's championship run from the lower levels of the playoff seeding with a similar run in 2011.

What the analysis does indicate is the inherent fairness of a single match playoff if a playoff format must be used to determine the MLS champion. Previous analysis of the two legged tie format showed successful clubs - those who compete deep into the season on many fronts and those with longer serving coaches - tend to be penalized more in a two legged format. That format also effectively takes away all the advantages of a higher seed's hard work throughout the season, as the lower seed also gets to enjoy a home match. Analysis of the single match format seems to indicate teams that do well throughout the season tend to do well in the single match format. If anything, MLS should restrict the two legged tie to the wild card match and reward the higher seeds with single game home matches in the proper first round against teams who've played an additional two matches via their victories in the Wild Card round. This would be a better balance of many people's desires to see consistent success over an entire regular season rewarded like it is other professional soccer leagues with the desire on other's parts for a US-style playoff.

An Interview with Simon Kuper

2011-10-20T06:03:00.000-07:00

Introduction

Simon Kuper came to Seattle on October 11th to take part in a forum on the sport and promote his latest book, Soccer Men: Profiles of the Rogues, Geniuses, and Neurotics Who Dominate the World's Most Popular Sport. Sarah Rudd and I were lucky enough to get an interview with Simon prior to the event that evening. The interview focused on Simon's latest book, as well as his best-seller Soccernomics and his award-winning first book titled Soccer Against the Enemy.

The full interview, forty minutes in length, is provided below. It should be noted that the interview picks up mid-introductions to provide context for my opening question.

Sarah and I are grateful for Simon taking nearly an hour in total out of his busy evening to discuss a range of topics with us. Special thanks goes to Simon's editor at Nation Books, Carl Bromley, who contacted me to help set up the interview. Carl gets social media and the key role it can play in keeping great print media alive and engaging. Other publishers should be so lucky to have someone like Carl.

The Interview

Sarah Rudd (SR): I think I read Football Against the Enemy 10 years ago [note: the book was originally published in 1994]

Simon Kuper (SK): Wow

SR: I just randomly picked it up when I was at Heathrow and it was a pretty amazing find. I'd never really read a book that sort of spoke about soccer so intelligently before.

SK: That's very kind. I wrote it about 17 years ago, so it feels like it was somebody else.

SR: Well it's held up well. I read it 10 years ago, and I still go back from time to time and re-read chapters. I love the chapter on Argentina and their Diego-worship. Certainly with the World Cup last year that was interesting.

Zach Slaton (ZS): I actually wanted to ask you about that book. It was, beyond Soccernomics, the second book of yours that I read. So I have a later edition, the 2010 edition. And you finished that book, to quote you,

"It's been seventeen years since I finished my journey around the world to research this book. I will never do it again. Forty-eight hours in a Ukranian train, weeks without hot water, and conversations in languages I don't speak - I have had enough."

SK: Absolutely. I think it is really only the kind of book you can write when you're 22... 23... It's hard to imagine how different the world was then. So, I would arrive in Estonia, and you couldn't really contact people in Estonia beforehand because how would you find out their phone numbers? How would you find out who they were? Even making a call could be difficult.

So I'd arrive in a country, get some local money, and go to a pay phone. I'd put money in the pay phone, and call some numbers an anthropologist or some journalist had given me. First, they'd be speaking a language you didn't know. Second, they'd say "Oh, he died," or "Oh, he lived here 20 years ago." Just the process of actually finding people was incredibly hard.

Getting information on Cameroon or the Ukraine, if you were in London [at that time] you couldn't actually get information on current events in those countries. You could find out about the history, but [not] what [was] happening in Cameroon [at the time]. So I went to the Cameroonian embassy and the guy wouldn't let me in because he thought I was a creditor. I guess they had a policy of not letting in people they did not know, because they were constantly being pursued by creditors.

Essentially now you could write the book without going to such places.

ZS: So it's more the world that the book was written within and the challenges it presented that you would not do again. Not necessarily the actual travel itself. Do you think [the travel] was integral to the book?

SK: It made it the kind of book it was. But now look. Here I am in the Sorrento Hotel. It's very nice. I am a middle aged man and I like my comforts, so this is very nice. If I were doing Football Against the Enemy I'd be staying in the cheapest place in Seattle, and I wouldn't be able to take a taxi. So I'd have to work out the bus [schedule] to get to the Sorrento Hotel to interview somebody. Who'd be somebody like me, a middle aged man with a job who would feel good. And so the older man would think, "Why am I talking to you?" The whole process was just so physically and mentally draining. But you're trying to get at something else -

ZS: Well, I was trying to get at my second question which is you're viewed in this role with Hornby, Goldblatt, and a number of other writers who have helped to establish this field over the last 20 to 30 years of a serious, large scale, popular field of soccer commentary and scholastic writing -

SK: Fairly popular, not very popular [a wry smile appears on Simon's face and I can't help but laugh]

ZS: In Soccer Men you start off explaining that you don't need to justify this field anymore, but that sometimes we need to remind ourselves to not take this so seriously. So you're not having to freeze your rear end off anymore and go to the lengths you had to in Soccer Against the Enemy, but on the other hand you are one of those foundational writers in this field that does take itself relatively seriously. So how do you strike that balance?

SK: Phil Ball wrote a very good book about Spanish soccer about 10 years ago called Morbo, and he says in the introduction

"The great thing about soccer is that nine-tenths of the poetry is in the fact that it doesn't really matter."

And everybody who's writing about it or is a fan REALLY KNOWS it doesn't really matter.

So I am watching Holland in the World Cup final. I really wanted them to win, but I also hated the way they played so I had these conflicting feelings. I was very torn up, but there is a voice in the back of you saying, "This is an escape. This is an escape. That's what this is." And what irritates me often is the hysteria of the commentary. The anger, the lack of humor about it.

Nick Hornby's book is great in part because he KNOWS it doesn't matter, and therefore he knows he has a problem. The book is partly, "What is my problem?" And if he were saying, "I love Arsenal! I hate Spurs! I'm so gutted we didn't win!" it would not be a fun book and it wouldn't be an intelligent book.

Soccer generates news all the time. There's always results, a press conference, or a trade. You have this huge apparatus which all three of us are obviously a part of in some way via commentary. Most people don't consume soccer - they consume soccer talk. Which is what we're generating now and hope that some people consume. To make that talk more appealing we sometimes make it sound more important...

ZS: More important than it should be?

SK: Well, I have a friend who listens to this phone-in show in England on Saturdays called Six-On-Six and people call in and say, "Oh, our manager, I can't believe..." These are middle aged men calling in. My friend always has the urge to call in and say, "Have you EVER thought it doesn't... really... matter?" And I think that's the kind of corrective voice...

ZS: And that's what you have to remind yourself?

SK: Well, I always find it very easy, but in my own pompous way I like to remind others. [again, a wry smile appears]

SR: Were you surprised by the reception Soccernomics got? Did you see any pattern in how well it was received across different countries?

SK: Very much so. It was much better received [in the United States] than in England. The sales were better, the interest was higher. I think Americans are much more atuned to using data - they don't think it's wierd, they don't think it's stupid. Moneyball educated Americans in part, but also Moneyball describes a trend that happens in all American corporations as you know better than I do.

In England people say that data can't teach you anything about soccer, and "I already know about soccer so if you're telling me something new about soccer it must be wrong". Whereas the American readers and writers that I spoke to were much more open to listening and open to new ways of thinking.

SR: In Soccer Men the profile of Jorge Valdano portrays him as a very literate man, but then he is quoted as saying "Reading books doesn't win games." Do you see that as part of the cultural divide where maybe Spain isn't ready?

SK: Well, he wasn't really talking about books on data. I think Valdano is old school, and he's a romantic. I gave him Soccernomics, but there really aren't any books on data in Spain. So he wasn't talking about those books. He was talking about reading Marquez doesn't win you soccer games. Which is probably true.

In terms of books on data, I think the big Spanish clubs are starting to move that way. They're slow, but I think Moneyball was very important because it shows you how cultural connections work. English clubs were the first to find out, so people you mentioned in your email - Mike Forde - started in San Jose. Damien Comolli lived in the Bay Area - he's not English but he ended up in England because he speaks very good English and that cultural connection goes through language. So if you speak English, you're more likely to find out about Moneyball. You're more likely to understand baseball in the first place, and to be able to see what it means and its lessons for your sport. So the lesson has actually been bigger in cricket because it's very similar to baseball. Everyone in cricket read the book and said, "Oh my god! Why didn't we ever do this?" And now they're all doing it.

Soccer has been a bit slower because it's less obvious link. But the link is with England, primarily. The Germans have a long tradition of sports science going back a hundred years. It's a bit different, but very open to the idea that you can use data. Klinsman is another key figure because he lives in California, so he brought that to Germany in 2005 when he was managing the national team. The link goes through America and through English-speaking people, which means the Italians and the Spaniards are a bit slower to come on board.

SR: So does that mean that English clubs can expect to win more Champions League titles?

SK: I said to Billy Beane, "It probably won't be as big in soccer as in baseball because it's a different kind of sport." And he responded, "Maybe. It doesn't have to be because if it gives you an edge you have to do it. Say you have 30% of transfers succeed, and say through use of data you can raise that to 35%. That's an edge." So it's not going to win you Champions League by itself, it's not going to do what it did for the Oakland A's ten years ago. But it is enough that you should do it.

SR: MLS soccer clubs are underfunded, so it seems like this would be an opportunity ripe for this approach. Yet only one or two teams have full-time performance analysts. Do you have any insight as to why they're a bit slower to adopt such an approach?

SK: Probably because they don't have any money. Say a performance analyst costs you $30,000 just in salary, that's significant.

The other thing I think is that data hasn't really made big inroads yet, it hasn't really been game changing in soccer yet. Nobody can show it has totally made a difference. Often it makes a big difference for the most resourced clubs, so far, because they actually have the money to do something with it. It's not just having the data, but it's also having the money to crunch the data. The clubs who make the most use of data are Arsenal because it is run by a data man, Bolton who under Sam Allardyce and somewhat in their corporate culture, and now Liverpool.

The smaller clubs you might have one guy with a laptop, his access to the coach is questionable. In the lower leagues there often isn't any data. You might not know who completed which pass. So far it's only been a few clubs at the top end, and they keep their cards close to their chest. We can't even necessarily see when it has made a difference, even when it has. I can say with a lot of confidence that at Liverpool and Arsenal it heavily informs their transfer decisions. At most big clubs like Chelsea it plays a supplementary role. It does make a difference, and I suspect it makes something of a positive difference.

ZS: So you're talking to Arsenal supporters here, and you wrote an article a couple of weeks ago about potentially the advantage that Arsenal has and in Wenger's management of the data -

SK: had

ZS: - that Wenger had has diminshed greatly. From your opinion, what needs to happen with Arsenal? They seem to do relatively well with the meager transfer budgets they are managing, except for this last transfer window.

SK: They do ok.

ZS: Some would argue they've lost the plot. What do you see they need to change?

SK: It's a really difficult question. They are not going to sack Wenger, almost no matter what happens. I think they see that Arsenal are where they should be now. And for years Arsenal were above where they should have been because Wenger was a genius. Now you're in a situation where three clubs are richer, so naturally you're going to finish behind those three. Those three clubs have copied a lot of what they've done. Where do you find a new advantage?

I don't think Billy Beane has found a new advantage since the days of Moneyball, and I don't think Wenger will. It's very, very hard to do. I was thinking of Einstein - now I am not an expert on this at all - but I think Einstein for the last 20 years of his career just messed about. He was trying to get somewhere and he didn't get anywhere. Just a dead end. It's very hard to invent the wheel twice, and that's what Wenger needs to do. He needs to find something game changing, because all else being equal Arsenal will finish fourth. And when Arsenal finishes fourth, people like you will complain.

ZS: Actually, I won't complain.

SR: Not this year!

ZS: As an Arsenal fan, I'd say you're quite optimistic. I think they're going to struggle to finish fourth this year.

SK: Okay, well maybe one year on Wenger's career he'll underperform and finish fifth or sixth. For fifteen years he's very largely over achieved.

ZS: Clearly over achieved.

SK: So maybe this year, a transition year, difficult circumstances, good players leaving. Even if they finish fourth, the question people will ask is "Why don't they win any prizes?" Which is sort of an unfair question. They could have randomly won an FA Cup or a League Cup. They're sort of unlucky that they didn't, because they are in that zone as one of the clubs who can. It's wrong to expect more of Arsenal than that. They should be a team that gets in to the Champions League most of the time, because if you're fourth you can slip. But Wenger gets there every year. And they should be a team that occasionally wins a cup.

SR: Looking at Liverpool, they've splashed out fairly heavily on young, English players. Do you think they are overpaying for them because of an English bias, or do you think they're just able to see something that's worth putting this high price tag on these guys?

SK: They do overpay. I think they know that. Torres wanted to leave, so they got a brilliant price for him. Something like £55M. So they say, "Ok, we've got £55M. We've lost a really good player, so now we've got to build a new team because we have a new owner. The fans are very angry. We need to satisfy the fans now. " So they spend £25M on Andy Carroll, and you always overpay for center forwards anyways. Say the guy was only really worth £18M. You need him, you have a lot of money, the owner bought the club cheap and is willing to spend, so why not?

In some ways you can overpay, as long as you are aware you are overpaying. If you're Manchester City, you always overpay. But they're okay with that. And in some sense Liverpool are okay with that. It's only when you don't have any fallback or support options like Arsenal that you can't afford to do it.

SR: I thought it was curious that you included a profile on Freddy Adu in [Soccer Men]. He's recently come back to MLS this season. What are your thoughts on his career trajectory and where it can go from here?

SK: I think he should be aiming to become a week-in, week-out MLS player and take it from there. There's no reason to presume right now can be anything more than that given the failed years in Europe. So I would say start playing every week, and he gets better and maybe he could get good enough to play for the US. It would be great.

To go back to the Nike fantasies when he was 14 would be absurd. The last few years have proven that's not the player he became as an adult. Presumably no one expects of that him anymore, right?

SR: Right. We're all hoping that maybe he'll get it together, and like you said be a very good MLS player. If he were to go back to Europe I think a lot of people would be very excited, but would [also] be surprised.

SK: I don't think he is going to be the guy. I think there is going to be someone else, some American. I follow Dutch football, having grown up there, and people are really impressed with the way Altidore started. He's already had a better career than Freddy Adu. He might be closer to being that person. I would be very surprised if in the next five years you don't have an American outfield player playing for one of the Top 8 clubs in Europe.

SR: Have you been following Brek Shea's career at all?

SK: No.

SR: He's sort of the next hot young thing.

SK: Where is he now?

SR: He's currently with an MLS team called FC Dallas, but there are rumored bids to lure him to Europe. So he might be the next guy.

SK: How old is he?

SR: 21

ZS: or 22 (Note: Sarah was wright - Shea is 21)

SK: He's probably already too old to become a great player. There seems to be a problem with the way Americans educate young players in that you all come out at the top end with very competent, hard working, efficient offensive players. And nothing more. I would suspect that anyone who is in the American academy system and college - worse if you're in college - is never going to be that great player.

SR: So do you think someone like Giuseppe Rossi made the right decision to jump ship at age 13?

SK: Oh yeah, totally. He's really the best American player. Is there another player?

SR: Neven Subotic

SK: Right. There's another one. So you have various very good American players, and the problem is then to make sure they stay American.

SR: Well hopefully that is part of Klinsman's allure. Maybe he will convince one or two people they should play for us.

SK: I think it would go through a sponsor. I think you get next time Nike will do it they will choose a slightly older player because they're not going to make the same mistake and bet on another 14 year old. Then they say "Look, we really want you to play for the US." Because the sponsors really need a big American player more than anything else. "We'll give you bonuses based upon national team appearances. So you can earn as much playing for the US as playing for your club."

ZS: In Soccer Men you've made the point that players are not good interviews, but that you like to profile them. However, one of the more interesting things for me personally was the interview with [Johnny] Repp and [Bernd] Holzenbein. The thing that got me was where you were approached at the end of it and were told "this is one of the most memorable moments of my life" -

SK: This friend of mine I had brought along with me.

ZS: Can you describe what that evening was like, beyond what you were able to write down. It seems like it was...

SK: You know, we had beers and I can't remember every word they said. It wasn't like they were incredible revelations. It's not like I suddenly saw what it was all really like. It wasn't at all like that.

It was just two very pleasant guys who were free to talk because they weren't playing for anybody. It was an away day for them. They had gone to Rotterdam, someone had put them in a nice hotel and we listened to them. They liked each other as well, even though they couldn't really understand each other very well. It wasn't so much that things were said that I went away thinking "Oh, my god!", it was just the camaraderie, the amiability, the niceness.

You're with these guys and I think it was more for my friend. I had met these guys before so it wasn't the first time I had met them. Although it was rare to be in such a relaxed setting. For my friend to be sitting there and to be getting beers and having a nice time, like you do with friends, and he's thinking, "Oh, my god! I am sitting here with Johnny Repp!"

At one point we were trying to work out would Repp go home, would he drive home that evening? Would my friend have to take the train home that evening? And we're all sitting there in Rotterdam and Repp said to my friend, "Noooo! We'll all stay here! You'll sleep on my floor." So this friend of mine, the icon of his youth is saying "Sleep on my floor, we'll have a great time!" That, for me, was sort of the stunning aspect. All the walls were broken down. No more divide.

ZS: Almost like as much as you said in that chapter where you went to some of these forums where people who were maybe not even alive during that World Cup final were putting up these walls between [Repp and Holzenbein] because of the roles they played in what you may say was a very serious juxtaposition of the conflict over the War. You obviously had this interplay between the German and the Dutch sides that used to come up, maybe not as much today. All that breaks away - you have these two guys who can't understand each other, one of them is offering to have one of the guys sleep on his floor, is that one of those moments where everything fades away?

SK: It's true that for Dutch fans the Holland/Germany World Cup is good vs. evil match that we lost. The Germans of '74 were villains. For the players it was obviously quite bitter. There are talks of "I had a header that just went past the post. I still dream about that." Then you're with the guy who beat us. In fact, dived for the penalty - we say he dived for the penalty, Holzenbein. And he's just a nice guy.

You realize we build them up as legends, we build them up as myths in our minds about who these people are. By the time they're 55 it's just really pleasant. It might differ per country. I wonder if anyone will sit around with David Beckham like that when he is 55. I somehow doubt it.

ZS: I think you make the case in the book too that these guys brought something to the table just in their conversations that you don't normally get in an interview with a soccer player. You mention that they're able to do this because they're freed from the professional involvement, they're freed from the professional responsibility. Have you found that in other players that you've interviewed? That the only good player interview you get is when they're an ex-player?

SK: Mostly, yeah. In the same book there's Bruce Grobbelaar. I think he was just kind of pleased to meet me, because he had somebody to talk to who was sort of from England where he had spent twenty years. I just wanted an interview. I would have been happy for twenty minutes, and instead we spent this whole night drinking in Cape Town. And I did actually sleep in his spare room!

He drank about four hundred times more than I did. We were completely wasted at the end. And I was trying to make notes, it was an interview. He knew I was interviewing him. He's drinking, I am very far gone and I am taking notes. Then we go back to his flat and he says, "Oh, we'll have one more drink outside!" And then I sort of go into a coma in the spare room, and the next morning he drives me in to town and I go off. It's probably the nature of the person, but also probably being out of the game. They're actually quite keen to have someone come and listen to their stories.

Also, it's more interesting when you can talk about your whole life, when you can look back on your whole life. With Lionnel Messi, if he were here, it'd be more like, "Did you play well? Can you win? How's your knee? Were you angry with the referee? What do you think of what Mourinho said?" It's very sort of the moment and boring, and you don't have much reflection. Plus you're 22 years old, so you don't have as much to say.

SR: So is that why you sort of loathe the autobiographies of so many young players?

SK: I don't know about loathe. I mean I loathe Ashley Cole's autobiography.

When I was ten I read these books as well, and there's a problem when you're twenty five and not willing to reveal the truth. And you're not a reflective person by nature because most people aren't.

SR: Do you think players are more honest as time elapses? Sort of like how Diego Maradona finally admitted that he did actually use his hand in 1986.

SK: Yeah, because when you're in the bubble it all feels very important. I remember I was with these journalists waiting in a mixer for players to come off the pitch. Villareal had played in Paris. It was a nothing game, 0-0, and I was waiting because I wanted to speak to this one Dutch player and ended up with two minutes with him because the press lady whisked him away. Irritating. It's one of those moments when you think, "What the hell am I doing here?" Villareal, a provincial team, there are about 40-50 Spanish journalists who come along, and the rule there was lots of mics, and radio stations, and talking into the radio while we're waiting for the players. Just the self importance!

And then the Spanish players come by. "Come to me! Come to me!" He interviews the Spanish player, and the Spanish player says a few words into local radio that is live as we speak. Just this huge apparatus for something that is utterly meaningless. And the joy of the access to the player - the player comes to the microphone and he says a few boringly meaningless words. And yet in that envrionment who is going to say anything else? And if you do say anything interesting you're punished for it.

So yeah, much better to be in a bar with someone twenty years later.

ZS: Who was your favorite player to profile or interview in this book?

SK: The hero of my youth was Cruijff, and I thought once about writing a book about him. What you have there is a condensed three thousand word version. That was where I had the most thoughts, the most I wanted to say.

I enjoyed writing about Lothar Matthäus because I had access. He was a way of working through the German player myth, and I thought there was something kinda funny about him.

ZS: That was a very interesting chapter in the book where he almost didn't recognize what he symbolized. Or was it that he refused to recognize?

SK: I think athletes generally have a problem with... to us they become symbols of something. They can't see that. They think, "I'm a person. I'm a professional."

So there is this great Paul Simon story where he's in a restaurant in New York, and he sees Joe DiMaggio in the restaurant. Of course he's waited for this moment for years because he knows that DiMaggio must know about his song. He's a bit nervous because he thinks DiMaggio might not like it. At one point, DiMaggio comes over and they start to talk and DiMaggio's fine about it. He's like, "I think it's sweet that you sang that about me. But what do you mean 'Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?' Everyone knows where I am because I am on the TV ads. Everyone knows where I am. So why did you say 'Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?" So Paul Simon wants to respond, but then he realizes Joe DiMaggio can't see himself as a symbol. He just thinks "I'm this person with this job." And he doesn't understand what he meant to Paul Simon as a kid.

ZS: I've heard you're working on Soccernomics 2. I don't know if you have another working title for it. What's going to be the vision for it? Is it a new book? Is it more of a revision to the existing?

SK: It's about half way. It's about 25%+ new. So we want to warn people that they mustn't expect to be buying 100% new text because that would be deceiving the consumer. But on the other hand, there's a lot of new stuff. So even if you've read Soccernomics 1.0 you should read it (the wry smile emerges for a final time).

There's going to be new chapters on "Why Spain?". Match data, using Moneyball-type data on pass completions to assigned players, which is happening now. We've ellaborated on the question, "Why do clubs never disappear?" and why do they never go bust. In every chapter we've added a lot of updates.

ZS: That last point you made, "Why clubs never disappear. Never go bust." One of your latest articles in the Financial Times talks about the ramifications of the European Court's decision on licensing of TV rights. How do you think that's going to impact the requirements that UEFA is going to ask clubs to meet? You famiously made the point in chapter 4 of Soccernomics that clubs aren't businesses. They aren't run like businesses. They have a life of their own. How much do you think [this court decision] is going to impact their ability to operate like a business? There are some pretty doomsday scenarios, which you down play down in the article. But not being able to carve up the television pie the way the Premier League wants to is going to greatly affect their ability to continue to grow TV revenue.

SK: I think they will continue to grow TV revenue. Because [this decisions affects] just Europe, and Europe isn't a growth market. They'll grow it here, and in Asia as growth markets. Europe is static. People watch the Premier League.

I think the big risk is piracy, the sort of Napster-scenario for soccer. I didn't have time to write about it in that article, but already you can get hold of the match you want to watch on the internet if you're clever enough. It's not a great experience today, but it will be great in five years time. So then you get the situation of "Why should I pay my cable provider? Why don't I get it from this Chinese provider or some other Internet means?" Once people can get Premier League matches for free, which is what happened to the music industry, what do you do?

Even if you were to shrink revenues by 90%, so you go back to the level you had twenty years ago. Twenty years ago you still had clubs. You'd be fine. Everything shrinks then. All the wages would shrink. I don't see that happening. I am very confident that all of these clubs are going to outlive all of us.

ZS: But you see this as not just being a Premier League problem? Certainly the Premier League has a bit more risk here, but you're making the case this would be Europe-wide.

SK: Yes, but only a few TV rights are of interest. The Premier League, the two big Spanish clubs, the Italians. Nobody else gets really significant TV revenues.

ZS: In the article you made the point to have the English clubs make themselves immune to that potential reality and go after other forms of commercial revenue. You made the point that in Germany, Bayern earns so much money -

SK: Yeah, Bayern earns nearly double what Manchester United earns from sponsorship, even though Bayern doesn't have many fans outside of Germany.

The Premier League's brand is amazing as we all know. So even in Seattle here we are talking about Arsenal. And you can have this exact same conversation in Soweto and Shanghai because people know about the club, but very few of them watch. If in certain markets you target advertising, and you target reach, and you target selling shirts, that might be a smarter way.

In China and India they've screwed up. Very few people watch. In China people watch the Champions League on terrestrial TV and it's huge. Nobody buys the channel with the Premier League.

SR: Do you think the Premier League might follow the model of Spain and try to alter kickoff times to cater towards the Asian market?

SK: We already do. A 12:45 PM kickoff in England is evening in Asia. I can't see it starting earlier, you know nine in the morning. You may get more games going to 12:45.

So far, the UK TV rights are still bigger than foreign TV rights. Foreign TV rights don't matter that much yet. The trend is like this - UK is like this and foreign rights are like that (second hand held flat but above second hand held at an incline).

SR: Do you think it is difficult to balance the two growth markets - Asia and the United States - when they're such opposite ends of the time zones?

SK: Yes, but you have nine air time games every weekend. The Champions League is a problem for the US market.

SR: It's lunch time for us during the week, so we can pop out for a little bit.

ZS: I think the bigger challenge we face here, that MLS faces here is that a lot of people are willing to get up here in Seattle at 7 AM to watch a match rather than sometimes go watch any MLS match other than the Sounders.

SK: Yeah, nobody watches the MLS on TV. It doesn't really matter because American soccer is this mosaic, and it doesn't depend on MLS.

ZS: So you don't see that being a critical roadblock at all, or an enabler either way?

SK: Well, it hasn't blocked you guys. In 2011 why would you need watch to watch Real Salt Lake rather than Manchester United if you lived in Seattle? Ideally the composite US fan would support a US team and Manchester United, and that's often the case. It's not like it was 100 years ago where the only games you had access to were local.

I see that in India, in China. Why should they be very interested in their local clubs? They're not! In India I hosted this conference on soccer and how it could grow. They have the same issue - they really like soccer, just not Indian soccer.

ZS: Do you see a challenge though for American growth? For being an exporting nation of talent? You mentioned we're due for a break through, a forward-playing player in a large European league. Is there any faster way to develop US soccer internationally, or when it comes to our national team based upon some of the concepts you've talked about in your books previously?

SK: I think the key for the US in that you have the raw material, the 25 million of people who play some soccer. You have loads of players. So the question is not, "What happens when they're 22 and in the MLS?" because that's already too late. They're never going to be a great player. It's what happens when they're six to eighteen, where the US doesn't seem to be optimizing. To some degree that's natural because you have a generation of coaches and parents who didn't know the game. That's changing now. I think you need to work out how the rest of the world is doing it, which is really [found] in Ajax and Barcelona. Because it's not happening here.

ZS: I think that's all I had.

SK: Well, very nice to meet you! Thank you very much.

SR & ZS: Thank you very much!

More than Just Honoring Kasey Keller: Reflections on a Successful Season

2011-10-15T16:56:00.000-07:00

Tonight the Seattle Sounders will play their last regular season home match of an already successful 2011 season. I will be in attendance at what is being billed as a fan and Kasey Keller appreciation event, especially given that the Sounders have locked up the second seed in the West come playoff time with RSL's draw last night against Colorado. This certainly isn't the last home match overall, as the Sounders are guaranteed to host at least one home playoff match in the conference semifinals, and perhaps a second via the conference finals if Los Angeles stumbles in their semifinal. However, all of tonight's pageantry should be viewed by supporters as a chance to appreciate this season as any of the next home events could be tinged with a loss and the uncertainty of an offseason.

From a personnel standpoint, this has been the best season of the three the club has played in MLS. The club certainly overachieved its first few years, finding good young players in Freddy Montero, Steve Zakuani, and Mike Fucito. They combined them with solid, established lower-division players like Osvaldo Alonso, Roger Levesque, and others. The experienced leadership of Kasey Keller led the way. What wasn't present was a cohesive team focus and work ethic. Tempermental DP's in Freddie Ljungberg and Blaise N'Kufo seemed to never fit in with MLS' style of play nor the Sounders, leading to less-than-optimal team balance and esprit d'corps. Alvaro Fernandez, the third DP picked up after World Cup 2010, struggled to find his groove in the half season he played in 2010. Overall, the team impressed the Seattle faithful its first two seasons, but was not one someone would look at and consider championship material.

Throughout the 2011 season, that perception has certainly changed. When Steve Zakuani went down to a horrific leg injury in the Sounders seventh match, every supporter must have been wondering how the team would do the rest of the season (especially offensively). No one would have predicted they would finish as the league leader in goals and second overall in goal differential. Fernandez would begin to earn his DP money, sitting at the top of the Castrol Index as of this writing. Freddy Montero, after a slow start, would end up leading the team in PP90 with 16 goals and 10 assists as of this writing. The man who spurred all of this offense, Maura Rosales, was a bargain basement buy at the beginning of the season and now leads the team in assists. Throw in Osvaldo Alonso's tenacious, tackling defense and Kasey Keller's outstanding play in goal and this team has a feel about it that it didn't have the first two seasons. It is a team that feels like it can win an MLS Cup.

As good as the players have been, the results have continued to improve as well. The Sounders won their third straight US Open Cup this season, something that hadn't been done in four decades in the competition. Their first US Open Cup championship allowed them to compete in the 2010-11 CONCACAF Champions League tournament, where the Sounders underimpressed with a 1-0-5 record for a total of 3 points. The second US Open Cup allowed them to return to the CCL tournament this season, where they have done much better by compiling a 3-1-1 record and qualification for the knockout rounds next year. In league play, the Sounders have improved greatly as well in 2011. See the table below for key summary statistics. Where the Sounders have excelled this season is in greatly improving both their offense and defense over previous seasons.

Perhaps the most impressive element of the last year has been the continued fan support. The club has broken its own MLS attendance records the last two seasons. This season has seen an average attendance of 36,932, a 2.10% increase over 2010. Tonight's match will see 62,000+ packed into Century Link field, representing one of the largest crowds in the history of MLS. The Sounders have set the US Open Cup attendance record two years running. Let's put this all in perspective - the Sounders total attendance in 27 matches this year outdrew all but two of the teams in the NHL (41 games), all but two of the teams in the NBA (41 games), and would put them in the upper half of attendance in the EPL, Serie A, and the Bundesliga. There is no quenching the thirst of the fandom in Seattle.

It is a match like tonight's where the entirety of the season must be appreciated. The mass of people must be taken in. The quality of the team to be appreciated. Reflection on an already successful season must be made. Yes, it can get better than this. An MLS Cup and the rare chance at a CCL Cup are still a possibility - very real ones with how well the club has been playing this year. But to condition success this season upon winning those cups would be greedy at this point. By any measure, the club has greatly improved this year and is building a record of which it can be proud. Enjoy tonight, whether you are at the CLink or watching on Fox Soccer. Very few people living in America get to enjoy this game and a club so much.

NOW C'MON YOU SOUNDERS! BEAT SAN JOSE!

Update: An Analysis of Wenger and Why I Haven't Been Posting As Much

2011-09-28T07:45:00.001-07:00

It's been nearly a month-and-a-half since I last posted to this, my own blog. It's not for lack of analysis and writing, but more that the writing and analysis has been concentrated on the Transfer Price Index (TPI) and their blog and competing with many other demands.

In case you missed it a couple of weeks ago, my latest post for the TPI was a comprehensive analysis of Arsene Wenger's performance versus the TPI data set using the three models I've created - the MSq£, the M£XI, and the m£XIR. The post took several weeks to build, with the monster graphic (2700 data points!!!) taking up most of my time. It's something I've wanted to do for a long time (Arsene is my email's namesake, after all), but it is something likely not to be repeated for other managers for a while. I've now applied such analysis to two of the three longest serving managers in the Premier League (Moyes, Wenger), and it will likely be some time before I turn to Alex Ferguson's tenure at Manchester United.

Looking ahead, I have been working on a new post for the TPI that creates alternative tables for each Premier League season based upon each club's performance versus the m£XIR model in each season. Essentially, it creates a table of teams for each season ranked from highest to lowest bang-for-the-Pound. It should be an interesting post, and while I certainly respect the results that produce a number of "alternative champions" I suspect that it may just be a poor consolation prize to supporters of clubs who didn't finish at the top of the actual table. Who knows... if I keep working on refining my TPI material I may just be lucky enough to have some of it included in an as-yet-unplanned second edition of Pay As You Play. That would allow me to realize one of my life goals - published author.

On my own blog, I will be providing a projection of 2011 MLS first (proper) round playoff predictions based upon my previous analysis of the impact of game differential on playoff results. Such a post should provide for some interesting discussion in the months ahead!

Finally, no matter how much I look ahead you may be asking why I have not been posting much recently. When I originally started this blog I was making 2-3 posts per week. Then I dialed it back to about 1 post per week to balance blogging with other interests (mainly exercising). Now I have dialed it back to about one post per month, albeit the posts are a good bit more dense with much more effort put in to the graphical presentations of data that accompany them. There are a multitude of reasons why the posting frequency has gone down, but it can be primarily chalked up to my need to study for a forthcoming engineering exam in October.

I've had my undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering for ten years now, and a masters degree in the same field for seven years. The final step in certifying my engineering "expertise" is to earn a professional engineer's license. To do so, one must work in the field for a number of years under another licensed professional engineer (I can check that box off) and pass an 8 hour exam on all things related to their specialty within mechanical engineering. Oh, and there is another 8 hour preliminary exam that I never took coming out of college, as most large companies don't require such certification (my first employer didn't, my second-and-current employer is in the minority that does). In summary, I must take that preliminary exam at the end of October, and then the professional engineer's exam at the end of April. Dredging up a number of concepts I haven't touched in seven years has required 10+ hours a week of studying since mid-July. Hence, I have minimal time to do analysis and write about it.

My hope is to get a month's respite after the October exam where I can have my free time back, and then not require so much studying in preparation for the professional engineer's exam given all the preparation I've undergone for the preliminary exam. If I succeed in that, I will have more time to analyze data and blog about it. I'll keep you posted!

Farewell, El Capitan

2011-08-16T08:24:00.000-07:00

All We're Left With Is Memories and Dreams of What-Might-Have-Been

When I went to bed Sunday night I was planning on spending this evening writing about the 2011-12 EPL season outlook using my input to the Transfer Price Index's season predictions. I thought I had come to terms with the departure of of Cesc Fabregas over the summer, and certainly in the last week as it became abundantly clear that Barcelona were going to have their man no matter what. All of that changed on Monday morning, as I woke to the inevitable news of his sale and for some strange reason I felt emotional loss. It's odd for me, as I've only been following the Gunners for 2+ seasons now. I certainly have come to love them because of their beautiful play, rich history, and their intention to not buy championships but build teams from the (relative) ground up to win them as a club and not a rich man's toy. But I've never seen them in person, and certainly have avoided buying any player's jersey in anticipation of the inevitable transfer they will leave upon. I've intentionally avoided making any emotional attachments knowing the brutal business realities within which a club must work.

At the same time, I've probably never typed "I <3..." for any other player except Cesc. Those unfortunate enough to listen to my Twitter feed during a match certainly saw that phrase on occasion the last two seasons. For some reason I was magnetically attracted to Cesc, and loved him for what he embodied and what he stood for the last 5-6 years. It was the realization Monday morning - the fact that I will likely NEVER type "I <3 Cesc" ever again - that made me think about why such a forgone conclusion seemed to affect me so much. This blog post is an attempt to explain the thoughts I've had in the last 24 hours.

The Emotional: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

During the drive in to work on Monday I had a flood of emotions come over me. Cesc's departure was the first big loss by the club in my brief fandom, so I wondered why this one seemed to bother me so much. Sure, losing a captain is never easy for club, especially when it seems as if he just might be coming in to his prime. But as I thought about those emotions, I concluded it was something deeper. I finally realized what was bothering me- these are some of the same emotions I felt when I went through my divorce from my first wife. Certainly this was nowhere near as personal, nowhere near as intense, but the feelings were similar nonetheless.

Betrayal of promises of a commitment to the club and its goals.
The finality of it all after such a long transfer process.
Even the issue of seeing someone you considered committed to you (or your club) kiss the suitor to which you lost them.

And that's how I choose to view Cesc's departure: a divorce, or at least an end to a long-term relationship where the two involved in the relationship made life-altering plans around each other.

Marriage Counseling, Arsene Style

Most relationships fail because those involved in them mistakenly believe love is all they need. Marriages don't survive on love alone - they survive because that love allows for the couple in the marriage to become more than the sum of their parts. Different marriages judge that sum by different measures - some desire money, some desire possessions, others desire spiritual growth, others find a higher purpose for their marriage in the rearing of their children. There are a millions of motivations for being married, but the most durable marriages rely on the concept of a "sum is greater than its parts" and then utilize love to realize that sum.

In the case of Cesc and Arsenal, that's where the relationship broke down. It wasn't about the money - he's paying €1M a year to Arsenal for five years for the privilege of going to Barcelona. It wasn't about the love - he reiterated his love for the club and its supporters even as he was introduced at Camp Nou. It wasn't really about going home, that was just a side benefit. Does anyone really think he would return to Barcelona if they weren't a more prestigious club than Arsenal at the moment? It was about the sum not being greater than its parts. In being introduced at the Camp Nou, Cesc said of his reason for the departure:

"It wasn't really the losing, it was the routine. Year after year, it was always the same story. Fighting until the end only to see we didn't have the energy, in the semifinals, the finals, to arrive in the final sprint."

Cesc knows he's a great player. What he was looking for in departing for Arsenal eight years ago was a chance to contribute to a world class club's already rich history. He could have done that at Barcelona, but he chose to take his talents to London and attempt to build upon what Henry, Bergkamp, and others had already started under Arsene Wenger. He soon found himself being the centerpiece the team was built around, both tactically and leadership-wise. Yet season after season, he saw his own club falter in the business end of the season while his former club became one of the best club sides of all time. He was brought in to a great club that was winning championships, was told the entire team was being (re-)built around him, and the rebuilding project had yet to bear fruit over six seasons of its implementation. Cesc had enough of the promises of something better that went continuously

None of this makes Cesc's departure any easier - not for him, not for the club, and not its supporters. No matter how rational the move might seem, we supporters felt he was our captain. During a particularly challenging time in the club's history, we were looking to him to lead rather than leave. We wanted him to recommit to the club, just as we wanted the club to recommit itself to spend the funds to build the championship team he deserved. In some ways, we entered "counseling" last summer and agreed to work on things - compete strongly in 2010/11, win a cup or two, and perhaps we could patch things up after five years of nothing. That clearly wasn't the case, and Wenger saw the writing on the wall. The counseling failed, and the divorce proceeded with Wenger reluctantly granting his captain the divorce he desired.

But did it make logical sense from Cesc's perspective, or was he making a decision as emotional as the supporters' reactions to it?

The Analytical: Cesc is Justified in Leaving

Let's look at what Cesc arrived to and what he left behind, and judge his decision in the totality of the data. As you know, I've spent much digital ink demonstrating that championship caliber teams are built upon transfers via my work in the Transfer Price Index (TPI) database. It is that outlook I carry over in to the analysis below.

Note: All transfer figures are in 2011 TPI numbers

Player Purchases: After spending big money on players like Dennis Bergkamp (£25.1M), Thierry Henry (£29.9M), Marc Overmars (£21.5M), and Sylvain Wiltord (£29.5M) during the championship years, Arsenal would only buy two players during the trophyless years for more than £20M - Alexander Hleb (£26M) and Theo Walcott (£27.9M).
Squad Cost: The total squad cost (Sq£) was £252M in 2003-04, but by the end of the 2010-11 season it had been reduced to £155M (a 38% reduction). This has led Arsenal to fall from a solid third position within the Big Six (and nearly on par with Manchester United in 2nd position) in 2003-04 to a clear sixth position in squad cost by 2010-11 (click on graph below to enlarge).

Starting XI Cost: When Fabregas arrived at the start of the 2003-2004 season, Arsenal had an average starting XI cost (£XI) of £120M. By the time of his final season at Arsenal, the average £XI had fallen to £71.5M (a 40% reduction). Arsenal's slide in the £XI metric versus the other Big Six clubs is similar to that seen for the Sq£ metric (click on graphic to enlarge).

Performance vs. Transfer Expectations: During the Invincibles run, Arsenal earned an astonishing 0.96 PPG above what was predicted by the m£XIR model. That had decreased to a more pedestrian 0.38 PPG by last season, with each of the last four seasons seeing a steady erosion from 0.63 PPG over performance in 2007/08 to the 0.38 PPG experienced last season. This suggests that Wenger's youth project that has focused on reducing squad costs and preserving performance clearly is not working, even given the reduced transfer costs of the assembled team. Especially troubling to Cesc must have been the championship caliber performances over the first half of the last two seasons (0.69 PPG in 2009-10, 0.53 PPG in 2010-11) that was followed up with poor second halves both years (regression to a season long average of 0.50 and 0.38 PPG, respectively).
Trophies: In Cesc's first three seasons with Arsenal, the club won the Premiership (2004), the FA Cup (2005), and made it to the Champions League final in 2006 where they lost to Barcelona. After that run, they featured in two League Cup Finals (2007, 2011), and were otherwise knocked out in semi-final or earlier rounds of every other competition in the five years.
Premier League Table: After finishing first in 2003-04 and second a year later, Arsenal averaged a table position of 3.67 and never finished higher than third in the final six years Cesc was at the club.

Conclusions

It's clear that while Arsene's management of the team finances has prevented the club from going into debt like other clubs, it has also put a glass ceiling on the club's table position and trophy case. Cesc's observation relating to "the routine" of late season failure was spot on. Frustrated with a lack of investment and results that were progressively worse, especially when he gave the club one final chance in 2010-11, he decided it was time to end the relationship. I can't blame him for doing so - six years of rebuilding is certainly long enough to judge a team and its level of commitment to its world class captain.

We Gooners can only hope that Arsene and the club take the lessons from the divorce and apply them to making the club better - invest the funds wisely, and sign a big name player or two. Much like the well wishes one might have for an ex that ended a relationship amicably, I hope that Cesc also gains from this breakup. He certainly seems to have made a tough decision, and faces an even tougher task of breaking in to Barcelona's crowded starting XI. I just hope his continued development doesn't come at our expense in Champions League - if we even make it that far in the next few seasons.

One of my Twitter followers, who is an LFC fan, made the following observation regarding how Fernando Torres' time at Anfield and his departure played out in the press and wider public. There is some coarse language in the quote, but I've chosen to preserve it to communicate the emotion.

"It's really weird, but I always say that Torres with LFC was that partner who everyone around you said "how the hell did you land him/her?", making the suggestion that the person was too good for us. Then the papers would continually link Torres away from us trying to fuck it up, and fans kept saying to themselves "it's not true, it's not true". Then, when we least expected it, Torres requested to leave for that one club everyone kept linking him to, but that we all fucking hated with a passion. I'll be honest, fans were prepared for Torres to leave, but the surrounding circumstances (timing, destination, hours after we brought in Suarez, team was winning, etc.) was just the perfect storm in the creation of the shit sandwich that was."

Cesc's departure was more drawn out and less sudden. Perhaps that made it worse than Torres' move to Chelsea, perhaps better given we Gunners won't be seeing Cesc winning games on a weekly basis at a league rival. What does sting more about Cesc's departure is that no one ever questioned how we got him. He came in to a team that was just embarking on its most successful season of league football in the history of England's top flight. We got him on the cheap, and he represented the finest example of Wenger's forthcoming youth policy. He was the embodiment of the Arsenal-of-the-future, and a team was built around him. The reality in him leaving is that our club, at least in its current vision, has failed and the experiment is over. We're no longer the attractive young man or woman that has others fawning all over us. We're now that club that will be greeted with raised eyebrows when we land that "great catch" with which we have no business being seen.

How the club in general, and Wenger specifically, react to this departure over the season will say a lot. Arsenal is facing the real possibility of rebuilding after a failed rebuilding project, and struggling to maintain their Champions League spot in seasons to come (and the important revenue and prestige that comes with it). They may not be a selling club yet, but they certainly are in trouble. Youth Policy 1.0 is effectively dead with Cesc's departure. It's tombstone will read, "Consistently 4th, but highly profitable". Where the club goes from here is any one's guess, but I can guarantee it will be a bumpier ride than in season's past.

The 2011 Update to the MSq£ Model

2011-08-11T20:28:00.000-07:00

My latest post using the TPI data is up at their blog. Utilizing the 2010-11 table and transfer data, the MSq£ model is updated to reflect the continually increasing correlation between transfer expenditures and table position. The fit of the regression model increased again, where the MSq£ of a club predicts 71% of the team's table position. A few clubs moved in to the over performance category, and the biggest over performer all time rejoins a very different Premier League than the last time they were in it. Head on over to the TPI blog and check it out, especially since it serves as the foundation for our forthcoming 2011-12 season predictions.

The Declining Fortunes of David Moyes (An m£XIR Analysis)

2011-07-15T05:34:00.000-07:00

Last week was a crazy one for me - good friends got married, I had a couple of big things to take care of around my house, etc. Hence, no post at the TPI blog last week.

This week the schedule was a more open, and I've returned with a piece on David Moyes' declining performance versus the m£XIR model. Moyes, the third longest tenured manager in the Premier League, has certainly earned a degree of management success while at Everton. He's solidly outperformed the model in four of his first six years at the club. However, he's seen a steady decline in the club's fortunes the last three years despite significant investment from the club in the first two years of that run. Moyes may be facing his toughest campaign yet given the expectations he's set and what appears to be a steady long-term downward trend.

Read on at the link above, and let me know what you think.

Using the Transfer Price Index to Set Expectations at Aston Villa

2011-06-28T10:36:00.000-07:00

My latest post at the Transfer Price Index blog is up, and is a must read for any Aston Villa fan. The post also dissects some of the differences between the long term (M£XI) and short term (m£XIR) transfer models, and identifies when it is appropriate to use one versus the other. Again, it will be some time before I cross post the material here due to the desire to keep things over at that blog given the proprietary nature of the data. Please head on over to the TPI blog and check it out!

Taking Requests for m£XIR Analyses

2011-06-20T20:12:00.000-07:00

Response to my post analyzing the effects of starting XI transfer cost on match outcome at the Transfer Price Index has been wonderful. Thank you to everyone for your feedback!

One of the re-occurring requests has been one of additional manager or team analyses using the m£XIR model. Some people are looking to pick on their least favorite managers, while others are looking to see how their favorites stack up. This is certainly why the model was created - to analyze club and manager performance!

I've set up a Google Spreadsheet to capture such requests. Please take a look at what's been requested so far, and if you don't see your request in the list feel free to leave a comment here or send me a tweet. I'll certainly add it to the list.

A few caveats are to be made. First, I will have to see how I can fit such requests into my crowded summer schedule. Second, posting will also be subject to approval at the Transfer Price Index blog. I am not the only contributor at their site, and the requests must be balanced against the wider blog material there. Perhaps a few of the posts end up here instead - who knows? We'll have to play this as it goes. In summary, it may take a bit longer to get through the requests than some of you may desire, but I will work through them.

Let's do some crowdsourcing - send me your ideas, and I will blog about them!

The Effect of £XI on Match Outcome

2011-06-20T07:06:00.000-07:00

I know I haven't posted much over the last two weeks, but that's not because I have been sitting idle. Rather, I have been creating a post over at the Transfer Price Index blog that creates a model that links the likelihood of match outcome (win, tie, loss) to venue (home, away) and the transfer cost ratios of the starting XI (m£XIR) of the two teams. It's 13 pages long when printed, and serves as the third leg in the three foundational models I have created for the Transfer Price Index (match outcome vs. venue and m£XIR, table position vs. average £XI, and table position vs. average Sq£).

I highly recommend jumping over to the post and having a read - it will be a while before I post it here as the data it is based upon is exclusive to the TPI. I will, however, use the m£XIR model extensively in posts at my own blog, so a good understanding of the foundational document is recommended.

Yet again I must express my extreme gratitude to Paul Tomkins for allowing me to use the data, and to Graeme Riley for his updating of the data set with the 2010/11 season and transfer data. Especially important was Graeme's meticulous reconstruction of the starting XI of every match in the history of the Premier League and the 2011 CTPP costs for each player in the starting XI. He's got the tough, time intensive job compared to the tens of hours I take in analysis and writing I partake in once he's done the heavy lifting. There aren't enough pints in the world for me to repay him and Paul for the data they provide.