Statistics v Instincts

By: Martha | December 30th, 2007

Math are good. It’s not just American sports franchises that are enamored of Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane, and his rigorously statistic-based approach to buying players — he’s also well respected by big names in English football, many of whom turned up last month to hear him speak about how his ideas apply to their game.

Bean’s concept, very generally, is to “pay for future performance, not past performance.” In baseball, he pays attention to signs of consistency like on-base percentage, rather than freak happenings like home runs, and stocks his teams based on those who perform in the former areas — they’re almost always more affordable that the ones with flashier statistics. In football, this translates to tracking qualities like running, tackling, and putting less value in things like unpredictability, and moments of genius.

You know those absurd stats they show at halftime of Champions League matches these days, measuring who has run the furthest? That’s part of this. According to The Guardian, about half the managers in the top two divisions in England utilize ProZone, a system that tracks the movements of players on the pitch in insane detail, and is taken as the gospel by some as an indication of fitness, productivity and use to the team. (Now is perhaps not the time to mention that Sam Allardyce has been a devotee since his days at Bolton.)

If you’re rolling your eyes at the idea of managers picking their teams based on numbers rather than what they see with their eyes, you’re not alone. David James, for one, thinks it’s more than a little silly, and explains himself in one of his typically frank posts on his Guardian blog. (This one features the hilarious revelation that being scored on by Phil Neville was the worst moment of his life.) There’s nothing particularly revelatory in James’ piece, but his specific examples — the story of Peter Schmeichel sprinting back and forth in his goal box and ending the match with more impressive stats than a field player stands out — provide a vivid counterpart to the cold statistics on which Beane’s system is based.

Obviously relying entirely on either gut or numbers isn’t going to work; it’s finding a useful balance that’s key. That said, it’s hard to imagine Allardyce walking up to Sir Alex Ferguson and telling him with a straight face that he needs to incorporate more statistical analysis in his decision-making.