My ventures into non-fiction are mostly about soccer. A bunch of years ago, Anson Dorrance (UNC women's soccer coach) suggested I read Moneyball, which I did and liked a lot. A step into sports analytics followed with Soccernomics, a sort or Freakonomics for soccer. Then I stumbled across a terrific blog called SoccerQuantified.com prior to the 2010 World Cup. I wrote the author, Chris Anderson, and we've emailed back and forth a few times where he told me a book was in preparation.
Then I was in Barnes and Noble and, per usual, wandered to the soccer rack where I saw Moving the Goalposts, another take on a numerical description of the game. Anderson's book was released in the US the end of July and Jovanovic's book came out in 2012. Ordered both from Amazon on July 30.
Analytics has been around many
professions for a long time. Finance, retail, health care all have a long
history with analytics, but the advent of BIG DATA, where enormous datasets are
analyzed has only recently made an impact in sport, including soccer. Most all
teams in the top league of a country have an analytics group. What they do with
the data they get is anyone’s guess; big big big money decisions hang in the
balance so teams hold their cards very close to the vest.
Now that NBC has gone wall to wall
with the EPL, the match watching public will start seeing more data presented
on the screen to help with your viewing enjoyment – possession, distance
covered, etc. What will inevitably happen is that some long held assumptions
and biases will likely be challenged, for fan and fantasy manager alike.
These 2 recent books deserve your attention, if you want to learn more about the game. Player,
parent, spectator, doesn’t matter. There is plenty here to peruse.
One book is The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Soccer Is Wrong by
Chris Anderson and Davie Salley. The other is Moving the Goalposts by Rob Jovanovic. Both look at old and
new concepts about the game and offer numbers to support or refute various
topics. While they are both conceptually similar, they really are entirely
different in their approach and presentation.
Anderson and Salley are both
business profs, Anderson at Cornell, and Salley at Dartmouth. I couldn’t find
an ‘about the author’ page for Jovanovic. You should quickly realize that The
Numbers Game is probably a more in depth look into the game.
Jovanovic’s book is a series of
short lessons on assumed truths about soccer and most of his applications are
from the EPL or the Euros. His number crunching (in comparison to
Anderson/Salley) is more of the back of the envelope type. Much of the data
used come from box scores and season summaries. For example, the myth of
the corner. The overall success rate of a corner in the EPL is about 1.5%. In
2008/9, there were 4232 corners and only 61 goals. A traditional corner is
practically giving the ball to the opposition.
How about the assumption that a
2-0 lead is the hardest to hold? Were you aware that in the Euros, the team
with a 2-0 lead wins 94% of the time and loses only 0.3%? 2-0 sounds pretty
safe to me.
Or who was the greatest player? Jovanovic says Pele. Why? Because
when Pele played for Brazil, they had a 94.2% winning percentage. When he
didn’t play, Brazil’s had a 56.3% winning percentage; Quite a dropoff. What
about Maradona? When Maradona played,
Argentina won 62.2%, but won 69.4% when he wasn’t in the lineup. OK, maybe
‘greatest’ isn’t the best term, maybe ‘important’ is better. But that didn't stop me from getting Maradona"s autograph.
Anderson/Salley offer a far more in
depth look at a few major concepts of the game and in doing so, use bigger
datasets like those from Prozone, Opta, databases available just to the media,
and even the EPL’s accountancy firm. BIG DATA by comparison. To begin, they
discuss in some detail the role of luck in the game and offer quantitative
explanations for why the outcome of a game is almost 50% pure luck. Tied to
this is the fact that the infrequency of goals makes luck an even bigger role
than in games like basketball or American football.
They also tackle (no pun intended)
the concept of possession vs. direct play pointing out while there is little
correlation between time of possession and outcome, teams that are able to
possess the ball not only score more but they also prevent the other team from
scoring. And they provide some insights into teams that buck this trend like
Stoke, Watford, and others. Like how Stoke can have less than 30% of the
possession, take 2 shots, and beat Chelsea 2-0 last year.
Here’s a question bound to raise
the ire of some. Which is better? To score or to prevent the other team from
scoring? Think about that. You can score a goal and still lose, but if you shut
the other team out, the worst you can do is tie. And from this, they go into a
discussion about personnel, managers, management, and decisions about transfer
and fees being so high for strikers and so low for defenders. Their position is
that defenders are ridiculously undervalued. As a former defender, I knew that!
So while both books are about
‘analytics’, they each have a bit of a different slant on the topic. Jovanovic
takes a more ‘People Magazine’ approach to analytics. Short, easily read and
digested topics. The perfect presentation for those who want to have some facts
in their arsenal for inevitable debates and bar bets. Anderson and Salley provide a deeper journey
into broader concepts of the game (while sparing the reader from the gory
mathematical details).
It all depends on what one wants
out of their ‘analytics’ so I won’t recommend one over the other (even though I liked Anderson's book; hey I'm a bit of a statistics geek so their methods interested me. That and it has a rich reference list). Each will set
you back $12 to $16 depending on where you find it. At that price, get both.
East Coast Don
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