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Post by ashaddick on May 19, 2015 7:15:48 GMT
Curious to read abut this new system ( something else imported from the states ) being used by Brentford, a recruitment system based on mathematical modelling and statistics by not one but two directors of football, It alleges that this helps clubs with lesser incomes compete with the richer clubs ? They are also connected with the side FC Midtjylland who are about to win the Danish Superliga and where this system is already used and have started to scout and buy players from lower league European sides. I just wondered if this is the way forward for football ? Or if it is something that we are already doing ? It obviously wasn't what Mark Warburton wanted and one can only have sympathy for him.
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Post by CharltonBoy on May 19, 2015 7:30:24 GMT
Moneyball is a decent system, but I don't know how it fits In to football. Arsenal apparently tried it and have been nowhere for the past 11 years. Fc mitylland have an advantage to because the recruitment laws for foreign players are less strict.
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Post by 19addickted96 on May 19, 2015 10:37:04 GMT
It's been around a while now but I think a lot of teams have abandoned it for obvious reasons that it's based on stats ... Afterall it was this very same stat based player finder that said Mark Gower was the best player in Europe (over messi , Ronaldo etc)!
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Post by ExeterAddick on May 19, 2015 17:03:57 GMT
I find this kind of thing really interesting and there's definitely a place for statistical analysis when looking at the effectiveness of players. However, as some people have pointed out, these stats can be misleading.
One example I've heard was Morten Gamst Pedersen at Blackburn. Apparently, Allardyce used to insist that his attacking players completed a certain number of "high intensity sprints" in each game. Pedersen, realising that he was falling short, allegedly used to make up the numbers by sprinting across at full speed to take each corner.
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Post by seriouslyred on May 20, 2015 8:44:22 GMT
Moneyball is a decent system, but I don't know how it fits In to football. Arsenal apparently tried it and have been nowhere for the past 11 years. Fc mitylland have an advantage to because the recruitment laws for foreign players are less strict. If "nowhere" is a place in the Champions league 16 years running and a brand new stadium filled to the brim with 60,000 fans every week then I'd take that! Arsenal chose to sell their 25 year olds to Man City and elsewhere rather than pay them a fortune. This also means younger players have more of a chance to push on. Moneyball is about developing underated players and selling them to fund losses. In our case the FAPL prize is so big, you'd have to question why sell when keeping the best will boost our chances. Southampton and Newcastle are clear examples of sourcing players they need and then selling. As a result they don't rack up hundreds of millions of debt. It's clear M.Duchatelet is playing a form of Moneyball - we will have to see who is sold from Charlton and Liege this summer before we can work out the rules he's playing by. And maybe previous patterns change if they are serious about the top six? The Category 1 Academy plan is all part of a Moneyball strategy to attract the best and end up with more than one new player entering the first team squad each season. Let's see if Buyens, Bulot and Gudmundsson fetch a fee...and who might arrive in their stead.
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Post by cafcforever on May 20, 2015 13:36:11 GMT
Quiet at the moment,Gomez to be sold?.
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Post by reamsofverse on May 20, 2015 13:47:12 GMT
Quiet is not the word, there is not one single friendly been signed and sealed yet, normally they are all in the bag by now.
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Post by seriouslyred on May 20, 2015 17:29:35 GMT
There was a lot of stories about Gomez and Gudmundsson price tags a couple of weeks but you never know if that's players agent, us or another club stirring interest. My money is on someone putting a bid in for these two and RD trying to make it an auction. At the same time they are trying to close out targets before a sale is done so we don't pay over the odds.
After this summer ideally talk of Koc, Nego and Piotr will be consigned to the bin because we will be buying and selling at the £2-5m mark.
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Post by Deleted on May 20, 2015 18:21:01 GMT
There was a lot of stories about Gomez and Gudmundsson price tags a couple of weeks but you never know if that's players agent, us or another club stirring interest. My money is on someone putting a bid in for these two and RD trying to make it an auction. At the same time they are trying to close out targets before a sale is done so we don't pay over the odds. After this summer ideally talk of Koc, Nego and Piotr will be consigned to the bin because we will be buying and selling at the £2-5m mark. I take it that the buying figure is the sum total of all our signings!
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Post by seriouslyred on May 20, 2015 20:40:41 GMT
I reckon we need 4, maybe 5 x €2m players on top of what we have. By that I mean same calibre as our top players.
Maybe we get one or two on a free...Or on loan from Liege or the FAPL. But if we are buying as an investment like Vetokele (or our Delort) then we have to pay €3m+ for a €2m player.
Go bargain basement and you get Tucudean, Church etc up front.
Entirely upto RD of course but he's wasting his time and money (and ours) if he doesn't give the club boost this summer.
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Post by ashaddick on May 21, 2015 7:35:31 GMT
Rather gone of the ball ( and the money ) here. I was just saying that this approach to running a sporting club is all very new to me and I find it quite fascinating. Now I know ( through reading ) that this system started in Baseball in the USA and has spread to other sports, but does anyone really know how it works ? I read also that at Charlton the manager will give the scouting network a profile of a required type of player and they then search for a person who fits that profile. If this is " Moneyball " I would suggest that it is working at best at 50% at our club as that is about the amount of players bought in who have actually benefited us in the middle to long term.
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Post by weststandfruitloop on May 22, 2015 12:01:10 GMT
People seem to be misunderstanding exactly what the "Moneyball approach" is. You need to read the 2003 book "Moneyball" (the best selling sports book of all time, I believe). There was also a Hollywood movie version of the book (same title) starring Brad Pitt a couple of years ago, but that very much glosses over the intricacies of the system in favour of drama. As a big Boston Red Sox fan - travelling over from the UK for six or seven games a season - it's one of my favourite books, and I'll try to distil it here...
'Moneyball' is about Billie Beane, the manager of the Oakland Athletics. This team has by far the lowest budget of any of the 30 professional baseball teams, so he needed to come up with an innovative new way to compete with the wealthier teams. Beane hired a couple of top statisticians (ex Harvard, MIT, whatever) and set them to work identifying players who were undervalued in the trade market or the draft (ie players that could be signed from under the noses of richer clubs).
Baseball is a hugely stats based sport, and players' values are largely down to their average rate of runs scored, players pitched/caught out, etc. Beane's bean counters set about discovering statistics that were important that people hadn't traditionally realised were important (thus didn't put a high "price" on). The most famous example is that of "walks". This is where a batsman doesn't hit the ball at all, the pitcher throws four wide balls and the batsman gets to walk to first base. This is not a stat that was really valued, as someone who gets a lot of walks is someone who doesn't hit many balls (so bats in hardly any runs). The statisticians discovered that where a player had walked the next person to bat was X% more likely to hit the ball (maybe the pitcher was tired from throwing all those wides?) and would score X% more runs than average (the walker on first equals +1 in the case of a Home Run, for example). Ergo someone who scores a lot of walks is much more valuable a player TO THE TEAM than the market prices them at. Kevin Youkillis (the "Greek God of Walks"), who Beane desperately tried to sign multiple times, is probably the best example of such a player.
This method of creating new statistics - sabermetrics - worked in baseball and Oakland performed way better than they should have, given their finances. The went about picking players in the draft, trading players, trading draft spots etc where they realised the value of the player based on the new stat crunching, and the trading/rival club valued them completely differently. It worked both ways, incidentally, in that Oakland traded away players that other people put a higher value on (due to traditional stats reasons) than Oakland's own sabremetrics suggested that player deserved. Getting rid of a 'star player' (that the other team value more than you do) in exchange for two or three 'prospects' (that you've seen value in the stats of), essentially. Just the sort of thing that football fans hate, in fact. Is this an approach RD is using, at Liege at least?
Whilst Oakland were the first to use the Moneyball approach, it was most succesfully used by the (far richer) Boston Red Sox who brought in their own stats nerds - and tried but failed to sign manager Beane himself - and won the World Series in 2004 and 2007 (after a gap of 86 years!).
So to what extent could the Moneyball approach, being based on interminable stats, really apply in football? Dunno, but these days with all the Pro Zone systems and so forth there are far more statistics available about players (how many metres per game they run, completed wide passes, completed short passes, etc). The first UK club to use sabermetrics was Tottenham - Billy Beane is a huge Spurs fan and he offered his services for free to advise them on how to use the approach way back in 2007. He's since shared his system with Arsenal (!), Man U and many others.
Sabermetrics in football is probably mostly about discovering young players that obscure stats suggest will develop into huge stars. This approach is perhaps one reason why the Arsenals of this world are snapping up kids you've never heard of from all over the globe. Does this Moneyball approach work in football then? Given that Man U "saw something" that lead to them paying us 500k for Sean McGinty, who a couple of years later is being released on a free by Rochdale, I rather suspect not...
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Post by seriouslyred on May 22, 2015 12:21:26 GMT
Having expensive 25-32 year olds blocks the progress and development of younger talent. So my first observation is that we only brought in Eagles, Diarra and Johnson as reinforcements to help turn around the situation. In the past we had a plethora of older players like Cort and Gower who hardly played...and we held a much bigger squad, again blocking young players.
Secondly we have just watched a season of Buyens, Bulot and Gudmundsson who all have a year left on their contracts. I don't know if they were good enough for Liege but the players, RD and the fans have benefitted from us playing them in the Championship.
If Bia does come to us then that will follow the same model - play at the Valley to enhance your Vale / get exposure. And this is the bit which Powell couldn't get his head around as per quotes in his recent interview.
Baseball is very different to Football but the similarity is that there is a mature market in players.
Another point I would make is that unless we are going for the play-offs it really doesn't matter where we finish. So bringing players through has to be the priority. If we are in a good place come November then I would expect the club to build on that via loans and the January window.
So I think this summer and the first few months of next season will add a layer of understanding to what is going on. My guess is that we will sell a couple, bring in eight, of which four are very good.
The player sales will not only fund losses and purchases but also show that playing on one of the best pitches in the division is a route to the top - either with us or being sold on.
That's my understanding of Moneyball as applied to Charlton together with some really heavy analysis of statistics and player values - both for our squad and target players.
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Post by ashaddick on May 22, 2015 16:26:47 GMT
Now this is becoming an interesting conversation, if only there was a table with some beer on that we could all sit round.
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