Stop bunching

We can all list the greatest managers and coaches of all time. The tactical innovators, the era defining managers who revolutionised the way the game was played. We can also name the players associated with those teams; Cruyff, Beckenbauer, the Dutch trio at Milan, Xavi and Iniesta. One of the great unknowns is; is it the coach who makes the players great, the players who make the coach great, or is it a real partnership? Looking at that great player list though then we have to ask the question; would these players have been great in other teams. And the answer is yes, they were great before and great after their periods with these managers. Xavi and Iniesta, who are strongly associated with the great Guardiola teams were already great players. Xavi was player on the tournament in Euro 2008. They had won leagues and a Champions League under Rijkaard. Did Guardiola change Barcelona significantly? Yes. Was this helped by the emergence of the greatest player in history and t...

Whenever you watch the news, or a read an article, about something you are interested in you realise just how misleading or superficial the coverage is. If there is a story about education on TV the reporters will always speak to either Toby Young or one particular school leader (whose name I won't mention) who revels in their role as "controversial headteacher". These people do not represent anything like the views of the majority of people working in education yet any causal watcher of the news would be given the impression they were echoing the thoughts of their profession. Or take economics, I cringe at the TV news whenever there is a correspondent talking about "the nation's credit card". It is just plain wrong. It doesn't work as a metaphor, it is just wrong in every respect. And then there is football. Watching a live Everton game with neutral commentary is just bizarre. You hear them saying things like "quiet game from Sigurdsson who ...

I'm writing this fresh from watching Everton concede three goals from set pieces so it may not be my most rational and well thought through piece. For those of us with a genuine interest in analytics we know the value of set pieces. I'm 100% certain that Everton have people within the organisation who know the value of set pieces. I know Everton have a well regarded analytics team.  Marcel Brands knows the value of set pieces. And yet we are conceding a lot of chances from set pieces. This has huge consequences. The worse you deal with set pieces the more the opposition targets them with you. The more teams work out how to exploit you weaknesses the more obvious it becomes to opposition scouts and set piece coaches. It can quickly turn into a negative spiral. The reason those of us interested in analytics like set pieces are they are one of the few situations in a dynamic game where you can slow everything down. You can easily measure the outcome. We also all k...

I floated the idea yesterday that we should be able to assign a positive value to players who do something good that doesn't *quite* come off. I'm not looking to reward a good idea that has been poorly executed. Nor a bad idea, turned good by massive amounts of luck, we already reward that. I'm talking about a really good idea, well executed but missing by a tiny amount. The game that comes to mind for me is Everton 0 Bolton 0 on 29th December, 2002. I'm pretty sure everyone reading this will instantly be able to recall that famous day.....no? It illustrated the 3 ages of analytics. Goals and assists era Rooney finished the game with 0 goals and 0 assists. xG and xA, era I'd love someone to go back and examine the footage for this but I'm pretty sure he would have finished with over 1xG and 1xA and about 10 dribbles completed The "unlucky son" era I cannot stress how good and plain unlucky Rooney was in this game. This was a good B...

 A little dash of post shot xG per 90 (adjusted for game state), a pinch of deep progressions, a  soupçon of final third passes......data scouting can often seem like writing a recipe for a player. Out comes your list, a quick eye check, adjust for the strength of the opposition, restrict to <24 and voila *chef kiss* a list of the next big things in football. And....it pretty much works. Data is good, it shows you how well players are playing, in the role they have, in the system they are playing in. It is also really easy if you have a reasonable grasp of football and access to the data. It doesn't, of course, tell you everything. That eye check is vital even with the best data you have. It won't easily pick out players who are good but are in poor form, in the wrong role, in the wrong system or playing in leagues without good data coverage. And that is where the eye is the only proper tool to use. But over the years data scouting has consistently picked out up an...

About 8 years ago some fellow Evertonians were moaning about Moyes and how he was "lowering our expectations". People seemed really upset that he had said (before beating Manchester City) that it was like "taking a knife to a gun fight" when, having gone 18 months without a first team signing, he faced a team that had just spent £150m in one transfer window. I set out to look at how you might go about working out how good a manager was. It wasn't easy then, and it has got a lot more difficult. My method back then was to look at wage bills and divide them by points to work out the "expected points" a wage bill would get you. I worked out the average points finish was around 48 points for a team with Everton's budget and he was averaging about 58 points. Therefore Moyes was worth 10 points a season to Everton. Now with Moyes it was quite a simple calculation, he has been at Everton around 10 years, he had full control over the team and sign...

As someone interested in football, and who regularly posts things critical of teams and managers, I think it is important to keep some perspective. I know very little about the practical reality of coaching an elite level sport team. So this blog is going to be a list of fundamental things that I don't know the answer to. This might be ignorance, or it might just be that there isn't a single answer to the question. How much are players influenced by the tactical approach of their manager? I remember two versions of Ashley Cole. A rampaging, attacking left back, regularly involved in goalscoring moves under Arsene Wenger. And an elite level defensive left back at Chelsea. He clearly changed his game based on his managers philosophy. Then I think of Everton and the transition from Hibbert to Coleman as right back. Moyes had generally played a lopsided team with the left side attacking and the right defending. The emergence of Coleman allowed both fullbacks to attack. T...

Like many I love Marcelo Bielsa, a man consumed by football who has an insatiable appetite for detail, and at 63, is still as passionate as ever. In his press briefing yesterday he gave an overview of how he prepares for games, breaking video of the opponent down into clips to prepare his players for the match. It split my timeline between people in awe of this level of detailed work, and those who said it was standard work nowadays at the top clubs. Most of the celebrated managers of recent years have been known for the level of detailed preparation they do. They know every combination of attacking move their opponents play, the strengths and weaknesses of each player and much, much, more. My question is: does this actually translate to the playing field? There may well be lots of minor tactical adjustments going on in every game that the average fan, like me, doesn't spot. But sometimes I think that we overestimate the role of the coach in on field decisions, and underes...

Imagine a 20 team league, where every team is exactly equal with equally skilled players. Every team creates exactly 4 good chances a game, each chance has a 50% chance of being scored. I think most people would say if every team is exactly as good, and create exactly as many chances then they'll end up with almost exactly the same number of points. People would probably also guess that a lot of games would be draws. Thanks to the excellent work of Danny Page  we can see the truth. A draw is he most frequent outcome (26% of the time) but that means 74% of the time we'll have a winner by between 1 and 4 goals. This is because although our defences are all mean, they aren't at all mean, giving up 4 good chances each. If I made it 0.5xG each the draw would be far more common. Possible scorelines 0-0 1-0 0-1 1-1 2-0 0-2 1-2 2-1 2-2 3-0 0-3 3-1 1-3 3-2 2-3 3-3 4-0 4-1 4-2 4-3 0-4 1-4 2-4 3-4 4-4 Updated list of results as I'd missed some ...

All stats from Football Whispers With analytics it is easy to get sucked into thinking you are producing useful and meaningful content. Most of the time it is just interesting. I think this is probably the case for this, but I'm going to do it anyway because interesting is better than nothing. Today I'm looking at Open play expected goals + open play expected assists broken down by playing positions. My hypothesis is that Everton are relatively poor on goal/assist contribution from midfielders. For this to be true I would expect that other teams generate a greater proportion of their open play goals and open play assists from midfield than Everton. So for this I am going to take the Football Whispers data for each team, then total the Open play expected goals + expected assists for each player under the categories defender, midfielder and forward. If I wanted to I could break it down into full back, centre back, but I don't want to spend the time. What follows ...

All data supplied by Football Whispers I'm playing around with some new data at the moment. It is a stylistic matching tool. Yesterday I did a quick sanity test to see if it worked and broke the Manchester City team down into individuals, replaced them with their nearest stylistic match and put it back together again. It seemed very reasonable with every suggestion looking as you would expect. Today I'm going to stretch it further using the best players in the world and looking for the closest player match stylistically, the closest match in output terms, and the closest match 21 years old or younger. I'll look at 2018/19 data concentrating on the big names. Lionel Messi: Closest match in style = Lorenzo Insigne Closest match in output = Lorenzo Insigne The U21 player = David Neres Seems fair, Insigne is the type of player I associate with that Messi style. Mohamed Salah I've never scored a hat-trick against Chelsea, if only I slowed down. ...

All data in this blog is provided by Football Whispers. Imagine you could take a successful football team, break it down into the individual players, find the nearest match for that player and then put it back together. Would you end up with Kelly Le Brock from Weird Science or, more likely Frankenstein's monster? Kelly Le Brock from Weird Science, google it if you are young. To give it a go I have picked Manchester City's normal team, which in my mind is: Ederson Walker Stones Otamendi Mendy Fernandinho B Silva D Silva Sterling Aguero Sane I'm going to use data from Football Whispers to find the nearest equivalent player (excluding team mates) to make up this team. As goalkeepers can't be easily compared we'll ignore them and allow Ederson to play for both. This will be the Kelly Le Brock XI made up of the players with the most similar stylistic profiles to that Manchester City line up above. I have picked the player with the nearest ...