Sports And The Moneyball Approach

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Moneyball for those that don't know was a statistical analysis using data to find undervalued players using certain metrics. Paul DePodesta was the brains behind this and was used by Oakland Athletic baseball team in 2002. This helps a team that operates on a budget as it helps find players who are not necessarily the big names who have a high salary.

I was listening to a cricket analyst a few weeks ago with regard of how they form and select a team. The answer is not necessarily money ball type data, but the concept on how teams are selected is data driven through statistics. What happened back in 2002 was the start of the change in all sports as they are all data driven.

With a tournament like the IPL 20 cricket tournament each team has an analyst and would be using a service provider like CricViz which gathers feed from every cricket match happening around the world wherever possible. Every player is analyzed so teams are aware of any new players what their strength and weaknesses are. The site even allows analysts to work out what is the best way to beat another team by feeding the program with various bits of information.

We have seen analysis and data being used in rugby and why South Africa benefitted from the last two World Cups because they were ahead of all the other teams. This will have changed as teams that had overlooked this in the past will be up to speed now. Data fed into a program would reveal game time of all the players so it highlighted areas that were ignored before and why depth in a squad is very important in a competition that required you to play 6 games in 6 weeks in order to win. Ireland in the last Rugby World Cup was the form team on paper, but they could not last 6 games in a row and were found wanting. If they had rotated and rested players instead of playing their key players who knows they could have won.

In motorsport like Formula One this is all data driven and why Mercedes had a purple patch of 7 years consecutively winning the World Championship. Toto Wolff the principal of the Mercedes team was the first team to introduce all the high tech and data analysis systems which gave them a big advantage. This has changed over the years since the other teams have now caught them up as they were caught out how big a deal this really is.

You wonder when data analysis will come into football when purchasing players as teams still for some reason chase the big names asking hefty pay checks. This does not guarantee success on the pitch as we have seen so many teams go down this route and fail miserably having spent hundreds of millions in the process. They have changed or influenced nothing and if they had the right data they would know which players to target. I would say Klopp at Liverpool were using a system because the players they bought were not all big names and went on to become more valuable players.

I would say that certain teams have a data analysis system they are using for recruitment like Brighton and RB Leipzig who for some reason do very well in the league each year. They are running the club as a business and do not mind selling players on for huge profit each year where other clubs would hold on to their star performers. Just look at how many players these two teams have sold in the last 5 years. Leipzig alone have made over $100 million during that period through selling their players whilst still buying players. This is extremely rare as most football clubs run at a loss.

Sport has definitely changed over that last 20 years more so on how those behind the scenes are more data driven. With budgets being far more important today than in the past I do think football will change within the next decade as buying the star players to please the fans is definitely the old way of thinking.

Posted Using INLEO