The Moneyball-ization Of Soccer

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Before Germany-Holland at Euro 2012,German data analysts crunched the numbers on their opponents and spotted a weakness: TheDutch defenders often strayed too far apart. The German national team’s secretcodebook says that the ideal distance between defenders in a back four is eight meters.The Dutch were regularly leaving larger gaps. In the group game in Kharkiv, Germanylocated those gaps and won 2-1. History is written by the winners, and, withhindsight, it’s to forget the Germans. One bad night against the Italians inWarsaw, two childish positioning errors by German defenders, and they lost the semifinal.Yet, going into the semis, the Germans were the only team with four straight victories.Since they began serious data analysis in 2005, they have reached at least the semifinalof four successive tournaments. Almost unnoticed by fans and media outside Germany, dataanalysis became more influential than ever before at Euro 2012. Statistics are starting tochange international soccer. Like almost everything on earth, modern dataanalysis in sports originated in California. About 20 years ago, the Oakland A’sbaseball team began finding new statistics to value players. For instance, hitters hadalways been judged on their batting average. The A’s found that on-base percentage-- in those days, an almost unknown number -- was a far better predictor of aplayer’s worth. They found that time-honored methods like stealing bases andsacrifice bunts made no sense. The man forever associated with this is the A’sgeneral manager, Billy Beane. In the recent film Moneyball,based on Michael Lewis’ book, Beane was done the honor of being played by Brad Pitt.Some years ago, on a romantic vacation in London with his wife, Beanediscovered soccer and fell for it hard. Back home in California, he became friends withJürgen Klinsmann, a German expat living in Huntington Beach. Klinsmann had noticedthat American sports employed statisticians. He spent time at the A’s learning more.Soon afterward, Klinsmann became manager of Germany. At 1:00 a.m. one night in2005, Professor Jürgen Buschmann of the Cologne Sporthochschule (Higher School forSports) was woken by a phone call from the great man. Buschmann sat straight up in bed. Heagreed to help Germany with data analysis. He and his team of students became known insideGerman soccer as Team Cologne. The world first got wind of Team Cologneat the World Cup 2006, when the Germany-Argentina quarterfinal went to a penalty shootout.In between penalties, the German goalie Jens Lehmann consulted a scrap of paper tuckedinto his sock. Composed with the help of Team Cologne, the note detailed the preferredcorner of each Argentine penalty taker. Lehmann stopped two kicks and Germany won. Theworld was astounded. Until then, everyone had assumed that penalties were a lottery. Still, even as data analysis helped the Germans, they learned the hard way thattheory is not the same as practice. Before the Germany-Spain semifinal at the World Cup2010, Team Cologne worked out exactly where Germany should position its lines. AnalyzingSpain’s 1-0 victory afterward, the analysts realized that the Germans had been sevenmeters too far back. No wonder: The Spaniards don’t let you do what you want. Just two years ago, data analysis was still not very widespread in internationalsoccer. Penalties are the most obvious piece of data to analyze, yet big teams likeEngland and Argentina entered their knockout games in 2010 with barely any statistics ontheir opponents’ penalties. England’s then-manager Fabio Capello rarelyused the Football Association’s data analysts. Capello preferred working with histrusted Italian comrades, and they were not data people. But at Euro 2012,data played a bigger role for more teams than ever before. Most visibly, before thepenalty shootout in England-Italy, England’s goalies’ coach briefed Joe Harton an iPad. It looked impressively high-tech, but one wonders about the content. The chiefdata analyst at one leading English club told me his doubts: “Did they have previouspenalties [video] to show Joe Hart? Yes, I saw them on the pitch with their iPad. Do theydo analytics on them and do more than show the last three or four penalties for eachplayer? I don't know.” Certainly Hart frequently went the wrong way and didn’tstop a single penalty. A German goalie might have been better prepared. Continue Reading

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