Who's Comolli Now?

One of the core problems with inbred structures is that new thought takes longer to evolve.
So it is with applying science to football.

In recent years, the pseudo-science of sabermetrics has been introduced into football - a sport for which it is patently not suitable. At best, sabermetric inputs are peripheral to any player evaluation, at worst they are useless.

Developed in baseball, sabermetrics has value in sports where we are dealing with a continuum of discrete events eg cricket.

Football is real-time.

Arrigho Sacchi: "This philosophy marked the difference between me and Silvio Berlusconi tactically speaking. He thought that football was a beautiful game played by skilled individuals. I thought - and I still think - that it is a beautiful game played by a team collectively."

Football is an integrated team-sport in real-time.

Pattern recognition at speed is the key skill both on the pitch and off it.
That is why the New York Yankees employ over twenty statisticians.

And that is why Lionel Messi is, by some distance, the best player that we have ever seen...
... or are ever likely to see.

The first 234 goals of Lionel Messi's phenomenal career are shown in a fifteen minute clip on YouTube.
Two things stand out - firstly, no two goals are the same, all are choreographed, all improvised, frequently around a theme (take his replicas of Maradona's two goals against England in the Malvenas Encounter). It is jazz football, the man is a dancer, the best that we have ever seen. Priceless.
Secondly, the beauty of Messi is a team process - an interaction between Messi and his colleagues that creates the space, the angles and opportunities for goals to be scored.
That is why he is so much more devastating with Barcelona than Argentina.

The Enhanced Sabermetrics Project (ESP)  is an Holistic Process with a variety of inputs that has been developed to provide a true current evaluation of any footballer.
Our aim is to improve the efficiency of the transfer market as the opportunities for arbitrage within the inefficiencies on offer at the moment are significant - the differential between true price and market price can be as high as $25 million!

The whole Moneyball concept when applied to football is nothing more than reductionism.
The wrong things are still being measured and when, by chance, the right things are being observed, it is generally not for the correct reason!

There is always a problem when academics get involved in football or footballers get involved in academia.
There is obsessive focus on the micro often without even being aware of the macro.
No lateral vision, no innovation, no intuitive consciousness.
How can one possibly do the holistic?

Football Moneyball is a scam like Freakonomics or Econometrics - no scientific overviews of a scenario but rather a simplistic niche cause and effect  in just one small piece of the jigsaw and a belief that such a slant equates with some form of reality.

To truly evaluate the value of a footballer we need to move into the territory of abstraction and decontextualisation...
... but that will have to wait for another day.

© Football is Fixed 2006-2012