How is Data Analytics Affecting Football?
Data analytics is a much debated topic for football fans. What impact is it having on the sport? Read on to find out more.
How is Data Analytics Affecting Football?
Football is often called a simple game. A team of eleven players compete against another eleven to see who can put a ball in the net more over a ninety minute period. The general trajectory though, as more people took up the sport and the talent pool improved, the means of scoring and defending have become more complex.
Competitors seek advantages. They will look for ways to be better than their opposition, or simply ways to win. Many teams now, following revolutions in other sports like baseball and basketball, utilise data analytics to find ways to be more effective and efficient and find the margins to exploit. Discourse has begun to focus on analytics as it becomes the reason for many on-field and off-field decisions which has, in turn, divided fans. But how is it affecting the sport? Is it doing it in a way which is fundamentally undoing the essence of the game?
Individual Performances
How good a player is has always been boiled down to goals, assists, team bias, and trophies. Three of those variables are numerical. The other is emotional and semantic and as integral as the numbers. Nowadays, these metrics are four among many. Finer and finer events with a game, a season, a career are tracked and compared, providing a more comprehensive view of what it is that the player did and offered. Teams are using this method to buy and sell players. It’s often called “moneyball.” But this is a misnomer, mostly. Moneyball is a concept which means teams maximise value on small budgets, often by finding players and tactics which are overlooked and misunderstood or misused. (The trouble with moneyball is that as soon as someone knows what you’re doing then prices go up.) Teams use complex metrics to unearth such value.
These metrics are researched, developed. It is a science. Liverpool F.C. have a physicist heading their analytics department. Because this approach in football is new, many job roles are filled from people outside of football. There is no established order. However, it also means that amateurs are finding their ways behind-the-scenes of teams, after they’ve blogged about their metrics, analysis, and discovery for fantasy football enthusiasts or those looking to maximise gambles at Sports Betting UK sites.
Team Performances
Transfers and squad building obviously are essential aspects of the sport. As such, it does change the sport. What teams are capable of and are doing will always change the sport. A team who develops one style of play inspires one to counter it, and so on and so on. It’s hard to avoid such change and progression.
Within this, there’s individual team performances which aren’t revolutionary, but are merely normal. However, that normal might not be reflected in results. They can overperform or underperform. In reaction to either performance, managers and teams can keep jobs or lose them. Either way could be beneficial or detrimental.
A team might not be as good as they appear, with their underlying numbers – chances created, chances conceded, ball progression, etc. – pointing to them being worse than their results suggest. Pundits can foresee a regression to their “true” numbers, that is their results begin to match performances. If this is the case, they might make or not make decisions in the off-season based on false representations, negatively impacting the same. A similar thing is happening to Brighton at the moment, where they’re underperforming drastically, but, because they’re analytically-tilted, it seems they’ll hold on to their coach, which could be a good decision in the long-run.
Football fans, like anyone in life, are caught in a sort of double bind, whereby absolutes are searched for and struggled with.