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IIIllllIIlllIIlllIIl t1_iy24w21 wrote

Can I offer an olive branch and a warning to the football world from an avid watcher and youth coach of soccer. There’s a current trend in soccer of using analytics to drive player tactics and it leads to some incorrect conclusions. One of the most frustrating is the tendency for players to, instead of shooting from a distance, try to cross it in or pass the ball back and forth all the way to the net. The stats say a shot from distance has a low likelihood of going into the goal so they opt for keeping possession. But the problem comes from what happens when acting upon that stat. Players know that shots won’t take place outside the 18 yard line so they just pack the box with players and wait for the inward pass or cross.

You see… taking these statistically low success shots were forcing the opposing defenders to leave the box, which paradoxically increased the likelihood of inward pass success.

The reason stats can’t necessarily be trusted is because there’s knock on effects of acting on statistics that aren’t immediately obvious unless you apply multiple layers of cause and effect.

The single remaining takeaway is that given two equally skilled teams, the team that can adapt quicker will generally come away the winner. Using stats is sometimes a false comfort. They lie. The smarter players will win if they are creative enough and have been trained to be observant enough to see and recognize what’s happening on the field.

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BasvanS t1_iy2c6ul wrote

Second and third order effects.

Johan Cruijff was very intuitive about that. He understood that the ball was the focus point for most, but that the good players understood their position and timing regarding/disregarding it were what made them good.

Seeing it as a static and judging what should have been done is Captain Hindsight territory, but I guess that’s what most commentators and spectators do.

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mechajlaw t1_iy4jh8d wrote

Sounds exactly like the stats on mid range jumpers in basketball. Thankfully even with analytics basketball people generally understand that an uncontested mid range jumper is better than a contested lay up for someone who's good at them.

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TheNextBattalion t1_iy230nj wrote

I think this article shows how there are lots of reasons why people might sour on analytics, not just one thing.

But in the sense of bogeyman, where people just blame any ol' thing gone wrong on analytics, that's probably just people trying to make their personal taste sound like grandiose principles.

As far as decision-making goes, we have to remember that what the algorithms feed you is which choice leads to the (marginally) higher addition to expected win outcomes based on average games with teams and average players. It doesn't tell you anything about the game you are actually in, the state of the players, the crowd, the season/conference/rival game on the line, etc.

It can't be like poker, where you can just ride the odds to better results... hell even in poker you get bad draws, cold tables, lousy nights... and in football you are never holding the nuts.

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donkeylipsh t1_iy4skwx wrote

What is the objective metric they're using to measure entertaining?

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Ted_Dongelman t1_iy20e78 wrote

Because a lot of decisions made via analytics fly in the face of conventional wisdom & everyone's an expert.

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itdothstink t1_iya6wdu wrote

Slavish devotion to analytics has made baseball pretty shitty to watch, so color me skeptical that it will really make football better in the long run.

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apreche t1_iy6epc2 wrote

I like how the coaches and sports experts use the argument that the analytics people don't know about football.

Well, the math nerds probably don't know as much about football as a football coach, but I'm sure they know more than a layperson does.

How much do you think those nay-saying coaches know about math? They'd probably fail prob & stat 101.

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