Comments on: Numbers or Lore? Soccer and Statistics in the U.S.

By: myles

myles — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 19:52:37 +0000

very interesting read, but there is one group of people who have used statistics in soccer effectively and its not mentioned at all in the write up. Sports bettors

There are a couple good sites (and many bad sites) that have you used to stats to help betting. One experiment was actually fairly accurate in predicting the occurrence of draws.

The point about counter attacks is a good point but there are formulas that take this into account. {Problem is these forumlas are very complicated for the average reader, myself included

Anyways if anyone knows about the importance of statisitics in soccer its pro bettors

By: SPA2TACU5

SPA2TACU5 — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 12:07:54 +0000

I still have a NY/NJ Metrostars jersey in my collection. I think it’s from 1999 when I was in NYC and Boston (also went to see the NE Revolution play against… Dallas? NE Revs had Edwin ‘Merlin’ Gorter and Richard Goulooze

I also used to play Yahoo’s MLS Fantasy Soccer League. Knowing nothing about the MLS and it’s players except for the foreign ones like Gorter and Goulooze.

I remember Ante Razov, Carlos Bocanegra, Chris Klein, Josh Wolff, Lubos Kubik, Jason Kreis, Gutierrez, Kevin Hartman, Greg Vanney, and Peter Vagenas (because of his name). I had never seen any of them play. Not in a stadium, not on tv.

One of the first players I picked was a guy called Clint Mathis. But at that moment not because of his stats, but because his name had a good ring to it.
At that point Clint Mathis was not a big star yet. He turned out the be a great player for my team and I never took him out.
Purely based on how he did for my Fantasy team I predicted Clint would make it into the USMNT and for a couple of years I was hoping my favorite local Dutch club (Sparta Rotterdam) would sign him. Eventually he made it to the USMNT and he became unaffordable.

But apart from that I don’t believe stats can capture the full performance of a soccer player. But I do love stats in soccer.

In 1998 during the World Cup in France me and my brother would both pick two players each per game who we would “follow”. We’d note down whether they made a good or a bad pass, if the pass went forward or backward, and if they would win or lose a ball (rebound, tackle, etc.).

We started doing so to prove Clarence Seedorf’s performances in the Dutch team were horribly bad. In the years before -pretty much since his move to Real Madrid in ’96- we had noticed Seedorf as had become quite lazy and would only play on the ball. Not doing any defensive work while losing a lot of possession of the ball.

Although everyone in Europe thought he was a world class talent who played incredibly well and the Dutch media praising him time and again, our stats showed in nearly every game he lost possession at least on 40% of his passes and he would never try to capture possession. Also he would never try to win a header.

Years later the media and coaches starting noticing, but for many years people didn’t understand that his club performances were so good because he played in a different position with the midfield supporting his lack of defensive work.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 21:14:20 +0000

Nice piece. And no, stats aren’t the issue here, there are a whole lot of other cultural reasons why we don’t like football that have to do with the style of the game and how we view our place in the world.

A personal side not here though… the “Red Bull” is just horrendous. I’m originally a New Englander who has been on the road for about 10 yrs and just settled in NYC and I wanted to support a team here. I hate American football and I bleed green, red, and yellow/black so the logical choice for me is soccer since I have no connection to the Revolution so why not support the Red Bull?

Why? because they’re called “Red Bull”! How can I possibly support a team who is named after such a d.b. drink? Think about the guy who orders a red bull drink at a bar. Do I want to support a team named for that? I know that Red Bull actually owns the team, but seriously can’t they just name it FCNY (a nice play on FDNY or NYPD) and then just have the red bull logo plastered on everything? It’s common in football to see logos everywhere, but why do we literally have to name the team for such a ridiculous sugary drink.

So, I’m left without a team here. Seriously, I might pack up and move just so I can support a local team.

By: 714, 60: Soccer needs its own American story | Pitch Invasion

714, 60: Soccer needs its own American story | Pitch Invasion — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:02:04 +0000

[...] a follow-up piece to our discussion on whether soccer to have more statistics to thrive in the States, Josh Crockett looks at the history of American sports culture and concludes it’s the stories [...]

By: Andrew

Andrew — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:37:04 +0000

“I don’t remember seeing Kevin Costner crunching numbers in a Field of Dreams.”

Honestly this is why Bull Durham is a much better baseball film.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 14:39:55 +0000

Just anecdotally, the extraordinarily deep statistical side to baseball is part of what has been drawing me deeper and deeper in to the sport recently (moving from a football-only obsessive toward someone with something to follow other than the Silly Season every summer…). The fact that so much rational, evidence- based argument can be had about baseball is a really enjoyable break from the extraordinary subjective debate/discussion surrounding soccer. And while the game’s history definitely is a nice side dish to all of this appealing statistical minutiae, it is really pretty hard to connect back to the game’s history. The inaccessibility, in my experience is two-fold: MLB’s uptight policy about YouTube means classic moments in the sport’s history are hard to find and experience for one’s self, and baseball modernization/commercialization/capitalization is at a far more advanced stage than the Premierships, meaning money has been drawing away something of the soul of the game for a long time now, both in terms of the expensive luxury and post-season seats pricing out many of the most passionate fans into the far reaches of the stadium, and also, relatedly, in terms of the stadiums themselves. After Fenway Park and Wrigley Field, no ballpark in the Major Leagues is older than 1960, and many are far newer. This is, unfortunately, even true in the minor leagues, where one might hope to find that “lost purity” of the game; unfortunately, it’s not so, and parks still in use that were built before 1990 are extremely rare.

By: JK

JK — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 10:27:21 +0000

Great article. Its interesting though that in the UK we are tying more to create these stats and show things with them. Recently Opta produced a report on Gareth Barry showing goals, assists, crosses and key passes which all showed him to be an average player compared with other’s in those categories. However where as in some sports you have players for attack, for defence as a midfield what it showed really was Barrys game was more all round than say a Robinho etc. Some times its ok having the stats but its the context of them that is the key.

By: Joe Westhead

Joe Westhead — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:12:57 +0000

Yeah, I think football could do with more nerd-fans writing and commenting on the minutiae of the game. We can but hope.

By: Coz

Coz — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:03:02 +0000

It’s not *the* reason, but I’ve always argued that the lack of stats is *a* reason why the game isn’t bigger in the States. There was an episode of “The X-Files,” of all things, where Mulder talked about how you can reconstruct an entire baseball game from the box score. And the proliferation of rotisserie and fantasy leagues — in baseball and football — is another piece of evidence in that direction.

My master list of reasons, by the way, is as follows:

1. We didn’t invent it
2. We’re not the best in the world at it
3. It’s not conducive to traditional sports television/advertising models
4. Not enough statistics
5. The myth that it is/should be a “participatory” sport at the youth level

Hmmm. I used to have seven, and I may have just made #5 up. Maybe I split #3 into two.

By: Tom Dunmore

Tom Dunmore — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 17:58:45 +0000

Joe, I do agree it’s the story connect to a statistic that matters the most (see the mythical status of certain baseball home run numbers). But in baseball, it’s also interesting that fans have driven much of the increasing focus on more and more convoluted (but brilliantly informative) statistics in recent years. Much of it came from the culture of grassroots baseball board games and fantasy baseball, from the work of a fan-writer like Bill James and those that built Baseball Prospectus.

From bottom-up, these fan-nerds helped revolutionise which statistics were used to analyse baseball performance (much helped also by the book Moneyball) by the media and the coaches: they had a broad base of popular usage before ESPN even began including them in their broadcasts. Quite an interesting cultural phenomenon in itself that might to some degree negate the point I make above, perhaps?