
Playing “Moneyball” on EA FIFA 16 - brewdad
https://arybressane.github.io/playing-moneyball-on-ea-fifa-16/
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sinatra
Consider doing this "Moneyball" experiment using Football Manager [1] games.
Those games are made for soccer/football management simulation. And your
"Moneyball" kind of playthrough is called LLM (Lower League Management) in the
FM community.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_Manager](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_Manager)

~~~
NTDF9
This is the ultimate simulation game. This is the one game that taught me so
much about simulations and my current job and interest in simulators.

The number of ways I could affect a match was insane. It was great to
understand the game and second guess how to beat the opponent (which meant
studying the opponent's form, tactics, key players, injuries besides your
own).

I created excel sheets of players that I would scout and make averages of key
attributes (like Pace, Dribbling, Heading, Finishing). These averages decided
my player purchase decisions.

With FM2007, I think I took Hull City from being a scrappy team to a team of
Real Madrid's caliber within 5 years and then maintained that till season
2018. I could've gone further but memory leaks caused the game to go slow.

I spent years of my childhood playing this. Could I have learned something
more productive in that same time period? Yes.

Do I regret studying this game inside out? No way.

~~~
GordyMD
I can totally relate to the impact of FM on my life. I'm CTO of Workshape.io
and some of our UI elements were inspired by the interface that was present in
some of the older versions of Football Manager and Championship Manager. The
concept of the radial plot for comparing player's skills was an idea we
applied to our matching service.

To echo the parent poster's comment. It would be very cool to extend this blog
into a series and see an analysis like this applied to the most recent version
of Football Manager.

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smcl
Weird aside, even though it's fictional I'm pleased to see that young Ryan
Gauld (who went to my school) in his Moneyball'd team. It's rare for Scottish
players to play on the continent - he's currently making his way through the
ranks at Sporting Lisbon. It feels like our brightest prospects either settle
down at Celtic/Rangers (big fish in a small pond, less so nowadays since
Rangers' relegation), languish in mid-table Premiership teams or switch
nationality and play for Ireland!

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pmcpinto
Sporting Lisbon have a good school for young players, but it's also very
competitive. Probably next season he will be playing in some small/medium
portuguese club to gain more experience.

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twic
In case anyone is wondering why the goal was to "win the Champions League with
Accrington Stanley" in particular, it's because they've been a byword for
being complete nobodies since this milk advert came out in 1989:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pieK7b4KLL4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pieK7b4KLL4)

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laxatives
I don't get it, why does he want to play for a team he's never heard of?

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asdfasdfq5462
The kids are fans of Liverpool. Liverpool's star player drinks milk and says
that if you don't drink it you'll _only_ be good enough to play for Accrington
Stanley. The kids then want to drink milk because they want to play for a
better team.

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ssharp
Does anyone have a recommendation on an online course or tutorial that walks
you through doing this type of applied analysis in R? I prefer learning using
actual problems, where the complexity of analysis increases gradually.

~~~
luckroy
The Analytics Edge[1] on edX might be what you're looking for. In one of the
lessons, they do some rudimentary recreations of the analysis described in
Moneyball.

[1]:
[https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:MITx+15.071x_2a+2T...](https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:MITx+15.071x_2a+2T2015/info)

~~~
dagw
Another course is Sabermetrics 101
[https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1%3ABUx%2BSABR101x%2...](https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1%3ABUx%2BSABR101x%2B2T2015/).
It's obviously focused on baseball and you have to understand baseball to get
much out of it, but many of the lessons on how to map performance statistics
to actual game results can probably be applied, at least conceptually, to
other sports.

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tdees40
I often played FIFA on my phone, and the trick was just to hire to best
possible scout and then constantly send him out, and your team would be
unstoppable pretty quickly. Scouts found outrageously good players with
unrealistic frequency.

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chimtim
This is a great experiment for computer vs computer simulations. When I played
FIFA, I tried to buy cheap players with properties that worked well with my
playing abilities. For me, at least until FIFA14 (did not try beyond that), a
player's speed had the most net positive in my scoring ability and I used to
buy the fastest yet cheaper players instead of buying a really skilled but
slow players[1].

[1] [http://fifabeast.com/top-50-fastest-players-in-
fifa-14-overa...](http://fifabeast.com/top-50-fastest-players-in-
fifa-14-overall)

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kelvintran
Interesting that EA distributes importance of skill differently for right and
left sided players (eg, passing 57% for right mids, and 41% for left mids,
while dribbling is more important for left mids than right mids (54% v 38%)).

Might reflect impact of actual players (Robben being a right-sided left footed
impact winger).

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foldor
Awesome write up, but one thing I'm wondering, since I don't play FIFA, does
the game heavily weight victory in favor of the player? I have to imagine the
game would do that in order to make players happy, and if they do it would
confuse the numbers here.

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pkd
As far as my 10 year experience with FIFA is concerned, no, it does not. The
dynamics are very weird and sometimes downright stupid. There is a concept of
home and away matches in the league and even with a great team beating
everyone easily at home, I have found myself losing consistently away from
home to even relegation contenders.

I hence stopped simulating away games as FIFA seems to weight the home
advantage for the away team much more than their form, team strength and
tactics.

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thehooplehead
Never seen it taken this far, but I do the same thing in Pro Evolution. I've
had a few players with bad ratings that suit my gameplay, players with unused
skills (fast defenders who can shoot), etc. My biggest gripe with any of these
games is that they don't do more with their own data in terms of immersion.
I'd trade the recorded commentary for generated text fed through a TTS engine.

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laxatives
There's a bunch of interesting tactics I've heard of people employing in the
FIFA economy, including cornering certain low value cards as well as
"investing" in players like Eric Dier who are likely to be upgraded in the
next update so that they can sell an overrated silver who is now only
attainable as a midlevel gold.

~~~
filipeferreira
Yes that's true, although what you're talking about is the Ultimate Team mode.
There's none of that in career mode.

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tragomaskhalos
Good work; I suggest you apply for the Newcastle job pronto. (reference:
[http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/02/you-were-of-course-
outs...](http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/02/you-were-of-course-
outstanding.html) )

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spongerbakula
As a fellow Fifa junkie, this is a really interesting article, and definitely
going to impact my trades.

If you ever play online my handle is "spongerbakula"

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jumirugu1
It's less bored playing carrer mode as Player.

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nickhould
Ary, nice post!

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svnssn
Awesome!

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guiomie
any comments on the best football manager games on Android?

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Eremotherium
You're using math. That's cheating!

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trdrake
Also: ask Liverpool how well "Moneyball" works out in real life. (hint: not so
much)

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filipeferreira
Their scouts aren't that great and their approach wasn't the best either.
Trying to replace a player like Luis Suarez, that single-handedly carried the
team, with a player like Daniel Sturridge, doesn't really work unfortunately.

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IkmoIkmo
As interesting as it is to run a few regressions... in all honesty, it's
pretty easy to take the shittiest team in the game to win the CL in a few
seasons. It's pretty much my standard playthrough every year, when losing 0
games in a few seasons in a row on the top difficulty gets boring.

Multiplayer is where the challenge is at, the AI is tons of fun but if you've
played football games for a while they're not too hard.

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dsugarman
he simulated all of the games, this was all about management

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IkmoIkmo
Ah I didn't even catch that, thanks. Makes it a lot more interesting, although
again these games are geared towards winning, like most games are. If you
simulate every pokemon matchup and let them take random actions, eventually
your pokemon level up such that they can beat anyone. There's no real way to
lose, the only way for your pokemon is to get better.

Fifa is much like it, buy any young player who shows potential (for which you
really don't need to run these regressions), let them play, and they become
amazing a lot of the time, even completely unknown players. The game's built
like that, you don't need to do anything fancy.

I'd be most interested if he ran a control group experiment, i.e. just pick
players himself instead of letting the model pick em, or hell even pick random
players, and compare how much better he does with his model. He'll surely do
better with the model, but he'll also surely win the CL with the control group
in a few seasons, which in and of itself is not much of an achievement.

As others have mentioned, doing this in FM would be a lot more fun.

