
How a Man’s Bad Math Helped Ruin Decades of English Soccer - protomyth
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-one-mans-bad-math-helped-ruin-decades-of-english-soccer/
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lordnacho
If you're going to interpret stats, you need a lot of them. Reep obviously
could not gather everything required to make a sensible conclusion by himself.

For one thing, Swindon Town has been a middling team since forever. No
particular innovation in strategy would be happening there at the time when
Reep was watching them. So he was probably not sampling nearly widely enough
to notice anything.

If you look at Wilson's book called Inverting the Pyramid, there's a great
history of football strategy.

There's no particular thing to do that will win you the game. There's always
been a tug-of-war between pressing, passing, sitting back, and pressuring.
Ukrainian coaches IIRC started to do high pressure, where you try to annoy the
opposition into making mistakes high up the pitch. The riposte to that is that
opponents who are comfortable on the ball will just... not lose the ball so
much. And you'll get tired running after it, and you'll lose. This sort of
balance thing comes and goes. Witness Barcelona passing it dozens and dozens
of times to win a huge trophy haul a few years ago. And then they ran into a
combined 7-0 beating by Bayern. Look at Mourinho, he somehow won the CL with
Inter, parking the bus infamously against possibly the greatest Barcelona team
of all time.

There's a big issue with using stats for adversarial games. It may be fine
-though non trivial- to use stats to judge players by (tackles, red zone
shots, etc), but you don't know how the opposition will react to your
strategy. It's even more non trivial to work out how the other team will
reshape itself given what you do, which depends on what they do, which
depends...

It will be interesting, though. Stats is seeping into soccer steadily. We'll
see better analysis and innovation, for sure.

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yk
I don't really like the article, the problem is that time of possession is a
decent proxy for better team, or actually a proxy for team A is better at
retaining the ball than team B is at getting the ball. So their counter claim
is roughly, be the better team. Thanks, we already knew that one.

Actually that ties into nicely with a general problem of the presentation of
statistics, anything involving numbers is usually presented as incredible
reliable, while actually it is just an additional argument. A statistic may be
trivial, like the one above, it may be bullshit or it may be conclusive, but
the use of numbers by itself is not some kind of magic that reveals a hidden
truth. Statistics is just a powerful method to construct arguments.

~~~
stinkytaco
> the problem is that time of possession is a decent proxy for better team

Decent, but by no means perfect. In Atletico's La Liga winning season of
2013-2014, they enjoyed exactly 50% possession. The following year they
actually had 45%, despite finishing 3rd. Leicester City won the league with
46% possession.

The problem is not just the presentation of statistics, it's the assumption
that if you do the same things title winning teams do, you will enjoy the same
success. It may well have been that hoofing down the field worked for some
teams (it did for Leicester), but that is no guarantee of success if you don't
happen to have a fast center forward and a holding midfielder who runs like
crazy. On the other hand, Spain won Euro 2012 without a proper center forward
(Torres won the golden boot with only 3 goals, but don't let that fool you,
Spain's goals were widely spread out and Torres scored one in the final long
after the game was won) by playing possession football.

~~~
gerdesj
Going into a discussion related to statistics with a couple of anecdotes -
tut.

Reep only seems to have followed one team - albeit playing against many
others. If he'd got other like minded people to do the same for their teams
(ideally all teams in all leagues!) as well then that would help to control
one or two of the huge number of variables.

Then as the article alludes, if he'd looked at the sequences that lead to a
score, rather than working back from a score to the sequence that lead to it,
something really useful might have emerged.

One thing is certain however: whatever the English national (soccer) team
decides is a good idea - it isn't. It's a bit embarrassing to be honest.

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simula67
So that is why the English game was 'known for long balls'.

I wonder if Arsenal ( which used to play possession football some time back )
was successful in England on account of this.

Also, teams like Barcelona which play the game with long periods of possession
and are extremely successful.

~~~
toyg
Arsenal still play possession football. They have not won anything for a
while, to the point "playing like Arsenal" (i.e. hogging the ball without
actually winning) has become a joke. Their early-'00s success was due as much
to an exceptional generation of talents (Vieira, Bergkamp, Pires, Henry...) as
to any other factor.

The same for Barcelona - Pep Guardiola, known for being the most successful
manager to insist on "possession first" football, was not particularly
successful at Bayern (he inherited a team winning _all_ domestic and
international trophies in 2013, and only managed to win domestically for the
following two years), and is somewhat struggling at Man City.

Famously, Leicester City won the Premier League last year playing the exact
opposite of possession football. Someone like Jamie Vardy, capable of quick
bursts of speed but with relatively poor skills on the ball, would be
embarrassing to watch at Arsenal or Barcelona, but was absolutely lethal for
the Foxes last year.

Possession football, like "moneyball" baseball, looks nice on paper but IMHO
is a red herring. Technically gifted players will like to hold the ball, and
gifted players naturally tend to win more _because they are better_ , so
people link this and that and say you have to hold the ball to win. What you
_really_ need to be successful is to play a style that suits your players. If
you have Messi, Xavi and Iniesta, you play possession; if you have Vardy,
Mahrez and Kante, you play counter-attack and long balls in space.

~~~
josephcooney
> They have not won anything for a while

Back to back FA Cups in 2013-14 and 2014-15? I think the rest of your analysis
is pretty valid however.

~~~
toyg
Eh, I tend to forget the FA Cup and the FL Cup - after all, major clubs will
happily sack managers who can "just" win one of those in a season (like Van
Gaal last year)...

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pbhjpbhj
In the previous few years Liverpool had been very successful by concentrating
on possession to the point of working the ball up from the backs rather than
hoofing the ball up with a big goalkeeper kick. They were a clear counter-
example to this admonition that the way to win was hoof it and chase.

Sounds like "horses for courses" to me [the correct advice varies according to
the characteristics of the situation].

~~~
krisgee
Not really up on Football (soccer) but this reminds me of the puck possession
vs dump and chase zone entry debate from hockey.

For a lot of reasons (up to and including global geo-politics) North American
teams for a long, long time over-emphasized dump and chase The basic tactic is
that you carry or pass the puck up until it will no longer cause an icing call
then throw it into the other teams defensive corner and send your forwards in
to generate a turn over.

Until reasonable statistical analysis this was thought of as the "right" way
to play the game. Actually it was long AFTER the statistics showed it because
politics was playing a role in what the statisticians wanted to find. They
wanted to prove that the NA way of playing was "right" so they went and found
stats to prove it. It wasn't until a combination of the NHL rising ascendant,
the fall of the Soviet Union and I would argue the fact that Canada missed
Gold in the '92, '94, and '98 Winter Olympics that forced Hockey Canada to
look at their developmental programs and do some honest analysis.

Today though, much like in this article short quick passes and maintaining
possession through zone entry is preferred and the statistics back that up.
I'd imagine that if what you say Liverpool has been doing it true it's for
similar reasons, maintaining possession allows you to generate more shots,
shots are important if you want to score, ergo keeping possession is important
for scoring.

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rendaw
Err, ahh, English soccer... that's American football, right?

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bmsleight_
However the mighty Wimbledon, (now AFC Wimbledon) play a passing game of
football now, time moves on.

~~~
Someone
On the other hand, Leicester, last year, played to get the ball towards the
opponent's goal ASAP, not for possession
([http://www.bodhiresourcing.com/rise-data-analytics-
football-...](http://www.bodhiresourcing.com/rise-data-analytics-football-
rise-rise-leicester-city/),
[http://www.skysports.com/football/news/30385/10267972/leices...](http://www.skysports.com/football/news/30385/10267972/leicester-
win-premier-league-how-they-did-it-differently))

That didn't end up badly for them.

~~~
dangravell
If you think Leicester played anything like the Sheffield united, Wimbledon,
PNE et al of old you need to check your history!

The main issue I have with Reep's analysis is he seems to ignore the defensive
benefits of possession.

~~~
Someone
I not think that, but they did show that _" Not more than three passes"_
doesn't imply kick-and-rush. My comment was triggered by your statement _"
time moves on"_.

So, the math still may be right.

For an extreme example, scoring without possession is as good as impossible.
That could lead to a rule _" keep the ball"_

However, that doesn't imply one should optimize for possession alone, as the
way to maximize possession is to play backwards when even pressed a tiny bit,
scoring own goals if needed to keep possession.

Also, I don't see huge defensive benefits of possession if you want to win. In
the end, it is about two teams both getting equal number of possessions (+/\-
1), so to score (which is needed to win), teams will want to maximize their
chance of scoring on possession and to minimize that of their opponent.

Only if your chance of scoring is lower than that of your opponent or if you
are ahead 'enough' (where 'enough' depends on time to play and speed of you
opponent), you will want to minimize the number of opportunities both teams
get, even if it means your probability of scoring on possession goes down.

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cdelsolar
Leicester City adopted this guy's style and won the league though :D

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mig39
Was it a case of confusing correlation & causation?

~~~
benchaney
Soft of, but it was more precisely the Bayesian fallacy.

~~~
taejo
I'm not sure what the Bayesian fallacy is (I find several papers with the term
in the title, but couldn't find a definition) but it seems like this could be
the base-rate fallacy (most goals come after short sequences of possession,
neglecting the base rate: most sequences of possession are short).

~~~
benchaney
P(A|B) does not equal P(B|A). The Bayesian fallacy is inappropriately
conflating the two. In this case, The commentator confused P(scoring | long
possession) and P(long possession | scoring). It is very similar to the base
rate fallacy to the extent that if someone commits the Bayesian fallacy they
almost always also commit the base rate fallacy.

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Hnrobert42
Damn it. I misread read the title. I was just having am argument about B.O. I
guess that's why I read "breath" instead of "math." I read the article twice
looking for how his breath changed things. So disappointing. Good article,
though.

~~~
mmel
I did the same, odd.

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tillinghast
Niggle: The title should be "How _One_ Man's …", not "How _a_ Man's …". This
reflects the actual title of the article, and avoids an ambiguous reading (was
this bad math attributed to _men_, or a singular person?)

