Lee Congerton and Steve Houston's Focus On Analytics

[TartanMackem]

I'm still non the wiser what a Director of Football actually is. All this has done is muddy the waters even further

It will vary from club to club, but he is usually the main person in charge of player recruitment, and directing the clubs' strategy or vision. At some clubs it will be a matter of getting players to fulfil the role the manager wants for his team, and at others it will be recruiting players to fit the "vision" the club has, and which the manager will then have to work with. At most, it will probably be a mixture of the two.

As we have found out to our cost, the old fashioned British way of giving the manager full control is very ineffective and very costly. Which is why we have spunked millions and ended up with a squad full of players that don't fit into any particular system. Just the bastard child of Keane, Bruce and MoN.

Managers don't hang around very long and unless you employ a Wenger, they don't usually concern themselves with the long term future of the club, but rather short term success. This is expensive, and doesn't allow the club to "transition" easily from one manager to another. Sharing the recruitment process amongst different people, including a DoF, allows the club to continue following a plan or vision even as managers come and go.

 

[Moneyball]

It will vary from club to club, but he is usually the main person in charge of player recruitment, and directing the clubs' strategy or vision. At some clubs it will be a matter of getting players to fulfil the role the manager wants for his team, and at others it will be recruiting players to fit the "vision" the club has, and which the manager will then have to work with. At most, it will probably be a mixture of the two.

As we have found out to our cost, the old fashioned British way of giving the manager full control is very ineffective and very costly. Which is why we have spunked millions and ended up with a squad full of players that don't fit into any particular system. Just the bastard child of Keane, Bruce and MoN.

Managers don't hang around very long and unless you employ a Wenger, they don't usually concern themselves with the long term future of the club, but rather short term success. This is expensive, and doesn't allow the club to "transition" easily from one manager to another. Sharing the recruitment process amongst different people, including a DoF, allows the club to continue following a plan or vision even as managers come and go.

The Swansea model for those struggling with the concept!

 

[ReaL Madras]

Oh its more than disturbing! Saw him coach an example session full 11v11 - how to play from the back. Bollocked the fullback for playing into the CM and not the channel for the striker. This is the future for England. Clueless. Jobs for the boys. Archaic.

That is it in a nutshell.

 

[nick5573]

thanks for posting mate. appreciate it mate. could you not have waited a couple of month til you'd finished reading this book before posting to provide the clamoring hordes with more information there. i think it's great you can read mate btw.

Couple of months to read a book?

 

[Brainman]

We're behind the curve. Allardyce was doing this stuff at Bolton.
Moyes had a three special IT rooms added to Evertons training ground with access limited to him, his ass man, chief scout and their computer analysis lads. Players, ordinary scouts, coaches, admin staff etc werent allowed in. Cleaners neither as they did their own hoovering ffs. Everton were the first club to pay Football manager/Championship Manager for early/full access to their facts n figures.
The moneyball boat has sailed marra.

The guys who developed championship manager are Everton supporters which is why, I believe, Everton tended to win everything in early versions.

 

[RodneySAFC]

Oh its more than disturbing! Saw him coach an example session full 11v11 - how to play from the back. Bollocked the fullback for playing into the CM and not the channel for the striker. This is the future for England. Clueless. Jobs for the boys. Archaic.

Had near on punch ups with him. The man is clueless and doesn't know football at all. Sadly he's not the only one like that!

There's a clear divide in our nations pool of coaches, there are the young newly qualified lot who are looking to play continental style football and then there's the old boys, who can often be heard spouting shite such as "442 is the cornerstone of football and there's no formation better" These old boys like to get it to the forward in less than 3 passes. Shocking when you think about it!

 

[Moneyball]

Had near on punch ups with him. The man is clueless and doesn't know football at all. Sadly he's not the only one like that!

There's a clear divide in our nations pool of coaches, there are the young newly qualified lot who are looking to play continental style football and then there's the old boys, who can often be heard spouting shite such as "442 is the cornerstone of football and there's no formation better" These old boys like to get it to the forward in less than 3 passes. Shocking when you think about it!

Shocking is about right. Think I've had a shouting match with every tutor I've ever had (had one apologise after as he agreed with him but had to stick to the book) from Level 2 up to my A Licence. Over dinner its a different story for some but when assessing its like the dark ages.

And these jobsworths are teaching the next generation of coaches?! Yeah we've got a bright future. Not.

 

[heroesof73]

There was a lad who was appointed just to wipe his arse. He's way, way ahead of us in that department.

Ashley has this as a standard clause if the contracts he dishes out

 

[PJH]

With the more recent data gathering of players on the pitch during a game, getting access to that data for other teams players could be a help in buying players. Mainly for positioning when dealing with offsides. Does a certain defender seem lax in concentration, playing forwards onside? Does that striker with blistering pace even seem to look at the back line of defence, or just head down and run and hope they're onside?

 

[The Situation]

If anyone's interested in the chapter referring to Darren Bent that I mentioned in the OP:

The authors show that all goals are not equal, so for example the first or second goal of a game is far more likely to result in the team which scores these goals winning the game, whereas if a player tacks on two goals at the end of a 3-0 to make the game 5-0 it doesn't result in any real gain for the team (aside from goal difference which has an affect on very rare occasions). They say - "strikers who score the key goals, the ones that can be directly translated into more wins and more points, are worth more than the flat-track bullies who appear to rub salt into wounds, scoring the third and fourth goals as victory turns into drubbing. Simply counting strikes can be deceiving: one goal is not the same as another."

They looked at what players scored the most of these "key goals" over two seasons (2009/2010 and 2010/2011) and found that Bent ranked second behind Rooney in this category in 2009/2010 and second behind Tevez in 2010/2011 (Gyan ranks 18th in the league in that category for that season) while Bent ranked first overall in both years in terms of the % of points his goals won for his teams (us and Villa) - 45.5% in 2009/2010 and 31.5% in 2010/2011.

This is the sort of stuff that I'd imagine Steve Houston is definitely in to, not just simplistic things like distance covered per game, shots per game, pass completion statistics etc.

 

[Plank]

thanks for posting mate. appreciate it mate. could you not have waited a couple of month til you'd finished reading this book before posting to provide the clamoring hordes with more information there. i think it's great you can read mate btw.

Class post there mate. You are the original hipster IMO there iirc there of course there mate.

 

[andy78]

This is worth a read on plus-minus and Steve Houston.

Just the other day I came across a piece Michael Lewis published in early 2009. Lewis, as you may know, is the guy who wrote Moneyball, now made into a movie starring Brad Pitt. One of Lewis' pet subjects appears to be the role of stats and figures and numbers and data in sports.

Said article, you see, is called "The No-Stats All-Star" and profiles Shane Battier, an NBA player then with the Houston Rockets, now with Miami Heat. (Or maybe that should read "with the Miami Heat" - I can't seem to figure that one out.)

What fascinates Lewis about Battier is that the player seems to be nothing special and that his stats are at best mediocre. "And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some magical ability to win," Lewis adds. Of course magic doesn't really come into play here. Rather, the conventional methods of stat-keeping in basketball fail to register what Battier brings to the game.

To use a football analogy, it's almost as if Battier is one of the greatest providers in the game but hardly anyone knows about it because the stats only tell you who scored the goal, not who played the final pass or crossed the ball - who, in the vernacular of the trade, "made" the goal.

You may think that this analogy is askew, because assists are such a vital football statistic that nobody would forget to note them. Yet kicker magazine, the bible of German football which has covered games since 1920, began publishing this particular statistic only on July 25, 1988. Until then, the only yardstick we had to measure performances of players was the number of goals scored or conceded. And, of course, the legendary player ratings dished out by kicker since August 1963.

Naturally, these were as subjective as another statistic kicker introduced together with the so-called "assists" in 1988, namely the number of goal-scoring opportunities a team created during a game. Obviously, it was left to the discretion of the magazine's beat writer to decide what qualified as a proper chance.

As goes without saying, one reason the game has a long history of preferring subjective opinion to objective analyses is that the sheer number of players in combination with the flow of the game makes it hard to break football/soccer down into easily observable situations and quantifiable behaviour. It's very much unlike baseball and gridiron/American football - sports you could call a succession of set pieces interrupted by only a few seconds of general motion.

It appears that even basketball, which has only five players per team and follows a rhythmic pattern of attack and defence which makes for predictable player positioning, cannot be accurately described through data. Or, as Lewis put it in his piece, "basketball has measured not so much what is important as what is easy to measure" and the resulting figures, he argues, "have warped perceptions of the game".

Yet there seems to be one stat that is meaningful: plus-minus. It describes "what happens to the score when any given player is on the court", Lewis says in the article. It is the one category in which Battier does not look like an at best average NBA player but like a perennial All-Star. It also happens to be the statistic the Rockets value the most because it reflects the only thing that counts: your value to the team.

All the other stats that look good on paper and will have a player ask for a pay rise, Lewis says, could actually be accumulated to the detriment of the team in very subtle ways. He quotes Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Rockets and a big admirer of Battier, as saying: "We think about this deeply whenever we're talking about contractual incentives. We don't want to incent a guy to do things that hurt the team."

A few years before Morey was signed by the Houston Rockets to change the club's approach to building a team, there was a young lad in Bristol who looked very closely at European basketball. Not so much because he liked the game but because he felt it lent itself to investigation. He said he wanted to "use some of the advanced statistical analysis that has been developed in the past two years mainly relating to NBA basketball to evaluate player performance in Europe". His name was Steve Houston. (I'm not making this up - it's just a coincidence.)

In 2004, Houston applied for a traineeship with the Rockets and was assisting the club's European scouts within six months. In early 2006, the Rockets signed that great plus-minus advocate, Daryl Morey. "I learned a lot from Morey about how to translate data into information that will really help you to identify talent and find new players," Steven Houston told the German footballer writer Christoph Biermann a few months ago.

In 2008, Houston - the man, not the club - was approached by Mike Forde, the director of football operations at Chelsea FC. At that time, the Dane Frank Arnesen was also working for Chelsea, first as head talent scout and then as director of football. When Arnesen moved on to Hamburg in May 2011, he took Chelsea's chief scout, Lee Congerton, and no less than five young players with him. Oh, and Steven Houston.

Since then, Congerton's trying to improve Hamburg's scouting system with the help of Houston's data. Congerton told The Guardian that statistics played an important role when Hamburg signed the Latvian striker Artjoms Rudnevs from Lech Poznan, as his numbers were "exceptionally high". And Houston told Biermann in June that the club had signed goalkeeper René Adler in part because he excelled in certain statistical categories.

Back then, many people questioned the logic behind signing Adler, considering Hamburg already had a pretty good goalkeeper in Jaroslav Drobny. But now, after six rounds of games, the transfer looks like the most inspired deal Hamburg have made in a long time. Unless, of course, Rudnevs keeps up his pace of improvement. He was a sub in the first game and not very good in the second, but he's scored two goals and set up one more in the four matches since.

However, the numbers men at Hamburg appear to have been using fairly normal stats, such as goals scored and shots parried. It seems safe to say that Houston, the Morey disciple, would love to apply plus-minus to football.

Naturally, plus-minus is perfect for games like basketball and ice hockey (where it's been in use since the 1950s), games that have an unlimited number of substitutions, so that players get into and out of action all the time, and in which the score often changes. You'd think it's useless in football, where there are only few changes to the line-up during a game, where a player who has been taken out of the game can't get back into it and where the score might change only one or two times over the course of 90 minutes.

But perhaps you can tweak plus-minus to suit football? There is now a German company called score.chart (makes you wonder why even number crunchers have to use silly spellings) that has come up with a method not unlike plus-minus to evaluate football players. Mario Gotze has a score.chart index of 106.0 and Mike Hanke's is 102.8, while Hans Sarpei comes in at an even 100.

This seems to indicate that Gotze is better than Hanke, who in turn is better than Sarpei. You could say one doesn't have to do maths to arrive at this result, but if you replace these three names with those of, say, three Latvian players you've never heard of, let alone seen in action, you can understand why some scouts are interested in such charts.

But much more intriguing is another question. Will the stats wizards one day find the footballing equivalents of Shane Battier? Are there players out there whom nobody rates particularly highly because they don't do any one thing particularly well but who should actually be starting players for the very simple reason that the team as a whole performs better when they are on the pitch?

After all, as many of us will know from their working lives, there are some people who bring something intangible, unclassifiable to the workplace - "some magical ability", if you will - that greatly improves the results. And that's what it's all about, isn't it?

 

[mackemdr]

This is worth a read on plus-minus and Steve Houston.

the main problem I have with this sort of data is factors that cannot be measured. The ability to dominate a game through an inspired tackle or dribble, scoring goals but from different areas and which are self-created. Players that can influence a team through sheer presence won't be found in stats, harrying, organising etc.

All stats also have the inherit problem not being able to control who they're being recorded against. For instance if england played spain/holland/italy in the group stages, all stats would be less except (hopefully) tackling. Whereas if we played lichtenstein, gilbraltor and maldova you'd (hope) have the shots stats up.

That striker with "exceptionally high stats" would struggle to get into a championship side here

 

[andy78]

the main problem I have with this sort of data is factors that cannot be measured. The ability to dominate a game through an inspired tackle or dribble, scoring goals but from different areas and which are self-created. Players that can influence a team through sheer presence won't be found in stats, harrying, organising etc.

All stats also have the inherit problem not being able to control who they're being recorded against. For instance if england played spain/holland/italy in the group stages, all stats would be less except (hopefully) tackling. Whereas if we played lichtenstein, gilbraltor and maldova you'd (hope) have the shots stats up.

That striker with "exceptionally high stats" would struggle to get into a championship side here

That's what plus-minus should show, that some players sheer presence more often than not ends in good results for his team and they lose more when he is not present, even if his conventional stats might not be stellar or noteworthy. Larsson had that type of record for us this season, as a guess I would have thought Cattermole would have had a similar record too.

 

[Lewberry pie]

the main problem I have with this sort of data is factors that cannot be measured. The ability to dominate a game through an inspired tackle or dribble, scoring goals but from different areas and which are self-created. Players that can influence a team through sheer presence won't be found in stats, harrying, organising etc.

All stats also have the inherit problem not being able to control who they're being recorded against. For instance if england played spain/holland/italy in the group stages, all stats would be less except (hopefully) tackling. Whereas if we played lichtenstein, gilbraltor and maldova you'd (hope) have the shots stats up.

That striker with "exceptionally high stats" would struggle to get into a championship side here

there is no 100% system when buying players though, what's safc successful % of main targets bought doing well, 1 in 10 maybe, there has to be better ways of identifying players because take last year for example borini and ki were both excellent and both were last minute panic buys, giac and altidore both failed but might get better giacc in particular could be a player for us in the future.

 

[The Situation]

This is worth a read on plus-minus and Steve Houston.

Really interesting read that, thanks for posting.

It appears from a quick search that Rudnevs scored 12 goals and had 4 assists in 34 games in 2012-2013 to finish as their joint top scorer but rarely featured at all last season, making only one start.

 

[BumbleBee]

That's what plus-minus should show, that some players sheer presence more often than not ends in good results for his team and they lose more when he is not present, even if his conventional stats might not be stellar or noteworthy. Larsson had that type of record for us this season, as a guess I would have thought Cattermole would have had a similar record too.

Would be interesting to compare Altidore with Fletcher. My money would be on Altidore.

 

[andy78]

Really interesting read that, thanks for posting.

It appears from a quick search that Rudnevs scored 12 goals and had 4 assists in 34 games in 2012-2013 to finish as their joint top scorer but rarely featured at all last season, making only one start.

Was on loan at Hannover in the second half of last season, scored 4 goals and had 4 assists in 16 games (10 starts).

 

[The Situation]

Was on loan at Hannover in the second half of last season, scored 4 goals and had 4 assists in 16 games (10 starts).

Cheers.

That's 16 goals and 8 assists in 57 games (39 of which were starts according to Who Scored) resulting in him giving some sort of contribution to the scoreboard in 42% of his games. It would be even more interesting to break that down into how much of his contribution comes when he starts games versus off the bench, but I'll admit to being too lazy at the minute to do it

For a price believed to be around €3.5m (about £2.7m), what more can you ask for really.

 

[andy78]

Would be interesting to compare Altidore with Fletcher. My money would be on Altidore.

Here you go...

Altidore: 19 starts, 12 subs (1783 minutes): 9 wins (3 wins when starts), 6 draws (5 draws when starts), 16 defeats (11 defeats when starts)
Fletcher: 13 starts, 7 subs (1238 minutes): 5 wins (4 wins when starts), 6 draws (2 draws when starts), 9 defeats (7 defeats when starts)

Cheers.

That's 16 goals and 8 assists in 57 games (39 of which were starts according to Who Scored) resulting in him giving some sort of contribution to the scoreboard in 42% of his games. It would be even more interesting to break that down into how much of his contribution comes when he starts games versus off the bench, but I'll admit to being too lazy at the minute to do it

For a price believed to be around €3.5m (about £2.7m), what more can you ask for really.

It's a pretty good ratio and you can't argue with that sort of contribution for that price.