| Nice piece on Barnsley and their success under US ownership on 16:26 - Mar 12 with 908 views | gordon |
When you hear stories like this about how recruitment and scouting is changing in football and becoming more empirical and data-driven and the obvious benefits of this, it just makes me more angry & sad about how awfully club as a whole messed up with Paul Hurst's regime. |  | |  |
| Nice piece on Barnsley and their success under US ownership on 16:29 - Mar 12 with 892 views | wkj |
| Nice piece on Barnsley and their success under US ownership on 16:26 - Mar 12 by gordon |
When you hear stories like this about how recruitment and scouting is changing in football and becoming more empirical and data-driven and the obvious benefits of this, it just makes me more angry & sad about how awfully club as a whole messed up with Paul Hurst's regime. |
I have often said Hurst came in like someone playing Football Manager somewhat tongue in cheek - However, the more I think of it, the comparisons seems deeply realistic. |  |
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| Nice piece on Barnsley and their success under US ownership on 18:27 - Mar 12 with 752 views | Edmundo |
| Nice piece on Barnsley and their success under US ownership on 16:29 - Mar 12 by wkj |
I have often said Hurst came in like someone playing Football Manager somewhat tongue in cheek - However, the more I think of it, the comparisons seems deeply realistic. |
He and Keane were definitely destructive: Keane for losing us Rhodes, Walters (let's face it, he'd have stayed if we'd been top6 and gone up), Supple (how horrible does a football club have to be to force a kid to retire?). He was allowed to rip it apart with no apparent plan.
Hurst was arguably worse, as his recruitment was so shocking after losing us the scorers of 40-odd goals.
I'd love to see us poach Stuart Weber from Norwich: he's the man pretty much responsible for Norwich's amazing results in the transfer market. |  |
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| Nice piece on Barnsley and their success under US ownership on 19:17 - Mar 12 with 691 views | Marshalls_Mullet |
| Nice piece on Barnsley and their success under US ownership on 18:27 - Mar 12 by Edmundo |
He and Keane were definitely destructive: Keane for losing us Rhodes, Walters (let's face it, he'd have stayed if we'd been top6 and gone up), Supple (how horrible does a football club have to be to force a kid to retire?). He was allowed to rip it apart with no apparent plan.
Hurst was arguably worse, as his recruitment was so shocking after losing us the scorers of 40-odd goals.
I'd love to see us poach Stuart Weber from Norwich: he's the man pretty much responsible for Norwich's amazing results in the transfer market. |
I'm no Keane fan, but Supple praised the way Keane handled things.
I think Supple just didn't fancy modern football, and that's fair enough. |  |
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| Nice piece on Barnsley and their success under US ownership on 19:45 - Mar 12 with 654 views | bluefunk |
Barnsley’s style of football isn’t exactly for purists apparently - John Becks Cambridge team are referenced for comparison in a piece in the Times, which quoted Tony Mowbray on the way they play, “it isn’t for me” |  | | |
| ITFC, analytics, and Billy Beane on 19:58 - Mar 12 with 647 views | ScottCandage |
| Nice piece on Barnsley and their success under US ownership on 16:26 - Mar 12 by gordon |
When you hear stories like this about how recruitment and scouting is changing in football and becoming more empirical and data-driven and the obvious benefits of this, it just makes me more angry & sad about how awfully club as a whole messed up with Paul Hurst's regime. |
Whomever the manager was who was on duty when the "soccer" analytics revolution started, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that ME was the owner when that started. Here's the thing - we want TOMORROW'S club to be better. And I want every tool available to me to achieve that goal. Would any good CEO say different about their company and product? Therefore, ME missed the boat when it came to analytics driving the train (I really want to shoot *myself for the poorest mixed metaphor of the century). Either we should have invented it or adopted it earlier.
And bringing up Billy Beane in that article is very interesting, as he is the subject of Michael Lewis's book Moneyball (later adapted into a film by Aaron Sorkin). Billy Beans was and is still, I think, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics in baseball. The Athletics are what we in the States call a "small market team", insofar as the demographics of their immediate surroundings are not as large as other places (like NY, CHI, LA) that have huge markets and, more importantly, control large television networks that broadcast 162 games a year (read: LOTS of ad revenue that all goes to the team that owns the network). Oakland even shares the region with the neighboring SF Giants, and the Athletics are very much the "little brother" in that scenario.
Anyway, Oakland is always at a monetary disadvantage. But what Lewis put forth (and gets misunderstood in any discussion about analytics) is that what Beane tried to do was use an investing approach, whereby he tried to take advantage of inefficiencies in the market, and use information asymmetry (where one party discovers or invents information that the market doesn't have in general) to gain advantages.
Analytics are just ONE TOOL that Beane used to take advantage of the market inefficiencies in baseball relative to the cost of acquisition of players. At that time 20 or so years ago, that market inefficiency was on base percentage (how many times you're on base, whether a hit, a walk, or whatever), because you can't score unless you get on base. The sluggers who hit homers but who would strike out a lot were expensive, but the guys who would not strike out and take a walk and get on base any way possible were cheaper.
So Beane signed guys like that in free agency and in the amateur draft. And sooner or later, Oakland were in contention more often that you'd consider it possible for a club that size.
And then everyone in baseball adopted the same strategy, and the on base percentage inefficacy went away. Beane had to discovery a new inefficiency, using analytics to discover it. And on it goes...
Beane initially was criticized because he would ignore the old scouts who would just go by eye, instinct and experience. But it worked for him. Today in baseball, it's a balance between analytics and scouting, as it probably should be. Scouting is ANOTHER TOOL. I want the best of that too.
It's been a long post (you don't say, ma'am). I just wanted all my non baseball friends the impact of Beane's ownership and history on Barnsley's success. And yes, it's a model I hope "my American cousins" will adopt.
But we should have beaten Barnsley to it. [Post edited 12 Mar 2021 20:04]
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