My collaboration with Billy Beane continues but the research remains highly developmental and is not being used in the day-to-day operations of the A’s soccer team, the San Jose Earthquakes.

They responded:

“Hi Austin,

“I have been forwarded your enquiry with regards to Cristiano Ronaldo speed data as this was my deal.

“For this particular project we used a partner company (who wish to remain un-named) who track player speeds. The data was not actually collected by Opta as player fitness data (speed and distance) is not something that we analyse. Unfortunately this therefore means that this is not something that we can provide going forward as the company that we used previously do not wish for their data to be used within the media sector.”

When I pressed further, the Opt man wrote:

“The reason for my ‘secrecy’ is because 99% of the clients that our partners work with are proffessional football clubs who want to protect the data and dont want it in the mass media. The companies therefore dont want to associate their name with data in the media as they want to promote exclusivity to their clients.

Hope this makes sense.”

Does it make sense? I tried Ronny’s agent, I talked to Carlos Queiroz, to Manchester United (Don”t get me started on the great wall of Man U), the Portuguese FA, and other stat companies, and found very little. I believe there are some serious metrical studies being produced in the Premiership (Arsenal supposedly rely heavily on them), but there is a very different notion of their provenance.

My understanding is that Beane and Gerrard are still working together and that their “product” is intended to be proprietary, at least in the initial stages. I haven’t read the article (I don’t have access to a university library at the moment), but the abstract indicates that Gerrard is well aware of some of the most fundamental challenges to developing something of real value.

It’s interesting to see that serious research into football/soccer metrics appears to be proceeding on a largely proprietary basis (see, e.g., Actim and the Beane/Gerrard effort), whereas Sabermetrics was for many years a pretty pure “open source” movement. It would be unfortunate if Beane’s success at demonstrating that one can “monetize” the results of Sabermetric analysis in baseball leads to development in other sports being done behind closed doors. I consider that to be particularly true for football/soccer; given the relative lack of sophistication of the current metrics and the worldwide reach of the sport, the most rewarding path is almost certainly one that takes advantage of contributions from the greatest number of interested individuals from the widest geographic range.

Two questions: Does anyone know what happened to that proprietary soccer-stats system Billy Beane was supposed to be working on with the guy from Leeds University? Billy Beane is the general manager of the Oakland A’s in Major League Baseball (also a hardcore Tottenham fan) who pioneered a revolution in bringing statistical analysis to the task of building a team. The ownership group of the A’s also owns the San Jose Earthquakes, and a few months ago Beane was reportedly collaborating with Leeds University Business School Professor Bill Gerrard to devise a series of new statistical categories for soccer. But I haven’t heard if it’s gone anywhere.

Second: Has anyone read Gerrard’s paper, “Is the Moneyball Approach Transferable to Complex Invasion Team Sports”? (Moneyball was the name of Michael Lewis’s influential book on Billy Beane.) The paper was published in the November 2007 issue of the International Journal of Sport Finance and doesn’t seem to be online, although the abstract is. I’d be curious to read it. Anyway I love the phrase “complex invasion team sport” as a generic description of football.

From the abstract:

The paper considers the difficulties of transferring the Moneyball approach to more complex invasion team sports in which player performance is much more interdependent. Three problems are highlighted—the tracking problem (the identification, categorisation, and measurement of player actions), the weighting problem (the importance of player actions toward match outcomes), and the attribution problem (the allocation of individual contributions to joint and interdependent actions).

Fascinating stuff.

At the other, you have soccer, which has defied any attempt to make a decent set of objective statistics from which different people would draw similar conclusions. I love the fact that one of the most “cherished” of soccer statistics is a gymnastics-like numerical representation of subjective judging.

In between, you have a game like basketball, with its soccer-like fluidity combined with a fundamental task — scoring — that is so relatively easy and common that it is fairly easily discussed statistically, though not with the certainty of baseball’s proclamations of numerical certainty. You also have American football, which thrives on a steady diet of statistics that rival baseball for quantity, but so many of which are fundamentally flawed in that they fail to consider the complex interplay of the units (i.e. players) of ritualized land-war that is American football.

I realize I’ve gone absolutely nowhere with this comment, but oh well; I’ve enjoyed thinking about the subject.

If this is so, I think that even if someone does come up with some decent ways to measure the game and allows them to come into the public domain, they might be given short shrift by a soccer public who have been brought up on the idea that stats are practically useless in football — an idea reinforced by the inadequacy of the hitherto available stats.

The rest of the post is spot on (though I probably would not have been able to resist the standard dismissal of the IFFHS as the “vanity project of a anorak from Wiesbaden”).

Given that I was thinking “no, it’s easy copy” a few seconds before I read just those words, it’s your second point that I find more intriguing.

The question, of course, is not whether more meaningful statistics could exist (they surely could), but what they might be. An analogy that I’ve used before is that whereas the linear and event-driven nature of sports like baseball lends itself well to Sabermetric measures grounded in simple arithmetic; the much more fluid, dynamic and, yes, uncertain, nature of football requires measures grounded in a type of quantum theory.

And given that I never took Math 21 (or whatever it is called now), that’s as far as I’ve ever gotten.