Interesting read.
But I would need to know a lot more before deciding how seriously to take it.
The article doesn't define how this metric of "Best passers" is calculated.
Is it based on the total number of passes players make?
Or is it an average grade for each player based on the overall quality of their passing?
And is there a cut off for minimum number of passes or appearances for a player to make the list?
If it's based on the number of passes then teams that pisball about at the back without ever getting anywhere will do well on that metric, whereas more direct teams who play a higher percentage of riskier balls will do less well.
You only have to look at the stats for Nicolas Madsen. He's probably our best passer and his six assists is top for us this season, but his overall pass completion of 80.83% doesn't look too special unless you cut him some slack for playing a lot of high risk forward passes:
https://footystats.org/players
Also, the article mentions in passing that James Madison is one of Spurs' best passers but has been injured all season (which would affect their passing data) but it doesn't give any weight to Spurs having a large number of injuries this season which might have deprived them of their better passers and would certainly disrupt team coherence on the pitch.
My final concern with this article is that it seems to put all the blame on the scouts:
"Instead, as a source who has worked with a number of Champions League clubs put it to me, the physical metrics are allowing clubs just to confirm their own biases -- the same biases we've been talking about in this battle between scouts and stats since "Moneyball" was written. Except, now we have new stats that say the scouts were right."
How can we be sure that it wasn't the data analysts who were driving the decision to recruit bigger and more athletic players?
Clive has made the point elsewhere recently that the modern game is veering towards bigger and more athletic players. That was particularly stark when we played Brentford in pre season and all their players were bigger than ours.
Brentford are widely acclaimed for their use of data analytics in recruitment. So in their case it would be a reasonable assumption that it was the analysts and not the scouts pushing for big players who can run. |  |
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