04/25/24
November 02, 2010
Sabermetrics Comes to Soccer: The arrival of Boston Red Sox owners to Liverpool will help bring Sabermetrics further into English soccer, the Telegraph reports. "Billy Beane and I are close friends," said Damien Comolli, who used baseball as a model when recruiting players while at Tottenham. "He loves football as I love baseball. We have and are talking at length since 2006 about data application in both football and baseball."
I like it when ESPN and the other American media refers to a team as "The Spurs" or a ground as "The Molineux".
posted by owlhouse at 09:58 PM on November 02, 2010
I like it when they say tomayto, and we say tomarto...
Let's call the whole thing off!
posted by Drood at 01:42 AM on November 03, 2010
I'm currently reading Soccernomics, which came out a year ago and reports on football number crunchers over the years. If there's one thing American owners can do to ease their transition into the EPL, it would be to not act like they've discovered something new. Not that Henry necessarily is, but the article does NESV no favors.
posted by yerfatma at 09:01 AM on November 03, 2010
There was a decent discussion on this topic on the BBC World Service a few weeks back, pointing out that the economic rationale for sabermetrics -- getting top-level performance while controlling payroll -- has even more relevance in a transfer market than it does in the sandbox of a trade system.
Obviously, the people doing the number-crunching know that it's the underlying principles of sabermetrics that matter more than transferring the models themselves, and while there's lots of speculation on what it might mean during the transfer windows or in the evaluation of established players, but I think this Arsenal fan's take is about right:
These men are investors, not benefactors like Abramovich, and they will want to maximize profits in their investment. They are sports lovers but they are also investors and in a sense, what I think that Liverpool are trading is short term speculators in Hicks and Gillette for long-term investors.
posted by etagloh at 05:18 PM on November 03, 2010
I love it when the British media says things like, "Many MLB franchises, including some of the wealthiest such as New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox..." instead of "the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox." Makes me smile every time for some reason.
Go Red Sox! Go Reds!