04/18/24
April 19, 2008
Billy Beane Gets Into Football: And wants to find out if sabermetrics can be applied to the English Premier League. Will Moneyball work in the beautiful game?
Thanks for the pointer, owly. It'll be good to see if Billy's work can tweak the soccer scouts, too. Can definitely see how it would be of great interest to teams working on a tight budget. I googled the Match Analysis company mentioned in the article and found this: Match Analysis sell video tagging and search software called Mambo Studio that allows you to quickly have your match videos tagged quickly on 1200 parameters and then ask and see the video for things like "How many times did player X pass to player Y in the last 10 mins of match Z?" Costs $1900 - $30,000 depending on if you're an amateur or pro team. They also sell something called Tango Online which is "a complete, touch-by-touch indexed video database of a single team or an entire league. Watch every shot, every foul, every goal, or even every touch by your favorite player." They're working with teams and sponsors right now to see who's gonna be the first to launch this. Veddy veddy interesting.
posted by worldcup2002 at 02:08 PM on April 21, 2008
Valery Lobanovski had a whole team of statisticians analysing Dynamo Kiev's games back in the 70s and 80s. So sabermetrics is not necessarily a new idea, but this is an interesting take given the difference in financial resources available to the Chelseas and Man Uniteds, compared with even the middle level Premiership teams. Yes, that's you, Tottenham.