X 10000. I reckon the only time that you can apply that sort of logic to footballers is probably goalkeepers, in that you can sort of think how many points they will stop you dropping.
And that was how Clough persuaded the Forest board, (or chairman back in those days I guess), to fork out a few bob for Shilton.
And even attempting to use it on foreign players in leagues miles different that ours makes it even more pointless.
Yep, the specialization of the keeper position and it's impact on the game is probably the closest you can get to identifying statistical impacts like you could with a particular pitcher. Remember in baseball that the players really only play together as a unit when they are defending, this is also why there are a lot more statistics based around batting. In football, an individual player (apart from the keeper) is usually involved in all stages of play from defence, to transition, to attack. Further, players are part of sub-groups within the team such as the line of defence, your midfielders, and strikers and each of those units has a similar shared set of responsibilities within their sub-group.
For me the key component of the Moneyball approach is what I said in the previous post, that players must be "
statistically suited to a particular playing strategy."
This is where Liverpool have failed. The American owners brought the approach with the only intention of guaranteeing a positive return on investment. They noticed that there were premiums applied to young players and to British players so they assumed that by buying promising young british players they would be able to develop them further and sell them on for a profit if they were not to be kept in the team. This led to the acquisitions of Andy Carroll, Joe Allen, Jordan Henderson, Charlie Adam, and Stewart Downing. The team didn't gel, and they were learning that the strategy was innately flawed because paying the british premium and the premium for young potential went almost entirely against the original Moneyball approach of finding players who could offer more to the team than what they were worth on the open market (and also they were crap).
