johnnydawg68
Chairperson, People's Front of Saint Domingo
The quality of your best player or your worst player?
A little background on the questions, I was listening to a great podcast series from the author Malcom Gladwell called "Revisionist History", which I highly recommend. http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/06-my-little-hundred-million
This episode is not about football, but he references a book written by two economists to illustrate a point he is trying to make about philanthropy, specifically to Universities in the US, and how most of it goes to elite institutions who already have huge endowments, and his theory that it should go to the universities with the smallest endowments, i.e. the "weak link" argument rather than the "strong link" argument.
Ok so on to the football part. The book he references is called "The Numbers Game": https://www.amazon.com/Numbers-Game...why+everything+you+know+about+soccer+is+wrong
The central thesis is that in football, due to a variety of factors, weak players are actually more influential than talented stars, the exact reverse of sport like basketball where a Michael Jordan can have a much bigger influence on results by himself that Leo Messi can for instance. Here's why: Football is a game where if you get lucky, that one goal may hold up. So mistakes play an outsized role in results much more than other sports. Basically if you're worst player on the field is significantly worse than your best player, then that player can effectively negate the performance of your best player over time.
Example: Your best * players string together * beautiful passes in a row. Your worse player ends up with a horrible touch and turns it over leading to a break which results in a goal. Those 8 beautiful passes in row may have increased your chances of winning by a certain percentage but the one guys completely negates the advantage. Or you are defending brilliantly as a team, but your worst defender switches off for 1 second and allows a goal which beats you.
In doing a statistical analysis of the top clubs in Europe, and found if they upgraded their poorer players instead of upgrading their superstars, they would win more and score more goals.
What matters in basketball isn't how good your 5th players is, it's how good your best player is. In soccer, the quality of your 11th best player on the pitch is actually more important than how good your best player is.
So what happened when the authors met with some of the richest owners of the top clubs in England to show them their analysis? None of them were interested. Because their were so many other factors they were driven by (shirt sales, the glamour of having a good looking, world renown striker, etc). Simply winning more games wasn't enough to change their behavior of working the top of the market.
For a variety of reasons I find this fascinating and it rings true with me. And for Everton, this approach would actually work, because although we're rich now, we still can't really shop at the top of the market. But we can dominate the middle market and make sure our 6-11th best players on the pitch are better than most, if not all of the other clubs we play, which would result in more wins, goals, and then would allow us entry into the top end of the market, if we chose.
Discuss....
A little background on the questions, I was listening to a great podcast series from the author Malcom Gladwell called "Revisionist History", which I highly recommend. http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/06-my-little-hundred-million
This episode is not about football, but he references a book written by two economists to illustrate a point he is trying to make about philanthropy, specifically to Universities in the US, and how most of it goes to elite institutions who already have huge endowments, and his theory that it should go to the universities with the smallest endowments, i.e. the "weak link" argument rather than the "strong link" argument.
Ok so on to the football part. The book he references is called "The Numbers Game": https://www.amazon.com/Numbers-Game...why+everything+you+know+about+soccer+is+wrong
The central thesis is that in football, due to a variety of factors, weak players are actually more influential than talented stars, the exact reverse of sport like basketball where a Michael Jordan can have a much bigger influence on results by himself that Leo Messi can for instance. Here's why: Football is a game where if you get lucky, that one goal may hold up. So mistakes play an outsized role in results much more than other sports. Basically if you're worst player on the field is significantly worse than your best player, then that player can effectively negate the performance of your best player over time.
Example: Your best * players string together * beautiful passes in a row. Your worse player ends up with a horrible touch and turns it over leading to a break which results in a goal. Those 8 beautiful passes in row may have increased your chances of winning by a certain percentage but the one guys completely negates the advantage. Or you are defending brilliantly as a team, but your worst defender switches off for 1 second and allows a goal which beats you.
In doing a statistical analysis of the top clubs in Europe, and found if they upgraded their poorer players instead of upgrading their superstars, they would win more and score more goals.
What matters in basketball isn't how good your 5th players is, it's how good your best player is. In soccer, the quality of your 11th best player on the pitch is actually more important than how good your best player is.
So what happened when the authors met with some of the richest owners of the top clubs in England to show them their analysis? None of them were interested. Because their were so many other factors they were driven by (shirt sales, the glamour of having a good looking, world renown striker, etc). Simply winning more games wasn't enough to change their behavior of working the top of the market.
For a variety of reasons I find this fascinating and it rings true with me. And for Everton, this approach would actually work, because although we're rich now, we still can't really shop at the top of the market. But we can dominate the middle market and make sure our 6-11th best players on the pitch are better than most, if not all of the other clubs we play, which would result in more wins, goals, and then would allow us entry into the top end of the market, if we chose.
Discuss....
