I wrote a post on Big Soccer about the challenges that we face in individual player analysis in soccer as compared to baseball.
I guess if I were to suggest a course of action for the statistical community, a soccer version of Bill James “win shares” might be the best idea. This is interesting because I’m not all that enamored of win shares in baseball; it’s interesting but I don’t think any significant improvement on the sorts of things already being done, particularly for modern players.
But for soccer, I think it’s the exact right approach. Figure out the quality of the team the player plays for, and then apportion out credit/blame to individual players based on those results. The difficulty, I think, is that intuitively I believe soccer is a multiplicative sport and not an additive one. That is, if one team has two players rated at 10 and 2 and the other has players rated at 5 and 5, the second team wins 25 to 20 rather than losing 12 to 10.
Granted I can’t prove that, which again is another problem. For the Billy Beanes of the world looking to crossover, they have a very difficult task ahead of them. The good news is that success may prove to bring monumental rewards, because they’d be one of the few people on the planet who would possess that knowledge.
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