Soccer Analytics: From Fantex to the Fundamentals

Fantex Brokerage Services recently announced that it will be offering shares in the stock of Houston Texas Running Back Arian Foster. That’s right – shares in an athlete. Essentially, Fantex paid Foster a cool $10 million for a 20 percent stake in Foster’s future income, which includes but is not limited to: contracts, endorsement deals, and public speaking. Fantex will begin to offer shares in that 20% stake as early as next month.

This is an incredibly interesting idea. Beyond the logistical limitations (will players want to do this? How will leagues respond?), I think it strikes the core of much of what analytics in sports is attempting to get at it: player value.

More specifically, I want to examine this story from the point of view of soccer analytics in an effort to start building an analytical framework – to start molding a mode of thinking through which we can analyze players and team performance. That all sounds rather abstract and wordy, but there really are some very concrete and real ideas behind what Fantex is trying to do. Caution: I started writing this article by talking about Fantex’s IPO of Arian Foster, but by the end it will have little to nothing to do with this. If you’re interested in the valuation of Arian Foster, check out NYU Stern Professor and valuation demi-God Aswath Damodaron’s blog post.

Let’s start by examining the most obvious parallel: an athlete has an intrinsic value, much like a company has an intrinsic value.

This intrinsic value can be measured by performance metrics – say goals allowed by a goalkeeper and revenues by a company. However, both of these statistical measures must be viewed in a proper context. Let’s take this very obvious example: Ford Motor Company rakes in revenues that are far larger than they were 100 years ago. A part of this revenue growth is simply because Ford produces more cars than they did 100 years since more people demand Ford cars . However, a major part of this large growth in revenues is due to inflation – Ford takes in more for every car for a reason that is really beyond their control.

Similarly, and this is another obvious example (but that’s why I want to use it – it elucidates the point quite well), the amount of goals a goalkeeper allows is highly dependent on the context within which he performs. A goalkeeper that plays for a team at the bottom of the league (which presumably allows a lot of goals, although it could be that they just don’t score many goals. But for now, let’s assume that they’re bad at both defending and attacking) will allow more goals than a goalkeeper that plays for a team at the top of the league.

Like I said, this is an obvious example that most fans intuitively get and wouldn’t make the mistake of overlooking. However, there are many other instances where the importance of context won’t be so clear.

And I feel like this is where most professional soccer analysis starts to fall apart – a failure to properly contextualize performance makes it hard to analyze what actually is due to player performance and what is simply a product of the context or even flukes.

It is also symptomatic of a larger problem within the community of soccer analysis, journalism, blogging, etc, and that is a problem of “irrationality”. Pick up a copy of any big soccer newspaper (Marca, Sport, La Gazzette…) if you’d like a quick survey of any and all logical fallacies: straw men arguments, inductive fallacies, the fallacy of false cause, etc. Much of soccer punditry in every part of the world consists of knee-jerk reactions to fluctuations in performance over small sample sizes of games or even a single game. Take, for example, the guy pictured above  -- public enemy #1 of rationality. The World Cup (and the Euro) is a perfect opportunity for Mr. Alexi Lalas to make outlandish claims on the basis of 45, 90, 135, or how ever many minutes (all small samples, no doubt) he's happened to watch this team play during the World Cup. Now, Lalas happens to say things that are easily recognizable as drivel  -- but what about your favorite pundits? Your favorite newspaper?

Take, for example, Lionel Messi’s current dip in performance – he hasn’t scored a goal in 4 games. Alarmists are already ringing up theories that Messi is taking the club season off in order to be at full peak for the World Cup, which is what he really wants to win. This is after about a month of mediocre performances from Messi.

I believe a major part of better decision making for soccer managers, owners, and executives and a major part of the discipline brought along with soccer analytics has nothing to do with data or statistical analysis. In fact, saying that is probably misattribution of the word “soccer analytics” on my part. Being a better soccer executive and being a smarter fan has nothing do with data; but it has everything to do with being a more rational observer and analyst. This is a point Professor Chris Anderson alludes to in his interview with our blog:

“General texts explaining decision making and analysis like Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow or Silver’s The Signal and the Noise are very useful for understanding how people think about and interpret information.”

In a game such as soccer, where research has shown (mainly by Professor Anderson) that luck plays a bigger role than in any other sport, a rigorous decision making and logical foundation is even more important – there is more “noise” that distorts our understanding of what is actually going on in the pitch.

Now, being irrational and succumbing to the emotions of being a fan is part of what makes soccer beautiful. I’m not suggesting that we need to be cold, emotionless fans. Rather, what I am suggesting is that it is important to detach ourselves from the irrationality of being a fan in order to see the game as what it is, not as what we may construct it to be based on biases and faulty reasoning. “Animal spirits” don’t just apply to the stock market.


Around the Web:

• StatsBomb examines the concept of managerial fingerprints through the profile of Andres Villas Boas
• Sam Borden of the NY Times has a nice little profile on Espanyol and what it's like to be "Barcelona's little brother"
• James Grayson explores how repeatable of a "skill" total shots are
• Richard Whittall with a piece on the more financial side of soccer as he looks into UEFA's Champions League media deals