Net Gains

O'Hanlon Ryan O'Hanlon

Description

An in-depth examination of the rise of analytics in soccer and the wild experiments unfolding around the world in the beautiful gameNet Gains: Inside the Beautiful Game's Analytics Revolution takes readers on a tour across the world and throughout soccer history, introducing the many people who have attempted to shine a light onto and innovate a sport that, in many ways, is still stuck in the Dark Ages. This deep dive into the rise of analytics in soccer-a sport where tradition reigns supreme-shows how revolutionary tactics and underexplored metrics are breaking the beautiful game wide open. By exploring how massive institutions built on billions of dollars can function for so long without any kind of introspection-and what happens when people from the outside attempt to question the status quo-author Ryan O'Hanlon, staff writer at ESPN, shows how time and again experts, managers, coaches, players, and fans feel they know the best approach for any given team or player, and yet get undermined by the complexity of the game-and human behavior. To tell this globe-trekking story, O'Hanlon takes readers inside the front offices and analytics departments of the top professional leagues' most cutting-edge clubs and profiles a misfit cast of number-crunchers, behavioral economists, tech insiders, and managers all working to move beyond the philosophical side of soccer and uncover the hard truths behind possession, goals, and developing talent.

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 18 octobre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781647005559
• Langue: English

Extrait

Copyright 2022 Ryan O Hanlon
Cover 2022 Abrams
Published in 2022 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022933713
ISBN: 978-1-4197-5891-1
eISBN: 978-1-64700-555-9
Abrams books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact [e-mail] or the address below.
Abrams Press is a registered trademark of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
ABRAMS The Art of Books 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007 abramsbooks.com
To Wally and Kathleen, You got me started.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
1. THE CHALLENGE OF BIG DATA
2. DUNKS ONLY
3. MYTHICAL FINISHING
4. THE MONEY WAY
5. A PASSING FAD
6. SET PIECES
7. BIG TED
8. THE MIDDLE FIELD
9. THE MODERN MANAGER
10. POST-MONEYBALL
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SOURCES
INDEX
INTRODUCTION
Playing football is very simple, but playing simple football is the hardest thing there is.
- JOHAN CRUYFF
* * *
My dad dropped out of college before the second semester of his freshman year. Whenever someone asks him what he studied in college, he tells them he majored in socializing. He sells fish for a living, gets up at four every morning so he can be in tune with the Asian markets, and then spends his days on the phone and on his feet, helping unload trucks, moving slats of wild salmon around in bedroom-size freezers, and making phone calls that ensure trucks full of tuna get from fishermen to wholesalers to your local northeastern grocers. He gets home around 2 P.M. and, without fail, reeks of fish. Not any particular fish-certainly not any kind of odor I ve encountered outside of post-work hugs or rides in the car-but rather what I imagine every fish smell put together would smell like. Call it fish essence.
I also have no doubt that, were my dad in charge, the United States would never have missed the 2018 World Cup.
Had I been born in another country, I d probably be playing professional soccer right now. Or at least, I would ve played professional soccer at some point. I was quick enough, I had the touch, and I had the vision to slow the game down. If I d grown up in Amsterdam or Lyon or London, I would ve joined up with the youth academy at a professional club, worked my way through the age groups, received the requisite developmental guidance, and ended up in the second division in Ireland or somewhere in Scandinavia. I probably wouldn t have gone to college; maybe, I d have already retired and would be going to college right now.
Instead, I grew up in St. James, New York, a sleepy little middle-class enclave on Long Island tucked between a bunch of other, more affluent neighborhoods that residents referred to, unironically, as hamlets. Robert Mercer, the shadowy hedge-fund master behind the election of President Donald Trump, lives 10 minutes away, deeper into the woods, up near the water. Trump held a campaign rally at a country club down the street from my parents house. Ignore the various moral and ethical issues with this thought exercise for a second: If, for some reason, you wanted to ensure that a newborn child did not grow up wanting to play soccer, then putting them in a basket, attaching it to a parachute, and dropping the contraption into the heart of St. James would be one of your better non-Arctic or -Antarctic targets.
The American soccer ladder isn t quite broken, though it is missing a bunch of rungs, costs way too much money to use, and comes with plenty of purported guides who offer the wrong directions. I made it about as high as I could-I was a starter at the NCAA Division 1 level-but only because of the guy who smelled like low tide.
* * *
It s easy to identify a basketball player or a football player. Think about the last beautiful, non-pandemic day when you spent a large amount of time out in public, bumping into, walking by, smiling at, exchanging pleasantries with countless people you ve never met before. OK, now think about how many of those people have the necessary body type to play in the NBA or NFL. Without even considering talent, sheer genetics provides a coldhearted selective filter for the player pool in both of those sports. LeBron James is six foot nine, 250 pounds, and built like a nuclear warhead. Tom Brady might be verging into dad bod territory, but he s still six foot four and 225 pounds. Anyone can dream of becoming the starting point guard for the New York Knicks, but only about 5 percent of the global population has the physical blueprint to make it happen.
Pretty much anyone can, in theory, become a professional soccer player. I m five eight, 155 pounds, and look like a lesser Greek god when compared to the best soccer player in the world, the puny five-foot-six Lionel Messi. In fact, Australian researchers found that 28 percent of the global population has the necessary physique to become a professional soccer player.
And yet, soccer talent development in America for most of the 20th and 21st centuries has used the same filters as basketball and football. The bigger and faster kids get identified at the youngest ages and then get fast-tracked toward the best available training. Why? Because when you re 10, being bigger and faster is what wins soccer games. But youth trophies have little correlation with long-term development. France overhauled its youth system, and now French children play half as many competitive games as American children. They won the most recent World Cup. As David Endt, a former executive at Ajax, the Dutch club widely considered to have one of the best youth-development structures in world soccer, told the New York Times Magazine , Here, we would rather polish one or two jewels than win games at the youth levels. Ajax recently reached the Champions League semifinals.
Soccer suffers from what is known as the relative age effect , where children born earlier in the year often perform better than those born later but are still funneled into the same arbitrary age group. After all, eight months of age difference matters way more when you re 10 than when you re 20. More than 30 percent of the athletes in European soccer s top leagues were born in the first three months of the year, and less than 20 percent have their birthdays in October or later. However, another study found that the players who win awards at the highest level-in other words, the kids who develop the best-are more likely to be born at the tail end of their age group.
My dad didn t know about any of these studies, or all of this data. He probably still has no clue. But he wouldn t be surprised to hear any of it because, somehow, he knew something was wrong. The first travel team I played for was the best travel team on Long Island, the Smithtown Thunder. I was one of the first kids who could both (1) run with the ball relatively close to my feet and (2) kick it in the air. So many of our games featured the same pattern: Someone would clear the ball up to me on the right wing; I d dribble 15 or 20 yards forward and then lob the ball into the net from the sideline because 12-year-old keepers still can t touch the crossbar. Most of my teammates were particularly big or particularly strong or particularly both of those things for their age, and we had only a handful of smaller, more skillful players, like me. The team had the perfect collection of talent to win games at that age group, my dad told me.
A paragon of unconventional sports wisdom my father is not: He s convinced Babe Ruth would be the best baseball player alive today, he doesn t understand why it was a mistake for the New York Giants to draft a running back with the no. 2 pick in the 2018 NFL draft, and his great basketball insight is that players don t jam the ball enough. He also doesn t have much personal experience to draw from. My mom was offered and accepted a full gymnastics scholarship from the University of Florida, but my dad s athletic career ended in ninth grade when he broke his ankle playing badminton against his gym teacher.
Despite that, he was able to turn himself into exactly what his son needed, and what the soccer world still doesn t have nearly enough of: a long-term thinker willing to go against the way things have always been done. He knew I wouldn t be able to keep lobbing the ball into the net. After all, those keepers were going to start growing at some point.
* * *
It was a Pieter Bruegel painting of the late-1990s American soccer scene: curly-haired me, in a bright-blue Carolina Panthers Starter jacket, sitting behind home plate in a dank, dark, and moldy indoor AstroTurf baseball field, crying my eyes out. My parents had taken me to meet a local private trainer with the air of an 80s Wall Street banker but an encyclopedic knowledge of Dutch soccer named Ron Alber-and they d done it absolutely against my wishes.
A few weeks before, on the way home from practice with the Thunder, I had told my dad that I was bored. He had immediately gone out to the local soccer shop and asked one of the owners for the name of the most intense soccer-trainer he knew. When they spoke on the phone, Ron told my dad that if he ever decided that he disagreed with his methods, Ron would give him his money back. That was music to a fish salesman s ears. But even though I claimed I was bored at practice with the Thunder, I d grown comfortable being the best soccer player on every team I played for. It was part of my nascent preteen identity. And what if it was no longer the case once I met Ron? I couldn t take that chance! So, I cried through the whole car ride there, and no doubt to the mortification of my mom and dad,