Football Manager Sabermetrics Principles

So, Comolli went out the window at LFC, but that doesn't necessarily mean the Moneyball and Sabermetric principles have gone the same route. In fact, it's important to remember that the club is still owned by a person who brought an old baseball giant back to the top by applying Moneyball principles. What really interests me, however, is whether playing Football Manager with Sabermetrics principles can work. The problem, as many have pointed out, is that Football seems far less quantifiable than baseball. Is that really true? I don't believe it is. It's a matter of identifying which metrics are important to the success of a football club. For now, I fear more astute minds than mine must take charge of sorting that out.

How Do You Use Sabermetrics With Football Manager?

Without identifiable metrics it's pretty hard to use sabermetrics with football manager. It's also really important to remember that while sabermetrics might be about stats Moneyball isn't! That's right, Moneyball is not about stats. In Moneyball the goal is to get value for money by taking advantage of market deficiencies. That is something we can work with in Football Manager. We can device a Moneyball transfer strategy pretty easily. We can also start analysing which stats affect the outcome of a match the most. I think goals for and against might be important, but I'm just guessing.

A Football Manager Sabermetrics/Moneyball/Soccernomics Strategy

The best guide for a transfer strategy comes from the book Soccernomics. It's a great book and you should be able to see an ad for it on this site. If you're interested in the economy of football it's more than worth a read. Some principles regarding transfers are outlined that could be applicable to Football Manager.

Never Buy Starts of Recent World Cups or Continental Championships

How many times have we seen a player purchased directly after a continental championship only flop exceptionally at his new club? You can't judge a player only based on a handful of games in a tournament that is likely to be one of the highlights of his career. Moreover, stars from championships tend to be grossly overvalued. Don't ever purchase a player based solely on his most recent performances. Check the players history, injury record etc.

Don't go Dutch on a Brazilian!

Frankly, I have no clue if nationality affects transfer value in Football Manager. It might be worth researching. In real life Dutch, Brazilian and players of other fashionable nationalities tend to go for a premium. See if you can avoid paying a premium on players of those nationalities. Consider the value you might get from players of more obscure nationalities.

Don't Keep Players Past Their Prime

Just as with the stock market you should sell when you can get the most money for your players. Each season you should look at the players seasonal performance. If it seems obvious the player is starting to decline; sell him! Kill your darlings.

How Lyon Did It Before They Lost The Plot

Lyon dominated French football the past decade by being smarter than the rest in terms of dealing with the transfer market. Here are the simple rules they used.

• Running a football club isn't a one-man show. Transfers will be decided by a group of people.
• In Football Manager that means you need to get several opinions on a player before signing him. Send out your best scouts, your assistant manager and anybody else you think can offer a valuable opinion. I'd say at least 2-3 others should approve the signing before you go ahead with it.
• Buy players in their early twenties.
• The reasoning behind not going for 17 or 18 year old is that you have a far better idea of how good the player will be when he is aged between 20 and 22. The danger, I have to admit, is that you may have to pay a hefty price for the players. It will be very interesting to observe.
• Help your foreign players move to the new country.
• This can be difficult in FM, but it might be worth securing at least one other player speaks the language of the player. It will probably also be a good idea to get someone to tutor him to build  a relationship.
• Don't buy strikers. Develop them.
• Ooh, it's tempting to disregard this rule. Strikers are after all some of the most exiting players in the game. If you decide to follow the rule and not buy strikers it is probably important to strengthen you attacking and shooting training capabilities to develop your own strikers.
• Sell players if you're offered more than they are worth.
• Sounds obvious, but it can be hard to sell your best players. If you're offered twice the value of the player you should definitely consider selling.
• Replace your players before you sell them. If you notice a rising interest in one of your players that is the time to look for a replacement.

Sabermetrics is a key aspect of Moneyball. Implementing it in Football Manager is a process. We have started with the part of Football Manager that is the easiest to apply these principles to. We won't stop there though.

Positional Analysis In Football Manager (Re)Defined

After the frantic final days of June I have slowed down the posting a bit (actually I haven't made any), but that doesn't mean I'm having a summer meltdown. Right now I'm working on collecting data for all the positions I have yet to analyze. During that process I'm thinking about a couple of things. Things that may lead me to revisit my initial posts on the matter.

The fact is that I failed to set specific criteria for what would make an attribute count as an essential attribute. That means I'll have to revisit my initial posts about the positions and my initial posts about the players in the Lota Schwager squad. None of this, however, will happen until I have collected data on all the positions. This post will define, as clearly as possible, the criteria defining the analysis.

The Player
Any attribute with a value of 16 or more will count as a strong attribute in the player. Most would probably agree that 15 is a pretty decent ranking for an attribute. To ensure that we get only the best attributes I decided to make 16 the treshold used in this analysis.

Players valued at more than £1 million or the top 100 will be analysed. If the value of the 100th player is tied among multiple players all players of that value will be included. That means there can be more than 100 players in the analysis. However, as seen in my Sweeper research teh number can also be lower. If the number of players analyzed is lower than 100 I will define the data as insecure. In truth 100 players probably isn't enough for a proper analysis, but time constraints have caused me to set that limit.

The Data Set
If an attribute has a rating of 16 or higher in more than 30 percent of the players I consider than attribute to be significant. The reasoning is that 16 is a pretty harsh requirement and more than 30 players in a set of 100 is a pretty significant group.

Evaluating The Player
The purpose of this is te enable us to make the right choices in the transfer market. So we want to rank the players according the attributes we find significant. However, and attribute with a rank of 16 or higher with 60 percent of the players should be considered twice as important as an attribute that only has a ranking of 16 or higher in 30 percent of the players. To that end we calculate an attribute facotr for each player. Here's an example.

• Heading - 35%
• Anticipation - 40%
• Composure - 35%
• Off The Ball - 50%
• Jumping - 60%
• Strength - 55%

This is not a real example, but could feasibly be a target man type analysis. As you can see each attribute is assigned a percentage value. This percentage value indicates the ratio of players where this attribute was significant. In this example the total percentage value is 275%. This number is important in calculating each attributes relative significance. We do this using this simple formula:

Attribute Percentage * 100/275

From that we get these values.

• Heading - 13
• Anticipation - 15
• Composure - 13
• Off The Ball - 18
• Jumping - 22
• Strength - 20

The sum of those values is: 101.

So, finally we are ready to calculate a players base ability according to this made up analysis. The player in question R. Andom a target man with unknown potential. His stats are Heading 12, Anticipation 15, Composure 13, Off The Ball 14, Jumping 20, Strength 17. His base skill level, according to my analysis, is:

((12*13)+(15*15)+(13*13)+(14*18)+(20*22)+(17*20))/101 = 15.66

So R. Andom has a base skill value of 15.66 when performing in this made up position. That's actually not a bad rating. Although his headers aren't always accurate he seems able to find space by using his strength and jumping higher than anybody else.

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Setting The Teamsheet

If you read last nights post about using 4-1-2-1-2 or 4-1-3-2 you realized that I obviously meant 4-4-2 or an entirely different formation right? Well, frankly it's a bit too soon to talk about specific formations for my Lota Schwager squad. Tomorrow the third position analysis post will be published. This time about central defenders. It would be foolish to decide on a formation without analysing all players in the squad the same way. Which leads me to to the topic of todays post. Selection policy.

The question is really simple. How can I decide on a formation without knowinig all the facts!

I obviously shouldn't, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the first who has made an attempt at that. And FM actually lends itself really well to making somewhat uninformed decisions. Here are a couple of selelction methods I have usded in the past.

Assistant Reports: Using the subjective opinion of my assistant manager to select the squad has been a proven initial selection method in my FM saves. When I say proven I don't necessarily mean proven to be succesfull! The main strength of using the assistant reports is that you can quickly get an overview of who you should select based on the number of stars assigned to each player. The weakness is that this star ranking is based entirely on the assistant managers opinion. This is fine if your assistant manager is good at judging a players ability, if he is not you will find yourself in a very bad place!

Average Rating: Selecting the players in each position with the highest average ratinig ensures you get the player who has performed best throughout the season on the pitch. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but if he is on poor form or has low morale at the time you might not be making the best choice. It also says very little about his capability to play a specific role against a specific opponent, however, this can be said about most of the selection methods I use.

Form: This is a good way to get players who are currently performing well on the pitch. It also ensures some rotation in the squad. It's a selection method I use on a regular basis, or at least factor into my overall selection method.

Elaborate Excel Sheet: On this one I will ALWAYS be guilty as charged. I love Excel, and it's gotten to the stage where I can't play Football Manager without using some kind of Excel sheet concocted by yours truly. The main weakness is the time it takes to create these, but if you love Excel this will just add to the exitement.

Careful Analysis Of Opposing Team And Your Own Team: YAAAAWN! This is exactly as time consuming as it sounds, it is definitely even more time consuming than the Excel spreadsheet. There is a big problem though. This is what you SHOULD do! It's definitely not a method suited for the casual gamer, but it works! A less elaborate method is to take some time to set the opposition instructions properly. That maybe a topic for another post :-)

The point is team selection is actually rather tricky. Everybody will work out their own system. Sometimes it will work, sometimes it won't. I have used 4 of the above 5 systems in the past (no prize for guessing which!) with varying degrees of succes. When I'm done analysing possitions I'll probably create a spreadsheet for the purpose of analysing players, maybe I'll make it available to you.

The First Steps With Lota Schwager

All right, tonight I decided to take a break in analyzing the game and actually play it a bit. The team, as mentioned in a previous post, is Lota Schwager In the Chilean First Division B. Even though I'm playing the game tonight doesn't mean I'll disregard my precious posts. So, first I'll ake a look at what the keepers on my team are up to.

The goalkeeper post suggests there are 4 attributes more important than any others: Reflexes, Jumping, Determination and Agility. The reason these 4 attributes matter more than the others is that at least 30 of more than 100 players had a rating of 16 or more in these attributes. I will determine each keepers base level using those 4 attributes. Of those 4 attributes Reflexes accounts for 34%, Jumping 25%, Determination 24% and Agility 17%. That is something I will take into account.

The first team has 3 keepers:

• Germán Sotelo (11.74)
• Iván Mateluna (10.36)
• Camilo Rodríguez (11.71)

The Reserve team has one keeper:

• Ernesto Bravo (9.86)

Finally the youth team has two keepers on the payroll:

• Mario Julio (8.8)
• Sebatián Piña (8.69)

Taking a closer look at the players keeping the 3 first teamers makes sense. Sotelo has a fair amount of natural skill and will be the natural first choice keeper. However, Rodríguez isn't fair behind and will keep him on his toes. Mateluna is a lot better than Bravo and will serve as a backup for the two main goalkeepers. Bravo on the other hand will be moved on. For the time being I will keep both Julio and Piña. They are nearly at the same level and although Julio is a more determined player it's too early to say.

My staff suggests playing either a 4-1-2-1-2 or a 4-1-3-1 formation so I'll set up tactics with both formations. This advice suggests that width will mainly come from my fullbacks. I'm thinking that I wan't to create tactics that work by starving the opposition of chances. I'll build from the back and destroy the opposition with deadly counter attacks - in theory. I will show Chile a destructive brand of football MUAHAHAHA!!!

Value For Money In The Transfer Market

Moneyball and Soccernomics are two books that have really inspired me lately. And they brinig with them a different approach for the dealing with the transfer market. They point to the fact that dealing in the transfer market is little different from dealing on any other market. The key is to buy cheap and sell for a profit.

The key to buying cheap is to avoid doing what the big clubs are doing. Paying £50 million for a player like Fernando Torres is just plain silly when you can get 3-4 other players of similar quality in other positions.

The point is that buying strikers is generally a bad idea. Having been on the receiving end of such a policy in Lyon Houllier would probably disagree. The fact is though, that strikers are overrated in the transfer market. For the price of Fernando Torres you could easily get 4 goalkeepers of the same quality.

Where strikers are the most overrated players in football, goalkeepers are the most underrated. It seems to me that the old adage that you should build from the back isn't just a wise footballing decision. It is also a wise financial decision. Here are a couple of rules to live by in the transfer market.

• Never buy strikers.
• Try to buy players from less prominent football nations. (that is avoid brazilians, dutchmen etc.)
• Build from the back.
• Never buy a player based on one performance.
• Always sell a player if offered more than he is worth.

Lyon has a philosophy that goes something like this: buy smart and improve your team. A better team improves your results. Better results gives you more money. Which gives you more money to buy smart and further improve your team.

This is a great philosophy. It might not be sexy. It certainly won't allow you to brag to your friends about how you signed Messi. It will on the other hand improve your team and give you a competitive edge in the future.

What Do You Do When You Have Sold All Your Strikers?
This is an obvious question you need to think about if you choose to follow the strategy outlined above. Here are 3 potential answers and a bonus answer.

Youth Development: Cherish the striker you get from your youth setup. Do your utmost to make these players as efficient as you possibly can. I know Football Manager caps their level with the potential ability attribute. I'd like to postulate that you can turn a player with a low potential ability into a lethal strikeforce if you handle him right. I had a save with Hearts where I had a DM with little natural ability who was a frequents starter. Why? He was good at exactly the things I needed him to be good at. The same can be done with strikers.

Freebies And Bosmans: The free transfer market can help you fill in the gaps you have in your team. Take a good look at strikers released by other teams, you might find someone you can use.

Retrain Players: You have no strikers but you have too many central defenders? Maybe one of the surplus central defenders would make a good target man? Other positions are useful as well. AMs could be deep lying forwards, wingers could be poachers etc.

BONUS - Switch Tactic: Roma and Manchester United have at times had succes with 4-6-0 formations, maybe you can do the same? There are always options.

The Sweeper - A Rare Breed

In the analysis of different positions in Football Manager we will now discuss the sweeper. The sweeper is so rare that I didn't feel I could reach a set of 100 players. To ensure that each player has at least some quality I have only included players worth at least £1.000.000. That leaves me with a set of just 24 players using my evaluation save which includes all the biggest European leagues and the Brazilian and Argentinean league. So, I can't really say that the data presented in this post can be considered conclusive in any way. However, there are some strong tendencies it might be worth exploring should you decide to be adventurous enough to employ the good old sweeper.

Here we go.

The technical attributes expected of the sweeper are hardly surprising.

Heading, Marking and Tackling are by far the most important technical attributes for the sweeper. In other words, the sweeper needs sound defensive capabilities to perform his duties.

Mentally the pictured is slightly more varied.

Positioning is clealy the most important attribute for a sweeper followed by Determination. Bravery and Influence also seem to be highly desirable attributes for a sweeper. I suppose this is because the sweeper needs to stand his ground and ensure that his defensive compatriots does so as well.

The data doesn't allow us to make a conclusive guess about which physical attributes are important for the sweeper. In fact, looking at the chart below we might even say that physical attributes aren't important at all as far as the sweeper is concerned. A little bit of Balance probably wouldn't hurt though.

Of the attributes mentioned I would say that only Heading, Positioning and Determination can be considered must haves based on the data available. That's the weakness with analysing positions such as the sweeper. The data simply isn't sufficient, but hopefully you still get a decent starting point out of this.

The One Stat You Want Your Goalkeeper To Have...And A Few Other Nice Ones As Well!

Right, a while back I wrote a blog post about the anatomy of a world class player. Following the link will take you to that article. I have now decided to take that one step further and go through at each position one at a time in the same manner. The goal is to determine exactly what attributes you can't live without in each position. Todays post is about the last line of defense, the goalkeepers.

The methology is simple. I will go through each of the top 100 highest valued players in a specific position manually. Each attribute with a value of 16 or higher will be noted. If the value of the player in the 100th position the remaining players of the same value will be included. In the case of goalkeepers that means 108 players in total will be analysed.

By a huge margin there is one runaway attribute in the Goalkeeping Attributes department.

As you can see Reflexes is by far the single most important goalkeeping attribute. In fact it outranks all other attributes in my research by at least 16 points! The next Goalkeeping attribute I would like my keeper to have is One On Ones, but reflexes is the must have attribute that a good keeper must have.

The result in the mental attributes department took me by surprise. Although I knew the winning attribute was important in all players I had expected another attribute to shine a bit more than it did. Here's the graph.

Determination confirms its position as one of the most important attributes in the game. The second highest attribute, Positioning, was one I had expected to be more important than it apparently is. It's an attribute you would definitely like, but it's apparently not as important as other attributes.

In the physical department I went "Oh yeah. That makes sense."

Agility and Jumping are the physical attributes you want your keeper to have, and that makes a lot of sense. I was kind of surprised to see so many keepers having a high Natural Fitness, but there you go.

So, if you are looking for a new keeper the attributes he must have (in order of importance) are: Reflexes, Jumping, Determination and Agility. Secondary attributes it would be nice for your goalkeeper to have are: One On Ones, Handling, Kicking, Aerial Ability, Positioning and Natural Fitness.