Very interesting post about a book that is Moneyball for football (soccer). It touches on concepts like regression to the mean, cognitive biases and that. The book’s first chapter can be downloaded for free for kindle, and it seems full of counter-intuitive goodness like:
-corners don’t lead to goals.
-defending a 2-0 lead is as easy as any other leasing score
-chance accounts for 50% of the final score.
-managers account for only 15% of a teams success
This fall for the first time in five years I don’t have a team to coach. Long story. So I thought I should use the time to write, with busy coaches in mind. Write stuff I’d like to read if I were a busy coach. I don’t expect many hits but it will keep me out of the 540 Club for a while.
The topic of the next few posts will be great ideas from the new soccer book The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Soccer Is Wrongby Chris Anderson and David Sally. Originally published in England, it has been available here in the US since August and every coach, fan and literate player should go out right now and read it. But if you can’t . . . I’m blogging.
The Numbers Game is commonly referred to as a sort of Moneyball or Freakonomics of…
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I’ve put up a new post re The Numbers Game, this one about the undervaluing of non-occurence of negative events in defense. Cheers.
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