My Scouting Report

Since Southampton needs a speedy right side attacking player and a defender who can play both in the center and on the right, I decided to see whether I could develop a plausible list of targets using Football Manager (FM) 2014 and the internet.

Right Attacking Midfielder

I created a large data base game for FM 2014 which included all nations.  I chose to play as Manchester United because they had a lot of scouts.   I spent a couple of weeks scouting players and then ran a search.

I screened for players 27 or younger, with good pace, who played right attacking midfielder and had an EU passport.

Then I eliminated any player who was playing for a clearly bigger club, unless the club was one that tended to sell players like Sporting or Athletico Madrid.  I also screened out players who had changed clubs or signed a new long term contract this. (This eliminated five plausible candidates.)

Next, I used the  FM Editor to arrange the players in order of their current ability (CA) with potential ability (PA) as the tie breaker. I chose this order because we need someone to play now more than we need someone for the future.  Also, I think PA is less reliable than CA.  Here is the list:

Player                                      CA                                           PA

Alessio Cerci                           151                                          160
Andros Townsend                   143                                          155
Patrick Herrman                      142                                          157
Alexandre Lacazette                140                                          -9
Luciano Narsingh                    137                                          157
Emilio Nsue                             137                                          150
Maximilian Beister                  136                                          148
Henri Saivet                             135                                          150
Callum McManaman               134                                          160
Nathan Redmond                     131                                          160
Lass Bangoura                         130                                          150
Ryan Mendes da Graca            127                                          150
Alvaro Vadillo                         126                                          -8

The negative numbers are for players whose PA is undefined.  -9 is better than -8.   -10 is the best possible score and is very rare.  Just for comparison, our best 11 last year had an average CA of 143.

This shows just hard difficult it is to improve upon last year’s team.  The players who are good enough to do so are generally ones whom we either could not afford or could not sign.  I should mention, however, that according to FM, the players on this list are all ones to whom we could afford to offer a significantly improved salary.

Nevertheless, this does not look like a bad list.  In fact, it might almost be the actual list Southampton is using (especially if they are using Prozone’s Recruiter) since the top two names on this list appear to be the team’s top two targets.

If I were playing FM and I had this information (which I wouldn’t because I don’t use the editor when I play the game) I would probably go after Lacazette first because of his high PA.  Cerci would be my second choice and I would take McManaman or Redmond over Townsend because of their higher PA and lower price.  I would pass on the two players with CAs in the 120s and anyone whose PA is 150 or less.

Defender

Using the same game, I searched for players from 20 to 28 who were at least partially capable of playing both right back and center back.  I did not limit myself to EU players, but that did not matter because no non-EU players ended up making the cut.  (This might be because such players were not on Manchester United’s scouting horizon in the game.)  I also screened for a minimum of 12 (out of 20) skill on the three basic defensive skills.  Again, I eliminated recent signings, which removed three good prospects from the list, including Stefan de Vrij, and players for bigger teams.  I ruled out Benedikt Howedes because I just do not see us convincing a German on a high salary to join us from Schalke.

Player                                      CA                                           PA

Gary Medel                               148                                          155
Micah Richards                         147                                          161
Robert Huth                              145                                          152
Toby Alderweireld                   140                                          155
Mikael Lustig                           140                                          143
Serge Aurier                             138                                          160
Sergio Sanchez                         138                                          150
Santiago Vergini                      137                                          154

Once again, the shortness of the list demonstrates just how difficult it is to find players who are good enough for us, but not too good.

I left Micah Richards on the list because he is in the last year of his contract and, supposedly, is available. According to FM, he currently makes 60K a week.  We could probably afford that, but I am not sure we should—well, actually, if he really is a 147 who will improve to a 161 we should grab him immediately but, obviously, the real world is not Football Manager.

Nevertheless, overall this list appears to be a viable list of prospects.  The one alleged target whose name has been leaked is on the list.  The problem is that everyone on the list would expect to start regularly.  With a normal number of injuries, that would probably happen, but our current back line of Bertrand, Gardos/Yoshida, Fonte, and Clyne would have to give up some starts to keep any newcomer happy.

I am off on a week’s vacation (or holiday, if you prefer).  I should be able to watch the West Ham game on my ipad.  Enjoy your Labor Day weekend.

Milestone 10,003

In my view the three biggest problems facing the human race are, in order, climate change, the misuse and overuse of antibiotics, and income and wealth inequality.  While all three could directly affect Southampton FC, only the third is likely to be an imminent problem—although it still might be wise to build any new stadium on higher ground and keep the locker room clean.

The above paragraph has nothing to do with the rest of this blog entry, but I wrote it and wanted to use it.  Instead, this blog entry is my look back at my blog after hitting 10,000 page views.

When I wrote my first milestone blog after 1000 page views, I wondered if I would be writing the next one within a couple of days. As it turned out, it has been 21 days.  The speed at which I hit both milestones was entirely dependent on a 36 hour period during which I got about 6500 pages views including 612, 5644, and 628 on August 3, 4, and 5, respectively.  The large number of hits on those days was triggered by my controversial explanation for the high number of player sales during this transfer window and the fact that my blog was linked in several blogs and forums and tweeted at least twice by Southampton fans with a combined several thousand followers.  I also received about 1000 hits directly from the Portsmouth Fansonline forum where they mocked me.

Since then I have only topped 300 pages views in a day twice.  The first occurred on the day I posted my first concussion piece, but there was undoubtedly still a lot of salary cap interest.  The second occurred when I posted my transcript of the Rickie Lambert interview.

I do not expect to write anything so generally interesting again so I probably will not get 5000 hits in a day again—unless, of course, some really famous person tweets a link to this blog.

I find it interesting where my pages views are coming from.  Not surprisingly, the vast majority of my page views come from the UK.  The top ten list

Entry	Pageviews
United Kingdom	7457
United States	892
Australia	220
France	131
Spain	110
Sweden	103
Canada	78
Malaysia	73
Germany	35
Singapore	30

I was surprised by how few people in the UK use the Internet Explorer as their web browser. If my page views had been coming primarily from the United States I suspect the vast majority of the Windows hits would have been from Explorer.  That is not what has happened:

Pageviews by Browsers

Entry Pageviews Safari 3805 (38%) Chrome 2798 (28%) Internet Explorer 1067 (10%) Firefox 963 (9%) Mobile Safari 545 (5%) Mobile 459 (4%) OS;FBSV 143 (1%) CriOS 89 (<1%) GSA 42 (<1%) Silk 23 (<1%)

 Pageviews by Operating Systems

Entry Pageviews Windows 3358 (33%) iPhone 2394 (24%) Android 1622 (16%) iPad 1552 (15%) Macintosh 831 (8%) Linux 69 (<1%) Other Unix 63 (<1%) iPod 28 (<1%) BB10 19 (<1%) iPod touch 19 (<1%)

In any case, I am glad some people are enjoying my blog and/or reading it regularly.  Hopefully, they/you will continue to do so.  I cannot predict how much blogging I will be doing in the future.  I am undoubtedly spending too much time on it and I need to get more paying work done.  But I am enjoying it so much that my computer game playing time has been greatly reduced.  At this rate I will hardly have any time to play Football Manager 2015 when it comes out in a couple of months—although I will undoubtedly use the new information in my blog.  On the other hand, I am sure I will devote hundreds of hours to Sid Meier’s Civilization®:Beyond Earth™ when it comes out in late October.

How I Became a Southampton FC Fan

I first became a Southampton FC fan some time in 2010.  This is how it happened.

When I grew up in the 1960s in Palo Alto, California, I played soccer occasionally, but there was no formal league or coaching.  I did not pay much attention to soccer for many years thereafter.  I attended the 1994 round of 16 World Cup soccer game between Brazil and the United States.  It was an enjoyable experience, but I have no clear memories of anything other than being there.

For reasons I cannot explain, I became very interested in the 2002 World Cup.  Even though I did not have a DVR at the time and, therefore, had to watch the games live, I stayed up until ridiculously late hours of the night or, more accurately, early hours of the morning and watched 54 and a half games.  Given that the third round group games are played simultaneously, it was mathematically impossible for me to watch more than 56 games so that was a pretty good record.  Obviously, I enjoyed the experience but, again, paid little attention to soccer until the 2006 World Cup where, this time with the assistance of a DVR, I watched 49 games.

I was so eager for the 2010 World Cup that in mid-May, on a whim, I decided to buy Football Manager 2010 from Steam.  Not knowing much about football (and yes, this is when I started referring to soccer as football) I created my first career save using the United States, Brazil, and England.  They seemed like the logical three nations to choose at the time.  I started playing as the manager of the San Jose Earthquakes and immediately discovered that Major League Soccer was incomprehensible.  You could not hire scouts.  There were things called designated players who were apparently both expensive and, hopefully, very good, but because there were no scouts, you would have no clear idea how good a player was before you signed him.  There was some kind of a player draft, but again, no ability to scout the players in advance.  Finally, there was something called allocation money which simply made no sense to me.  I gave up and started over.

I had saved the initial starting state before I picked a team to coach so I reloaded it and decided to play an English team.  I vaguely understood the concept of promotion and relegation and knew that it would be too complicated to run a premier league team so I decided that I would start two levels down in league 1.  I wanted a financially healthy team with a strong youth development system. Obviously, that meant that I picked Southampton.

What I didn’t know is that by using the game that I had created to play the Earthquakes, I was starting in January of 2009.  This meant that I was in charge of a team with no schedule.  While this might seem like a drawback, it was actually a handy way to learn the game.  After a few weeks without any games, I started scheduling my own friendlies.  I played a serious of friendly games against miscellaneous teams stretching from late January into May when, suddenly, all my players went on vacation.

One would think that somewhere along the line I would have done some research, figured out what I was doing wrong, and started over, but I didn’t.  Instead, I patiently worked my way through the transfer window, my players came back from vacation, and I started the regular season.  I won my first game and checked the standings and was stunned to discover that I had negative seven points.  This was, obviously, very confusing.

Inexplicably, I did not go to the Internet to figure out what was going on but continued playing.  (I’ll spare you the crackpot theories I came up with to explain the negative 10 points.) I did pretty well that first season, missing the playoffs by only a single point.  In subsequent seasons I worked the team up to the premier league and, eventually, Southampton became the best team in the world winning the BPL and the Champions League six seasons in a row. (If you think my ability to do this without knowing much of anything about football, suggests that, perhaps, the game was too easy, you are probably correct.)

One of the advantages of playing Southampton in Football Manager 2010 is that Markus Liebherr was happy to hand me unlimited amounts of money whenever the cash ran short.  As best I can estimate, by the time I was winning all the championships, he was gifting the team about a quarter of a billion dollars per year.  Even though I didn’t know anything about the real Markus Liebherr, I was shocked to hear of his death.  It bothered me enough that when Football Manager 2011 came out I couldn’t play Southampton and, instead, I played Middlesbrough which I also advanced to the premier league and multiple consecutive Champions League titles.

In subsequent editions of Football Manager I went back to playing Southampton with varying degrees of success, but I usually won the Champions League multiple times.  Only once did Nicola Cortese fire me.

Meanwhile, I started watching English football regularly in August 2010.  I tried to follow Southampton, but it is basically impossible to follow a League One team very closely from the United States. Had I discovered the League One Minus Ten blog  at that point it would have been helpful, but I only found it halfway through the 2011-2012 season.  Instead, I temporarily became a Tottenham fan because I had two friends who followed them.  By the time the 2010-2011 season was ended, I was routinely watching 4-8 BPL games per week while checking Southampton scores as they occurred.

Once we were promoted to the championship, it was a little easier to follow the team because the Fox Soccer mobile app usually had one or two championship games available every week and, because we were doing so well, a Southampton game was often one of those games.  As a result, I was able to watch about eight or nine Southampton games that year.

Once Southampton got promoted to the premier league, I was able to follow the team quite easily.  I watched 37 of the 38 league games our first season.  The only game I missed was the nil-nil away draw at Norwich which I had DVRed, but I accidentally heard the score of and decided that I could skip it. Last season I watched all 38 BPL games.  I have also watched  three FA cup games, but have never seen a league cup game.  I vaguely considered starting a blog about the team in August 2012, but did not do so because I wasn’t sure whether I had anything interesting to say about the team.  Also, I was busy.  I started this blog when I did because I believed that I could provide useful information about the potential effects of the financial fair play regulations on Southampton and because of my Moneyball approach to sports.

Why this sequence of events should have led me to becoming a fanatical fan of a new team in my 50s is hard to explain.  I have always been a fanatical fan of the San Francisco Giants Baseball team, the Stanford Cardinal college football team, and the San Francisco 49ers football team.  I was also very much a fan of the California Golden Seals ice hockey team in the early 1970s, but that team no longer exists.  However, my interest in all those sports has greatly decreased.

With respect to the Giants, I miss Barry Bonds.  Despite the fact that we apparently now know Bonds was using performance enhancing substances, his five peak years from 2000 through 2004 were quite simply amazing to watch.  When that streak ended, the scandal and the lowered level of excitement made baseball less interesting to me.  Of course, this was very bad timing since the Giants have won the World Series twice since then—of course, I watched them do it, but without the intimate familiarity with the team I had had for my entire life.

My interest in the San Francisco 49ers has not dropped quite that much.  I still watch every TV game in my area which is every game when they are playing well and most games when they are not.  However, my growing awareness of the severe level of brain damage American football is inflicting on its players made it harder for me to enjoy. Certainly, I could no longer be enthusiastic over hard hits.  It also did not help that after nearly 20 years of being pretty much the best team around, the 49ers became not very good for over a decade and only recently, became one of the best teams again.

In other words, I was a big sports fan who had, for various reasons, lost significant interest in my prior sports obsessions.  As a result, I had an opening for a new obsession and purely by the happenstance the team I picked was Southampton.  This may not be as good a reason as growing up near The Dells, but it works for me.

 

 

Color Me Confused (and Rambling)

The reaction to Saturday’s draw has left me somewhat confused.  On the various forums devoted to Southampton FC, many alleged fans of the team have already decided the season is a disaster and Pelle is the worst thing since unsliced bread.  This seems to miss the point of being a fan. 

Although I have only been a fan since 2010, I want Southampton FC to play well, win games, and provide entertainment.  Now that I am writing a blog about the team, I also want the club to generate interesting subjects for discussion.  Generally, this means that I support the team.  This does not mean mindless—the team is always right—total support, but it does mean approaching events with an optimistic attitude.  When I analyze some aspect of Southampton FC, I will let the chips fall where they may.  I will not slant my analysis to favor the club or begin the analysis already knowing my result.  But no matter what I conclude, I will always hope that things will go well, that the team will win games, and that the team will improve.

Of course, sitting at my computer in San Luis Obispo, California, there is not much I can do that is directly helpful and supportive.  The situation is different for fans living in Southampton.  This brings me to my primary question:  What useful purpose is served by making a scapegoat out of Pelle or any other Southampton player?  Does anyone really think that if the fans harass and mock him, he will play better?  Given this past summer where we were all disappointed by the level of loyalty shown by some of our player wouldn’t it be a good idea to try to start things out on the right foot with the newer players by making them feel welcome and wanted?

Think back to this moment: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfZlkEtaAjA and http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/sport/10964487.Guly_penalty_proves_team_spirit_is_strong___Perez/ ) Does that not suggest that suggest that, despite the extreme hostility towards Guly demonstrated by many fans, Guly was popular with his teammates?  Maybe they would have felt more loyalty to our team if their friend and fellow player had been better treated by the fans?

The same is true of the treatment of Katharina Liebherr.  After the first few player sales had occurred, it was certainly theoretically possible that she was asset stripping the club.  Yet, the board members all said that was not what was happening and, however, this season turns out, they were telling the truth.  Yet, appalling comments about her gender and appearance were not uncommon on the various forums.  I have seen few, if any, apologies either for the personal attacks or the misguided accusations.

I assume that someone at the club keeps up with what is said about the club online—if nothing else, it might help them figure out if anyone is leaking information they shouldn’t.  Does anyone really think that our team’s owner will do more for the club if she hears that many fans have gratuitously insulted her and accused her and her handpicked board members of being incompetent, evil liars?  Hopefully, the insults will not affect her at all, but what is the point of making them?  And don’t tell me it is just a way of blowing off steam with some harmless banter.

Some people have claimed that last year’s team would have won Saturday’s game by 3 or 4 goals.  Given that we only won three league games last year by three goals, this seems unlikely.  If anything, the first two games have raised a strong sense of déjà vu.  In Liverpool, we outplayed the other side for much of the game, but missed our chances and dropped points.  Against West Brom, we dominated possession but failed to turn that possession into goals and dropped points.  Those results are entirely typical of last year.  By my count, there were twelve games last year we should have drawn or won but instead lost or drew—dropping 24 total points.  Of course, all team drop points, but I don’t see the performances this year as being out of line with the performances from last year.  This might change if we lose our next two games, but even if that happens it hardly means we are doomed to relegation.

There are legitimate questions to be asked about the current team and management and I am sure we would all like a chance to ask them and get some answers.  But that probably won’t happen. In time, many of the answers will become clear, but in the meanwhile there is simply nothing to be gained by holding a negative attitude.  On paper our team is one of the ten best teams in the league.  Financially, our team is one of the six or seven strongest in the league.  Our manager has a good track record—I certainly would not trade him for the managers of most other BPL teams.  The dream we all had—that last year’s team would progress and reach the Champions League—is gone, but it was probably not a realistic dream in the first place.  (http://redsloscf.blogspot.com/2014/08/how-close-were-we.html )  Instead, we should enjoy what we have now, which is a lot more than what Southampton FC fans had five years ago, and more than most fans now have in their local clubs.  If nothing else you can look at the situation of your beloved neighbors to see how much worse things could be.

Concussion Update

The new Barclay’s Premier League Handbook is out.  It contains the official new rules governing head injuries:

O.22. Each Team Doctor, physiotherapist, therapist and Medical Coordinator shall, when present at a League Match or at any other match or at training, carry the pocket concussion tool (which is set out at Appendix 4A).

O.23. Any Player, whether engaged in a League Match, any other match or in training, who has sustained a head injury, shall not be allowed to resume playing or training (as the case may be) unless he has been examined and declared fit to do so by his Team Doctor or, if he is unavailable, by another medical practitioner. The decision of the Team Doctor or other medical practitioner as to whether the Player is fit to resume playing or training shall be final.

As I noted in an earlier post (http://redsloscf.blogspot.com/2014/08/saturday-august-16-1014-match-thoughts.html ), Phil Jagielka left the field with a head injury during the August 16 game between Everton and Leicester.  Yet, he returned to play moments later.  There was obviously not enough time for the team doctor to have conducted the supposedly mandatory examination needed to declare Jagielka fit to play.  The Pocket Concussion Tool mention in Rule O.22 lists as one of the visible clues of a suspected concussion being “slow to get up” which Jagielka clearly was.  I see no way to reconcile the new rules with what happened with Jagielka other than to assume the new rules are intended to make the league look responsible, but not to actually change anything, except maybe in the very worst and most obvious cases.  Given the liability for head injuries the NFL has already accepted, the BPL might be wise to adopt more stringent policies.

The information in the Pocket Concussion Tool is fairly basic, but seems to be consistent with the other information on concussions I can find on the internet.  However, there is a fundamental problem.  The information about concussions in sports put out by the American Center for Disease Control (CDC) suggests that the standards put out by the BPL are not rigorous enough.  (http://www.cdc.gov/concussion/headsup/pdf/Heads_Up_Concussion_in_Sports_Script-a.pdf )

As possible causes of a concussion the CDC lists

• A knock to the head from a fall…

• A jolt to the torso from a collision…

• A hit to the head from a stick or ball…  

Very likely, football would become unplayable if every hit to the head from a ball or jolt to the torso from a collision was treated as a possible concussion.  Of course, this is not what the CDC advocates but they do warn that

• Most concussions occur without loss of consciousness.

• Athletes who have, at any point in their lives, had a concussion have an increased risk for another concussion.

• Young children and teens are more likely to get a concussion and take longer to recover than adults.

And

Don’t be fooled! Even what may seem like a mild bump to the head can actually be serious.

And

So to help recognize a concussion, you should watch for and ask others to report the following two things among your athletes:

1 A forceful bump, blow, or jolt to the head or body that results in rapid movement of the head.

—and—

2 Any concussion signs or symptoms, such as a change in the athlete’s behavior, thinking, or physical functioning.

How, these medically appropriate processes can be implemented in the middle of a BPL game is less than clear.  Should a player be expected to tell his coach or team doctor, “Fred may have a concussion.  He collided with Joe five minutes ago and just now didn’t mark his man like he normally does.  Isn’t that a change in his behavior?”

I do not have an answer to this, but I do think it is clear that when player leaves the field after a head injury, he should not be medically cleared to return in under a minute.  I believe that anyone who suffers a head injury serious enough to require treatment should not be allowed to return to that game at all (unless this will result in teams failing to treat head injuries in order to avoid the mandatory substitution).

After the Hugo Lloris injury last November, Roberto Martinez suggested that a rule change was in order.  (http://www.theguardian.com/football/2013/nov/07/roberto-martinez-andre-villas-boas-concussion-row ) He thought that an additional substitution should be allowed for head injuries if the regular three substitutions have already been used.  This would take some of the pressure off the decision to remove a player with a head injury, but I am sure there are football purists who would oppose any change to the traditional three substitute rule.  Also, the rule might be gamed by someone pretending to have a head injury in order to make another substitution available.  (Head injuries might become very common in the 30 minute extra time period of important games.  “If he has a head injury why is he clutching his leg?” “That shows how bad the head injury must be. He is so confused he is grabbing the wrong part of his body.”)

Speaking of which, Hugo Lloris now admits he was wrong to come back on after his head injury last November.  (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2732803/Hugo-Lloris-admits-WRONG-play-head-injury-Tottenham-keeper-welcomes-new-rules-concussion.html ) Obviously, he was wrong, but he had just suffered a concussion.  He was not thinking clearly.  He doesn’t need to apologize.  The people who let him back on the field—such as Andres Villas-Boas—are the ones who should be apologizing.  But AVB is long gone from Tottenham and, given what he has already said, no apology is likely.  (http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/news/defiant-andre-villas-boas-stands-call-2682293 and http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2497972/Andre-Villas-Boas-snaps-Lloris-withdraws-Spurs-squad-concussion-fears.html )

I will end with one last quote from the CDC:

“Toughing it Out” isn’t Strong— It’s Dangerous

Sometimes people believe that it shows strength and courage to play when you’re injured. Not only is that belief wrong, it can put a young athlete at risk for serious injury.

Don’t let others—fans, parents, or teammates— pressure you or the injured athlete to continue playing. As you’ve probably experienced, some athletes may try telling you that s/he is “just fine” or that s/he can “tough it out.”

Tell them that taking a time out is not a sign of weakness, and that playing with a concussion is dangerous. Don’t shy away from sharing this information with parents and other team supporters, either.