I received some criticism and inquiries about this approach. Interestingly, the most severe criticism was posted on the fansonline.com Portsmouth Boards where my blog was linked under the names “deluded” and “in denial” although, to be fair, their displeasure seemed to be more focused on the existence of positive comments about Southampton FC than about the substantive merits of my analysis.
Nevertheless, the question as to whether I was crazy to use information from Football Manager in my analysis of the real world Southampton FC is a valid one. I believe that is appropriate to use FM this way so long as I disclose FM as the source of my information and so long as I am not deluded or in denial about the limits of how the information can be used.
That being said, however, it appears that the applicability of FM data to the real world has been answered definitively by today’s announcement of a partnership between Sports Interactive (SI), the developer of Football Manager, and Prozone, the “pioneer of performance analysis in sport” as they humbly put it. Prozone’s Recruiter software will now incorporate data from FM developed by SI’s worldwide scouting network—apparently the largest football scouting network in the world.
The Times has an article about this announcement (which is behind a paywall): http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/sport/football/premierleague/article4172443.ece
More information is available from Prozone’s website: http://www.prozonesports.com/product/recruiter/
My first reaction, upon reading the Times article, was to wonder if Southampton is one of the premier league teams that is using Recruiter. I certainly hope so. Using Recruiter to spot possible players to focus on in the transfer process seems like a great idea. Surely, one of the biggest limitations in conventional scouting is the inability to be everywhere and see everyone. If the Recruiter data is at all reliable, it addresses that problem. A scouting department can run a search that evaluates every striker in the work under whatever criteria the department wishes to apply. Recruiter then allows the team to look at actual game footage of the player. Depending on how reliable the data is or how reliable a given club thinks the data is, the search can be very precise. The search can find, for example, every striker who is at least as fast as Mayuka and who shoots as least as well as Rickie Lambert. In my FM 2014 save, this turns out to be a pretty elite group of about 20 players. Likewise, one could search for strikers with the pace of Lambert and the shooting skills of Mayuka. This generates a much larger group of players with a much lower average quality.
Of course, Recruiter, unlike FM, also allows the club to look at actual footage of each player. Certainly, the availability of this information can only speed up the process of identifying potential recruits so that the team’s efforts can be focused on evaluating and signing specific targets rather than are simply locating potential targets. In addition, the fact that this information is out there and being used will very likely mean that any team that does not use this information will be at a competitive disadvantage going forward. The correct Moneyball approach, of course, would be to use this information, figure out what is being overlooked and misjudged in the Recruiter database, and take advantage of that opportunity before anyone else notices.
Of course, none of this says that my decision to use FM’s estimates of Southampton players’ salaries was valid. Today’s announcement suggests that FM’s evaluation of player skills has value to real football clubs. It does not prove that FM has accurate inside information on player salaries. Nevertheless, I will continue to use FM information in my blog when it appears appropriate to me. If anything, I will now feel safer using the information than I previously did. At the end of the transfer window I will probably do a blog evaluating our transfer activity using FM’s player rating information. Maybe I will do a similar evaluation of Portsmouth’s transfer activity for my many Portsmouth fans.
Meanwhile, everyone agrees we need at least one Center Defender. Just for fun I loaded up a FM 2014 save that happened to be near the current transfer window and conducted a search for EU citizen (to avoid work permit issues) center backs between the ages of 21 and 29 who had skill ratings of at least 13 (out of 20) in all the major relevant defensives skills. I had the game exclude ones who would not be likely to want to sign for Southampton. These are the players the game listed who had enough potential talent (in my opinion, based upon the game’s ratings) to play for us:
Steven Caulker
Giuseppe Bellusci
Benedikt Howedes
Aleksandar Dragovic
Jannik Vestergaard
Vasco Regini
Jordi Amat
Jeison Murillo
Shkodran Mustaf
That seems like a pretty good list. The presence of Caulker at the top of the list certainly suggests that the results were not complete nonsense. By the way, the search eliminated Marcos Rojo as not being likely to want to sign for us. Florin Gardos was excluded because my game was not using a large enough data base. (For future blogs, I will create a large database, basically unplayable, game to reference.) Virgil van Dijk and Ron Vlaar were eliminated because my scouts did not think they were good enough for us using the standards I asked them to apply. Maybe I was setting my sights too high. Of course, I have no idea whether the players on this list are ones we should or could buy, but surely it wouldn’t hurt if Southampton had access to the SI database and was able to consider them. Les Reed, please feel free to evaluate the players on my list. If you sign one of them, you don’t need to thank me.
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