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Honestly I tried but what do you do when your faced with a paragraph like below
Keep going, the pay off is rather worth it. Basically, it asks the question, what how can we measure the early part of an attacking move? The shot is the end of the move, and an assist in only one step back from that. But how can you measure the guys who start the possession chain or keep it going?Honestly I tried but what do you do when your faced with a paragraph like below
"I intend in this article to squeeze one last drop of juice from the desiccated lemon that is expected goals. xG has always served strikers well. xA takes a step back and helps credit creative players that make key passes. But what of the humble pre-assist? And indeed the pre-pre-pre-assist? Do they not"
I like it. The more aspects of the game that can be measured by stats the better.
I don't care about how we understand the game, I'm thinking about scouting departments at European clubs. Look at baseball. In the old days, the richest teams dominated, there was no contest. The Yankees picked up 41 American League titles in just 80 years. Then stats came along, and all of a sudden smaller teams became capable of competing. The Seattle Mariners, the USA equivalent of West Brom, set the record for most wins in a season. The Oakland A's, the USA equivalent of Everton, set the record for most wins in a row. The Yankees, meanwhile, have not won the AL in 8 years, the second-longest drought in their entire history. This is thanks to stats allowing poorer teams to identify future stars and gamble on their future success.
Baseball isn't comparable to Football as the sports are so different. Baseball is much like cricket, an individual team sport based around specific moments to score point, runs etc which come routinely at each ball of the over, or pitch at bat.
Lol, exactly. We love numbers, numbers love us. All our sports are based on them, we have spent 150 years quantifying every aspect of our sports. Try to watch a baseball or basketball game sometime, the commentators will bust out some wacky stat like "He is batting .321 against left-handed pitchers against American League teams on weekdays, this means that the manager needs to make a pitching change"
Baseball isn't comparable to Football as the sports are so different. Baseball is much like cricket, an individual team sport based around specific moments to score point, runs etc which come routinely at each ball of the over, or pitch at bat.
Football is a far more nuanced, intuitive game where much of the genius cannot be quantified statistically.
An example that comes to my head is something like this...
The cross is counted as an assist despite being a poor one, the goal is completely due to the genius and bravery of Zidane. First to think of that volley, secondly to have the bollocks to attempt with his weaker foot, thirdly the importance of the game (CL Final), then the technical execution.
Those things can't be quantified in statistics.
Stats have their place, no doubt about that, but they will always be secondary to actually watching and assessing.
Football is played on grass, not paper.
I used to watch Baseball quite a bit when it was on late at night over here on a freebie channel 5. Some of the stuff brought up is like alphabetic binary. RAW, OBP, RBI, ERA...everything has one. Takes quite a while to get your head round it all.
Dumb cunts who are in their late 30s, single and never leave their basement
footie should be a mix of the qualitative as well as the quantitative. Would you award an assist to T Carroll for the pass to Bale for the last minute winner at Upton Park? I wouldn't. Or I'd give it 2/3 out of 10. Seems daft to equate with the Lamela assist for Eriksens winner at Citeh last season. I'd give that 8 out of 10. He won the ball, got the return, made a 30 yard run and slipped it to CE in a scoring position.Baseball isn't comparable to Football as the sports are so different. Baseball is much like cricket, an individual team sport based around specific moments to score point, runs etc which come routinely at each ball of the over, or pitch at bat.
Football is a far more nuanced, intuitive game where much of the genius cannot be quantified statistically.
An example that comes to my head is something like this...
The cross is counted as an assist despite being a poor one, the goal is completely due to the genius and bravery of Zidane. First to think of that volley, secondly to have the bollocks to attempt with his weaker foot, thirdly the importance of the game (CL Final), then the technical execution.
Those things can't be quantified in statistics.
Stats have their place, no doubt about that, but they will always be secondary to actually watching and assessing.
Football is played on grass, not paper.
Tottenham Hotspur are the "largest" English owned football club in the World!
And what you describe is almost exactly what the Expected Assist (or "xA") stat that the Statsbomb website uses is trying to achieve. It's looking not at how many actual assists a player makes, because as you point out, not all assists are equal. And of course, many great passes end up not resulting in goals when a striker makes a poor shot or a keeper makes a great save - but those great passes get completely ignored by the conventional assist stat.
And this is based on 2015-16 accounts, so it's before the new domestic and chinese tv deals (should add about an extra 100 million for each team iirc).
