SaintlyAnd

Maybe we’re all wrong and FM is reality and what we have to endure at St Marys is some bug-ridden shit simulation. It would explain quite a bit.

I merely implied the real transfer process is somewhat more complex than FM. I was not being dismissive of it. I have played it and loved it in many of its forms over years. It’s a game. I mean I won the Premier League as Southampton - it’s clearly not real. But seriously I know the people working at SI building out their software to sell their data to clubs, so I have no intention of disrespecting them and their work.

Given the uncertainty over many players who may leave, there is mountains to do within the club. Continue identifying targets, analysis and research into them, find out which players might be interested in joining, speak with agents to see if it financially fits, enquire to clubs to see if they may sell, convince players to wait for us. Internally they will be doing shit loads right now. We probably have the highest risk in the league for number of departures, so I’d suggest our recruitment folk are under a ton of pressure (remember they also do 3x the work to bring in players for the other SR teams). Replacing players isn’t like in FM, its a big process and overhead. And we all know most transfers hit in the last week/days of the window. We’re going to struggle to replace 5, 6, 7 players in the last few days and get anyone decent. Or we could just panic like Ras did with Onuachu, Sulemana, the Croatian lad and someone else if I remember right. None of them were scouted and Ras pissed off a lot of people within the club by going off by himself and its had a long impact on the club.

From a quick look on youtube, he seems to have pace, some tricks and absolutely no left foot.

Can we bring in another loan (Sylla)? I thought the rule was we can only register two at a time and we already have Les and Albert.

Really hope SR are on the phone to Ivan Juric now he’s left Roma. His style would be very different and fun.

The way we’re lining up is horrific. With BBD and Arma so wide, the wingbacks are basically blocked from progressing forward and just become full-backs. And we have nothing attacking centrally which is where most goals are created and (obviously) scored, and the centre midfield gets dominated. I can’t work out what we’re trying to achieve with this team structure. If we want 5 at the back, play 3 midfielders plus two attackers centrally (one can drop deeper). Let the wingbacks attack. That approach gives far better pitch control both offensively and in defence. I guess it’s out of fear against better teams than last season which is sad. I’d hoped Martin would approach the EPL with some belief and we’d play our way and have the confidence to play like we know we can win. But honestly it’s like they line the team up thinking all other teams are better and we go into games to try to stop them.

A 'tagger' watches a game and inputs every event that occurs in real-time. Wyscout have a list of event types, like: Pass, Duel, Clearance, Ball Touch, Shot etc, and those events get attributes like the player, the position on the pitch and whether it was free-kick, throw-in, corner, cross etc, so all that needs to be 'tagged'. Each event provider like Opta, Statsbomb, Wyscout have their own definitions and classifications. Taggers are trained but generally low paid, and they have to identify every player immediately and get through games pausing them constantly. It's very prone to human error, and if they're using a video from a tv broadcast then there are gaps in their data (eg. when the camera focuses on a single player or manager or a replay while the game continues). For top leagues where people want fast data, you'll have multiple taggers working a game for different players. The xG value is calculated based on the information available at the time of the shot event, which can include data from the previous event/s. Their input into the xG calculation is, as you say, really subjective. But I assume it's an attempt to quantify what a human can see and understand, and isn't in the tagged data. If we take the Haaland 'shot' the other night where he flicked the ball with his foot at head height from behind him and it loop over, and if we pause the game at the moment the ball touches his foot (when the 'shot' event happens and xG is calculated from). The data tells us: 1. the position was central and about 10 yards out (this is where lots of goals come from), 2. the shot was with his foot (more goals come from shots than headers, so gets a good score), 3. the assist was from a cross, 4. it was in open play. All that makes it sound like a great chance, so would get a good xG value. But it doesn't factor in: the ball was behind him, the height of the ball, he was side-on or facing back to the goal, how fast the ball was coming to him, was it deflected before it got to him, has he seen the ball coming clearly, how many opponents are there between him and goal, is the goalkeeper set to try to save it (or is he laying down after just having made a save), how much pressure he's under from defenders, etc. I'm sure we can all think of more details that go into how good we perceive a chance to be. I think most of us would think that Haaland chance is very unlikely to go in, and therefore the xG should be really low. So, like I say, I guess that human input into the xG calculation is to factor in everything else the data can't (which is a lot of things). Just having looked at the xG score from wyscout for that chance - it has calculated 18% of the time that should end in a goal. My assessment would be about 1 or 2%. Not that I'm defending it as useful. Just trying to point out the limitations and, like I said above, I don't think it's meaningful in the context of individual chances or games. Out of interest, I just looked at Adam Armstrong's xG for this season in the PL. From one source, I found an xG of 1.1 goals and another 2.1. I think that highlights how it being used in isolation is meaningless and inconsistent calculations are. Whereas if I search for strikers across European leagues, aged less than 27, who have scored over 5 goals so far this season (using a single data provider), and get their xG alongside stats like shots per 90 minutes, % shots on target, number shots blocked (and more stats), then I can start to compare players and see who may be over or under-performing. And from there, start looking at videos and real games to prove or disprove the suggestions from the data, which is probably a very simplified version of what Southampton do with the data-driven recruitment approach. (Apologies for the long reply)

When I started working as a professional football data nerd (not my real job title but for the sake of the thread it sums it up) the enjoyment of watching a game disappeared because I kept seeing everything in a game from an analytics perspective. I think I stopped watching football for about 6 months. Now I manage to switch off the job when I just want to watch what is just a game and enjoy it. I think as a fan the stats can take away the enjoyment of supporting a team, having opinions about who played well etc. I got quite grumpy in the World Cup when some random metrics were flashed up in game because I felt there was no need, no context, told me nothing anyone watching the game couldn’t see and reminded me of work.

Post-Shot xG and xG are different. Post-shot has additional information from after the shot about how likely it was to have been a goal. Given a shot went wide, we know it cannot be a goal, so value is 0. In my opinion post-shot xG is a very weird metric. After the shot we know whether it’s a goal or not so it should be black or white, 0 or 1, so pointless. The penalty value is based on the wyscout model for calculating xG. I assume over historic data there’s a 76% chance of scoring a penalty. Other people calculating xG would use different models and get different values. And no models for calculating it are very good because of so many variables that aren’t in the data. Personally I don’t like using xG in individual games and used in the media or broadcasters to try to tell something insightful about a game. The limitations just can’t add anything more than (or even close to) someone watching the game. The value from my experience is for clubs in player/match analysis over a series of games and in player recruitment to start identifying players over at least a season. But it’s a tool to help as part of wider processes. Clubs use data alongside video a lot and use tools like wyscout, instat, match tracker and various others to align data/video analysis.

https://www.footy-scout.co.uk/post/joe-aribo - some video and analysis about Aribo

Bahebeck from PSG.

Couldn't see this mentioned anywhere... we've agreed a deal with Feyenoord for Clasie - £10 mill. Source is a friend who has a contact in the club.

As someone mentioned above, his time at Valencia seems to be the one role he wasn't very successful in, but seeing this article from the guardian gives me a bit more confidence that the problems weren't down to him: "a club that's never at peace; the Dutchman walked into a viper's nest, where sporting directors and coaches are at each other's throats like a bunch of deranged emus; where, with honourable exceptions, fans are never satisfied; where president and shareholders are always at war, creating tension and instability" http://www.theguardian.com/football/2008/apr/21/europeanfootball.sport I think, even with some players reportedly wanting out, we're in no way close to that kind of environment. And I'm beginning to feel far more optimistic about him coming than I was initially.

Does anyone know much about Koeman's teams style of play? From what I've seen Feyenoord played a similar formation to us but played very directly to Pelle up front rather than an entertaining passing game. I hope we're going to continue with the high pressure, passing game but not sure Koeman brings this and I think I'm a bit more pessimistic about him than most others (I hope I'm wrong). If he does come then I want him to bring Boetius from Feyenoord as he's going to be a top player.