- Soccer has been relatively late to analytics, particularly when compared to baseball. Why do you think that is?
It definitely lagged behind. A bunch of people in the book and a bunch of other people that I spoke to read Moneyball [when it came out] and they were like, “Whoa, you can do this? I could look at soccer this way?” That was a not uncommon response across other sports as well. It definitely lagged behind for structural reasons. It’s really fucking hard to measure soccer. It’s probably impossible to create a “wins above replacement” metric. I think you could maybe create it for your own team—if, that is, you’re committed to playing in a particular style. But that’s useless for the Moneyball idea of finding undervalued players!
That’s one big reason. But there are also all of the cultural reasons. The first baseball and soccer leagues are a little more than a hundred years old at this point. To me, that’s really not that old. The National League was immediately a closed system—a cartel system. They had like eight teams and knew they were getting all the money for themselves. The big question was, How do we make more money? In England, it was always an open system. Anyone could create a team; anyone could go up and down the ladder. The relegation and promotion system, that’s a competitive lever. But it’s more of a symbol. These teams are a community trust. You grow up rooting for them. There might have been a former butcher running the team in the 1920s, whereas the baseball teams were immediately businesses. When you’re a business you’re naturally searching for ways to cut costs and find value. It’s unsurprising that the first closed sports league in the world was the first one to be taken over by data valuations.
In soccer, these teams weren’t created to be these efficient, moneymaking, win-seeking vehicles. That only happened once the Premier League was officially founded in 1992. That’s the biggest reason. The other thing is that soccer’s brain center is in Europe and there’s just less osmosis with ideas than there [was] in American sports. In England, soccer has mainly been a working-class game. The people who run the teams have until recently mostly been guys who barely went to high school because of the academy system. All those things come together to cause this lag.
Source: https://newrepublic.com/article/169757/ryan-ohanlon-soccer-analytics-messi
