chiknsmack

They've scored five goals this year - in twelve games - so you'd think they would struggle to beat anyone. That said, their final ten includes matches with all eight teams currently below them on the table. They picked up 16 points in the reverse fixtures. I haven't been a Saints fan for as long as some on here, but I know enough to know that relegation battles and final-day escapes are in the club's blood. And I've seen enough under Selles to be hopeful that this lot can stay up. The fightback and that whole "actually scoring goals from open play" thing they did on the weekend are the clearest signs yet. But as poor as Palace have been recently, they're the last team I could realistically entertain Saints finishing above.

If you're a player for a team which gets relegated either you were playing a lot and are somewhat to blame for the relegation, or you weren't good enough to get into the side and still partly to blame for not being able to push your way into the side and keep the club up. The relegation clause in contracts should be "if we go down it's your fault and your responsibility to get us back up, and you have to take a pay cut too because we make less money in the Championship". That said, having the out of "if the club gets relegated I can leave" is a perk that means we can sign some players we otherwise couldn't. No-one wants to leave a Champions League or Europa League side to play in the Championship, even if the pay is better and it's the sixth-strongest league in the world. If we go down, I'd like to see the club pushing very hard to loan out players like ABK/Sulemana (young and with long contracts) rather than selling. A one-year loan to a premier league side covering 100% (or even 50%) of the wages would mean they could return if we were to bounce straight back up. And if we didn't we'd still have the players under contract and could sell them next summer rather than this, possibly even for more money after they have another year of PL experience.

I think he feels the same.

OldNick was talking about Brighton owner Tony Bloom, who "is an English sports bettor, poker player, entrepreneur, owner and chairman of Premier League football club Brighton & Hove Albion". Not Dragan.

"Chances Created" is binary; it's either a chance or it isn't. "Expected Assists" (xA) are probabilistic; what is the percentage chance that making this pass to an average player results in that player scoring a goal? It's like using xG instead of shots taken/shots on target to predict goalscoring; one is a cut-and-dried observation that doesn't have a clear relationship with whether you'll score goals (shot volume alone doesn't matter that much if they're all shots from 30+ yards, quality matters too) while the other adjusts for the quality of the chance.

- 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

Juanmi was quality, as we've seen at Betis. He just didn't settle in England. Carrillo was an Argentinian signed from France. Our new Spain & Portugal scout will struggle to find one of those (thankfully).

They are player values as per Transfermarkt.com. Here's us at 315m. https://www.transfermarkt.com/fc-southampton/startseite/verein/180

Arsenal have struggled for the last couple of years with a squad of mostly youngsters. Now they're seeing the rewards for their faith and patience and could even challenge for the league this season. Southampton have struggled for the last couple of months with a squad of mostly youngsters. Now they're a couple of years away from seeing the rewards for their faith and patience and could even challenge for the league in two or three seasons.