Eye Test vs Stats Debate

Hammondo

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No idea if anyone else posted this, this is a great video.

 
stats people are wankers and have ruined football.
 
I’ve been saying this for ages.
I think stats / data analysis clearly has a role and function especially when it comes to narrowing down the list of 100000s of players world wide to maybe a dozen or so then you use the eye test eg video and actual scouting.

In regards to actual match analysis it was so annoying when United were clearly the worse team, didn’t play well but some guy would reply with “but the xG was higher than the opposition team so don’t blame ole”

The best way to show that stats can sometimes deceive is lukaku. His stats for the most important thing in football was very good at United. But anyone who watched would see that he cost us more and was quite limited.
 
I listened to Danny Mills after the last match. It was one of them YouTube videos where they combined all the analysis from different channels. He said United were poor and Everton were decent. His only reason was the expected goals. It was possibly the worst analysis I've ever seen.
 
I listened to Danny Mills after the last match. It was one of them YouTube videos where they combined all the analysis from different channels. He said United were poor and Everton were decent. His only reason was the expected goals. It was possibly the worst analysis I've ever seen.
Your first mistake.
 
I love and hate stats.

They've embedded their way into tactics, made players and teams more efficient at the expense of making them less entertaining and fun to watch. Chaos can be beautiful. Why wouldn't clubs use them if they exist though? They're at a disadvanatged if they don't in a world where everyone else does. I'm a bit saddened by the stats revolution in that sense.

Don't know who would want tospend time arguing over why player A is better than player B anyway. What do people get out of that if they're not scouts? It doesn't matter. Great for scouting departments though as @JediSith already mentioned. Clubs can't watch every player in the world, particularly those teams on smaller budgets. They can flag up which players might be worth going to watch if your analytics people know what they're doing. You need both stats and eye test.

They can be great for gambling, but maybe more so in the past. See Brighton's and Brentford's owners. Think the edge was actually having stats that weren't widely available at the time, compiling them themselves. If not that then being the first to to see patterns within the stats that were out there before others, including betting companies. Can't really do that as easily now. Still, those are two clubs that have a great record in finding bargain players too, often using data.

I like them for Fantasy Football. The scoring system is based off stats so you need to look at the relevant stats that you're hoping your players will hit.

Always been interested in data and numbers. I think the entire world or universe could be explained through numbers if we had enough understanding and computer processing power. I'm Jekyll and Hyde though.

When I'm watching a game I don't care at all and am not remotely aware of what's happening with them or tactically. That's the time for the entertainment. Singing when I used to go to games, yelling encouragement when a promising counter on looks on, even if it's just on TV. Sometimes I might even be drinking. Don't give a shit what someone's pass completion rate is, or how many interceptions a defender made then. Before and after though, I do have interest in them from the point of view of trying to understand what I saw and hopefully trying to see positive things in a bad result, or to contextualise a win so I don't get too carried away.
 
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I listened to Danny Mills after the last match. It was one of them YouTube videos where they combined all the analysis from different channels. He said United were poor and Everton were decent. His only reason was the expected goals. It was possibly the worst analysis I've ever seen.

Perfectly demonstrating the issue here, it's not that stats in football are bad it's that they're used lazily and it clouds the context. Saying that these people would give idiotic opinions with or without stats.

I actually think we need more discussion involving stats but it needs qualified people who can provide interesting insights rather than ex-pros.
 
The vast majority of clowns who peddle stats online have never kicked a ball at a standard in their life.
 
The problem with stats is, the people who use the stats do not actually understand how the stat has been derived.

Like xG and xA.. Those stats may help to analyse games but people use them as literal. It doesn't work like that.. because we do not know how those stats are calculated.

For instance.. Eye test will tell you a that a player running through 2 v 1 and the player messes the pass will be a good chance however; if the player never gets a chance to go through on goal, its not counted as xG.

Or for instance.. playing in a final and a team takes an early lead, then they change to playing more pragmatic football and have less chances, does not mean they got outplayed, they just played the situation better.
 
Stats can be misused by those that don't understand them, it's quite simple. Maybe that is the major issue with them in that they are so widely available now that people who don't have an understanding on how to use statistics can also post them and make conclusions.

For ever issue that he stated with stats, there are either other stats available that can add more information (for example, SCA is shot creating actions that would credit a player for pre-assists/chance creation as well rather than just the final pass) or analyzing stats with a different view to add context. I'm always uncomfortable comparing any stats from different generations because of how much football has changed. Scoring 30 goals today is not the same as scoring 30 in the 90's. You should always look at stats and see how they compare to players from the same era (someone fbref looks at with their percentile measure).

I love stats, it adds a lot more context to what see and more importantly can be used to debunk the narratives that are around football discourse. But of course one needs to understand what those stats mean and it's flaws before making conclusions from them.
 
I would say stats are necessary though but as a way to back up the eye test, if you just say 'Garnacho is better than Saka' or something mad and then you say the 'eye test' then if I'm thinking of ways to prove you wrong, inevitably you end up looking at stats as the way to do it. Because an eye test is one person's eyes/word over another, whereas stats have something more factual behind them. The issue though is when you only look at stats, particularly without context.

Another annoying sub-genre of this is when people say winning a trophy automatically makes a player a better individual in a team sport. There are 11 v 11 players and millions of variables on a pitch that a great player will control most but never all of them. You could have the best game of your life in a final and the goalkeeper throws two goals in Karius-style and it means nothing for example. Carvajal and Jorginho getting Ballon d'Or shouts despite being nowhere near the best players in the world are examples of this.
 
They are copying American sports where they have stats for every little thing it won't take long till they will start registering pre assists.