For those who have seen the film Money Ball or read Michael Lewis’s book of the same name, you will be familiar with the name Bill James. For those who don’t know about the remarkable story of the Oakland Athletic baseball team then I thoroughly recommend seeing the film or picking up the book. Without spoiling too much of the plot, James is a much-maligned chap who came up with a statistical system that was able to be used to rank each attribute of a player and thus whether they could do a job for a particular team. He coined the phrase Sabermetrics and defined it as “the search for objective knowledge about baseball.”
Sabermetrics attempts to answer objective questions about baseball, such as “which player on the New York Yankees contributed the most to the team’s offense?” or “How many home runs will a particular players hit next year?” It cannot deal with the subjective judgments which are also important to the game, such as “Who is your favorite player?” or “That was a great match”
The General Manager of the Oakland A’s, Billy Beane, adopted the concept and took his team on an amazing run which then resulted in an approach from Boston Red Sox owner John Henry. Yep, the same John Henry who today owns Liverpool FC.
Why is this relevant to the beautiful game? In recent weeks a remarkable story has broken about Brentford’s manager Mark Warburton announcing he will step down at the end of the season. Brentford are currently playing at the highest level in their history, they have a real shot at promotion to the Premier League and a long overdue move to a new stadium is finally on the cards. So why is Mark Warburton stepping down?
The reason is the direction self-made millionaire and club owner Matthew Benham wants to take the club. Benham made his cash pile in betting, managing a hedge fund to be more precise before turning his hand to the world of sports spread betting. He employed a team of people to analyze every statistic about clubs and players, and used the results to predict results. Based on his wealth who is to question the success of this approach? The next logical step is to apply the model to his own clubs. Clubs plural as he purchased FC Midtyjlland in Denmark last year. The club, who had have never won a major honor are currently top the Danish SuperLiga using his model.
Will this model work for Brentford? FC Midtyjlland’s chairman, appointed by Benham, 31 year old entrepreneur Rasmus Ankersen thinks there is a 42.3% chance of Brentford gaining promotion to the Premier League based on the data they have collected rather than looking at current form and making a reasoned guess of yes or no. And that, ladies and gentlemen is the theory of Sabermetrics – using past performance and data trend analysis to make decisions about the future.
