"Take a guy like Robert Taylor...He was good before Messi came, but now can shine a little brighter with a better player."
The challenge with analytics in soccer is that almost all the useful, deep-dive ones are behind the Opta paywall (and a couple others). Teams pay thousands of dollars a year for that data, and the general public is le…
"Take a guy like Robert Taylor...He was good before Messi came, but now can shine a little brighter with a better player."
The challenge with analytics in soccer is that almost all the useful, deep-dive ones are behind the Opta paywall (and a couple others). Teams pay thousands of dollars a year for that data, and the general public is left with crumbs that they then try to reverse engineer a cookie out of.
If more data were public, like it is in (checks notes) literally every other sport, it would be easier to see WHY a Robert Taylor plays better with a Leo Messi, other than the obvious "it's Messi, duh", but soccer has decided that 95% of the useful information on player performance should be proprietary, so we basically just have to guess.
And yes, a lot of folks are getting better at guessing, which is great, but without a full data picture, it's all just guessing.
It's good that teams have access to that info, though, and it's good they're starting to use it to inform decisions.
It's not an either/or, though. Coaches can absolutely see how a player does, and they will always be able to; the numbers can help them figure out *why* the players do what they do, and what combinations of players work best together based on how the coach wants to play.
Teams are using analytics all the time now, whether we see it or not; they're not the be-all-end-all of anything, they're just another tool in the box. I just wish more of those tools were, as in other sports, more widely available to the public to play with.
"Take a guy like Robert Taylor...He was good before Messi came, but now can shine a little brighter with a better player."
The challenge with analytics in soccer is that almost all the useful, deep-dive ones are behind the Opta paywall (and a couple others). Teams pay thousands of dollars a year for that data, and the general public is left with crumbs that they then try to reverse engineer a cookie out of.
If more data were public, like it is in (checks notes) literally every other sport, it would be easier to see WHY a Robert Taylor plays better with a Leo Messi, other than the obvious "it's Messi, duh", but soccer has decided that 95% of the useful information on player performance should be proprietary, so we basically just have to guess.
And yes, a lot of folks are getting better at guessing, which is great, but without a full data picture, it's all just guessing.
It's good that teams have access to that info, though, and it's good they're starting to use it to inform decisions.
Coaches can see how a player does, and that ought to be enough.
It's not an either/or, though. Coaches can absolutely see how a player does, and they will always be able to; the numbers can help them figure out *why* the players do what they do, and what combinations of players work best together based on how the coach wants to play.
Teams are using analytics all the time now, whether we see it or not; they're not the be-all-end-all of anything, they're just another tool in the box. I just wish more of those tools were, as in other sports, more widely available to the public to play with.