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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
de gea was what when? i thought he's pretty great at man u-- not the best ever but a good keeper.
lol @ abramovich.
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anyway, regarding MATH in football. when i used to follow teh MLS they had these useless stats that meant nothing, because they have no context.
like "possession time". i mean that's good and great if you're playing a possession game-- then measure possession. but if you're not, it's meaningless. the other day i forget who dortmund was playing-- they were ahead like 3-0 and they didn't even have 40% possession. who gives a shit about possession-- the only stat that counted was the actual score.
the issue is that for a game so fluid and with so little scoring (compared to somehting like basketball, teh sample is extremely small) it's hard to find a mathematical model that describes what's going on. i mean, i can observe, intuitively, that tony kroos is GREAT at scoring from outside the area, but how do you account for that? measure average distance to goal, per goal? measure the speed of his shots? if he for some reason scores with a header from a corner, does that "ruin" his average? that's the kind of thing that's hard to figure out. but eventually someone (likely lots of people) will figure something out-- there's some kind of measuring going on and it's been going on forever. i remember when i was a kid i saw this old german documentary about football and they discussed how a properly kicked penalty couldn't be stopped because the average speed was 60kph and the speed of the keeper blah blah blah-- still penalty kicks get stopped (mostly by guessing).
in baseball, because things happen in very fixed positions and situations, it's easy for the statistics to describe a whole game. it's been done for i don't know how long, a century maybe? i'm not an expert but there's that notion around that a lover of baseball can read the whole game just from looking at the stats.
some years ago i read an article in wired about basketball-- i think it was about the dallas mavericks. the article talked about how people used stats to evaluate the game but there were somethings that weren't accounted for. like how there was this player who was kinda average when you looked at his personal stats but when he played for some reason everyone else's stats went up. because he enabled other players to do better. so the mathematical models are always changing. and even with mathematical models though, there is an element of randomness and let's call it "human inspiration" that cannot be accounted for-- so with the right math you could, in theory, optimize a team, but of course you couldn't guarantee it would win.
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De Gea's probably gonna get better but he's really shaky. Fergie regular plays Lindergaard instead of him. But yeah, definitely a prospect.
The possession thing became a factor I suppose because of Barcelona, who keep the ball forever. But as Chelsea proved against them last year, it only counts if it leads to a goal.