Rate the players coming up from 1-5.
5=World Class, starter on a top CL team.
4=Very good.
3=League Regular
2=Backup in a major league
1=Lower League talent only

Examples:
Messi is a 5 (and would be higher if the scale went there).
Frank Lampard is a 5
Robert Pires is a 5.
Nani is a 4 .
Gareth Barry is a 4.
Damien Duff is a 3.

Now give me your ratings for the following:

Brett Emerton.
Muzzy Izzet.
Morten Gamst Pedersen.
David Bentley.
Carlton Cole
Stephane Sessegnon
Sal Kalou
Thomas Hitzsperger
Jermaine Pennant
Steed Malbranque
Nobby Solano
Eyal Berkovic
Geremi
Wayne Routledge
Simon Davies
Danny Murphy
El-Hadji Diouf

The director’s assistant knocks on the door.

PA: Excuse me sir, there’s a package for you. It’s marked urgent.

DoF: Thank you, Anne.

The director opens the package. It contains a photo and four pieces of paper.

Owner: Who’s that in the photo?

DoF: Some guy named Max Kruse.

Owner: Who?

DoF: Max Kruse. Apparently he plays for Freiburg in Germany.

Owner: They play football in Germany?

*silence*

Owner: That was a joke. Of course I know they play football in Germany. I’m going to the Champions’ League match later this month, I know this.

DoF: The first piece of paper says, “They should have bought him.”

Owner: Who?

DoF: Everyone, apparently.

Owner: Everyone should have bought him?

DoF: Every football team in the English Premier League.

Owner: Why?

DoF: Take a look at the next piece of paper.

Owner: It’s just a bunch of stats with no names.

DoF: Yeah, I think this Max Kruse guy is probably one of the names on the list. I have no idea who the other guys are though.

Owner: Well no, obviously. I don’t even know why you would track most of these stats anyway – this isn’t baseball.

DoF: Here, this piece has the names.

Owner: That’s a fairly impressive set of players there. Maybe we should buy this guy.

DoF: We can’t. This sheet says Borussia Moenchengladbach got there first, back in April.

Owner: Hang on, let me guess what they paid. What did these other guys sell for?

DoF: Last season Modric went to Madrid for £26.4M. Mata transferred from Valencia to Chelsea two years ago for £23.5M. Bayern Munich apparently activated Goetze’s release clause a couple of months ago and bought him for £32.5M, a price some German scouts I know thought was too cheap.

Owner: Let’s see then… I bet Kruse went for… £25 million?

DoF: *mumbles something*

Owner: What was that?

DoF: £2.25M. *cringes*

Owner: TWO POINT TWO FIVE MILLION?!? THERE’S A GUY OUT THERE – IN A MAJOR LEAGUE MIND YOU, NOT PLAYING IN BUMFUCK NOWHERE – WITH STATS LIKE LUKA MODRIC, JUAN MATA, AND MARIO GOETZE, AND SOMEONE ALREADY BOUGHT HIM FOR £2.25M?!? WHAT THE FUCK AM I PAYING YOU FOR?

DoF: …

Owner: What’s the last piece of paper say?

DoF: “You’re doing it wrong.”

End scene.

“[Giger] mandated that the creature have no eyes, because he felt that it made them much more frightening if you could not tell they were looking at you.“ - Alien Evolution, Alien Quadrilogy Box Set

“The Newborn’s eyes and nose were added to improve its expressions to make it a character, rather than just a “killing machine”, and give it depth as a character.” - Unnatural Mutation – Creature Design, Alien Quadrilogy, 2003, 20th Century Fox

So, now this is happening.

Anyone getting tanked up to make a moral judgment about this criticism should consider that the auteurs of this harlequin fetus have a job in paradise creating entertainment products to sell at a markup. Their asses are covered, their motivations a mixture of personal creative ambition and company direction, and like any object d’art put forth for our consumption, and *to* consume our hard-earned dollars, it is the fairest of games. Fairer, indeed, than Magic itself.

It was with the weariness of a weathered pack animal that I slumped upon seeing the M14 Sliver reboot. It is not just that it’s unnecessary, ill-advised, implicitly insulting. It’s that creativity has found no purchase on the dull edifice of this undertaking. It precedes M14 like a corpse floating headlong down the Nile, fly-blown and crocodile-bitten, leaving us to wonder what homogenized horrors may yet come.

Slivers with male and female characteristics? (Can sexualization be far behind? Is the Sarah Kerrigan of Slivers on the horizon? Or is one Glissa enough?)

Sliver generals, ranks within the collective? Slivers in clothing?

A menacing Sliver planeswalker dropping one-liners on token-generation Sorceries?

“You’re about to get a bad case of…the hives.”

The mind reels and rebels.

Where to begin? Perhaps with the admission that this doesn’t matter. A set is no museum exhibit but a collection of mass-produced game pieces, and if the rooks and pawns carry the benzine stink of the industrial process, they will still play readily enough. The art itself is expertly done. In a year, nobody will care. We are just here to get on the record, you and I, that we may one day link back to this combined outcry of voices, having suffered for too lengthy an interval the release of sneering, talking slivers that look like Donkey Kong. Today is our Independence Day.

Aaaaaaaaaaaanyway, look at this piece of shit:

BOOGA BOOGA.

Well, this guy certainly seems like he’s part of a hive to me. A hive of gorillas. I’m not sure why the extra limbs were necessary to set this heater of a design apart from it’s predecessors.  In case you’re wondering if there’s ever been a sliver with tusks and black sinew accented by boney plates before, the answer is no. That could have been sufficient had cooler heads prevailed.

(PS: Gives all slivers trample? HOW EXCITING. They couldn’t have picked worse cards to pseudo-spoil.)

I especially like how the word ‘Sliver’ evokes something infiltrating, sharp, a lithe and predatory scintilla that’s part of a larger whole… and this card is a giant chimpanzee blundering through the forest, alone. As for the face, stretched as it is between two chitinous outcroppings, it appears to have all the mobility and expression of a vintage phrenology chart.

Come on! You wanted the face, Spielberg. Let’s see the soliloquy! Oh, what’s that? You’re saving it for the Wal-Mart shelf, those burning Sliver eyes writ large on a fat pack?

My conceptual complaints are, like my sadly desecrated friends, legion. Slivers have always been a basic form to which disparate characteristics could be applied, leaving all Slivers present (one presumes) with identical, combined traits. Now that the symmetry of the basic form is broken, the mental picture of what happens when slivers gather is muddled. Instead of imagining plating hardening or muscles strengthening on a hive-wide basis, we’re just left to conjure all a montage of disparate forms working together, looking like the X-Men if all their faces were shot up with Novocaine.

Moving on in this burgle-fest:

The General Grievous of slivers, and no less superfluous a visual design. This looks like a Phyrexian Obliterator fell into a bag of ketchup chips and got really mad. The face, with all the softness and expression of an uncracked walnut, adds the now-expected stone nothing. Oh, and he’s got dreadlocks because he’s a Sliver.

It’s hard to explain why using faces this way is so ineffective, but I’ll try. Human faces are soft, they can express sadness, joy, fear, resolve, they have folds and pores, distinguishing marks. Sliver faces will never be used to express any emotions besides “I’m going to attack you”. These faces are just simulacra – blank, glowering, and dare I say “Phyrexian” in their unrealness. Do Slivers have tear ducts, throats, teeth? Do they eat human food? What other anatomical weirdness is suggested by this change?

You can’t just slap a face on something inhuman and give it character. It’s like putting a face on an ant or a cockroach.

I’m preemptively not interested in the inevitable “Slivers have been twisted by a humanoid corruption into the image of their new master, [Planeswalker whoever]” explanation, because I know it’s just a planter placed strategically over a commercial carpet stain. As a narrative impetus, accessibility is no less hollow than the lightless eyes of the new brood it’s birthed.

Hell, maybe there won’t even be an explanation, since core sets are the garbage time of Magic narrative. (Anyone remember the Eastern Paladin and Western Paladin?)

Anyway, my point is that every new sliver is just this guy.

The faces are either dead, waxen and mockingly human in a way the designers didn’t intend, or it IS intentional, in which case the slivers are just Phyrexians 2.0 and this is further reinforced as the dumbest idea of all time.

To add to the misery, the flavor text suggests that slivers have to “command” each other to take on their shared characteristics. I wonder if that was in the style guide or some random dingleberry just made it up on the spot. Neither would surprise me.  I further wonder- if you have this in play with a Blade Sliver, does the Blade Sliver grow two legs and a face as well?

Might as well keep the mediocrity train a-chugging:

I don’t think that’s how Slivers work, flavor text guy. They don’t all see through this Sliver, they gain the ability to…oh-never-mind.

This one looks like somebody disemboweled Voldo from Soul Calibur and dropped him into Cambodia on a mission to assassinate communist advisers.  I fail to see why you couldn’t use the existing Sliver morphology to just this Vigilance effect- a slender sliver propped upright on it’s limb, triangular head raised, cobra-like, to detect any possible stimuli.

Oh, wait, now I remember- lazy art production.

Even if Sliver morphology had run its course (which I don’t concede), there were settings, textures, actions, colors, sizes! All sorts of knobs to be turned on the Sliver etch-a-sketch. Look man- tell me you don’t like my name. Tell me you don’t like my voice. Tell me you don’t like my fucking necktie. But don’t tell me you couldn’t put three creative people in a room for a few hours and come up with compelling art for fifteen new slivers without increasing limbs by 300%. Anyone who tells you that is lying to you.

Now we be a good time to talk about what a disaster it is to take an essentially insectoid/feral race and make it humanoid when a huge part of suggesting a hive (without actually showing one) is that morphology. If I see one ant, I expect more ants. If I see an ugly two-faced humanoid standing around  like the Marlboro man, I don’t expect more of the same.

Alright, let’s wrap up this freakshow before I vomit:

Guy looks like a Viridian Elf that stumbled out of the Mephidross after a ten-day crack binge. Of the spoiled art, I think this is probably the biggest departure from the typical Sliver, visually…but it’s certainly not a departure from various other designs that have come and gone throughout Magic’s history.  Maybe it’s the Steelform talking, darling, but you seem like either a Myr or a Phyrexian to me.

I don’t get what the flavor text is trying to say. It’s either awful, awful, or boring, and the only mystery is what the intent was.

Does Sarlena think people could actually mistake them for humans? If so, she’s dumb.

Does Sarlena think people would try to fight them the way they fight humans, in terms of vital spots and such? Are sliver legs not legs? Do they not have tendons to cut? Do their faces not protect eyes and brains? We know they do, since Sentinel Sliver has eyes…so why can’t you fight it like a human?

Does Sarlena just mean they have inhuman cunning and viciousness? If so, this is a boring and none-too-expansive reference to the art change.

Spin-doctoring and digging the needle in is the explanatory post by WotC creative guru Doug Beyer, who I’m hoping was not the genesis of any of this schlock but rather was handed market research lemons with which to poop out a putrid and hackneyed lemonade.

Here’s the link, which should come with a kiss, since I fancy a kiss when I’m getting my doodle pulled.

” M14 adds a host of new slivers, and we decided it was time to broaden their range of potential morphologies.”

“We wanted them to be able to look you in the eye like other fantasy races, to be capable of a greater range of body language and even, sometimes, to generate facial expressions.”

So you wanted to broaden your range…with the restriction that they have humanoid faces and be able to show humanoid body language?

I’m curious to hear your initial thoughts.

Well, here you go.

I just can’t imagine anyone thinking this was a good idea. Taking one of a canon’s historically unique elements and gentrifying it for the masses is not a creatively laudable action, let alone advisable. I hope it was done under protest. What design space is opened up here? A chance to fill a graphic novel panel with a sliver’s flashing eyes? To describe a sliver’s changing expression in a novelization? Is this a genuflection before the graven monolith of packaging art, full-page advertising, and retail surfacing? Was the intent simply to place expressive Sliver faces at eye level with young Wal-Mart shoppers, piquing interest enough to elicit a tug at mom’s dress?

Slivers have lost their uniqueness- they are now the equal of any other sneering, razor-clawed antagonist. This new direction weakens the impact of the race and how it can be understood by players as a hive group without exposition to that effect.

While I’m at it, let’s just say that your flavor text writers needn’t bother keeping their mantles dusted for the installation of a Franz Kakfa prize.

It’s moot anyway. We’re still going to buy ‘em. We’re still going to crack’em and play ‘em. If Magic Online has shown us nothing else, it’s that the game is strong enough to weather most any stumble, so long as the gameplay remains pure. Our hides are toughened by numberless lashes, scabrous gifts from the whip of commerce. Virescit volnere virtus, as noted orator Sarlena, Paladin of the Northern Verge might say.

Though we will persevere, there has been one casualty here, and before it passes into the shadows of the internet perhaps this communication can serve as an epitaph.

Visually and in terms of mystique, Slivers are done.

An iconic creature type ends. Not with a bang, but with a click, a chitter, the crack and snap of flesh hardening into more of the same.

Let me start by saying that those guys are all outstanding journalists. They are part of a very small group of writers whose work I read every week because it is both valuable and because I enjoy the experience. That said, some of their tweets show such a dramatic lack of perspective that I was shocked. If you can’t count on great journalists to have realistic football expectations, what hope can we possibly have for normal, everyday fans?

First let’s take a look at Mourinho’s past performance, starting since he left Porto. How does Mourinho typically perform in isolation when he takes over a new team?

So historically you can expect Jose’s teams to always make it out of the Champions’ League group stage, and usually to the semifinal. Before Madrid, he was winning the league nearly every season, and taking home domestic cups about every other year.

Madrid’s league performance under Jose is a win below his personal standards. If they win the Copa del Rey this year, two wins in three years would be slightly above expectations, and three CL semifinals in a row is basically exactly as expected.

Honigstein: What were they up against? One team, that’s all.

I’m pretty sure Raph was talking about La Liga here, so let’s run with that. Assuming we buy his logic, it kind of helps to know that the “one team” in this case is the one that was widely dubbed as the greatest team of the modern era – Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona. This is part of that key perspective thing I mentioned above. It’s not just one team, it’s the team. Either Barcelona were absolutely amazing like everyone generally agrees, or Honigstein is out on a limb here saying they weren’t. If they were amazing, then give Jose credit for beating them in year 2? This year, Real let off the gas early and haven’t been as good as they were the first two years, and Barcelona ran away with things. It happens, even to the best managers.

The first year where Mourinho and Madrid finished second? They did it with 92 points. A points total that would have demolished the league every single year for a decade before Guardiola started managing Barcelona. So yes, not winning La Liga in two of the three years is slightly below Mourinho’s historic performance, but what they were up against does matter.

[Note: Mourinho deserves credit for finally solving Barcelona. His teams haven’t lost to Barce in a competitive match in 18 months and likely provided the blueprint for Bayern’s domination as well.]

Now take a look at the three teams Madrid lost to in the Champions League (all semifinals).

Year 1: Barcelona
Year 2: Bayern Munich on penalties
Year 3: Borussia Dortmund

Miguel Delaney: Real define themselves by the European Cup. Simple as that. He’s had three awful semis.

So they lost to eventual champions Barcelona year 1, when Barce were at their peak, losing 2-0 at home and then drawing at the Camp Nou. The second year, Madrid lost to Bayern on penalties. Honestly, that doesn’t seem awful. Talk all you want about bottle and mental toughness and whatever, penalties are a crap shoot every single time. Well, except maybe when England are involved.

In this year’s Champions’ League, it’s fair to say Klopp totally dominated him from a coaching perspective. And yet if Madrid manage to convert one more of the many, many great chances they created at home, they would go through to the Final almost despite themselves. Dortmund deserved to win that matchup, but they very nearly didn’t.

So maybe we can nod toward Miguel and call it two awful semis, plus one pretty good one against the team everyone is already calling “the next Barcelona.” During that time, the best club team ever had the same number of semifinals appearances(3) and won the CL trophy once. They also lost to Bayern Munich 7-0 on aggregate. When it comes to perception, however, a win changes everything.

Honigstein: Is this year’s Barca the best team ever and thus untouchable in the league for RM? Were Dortmund & Bayern impossible to beat as well? But at least he failed playing great football. Oh, hold on…

Marcotti: But he also finished way behind, failed to beat other teams in La Liga as often as Barca did and, most of all, generally played pretty uninspired football (with some exceptions). Fair to expect more, no?

Here’s the thing I really don’t get about that whole conversation… how can you possibly think Real failed to play great football? In what world is that the case? Jose didn’t rock up to Madrid and make them play hoof ball when I wasn’t looking, did he? Well, no. Maybe they are thinking historical Mourinho teams and judging by that. Chelsea and Inter both had a habit of getting the lead, then holding the ball and simply squeezing the life out of the game. Effective stuff, but not very pretty. That’s not what Mourinho’s Madrid did. I watch a lot of Real Madrid matches due to my work, and they were scintillating. It’s not tiki-taka – Madrid played a more traditional style than Barcelona – but it was beautiful nonetheless.

Under Mourinho, Real Madrid destroyed opponents. They scored tons of goals! Fine, they didn’t have possession of the ball more than 60% of the time like Barcelona, but who cares? Seriously, look at the numbers!

310 goals in the league vs. 308 over three seasons!

Maybe at this point you are sick of numbers, so let’s look beyond them for a moment…

Ignore Ronaldo’s Michael-Flatley-Meets-Football magic – if you don’t find what Ozil and Alonso do on a weekly basis aesthetically pleasing football, the problem is with your definition, not with how they play.

The Greatest Managers In the World…

Who are they? Who can you compare Jose to and see if he is failing? Alex Ferguson. Guardiola. Klopp? Heynckes? Wenger? Absolutely no one in Italy any more? (Okay, maybe Conte, but the suspension throws off any potential analysis.)

Pep is hard to compare because he’s only had the four years, but his four years were probably the greatest run of all time. It amuses me that he could match that when he takes over Bayern next year, but the truth of the matter is that they didn’t really need him – they’ve already been in three finals over the last five years. At that point will Bayern be winning because of Pep or will Pep be winning because of what he took over at Bayern? [It doesn’t matter, because everyone will be super happy if they just win all the trophies.]

Klopp is tough too but he’s undeniably great, having won the Bundesliga two of the last three years, and now hitting the Finals of the CL. That said, Dortmund finished last in their CL group last season, coming behind Arsenal, Marseille, and Olympiakos. I am a huge fan, but it’s too early in his career to really compare.

Heynckes. Three total Bundesliga trophies in a long managerial career. A CL win with Real Madrid of all places, but he was fired for not succeeding there in the league. A CL final with Bayern last year and possibly another CL trophy with Bayern coming up. You’d gladly take him as a manager, but his career has had a ton of peaks and valleys.

Wenger has been mired in the Arsenal financial morass for eight years now. Eight years ago, he would have compared very favourably. Now? Does 4^th count as a trophy?

Fergie might be the greatest manager I have ever seen. In the last twenty years, Fergie has made the semifinals of the Champions League seven times, winning twice and finishing runner up twice. In the last eight years (the same period as Mourinho above), he’s won the league five times.

And what of Jose? Europa League and Champions League titles with Porto (which may forever boggle the mind). In the eight years since, he has five league titles across England, Italy, and Spain. His Spanish title came at the expense of Pep’s Barcelona. Six more Champions League semifinals in those eight years, and one win. He basically has the same Champions League resume as Fergie in half the time. Paisley is the only manager ever to have more European titles, and Jose still has a chance to tie and surpass him.

At the end of the day, no one is doing better than Jose, except maybe Guardiola, while Fergie is at the same level. You can’t even make the vaguest argument that anyone else is close.  Even in the three years at Madrid, with only one league win, two (probable) cup wins, and three straight CL semifinals, he’s performing as well as any of his compatriots, all of whom are regarded as the greatest football managers in the world.

Maybe it’s not Jose’s performance that’s the problem, it’s the superhuman expectations that everyone – even some of the brightest journalists in the world – seem to place on him.

He’s not Superman.

He’s only the Special One.

Corrections: This blog originally stated it was Shankly that had the most wins in Europe, it was Paisley. It also had the locations of the scores for the semifinal against Barcelona switched.

Initially I wanted to synthesize the current literature and add links to all of the major work thus far in one spot. Unfortunately things are moving so fast right now (most topics are very much in the discovery phase), that instead I think it’s probably easier and more useful to provide a short profile of people I have found to be interesting and valuable in my exploration of the topic. Consider this sort of a Follow Friday outside of 140 characters for anyone who is interested in getting up to speed on soccer analytics.

Note: As of this writing, all of these guys are currently publishing stuff. Some work for data companies like Infostrada Group, but most are independent and just seem to love numbers and football.

James Grayson
Twitter: @JamesWGrayson

Grayson is a graduate student in atmospheric science, which means he’s used to working on systems far more complex than silly football games. Common topics include Total Shots Ratio (TSR), regular updates on probable league positions in EPL, and he also dabbles in NHL. James’ Blog can be found here.

Mark Taylor
Twitter: @marktaylor0

Mark is incredibly prolific and publishes almost daily on his blog The Power of Goals.  His posts usually have a strong math bent, but Mark’s writing makes things easily accessible. Given how much he publishes, and assuming he has some real job to pay the bills, Mark may also be a robot or a particularly mathophilic vampire.

Ben Pugsley
Twitter: @benjaminpugsley

Ben is also prolific, writing mostly for the SBNation community Bitter and Blue as shuddertothink (where his brother Danny is the editor), but also publishing more recently on his own blog. He writes a weekly column called 10 Points that takes a statistical look at the weekend’s English Premier League action, and then publishes on various and sundry topics throughout the rest of the week. He was one of the first analysts to take a heavy look at game states and their statistical effects.

Simon Gleave
Twitter: @simongleave

Simon is officially Head of Analysis at data provider Infostrada. He created the ISG Coefficient, which examines how teams have fared from season to season over identical fixtures (which helps to control for opponent strength versus what you see on a league table), and had a hand in the Euro Club Index as well. Some of his work can be found on the Infostrada website, some on his own blog Scoreboard Journalism, and some in the mainstream Dutch publication Volskrant.

He also seems to enjoy rugby, but try not to hold that against him.

Sander Ijtsma
Twitter: @11tegen11

Sander is a Dutch doctor who writes excellent analytics posts in his spare time. Being Dutch, he often focuses on Eredivisie, but his takes on some of the more notable analytics topics are always well thought out and sometimes groundbreaking (try this one and this one for examples). He’s notable for his work on Relative Shots Rate (RSR) and like Simon Gleave, has also been publishing in Volskrant recently.

Chris Anderson
Twitter: @soccerquant

Chris is a professor at Cornell University, is one of the partners of Anderson Sally consulting, and publishes his soccer work at Soccer By the Numbers. His topics are extremely diverse in nature (Age and player valuation, the Value of Corners, Points and Relegation), and he has a book called “The Numbers Game” filled to the brim with soccer analytics, set to be published in late May.

Martin Eastwood
Twitter: @penaltyblog

Martin is notable for a number of topics, including simplifying the Pythagorean model for soccer, creating a football Elo predictive model, and for writing some harder core mathy explanations for Betting Expert. In real life, he is a man of science.

Zach Slaton
Twitter: The_Number_Game

As he puts it, Zach “writes statistically informed articles about MLS and EPL” for Forbes magazine. Every week he posts model updates for where teams are likely to finish in EPL, and he’s one of the few soccer analytics writers to get published on a mainstream US site. (Though ESPN has ramped up their game dramatically in the last year or so with Albert Lacarda and Paul Carr). As the European season comes to an end, expect him to write oodles and scads about MLS.

A Different Game
Twitter: @FootballFactman

The Shot Position Average Model (SPAM)  is far enough off the beaten path that it deserves special consideration and merit, both because it is different and because it seems like a TON of work went into this thing in charting shot position and their ROI. This blog is usually a bit less mathy than most of what I have listed above, but that’s one of the things that makes it great. I like most of the stuff he publishes, but especially enjoyed the look at Bale vs. Walcott.

Right, these are just the guys that I personally find most valuable right now. There are plenty more who have published heavily in the past, who have been snapped up by clubs (Ravi Ramineni) or bigger companies like Prozone (Omar Chaudhuri), and many more that are writing right now that I probably just don’t know about yet.

Richard Whittall, editor off the Counter Attack blog at Canadian site The Score  is another mainstream voice who seems to have become hooked on soccer analytics in recent months and follows community publications fairly closely. Be nice to him, he is a long-suffering Aston Villa fan.

Best of luck!

Ted Knutson
@mixedknuts

About me:
Formerly a professional sports bettor, I have worked for Pinnaclesports.com since April 2007. While there, I have managed their Soccer, European, and Live Sports departments, as well as being the head of Sportsbook Research & Analysis. These days I act as lead trader for the English Premier League. Most of my writing goes toward work-related things, but I occasionally publish here when the mood strikes. I also chat constantly about football, analytics, and gambling on Twitter.

Schweini knows…

If you said Barcelona, you have been brainwashed by popular opinion and past success. By just about any statistical measure, Bayern Munich are the best team in Europe this year. They have a higher goal differential than Barcelona (75 vs. 66), shoot more times a game than Barcelona (17.4 vs. 13.8), allow fewer shots per game than Barcelona (8.2 vs 9.5), and have the lowest goals per game against average (.46) of any team in Europe. The only area Barcelona pip Bayern is in how many goals they average per game, with Barcelona scoring 3.09 and Bayern driving home 2.96 per game.

This is all true before Pep Guardiola takes charge this summer, and before – as announced this morning – Mario Gotze transfers from Dortmund to Munich.

To recap, Bayern are the best (and deepest) team in Europe right now. They replaced their retiring manager (Jupp Heynckes) with the man who managed what is widely considered to be the best team in modern football, depriving all potential rivals of his services in the process. They just signed the best player from their closest league rivals for 37 million Euros. And not only are they FFP compliant, they allegedly have a mountain of cash for transfers Guardiola wants and keep making a profit.

Bayern destroyed a very good Juventus team 4-0 on aggregate. Barcelona drew with a very good PSG team 3-3 on aggregate, but went through on away goals. Yet even with a gimpy Leo Messi, Barcelona are still favoured to win the Champions League matchup between the two that starts tonight? Missing Kroos and Mandzukic for the first leg will hurt, but I’m still not sure that line makes sense.

Anyway, I wrote this just so that I could make a point that I think will hold true for the next 4-5 seasons of European football. At Bayern Munich, Pep Guardiola has a very strong chance of matching or eclipsing his incredible record with Barcelona.

Bayern Munich are that good right now, and they have more financial muscle and flexibility than anyone else in Europe to fill needs as they arise.  They have as much talent as any other club in Europe, they are deeper than just about anybody, and they have an amazing academy. They also seem to have a ridiculous knack of finding talent for cheap prices (with Mandzukic and Dante the latest examples. Real  Madrid bought Modric this past summer for £26.4M. Meanwhile, Bayern bought Mandzukic for £11.4M and Dante for £4.1M, both of whom slotted directly into their starting 11. Even Javi Martinez, who was outrageously expensive at £35M, seems to be worth every pound of his transfer fee.) Bayern’s revenues are also some of the best in Europe, and unlike the Spanish clubs or Manchester United, they have almost no debt.

Mark it down: Bayern are the team to beat right now and for the foreseeable future.

Anyway, I noticed yesterday that the video for the Sports Betting Panel was now up on the site, and I jotted down some brief notes while watching it yesterday. Why should you care what I think about predictive sports betting? Well, I’ve worked for the company Haralabob says they aren’t supposed to talk about for the last six years, doing all sorts of interesting things for them along the way.

I really liked Jeff Ma’s moderation. He’s a genius, his book is excellent (read up on his background if you don’t know), and he’s a clear subject matter expert, but here he does a good job asking interesting questions. I probably would have been happier with someone else clever just interviewing Ma and Haralabob, but that’s probably due to the fact that I find Cantor currently irrelevant.

“The largest LEGAL sportsbook in the United States.” Impressive! Can you take bets on the internet? No? You know nothing, Cantor Gaming.

Haralabob is awesome. He’s a bit of a hoops savant (which makes me intrigued about why he recently asked for Manchester City data set via Twitter – new business venture?), but he obviously knows his shit. It’s slightly frustrating (though understandable) that he doesn’t want to get into specifics and that he only knows about basketball, but he’s fun to listen to regardless.

Millman also comes across better than I expected him to, especially because I often found his writing on gambling to be awful in the past. Then again, this piece for Sloan was solid, so maybe he’s improved since I stopped reading. You probably aren’t an idiot if you are the Editor-in-Chief of ESPN Magazine and he does seem to know a lot of gamblers.

Matthew Holt (the Cantor guy) is uh… let’s just say any of the guys who lead trade our major sports would probably come across better than he does. To be fair, he gets roughed up by Bob and a bit by Millman, so it wasn’t the easiest panel to be on. Listening to what he says about their processes, either the Cantor guys who work on specific sports are dumber than those I have interacted with in the rest of the industry (and they just copy someone else’s lines *cough*PINNACLE*cough*) OR he’s downplaying how smart they are. I’m not sure which way to go on this one. Maybe they just don’t have the revenues to pay for real talent across the board. The vig shall protect you!

Following along those lines, Haralabob says, “In reality, bookmaking is pretty easy. Some of the dumbest guys I have ever met are bookies.” Maybe in the U.S. at -110, Bob. How about at -104 with infinite rebets? -102/-103 in Soccer? Nooooot so easy then, jefe.

Minute 25: Haralabob roughs up Cantor guy with the size of the bet they are willing to take from him. He can bet 5K with Cantor, and I assume that’s total. A place like Pinnacle probably lets Bob bet 20K on an NBA spread, and he could rebet that as many times as he wants (with line moves in between). Conclusion: Being a bettor in the US clearly sucks. Still. #Murica

Minute 31: “No one here wants to talk about Pinnacle right now.” Heh. What follows is an interesting discussion about gambling market dynamics in American sports right now. It is legitimately difficult to bet a lot of money on your average game in most U.S. sports if you live inside the United States, even if you have access to every sportsbook in Vegas. This has lead most professional sports bettors (and a lot of poker players as well) to set up residences in countries where betting is legal.

Like poker, sports betting is a skill game. This is the case at -110 odds and it is especially the case at -104. The majority of civilized countries consider betting a natural element of society.  It is a legitimate recreational activity, and point spreads for NFL games are carried in every major newspaper and sports website in the country. Lotteries abound in the U.S. and casino gambling is now basically everywhere. But you can’t legally gamble on sports in the U.S. It boggles the mind.

Dear USA: Fix Yo’ Shit.

There’s also a secondary discussion along the way about how lines are currently shaped versus how they used to be. It used to be that place X (and this varied sometimes, but was often BetCris) would open a line at medium limits in the morning US time, and then all the other books would copy while being open for fairly large limits, and the line would rapidly get shaped as everyone plunged in. Nowadays lines open overnight for comparatively small limits ($500 to $2000 USD when the lines will usually be open for 20K before post), and sharps of varying bankroll sizes get priced in as the limits go up. As Bob notes, this makes for much sharper lines, and takes away some of the edge the biggest sharps and betting syndicates have. Not all of it, mind, but this methodology uses the information markets to find a much sharper line than you would get based on just a couple of guys’ opinions. The guys who run sportsbooks aren’t always dumb!

I enjoyed the hour, since the topic is always going to be exciting and there were some strong personalities on stage. This panel would be really different if they had a Pinny guy there, since Pinnaclesports.com was clearly the elephant in the room during the entire hour. Whether they could GET any Pinny guys to show up would be another question entirely.

Maybe if they ran a similar panel in Europe or Asia…

Well, I got a job in the computer industry.

KNUTSON Y U SO DUM?!

Once upon a time I was reasonably proficient with SQL, which helped me do DBA work (my real love is data), but I never managed to turn myself into a script kiddie with Python, etc, like I probably should have. This is unfortunate, because those skills would be incredibly useful now. I don’t have them, so brute force is my only option.

Backtesting football seasons – by hand – is a process. Each one takes me about three hours of tedium, half of which is a math test. Learn to code early, kids, then you won’t have this problem.

Anyway, as part of this testing, I found myself wanting the model to win. This is a problem you won’t encounter when you test strictly via computer, because the computer does not give a shit. You give it the data, it does the math, and then returns the math to you where you can apply caring however you want. However, as a human, I was secretly trying to insert bias to help the model perform better each time I did the comparisons. It’s my model, I want it to win. Now don’t get me wrong – I have other models, some of which are competing against this model to see which is more efficient. For right now, despite my best efforts to convince it otherwise, my subconscious wants this model to win.

This is monumentally stupid thing to do.

Logically, I know this. But it kept happening!

Look brain… this is testing. Testing is important. What we (we’re in this together, buddy) really want to get from this is to learn, as accurately as possible, how the model will perform in the real world given the parameters of application. Bending these parameters to help the model win more in certain situations while ignoring them in others is just as dumb as you can possibly be.

And yet… I found myself waffling about it.

*Glances at outcome that would yield a win* “That’s close enough that I would make that bet.”

*Glances at a different outcome that would cause a loss* “Oo, no, that falls just outside – I definitely would not make that bet.”

I have strict parameters. There is no grey area. Waffling ist strictly verboten!

Most of the time, I am not this dumb. I swear. But here I am, knowing that this is bad and knowing that it will probably cause poor expectations and potentially lost money in the long term, and I’m still fighting with myself, introducing biases that are counter-productive.

Why?

Probably because I’m hyper-competitive and want the model to win the mini-game as well, but who the fuck knows? It just needed to stop.

The solution to problem was as incredibly simple as the problem itself was incredibly stupid. I hid the columns that contain the results, then did the wager testing, then revealed the results and did the grading. It takes maybe an extra ten minutes of my time, but critically, avoids bias.

The lesson for today is this: Be careful doing your back testing when you can peek into the future. The temptation to cheat is overwhelming.

That said, there IS a source of publicly available data for a number of leagues and countries at the Football Data site. The data contained there covers 11 countries, multiple leagues in each country, and some of it goes back for a decade. It’s not as complex as the stuff you would get from the professional companies, but it IS data, and that in itself is laudable and potentially useful.

One of the issues with this data, however, is that the definition of a “Shot on Target” is completely different than what Opta uses. (You can get more info on the differences in this forum thread.) Since that sort of thing matters for a number of models, I have stated public concerns about using it for data crunching instead of the professional scraps available elsewhere. That said, James Grayson uses it for most/all of his research, so I promised to take a quick look at it after my holiday and see what conclusions I could draw.

The Good News
Shot data, which is pretty simple to track, is close to make it useable. I looked at current season totals for Arsenal, Aston Villa, and Chelsea, and all of them end up fairly close to the aggregate info I have been tracking from EPL Index.  The Football-Data info under counts both Shots and Shots Against vs. what Opta tracks, but it’s within 10% of the aggregate totals, and since the differences are fairly consistent on both sides, it keeps TSR ratios close to the same.

The Bad News
Shots on Target info is completely different.

Whereas the shot tracking data is within 10%, Shots on Target has huge differences due to the different definitions used by the tracking companies. If your model uses Shots on Target modifications to adjust goal expectations, it won’t translate at all between the big companies and FD data.

One thing you might be able to do is crunch data across years for the SoT information and come up with a modifier for the Football Data info. Eyeballing these three clubs suggests that the FD numbers are between 63-70% higher than what Opta says. If that ratio is fairly constant, you can simply plug in the modifier and reverse engineer numbers close to Opta’s for all the years Football Data. It will be an imperfect solution, regardless, but it might get you close enough not to matter. I don’t have the time to do this right now, so if you do it (and crunch it across the lower leagues and the different countries) and find something useful, please let me know.

Conclusion
So there’s good news and bad news here. The good news is that shot data is fairly constant, which to me means you can use all the extra years FD has with some confidence. On the other hand, if you need Shots on Target info, you’ll need to put a lot more thought and work into the subject before you can come to any real conclusions. For now I’m going to stick with using whatever Opta info I have available, but this summer I might delve into Football League data from Football-Data.co.uk a bit more and see how I feel after that.

Best of luck!

–Ted Knutson
@mixedknuts on Twitter

Over the years, Mancini has also proven outstanding at winning domestic Cup competitions, winning five total Coppa Italias and FA Cups since 2001. This is a very impressive record, especially given that he won Cups with an undermanned Fiorentina squad and at Lazio when chaos reigned. But has the ability to bring home domestic cup trophies translated to success in Europe?

Mancini’s Champions League Performance

Inter 04-05 – Beat Porto in the Rd of 16, Destroyed in the QF by AC Milan (0-5 aggregate)
Inter 05-06 – Beat Ajax in Rd of 16, Lose in the QF to Villareal on away goals
Inter 06-07 – Lose to Valencia on away goals in the Rd of 16
Inter 07-08 – Lose to Liverpool in the Rd of 16 (red cards in both legs)
ManCity 11-12 – Fail to make it out of a tough group stage
ManCity 12-13 – Fail to make it out of a tough group stage

Now instead of two seasons, we have six seasons of data to analyse, four with Inter Milan and two with Manchester City. The group stages here equate to about the same number of games in one season of football, which is probably enough to try and judge a manager, though not nearly enough to run a statistical analysis. Small sample sizes make analyzing performance in Europe messy for just about anyone, but you work with what you’ve got.

Now during this time, Mancini wasn’t piloting underdog clubs – Inter were in the Top 10 of the Deloitte Money League consistently during his time as manager there, while City have one of the highest wage bills on the planet. (Note: High player wage bills are heavily correlated with success on the football pitch.) Therefore, you would expect his clubs to perform well at the domestic level as well as in the Champions League. Did they?

In six seasons of CL football, Mancini has produced two Quarterfinals appearances, two Round of 16 appearances, and two seasons where they didn’t make it out of the group phase. Given that his teams were likely favorites or strong favorites on To Advance lines out of the group stages and in the vast majority of their knockout matchups (excluding his first season against AC Milan), that has to be considered a bit disappointing. Yes, you can add context and develop plenty of reasons for why they didn’t advance, but both Inter and Manchester City were spending huge amounts of money presumably in pursuit of a Champions League trophy and Mancini has never even made a semifinal.

Mancini has four league titles across England and Italy and enough cup titles under his belt, that you have to consider him to be at least a good manager. On the other hand, his clubs barely punch their weight in Europe, and never seem to overperform.  Two seasons after Mancini was sacked at Inter, Mourinho won the Champions League title with Inter, beating Chelsea, the world’s greatest team (Barcelona), and Bayern Munich in the process. Yes, that team had a different composition, but still – Mou had almost immediate success in Europe at Inter Milan.  Mancini had four seasons and didn’t make a semi.

Conclusion
Sure, Manchester City have been unlucky in their group draws for the Champion’s League two years in a row, and it’s harsh to judge Mancini on CL success alone when they were only about 50% to progress out of the group in either year. However, after six seasons at the helm of two of Europe’s biggest clubs, I think you have to look at Mancini’s record and be sceptical of his ability to bring any club Champion’s League success. He’s been gifted with resources the like of which many managers will never see, and has failed to produce any notable success.

Ted Knutson
@mixedknuts on Twitter

Post Script: The 2003-2004 UEFA Cup Caveat
Mancini did make the semi-finals of a European club competition, and he did it with Lazio in the 2003-2004 UEFA Cup. On one hand, I want to give him credit for this, since it technically counts. On the other hand, I look at the fact that Lazio went through heavyweights Sturm Graz, Wisla Krakow, Besiktas, and I can’t do much other than shrug.

The team Lazio lost to in the Semifinal that year? Eventual champions Porto.

Managed by…

You were expecting someone else?