Let’s Talk About Twitter

Welcome to ye auld personal blog. It’s been a while. 

So a conversation happened on Twitter last night that definitively made up my mind on something I’ve been debating for a while and I wanted to walk through my feelings on the process.

So I’m checking my LinkedIn inbox (my least checked one) at 11:30 at night and run across a request. It’s a request I have received basically monthly this year from different people and I thought it was weird so I made a tweet about it, as it is very anti-millenial in its nature.

Random LinkedIn DM from a student:

“Hey, love your work. I was wondering if we could…

CONNECT ON A PHONE CALL

to discuss career options, etc.”

You guys are generally good kids, but this is crazy talk. It’s like leaving a voice mail – just red flags everywhere.

— Ted Knutson (@mixedknuts) August 5, 2019

And then a follow-up tweet.

It’s hard for busy people to even find time to answer public emails and DMs adequately – a status that many of us feel guilty about, but balance against not even spending enough time answering all of our own employees and friends properly EITHER…

Learn to write lovely letters.

— Ted Knutson (@mixedknuts) August 5, 2019

 

I’m like, ha, that’s kind of funny, people asking for phone calls to connect. Who ever hops on a phone call in the modern generation? And even worse, how the hell would I fit in additional calls in my schedule, especially without missing them, being late, whatever, which would cross my personal threshold for feeling terrible and rude. I try never to be late to anything nor to cancel appointments if I can help it at all, no matter who they are with.

And then the replies started rolling in…

There were a lot more that were angry I was “dunking on” the young person who came to me for advice. Which to me was weird, because there was no specific person I was talking about, it was a general occurrence that kept happening, it was anonymous, and between the two tweets, I thought I made the tradeoffs quite clear.

Hopefully if you read my responses to people last night, you’ll see that I actually feel quite bad about not being able to respond like I used to. But hey, maybe recruiter guy who loves 5-minute phone calls is right and somehow, after all these years of extreme productivity across many jobs, I am actually bad at managing my time effectively.

Yesterday was a Monday. What did I do on Monday?

• 20 minutes To Do List writing.
• 3 hours of inbounds. This includes email, Twitter DMs, LinkedIn. Average of 5 minutes per email. Thoughtful stuff takes longer. Legal documents too. We haaaates them. 
• Slack is its own thing that I do not know how to account for. Sometimes it’s just overhead of watching conversations, other times it’s active productive work.
• 30 minutes Whatsapp
• 6 hours of calls and meetings.
• Out of those calls and meetings, I probably have an hour of my own follow up work.

And that’s just work stuff. Normally I have 30 minutes of school run, 30 minutes of commute time, and whatever basic life maintenance that often includes making food, doing laundry, cleaning dishes, and not working out nearly often enough. 

I also have kids that deserve and need daily attention to live. And a lovely wife whom I would like to stay married to and who has her own insanely busy job and wow I should really find time to have an actual conversation with her more often.

Okay, but that’s Monday. Everyone’s Monday sucks, right? (For the record, my Monday doesn’t suck, it’s just busy.)

Let’s take my last Thursday at work.

• To Do List
• 3-4 hours Inbounds
• 1 Hour Job Interview
• 2 Hours Conference Planning Meeting
• 1 Hour Egypt Weekly Call
• 90 minutes unplanned customer calls or meeting drop-ins (SUPER valuable stuff).
• 30 minutes pre-scheduled task I needed to build into my schedule or I would not get done on deadline.

And this assumes that I am not doing project work or writing strategy docs or any number of other things that I actually do.

A lot of my recent time has gone into testing and feeding back on IQ Tactics. It still needs more. My spare cycles this month will go into designing [REDACTED], which won’t appear until mid-2020. I’m already a month behind where I should be with this, but the summer has been crazy good + busy on the customer end, so I needed to focus there.

I’ve also been spending more and more time learning about startup businesses from some very rich veins of material that I didn’t know existed until recently. This shit is hard. I am dumb. Many clever people have chosen to give me useful information that I would only learn through painful experience otherwise.

I don’t spend enough time learning. I need to do it more. I do generally get just enough thinking time, but that largely comes on commutes and walking my dog. It’s crazy important time for problem solving and design.

And I also need a bit of time for myself to unwind. I do this usually by reading fiction or playing video games.

There is also zero chance – like none whatsoever – I sacrifice sleep to create more time in my day. Less sleep would make me dumber (science!), and end up a drag on every single thing I do. Sleep science is legit. Find time to sleep enough.

Sooooo yeah, I’m actually pretty good at managing my time. In fact, I’m basically maxed out for balancing business, family, and mental health, but sometimes it is worth checking.

Back to The Angry Place…

These three are my employees and they are joking, but there’s a kernel of truth in there too. I should probably be spending more time talking to as many employees as I can. I don’t owe random people on the internet anything, but I owe a lot to my employees, and they are quite frankly the reason the company is successful at all.

So these guys need more time, but I am mostly maxed out. Where can I find the time?

Let’s talk about Twitter…

I’ve been on the platform for around a decade now, and I still think it is amazing, but the tone has changed dramatically over the years. It used to be a fascinating space of collaboration and friendly hangouts. Disagreements were civil, and when we had them, it felt more like academic discourse, especially in the analytics community. Now Twitter in general is a cauldron that’s always near a boil. Everyone seems to treat everyone else as if they are an asshole, at all times.

As occasional behavior, it was acceptable historically. The block button is useful. As default behavior, it’s pretty toxic. I blame the political climate for a lot of this – it’s harder to treat people nicely when everyone is a ball of anxiety at all times, but the larger problem is that seemingly half the online population has given up trying.

(FWIW the analytics community became far more competitive and less collaborative for various reasons, but largely because many of us did end up competing against each other for various jobs, contracts, etc.)

Also, the entitlement people feel about anything regarding my own time or activity is illegitimate and non-existent, even if you think otherwise. It is great that people appreciate my work and the work at StatsBomb. A lot of people bust their asses to make it such, and I have written literally hundreds of free pieces over the years for people to spend time with.

Beyond that the public is entitled to nothing except what I choose to give. If you feel otherwise, kindly fuck off. That is the line between public self and private self and it is one that must exist for people to maintain sanity. Learn to respect it and appreciate it, because it is what enables you to have interactions with even moderately famous people around the world in the first place.

(I am not famous. I know famous people. I don’t know how they do it.)

So if I need to find some time, I can spend less time on The Angry Place (Twitter). Contrary to a lot of people’s use, I actually need Twitter to follow industry news across football and the sports data space, but it doesn’t need to be interactive. And I could certainly use fewer “fuck that guy” moments in my life.

I could also be the problem. Maybe I am communicating badly and failing to convey nuance when I do tweet. Or maybe I just really am an asshole, though the people who interact with me regularly outside of Twitter aren’t really feeding that back to me, so who knows. Communicating badly via tweets means you should still stop tweeting, either way.

So I am going to take a break for the rest of the month, at the very least. My CTO Thom Lawrence tried it recently and said it was glorious. If I want to communicate with the general public, I’ll either write something over here in long form, or publish it on StatsBomb.com. 

And if you want to communicate with me, definitely send an email (ted@statsbomb.com). As noted above, I read literally everything that comes into my various email boxes. This is true even if you never get a response from me, which is almost exclusively because I simply don’t have time. I read everything, evaluate it, question it, and apparently go right back to being arrogant, immodest and egotistical.

Or you didn’t read my pinned tweet where I already answered your question.

–Ted

For those wondering about me personally, my life is really great. Our business has taken off in ways I could only dream about, I love our team, and the projects we are working on are incredibly rewarding intellectually and personally. My family life is also fab, even if it’s insanely busy, and my kids are amazing little people. I feel very, very lucky to be where I am today.

Does Your Manager Suck? Let’s Find Out!

One of the things I’ve been mulling over recently is how team stats are both a reflection of the players and of the man in charge. Even in this era of unprecedented player power, a team’s manager still picks the team sheet, and players generally need to do what the manager wants in order to stay in the lineup.

But when it comes to managerial evaluation, more than anywhere else in football, it is incredibly hard to divorce personality from performance. Managers who are grumpy gits with no sense of humor get away with far less than the slick salesmen whose performance is never more than average wherever they land. Strong tactical, technical managers who aren’t that great with the press often seem less fondly remembered than their less successful, but smoother talking counterparts.

How can analytics help with regard to manager evaluation, and better separate the good managers from the bad?

Things We Think We Know About Football – July 2013

Some days it’s good to take a step back from the daily deluge of information and try to organize what you think you have learned recently. I’ve been writing regularly on football analytics for about six weeks now (and off and on for seven months), and I’d say half the topics I’ve covered are based on poking around the data, and the other half are riffs on insight from other writers. I certainly feel a lot smarter about the game and about analytics than I did before, but what do I really know? And more generally, what do people in the analytics community think they know about the game that maybe they didn’t a month or two ago?

Crosses Are Bad
There are a couple of references for this that I really like. The first ones are from WillTGM, who looked at crossing generally as well as in the context of Liverpool, last summer. Will’s task was to look at whether Liverpool chose to play a heavy-crossing game tactically the year Kenny Dalglish was fired, and then to investigate whether that type of tactical choice is particularly effective at generating goals. I’m linking to the whole category of pieces he did, because they are really well written, explore a number of different aspects, and should basically be required reading for anyone interested in the topic from an analytics perspective.

Will concludes that open play crossing is extremely difficult (20.5% accuracy vs. nearly 34% from set pieces), and that most teams aren’t very efficient at converting them into goals. Liverpool did indeed choose to cross the ball an awful lot that season, but goals did not pour in as a result. In general, nobody is effective at turning crosses into goals. (I’m shortchanging the work a bit here when I summarize – he covered all sorts of useful stuff. Just go read them.)

The second one is from @footballfactman, looking at Theo Walcott’s crossing, which is deemed a) generally inaccurate and b) surprisingly devastating. Paul digs a little deeper and discovers that most of Walcott’s assists are from short (presumably low) crosses and pullbacks. In fact, from having watched Arsenal constantly, I would guess the majority of Theo’s crosses period have been low and hard, and he had an almost psychic relationship with RVP and that near post run. This is dramatically different from what you would typically get from Golden Balls or Leighton Baines. Because of this style, they are easier for defenders to simply cut out and clear, but they also result in a reasonable amount of goals when completed. It would be interesting to see how many of the cutouts from this type of pass result in possession going right back to the attacking team, since they don’t see very controllable.

The point here is that crossing is really hard. Even Baines, who is one of the best in the Premier League at completing them, only succeeds in finding a teammate 30% of the time.

Headed Shots Are Bad
This one is fascinating because if you do the surface analysis, it looks like this.

That image is taken directly from Colin Trainor’s seminal examination of the subject , and if you stop at the surface examination you suddenly think “WOW, headers are the way to go. They are just as accurate as ground shots, they are three times less likely to be blocked, 10% less likely to be saved (based on percentage comparison), and 33% more likely to score a goal. Those numbers are massive!”

Not so fast, my friend.

This… this is the area where good, detailed analysis comes into play.

When controlled for location as Colin did, headers are considerably worse at scoring than ground shots in every single spot on the pitch. The only thing that makes headers look so amazing is that they are all taken relatively close to the goal. Meanwhile, ground shots come from everywhere (even though they shouldn’t – that’s a topic for a different day).

Headed Passes Are Bad Too
This one came up as a result of the piece I wrote complaining about how big forwards don’t fit into Arsenal’s general strategy, so why does Wenger keep buying them?!? Anyway, it sparked a bigger discussion that not only deserves its own article, it also indicates a need to change the way we break out and display passing stats. Here’s the quick hit:

Player	Ground PS%	Ground Pass	Head PS%	Headed Pass	Total PS%
Giroud	77.9%	430	39.3%	234	64
Dzeko	79.5%	517	32.1%	131	69
Ibrahimovic	78.5%	1165	41.4%	111	75
Van Persie	86.4%	831	39.6%	91	80
Lewandowski	78.9%	560	42.3%	123	72
Carroll	81.8%	340	38.6%	321	61

*pause for effect*

Headed passes from forwards are half as likely to be completed as ones on the ground.

There is sense to this. The hits that players take when trying to head the ball would be instant fouls if anyone did the same when they are standing on the ground. Additionally, the quality of the aerial ball itself is so much more important than the quality of a ball played to your feet. A headed pass is a first-time pass, every time. Oh, and unlike a pass along the ground, the trajectory of the ball now exists in three dimensions instead of two. Heading is just really bloody hard.

Andy Carroll has nearly equal amounts of attempted passes with his feet as his head – of course he’s going to look terrible. Maybe the problem isn’t with passing skill with the big forwards, maybe the problem lies with the approach?

Obviously it’s an important part of the game, but heading the ball simply isn’t something you want your offensive players to do a lot of if you can help it.

Passing Bleed Is Bad
I discussed this in brief when I talked about Olivier Giroud at Arsenal, but it deserves application on a broader scale.  Central midfielders pass the ball 50 to 80 times a match. A 5% difference in player completion percentage is 3-4 passes a match. A 10% difference means 6-8 more failed passes in the central midfield, and at that point it really starts to matter. It also has a trickle-down effect into what kind of passes your team has to make to be safe, and what kind they are capable of making to attack (think long, diagonal balls to wide forwards on the counter-attack).

Passing percentages vary widely due to tactical considerations, but if you control for those types of things, you want the best passers possible all over your squad. Choosing a player with a 5% lower success rate that makes up for it in other areas is fine, occasionally. However, 5% worse across an entire team that passes 500 times a match results in 25 more possessions for the opposition, every game.

Lesser passers bleed away possession to the opposition, and eventually that bleeding will lead to goals.

Football is Inherently About Percentages
It’s true, and the game does not give a damn whether people care about this or not, because it is imposed as one of the basic structures of playing football.

I know that’s statty/geeky as hell, but it is a simple, obvious truth. The sooner this is accepted, the sooner people can go about applying the principles to make their teams better.

Conclusion: Strategies that revolve around crossing and heading are hugely inferior strategies.

Look, this isn’t my conclusion, this is what math says.

Crossing is hard.
Heading is hard.
Passing the ball as a header? Also really hard.

So why would any manager choose to do it regularly?

I have two theories on this, from two different angles.

1)      This approach makes sense if it is rare and teams are unprepared for it. If the vast majority of the league plays normally, and your squad employs a physical, aerial approach, teams may be uncomfortable playing that style of football and you have an advantage. However, once a number of teams play this style, counter-strategies (like putting four centerbacks in the lineup across the back line and/or playing all your tall players) come into play that destroy this.

2)      It’s cheaper to play this way than competing with other teams for “normal” players. I might believe this if I didn’t see how much Sam Allardyce and especially Stoke had spent on players in the last five years.

So uh yeah… I don’t think either of my theories make logical sense anymore. Therefore I honestly don’t know why any smart manager, and especially an analytically savvy one, would choose this avenue for their team.

Mixed Strategies Are Not Only Good, They Are Vital
So this is where it gets tricky. Crosses are bad. Balls in the air are bad. Headed shots are inferior to ones on the ground from the same location.

BUT

Image from thetimes.co.uk

You need to be able to perform all of these at a reasonable level in order to make your opponent respect they are part of the arsenal. You need to threaten from wide to keep the defense from simply packing the box so tightly nothing ever gets through.  You also really need to be able to head the ball well to have a chance at scoring goals from longer free kicks and corners.  So even when they aren’t deployed as a primary avenue of attack, these things need practice, and work, and players who have the skill to turn them into threats.

However, when you bring it back to percentages, they don’t have to be the primary or even the secondary options. You need to enact them just enough that your opponents don’t know what’s coming all the time.

The interesting thing is, when applied in this fashion, the effectiveness of these lower percentage plays often goes up. Teams get so focused on shutting down the central passing and lateral movement, that they overbalance and leave the break to the byline open. Suddenly defenders are scrambling to prevent a free break on your keeper, and the cutback to the penalty spot is completely open.

Central defenders’ legs get tired from chasing speedy guys around for 75 minutes, and they no longer defend aerial crosses to the far post as well. Chicharito/Dzeko have a late-game feeding frenzy.

The short corners you keep taking pull out not just one, but two extra men from the box, and that was the guy that was supposed to mark the player on your team who just got an open header.

So yeah, all those things listed above are bad, but… you can’t just play it on the ground all the time, or your team becomes predictable and easier to stop . Mixed strategies aren’t just recommended, they are vital when it comes to success. This is true whether your team is trying to pass the ball into the back of the net every game, or whether your manager has procured Andy Carroll as the pack horse for their own special brand of hoof ball.

Brain dump, finished.

Class dismissed!

–TK

Holy Shit, Football Is A Game Where Every Team Plays the Percentages

I haven’t written this article yet because my brain has been chewing its cud here for some time. It’s not hyperbole to say this is the single most important concept guiding my analytics research and the way I think about the game. It is addressed with the briefest of kisses in the Giroud article, but it’s a topic you can write a book on and someone, at some point, almost assuredly will.

As the title indicates, everything in football comes down to actions, and how successful you are at completing those actions. In short, percentages. We never think about it this way, but just by playing football, you are inevitably throwing yourself into the hands of the probability gods, and the only way to push them to guarantee your favour is to create better percentages.

Confused? Don’t be… there are examples bloody everywhere.

What the Hell Are We Doing? Goals and Transfer Shopping

Today’s piece is inspired by the early summer transfer signings. The goals in the title don’t refer to actual goals that are scored on the pitch, though that’s what I normally write about. Today, the word “goals” is referring to team milestones.

Literally, what is your team trying to accomplish this year?

Are they simply hoping to survive in the top tier of football? To snuggle deep into mid-table obscurity? To compete for a spot in Europe? To get into the Champions League? To win the Champions League?

All of those goals have different requirements in terms of what kind of players your team should be buying, how much they should be spending, how many players are needed in the first place, etc. Everything in football has a cost, not just in terms of £££, but also in terms of expenditure.  Money is a resource, but so are effective player minutes. At some point, rotation becomes absolutely vital, even for smaller teams.

Want your team to make a deep cup run or two? You either need a bigger squad, or you can expect it to cost you places in the league. Given how much the English Premier League now pays out in prize money based on league finish, that money adds up quickly.

Want your team to compete for the Europa League as well? That will burn a lot of player minutes. The more minutes your team plays, the more likely they are to get injured. If your first team is absorbing all of those minutes, then your best players will be the ones who get injured, and that has an effect on every other competition you are in. Also, even if nobody really mentions this, fatigue is totally a thing.