Ironically, Billy Beane is a big soccer nut. Maybe someday his relationship with the Liverpool owners will see his particular methods translated to big time soccer.

Until then I disagree that “we do not yet have good answers to these questions”. The people at places like Barca, Bayern, and Man. U. would not have had the kind of long term sustained excellence without such knowledge.

They may not have reduced it down to one stat freak like they do in the movie (it is a movie after all) but those places have an organization in place that works for them.

Soccer is a far more dynamic sport than the major American sports and so it resists the kind of statistical breakdown that can be more easily applied to baseball which is a series of static one on one interactions. Obviously so is soccer but in a far more dynamic fashion because of the comparative lack of breaks in the action from start to finish.

Beane’s basic concepts can still be applied but it may take a while to translate from a sport that has always been statistics heavy to one that traditionally has been light on them.

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This raised a number of questions for me about how you put together a team across different sports and how you assess which players will or will not fit into your system (a timely point for MLS teams looking to the draft on Thursday).

My comment was more about how do you assess who the best players are for your team/lineup. In baseball, you probably will see your batting average go up if you have a few big hitters behind you – does that make you a better player or just fortunate to be on a good team? Its similar to comparing GPAs between good and bad colleges – US News lumps them all together but presumably they should be weighted differently. Similarly, a 300 hitter on a good team may not play as well on a bad team.

Getting back to soccer – if a player is surrounded by a stronger supporting cast he will get more assists, more opportunities on goal etc. Does that make his Castrol/Opta/EA or other mathematical rating go up? Is there a way to isolate and quantify the qualities of an individual player?

In short, we do not yet have good answers to these questions – just look at how MLS teams have fared in the previous draft picks – but I think this is an interesting and important conversation to have.

thesoccerist.com

Much of the debate in American soccer about style versus substance. Apparently that is now leaking over to posts on blogs. I remember when I used to get slammed for pointing out spelling mistakes.

At any rate, Spurs are big club and subscribe to the rotation policy. Basically, you can play your best eleven until they drop and then it is next man up or you can try to strategically rotate them depending on the circumstances.

Very few, if any teams, start the same eleven every game.

The best managers are the ones who make the best decisions about who to play and when over the course of a very long and draining season.

The best analogy for a casual American soccer fan is the job a MLB manager has to do over the course of the season.

If he maintains his form, Dempsey is clearly someone who will play a fair amount. He will not get the same amount of time he got at Fulham because he is no longer the best player at the club.

That said, my point remains. In the past, I have been able to read the blog and it didn’t require much active thought to consume the content. More recently, I am having to force myself to concentrate more to follow the content because of the lack of linking words, the excessive use of abrupt breaks, and the aforementioned fluff.

This is probably getting long in the tooth, so I will leave it there. Thanks for engaging me. I am sure getting this kind of critique from a random internet poster is not your idea of fun, and I appreciate the discussion.

Wow. This is … not an accurate description of parenthesis. Thanks for sharing your views. I appreciate it, but this view on parenthesis is practically draconian. In fact, the use of parenthesis usually provides the exact opposite effect, allowing you (or more broadly, any reader) to include the exact same offsets you would hear in casual language without having to alter the base sentence.

It is actually the exact opposite of lazy or inconsiderate. It would be lazier to omit the parenthetical entirely. However, it gets included for the sake of completeness as a consideration to the reader. It assumes the reader’s capable of comprehended above a very basic reading level.

If you writing experience is strictly in “news” or technical writing, I understand why you’ve come to this view. I would just ask you to be a little more open-minded. Your had line stance on parenthesis is a perfectly justifiable personal preference, but as a hard line with which you distinction good and bad writing, it’s intolerant and untenable.

It’s just a stylistic preference. Calling somebody’s writing bad based on it is (I would offer) rude.

Again, thanks for your feedback, and I really appreciate all the comments you give us. Your feedback is always appreciated.

PS, and added later, I do agree that this post had more parenthetical that I would have liked, but a proportional comments would have been ‘Whoa, lots of parenthetical, Rich,” and we would have probably had a laugh. “Oops! Yeah, you might be,” would have probably would have been my response. Ultimately, though, each parenthetical is justifiable, even if the collection is sub-optimal.

Richard, I agree that unjustified use of cliche is way more problematic and much more irritating. However, consider this the humble opinion of one reader who did a little freelance news writing for a tech and startup news site. I think the writing quality has slipped a little bit since I first fell in love with this place during the summer and fall. Its a turn off and I find myself reading articles on other sites more frequently as a result. If I do happen to read something here these days, I almost always skip the first paragraph as it almost never contains useful information.

Again, just one opinion and I could be completely wrong. But it’s my opinion and it impacts me as a reader.

http://thesoccerist.blogspot.com/2013/01/can-you-buy-winning-team-in-epl.html

As someone who regularly points out typos to these guys, I think that complaints about form (unless they obscure meaning) are not helpful.

Time and place for everything.