The Soccer Data Revolution

The first time I watched the famous baseball analytics film “Moneyball,” I asked myself, “Where the hell is soccer’s Billy Beane?” Now, for those of you who have somehow never seen this must-see movie, I was asking why no soccer geek had attempted to do what Beane did when he revolutionized baseball with his intelligent use of data to sign undervalued players to his team. Yes, I’ll admit, being the soccer geek that I am, I imagined being locked up in my room all day, studying my little book of numbers and eventually coming up with the secret of what it takes to win. Ideally, I was going to gift this formula to my favorite club, Liverpool FC, to help them finally win that ever elusive Premier League trophy. 

As it turns out, soccer already has its data geeks. And believe me, these soccer statisticians and fanatics are shaping the future of the sport. 

For poorer clubs stuck in a world in which the rich clubs only get more dominant each year, employing data analysts may, in fact, be their only hope. If used correctly, data analytics can help these mediocre clubs to drastically improve the quality of their match analysis, scouting, and training, allowing them to more effectively develop strategies to compete with the more affluent clubs. 

Few things are as painful as watching your team waste a ‘golden chance.’ Not many Chelsea fans will forget how Fernando Torres somehow failed to slide the ball into an empty goal against Manchester United in 2011. Regular fans, engaged in their often-heated post-match discussions, might say that the team missed a key opportunity. For the soccer analyst, however, it is much more useful to know just how good the missed chance was. The analyst can then provide the coach with a more objective evaluation of the team’s performance. But how does the analyst quantify the quality of a chance in the first place?

This is where the ingenious invention “expected goals” (xG) comes in. Taking into account variables such as how far from the goal a player is, how many defenders are around them, at what angle they are positioned from the center of the goal, and whether the ball is on the ground or in the air, xG models can determine the probability that a player, in nearly any given situation, will score a goal. 

The probability is calculated based on a large, historical database that records past data of the outcomes (goal or no goal) of real game situations. For example, a penalty kick in the English Premier League goes in about 77 percent of the time, which translates to a 0.77 goal value. For a soccer fan, this means that if your favorite team has a penalty, you can probably be optimistic, since the probability of them scoring is 0.77. 

For the analyst, xG is particularly useful because it provides an objective view of the quality of goal-scoring opportunities that a team has created over a period of time. A team may lose a game two to zero, for example, but looking at the data can soften the blow of the loss. If an analyst studies the post-game data and finds that the team actually created chances resulting in a predicted total goal value of three (the sum of the team’s xG probabilities), the team played well even though they did not get to capitalize on their efforts and score those predicted goals. 

Expected goals is just one example from a group of new, revolutionary metrics being used in soccer (others include expected assists, expected points, etc.). Forward thinking individuals are now using data to make more objective judgements about The Beautiful Game.

One such forward thinking individual, perhaps the closest soccer has come to finding its own Billy Beane, is Matthew Benham. Formerly a shrewd professional soccer better, Benham now owns FC Brentford in England, his beloved boyhood club, and FC Midtjylland in Denmark, the team with which he has found the most success. By introducing the use of data analytics, Benham has elevated Midtjylland from a mediocre club on the brink of bankruptcy to the champions of Denmark. The club uses analytics in areas such as scouting, in-game analysis, post-game analysis, and training. 

Of course, it’s one thing to have data and another to know what to do with it. Midtjylland’s success is remarkable, not only in the abundance of data they have been able to collect, but in their utilization and interpretation of that data as well. Midtjylland gives other small, relatively poor clubs the hope that they may too employ data analytics as a secret weapon in the economically unbalanced world of soccer. 

However, it is unlikely that the better-funded clubs will simply sit back and ignore the use of analytics. In fact, Liverpool FC (my dream employer and one of the wealthier soccer clubs) already employs data scientists. Willer Spearman, a Harvard educated physicist who has published numerous research papers, including one entitled, “Physics-Based Modeling of Pass Probabilities in Soccer,” works as the lead data scientist at the club. Tough competition, not just for my own career dreams, but for the poorer, mediocre clubs hoping to use analytics as their secret weapon.  

Some may feel that analytics cannot be used to predict every outcome in soccer or that the numbers take away from the emotion and complexity of the sport. And they would be right—but only to an extent. Soccer, with its low scoring nature and its susceptibility to random events, will always be a difficult sport to quantify and analyze. Data and probability can’t explain every outcome: for example, in 2015, Leicester City won the English Premier League with the odds stacked against them 5000 to one. But does this mean that any attempts to further our understanding of the game are fruitless? Matthew Benham and FC Midtjylland certainly wouldn’t say so.

As for the claim that numbers are taking the emotion away from soccer, I like to think of it this way: the numbers are not there to reduce the emotion of The Beautiful Game, they are simply meant to explain it. I, for one, felt a greater appreciation for the brilliance of Lionel Messi when I looked into his xG statistics and realized that, season after season, he scored from positions that most other players only score from 1 percent of the time.  

Soccer will always have an element of randomness to it. It is in this randomness, perhaps, that one finds beauty. The sport’s complexity also ensures that there probably will never be some simple mathematical formula that “solves the game.” However, there will be curious and intelligent minds like Matthew Benham that will constantly seek to push the boundaries of how we understand soccer. As for us regular soccer fans, we need only hope that the use of analytics will level the playing field and prevent soccer from becoming a sport dominated by the same exclusive group of rich clubs.

Mediocre Issue | November 2019

Wash your Tears Off in the Lake

Wash Your Tears Off in the Lake: In Praise of Mediocre Diving

'To vision profounder 

Man's spirit must dive."  -Emerson 

         Ella is standing backwards but facing me; tears are running down her face and neck. She’s thinking about her most recent back dive; she jumped too high and came straight down in the same spot, hitting the board with her lower back. It’s a common fear that almost never gets realized on the diving dock, and although she only got a bruise, she’s terrified of it happening again, and understandably so. Any horror story about being paralyzed or seriously injured in diving almost always has to do with hitting the board. The board naturally springs one outward, so it’s rare, but Ella had the misfortune of actualizing this fear. Her bruise was on the milder end of what the outcome could have been. Afterward, she practiced countless back approaches—essentially a backward pencil dive—to regain that distance, but still, it’s a tough fear to shake. She wants to do it, though, so she has to trust that she won’t hit the board again. 

The moment you dive off the board is elusive, like the very moment you wake up from sleep—you are never totally cognizant of it. That single second in the air is not conducive to thinking or planning. Ella has to commit to powerlessness, and she has trust in her own instincts. She lingers on the board, settling into her fear. Suddenly, she lifts her arms, swings around, and plummets backwards and headfirst into the icy lake water. She does the dive well, if not beautifully, but more importantly, she is not the same afterward. 

         At this particular tradition-based and achievement-oriented girls camp in small-town Maine, girls spend their summers working for the same awards that their mothers, grandmothers, and even some of their great- or great-great-grandmothers have earned. “Achievement-oriented culture” sounds bad, but at camp, it encourages risk-taking and failure and doesn’t idolize perfection in the way that schools do. These awards are the reason campers like Ella are so driven to be vulnerable and to conquer their fears. The silver pins that they receive are emblems of both individual hard work and perseverance, but also of their place in a long tradition of driven women. Ella’s courage in completing her back dive was catalyzed by the drive to achieve her Water Queen pin—a demanding award that is not often achieved because of the grit it requires. 

         There are also awards for various activities like swimming, identifying trees, and canoeing. They activities teach valuable lessons, but I think the most unique and instantaneously transformative activity is diving (it should be noted that this is something I never shut up about). We’re not a diving camp, but we have two boards on the dock; one is slightly higher than the other, and only get higher as the lake’s water level drops throughout the summer. It's an entirely mediocre setup. I have never been a competitive diver. I’m not a particularly good diver, and I've never been taught how to teach it, but from June through August, I spend my days holding a Lifeguard tube and teaching girls like Ella how to do elaborate dives I likely won’t ever attempt. The task of teaching diving with no formal training aside from safety protocols was at first unfamiliar and more than a bit overwhelming. And yet, I fell in love with it quickly. It was silly, stressful, rewarding, and more about emotional guidance than actual technique. I was seeing adolescent girls becoming radically more confident and independent before my eyes—it turns out that mediocre divers are the most rewarding type of student. For one award, a younger camper might be working on a simple approach, while others practice tuck, pike, or back dives for more advanced ones. The Water Queen award requires girls like Ella to master seven dives: a back dive, a flip, a twist, a tuck, an inward (jumping backwards off the board and flipping inward towards it, aka scary), a high dive, and a choice dive. 

         The awards themselves hold no weight outside of camp, of course, and the Water Queen pin only has clout with the distinct group of camp girls who understand what it is and how difficult it is to earn. The skills do, however, matter in the real world. These girls know how to grind. I watched them willingly thrust themselves over and over into freezing water, into waves and wind, into bellyflops and bruises and frustration and self-doubt. They may not be Olympic divers, but they learn grit, they take feedback, and they push through discomfort. 

         Innovation is a pillar of a mediocre diving program. Crocs, for example, are crucial on the diving dock. You can tell someone to “just jump higher,” but put a Croc on their head so that they don't look down while they’re doing their approach (Crocs float, and the campers have fun swimming for it after). Legs coming apart? Put a Croc in between their knees; it works like a charm. If they keep over-rotating, tell them to swim to the bottom of the lake and bring back sand—they’ll straighten right out. Our most dreaded and most effective invention is a game called “Jump or Dive.” The participant does their approach—the specific sequence of steps and arm motions that precede the dive—and jumps off the board, at which point a counselor yells “jump” or “dive.” It works, despite the terror involved. We have very limited insight as to how legitimate diving teaching works, but our methods have proved pretty effective in producing some solid dives. 

         There are certain things no human being can do (as of yet), like jumping off the Empire State Building without dying. But that is exactly what diving often feels like—impossible and terrifying and utterly beyond human ability. Knowing that the worst that can happen is a bellyflop, notwithstanding an almost freak accident like Ella’s, barely softens the pit that forms in the stomachs of so many of our divers. 

         Yet, fear is so fundamentally human: it’s instinctive but also learned, and it steers us away from the unknown and the unscripted. It suppresses the lives we might have otherwise had if we’d opted for a riskier choice when one was available. This is obviously not a horrible thing; we are fortunate to be biologically hardwired to fear things like driving off a cliff or eating spoiled food. But buffering the threat of death can also blunt the thrill of being alive. Adrenaline spikes from the perceived but unactualized threat of death. The terror of diving is primal like that—it turns out that bodies don’t know that throwing yourself headfirst off a springy plank is (probably) not actually going to hurt you. When you do it, though, and you end up safe and fine, it calls all of your fears into question: if you were wrong about this, what else could you be wrong about? If I just did something that I had formerly thought was impossible, how many other seemingly impossible things actually aren’t?

         The quality of the dive is not the point. It’s the act itself that matters: launching oneself in an unfamiliar direction, opening up to vulnerability and failure in front of the others on the dock, accepting criticism and recognizing that there is a difference between feedback and judgement. Where else do teen girls get to practice these fundamental skills? They go home in August to college-oriented school pressure, to a world that tells them they’re crazy for having feelings, to a social media culture that makes them feel compelled to present a curated, perfect image of themselves. It sounds trite, I know, to list these particular perils of being a youth in the contemporary world. But as cliche as it may seem to talk about them, they are the woes that these girls actually experience. Diving (especially mediocre diving) equips them to grapple with these challenges. Conquering one big fear can start to melt all the other ones that linger behind it. Learning how to do cool shit like backflips is just a plus.

         On a Wednesday night this past August, I handed out four tin foil crowns decorated with puffy paint, delicately placing them onto the heads of four adolescent girls in front of 121 other teens, 34 staff, and a sea of proud parents. I'll admit it—my eyes filled with tears as I pressed hard-earned silver pins into their open palms. They received explosive applause, and my pride for them in that moment remains inarticulable.

         Some of the girls didn’t get crowns; many of them just dove for fun. But Julia tasted self-confidence, Grace learned to persevere through frustration, Katie realized that there’s nothing wrong with messing up, especially on the first try. A century ago, my camp’s founder, Charlotte Vetter Gulick wrote, “In all the activities of camp we have striven to make them, not only a symbol of the big things in life, but a miniature epitome of that life, seen with [a] loving vision and attacked with courage and devotion. Because we believed that life was beautiful, we have tried to give a beautiful preparation for it, to awaken unquenchably a sense of its infinite significance.” Louder for the people in the back, Charlotte! Diving is this “beautiful preparation,” not because the dives themselves are visually beautiful, but because of the skills and courage it demands from the preparers. 

         I’d seen it countless times, but it still amazed me. When Ella did her back dive after hitting the board, I didn’t really focus on the height she got, her almost perpendicular entry into the flat lake, her pointed toes. Her eyes were still a bit puffy, but her tears had been washed off. When her head popped up through a wave, I caught sight of a grin, a glow of pride, a cleansing of her terror, and her anxiety assuaged, if not erased. At 16, she is learning the same courage I learned the first time I did a back dive. Later in the summer, when she was terrified to attempt a backflip, I promised to do one first in solidarity, and truly thought I was going to pee myself (those who can’t do, teach, as they say). We grew together that afternoon, with my bathing suit remaining un-pee-ified, and Ella safely far away from the board as she rotated in midair. 

The puffy-painted crown that kept slipping over her eyes in August was for her, but also for me. Somehow camp clout makes both campers and counselors stand a little taller and be a little riskier, even and especially after parents arrive to pick up their children and camp closes up for the year. I have a little diver tattoo on my ribcage, but for those of us who have dove, our little divers are always with us, whether they’re inked on your skin or not. Ella carries her back dive and backflip in her demeanor now, exuding confidence and bravery. Maybe that unrememberable instant in the air is absorbed instead of experienced. Wherever it resides, as I watch these girls grow up, I can see that it never leaves them. Tears always wash off in the lake, but the dive, in all of its glorious mediocrity, stays with them forever.

All names have been changed. 

Mediocre Issue | November 2019