The farewell to Paolo Maldini was accompanied by the adoption of the Moneyball Method, developed in US baseball by Billy Bean, based on data analysis for technical operations. Genoa’s bad experience has cooled its diffusion in Italy and caused distrust to take root. But its use in selecting and recruiting talented footballers could change everyone’s habits
The intelligence is artificial but the effects on the field are real. The Big Data revolution has long arrived in the world of sport. And after putting itself at the service of technical and medical staff, with indications on athletes’ performance data, it is also finding ground for application on the market, for the identification of players to acquire and strengthen the team.
The activity that in technical terms goes under the label of “selection of sports talent” has found a new matrix in the use of the algorithm. Football adapts and Italy with some delay compared to other countries, not even marginal. If a leading company like AC Milan is doing it now, the prospects for the development and adoption of the method change. Is it good or bad?
The third way between training and recruitment
Traditionally, the talent selection activity is carried out with two opposing criteria, training and recruitment. Training consists in handling raw talent, male and female athletes at a very young age, with ample room for improvement, to try to develop it within one’s own structures, to prepare it for competitions at a high level, in adulthood.
Recruitment consists in acquiring an already trained talent, through an operation that envisages a market transaction, with the training club or with the athlete. Training is a much more expensive and risky activity than recruitment. With the evolution of information retrieval and monitoring systems, a third criterion has been developed, scouting, which consists in building databases on athletes not with a view to their immediate acquisition, but in order to have a reasoned catalog of alternatives available to draw on whenever it will be necessary to carry out an operation.
In this sense, scouting leads to a high degree of refinement in carrying out the task, since individual athletes are analytically selected for their physical and technical characteristics, which can be cross-referenced for the construction of “suitable profiles”. With the development of information technologies, the use of algorithms has greatly improved the possibilities of processing information and refining research.
Traditionalists will always object, arguing that nothing can replace the direct vision of the athlete on the pitch, because only this experiential approach provides a complete picture of the potential of the identified “suitable profile”, especially as regards character and behavioral aspects. In reality the experiential element is neither eliminated nor neglected. Direct observation must remain (at least we hope) the last step in the talent selection process. The use of the algorithm serves to refine and make the operations that prepare for the definitive identification of the profile richer in cognitive material.
Metodo Moneyball
They call it the Moneyball Method. It was invented by William Lamar “Billy” Bean, a former baseball player who, once he started his career as a manager of the Oakland Athletics, developed a highly effective procedure for the selection of sports talent through the use of information technology and statistical data. With a budget well below the giants of Major League Baseball (MLB) he managed to build highly competitive formations.
In European football the method has been adopted to good effect by the Englishman Matthew Benham, who had previously built a successful career as a gambler, and the former Danish footballer Rasmus Ankersen. The two put the method to good use in managing Brentford in England and Midtjylland in Denmark.
Looking at these examples, it could be deduced that the use of the algorithm is a weapon available to average competitors, less endowed with financial resources, so that they can compete with the richest. Instead, signals are coming from very rich Premier League clubs that go in the same direction. Liverpool, under pressure from manager Jürgen Klopp, make extensive use of this method. Klopp himself was selected by the company through a specific study of statistical parameters. In Italy there are still not many followers.
The unfortunate precedent of Genoa
The reason for the delayed adoption of the Moneyball Method in our country is linked to its first experiment that ended badly. In the first season under the new US ownership of 777 Partners, Genoa bet on this solution, relying on the German couple formed by the general manager Johannes Spors and the coach Alexander Blessin.
The outcome of the camp was a relegation after fifteen consecutive championships in Serie A, with the accompaniment of vast ironies from the Genoan world itself which up until then had seen numerical data used to mainly perform other magic (read capital gains, favorite dish of the Preziosi era). But in the case of the application to the AC Milan transfer market, the recourse is to the original method. Because the US owner of the Rossoneri company, Gerry Cardinale, is a partner of Billy Bean.
So he knows what he’s handling. The Rossoneri world, and Italian football in general, were baffled by the way in which, at the end of last June, a pillar of Milanism like Paolo Maldini was shown the door, with the same dispassionateness that would have been used to send away an intern. Some additional perplexity is generated by the fact that the removal of a figure like that of Maldini (and his faithful transfer market man, Frederic Massara) in fact means the delivery of full powers to the men of the Moneyball Method, Geoffrey Moncada and Giorgio Furlani.
But beyond the respect for a totem in AC Milan’s history, this handover (which certainly could have been managed with a much different style) is the sign of a change of era. Which does not concern so much the specifics of Milan, but in general the way of doing the transfer market in Italy. Only time will tell if the change has been for the better.
So for the moment all that remains is to update the list of new arrivals for the Rossoneri: Christian Pulisic, Tjjani Reijnders, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Noah Okafor, Luka Romero. And make an appointment at the end of the championship to see how many of these the Moneyball Method will have made the right choice.
© Reproduction reserved
2023-07-24 17:35:39
#Devils #Algorithms #datadriven #Milan #transfer #market #works
