This is SUCH A GREAT Article on Leicester City and their scientific scouting approach written by a Bloomberg editor. Its long but its a fascinating read (a lot of clubs could learn from this):
Leicester, Luck and the First Management Guru: John Micklethwait
2016-04-26 04:01:08.738 GMT
By John Micklethwait
(Bloomberg View) -- This column should begin with a
financial disclosure -- of the writer’s own ineptitude. For
around 20 years, every August I have bet 20 pounds on Leicester
City to win England’s Premier League. The wall of my office at
The Economist in London was festooned with the resulting betting
stubs, to be mocked by my colleagues who followed more
successful teams. True, Leicester did once finish second -- but
that was back in the 1928-29 season; their main battle in my
lifetime has been to avoid relegation, a struggle they have lost
seven times. Last summer, having moved to New York to work for
Bloomberg, I missed making my routine bet; the odds being
offered on Leicester winning the title were 5,000-1, but,
somewhere deep down, I assumed it was 20 pounds saved.
A huge mistake. With three matches to go, Leicester stands
seven points clear at the top of the Premier League. If I had
bet on Leicester, I would need to keep the ticket in a bank
vault: it will be worth 100,000 pounds if the team wins just one
of its remaining three games (and Leicester may not even need to
do that if the second-placed team, Tottenham Hotspur, slips up).
Earlier this month, fearful bookmakers started offering
Leicester fans the chance to cash in their betting slips early
for around 75 percent of their potential value.
Having supported Leicester for nearly half a century,
having sneaked into a recent home game disguised as a
Southampton supporter (the only ticket available), and even
having bet on Emile Heskey, a notoriously inaccurate Leicester
striker, to be top scorer in a World Cup, this columnist is
obviously hopelessly biased as well as financially incompetent.
But please accept two mathematically proven truths. The first is
that, if Leicester hangs on to win the Premiership, my team will
have pulled off the most outrageous surprise in modern team
sports. The second is that Leicester will have done so by
applying scientific management to the least scientific of
activities.
The first truth can be proven by the odds. Nothing in
American sports comes close. Judged on their gambling prices,
both the Philadelphia Phillies and the Atlanta Braves are pretty
useless at baseball, but as spring training dawned you could
only get odds of 500-1 on them to win the World Series.
Leicester was deemed 10 times less likely to win the
Premiership. By way of contrast, bookmakers think that Bono
stands a 5,000-1 chance of being the next pope.
The long odds last summer reflected a couple of realities.
For starters, the Premier League, the most watched in the world,
is an oligopoly: Four big clubs -- Manchester United, Chelsea,
Manchester City and Arsenal -- have won all the titles in the
past 20 years. The big four in England get most of the
television revenue (especially once you add in the European
Champions League) and they have the biggest stadiums so they can
buy the best players and pay them better wages -- and there has
been a very high correlation between wage bills and league
position. Last year’s Premier League winner, Chelsea, spent 215
million pounds assembling its squad, roughly 10 times the cost
of Leicester’s team.
The other justification for the long odds is that last
summer Leicester looked pretty useless. They had just achieved
one sporting miracle, somehow avoiding being one of the three
clubs that were relegated, despite being bottom for most of the
season. "The Great Escape," as it was known, saw Leicester win
seven of its last nine games, an amazing feat for a struggling
team. But miracles don’t tend to happen twice -- and in the
off-season Leicester lost its manager, Nigel Pearson, and
arguably its best player, an elderly Argentine by the name of
Esteban Cambiasso. In Pearson’s place, the club’s Thai owners
hired a much loved Italian coaching veteran, Claudio Ranieri,
who has never won any major league. Given all that, 5,000-1 did
not seem absurd odds.
So how have they done this? Luck has played a role. The
main clubs have all had appalling seasons: Chelsea, which sacked
its manager, is currently in ninth place; Manchester United is
in fifth place and Liverpool, the other big club, is seventh.
All have been hit by injuries and all have played huge minutes
in non-league games. Leicester, by contrast, has had very few
injuries and was (paradoxically) fortunate to get knocked out of
the domestic cups quickly. Ranieri has thus been able to field
the same team week after week, the one big disruption being the
sending off, in dubious circumstances, of their goal machine,
Jamie Vardy, which meant he missed last weekend’s match. (They
still won 4-0.)
Where, then, is the scientific management? One clue can be
found in the astonishing job Leicester has done buying players.
The club’s scouts found Vardy playing non-league football and
paid 1 million pounds for him, while Riyad Mahrez, a pencil-
legged Algerian, was plucked out of the French second division
for half that amount. Several of Leicester’s players came in on
free transfers, because they had been rejected by their previous
clubs, mostly for being too old. There is thus an element of the
Dirty Dozen about Leicester -- a group of ne’er-do-wells trying
to steal a fortune. It has become every football fan’s second
team not just because Leicester gives every football fan some
hope, but also because, under the avuncular Ranieri, its players
seem unusually team-like and free of the sort of egos that
bedevil professional sports.
But there was mathematics behind this, as well. A little
like the Oakland Athletics, the baseball team that Michael Lewis
chronicled in “Moneyball,” Leicester’s scouts were obsessed with
statistics. N’Golo Kante, the midfielder they bought last
summer, was not well-known, but he had topped the French leagues
two years in a row for the number of interceptions he made. The
numbers also detected that Mahrez had a rare ability to dribble
past people. Another focus of the scouts has been speed:
Leicester has several of the fastest players in the Premier
League.
Once they have the players, they follow their statistics
relentlessly, with match data kept on tablets. The team looks at
what players do in the 10 seconds before and after they touch
the ball. Leicester players even seem to foul scientifically,
slowing down their opponents by taking turns to obstruct them,
so that few of the Leicester players get booked or sent off.
Some of these science-based ideas predated Ranieri, but he
has embraced them, becoming the Frederick Winslow Taylor of
football. In business history, Taylor is the first proper
management guru, the man credited with inventing stopwatch
management, management consultants and sundry other evils.
Before Taylor started spouting his ideas at the end of the 19th
century, nobody assumed there was much of a science to business.
But Taylor, a mechanical engineer by training, argued you could
improve productivity and companies by measuring how long it took
factory workers to do individual tasks (hence the stopwatch) and
then redesigning workplaces and management practices. It was
Taylor’s scientific ideas that Henry Ford and other American
industrialists spread round the world. Though Charlie Chaplin
satirized them in “Modern Times,” they proved astoundingly
successful.
In Ranieri’s case, the end product is not a car but the
rapid counterattack. This in itself is another innovation. All
teams have always counterattacked, but few have based their game
so completely around it. In most matches, the team that keeps
control of the ball more scores more goals. Teams like Barcelona
and Arsenal are famous for never letting their opponents touch
it. Not Leicester. Last weekend, Swansea had possession 62
percent of the time, but they still lost 4-0. Leicester’s tactic
is to let their opponents have the ball, wait until they make a
mistake and then attack at remarkable speed: Hence all those
quick players and the unusual disciplined approach.
Will Leicester win the premiership? Being a Leicester fan
makes you a pessimist. Even now, the supporters’ favorite song
is “We’re Staying Up” rather than “We’re Going to Win the
League.” Tottenham has an easier road ahead. There is the
persistent fear that it will go wrong. When it does so, I will
be heartbroken, but at least I will have saved 20 pounds.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the
editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story:
John Micklethwait at [email protected]
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
David Shipley at [email protected]
Leicester, Luck and the First Management Guru: John Micklethwait
2016-04-26 04:01:08.738 GMT
By John Micklethwait
(Bloomberg View) -- This column should begin with a
financial disclosure -- of the writer’s own ineptitude. For
around 20 years, every August I have bet 20 pounds on Leicester
City to win England’s Premier League. The wall of my office at
The Economist in London was festooned with the resulting betting
stubs, to be mocked by my colleagues who followed more
successful teams. True, Leicester did once finish second -- but
that was back in the 1928-29 season; their main battle in my
lifetime has been to avoid relegation, a struggle they have lost
seven times. Last summer, having moved to New York to work for
Bloomberg, I missed making my routine bet; the odds being
offered on Leicester winning the title were 5,000-1, but,
somewhere deep down, I assumed it was 20 pounds saved.
A huge mistake. With three matches to go, Leicester stands
seven points clear at the top of the Premier League. If I had
bet on Leicester, I would need to keep the ticket in a bank
vault: it will be worth 100,000 pounds if the team wins just one
of its remaining three games (and Leicester may not even need to
do that if the second-placed team, Tottenham Hotspur, slips up).
Earlier this month, fearful bookmakers started offering
Leicester fans the chance to cash in their betting slips early
for around 75 percent of their potential value.
Having supported Leicester for nearly half a century,
having sneaked into a recent home game disguised as a
Southampton supporter (the only ticket available), and even
having bet on Emile Heskey, a notoriously inaccurate Leicester
striker, to be top scorer in a World Cup, this columnist is
obviously hopelessly biased as well as financially incompetent.
But please accept two mathematically proven truths. The first is
that, if Leicester hangs on to win the Premiership, my team will
have pulled off the most outrageous surprise in modern team
sports. The second is that Leicester will have done so by
applying scientific management to the least scientific of
activities.
The first truth can be proven by the odds. Nothing in
American sports comes close. Judged on their gambling prices,
both the Philadelphia Phillies and the Atlanta Braves are pretty
useless at baseball, but as spring training dawned you could
only get odds of 500-1 on them to win the World Series.
Leicester was deemed 10 times less likely to win the
Premiership. By way of contrast, bookmakers think that Bono
stands a 5,000-1 chance of being the next pope.
The long odds last summer reflected a couple of realities.
For starters, the Premier League, the most watched in the world,
is an oligopoly: Four big clubs -- Manchester United, Chelsea,
Manchester City and Arsenal -- have won all the titles in the
past 20 years. The big four in England get most of the
television revenue (especially once you add in the European
Champions League) and they have the biggest stadiums so they can
buy the best players and pay them better wages -- and there has
been a very high correlation between wage bills and league
position. Last year’s Premier League winner, Chelsea, spent 215
million pounds assembling its squad, roughly 10 times the cost
of Leicester’s team.
The other justification for the long odds is that last
summer Leicester looked pretty useless. They had just achieved
one sporting miracle, somehow avoiding being one of the three
clubs that were relegated, despite being bottom for most of the
season. "The Great Escape," as it was known, saw Leicester win
seven of its last nine games, an amazing feat for a struggling
team. But miracles don’t tend to happen twice -- and in the
off-season Leicester lost its manager, Nigel Pearson, and
arguably its best player, an elderly Argentine by the name of
Esteban Cambiasso. In Pearson’s place, the club’s Thai owners
hired a much loved Italian coaching veteran, Claudio Ranieri,
who has never won any major league. Given all that, 5,000-1 did
not seem absurd odds.
So how have they done this? Luck has played a role. The
main clubs have all had appalling seasons: Chelsea, which sacked
its manager, is currently in ninth place; Manchester United is
in fifth place and Liverpool, the other big club, is seventh.
All have been hit by injuries and all have played huge minutes
in non-league games. Leicester, by contrast, has had very few
injuries and was (paradoxically) fortunate to get knocked out of
the domestic cups quickly. Ranieri has thus been able to field
the same team week after week, the one big disruption being the
sending off, in dubious circumstances, of their goal machine,
Jamie Vardy, which meant he missed last weekend’s match. (They
still won 4-0.)
Where, then, is the scientific management? One clue can be
found in the astonishing job Leicester has done buying players.
The club’s scouts found Vardy playing non-league football and
paid 1 million pounds for him, while Riyad Mahrez, a pencil-
legged Algerian, was plucked out of the French second division
for half that amount. Several of Leicester’s players came in on
free transfers, because they had been rejected by their previous
clubs, mostly for being too old. There is thus an element of the
Dirty Dozen about Leicester -- a group of ne’er-do-wells trying
to steal a fortune. It has become every football fan’s second
team not just because Leicester gives every football fan some
hope, but also because, under the avuncular Ranieri, its players
seem unusually team-like and free of the sort of egos that
bedevil professional sports.
But there was mathematics behind this, as well. A little
like the Oakland Athletics, the baseball team that Michael Lewis
chronicled in “Moneyball,” Leicester’s scouts were obsessed with
statistics. N’Golo Kante, the midfielder they bought last
summer, was not well-known, but he had topped the French leagues
two years in a row for the number of interceptions he made. The
numbers also detected that Mahrez had a rare ability to dribble
past people. Another focus of the scouts has been speed:
Leicester has several of the fastest players in the Premier
League.
Once they have the players, they follow their statistics
relentlessly, with match data kept on tablets. The team looks at
what players do in the 10 seconds before and after they touch
the ball. Leicester players even seem to foul scientifically,
slowing down their opponents by taking turns to obstruct them,
so that few of the Leicester players get booked or sent off.
Some of these science-based ideas predated Ranieri, but he
has embraced them, becoming the Frederick Winslow Taylor of
football. In business history, Taylor is the first proper
management guru, the man credited with inventing stopwatch
management, management consultants and sundry other evils.
Before Taylor started spouting his ideas at the end of the 19th
century, nobody assumed there was much of a science to business.
But Taylor, a mechanical engineer by training, argued you could
improve productivity and companies by measuring how long it took
factory workers to do individual tasks (hence the stopwatch) and
then redesigning workplaces and management practices. It was
Taylor’s scientific ideas that Henry Ford and other American
industrialists spread round the world. Though Charlie Chaplin
satirized them in “Modern Times,” they proved astoundingly
successful.
In Ranieri’s case, the end product is not a car but the
rapid counterattack. This in itself is another innovation. All
teams have always counterattacked, but few have based their game
so completely around it. In most matches, the team that keeps
control of the ball more scores more goals. Teams like Barcelona
and Arsenal are famous for never letting their opponents touch
it. Not Leicester. Last weekend, Swansea had possession 62
percent of the time, but they still lost 4-0. Leicester’s tactic
is to let their opponents have the ball, wait until they make a
mistake and then attack at remarkable speed: Hence all those
quick players and the unusual disciplined approach.
Will Leicester win the premiership? Being a Leicester fan
makes you a pessimist. Even now, the supporters’ favorite song
is “We’re Staying Up” rather than “We’re Going to Win the
League.” Tottenham has an easier road ahead. There is the
persistent fear that it will go wrong. When it does so, I will
be heartbroken, but at least I will have saved 20 pounds.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the
editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story:
John Micklethwait at [email protected]
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
David Shipley at [email protected]
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