I was watching that last night. Some guy kept planning Copacabana and I learned that the bartender has a remote that let's him skip a song on the jukebox.
The one guy seemed to be in pain more often than was good for him.
Speaking of time travelers, the Messi/Lamine Yamal thing is crazy.
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5614184/2024/07/06/lionel-messi-lamine-yamal-photo-barcelona/
The US is totally unprepared to host the World Cup, who could have guessed?
It's not for another two years, though. Plenty of time. And it isn't like the Olympics where you have to do loads of construction work. Hosting the World Cup requires lots of stadiums and some hotels for the teams, both of which the US has already.
This isn't a US problem, it's a CONMEBOL (South America) problem.
The US ran a Copa America here back in 2016 and everything was fine (field quality, security, etc.). But USSF made a *ton* of money, which CONMEBOL was upset about. So this time CONMEBOL ran it themselves and did everything on the cheap (in particular short timelines for the grass fields, and not best practices for security perimeters).
The US and FIFA will do fine. These are all easily solvable problems if you spend a little money.
Is there anything more American than naming our stadiums after stupid theme restaurants?
A soccer thread! I watched both the finals yesterday and I am unironically this tweet.
Folks who don't follow basketball might not realize that in this century the strategy of the game has been transformed through a synergy between the "analytics" camp who had new ideas about how to play, and a player--Steph Curry--who had the skill to execute those ideas. If you watch games from even 15 years ago, you marvel at how many "bad shots" and missed opportunities there are, by today's standards.
Speaking from a position of almost total ignorance, soccer feels like it's on the verge of being analyticised in the same way, and I'd wager that in 20 years it will look very different.
Yup, powerbottomdad1. Also, I don't subscribe to any of this recommendations or the stupid comments. Just sayin', I think the mathies are coming for soccer.
It's a shame he was too late to get the powerbottomdad handle.
8: interesting. Firms like Liverpool and Bradford are already bringing in a lot of analysis and doing much better as a result - but that's for Moneyball-style transfer strategy and teambuilding, not for how you actually play.
FIFA does stuff like this https://www.fifatrainingcentre.com/en/fwc2022/technical-and-tactical-analysis/use-of-wide-areas.php which seems similar to what happened in basketball, if I'm interpreting your second link successfully? But the analysis will probably be more difficult, because:
a) fewer goals in soccer, and fewer goal attempts, than in basketball. A typical soccer match might have ten or so attempts and two or three goals. So your data set is smaller.
b) - I'm guessing here because I don't follow basketball, but soccer has a lot more variables in terms of defender placement. The teams are bigger, for one thing, and a defender can do a lot more to block a shot, because the shot has to start and finish at player height - think about a basketball going into a high arc into a basket three metres off the ground. For most of that it's outside the engagement envelope of the defence. A football going from my foot into a goal has to spend most of its journey inside the engagement envelope, just by the laws of ballistics.
I would speculate that most of the time when a basketball shot misses the basket, it's because it was aimed wrong; most of the time, or at least a lot of the time, when a football shot doesn't go into the goal, it is because a defender stopped it.
The ball is round. The game lasts 90 minutes. That is fact. Everything else is pure theory.
The ball is round. The game lasts 90 minutes. That is fact.
The game almost never lasts 90 minutes, in fact I don't think I've ever watched a football match that did :)
Exactly like that! And yeah, I think, for lots of reasons--fewer chances, more players, bigger field, lower chance of success on any given shot or pass, and so on--soccer will be much harder to model. But it'll get there eventually.
You can do various nonparametric models. Probably.
re: 8
I think soccer has already gone through that revolution, too. The end result just isn't more goals because the arms race between the attacking and defensive sides of the game has been pretty even and football is nothing like basketball.
Managers like Guardiola and his peers work with a mixture of incredibly detailed tactical fine tuning and analytics. Players are tracked through every single training session, with GPS trackers and every single aspect of the game is broken down and analysed by a mix of specialist analysts and coaches using a bewildering array of statistical models. Every single pass and off the ball movement is tracked, and they have detailed mapping for everything.
Modern defensive players are much faster and much more skilled ball players than ever before, and the role of the goal keeper is completely different. You'll see defensive players and goalies do things now that would have been seen as suicidal recklessness even 10 or 12 years ago. Lots of tight triangular passing between players in their own box while they are being pressed by attacking players from the other team. Defensive players split wide apart with the goalkeeper acting as a ball playing centre back or sweeper some of the time. Teams lining up with four centre backs rather than with fullbacks or with fullbacks who spend half their time in midfield.
Teams don't play with single formations any more. They have multiple formations that they switch between seamlessly, like NFL plays, except done dynamically, hundreds of times a game. The defence might be two players, or three, or four, or five, depending on what's happening on the pitch at any given time, and the players have obsessively drilled those switches through training matches.
FWIW, The best teams of today would annihilate even the best club teams from 20 years ago, but at the cost of fewer moments of improvisational brilliance.
I remember watching the whole of the celebrated Brazil/Italy game from the 1972 World Cup and being shocked at just how poor a lot of the play was, and also how slow it was, and how much space attacking players were given. That would never happen now. It only happens when you get extreme mismatches, either between small nations and more celebrated football nations, or between lower league clubs and top level clubs.
I assume the tweet linked in 8 is meant to be a joke, because it's more or less "I don't know anything about football".
I mean, obviously a joke, but there were times where I thought "why the fuck are they doing that, it seems like an obviously bad idea" (and felt vindicated when once it led to a goal for Spain), which got me thinking about this. I didn't realize the analytics revolution had already come to soccer. Is there a Sprawlball equivalent that charts the evolution of soccer?
Soccer is a multi-billion dollar industry. They are paying attention to what happens in other sports. So the analytics thing was definitely inspired by things happening in US sport and elsewhere. A lot of the top UK Premier League clubs like Arsenal or Liverpool are owned by people who own NBA, or baseball, or NHL or NFL franchise, so there's direct knowledge sharing happening.
Of course, teams do do things that are bad ideas. Not all coaches are consistently great, and teams are always looking to move the other team around and take advantage of a weakness in their players or formation. I watched the England game with a lot of fanatical England fans last night, and both the ordinary fans and the expert analysts all agreed that the team selection and team tactics had some mistakes in them.
re: Sprawlball, not sure. But there are lots of books on the evolution of football tactics.
https://www.soccertake.com/performance/soccer-analytics-how-data-is-changing-the-game
re: 20
That article I linked has some book recommendations at the bottom of the page.
Those look like exactly what I was looking for. Thanks.
I used to watch a lot of soccer but stopped when I stopped subscribing to to channels that get it (or it moved to channels I didn't get) and haven't kept up. I always had the impression that the knockout stages, especially the semifinal/final of the major international Cup tournaments were lower scoring than the average club regular season game or even club tournament game. Is that true? Has that ever been true?
I just remember when I was talking to people who didn't watch soccer, I often ended up saying "0-0 games are rare, actually, but seem more likely in major finals." I see that neither of yesterday's games were 0-0, at least.
I mean, it was 0-0 for a very long time.
Golden boot winners often score six or more. No player scored more than 3 in the Euros and there were very few high scoring games.
Basketball is weird because of 3-pointers. Before analytics people took too few 3-pointers and too many long 2s, now they take only 3s and shots around the basket.
Soccer has no 3-pointer, so instead you just get fewer long shots period (which has happened!).
If basketball had no 3-second rule and no 3-point rule it would be much lower scoring.
If basketball had the "no hands" rule, it would be really low scoring.
I'm pretty sure 24.1 is true. Offense is hard and requires practicing together.
2-1 is a great score for a soccer game, and nothing like 0-0.
27: This gets at most of the reasons why, though soccer has undergone an analytics revolution, sprawlball NBA tactics don't translate.
The biggest difference though is the goalkeeper. In soccer, goaltending is legal. It's literally someone's whole job! Ergo the further from goal a shot is taken, the longer the keeper has to react and stop it.
Post Script Podcast is infrequently updated but tells a good story about the rise of the soccer analytics blogosphere. Then clubs hired the bloggers and the best data/theory went from widely available to proprietary, leaving the public debate to stagnate. If Bill James had found an MLB job before a subscriber base the same might have happened in baseball.
One factor worth mentioning is that national teams in major tournaments tend to play with simpler tactics. They get much less time to practice together and the players are from different teams-- and often different leagues-- that play different systems. And the most innovative/analytical coaches tend to be at the club level, not coaching national teams.
31.3: that exact phenomenon happened in hockey as well. Many of the best/most analytical bloggers got hired by teams, and publicly available hockey analysis isn't nearly as good as it was a decade ago. A former blogger just got hired as the GM of the Carolina Hurricanes, widely considered among the most innovative teams in the NHL.
Hockey has exactly the right amount of scoring, enough that one mistake isn't fatal and a goal can happen at any moment so you're on the edge of your seat, but not so much scoring that you don't give a shit about the middle half of the game. Soccer is hard for new fans to appreciate for the former reason, basketball hard to watch casually for the latter. Baseball is too little active time. Football is slightly higher in scoring events than hockey, but again too much downtime.
Dusting off my decades-old memory of hockey: wasn't there some angst about low scoring and the neutral zone trap (or something like that?) making game boring? Was that overblown or did they change rules to discourage it?
In general, it seems like some games will have rules where the optimal strategy is lower scoring or less interesting (to the viewer, especially the casual viewer) tactics.
Changed a few rules. Goalie trapezoid, no defensive subs on icing, two line passes allowed, and safety rules that also increase offensive chances. New types of skills take advantage of the latter. A bunch of old school people think is someone "shows you up" by skating around you that the defense should be able to fight/injure the skill players but I think the league realizes that turns off more fans than those who care about "playing the right way".
36 gets at the big things, though there was also a decision to just enforce the existing rules a bit more strictly.
Hockey also had/is having a bunch of changes as a result of analytics, though it's more subtle than in baseball and basketball. It's kind of a two part story, and both of them involve changes to the 'old school' thinking SP mentions.
The first stage was using pretty basics available stats-- mostly shot attempts-- to realize that (a) having more shot attempts that your opponents was strongly correlated with winning, and (b) some traditionally valued strategies and player-types seemed 'safe' but actually led to getting outshot. That led to new strategies and choices about roster construction at the margins. Smaller defensemen who can skate and pass are more common than they were 20 years ago, giant defensemen who hit hard but can't skate or handle the puck are less common.
The second stage is fairly new, and depends on puck and player tracking technology. These let teams see that shot quality is as important as shot volume, and so teams have been prioritizing creating higher percentage chances. (Roughly: shots from close that are preceded by a pass that makes the goalie move.) Hockey people always knew this to some extent, but the math-- and the increased skills SP mentions-- make the advantages bigger than people thought.
A last thing, but a big one, is that today's sticks are completely unlike the sticks of 30 years ago, and as a result the average player can shoot much, much better than players 30 years ago.
Am I wrong or was there on Winter Olympics that helped galvanize the NHL rule changes 20 years ago? IIRC there was a lot of exciting fairly wide-open offense and in contrast the NHL seemed much more of a grind. 2002 maybe. Or it may just have been US & Canada getting to the final brought more attention to Olympic hockey with NHL players. (And I know there were then and continue to be other rule differences between the two.)
38: the main catalyst for the rule changes/enforcement was the 2004-2005 NHL lockout that cancelled the whole season. Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin were both rookies the following season.
People always say that about the Olympics, but it's a bit misleading. The 2010 Canadian Olympic team had at least 13 future Hall of Famers playing in a short tournament where every game was high stakes. Of course the hockey was more exciting!
Defensive players split wide apart with the goalkeeper acting as a ball playing centre back or sweeper some of the time.
This is very helpful. My wife and I spent his season watching my son play D in Italy at a higher level, both of us wondering why they kept making those risky backfield passes to and from the keeper (we might have been more critical and snarky despite our almost total ignorance other than playing in the US decades ago). It was a revelation to see all the teams doing this in the Euros.
play D in Italy at a higher level
Like in the Alps?
re: 32.1
Yeah, that's right, I think.
Compounded for England, where the best club teams in England are coached by Spanish or German coaches who play a very modern style of play, and some of the best club players* in the English team play in Spain or Germany. So most of the players in the England team have learned a particular modern style of play, and a particular approach to positional play, pressing, transitions, etc. But that's not the way the national team typically plays for England because Southgate came of age in an earlier system, and hasn't managed a top club side.**
Whereas with Spain, there's a very clear identity and everyone understands it. It might have changed a little from the del Bosque style, and the ball gets moved forward more quickly and there's less sterile possession, but it's an evolution and everyone has been coached to understand that system since they were kids.
* this is a big change from 10 or more years ago
** although I imagine if England had won it, pundits would now be talking about the strength of individuals over the system, etc.
33: I've heard that argument before - I think from Michael Berube. Yes, hockey is the perfect spectator sport, except that the puck is too small, so this infrequent spectator never has any idea what's going on.
I think curling is basically hockey with a bigger puck.
Curling hair could also be an Olympic sport.
It's not that hard to find once you realize that most of the players are looking at the puck most of the time. I sometimes lose sight of the puck when I play but it's easy to figure out where it is based on everyone else's reaction.
My kid (a lightweight rower) is pissed they replaced lightweight rowing with some weird beach sprint thing.
46: Yeah, I figure out what's going on eventually, but it always seems like I'm a couple of seconds behind, so when I figure out where the puck is, it's already not there.
They should paint the ice black so no one knows where the puck is.
Now that I live very close to an arena, I have been able to go to a few ice hockey matches, and, yes, the ideal spectator sport, especially from the front row. Fast enough even for visiting kids with very short attention spans.
But I think you have to be close to watch it properly. Back row, you can't see the puck as easily, much less fun.