Champions League Draw 2009

here is the draw!

I think the weakest groups are Group G & Group H
So Arsenal looking good, even though Dutch & Turkish teams are tough

Strongest groups are likely Group D, Group E & Group A
Chelsea have Porto & Atletico Madrid, so finishing in the Top 2 will be a dogfight
Group E have Liverpool, Fiorentina & Lyon, so it will be a fight amongst mediocre teams
Group A have Bayern, Juve & Bordeaux, so also tough.

First round September 15 & 16

 

 

Champions League Team earning potential

From the BBC:

“Last season, clubs contesting the Champions League proper earned between £4.6m to £20.4m.
In addition, they took home a share of the £237.31m television pot and match-day income, which for the top English clubs is about £3m per match.”

Inefficient Markets in Sports & Finance

I just finished reading Moneyball – The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis, also well-known for his

best-selling book Liars Poker: Rising through the Wreckage on Wall Street, and although it’s an OK book (written in 2003) about how a major professional team is pioneering the use of a revolutionary statistical system (called sabermetrics) for scientifically evaluating and selecting players to maximise team performance, I actually found it amazing that the book was written in the first place for a few reasons.

The book is mostly about how the Oakland Athletics (The A’s), a “small-market” resource constrained Major League Baseball Team, have broken ranks with the traditional methods employed by the rest of the league to employ a scientific statistical method to value players to ultimately field the winningest team while competing against richer “big market” rivals like the New York Yankees and Mets. This has led to the A’s consistently having one of the best team records in the league while also having one of the lowest payrolls at the same time, clearly outperforming every other team when considering the number of team wins vs. the total team payroll.

What really surprised me about this book was the continued comparisons of the “market” for baseball players to financial markets, namely that the Oakland A’s have discovered and now exploit “market inefficiencies” which lead to abnormally high profits or performance over a sustained period. The case goes, if markets were “efficient” then all information would be known to all traders in that market under exactly the same conditions, making it therefore impossible to generate excess profits from better information. This is one of the reasons insider trading can be so profitable since the trader has non-public proprietary information that they can trade for their benefit.

So why did this surprise me? – Two reasons below…

• Disclosure of Trade Secrets: If the A’s believed they have discovered an inefficiency in the market for valuing player performance that has led to their “abnormal” positive performance, why would they participate in the publishing of this book which essentially would disclose its “secret sauce” to their competitors (the other teams)? Given the implications of disclosing their methods (even though the A’s did not invent them), they risk eliminating this market inefficiency, thereby making the market more efficient leading them to a situation where they can no longer acquire valuable players at discount prices

• Reputation Effects for repeated interactions: Given that the A’s have 29 other teams they need to interact with repeatedly, the publication of this book not only discloses their secret sauce as covered in #1 above, but it also announced to these teams that the A’s believed they were “smarter” than the other teams and took advantage of the other General Managers in the league . In game theory, with repeated interactions you clearly do not want to take advantage, or screw over, your fellow players for fear of retribution. In a nutshell, reputation matters. If I were a peer of Billy Beane, the General Manager of the Oakland A’s, I would be extremely wary of ever doing a deal with him given what I have read in this book.

Public Enemy #1 according to Nash

For these two reasons, I was extremely shocked to read such an open discourse of the Oakland Athletics’ trading strategies. The rest of the book is actually just OK – I did not love it, and as a kid I was an avid reader of baseball books, and Michael Lewis tries to bring the game to life through experiences of some of the players who were evaluated by the A’s over the course of his research. As a whole though, I am very supportive of the use of technology and more quantitative analysis (see ‘I don’t need your stinkin’ numbers’ section in the link) to measure performance, so its definitely worthwhile in this respect.

English Premier League Football and Technology (or the lack thereof)

As an American sports fan who has been living in the UK over the past 10 years, I have increasingly been amazed at the lack of technology in football (English Premier League) – both in the sport itself, in its reporting and in its statistical analysis.

This is where Arsenal love to draw while charging the highest ticket prices in the Premier League

Can I please see every match live on TV…it is 2008!

Just today, I turned on Sky Sports and watched grown men with headphones on reporting on today’s football matches while watching private direct video feeds of the matches that I as a consumer do not have access to…compared with the US where I can watch ever single baseball match on TV or the internet live, or every NFL game live again on TV or the internet. Yet here in the UK, I can perhaps watch two to four football matches per weekend live (if I am lucky) out of the 10 possible matches that can occur in the Premier League alone.

I understand that there are broadcasting restrictions in place, and that some clubs feel that showing all the matches on TV can have a negative impact on attendance figures, but the spiralling ticket prices and unbelievable year over year increases in both season ticket prices and individual game tickets is not helping attendance either. I think clubs who have waiting lists for seasons ticketholders that number into the tens of thousands feel that there is sufficient inelastic demand to raise prices, but feel that allowing all the matches to be broadcast on TV will erode a fans’ desire to go to a game. However, many of these waiting lists have people who were applied when times were better and prices were lower – surely there is a better way to increase total revenue to clubs through more universal broadcasting and availability of live matches and highlights on TV and the internet, as well as keeping the lucrative gate receipts.

English Training Regime: Pints & Pies

A second area where the lack of the latest technology was apparent, although less so nowadays, is in the training and technology employed by teams. Arsene Wenger is credited with bringing the English Premier League into the modern age in terms of training, diet and player management. When Wenger arrived in the Premier League twelve years ago in 1996, he was derided by the likes of Sir Alex Ferguson of Manchester United, and even by his own players at Arsenal for his “professorial” ways. Its amazing that a league like the Premier League was still stuck in the dark ages, and even its leading managers did not employ better training methods. Its taken the past decade for the Premier League to catch up, but its amazing to think that the poor training and diet habits persisted as long as they did, and that the good ol’ boy tradition of pints, fish & chips and biscuits was the norm amongst supposedly world-class athletes.

This is how I watch football...I watch a grown man telling me what's happening...its like the anti-radio broadcast

‘I don’t need your stinkin’ numbers’

The final area in which English football is behind the times is in statistics. When one watches a US baseball or NFL game, the announcers (and teams) are armed with statistics – everything from situational probabilities (e.g. the probability a team will score when in this portion of the field, the number of steals/tackles won, goal efficiency by player, etc), to matchup facts and head-to-head player records. I have never seen this during an English football broadcast – e.g., if a team or annoucer knew that Arsenal have a 10% probability of conceding a goal on a corner kick, and a 50% probability if it happens to be within 2 minutes of the end of the first half, or which player had the highest probablility of scoring a penalty at night away from home, it would be very helpful in decision making, training, etc. Being armed with situational statistics can help managers & teams be more scientific, and it can be more entertaining for viewers as well.

Anyway, I will wait for Match of the Day tonight to find out what I missed…and perhaps my next company will be a stats company for football.