TFC hires Manager of Analytics

[ryan]

When the acid reflux starts eating your throat muscles, you'll be left without much choice. but generally that's not until about 40.

9.5 more years of bad decisions! WAHOO!

[jabbronies]

You may not like analytics, but Jose Mourinho, Pep Guardiola, Sir Alex Ferguson, Arsene Wenger and a whole lot of other top mangers do. Anayltics are never going to replace a good manager, make a bad one into a good one, or a good one into a great one. But is is another tool that they can and do use.

This is exactly it - it's just one of many tools that a manager should be using.
Not the be all and end all, but it is part of a larger picture.

Bad example but knowing something like - 75% of the times when the ball is swung out to the left flank after a counter attack against us, we create X amounts of scoring chances vs. going up the right.

It doesn't give you the whole picture, but it can alert you to things you may never have considered before.

[TOBOR !]

Before there was Analytics there was Valeriy Lobanovskyi

http://www.theguardian.com/football/...yi-dynamo-kyiv

Eventually, after a chance meeting with the statistician Anatoliy Zelentsov at a party, it was the latter that won out. Football became for him a system of 22 elements – two sub-systems of 11 elements – moving within a defined area (the pitch) and subject to a series of restrictions (the laws of the game). If the two sub-systems were equal, the outcome would be a draw. If one were stronger, they would win. The aspect that Lobanovskyi found most fascinating was that the sub-systems were subject to a peculiarity: the efficiency of the sub-system was greater than the sum of the efficiencies of the elements that comprise it. That, as Lobanovskyi saw it, meant football was ripe for the application of the cybernetic techniques being taught at the Polytechnic Institute. Football, he concluded, was less about individuals than about coalitions and the connections between them.

[Fort York Redcoat]

My new sports viewing drinking game is taking a sip everytime an announcer says analytics...you should have a pretty solid buzz going merely 1/4 into the game.

It should be as slovenly as the pre season Winter got here and mentions of "Total Football"

[Lennon]

For any analytics doubters ..
http://www.theguardian.com/football/...P=share_btn_tw

[OgtheDim]

http://www.mlssoccer.com/news/articl...ish-style-play

[hulkrogan]

I like stuff like this if it's used to measure workload etc for injury management. Where I get scared is stuff like judging past performance on specific stats and indicators. For example, we played bad last game because we didn't complete enough passes. Next game you have a bunch of guys completing passes for the sake of completing passes, and still losing. This stuff is useful if looking at the whole picture, but teams that have played for the stats instead of using the stats as a tool to review past performances (the Edmonton Oilers) have shown us this approach doesn't work in highly dynamic sports.