Are we ready to admit covid vaccine dangers now?, page-88

Data is a funny thing. Long story, bear with it....

On the topic of sports people, FSG were famous for being early adopters of data analytics in performance. The famous Brad Pitt movie, Moneyball, follows the story of their earliest use of player data.

Some years later plenty of teams attempted to replicate their success using a rudimentary understanding of metrics that, on the surface, seemed to tell a story. Most failed because they kept using simple correlations which seemed to be self evident truths. A great example was buying players who had high percentages for completed passes or tackles won. Nobody questioned the logic, surely higher success = better?

But it didn't work, they overcapitalise on players that had good success in their comfort zones, but underperformed when brought into new teams. It didn't make much sense and data analytics became unfashionable again.

Some years later, one of their flagship teams, Liverpool FC, recruited a team of world class data analysts from varying fields (theoretical physicist, chess grandmaster, particle physicicst) to develop bespoke algorithms for finding insights that were being missed by the data.

The guy who headed the team that developed the algorithms is a lovely bloke, soft spoken, imaginative, passionate about his work. Highly experienced and credentialled, but not a sport person or coach.

He worked out that a player who is afraid to take chances will have a higher completion rate because they won't do anything outside of their comfort zone. This lead to them underperforming under the higher pressure demands of title chasing. It also made them look really good on paper.

Since developing their new "probability of executing a pass that could lead to a higher chance of a shot on goal being created" they found that some players with lower success rates were more effective at making game-changing actions, and because their data looked poor compared to the high success rate players, they were usually cheaper to buy. They weren't always successful in their actions, but when they were, it would usually lead to a goal being scored.

This is how Liverpool FC built their title and champions league winning team with cheap players like Mo Salah, Andy Robertson, Naby Keita etc.


Moral of the story, if you aren't an expert, you probably don't know how to best intepret data.