by Simon Kuper
The smile falters only when he is criticized. Then he throws a tantrum. Last week he did so when a German consumer group said some of the World Cup stadia were unsafe. Beckenbauer duly appeared in Bild—his representative on earth—and announced from Cape Town that the group should stick to “face cream, olive oil and hoovers.”
Usually any attacks on Beckenbauer came from the critical intellectual Left—a lot of people in Germany. Beckenbauer reads books but disdains intellectuals, and they tend to disdain him as too rich, greedy, right-wing, unapologetic, celebratory, and Bavarian.
Now the incarnation of Europe’s critical Left is taking him on. Danny Cohn-Bendit, “Danny the Red” of the 1968 student revolutions, has founded an Allianz gegen Franz, or “Alliance against Franz.” It aims to stop Beckenbauer from becoming president of the European soccer association UEFA. The argument is that Beckenbauer, who is already president of Bayern Munich, would devote his reign to making the world safe for the big clubs.
He probably would, and he probably will. If Beckenbauer stands next year, he will surely win. He always does. As the only soccer official who is popular with the European public, he would have a power almost unprecedented in the game. If he carries on like this, his ancient nickname of Kaiser will require an upgrade.
Mike Forde
November 2009
It’s taken too long, but at last European soccer clubs are starting to learn from American sports. Mike Forde, Chelsea’s performance director, visits the United States often. “The first time I went to the Red Sox,” he says of the Boston baseball team, “I sat there for eight hours, in a room with no windows, only flip charts. I walked out of there saying, ‘Wow, that’s one of the most insightful conversations on sport I’ve ever had, with guys that don’t know who Beckham or Ronaldo are. It wasn’t, ‘What are you doing here? You don’t know anything about our sport.’ That was totally irrelevant. It was, ‘How do you make decisions on players? What information do you use? How do we approach the same problems?”
Forde, holding forth excitedly from his comfy chair at Chelsea’s health club, is tapping the statistical revolution that has swept American sports. The revolution’s manifesto was Michael Lewis’s baseball book Moneyball (2003). Earlier this year, Lewis proclaimed, “The virus that infected professional baseball in the 1990s, the use of statistics to find new and better ways to value players and strategies, has found its way into every major sport.” In soccer, Forde is spreading the virus.
Forde worked at Bolton Wanderers before Chelsea, and he looks like a soccer man: trim, graying, regional accent, nice suit. That helps him deal with hidebound soccer men who are wary of fancy numbers spouted by dowdy statisticians. “Letting even a top-level statistician loose with a more traditional soccer manager is not really the right combination,” says Forde.
He studied psychology in San Diego, and that early American experience proved key. He often visits Billy Beane, hero of Moneyball, general manager of the Oakland A’s baseball team, and a soccer fan who grills him on English soccer’s latest goings-on. Recently, though, Forde has been studying basketball, a sport more like soccer. “Basketball’s ahead of us,” Forde admits. However, he says England’s biggest soccer clubs now have people in roles like his. “We as a nation are probably more open to the American experience than maybe the French are, the Italians are. Maybe we’ll be quicker to adapt the Moneyball ideas because of that.”
Adapting those ideas began a decade ago, when clubs started to buy data on the number of passes, tackles, and miles run for each player per game. Forde remembers the early hunt for meaning in the numbers. “Can we find a correlation between total distance covered and winning? And the answer was invariably no.” People from the England rugby team told Forde that possession won matches. Yet that didn’t work in soccer. “If you had 55 percent possession, the chances of winning were less than if you had 35 percent possession.”
But the data can help clubs evaluate individual players. After all, says Forde, “Most of the elite clubs are probably spending 70 percent of their revenues on 2.5 percent of their workforce. Really all we’ve got is talent.”
Clubs are always buying the wrong players. Forde sees his task as “risk management”: reducing the game’s uncertainties. For instance, he studies data covering a player’s whole career to avoid the old trap of signing someone just when he’s in top form. A player, explains Forde, spends minimal time in the ideal state of flow. “The player thinks that’s his normal standard. It’s not. My job is to see what form he regresses to.”
The search is still on for the best data to evaluate players. If a forward is tearing up the French or Dutch league, you need to predict his strike rate in the tougher Premier League. Forde says, “We’ve created our own algorithm: The guy scores fifteen goals in France. Is that ten in England?” Finding criteria to assess defenders is harder. “Is it tackles? Well, look at Paolo Maldini: He made one tackle every two games.”
The holy grail would be discovering the key to victory. “I don’t think we’re there yet,” Forde admits. But he says, “If you look at ten years in the Premier League, there is a stronger correlation between clean sheets and where you finish than goals scored and where you finish.” Billy Beane would be proud.
Ignacio Palacios-Huerta
June 2010
If Uruguay’s Diego Forlan ends up taking a penalty against Ghana on Friday night, we have a pretty shrewd idea of where he will put it: in the opposite corner to his previous penalty. Forlan has a pattern of hitting one spot kick to the right of the keeper, the next left, the next right, and so on. He is trying to shoot in a random sequence, but failing. And one man has spotted it.
The man is Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, economics professor at the London School of Economics, who is watching the World Cup from his native Basque country in between bouts of child care. Palacios-Huerta played professional soccer in Spain’s third division, and then began looking at penalties as a real-life case study of game theory. He has studied more than 9,000 penalties since 1995, and now probably knows more about penalty takers than all the teams in the tournament. Their ignorance amazes him: “I have nothing at stake. They have lots: the whole nation.”
You rarely anymore hear coaches or players grumble that shoot-outs are “a lottery,” but their planning for them mostly remains antediluvian. Germans, for instance, revere the crib sheet that their keeper Jens Lehmann had tucked into his sock during their victorious shoot-out against Argentina in the last World Cup. Yet the sheet, scribbled on a piece of hotel notepaper, is ludicrously simplistic. It lists seven Argentine penalty takers and their supposed preferred corner: “Messi left,” for instance.
Palacios-Huerta notes that almost no regular penalty taker has a careerlong bias toward one side. Lionel Messi, he says, randomizes his penalties almost perfectly. “He can also change his mind at the very last instant,” notes Palacios-Huerta. Sometimes Messi waits for the keeper to shift his weight very slightly to one side, and then shoots to the other corner.
Four years on, some teams may have crib sheets more sophisticated than Lehmann’s. One team in the quarterfinals has an hour’s film of penalties taken by its opponents, plus a penalty database. That’s why it was silly of England’s coach, Fabio Capello, to announce his designated penalty takers before playing Germany. He gave the opposition time to study their habits.
But Palacios-Huerta thinks that even today’s most sophisticated teams probably just count who shoots how often to which corner. “I would be supersurprised if they do any kind of statistical test,” he says. He himself runs two. The first is: Does a particular kicker follow a truly random strategy? If the kicker does, then the direction he chooses for his next kick—right of the keeper, through the middle, or left—cannot be predicted from his previous kicks. A random kicker is like a man tossing an honest coin: Whether he throws heads or tails this time cannot be predicted from his previous throws.
But people in real life struggle to follow random strategies. Of
ten they fall into patterns, and Palacios-Huerta gets excited when he detects someone’s patterns. Argentina’s Gonzalo Higuaín, for instance, kicks too often to the right. And the keeper whom Higuaín may face in a shoot-out on Saturday, Germany’s Manuel Neuer, also fails to randomize: Too often, Neuer dives to the opposite corner from his previous dive, going first right, then left, then right, and so forth.
Next Palacios-Huerta tests the kicker’s success rate with each strategy. The kicker should have an equally high scoring rate whether he shoots right, middle, or left. But both Argentina’s Sergio Agüero and Germany’s Miroslav Klose, for instance, score more often when shooting right of the keeper. That would logically encourage them to aim right on Saturday.
Only rarely does Palacios-Huerta find a kicker with a very skewed strategy, but England’s Frank Lampard is such a man. For years, Lampard randomized his kicks beautifully. But this season, notes Palacios-Huerta, “he has kicked thirteen out of fifteen times to the right of the goalkeeper—and the two lefts were in the same game when he had to retake the same penalty three times.”
No wonder Lampard has recently developed a habit of missing penalties. Keepers are figuring him out. Portsmouth’s David James, for instance, chose the correct corner for Lampard’s penalty for Chelsea in the FA Cup final—perhaps with help from Palacios-Huerta, who had sent Portsmouth a briefing note before the game. In the event, Lampard’s shot went wide. Admittedly, Kevin-Prince Boateng missed his penalty for Portsmouth in the match, but then he had ignored Palacios-Huerta’s advice to kick left of keeper Petr Cech.
The patterns of individuals are only a secondary matter, though. The most important moment in any shoot-out occurs before it even starts. The referee tosses a coin, and the captain who calls correctly gets to decide whether his team takes the first kick. Always kick first, says Palacios-Huerta. The team that takes the first penalty wins 60 percent of shoot-outs. That’s because the team going second shoots under great pressure: It keeps having to score just to stay in the game. In Tuesday’s shoot-out, for instance, Japan was the likely loser the moment Paraguay’s captain, Justo Villar, won the toss and chose to start. Paraguay duly won.
Few seem to know this initial advantage exists, notes Palacios-Huerta. Television commentators rarely even mention the toss. Bookmakers don’t shift their odds immediately after the toss is done—a mistake from which gamblers could benefit. And at Euro 2008, Italy’s captain, Gianluigi Buffon, may have decided the outcome of the tournament when he won the toss for a shoot-out against Spain and let the Spaniards shoot first. They won, of course—not necessarily gladdening the heart of the Basque Palacios-Huerta—and then won the tournament.
Ignorance about penalties could decide this World Cup, too. Palacios-Huerta sighs, “I don’t think serious analysis of the data has arrived yet in soccer, but it’s coming. I think the world will be a different place in a decade or so.”
*Declaration of interest: I recently helped set up a soccer consultancy called Soccernomics, which aims to advise clubs and associations. Ignacio became our penalty expert. He did his first (unpaid) work during the World Cup. First we supplied England with his analysis of Germany’s penalty takers, but that game, surprisingly, didn’t go to a penalty shoot-out.
When Holland reached the final, I e-mailed a Dutch official I knew slightly. I explained what we could provide. Was the official interested?
He was. Ignacio pulled all-nighters and finished the report on the Saturday morning before the final. We sent it to the Dutch. At lunchtime on Sunday—matchday—someone inside Holland’s camp e-mailed us: “It’s a report we can use perfectly.”
In Soccer City, with the final scoreless in overtime, I reread the report on my laptop between Dutch yellow cards. It turned out that Spain was finishing the match with only one experienced penalty taker still on the field: Fernando Torres. Spain’s two most regular kickers, David Villa and Xabi Alonso, had been substituted. The Spaniards must have viewed the impending shoot-out with anxiety.
I checked our report’s findings on Torres. He had a slight tendency to kick to the keeper’s left, but critically, 76 percent of his shots were “low.” Sometimes Torres shot “midheight,” but never high. Clearly, Holland’s keeper Maarten Stekelenburg, should go to ground fast against him.
The only remaining Spanish player to have taken even five penalties as a pro was Cesc Fabregas. The report’s finding: “He has a strong tendency to kick left [of the keeper]. Looking at his videos, it seems hard for him to kick to the right.”
No other Spaniard still on the pitch had any significant penalty-taking experience. However, that fact itself was telling. According to Ignacio, infrequent penalty kickers hit 70 percent of their kicks to their “natural” side: right of the keeper for right-footed kickers, left for left-footed ones. That’s the easiest way.
As for Spain’s keeper Iker Casillas, over the fifty-nine penalties that we observed him, he did better diving to one corner than the other. Kickers scored considerably more when kicking to their “nonnatural” side against Casillas. Right-footers should therefore aim to his left and left-footers to his right.
Sitting in the stands, I started to get excited. I might be about to help the team I support win a World Cup. Alternatively, I might be about to help it lose one. And then, five minutes before the shoot-out would begin, Iniesta scored.
INDEX
Abramovich, Roman
AC Milan soccer club
Capello as coach of
and Drogba
and Gattuso
and Kaká
and Seedorf
and Shevchenko
Adams, Tony
Adebayor, Emmanuel
Adu, Freddy
Agüero, Sergio
Aimar, Pablo
Ajax Amsterdam soccer club
and Cruijff
and Ibrahimovic
and Litmanen
and Van der Sar
Ajax Cape Town
Ali, Muhammad
Allardyce, Sam
Allianz Arena in Munich
Allianz gegen Franz
Allison, Malcolm
Aloisi, John
Alonso, Xabi
Altobelli, Alessandro
Anatomy of England (Wilson)
Anderson
Anelka, Nicolas
boycotting practice/forty-five day ban
conversion to Islam/change of name
incomprehension of outsiders
joining Real Madrid
learning confidence
penalty kick vs. Van der Sar
physical description of
and Wenger
Anfield stadium
Aparicio, Don Salvador Ricardo
Aragones, Luis
Archetti, Eduardo
Argentina
football ancestry of
Maradona as coach
match vs. England in World Cup of 1998
pibe and Messi/Maradona
World Cup in 1978
World Cup of 1986
World Cup of 2006
Arnesen, Frank
Arsenal soccer club
and Anelka
and Cole
“controlling Premiership league,”
and Fabregas
and Henry
and Owen
and Wenger
and Will
Atletico Madrid
Auclair, Philippe
Aulas, Jean-Michel
Auset, Manuel
Australia
Autobiographies of soccer players
Back-pass rule
Bad as I Wanna Be (Rodman)
Bale, Gareth
Ball, Alan
Ball is Round, The (Goldblatt)
Ballack, Michael
Ballpark renaissance
Barça: A People’s Passion (Burns)
Barcelona soccer club
choosing Guardiola as coach
and Cruijff
and Henry
and Iniesta
and Messi
“more than a club” motto
most glorious club side on earth
Mourinho as “anti” figure by 2010
and Real Madrid
and Romario
Ronaldinho leaving
and Saviola
Van Gaal as head coach
and Xavi
Barclay, Patrick
Baresi, Franco
Barmby, Nick
Barry, Gareth
Barthez, Fabien
Baseball
See also Beane, Billy
Baseball Abstracts (James)
Basel soccer club/stadium
Basilevitch, Michiel
Basketball
Bastia soccer club
Bates, Ken
Batistuta, Gabriel
Batty, David
Bayern Munich
Beckenbauer signing with
haters of in German society
Klinsmann and
Matthäus and
and Ribéry
signing of Ballack
and Van Gaal
Beagrie, Peter
Beane, Billy
and Arsenal economics
as baseball player
e-mail to Kuper
fell in love with soccer on England trip
influences Chelsea and Manchester City
quitting as baseball player to become scout
soccer people interested in
unpaid consultant to Liverpool
using sabermetrics with Oakland A’s
and Wenger
See also Comolli, Damien; Forde, Mike; Moneyball
Bebeto (José Roberto Gama de Oliveira)
Beckenbauer, Franz
compared with Ballack
and Matthaüs
poster boy for German soccer
after soccer career of
as superstar leader
and World Cup
and Zidane
Beckham, David
and Cantona
