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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2974 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 14, 2024

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Some sports like baseball and basketball are pretty autistically data-obsessed and managers have based a lot of decisions on data for many years.

I was recently listening to a podcast in which an ex professional football player talked about the politics that go on behind the scenes.

He said a lot of what determines if you are a "good" player beyond the fundamentals is akin to astrology or colloquially known as the eye test.

At one point he said "You could be the most talented midfielder in the country but because of manager bias, your reputation and other external factors you will never reach the higher levels."

I read somewhere that soccer/football is pretty unique among sports because games are usually decided by a single point, which means there are far fewer datapoints. The argument was that this makes management much less scientific than most other team sports where scoring is regular and consistent through the game. Soccer is more stochastic, overly reliant on luck, on a sudden mistake by the other team that allows you to convert one of dozens of scoring opportunities into a goal.

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