Reddit reviews Football Hackers: The Science and Art of a Data Revolution

Full thread, excerpt from Football Hackers book detailing #AFC's transfer strategy in 2018 & the role played by Sven Mislintat. The full book can be purchased here:

In the first 2 transfer periods, Mislintat pushed through the signings of 3 players he knew from his BVB days. Goal-scorer Aubameyang was an immediate success and became #AFC's best goalscorer straightaway.

Sokratis, a solid Greek defender, too, established him self in the 1st XI, while Miki arrived from MUFC in a swap-deal for Alexis. The swap reduced #AFC's wage bill & replaced 1 player who was past his best with a reliable performer.

Those were all safe transfers in the sense that they held little risk. The same was true of buying German keeper Bernd Leno, who took over from Petr Cech in goal before too long.

Mislintat was aiming higher, though. He wanted to take the club back to its player-developing roots and discover talents with the potential to grow in the #AFC shirt. Midfielder Lucas Torreira from Uruguay exemplifies this strategy. Mislintat found him thanks to a feature in his software called 'Similar Players'. It follows the logic of Amazon's algorithm: 'Clubs who like this player might also be interested in those ones.' Eager to add more resilience to #AFC's midfield, Mislintat checked players with a similar data profile to N'Golo Kante. The system proposed Sampdoria's Torreira.

'I knew him, and I had also noticed him doing well before,' Mislintat said. But without looking at the stats, he might not have thought of the South American.

The club's fans also took an instant liking to French Matteo Guendouzi, a signing from second division Lorient. For once, the energetic young CM's arrival had nothing to do with data analysis but instead courtesy of some old-fashioned scouting, similar to Julian Weigl [at BVB]. Mislintat saw in the 19-year-old qualities that cannot easily be measured in numbers: courage, strength of nerve, enthusiasm & leadership. In his 14 months at #AFC, Mislintat proved that his way of doing things worked in the PL.

#AFC's newly appointed DoF Raul Sanllehi, however, decided to put more trust in his network of agents as far as recruitment was concerned. Mislintat saw this startling development as a signal. His contract was terminated by mutual consent.

There's stuff about buying StatDNA in secrecy in late 2012. Apparently, it identified Manolas before his move to Roma but scouts weren't convinced. Implies Wenger was convinced to buy Chamakh & Park Chu-young after data from StatDNA suggested they'd be poor signings.

Very interesting. Their approach seem to fall very much in line with methods outlined in ["Football Hackers" by Biermann] (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Football-Hackers-Science-Data-Revolution/dp/1788702050). Especially when they discuss the types of chances they create, and identifying a striker that is particularly good at those. Very interesting to see them benefit from it.

It’s hard to quantify, yes, but we are getting better and better at advanced metrics across professional sports, and soccer is no exception.

This book is in my Amazon queue for that reason.