How were teams ever successful before the age of technology then?
The age of technology precedes the age of football, Fiasco. Sides break the mould because analysis allows them to out-think their opponents. That goes back as far as competition does, but specifically, because it's relevant, I tend to think of Jock Stein sitting in the dugout drawing on pitch diagrams to figure out where the other side's play gets directed through, or Shanks building his sweat box, or Michels figuring out that zonal overloads combined with multi-functional players gives his teams a massive advantage.
Let's get the chicken and egg element of this out of the way before we go on.
Football exists full stop - it's independent of the analysis*
Analysis exists as a derivative - it's intertwined with the subject, whatever the subject is.
Football gets refined as a result of that analysis.
Or to rephrase for the geeks...
10. MAKE FOOTBALL
20. ANALYSE FOOTBALL
30. GOTO 10
You make it sound like football can only exist and get better because of it. That just isn't the case. I've already said that analytics and stats are more than useful, I'm not taking that away from it. I'm saying people are going way too far the other way.
Now - let's go back a bit. Here's where you came in.
One of my main issues with xG is that it doesn't take into account the human aspect of the game ...football isn't an exact science and especially not when you look at things in the long term.
But oddly, you then, despite saying it's not an exact science, define a number of attributes that might be useful to measure, and therefore improve the precision of the science.
...does anything else come into it? Who the goalie is? The angle? The form of the striker? The conditions? Whether his team is 4-0 up or whether it is goalless and in the last minute? Did the striker scuff the shot? Was a defender closing him down as he hit it? Was he wary of being offside and yet not fully committed? The possibility of the goalie making a world class save?
I could ask 10 other questions like that.
Yes, and in doing so, you'd be doing analysis (or proposing things that might potentially improve it).
What happens on a pitch happens on a pitch because of 1000s of variables.
Exactly. More and more of them are measurable, too.
Stop over-analysing the game. It is already watered down and not what it was in the past. Football is too unpredictable to be predictable.
There's then a series of posts where people who like stats say things like 'the things you say are common in people who are sceptical about stats, which is annoying, and then you say things like this.
...is it so otherworldly that a luddite like me could never understand it?
You can patronise all you want mate with sly comments, it doesn't phase me.
Now - can we all stop that?
Nobody seems to be claiming that stats are an end in themselves. The stats that matter are goals for and against, and points. That's about it. Everything else has to contribute to those ends, be they glamorous German nutritionists, Portuguese youth coaches, PHDs in astrophysics, or whatever else.
I don't find Liverpool's football robotic. I find Man City's football can get that way as much as I can with Simeone's sides. We kind of go another way and kind of harness chaos in our approach, despite our side having probably the most direct analytical input of any set up since Charles Reep's bollocks in the middle of the last century that led all the way to the Crazy Gang.
You say xG told our stats gurus that Dortmund should have been second but weren't. Fair enough. But how many could see that anyway? I remember around that time many on here and other outlets were saying the same thing and from the Dortmund games I watched myself it was clear that they were much better than their table showed. So why give xG so much credit for pointing that out?
Cos the fella marched through to the men in the suits and said, "Klopp's stock is low - maybe we can get him", then showed him his workings, and they acted on it.
It seems to me that what you're suggesting is pretty simple: that analysis, in and of itself, waters down the beauty of the game. That magic (the wonder of not understanding how things work) will be diminished to zero if people think too much. Me personally, I think that says more about you than it does the limits of the magic of the game. The beauty of the game is boundless - it can never be over-analysed. You can go from noughts and crosses, to stone/paper/scissors, to Connect 4, to whatever else through to football. Even the simplest of games are pretty straightforward to analyse, but somehow people keep playing and enjoying them. The more variables there are, the more infinitely complex the game can be, and the less it yields to being 'perfected'. The minute you go with a certain approach, someone finds a way to work around it.
Football is just about the richest game there is, in terms of its complexity.
