The owner of SmartOdds betting company, Matthew Benham is applying his company's statistical insights to the clubs he owns. This has proven quite successful. Great to see Arsenal doing the same.
http://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/jul/27/how-fc-midtj...
It has to be said, the article gives remarkably little insight into what Benham's statistical system actually offers (and of course what was so objectionable about it to the successful manager who chose to part company with the club over it). I mean, any football club in the world has access to data on "any two-footed left-back in the world of a certain standard, aged 22-26, who has not been injured for the previous 18 months"; we had games that could do this pretty reliably in the 1990s.
Football seems like a particularly difficult sport to try the Moneyball approach with because it's largely a battle of team cohesion rather than individual skills, and even apparently novel and meaningful heuristics one might devise like "percentage of forward passes completed in opposition half over the course of a season" are likely to be heavily influenced by the tactical approach of the player's team. Even if your telemetry data is incredibly comprehensive, it's going to be difficult to teach a computer the difference between chances created because the timing of the pass was exquisite and chances succeeded because the covering defenders were out of position or made a glaring hash of the interception; not something you'll ever find coaches or commentators struggling to decide on.
Football seems like a particularly difficult sport to try the Moneyball approach with because it's largely a battle of team cohesion rather than individual skills, and even apparently novel and meaningful heuristics one might devise like "percentage of forward passes completed in opposition half over the course of a season" are likely to be heavily influenced by the tactical approach of the player's team. Even if your telemetry data is incredibly comprehensive, it's going to be difficult to teach a computer the difference between chances created because the timing of the pass was exquisite and chances succeeded because the covering defenders were out of position or made a glaring hash of the interception; not something you'll ever find coaches or commentators struggling to decide on.