How valuable are marginal gains vs recruitment decisions?

What happens when you bring together data geeks and sports enthusiasts? In this fascinating episode, Matt and Nick are joined by John Carney to explore the hidden world of sports analytics and the surprising role of randomness in athletic competition. John dives deep into the intersection of probability, statistics, and sports performance, revealing how data is transforming everything from penalty shootouts to player recruitment. The conversation ranges from the theatrical nature of sports as entertainment to the mathematical frameworks that help us understand (and predict) athletic outcomes.

You can find out more about Field of Play here: https://www.fieldofplay.co.uk/

The Pydata London Conference here: https://pydata.org/london2025

And more about the PyData Manchester here: https://www.meetup.com/pydata-manchester/

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Transcript auto-generated by Descript:

[00:00:00] Matt: Hello and welcome to episode 338 of the WB 40 Podcast This week with me, Matt Ballantine, Nick Drage, and John Carney.

[00:00:56] Well, welcome back to the reasonably, reasonably regularly on a fortnight basis. Podcast that is WB 40 now in, into our 10th year of putting this stuff together. Joining me hosting this week is my co-author, not only my co-host, but my co-author, Nick. I think this is the first time we’ve done the show together, where we have been the hosts.

[00:01:18] You’ve, I think, interviewed me in the past, but this is the first hosting we’ve done together. That is a good point. Yes. Yes, it is. How very exciting. How have you been over the last week or so?

[00:01:28] Nick: Alright. He says hastily, looking at what he’s done the last week. Thank, thank, thank God for calendars. I’ve been, and unfortunately the audience won’t see your response.

[00:01:41] I’ve been teaching people about wardly mapping. I’ve been looking at writing. Interactive. Well, I’ve been looking at course at writing interactive cities in a language called Inc. Which is something I’ve played with before, and that looks really interesting, just a way to build small interactive demonstrations or games.

[00:02:04] And then I was at a session at the weekend looking about building micro games, which are basically short, very short, very small war games , that take quite a while to design. But you can learn and play in like under half an hour, ideally like 20 minutes. If you wanna get a single point about an event rather than you play sort of the war for North Africa or something and understand it after months of replays, it’s like 20 minutes.

[00:02:30] You get the rough idea of how something works. So, looking into, so did that really good session. I need to generate some, I need to write some now.

[00:02:38] Matt: That sounds fun. How about

[00:02:39] Nick: you? What about you in your last week?

[00:02:40] Matt: Well, well, kind of related to that, I have started at last to read a book that I bought about a year ago which is, I can’t remember what the Intitle was, but it, it was originally the Oxford Book of Card games, and it’s not a book about sorry, the Oxford Book of Playing Cards.

[00:02:55] I think it’s. It’s not about a book about rules of playing cards, it’s the history of playing cards and playing card games. And the reason I mention that is because one of the things that it says quite early on is one of the reasons why some people don’t like card games played with a 50 standard, 52 card deck is because the de cards themselves gives you no indication whatsoever of how the game is.

[00:03:18] And so you have to learn the rules and the rules are completely independent. Whereas if you’re playing, I dunno, Scrabble or Ludo or whatever you, with the board and stuff, there’s, there’s information about what you’ve got to do and how it works right in front of you all the time. I also found out, which I didn’t realize, is that earlier versions of the game of chess were played for gambling and they involved dice and things like that as well, which is interesting ’cause we often, and I know we’ve been writing some stuff about how chess is very different to card games.

[00:03:46] But actually they, they came from a similar route originally, so, so that’s the sort of stuff that I’ve been looking at in terms of reading. I have started my civic duty this week. I can say no more about it than that and we’ll see where that goes. And other than that, I’ve, I mean, yeah, mostly it’s been getting ready to have a break from work for a short period and then getting ready to go back to work in about a week and a half and.

[00:04:12] Really getting into a new client. It’s been a very strange liminal few weeks where I’ve been sort of closing things down or putting things on pause and getting ready to start again. So, yeah. No, got it. That’s a bit odd. Anyway, joining us on the show this week John what have you been up to over the last week or so?

[00:04:32] john: Hey it’s been a busy week, the past week. I ended up gonna gi at my best friend’s wedding, so I exchanged the grim and dark of Manchester, the bright sunny of gi which is lovely. It’s wonderful. See, my best friend get married, had a lovely wife, and.

[00:05:04] On the flight home, I, I expect so I’m suffering at the moment, but been a lovely time. Was it warm? It was very warm. I’ve never been before, but very warm, very, very sunny. Not cloud in the sky. Very breezy at the same time. Very pleasant. I’ve never experienced that combination of 29 degrees Celsius and a nice core breeze at the same time.

[00:05:24] Matt: Oh, that sounds, yeah, my wife was in Seville a couple of weeks ago, and so similar. I mean, that’s not that far away. No, no. Right. From

[00:05:31] john: all aia, I believe.

[00:05:32] Matt: Yeah. Yeah. So and, and is it the monkeys, apes something in Gibraltar? Yes.

[00:05:38] john: Monkeys on the, on the on the Rock. Can’t say I.

[00:05:42] Matt: Okay. That’s, that’s probably for the best.

[00:05:44] So we are are going to be talking this week about. At least two of about the six and a half dozen conferences that you apparently do in your spare time. One of which is the thing that originally brought me to your door, which is a thing called Field of Play. So I think probably we should crack on.

[00:06:02] john: Yeah, I do.

[00:06:59] Matt: I am a big believer in. How serendipitous events happen and how you and I, John got put in contact is one of those. I was at a conference about three months ago and I bumped into somebody who I’ve known for many years but hadn’t seen in donkeys and certainly hadn’t chatted to for a long while, and Andy and I were chatting away and he told me about a new venture that he had which involved sports data.

[00:07:26] He was being a bit cryptic about it ’cause it’s one of those stealth mode things, which I know that people mostly do because they haven’t quite worked out what the idea is yet. But and he he said about whether I knew anybody who knew anything about Sports Station, I had a think about it. I thought, well there’s somebody I know who used to work for England Wales Cricket Board, so I can put you in touch with him.

[00:07:44] And there’s somebody I know who works at the football association I used to work with at Microsoft, so I can put you in touch with him and I’ll have a word around and see if anybody else knows anybody. And so I had a word around, and you and I are connected through both being an equal experts network.

[00:07:59] We will not talk about equal experts tonight other than just to get that disclaimer outta the way. And somebody said, oh, you speak to John because he’s organized earlier this year, an entire conference about sports data. We exchanged a few messages and out the back of that, it sounded like it would be quite an interesting thing to talk about.

[00:08:15] So there, that is why we are here now today through that random chain of events. So field of Play happened March last year. You’ve got another one coming up. In 2026, which is so far in the future, it’s just impossible to believe numbers wise. And I realize it’s only like six months away. And I hope you’ve got the organization well in, in trail by now.

[00:08:36] But tell us about it. It’s less than that now. It’s. Yeah, I, I was telling somebody else today that procrastination is the, the evidence of original thinkers. So keep that in mind. But tell us about it. What, what, what is field of play? What drove you to, to create a conference about this stuff?

[00:08:55] john: That is a good question and a compelling one compelling one. Somewhere been a long story and a spiteful story. And I say that the most, the smallest of so let’s start with pie data because I promise it’s relevant. So I’ve been working in data for 10 or so, actually, no, sorry, 10 or 15 years.

[00:09:22] It’s been been while. And hence this is kind of how we’re connected through through the network. As part of this, after my first ever job which is a lovely job I got not knowing how to, I started a local chat. Essentially a huge group which is lovely. And being, I’m proud the city, many people who know and there’s Divide Man.

[00:09:53] I have many from down in London. Over large chunks of the story. A number of folks were saying to me, John, why don’t we create a Pie Data Manchester conference? You’ve been the Pie Data London Conference. We should have a conference. And I thought, yes, we should have a conference. Manchester’s.

[00:10:12] Brilliant. We should.

[00:10:38] Chester

[00:10:41] folks, folks who’ve been coming for years and years. One of those folks is Dominic Jordan. When I first met him was head of data at in, I think possibly had moved. So one is kind of travel data, one is eCommerce ended up becoming first head of Data United.

[00:11:08] Few of his.

[00:11:17] Quite well.

[00:11:21] We spent a chatting, but yeah. Wonderful, wonderful. So I think fantastic and a great history in terms of computing novel.

[00:11:42] In computer. Can’t remember I world,

[00:11:48] but obviously man, fantastic history, sports. And I nerd, I’m not very good at any sports, but I really enjoy watching.

[00:12:08] One thing I can say that Manchester has an advantage of it is this combination of sports and data and computer. There is a conference in the us in Boston, the mit, the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. But other than that, I wasn’t really familiar with any other sport theater conferences. I’ve been on Twitter for years and years, and I followed various people who do bits of sports analytics, both in an amateur capacity and a professional capacity.

[00:12:42] And I thought, well, something just so happened that a years ago I applied for a job in the sports analytics world, being the first, the idea was I’d be the first ML engineer.

[00:13:06] But everyone was like, yeah, John’s great. John’s great.

[00:13:13] Which, you know, he,

[00:13:17] but he was doing a different sports conference and a few folks I knew kind of mentioned, well, it’s. People who look the same, with the same perspective, the same background, talk about the same things. And we thought, well, with pie data we try and make sure we’re welcoming many people as possible. Many different backgrounds, many possible, because that’s always been tremendously valuable to the work we’ve done, you know, in pretty much every dimension.

[00:13:50] So we, that’s. One being geopolitical and one being that guy. I mean,

[00:13:59] Matt: there are many things in this world that have been created through spite. I think the Manchester Ship Canal was one thing that was created mostly through spite. So and before we started recording, one of the things I find fascinating about the, the realm of sports data is quite how hugely diverse.

[00:14:19] A set of subjects it covers because there’s a, I mentioned I know people who work at the football association and I know people who work or have worked at the England and Wales Cricket Board and those sorts of organizations have everything from the management of data around elite athletes through to all of the management of all the way down to grassroots level sporting activity, which includes things like you know, really important stuff like safeguarding, which is a big, big.

[00:14:46] Concerned with those sorts of organizations. You, you’ve got things that are running massive sports rights enterprises. So, you know, within that, everything from, you know, audience viewership through to advertising, through to massive sales and franchising rights. You’ve got the running of massive event venues.

[00:15:06] And the list goes on. And I mean, is that one of the things that you’ve been able to pick up within field of Play to be able to cover some of that data or have you put a, a focus in particular areas?

[00:15:18] john: This has been something that kind of we wrestled with, I wouldn’t say struggled because frankly I wanna.

[00:15:26] I wanna sit and chat to kind of almost everyone from every element of it. Being the type of nerd I’m, I wanna understand, oh, how do you measure every single event in a football game, you know, from the, the right back looking over shoulder while the striker scores goal, there’s so much collect, but also as you quite rightly say football clubs care about shifting and selling every single shirt in a club shop.

[00:15:52] How do they handle that? How do they handle logistic networks? How do they handle the sports rights and the entire sports media is a, a massive thing that I would to understand how that works. They’ve got some work in different bits of the sports media environment, but in terms streaming stream your football game to however many millions of people across the globe is a massive endeavor itself.

[00:16:17] So there are so many endeavors. If we just pick one. Football is one of the, one of the bigger industries, certainly one of most visible industries in our society, and it has all of the complexity of any other business. I’ve done a lot of work in eCommerce. Football has an entire e. I’m sure, I’m not sure what you call it, dimension, I suppose, to it.

[00:16:44] Because there’s so many, so much stuff that gets at the same time measuring the this is, I’m not this type of data person, so I’m, but measuring athletes, measuring the.

[00:17:04] Of breathing done in certain decile of intensity. All of this is also being measured at the same time. Football, tremendous being, I’m big baseball fan

[00:17:21] and stuff that’s been done and I think that’s probably the most mature sport in terms of data analytics. You’ve got the great film a, a really good film with Brad Pitt, Moneyball.

[00:17:36] And see how

[00:17:42] way

[00:17:47] in basketball,

[00:17:51] the, because it became evidence that taking shots within the, within the three point zone. I’m not a basketball fan, but shots from long long distance were a lower percentage based on the, if you stepped outside the and took three points, it was worth it even though you were less to score the expected reward from the increased three points.

[00:18:20] More relevant and you can see differences in heat maps of where shots were taken now be 20 years ago. So yeah, there’s a, there’s a ramble, but there’s a huge amount of things that can be collected.

[00:18:31] Matt: Do you think that, I mean in, there’s definitely different types of sports that have got different levels of, of data accessible to them by the nature of the sport.

[00:18:41] And. So I’m a Watford fan. It’s my only sporting allegiance really, and it’s something I carry with me as a burden for most of my, my life. But one of the things that Graham Taylor, I can’t remember the exact quote, but one of the things he said is that actually, ultimately this is also about entertainment.

[00:18:57] Is there a, are we seeing in some sports the risks that actually the the data telling you how to be able to win leads to not entertaining sport?

[00:19:07] john: Yes. Obviously beauty is the eye of the beholder. But this is certainly something that I think a lot of people have

[00:19:16] complained about, I suppose

[00:19:18] where to start. So in

[00:19:21] baseball the, the number of home runs and the frequency which home runs have been hit has been increasing or blessed. Past that because hit runs you’ve got difference between kind of, I suppose, very broad trying hit home runs and playing what small ball. So taking bump, stealing base, hitting the ball within and.

[00:19:59] Are pitching faster than ever to more increases in injuries, which again, in different therefore it’s harder to get a hit. So when you hit the and try, that’s what’s happening. Which to kind of, the game being a little bit more one dimensional because it was either the ball gets hit and goes out. So you get

[00:20:26] Nick: far more strikeouts.

[00:20:30] So I just wanted to jump in there because Please. Well, I’m sort of with mute on tapping away to make sure I get the title right. There’s a episode of the series Losers that’s currently on Netflix in the UK called Stone Cold, which is about how the sport of curling of all things with a, a player that looked.

[00:20:51] The analyzed kind of in the sports analytics way, but sort of simpler like seventies, eighties, nineties looked at how to win the game and just demolished everybody and almost destroyed the sport ’cause it was, it was just sort of a really dull, low points fight, last man standing wins kind of thing.

[00:21:11] Rather than, it was a much more in intriguing sort of tactical play before to the extent where they changed the rules in which. Because they changed the rules. The sport got so popular it made it to the Olympics ’cause it was so much more interesting, you know, for what is kind of just a Canadian sport.

[00:21:28] Yeah. And a, you know, ish. But just an excellent summary of just analytics through sport and especially sort of being mindful of any listeners depending on what you can find that thing. I think more also than the other sport, the change in three point shooting in basketball, and again, not being a basketball fan, but just some knowledge of just how it’s completely changed the way teams play, the way teams try and score and therefore the way teams defend and also therefore, who you get, who you try and draft and trade for on your team.

[00:22:04] Like it’s altered the whole thing. It’s amazing, the effect it has and especially. Thinking about sport as a business, I thought you made really great points in, in just sort of e, e-commerce is one dimension, and kind of you want to win because that makes your team more popular, which means you can charge more for everything.

[00:22:23] But if you win in a really uninteresting way financially, your team loses. So you’ve got sort of two sets of analysts, almost presumably against each other. It’s like, well, we want the team to win, so we’re successful, but we want the team to win in as dramatic a way as possible. So we can so we can make as much money as possible.

[00:22:43] john: Hmm.

[00:22:45] Nick: It’s,

[00:22:47] john: and I think that’s a really good point, and

[00:22:53] I think these are often not even the data questions, but the overall strategy questions that, as you say, without data, we wouldn’t know that they were there, wouldn’t be able to ask them. But it’s kind of an overall organizational direction. One thing I do, people probably get sick of saying this, I’m working with them, but it’s very, very rare that data is a product and delivers value in of itself.

[00:23:21] You have to use it to do something. It could be an automated decision through a machine learning model. It could be a report somebody reads, but essentially you an input to do something. This is often the way, I mean, oh, I think going back to, I think I’m remembering this correctly. Graham walked team in the early nineties.

[00:23:44] One of the things he was trying to do was based on some analysis that had been done that was Charles had done in the fifties. Fewer passes we do the quicker we get the ball up field. I think the high pressure involved as well, the more likely we be successful. And you see variations of that at the moment, first with, and then with evolution pressing really high because that’s kind of partially what the data tells you, but partially how they understand the game itself.

[00:24:20] I mean, there’s been old manner of kind of changes, especially in American sport. Not sure why they’re really open to having rule changes for better. But in baseball, because of this change in strategy, lot of focus on hitting, oh, one part of this was what’s known the shift. So normally there’s four baseball infields.

[00:24:48] Second base, so side essentially. But what would happen is you could shift one infielders to where you thought hitter hit, sometimes player second base

[00:25:07] not, but you’d be very, very imbalanced defenses and MLB decided to make a change to say you couldn’t do that. It was giving, not that it was giving too much of an advantage, but because it wasn’t fun people weren’t getting on base. An and I think this is another example, like you saying or tweaking the experience.

[00:25:34] Changing the experience to make things more enjoyable, not just more efficient. In some ways, you could have to say see how this is going with.

[00:25:46] Set pieces in football at the moment, arsenal being very at this and getting the arsen. But you were getting those whatever 30 years ago with the old Graham Taylor side. And that certainly wasn’t, as far as I’m aware, not data led. So it’s different ways to get to the same and result suppose,

[00:26:05] Matt: I guess, as well as, I mean, there’s, I’m old enough to remember when it was two points for a win rather than three points at a win.

[00:26:11] And that was a, a mechanism to be able to help. Get more people going for wins because it was, wasn’t worth enough and it was just two points to the win. And I guess there’s also, there’s a, because I’m a social scientist and I have these things, I have my favorite two social science laws, which are Campbell’s Law and Goodheart’s Law.

[00:26:29] And Goodheart’s Law is basically if you, if you make a measurement, the outcome of some sort of change, then the measurement changes. Its its meaning and so it becomes therefore useless and Campbell basically, and people will game it to hit it. Now it’s really interesting within sport where you have the mechanisms of, of.

[00:26:47] Points are literally what you are there to be able to deliver, whether that’s points in the game or points on the table. And that those, those changes in the rules do mean that it adapts behaviors, but then you, you do sometimes get kind of weird after effects as a result of the Yeah. And that, that

[00:27:07] john: it, it, it’s fascinating.

[00:27:14] Those are, those are laws that I often not quote because I forget the name of them, but I, you know, I certainly subscribe to them and certainly often because I do career advice helping people their, often I can, if you working eCommerce, it’s really easy to kind of show you’ve done a, got a good job and you can say, okay, we’ve optimized a number where the number optimizing is revenue.

[00:27:56] Con.

[00:28:13] People just playing sports really well, you know, an excellent pass, an excellent like movement off the ball in cricket, an excellent swing or spin, bowling executed perfectly. But end of the day, some people I know, they just care about winning. They just wanna win and who’s say which is right, or, but yeah, all kind of, all kinds of stuff up.

[00:28:35] People diving or whatever.

[00:28:39] Exploiting these spaces within those constraints? Yes. From a mathematical perspective.

[00:28:44] Matt: Yeah. I mean things like why people who are into rugby and don’t understand why footballers play they fall over all the time is because in rugby you don’t get advantage for falling over. Whereas in football you do, therefore you make sure it’s obvious you’ve fallen over.

[00:28:57] Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Absolutely does. So, I mean in, in most, well, certainly professional team sports now, it seems that there’s data being gathered in real time across an entire team. You see, there’s little packs that players have got on their backs and they’re collecting presumably body biometric data or telemetric data and then also position data and all that kind of stuff are, are coaching teams using that data in real time.

[00:29:25] Sometimes it

[00:29:26] john: generally depends on the resources, and it also comes back to, again, how we plug data into a business process. How do we do something with it? I was chatting with a director of cricket and

[00:29:45] I discussions in Major League Baseball.

[00:29:53] You might, you might correctly guess that they’re massively differ in size, budget. So in terms of what you can do what the most impactful things you do

[00:30:09] resource now I won’t go into too much detail for the sake of, you know, these are all private conversations. I’ve eCommerce with teams twice the size of professional sports, professional sports teams, you know, the Premier League,

[00:30:31] some of those teams I’ve worked with, eCommerce. Fantastic been. It’s all to do with how well teams organized standard business, right? The same applies in sports. How can you, if you work with a

[00:30:52] whatever reason they play best or their mentality is, I don’t wanna think about anything, I just wanna play my game. If wanna get the most them, they work hard in every way. They’re, they’re trying to learn, they’re trying to improve, but their learning style isn’t aided by data. How do you help them improve?

[00:31:13] And it’s very, in those cases, conversation been very delicate and intentional conversations you have with them so you can support them, but in a way that works best for them. On the flip side, how much can you impact the overall performance of your team over the course of an entire season of several seasons?

[00:31:34] Thinking long term is it by telling a striker you should score a goal, you know, shoot more if you’re position it rather than shoot, you know, and there data might be 90.

[00:31:53] Professional footballer, 96%. A little bit extra tidbit of marginal gain. And that can be tremendously useful. But one, the other element you at in saying we spend 50 million quid on new, you wanna be sure you spend the money on the right person or even more so, and you don’t see this anywhere near as much.

[00:32:19] Don’t spend 50 million on this. So the decision never gets made because analysts in the background are saying, Hey, here’s a risk. Here’s some elements of what information about how we make the decision massive risk. This money essentially risk. We play out the way we might hope it.

[00:32:47] Be folks in America or folks in the cricket world where much, much lower

[00:33:00] someone,

[00:33:05] Aman role on your team, maybe play half the game, maybe play a third of the games. Are they gonna be able move? Hypothetical example. And it, it’s fascinating because it all depends on the organization and the way they operate, the constraints they have, the leaders they can pull.

[00:33:26] Nick: I really like that as well.

[00:33:28] Your, that to me, the, the real. Importance of analytics is through context rather than just the numbers itself. And I mean, this comes up a lot in the coverage of the NFL and going for it on fourth down. Do you give two points after a touchdown or one, that kind of thing. And the, the analytics tend to give very general answers based on the performance of all the teams in all the situations.

[00:33:50] When of course, it’s much more about context and like not. Momentum because I think that’s been statistically proven not to be a thing. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s it’s feelings. But like how healthy are your team feeling? How are the, how, what’s the health of the key players for this play kind of thing, but that you are emphasizing.

[00:34:11] As I say, so analytics I think are useful in context and also you are looking at analytics in context. Like you say, if you can improve the performance of someone amazing, slightly what’s, you know, what’s the point? But if you can raise the flaw of say, some lower players or pick the best ones, or as you say, especially not make mistakes, which must be particularly brave from a.

[00:34:33] Analyst point of view because there is of course a chance depending on system fit and so on in whatever sport that that player will go off and be amazing somewhere else. And you are the one that said don’t pick them. And it’s kind of better for you to advocate for someone who’s then terrible and it’s like, well, you know this, this player was bad.

[00:34:53] It’s not me. But if they go and be great somewhere else then, then you are sort of the one that that carries the can in that regard. Yeah.

[00:35:01] john: And, and again, because I, I’ve got the way I, I’ve never worked in any a situation like that as, you know, a premier league club or anything, but I know folks who worked at I suppose teams that in the media and know slightly dysfunctional and teams that are known as Exact was.

[00:35:25] And both of them, I’ve heard of stories of a manager or a director of football or whatever saying, nah, I think we should get this player, or, I think we should not get this player. Essentially overruling the, the analytics, and I don’t know that ignore analytics, but I think it’s decision that does not necessarily,

[00:35:47] analytics is not the final site.

[00:35:54] I,

[00:35:56] whether it’s the, whether it’s,

[00:36:16] so listen to interviews. Professional sports players who say, I know at this point we felt like we had the momentum with them. And then you get into latent variables and all kind of stuff. They’re very fascinating. But I try to think about in the world of sport, because it’s a hobby

[00:36:32] Nick: not wishing to get you into trouble, but that, I mean, that raises an interesting point, whereby are the players of a game.

[00:36:44] Other players of sport, the best people to provide that kind of feedback? Or are they too close to the actual events? And of course of everybody in a stadium, they’re the most emotionally affected, arguably by what they’re doing. Are they the best people to look at something analytically and pick out the optimum strategy?

[00:37:05] For example, three. Three point shooting I gather, came completely from. From outside of the player base. I have a vague memory of without sort of, kind of trying that Wikipedia. Yeah. So I, so I, I won’t say anything. What, what do you think about that? Or are you willing to sort of say on a, on a podcast are players for people to listen to or not?

[00:37:29] I go to be a very

[00:37:29] john: difficult guest and really on the question.

[00:37:36] The best place to make the analytically optimal decision. And to that, I think no, but I don’t think that, that’s not fault for winning the game. And those are the people who have to execute, go out, run 10 kilometers for 90 minutes, fight in the trenches in the NFL field. I’ve had in my head since, I think it was, I think it was civilization five. There’s a quote, make measurable, measure. What is measurable, make measurable, what not attributed to. I think, I can’t remember. But when I was doing my PhD, that was something I thought about a lot. And the more I spent time with data, I more and more time thinking all these things, whether it’s tracking data, whether it’s expected ones added.

[00:38:28] Expected goal, whatever the measurement, we’re not measuring something. That is actually the thing. We care to optimize. We’re building models and all models are wrong. So what we care about is how best to, how best to win the game. Now, if you say to, if you say to someone.

[00:39:01] The best point. I want many something on board without being no idea what opinions are. So I don’t wanna, but it’s, if you can understand, hey, strategy a. You say, alright man, United back in 99, bomb on down the gigs. You’re not doing anything particularly difficult, you’re saying, well is probably the best way of winning.

[00:39:37] And I think most of the time in most books, it’s pretty well established, the best way of playing the game. Now obviously you’re quite right in there. Hadn’t been established the advantage of this particular strategy. And data can really, the fact.

[00:40:05] I know this wasn’t the first, the first guy to do it, but I, and there was a, a high school coach a few years ago who would never, ever kick, never kick, never never kicked. Yeah. I was, I was

[00:40:14] Nick: thinking I know him and he’s, yeah. Like I can see his face. But we’ll save either the audience listening to a search, the internet or Paul Matt editing out us, but yeah, someone who was, who took it to the extreme.

[00:40:29] Mm-hmm. I, it gots publicity outta it. It seemed to get more wins than losses, if I remember rightly. Yeah. And from what I’ve heard, I think there have been other

[00:40:37] john: people in the past who’ve done similar extreme strategies. But to your point earlier, it’s one thing to do at high school level, which again, in America can be very intense.

[00:40:46] But doing that at the college level,

[00:40:51] he tremendously different. I remember a few years, bill Belichick, the great new England Patriot, went down against. I think two yard big playoff and people were talking about what was he doing such a decision. Whereas nowadays it’s such an obvious go, people don’t even question because of evolution.

[00:41:18] And I think in.

[00:41:27] To exploring new ways of playing, but there’s been, there’s been such a big focus, for example, on how winning back and they’re undervalued,

[00:41:44] but warning, never ever matter. You should only a pass as much as possible. That all depends on the context. If you’re playing against a defense who are only playing, stop the pass and don’t even try and stop the run, then you should run the ball. I can’t remember where I was going with this. No worries.

[00:41:59] I was Sorry. Go on. Go on. I, the thing is, it’s always two sides playing and you’ve got variable conditions within the constraints of the game.

[00:42:07] Matt: And there’s also to, I can’t remember where this is sourced from, but I’m, I’m relatively confident in this, in an area more broadly where I, I’m speaking with people who know a lot more about things than I do, but penalty shoot penalty kicks statistically, the best thing a goalkeeper can do is stay in the middle, because that’s the most likely place they’re gonna be able to get to reach the ball when it comes to them.

[00:42:31] And they don’t. And the reason they don’t is because if you just stay in the middle and it goes either side of you, you get an awful lot more shit from the crowd than you do if you’ve dived, you know, manfully, but in completely the wrong direction. And so there is a thing around the psychology at an individual level and what that means in terms of the context of the.

[00:42:52] The arena, the drama, and the fact that we should never forget that for all the analytics. This is also an enormous theatrical event.

[00:43:01] john: Tremendously. I mean, and this like, do the amount of pressure that these people under when taking a penalty saying your penalty, do, do any of these things. If

[00:43:10] Nick: I was them, like the, the analytics would be the last thing in my mind.

[00:43:14] Oh, and can, can we just highlight that theatrical. It’s an excellent word to describe that when thinking about this and you think, yeah, you can see the numbers, you can see what you should do, and like you say, you should stand in the middle and so on. But then this is, this is theater with all the connotations of performance and being on the stage and you’re a star.

[00:43:35] And all that. Yeah. You have to, all of that figures into your decision making rather than just what are the percentages for each of these actions I could pick.

[00:43:45] Matt: And then the other thing that I’m reminded of, and this has come from some of the stuff that Nick and I have been looking at for the last 18 months, and then the role that luck might have to play.

[00:43:54] I think the most extreme example of that in the last 12 months would be Adam Petey, who after four years of training to be able to try to retain his gold medal in the breaststroke at the Olympics, lost by two, 100th of a second, and then the next day found out he’d contracted COVID. And it’s difficult to make the distinction between two 100th of a second and being a little bit under the weather ’cause he had COVID and you know, what do you think?

[00:44:18] And then you’ve got luck that he’s built into some games where, you know, the shape of the rugby ball of the American football is designed to be able to make it unpredictable in the way in which it, it will, will bounce. But even there’s a fantastic research I found that have been done by I think somebody in the Netherlands looking at the.

[00:44:36] Track record of penalty shootouts in international tournaments and demonstrating that 60% of the time the the team that won the toss for the penalty shootout would win the penalty shootout, statistically significant. And the reason was the first mover advantage. So if you have. If you think you’ve got a stronger team and you get the chance to go first to stronger team shooting, you go first with the kicks.

[00:45:02] If you think you’ve got a better goalkeeper than the opposition, you go first with being shot at. And that seems to be, you know, it doesn’t guarantee the win, but the toss of the coin actually has quite a big impact in a game that generally doesn’t really think that, you know, randomness and, and luck has anything to do with it.

[00:45:20] ’cause it’s all just about skill and, and expertise.

[00:45:23] john: Yeah. Well, and not to get, I’m gonna spend a little moment getting a little bit with this, but you mentioned the role of randomness and it’s interesting that you’re writing a book because I don’t think of randomness. I think of probability distributions in which you take, you take a random sample from a probability distribution, but the probability distribution.

[00:45:51] How good a goalkeeper, how good is a, a suffering or whatever are all these things, which for some of which you can I take a moment to a little a of mine who works, Miami s Alex, who’s in play this year.

[00:46:19] Is kind a school of thought around probabilities. S in which understand which we try and improve our prior expectations With the observed observations we made to come up with a better posterior understanding. So we evolve our understanding by watching things, and this is something that. School of statistics is kind of formulating in a mathematical sense.

[00:46:50] One of the things with almost, in fact I’ll say every sport, even things like baseball, when you have thousands of at bats over season, it’s still incredibly small sample size. So when you’re a striker taking a penalty, you may only do that, you’ll likely do that less five times. A how do we understand and predict, which.

[00:47:16] Goalkeeper.

[00:48:24] Nick: Okay. Thank you very much for that. That was a, a great episode that I think could have gone on for several hours longer. But instead we’ll look at what we’re all doing next week. If John, what have you got to look forward to?

[00:48:37] john: You said lot you mentioned earlier

[00:48:47] of the Pennsylvania railroad, so that’ll, that’s one of things I’ll be doing.

[00:49:01] Next week as we this, looking forward to that.

[00:49:05] Nick: Excellent. For me, I was looking through, it’s, it’s mainly game design with lots of sort of open spaces. I’ve carved out to do it, so I need to get on with it. Especially after that, like I say, that session on micro games I attended and also discussing where to go next with a.

[00:49:26] A kind of card game for children based on the survival rates of para lithic tribes and just how to illustrate that without it just being like a grim death march. You know, like we’ve said about thing like sports needing to be theatrical, you wanna educate children. But also the game’s gotta be interesting.

[00:49:48] Otherwise, none of none of the lessons will stick. So discussing with a company on where to take that next, that sounds fascinating. It’s, it’s, it’s actually interesting to seeing how grim their, well, kind of how grim their lives were, how survival based they were, as opposed to. You know, the, the, the kind of time we’ve got now to do things like have a chat about things, things like sport, you know, all these things we, we do arbitrarily.

[00:50:14] Meanwhile, Matt, as much as you can tell us, what are you doing for mostly

[00:50:19] Matt: be doing civic duty, which I can’t talk about, but I will be continuing to go through the edit of the book which I completed the last picture for it. Today, which is very exciting. And the other thing which I’m looking forward to is I will, as I do every year, I will wish a happy birthday to my dear friend Daniel, because for some reason I have in my diary.

[00:50:46] His birthday recorded as being the 11th of sorry, the 2nd of November because at some point in the deep and distant past, I had an app somehow that got American dates in UA UK date formats muddled up. And so it’s not his birthday at all. But his, his wife’s half American, so it seems apt to celebr.

[00:51:05] In a, in a small and slightly tedious way, the fact that there’s this bad data in my diary, but I keep it there because it, it, every year it tickles me. So that’s, I’ll be looking forward to that on the weekend.

[00:51:17] Nick: Does it tickle Daniel? I’m not sure we asked. I think he still

[00:51:20] Matt: finds it quite amusing, but there’s a long story about how his 40 50th, 30th, 40th, and fifties birthdays weren’t celebrated on his birthday either, but I won’t get into that here.

[00:51:31] Nick: Got it. Thank

[00:51:32] Matt: you. Anyway, that’s it for another we, we’ll be back again in a fortnight. I think we have a a relentless fortnightly roster of guests all the way up to Christmas now, which is great news. I’m not sure who it is next week, but it’ll be fabulous, I’m sure. And so John, thank you again for joining us.

[00:51:48] It’s been a fascinating conversation. Thank you very much and Nick an absolutely delight our first joint hosting. I think we’ve managed to get through it unscathed,

[00:51:58] Nick: I think. I think we’ve managed, just to fill in one gap from earlier, Kevin Kelly, if you’re wanna look up a high school American football coach who.

[00:52:08] Is 110% the kind of personality you think he is and always goes through on fourth down, K-E-L-L-E-Y is is the person to look upon. I have

[00:52:18] Matt: no idea what most of that sentence meant, but I’m sure it’ll be enlight. Anyway, that’s it. Well thank you for listening and we’ll speak you soon.