Nate Silver: commitment

Transcript context

…Let me ask you about a sport which I find totally baffling, soccer. [laughter] There’s not much of a natural time unit. That’s why it’s hard to squeeze in commercials, and not many points. There are assists, not many. They’re not always well defined. Defense, my goodness, more confusing to this American than cricket, yet market salaries of soccer players are determined. There’s some papers on market salaries. The small amount of data we have seem to predict those salaries very well. The fact that soccer behaves in normal ways, does this mean A, we can still get it all done with limited data, or does it mean B, having more data doesn’t really help us that much, and all of sports is a bit like soccer, and we’re ultimately just throwing up our hands and saying, “My goodness, it might as well be cricket”? I feel like I’m answering all your questions the same way, which is analysis is far from perfect, it’ll make lots of mistakes. At the same time, pretty good is hard to beat, sometimes. [laughs] The heuristics that develop over time about how to value players at different positions in soccer — they kind of appropriately don’t value goalkeepers all that much, which the analytics seems to bear out, for example. I do think, though, in soccer, that we’re at the very early stages, and partly there hasn’t really been very much data collected at all. It’s not like in the NBA, where you had blocks and steals, very crude defensive stats. Literally, and we built the system for ESPN a few years ago, where the only data that’s been kept in the long term in soccer is goals and bookings, red cards and yellow cards. It’s not like we have assists, until recently. It’s not like we have tackles. You can maybe get time on the pitch if you parse play-by-play records. We don’t have crossing passes. I think there’s still a lot of room for upward improvement in soccer. We live in a global economy, with billions of laborers. Why don’t more of them learn the knuckleball? Wilbur Wood, Hoyt Wilhelm. They were not athletic. The pay’s pretty high. R. A. Dickey won the Cy Young award in 2012 with a knuckleball, which he taught himself. People put labor into a lot of endeavors, but why so few knuckleballers? Why isn’t that a more regularized statistical process? Why so lumpy?…

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