What Football Analytics can Teach Successful Organisations | Rasmus Ankersen | TEDxManchester

Do you remember this one? It's a Nokia 3310, once recognized as the best phone ever produced. I guess most of you in this room in one, wouldn't you raise your hand if you had a 3310? Wow, almost one hundred percent of the market here. You remember that it never ran out of battery, you could play snake with it, it was world famous for being the indestructible phone, so in the mobile industry they say that if someone drops an iPhone, the screen breaks, yes someone drops a Nokia 3310, the floor breaks, it was incredibly solid, the 3310 embodied exactly

what

Nokia stood for as a brand, resilience, quality and innovation, it was products like this that made Nokia one of the most

successful

companies on the planet, but, as you will remember, there is also another and A more tragic side to this story because today the 3310 rests in peace in the cemetery of gadgets, it has become a symbol of the collapse of Nokia, a company that went from 50% of global marketing to 3% in less than five years and it made me think that While we talk a lot about how an organization achieves success, maybe we don't talk enough about the psychological challenges that often follow success, because if you think about it , almost every industry has its own Nokia story.

Companies that once dominated their industry but then somehow completely lost their mojo, all leave us with that million-dollar question: why do

successful

companies really fail and

what

could they have done to stay ahead? So today I will try to answer that question without using additional threatening thoughts. But using a day of

football

analysis I think it explains why many successful businesses often hesitate to change until it's too late before they start. I need to ask a very important question: do we have any Newcastle United fans in the room? Yes, there are a couple. from there, so guys, I'm just going to warn you that the next ten minutes are going to be painful.

Well, I know the last 25 years have been painful, but it's okay, don't take it personally, this is Newcastle United's stadium. James's Park every two weeks 50,000 dying fans flocked to the stadium to watch the team play and instinctively Newcastle United have all the building blocks to become a truly successful

football

club. They have a billionaire businessman who owns it. They have a fan base. Most other clubs would die. Because despite everything, Newcastle is also known as the team that never really reached its potential, but just over five years ago, in 2012, luck seems to change for Newcastle because they finished sensationally fifth in the English Premier League, the league stronger. in the world there was a surprising achievement, all the experts predicted that Newcastle would be fighting to avoid relegation, they were now fifth within Newcastle, the emotion was running high: the management team was convinced that this was the beginning of a new era in the history of the football club, so they decided to reward the head coach and his former coach with a historic, long and unbreakable contract of eight years and really tried to do everything possible to keep the team together for the next season because that's how successful organizations are supposed to properly think about the next season.

This happened in Newcastle. they almost got relegated, they finished in 16th place and nobody had any idea what was going on because they had the same players, they had the same coaching staff, they even played in the same stadiums, I mean, nothing has changed, how could a team with practically no changes go from 5 to 6 in In less than 12 months I will try to answer that question, but first I will give you a little history because in football there is an old expression that coaches, players, commentators, experts frequently use and it goes like this, the league standings never The lie that is supposed to be that once the last game of a season is played, justice prevails, the teams that finish at the top of the table are the ones that perform better and it seems that those that are relegated They are the worst performers at the end of the day, everyone gets what they deserve, it's really not that simple and let me explain, your wife please meet Matthew Benham, it's a game, he convinced me, the guys most football brilliants, they don't work for football clubs, they work in the gaming industry and I don't talk. about the amateur gambler, the guy who places a bet every Saturday morning to trigger his weekly adrenaline rush.

I'm talking about the professionals, the guys who use sophisticated mathematical models to place bets, they are the brightest guys and Matthew is one of them. For them, he is an Oxford physics graduate who decided to set up his own bidding syndicate in the north of London, basically an office full of statisticians with PhDs who calculate the probabilities of the outcome of football matches, which has made him such a rich man that he decided to buy Football. Club he supported since he was a teenager, Brentford in west London, and that's where I met him five years ago in Jersey.

I wrote up the Brantford training round the moment we met. Brentford was third in Ligue 1, which is the third division of English football. There were only five games left in the season and Branford was pushing for a promotion, so I said to Matthew, what do you think you're going to promote this season? What does your god feel? And I didn't do it. I gave myself an answer that I didn't fully understand. I hope it wasn't a response full of emotion, the guy just looked at me and then said very dryly, well, right now there is a 42% chance that we will promote, that in common made me realize that I met someone who was completely different about the game and me.

Having met over the next few months, Matthew and I began meeting regularly to brainstorm how a football club could be run differently, in particular how it might be possible to break the correlation between spending and results that seems to exist. It's possible? Not to spend more, but I will think about the competition using the weapons of a data and analysis player. One day we had lunch together in a restaurant in Soho in London and Matthew told me that he and I had been looking to buy another football club. I responded immediately, why don't you check out the club he supported as a teenager?

If, for example, Michelin, based in rural western Denmark, in the middle of nowhere, Michelin was almost bankrupt at the time, so it was a perfect place for something radical. ideas a week later we flew to Denmark and took a look at the club, he finally decided to buy the club, he appointed me president of the club and we ran the club together for the last four years in the first season we won the first championship in the club's history and a A year later we became world famous because we beat the mighty Manchester United in the Europa League, unfortunately in the UK it is perceived more as the absolute disgrace of Manchester United than the genius of Michelin, but we will live.

With that, suddenly, media newspapers, television stations from around the world were flying to western Denmark to learn more about this little club that no one can pronounce, whose name is run by an English game that uses data and analysis to find a competitive advantage, that's the thing. If you want to understand how a player thinks, there is a concept you need to understand: the league ranking always lies why players say that because understand that football is a very random game, it is a much more random game than basketball, for example, why? Because football is a low-scoring sport, there are not many goals in football, you know, the average number of goals in a football game is 2.8 points.

The average number of goals in a basketball game is more than 200, he is the main one, the fewer goals there are. en in a sport, the more impacts random events have F random events like the ball deflecting and spinning into the net or the referee making a wrong decision in the last minute of the game, ultimately this means that team when it is less frequent in football. low scoring sport than a high scoring sport like basketball and that's why the league stabilizes more after 10 games than after 20 games, but even 38 games is a full season, 38 games is a very small sample , you know it's not enough to take randomness out of the equation, so the player goes about making predictions and backing up those predictions with his bets, and when he decides to Beckettarlo and place bets, he doesn't look at where that team is on the table. the league. looks at underlying performance indicators so they have more predictive value and tells you more about where that seam is likely to go in the future than its current position in the league field, so let's go back to New Castle's glory season when they finished fifth and let's review that through the lens of a gamer because we as experts on the game were overly impressed by the performance of the new consoles.

The players were very skeptical. Their analysis showed that it was a fragile bubble that could burst at any time. Here's why one of the statistics that a player relies a lot on is that assists ik called goal difference is the difference between the number of goals in the seam and the number of goals the opponent scores. It's a very reliable indicator of a team's strength, so let's look at Newcastle finishing fifth with a total shot differential of plus 5 a. well behind the top four teams and if you look at that column it is by far the lowest number, this indicates what one player calls an extremely effective goal distribution.

Our goals in football are important, not all goals are equally important, so he is an example, let's say Newcastle. He scores two goals in two games and the opponent scores six goals. Newcastle would be better off winning one in this first match, losing six, one and a second, rather than losing twice for free, same goal difference but different number of points, so if a team is able to consider the number of passes throughout the season, how effective the goal distribution is with those scores, there is a huge degree of randomness in that and if you look at Newcastle's 65 points this season you will see that it was driven by a very effective, eight victories. with a goal and important free losses with more than free throws, statistically it is very unlikely to be able to repeat 65 points with a goal difference of +5, another statistic again, but confidence is something called shot differential, the difference between the number of shots the producers had seen versus The number of shots the opponent produces is statistically very well documented in football: the best team in overtime produces more than the worst teams, so let's take a look at that and as you can see , Newcastle finished fifth with a total shot differential of minus one point four. they clearly do not belong to this company this indicates an unsustainable high conversion rate when you have a positive goal differential driven by a negative shot differential it indicates unsustainable high conversion rates how many of those shots were converted into goals a new cast that had especially one player This season when his name stood out see the top scorer say a key component of his success he converted 33% of his shots ladies and gentlemen that is a strange number well, the same season the best player in the world Lionel Messi of FC Barcelona converted 20 % that's how I would put it.

New Castle's fifth place is the equivalent of a publicly traded company having a very high share price and very low customer satisfaction; At the same time, you can have it for a year, but you can't maintain it over time. he is a visualization of how a player perceived the situation the black line shows the number of points Newcastle achieved over those two seasons when they were fifth and when they were 16th the red line is the underlying performance what a player calls waiting for the points for you It can be seen that Newcastle scored far more points in the first season when they finished fifth than the underlying performance justified.

In reality, Newcastle performed almost the same in those two seasons, they were just less lucky and this rephrases the original question: why not the Newcastle management team? I see this crisis coming, why did they decide to reward the head coach with historic, long and unbreakable contracts when the results were clearly unsustainable? I think Newcastle was blinded by one of the most common managerial illusions, what psychologists call results bias, the assumption that good results are always the consequence of good decisions and superior performance or, put another way, success. , luck, genius and this is where the lady becomes much more than just football analysis, because when an organization fails, it is very natural for us to look for reasons to ask the difficult questions why we failed how we can do things better but when we are successful we don'tWe ask those questions we tend to move forward blinded by results bias we expect the results to continue automatically we don't dig deeper and ask them what the underlying reasons for success really were.

Was it due to the price of oil? Was it due to good leadership or exceptional market conditions? How many companies do you think confuse good leadership with good market conditions? This is what successful organizations should think. more like a good player because a good player has trained his brain to resist the human tendency to assume that good results always mean that someone performed brilliantly. A good player treats success with the same skepticism with which he treats failure and this is what successful organizations must do. If you want to stay relevant, ask yourself a gamer's questions. Why were we successful?

How do we separate luck from skill? Is it possible that the times table sometimes lies? Thank you so much.