A Thank You Letter to Paul Tomkins

The aforementioned side project that I had been working on is now up on The Tomkins Times. The post uses Paul Tomkins' Transfer Price Index database to make a pretty compelling case that contrary to Soccernomics' assertion, finish position is correlated to transfer fee expenditures. This clearly has big implications related to fairness within the league, ability to spend in the future due to heavy debt loads at some clubs, and will certainly be impacted by the forthcoming Fair Play rules. I encourage my readers to check it out. I'll have a brief post on Arsenal's performance against the new transfer metric that we developed at a later date.

Most of all, I can't sing Paul's praises enough. He reached out to me over half a year ago about running some analyses on his database. Unfortunately, I was not able to indulge him at the time due to the hectic summer I had with the wedding, business travel, and just getting my blog off the ground. Luckily, I saw a mention of Pay as You Play before I went on my honeymoon last month and it rekindled my creative juices. I contacted Paul, and was lucky enough that he was still interested. The rest is history.

Paul took a chance on a newbie that had a hot statistics hand, and I can't thank him enough. The data he has assembled is a statistician's dream, and I am so privileged to have access to it. More bloggers and writers need to be like Paul - engaging, understanding, patient, and above all non-judgmental and not egotistical. Paul is a true collaborator, seeking talent and engaging it when he sees it. And when it's especially "rough talent" like me (I know I am way out of my league when it comes to Liverpool knowledge), he's willing to continually work with the writer.

It's been an awesome experience over the last week, and I hope to repeat it in the future. If you're a fan of good discussion and analysis (especially related to Liverpool), pay the six dollars a month to be a subscriber to Paul's blog. I've been singing the man's praises, but the blog content is even better! Reward great talent, effort, and product when you see it.

PS - Special shout out to Paul's co-author on Pay as You Play, Graeme Riley. His reviews of drafts and continual suggestions throughout the development of the piece were invaluable. Trying to make a complex 12-page study reasonably readable for a wide spectrum of readers is no easy task, and Graeme played a large part in getting it there.