A Final-Footballer Rating Look at The World Cup

Perfect game plan, imperfect result

I have precious little free time this week as I am getting married on Saturday. Whenever I am not at work I am working on the last critical items for the wedding. I do feel compelled, however, to comment on what I think is undeserved criticism of the Dutch team's performance in the final.

Let's get one thing straight. Any team in the final has one purpose: to win the match within the confines of the rules of the sport. When a team encounters a finesse/rhythm/passing squad like Spain, they have two options for victory. They can either try to match that team's strategy (if they feel they have the talent to do so), or they do their best to disrupt the other team's strategy and pounce on the mistakes. From the outset of Sunday's match, it was clear the Dutch were pursuing the latter strategy.

To make the latter strategy succeed a team must be relentless and ruthless in their physicality. I am not talking about Ryan Sawcross or Nigel de Jong ruthlessness, but I am talking about fair challenges that push the limits of yellow card territory. You have to make every player think they are about to be hit as soon as they touch the ball. Doing so not only makes them less likely to complete an attacking pass, but it makes it far more likely they'll make a bad pass that sets up a counterattack. I am an Arsenal supporter - this type of tactic is the MO of every lower level squad our team faces in the EPL. I am the most likely to gripe about its application, but as long as the challenges are fair it's part of the game. You can't dictate how the opposition chooses to engage you.

And you know what? The Netherlands' strategy worked perfectly. See Figures 1 and 2 below, which plot each semi-finalists' Footballer-Rating absolute and differential score in each World Cup match they played.

Figure 1: Footballer-Rating score differential by match (dashed line represent three match moving average)

Figure 2: Footballer-Rating score by match (dashed lines represent three match moving average)

Looking at Figures 1 and 2, one clearly sees that Spain had their worst match of the tournament in the final. This is especially true when one looks at the running average, where the only time the Spanish average takes a dive is after they play the Dutch. Passing efficiency for a number of Spanish players was off by 10% or more compared to their match against Germany, and far fewer Spanish players had an efficiency rating of 80% or higher against the Netherlands. The Dutch disrupted the Spanish team's rhythm, and when Spain is winning all their knockout round matches 1-0 such disruption makes a win for the opposition possible.

FIFA, ESPN, and commentators around the world can gripe all they want about the Dutch play in this match. They can call it ugly. They can call it dirty. They can claim it will dull the acceptance of soccer in the US. They can make all the claims they want. What they can't claim is that it was ineffective because the numbers don't support that claim. Quite simply, the Dutch were the most effective at disrupting the Spanish style of play that has shredded the world over the last two to three years. If not for a missed Dutch opportunity or two, we never would have gone to extra time and would instead be talking about how brilliant of a game plan was executed by the Dutch.

The goal of any soccer game is to win within the bounds of the rules. If it produces a beautiful match in the process, that's great. Let's not let our obsession for "the beautiful game" lead us to penalize teams who come up with the best strategy to use against their opponent that doesn't fit within our narrow view of the game. Let us celebrate diversity of tactics, a near perfect game plan to take down a soccer juggernaut, and that juggernaut's impressive patience to score a late goal after nearly two hours of such physicality.

This is how I will choose to remember this World Cup and its final match. How about you?

Update: Only a few hours before I made this post, Soccer Quantified made a similar post that looked at each team's foul count during the tournament and their relative success at winning matches, their total points during group play, and their goals scored. It turns out the Dutch ranked in the top third for fouls/match (although that average was helped out by the 28 fouls in the final), and clearly outperformed all other teams in the metrics vs. their fouls per match. Soccer Quantified found distinct negative correlations for each metric with regards to the number of fouls committed. This implies, clearly, that fouling is no way to win an average match. Deploying the strategy, at the right time, can win a single match. That's the essence of my post above, and I stand by it given the several missed opportunities by the Dutch that would have sewn up their first World Cup in regular time.

World Cup Finals Prediction

What I am hoping to see, but not what I expect to see

I could give you a whole bunch of reasons why the Dutch will win on Sunday. Lord knows I want to - it's not only my personal interest, but my professional one as well.

My upcoming statistical analysis hinges on it (the "he" in the linked tweet being Paul the Octopus who predicted a Spanish win).

Behind US and English soccer, the Dutch are my third love.

Then I look at Figures 1 and 2.

Figure 1: Match-by-Match and 3-Match running average Footballer-Rating score by team - dashed line is three match running average (click to enlarge)

Figure 2: Match-by-Match and 3-Match running average Footballer-Rating score differential by team - dashed line is three match running average (click to enlarge)

And Figures 1 & 2 make me face reality: if Spain and The Netherlands play anywhere near to form, the Spaniards will win the World Cup. With over a 1.2 advantage in the 3 match running average score in the Footballer-Rating system, Spain is a 3:1 favorite to defeat the Netherlands. Even more telling is that while the competition has grown tougher and the final four teams have had their Footballer-Rating scores drop accordingly, Spain is the only team to have both their score and score differential be greater than zero in the last match. They've been the only team to really maintain form, albeit a form that earns them 1-0 wins.

Sure, one could claim that Spain benefits in the Footballer-Rating system by increasing their pass percentages by making a far greater number of inconsequential passes. Then again, that's how they open you up to scoring - pass until they see an opening.

The bottom line is that Spain, statistically, is the best team. They play good possession ball, and they wait for you to make a mistake. They took a German team who was rolling, scared them so much that they changed their game plan, and then they punished them for that.

I am happy that this is the final. These two teams are the ones that steamrolled the competition in the run up to the World Cup. If Holland wins, they will be the first team since the 1970 Brazil team to run the table both in the tournament and pre-tournament. Save for their blemish at last year's Confederation Cup tournament against the US, Spain has been just as good.

Alas, I must follow the numbers. Spain will likely win their first World Cup, and deservedly so. Or you could say the stupid octopus made you pick Spain. Either way, Spain is the favorite today.

It's a shame that both teams can't win their first World Cup. I, however, will be the first person to cheer a Dutch upset if it does happen.

Happy World Cup viewing. It's been a heck of ride. Here's hoping the finish is just as good!

PS - If you're looking for a prediction for the 3rd place match, I don't really have one. The Footballer-Rating scores of the teams are a wash. Miroslav Klose may miss the match. Germany's pretty banged up, but gets Thomas Muller back from his one game suspension. Uruguay's Diego Forlan has been one of the more dangerous men in this tournament, scoring from anywhere on the pitch. I would say go with Zonal-Marking's prediction, but they don't have anything up on their site yet. By a flip of a coin, I say it's going to be Germany. And Paul says so too.

First Game World Cup Performance vs. Soccernomics Predictions

Building upon my previous post, the table above shows the residuals for each team after their first match (except South Africa and Uruguay, who played their second match today) in the 2010 World Cup. A residual is the difference between an observation (goal differential in the first match) and the predicted value of the model (predicted goal differential of the first match according to the Soccernomics model). Residuals are useful in:

• Determining which observations are over- or under-performing versus the model
• Determining whether the model (regression equation) satisfies the statistical tests required of it

I will continue to use the residual approach to quantify how each team is doing against their corresponding Soccernomics predicted performance as both the second and third matches are completed for all teams. At the end of group play, I will be able to comment as to which teams were the biggest over- and underachievers in the tournament, as well as comment as to whether or not the Soccernomics model actually applied well to the tournament.

Before getting to that point, however, we can gain some useful observations from each team's first match. Germany's top position in the list, given a 4-0 drubbing of Australia, is not a surprise. As I have said in previous posts, Slovenia can easily play this tournament's "giant killer" role if they keep up their great start and tie or beat the US and England. Finally, even though the Dutch and Danes only had a 0.2 predicted goal differential, Holland's 2-0 win moved them to the third spot in the ranking.

At this point, as only one game has been played, the list is basically a reflection of who won and lost. The bottom three teams are the teams who lost to the top three - the bottom half is an inverse of the top half. As group play goes on, this list will get more jumbled and I will provide commentary as to the bottom three teams.

Finally, how about the Swiss upset of Spain today? Spain, favored by nearly a full goal in the Soccernomics model, finds itself in the bottom of the rankings around Algeria, Serbia, and South Africa. They will be playing catch up to Chile and Switzerland the rest of the way, hoping one of them stumbles in their next two matches. Perhaps there is hope for the rest of the world against the Spanish juggernaut that the press wants to prematurely crown champions.

Statistics are just numbers

Cultural anthropology through Dutch soccer

I spent the weekend in Portland at a friend's wedding, and one of the side benefits was catching up with two friends and their new born son. The husband and I are always chattering about soccer whenever we get together (especially Arsenal as we are both supporters), and the topic of my blog came up. He's a regular reader, and while he enjoys the blog he did feel compelled to mention the change in tone just prior to my recent trip to Europe. He singled out this post for comment, inquiring why I moved away from statistical commentary and spoke with a different voice in asking for readers' recommended books. I think such inquiry provides a perfect opportunity for me to clarify my purpose for this blog and comment on one of those recommended books.

First, this blog is an outgrowth of my belief that statistics can illuminate unseen relationships, but they cannot be dealt with independently of the wider context of the subject area they are being used within. As my Portland friend commented earlier in that visit, we Americans are obsessed with statistics compared to other nations. Our obsession often leads us to look for patterns or significance where there are none. The mark of a good statistician is one who, in their normal course of study of a subject, stumble upon a question that may be best addressed with statistical analysis - that is, the use of statistics should be a rare occurrence in most fields. The same should be no different in soccer.

The challenge comes in building a blog around soccer statistics when my stated goal is to not be in search of patterns that don't actually exist. To me, this blog is a journey in understanding the many facets of the world's most popular sport. Statistics will greatly aid in that journey - to make sense of some larger truths in the sport. However, statistics often only describe the most likely outcome of an average event and not the actual outcome of a specific one, which is why we play each and every match to determine the actual outcome. In the same manner, I see statistics only being part of my journey through the world of soccer. Statistics related to the latest happenings in the soccer world will make up the bulk of my posts, but I also don't want to lose touch with the human element of the game. Soccer shapes our human experience, and to a greater degree our human experience shapes the game of soccer. I want to understand the humanity that produces the numbers I study. With that explanation, I now dive into one of those recommended books from my previous post.

At the urging of a regular reader/re-tweeter I picked up Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer by David Winner. It was a late addition to my reading material for my trip, and I was a bit sad I couldn't get it on the Kindle as it would have kept my bag weight down. Nonetheless, it came highly recommended and had the side benefit of helping describe the culture from which many of my co-workers come. After completing this book, I only wish I had read it earlier. It would have made my nearly three years of working with the Dutch much easier.

The book, more than anything, is a fascinating study of how such a small nation that outperforms expectations copes with the inevitable defeat it faces in major tournaments. This over performance has been quantified in the Soccernomics model, where the Dutch score a half goal more per match than the model predicts and they sit 9th out of 49 European teams in this category used to gauge over-performance (see Figure 14.4 in Soccernomics). The book starts at the beginning of post-war Dutch soccer to explain how coping with over-achievement became a Dutch soccer challenge.

To younger fans like me, Dutch soccer can be found everywhere today. Even Brilliant Orange acknowledges this, singling out Arsene Wenger's Arsenal squads as one of the professional embodiments of Dutch "Total Football" outside of the Eredivisie. This wasn't the case in the early 1970's. At that time, the Dutch were perfecting their version of soccer and unleashed it upon the world in Germany in 1974. At that World Cup the Netherlands began its run of over achievement. The heartbreaking loss in 1974 and the expected loss of 1978 set up the Dutch soccer story and was dealt with in the Dutch psyche as something to be accepted, largely tolerated, and in some ways celebrated.

The book goes through and weaves compelling stories of Dutch cultural impact on their style of soccer. Chapter 14 explains how Dutch land constraints and use lead to a different visualization of the soccer pitch, while Chapter 25 explains how their strategies of multiple uses of the same space on the pitch are also reflected in the unique layout and use of space at Schipol International Airport. In Chapter 18, the author explains how Dutch collaborative democracy is a handicap for their soccer team, and how the atheistic Dutch are still shamed about outstanding achievement based upon their Calvinist cultural mores. Such belief structures make accepting failure to win a championship all that much easier, and Chapter 6 explains how such democratic tendencies doomed the great national team of the 70's. Chapter 15 details the Dutch struggle with their role in the Holocaust, and how the adoption of the Jews by Ajax as a way to cope with that past has bred modern anti-Semitic chants from rival clubs. Chapter 13 explains how anti-German feelings, which were largely absent in the Netherlands until the late-70's, rose and fell in the 80's and 90's via the heated battles between the two nations' soccer clubs.

One of the final chapters plays right into one of the themes from Soccernomics. In the chapter entitled "5 out of 6: Frank, Patrick, Frank, Jaap, Patrick, Paul... and Gyuri" (read the book to understand the chapter numbering system), author David Winner takes us behind the scenes of a debate within Dutch soccer: to win, or not to win, by penalty kicks. It seems that in their pursuit of playing their beautiful game, Dutch teams of the 80's and 90's felt winning by penalty kicks was beneath them. If they couldn't win in 90 or 120 minutes playing their game, they felt it was better to leave winning up to the chance of penalty kicks rather than a system for taking them. While other teams were analyzing goalie behavior before matches and devising systems for taking penalty kicks, the Dutch weren't even practicing penalty kicks let alone doing any preparation like the other teams. They were convinced of the Soccernomics conclusion that penalty kicks didn't change the likely outcome of the match based upon certain predictors before Soccernomics was ever published. The problem is that they came to the wrong conclusion.

We know that the conclusion in Chapter 6 of Soccernomics is that penalty kicks don't have a statistically significant impact on the outcome of a soccer match vs. the predicted outcome from the Soccernomics model that looks at home pitch advantage, GDP, and population size of the two countries playing each other. The simplification behind that statement is that the statistical test says penalty kicks have no impact on the average outcome - it doesn't say much about specific outcomes. In the case of the Dutch team, we already know they punch way above their belt when it comes to international competitions. In their case, each game won on penalty kicks would have been another notch in their belt of over-achievement. The fact that they have likely conceded a number of matches due to lack of practice or respect for winning via penalty kicks means their over-achievement is likely higher than measured in Soccernomics. I'd be interested to see if the Dutch team itself would have shown a statistically significant shift in wins or losses based upon matches that went to penalty kicks. Luckily, David Winner outlines the ongoing battle by many in the Dutch soccer program to emphasize penalty kick practice and strategies.

In summary, I'd highly recommend this book to anyone. It's well written, very conversational, and strikes an outstanding balance between soccer and cultural material. To read this book is to begin to understand both Holland and its soccer team.