In case you’re wondering. This isn’t Zenpolitics. It’s me, sounding off. This will happen occasionally. I might occasionally touch on politics. And Zen remains a lodestar for me. But trying to put the two together in today’s world is a fool’s game. But that won’t stop me, from time to time, sounding off.

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You lose so much more when you don’t know what it is you’re losing.

Jazz

I recently caught up again after forty years with Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. I was listening on Apple Music via my iPhone. I let it run and more music followed, all of which I engaged with, but none of which I’d chosen. My old CD player sits quietly by, like my CDs, reminding me of days when I chose my own music, rather than ‘my’ music choosing me.

There’s so much choice in every possible field out there. Algorithms are our masters and mistresses and they can be so much fun. They do the choosing for us. But it’s their pathway, not ours.

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Can I apply the same line of reasoning to baseball and from there to football (soccer, if you will)? It’s data analysis that’s the starting-point for what follows. Algorithms have now taking it all so much further.

Baseball

I’ve just read Michael Lewis’s ‘Moneyball’. (Having also caught up with the movie. Both are marvellous.) Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland As, is the hero. He disallows all the personal judgements of the coaches old and new who trusted their instincts and experience. On what basis?

The early-80s had seen a revolution in financial markets. Data was computerised and risk could be offset by grouping mortgages and loans into financial instruments which revolutionised both the markets and precipitated extraordinary growth. No-one had thought until the mid-90s of inputting baseball data, every aspect, every player, past and present. The big event as every American and few Brits know is the annual draft, when players are selected. The stakes are high and the bidding rapid and the more you know about a player the better you can match him to your requirements.

One Harvard maths graduate hadn’t followed the path to Wall Street. He analysed every bit of baseball data he could access and then came to work with Billy Beane, and they put together teams (their players kept getting poached, so ‘teams’ is the word) which out-performed the big-league teams with only a third of the budget. Their players were highly effective at some specific aspect of the game, not all. They balanced their skill sets, where other teams went for the all-rounders, the big hitters, the more obvious superstars.

Football

They were scorned and ridiculed by the old school. Now it’s the norm. Also for other sports. I saw a T-shirt yesterday (they come with a million different messages) with all the different team formations we now talk about in football, variations on 4-3-2-1 upwards and downwards. (Liverpool have played 4-2-3-1 for the majority of games this season.)

Players must have the characteristics to fit a manager’s preferred set-up. One message from Oakland: you need manager, coaching team and owner all of one mind and in it for the long term. (Or at least until disaster strikes!) Another message: scouts and manager have to look for players who might not be the most glamorous, who may be undervalued elsewhere, but who might just blend into the kind of lower-budget teams, the likes of Bournemouth and Nottingham Forest, who’ve proved they can take under-performing big names apart.

The big teams have of course now learnt the same lesson. They stretch their recruitment net wide. (Check out the algorithm-based assessments of Premier League players that the Football Critic website runs each week.) But there are always the smaller clubs who undistracted by current success recruit teams that can take on anyone. Maybe they’re just using algorithms better. Watching how all this happens is one of the joys of football!

All this close analysis does sound heavy duty. Is putting a decent team together now very little about hunch and much more about data? Be that as it may, it does mean that the clever small guy can sometimes come out on top against the not-so-bright big guy, and that does just keep on happening.

Michael Parkinson wrote about his childhood memories of ‘Skinner’ Normanton and Barnsley FC. And remember Vinnie Jones from thirty years ago? OK, they kicked a few shins and pushed the boundaries. But how much have we lost by football losing the hard boot and the raw edge?
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We could apply similar arguments to almost every sphere of life these days. We’re told, for example, that if you find yourself a green field, could be a football pitch (no floodlights), and look up to the sky, you can find all the planets in alignment this month. We all troop outside and try and fathom what’s going on.

What we miss is the fact that the night sky on a clear night is always amazing. The fun lies in tracking the planets month by month.

Take the world as it comes. Don’t try and boss it too much.

Better a team of non-algorithmically-chosen players making music (sometimes massively off-key) on a football field? Or an information-driven well-oiled machine that knows how to win?

It’s a question to which there isn’t a simple answer.