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Comment by dandermotj | Hacker News Reader

This article's attempt to contribute Leicester's success this season to "statistics" is just painful. As if every other team in the Premier League and three tiers down don't use extensive analysis in every aspect of selection, performance and scouting. Ranieri's style isn't bizarre or unseen-before. This isn't Moneyball.

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Actually, you'd be surprised how many teams "three tiers down" still work in very old-fashioned ways. One reason is budget, which falls dramatically from the Championship down; another is that the Premier League is simply at the forefront of scientific development in football the world over.

Source: I have a brother working in the space.

I wonder how much of it is clubs prioritising Champions League success over winning the Premier League.

I think for many reasons they prioritising qualifying for the group stages... Financially for the club but also this dramatically affects their ability to ability to attract players from the very top tier.

Of course, Leicester have just shown you can assemble a team good enough to win the league (You're not getting 5/1 now, nevermind 5000/1) for next to nothing. I hope they've all got incredible win the league bonuses in their contracts anyway.

From across the pond there are a couple of tendencies I see in English football that Leicester runs against. The most obvious is that Pearson wasn't sacked when it looked like Leicester was going down last season. The "great escape" was more unusual for going against conventional wisdom than for the run of form.

The more subtle is that their squad does not reflect the English fixation on player pedigree and that fixation is exactly where moneyball offers an advantage. Vardy is a prime example of what I would call the Rickie Lambert problem, players who score lots of goals not considered for the Three Lions unless they're fortunate enough to play in the Premier League -- for both Vardy and Lambert, it was only after their teams earned promotion to top flight that they were deemed quality.

Despite his current form, Vardy is on the bubble for the Euros behind forwards in poor form but of pedigree, Sterling, Sturrage, Rooney, Walcott, Wellbeck. Good players all, and several hundred million in transfer value.

Moneyball happens at the ownership level because that's where the money and vanity concentrates. Hiring Ranieri and sacking Pearson during the summer reflects sophisticated and unconventional footballing philosophy. Not splurging in the past to transfer windows does too. Maintaining continuity is again against footballing tradition, one needs only look at the post-Fergeson chaos in Manchester to see the price of discontinuity.

Leicester staying up this year means they collect on the new TV contract. Finishing top of the league means their slice of cake is bigger with UEFA Champion's League group stage eurobucks for icing. If that ain't moneyball, it will do until moneyball shows up.

The replacing of Pearson with Ranieri could be seen the same as when Golden State replaced Jackson with Kerr. Huge guts to get rid of someone who wasn't actually doing bad - definitely goes against conventional wisdom.

Pearson barely managed to avoid relegation. I think it was more the case of delaying what would have been a standard mid-season sacking [or two or three] at other clubs building a vacation house at the bottom of the table.

Perhaps might be worth asking Aston Villa fans how the 'Moneyball' philosophy has worked out for them.

But there's Brighton, Brentford and Midtjylland on the other side of the coin. It clearly brings some results but is obviously not enough on the highest level.

Maybe that's why bringing in Ranieri was such a good call? He's been quite vocal about his non-involvement in the transfer policy and purely focusing on building a team with the players he has.

The reason I'm hopeful for these kinds of strategies is that we might get more Oakland A's and Leicester Cities because seeing money dominate the sport over and over gets kinda boring.

Yes, all clubs use extensive analysis to find players, but each club is also striving to find new ways of doing it or gathering new data to work with so they can gain an advantage over the others.

When Oakland did so well, all the other teams were doing analysis too, but they were looking at different stats.

Winning the league with players bought for very little money surely means Leicester are on to something?

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