Thoughts from SSAC Day One

This post is part of my ongoing coverage of the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference for Howler Magazine.

There was a point late Friday evening where the whirlwind of 10+ hours of presentations at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference final slowed down enough for me to appreciate the moment. I was sitting in McGreevy's, an Irish Sports Bar and Pub owned by Drop Kick Murphy's bassist Ken Casey, listening to the insights of fellow soccer analysts over the din of the Celtics game and some pretty righteous punk rock from my youth. I couldn't help but finally feel at home in Boston after a busy 24 hours in the town. Here are my reflections I had in that moment and the night of sleep since.

Say what you may about Alexi Lalas. I am pretty sure everything under the sun has been said about him already. From a random dinner after running into him on Friday night to the half hour interview I had with him yesterday, I have spent the better part of an hour and a half with the guy in the last 24 hours. He is a fountain of enthusiasm, has some great insights into the last 20 years of the game, and is willing to genuinely engage anyone no matter their status in the journalism or sports game. He took what was meant to be 8-10 questions over 15 minutes and ran with them to make it a great 35 minute back-and-forth conversation about everything from soccer analytics to more lighthearted topics like hair care tips from his bearded days. He didn't treat me with kid gloves, pushing and probing pretty hard on some of my more controversial statistical theories at dinner on Friday night. After yesterday's interview I am confident he's going to bring some really good insights to the soccer analytics panel, maybe even some personal ones from his playing days.

As for the SSAC panels on Friday, I can't help but feel they would benefit from more participation from sports journalists, analysts, and executives from the soccer community outside of the United States. I get that the conference is hosted in this country and thus is going to be focused on our most popular sports, but the size of the conference definitely now warrants some better representation from international soccer representatives given the sport's rapidly growing popularity here in the US. Even the international attendance at the conference is growing, with 10% of the 2200+ attendees coming from outside the US.

A prime example of panels that would have benefited from such representaiton would have been "The Evolution of Sports Leagues" and "Arts and Analytics of Negotiations". Both contained some great insights, but the level of thought provoking dicussion could have been elevated if an EPL or MLS representative had been on those panels. Such views are important to include because the reality is that MLS must compete for international players looking at non-US leagues with utilizing non-US agents, and a greater number of Americans every year are viewing games from foreign soccer leagues who operate under very different rules and structures. I would think adding such content to the panels next year would be a big improvement.

One need to look no further than the "Business of Sports: Winning off the Field" panel as to what a single soccer participant can do for the discussion. At one point the moderator asked the panel, "If you could go back and start your league or club over again, what would you change." The few seconds of timid silence was broken by Manchester United CEO David Gill, who proceeded to offer a nearly five minute explanation and thorough defense of the EPL's revenue sharing agreement, top-of-the-table format, and promotion-and-relegation system. The looks of wonderment from several in the crowd around me indicated they had no idea such an alternative to single-entity/league franchise models existed. I may not agree with all of Gill's statements, but they certainly were more thought provoking that the recitation and agreement of the American sports model by the other participants on the panel.

Gill's explanation of minimalist Old Trafford elsewhere in the panel stood in start contrast to New York Knick's representative Scott O'Neill's "show-within-a-show" description of the NBA that involves jumbo-trons, balloons dropping prizes on the crowd, and generally a whole lot that had a very little to do with the actual game on the court. Lakers Executive Jeanie Buss would go so far as to defend the Laker Girls as a component of their business model, while Boston Celtics co-owner Steve Pagliuca mentioned the team went without cheerleaders until they could generate revenue via a Mohegan Sun sponsorship. Meanwhile, Gill observed that very few of those frills are found in the EPL, with much of their revenue based directly on the quality of the team on the pitch - kit maker fees, shirt sponsorships, TV rights, and apparel sales. At one point Gill sounded like an Englishmen driving for a NASCAR team, rattling off "our Nike kit deal, Aon shirt sponsorship, and DHL training kit sponsorship." It was nice to focus on revenue derived from the performance of the club, and not "game day experiences" based upon girls in skimpy clothing or t-shirts shot into the crowd from a cannon. What was clear was that whether it's concession sales, shirt sponsorships, or crowd enjoyment, all of the participants on the panel had very sophisticated statistical models for predicting and delivering revenue for the clubs.

At an analytics conference it is easy to forget the human element of the sports or the people who write about them. I found Bill Simmons' "Live BS Report with Bill James" fascinating from both a human and a soccer analytics perspective. While the discussion centerred on James' role in the baseball analytics movement, the stories from the very early years of the Baseball Prospectus had many parallels to the struggles of the burgeoning soccer analytics movement. At one point in the late 1970's James was attempting to quantify catchers' performance versus players' ability to steal bases. Combing through box scores at the time, he found that they didn't keep records of which catchers were in the game at the time of a stolen base. All that was available at the time was which catcher started the game, and even the box score only included the number of bases stolen and not the number of attempts and a count of successes and failures. James proceeded to compile the data that was available, and at some point someone reading his Baseball Prospectus challenge him and said, "You can't draw conclusions on catchers from that data. It's imcomplete." To which James' response in the interview was, "[I'm] just trying to do the best I can with what I've got."

Soccer analysts can certainly relate to that sentiment. There is a paucity of data for events we know matter in the game, especially within the publicly available data for people like me. The generation of that needed data won't happen until value can be demonstrated with the data available to us today. Successful demonstrations of value with the limited data will highlight the benefits of additional data one could be generated tomorrow. It took Bill James and the Moneyball guys nearly 20 years to change baseball. The soccer analytics community should expect just as long of an evolution in our game.

There are certainly many other highlights from the first day of the conference with only a small summary provided here. Side conversations with Sports Illustrated's Jen Chang provided fascinating insights on the domestic and international game that would take up several blog posts. I can say that he is a huge fan of the Osvaldo Alonso, which should warm every Sounders fan's heart. There is a lot of exciting soccer analytics work going on at ProZone and StatDNA, some of which I hope to be able to cover in the future. Toronto Maple Leafs President and GM Brian Burke may have already sewn up the award for most utterances of words you wouldn't say in front of your mom. Apparently he thinks all hockey analytics are "horseshit", and that he generally approaches negotiations with the intent of being a "prick all the time". A few brief questions with ESPN's John Skipper after the media rights panel indicated that the monolithic nature of soccer as the sport of choice in the rest of the world presents challenges for ESPN's growth outside the US, as does the fact that the US is a bit more sports obsessed than the rest of the world and thus more readily accepting of ESPN's current format.

Day two of the conference is all about soccer. I will be starting off the day watching the Arsenal/Liverpool at a local Gunner bar, and follow that up this afternoon with the soccer analytics panel. In between I will be stopping off at the ESPN analytics booth to talk shop with their soccer analytics team and catch a few panels and reserach presentations on how teammates complement each other. It should be a very fun day.

Ten hours from now the conference will close, representing 20+ hours of stats nerdery that flew by way too fast. I may just end up back at McGreevy's again for dinner. It would only be appropriate, as that's where I've spent my last two dinners. If I do end up there I'll have a beer, listen to the 90's punk rock that I love, and will discuss anything but soccer analytics at that point. At some point I'll lean up against the brick wall with the Dropkick Murphy's logo and simply think to myself, "What a wonderful future soccer analytics has. What a lucky guy I am to be a part of this community and covering this event."