TorontoChelsea

I think systems are generally overrated. If you play with good players who are disciplined and cover all areas of the pitch, you could play almost any formation and have success. I dislike how once one team has success with a system, everyone wants to copy them. That said, I think the 3-5-2 actually is potentially a good balance for a lot of modern teams because there are so few teams with real width in attack so having three central defenders effectively cuts out a lot of attacks that refuse to use width.

Torres was seriously declining when we bought him although it was hard to see at the time. Rooney had a fantastic year last season. He had 12 goals and 10 assists in 22 starts despite playing mostly out of position. I can't understand how people are acting as if he was useless or a shadow of the player he was. He's still a terrific player.

Exactly! I've been saying this for a while. We don't have a great natural rival like Arsenal-Spurs, Liverpool-Everton, United-City...I'd like Fulham to get better. It would create an excellent local rivalry.

Of course he is. He's probably the best player in the Premier League right now and certainly the one player I would take if I could take any (given his age). In many ways, he's like a young C. Ronaldo with better defensive abilities and playing for a worse team. Not only is he a dynamic scorer, he is a very good crosser of the ball, can use his speed to burst past people, holds on to the ball well, and can defend.

This is a fundamental problem. There is no system where Oscar, Mata, and Hazard will be able to be at their best. Mata, to be effective, needs to play in the middle. Even when plays on the left, he drifts into the middle. Hazard plays more like a winger but even he likes to cut into the centre. Oscar has excellent potential but right now he is clearly the the third best of the aforementioned three and for me, De-emphasizing your best player because you think Oscar has better potential just makes no sense to me.

Because pre-season is completely and utterly meaningless. Marin was probably our best player in the pre-season last year and our worst when it mattered. Pre-season is simply about building fitness for the players and getting them a little bit of a chance to get used to each other. I know people always get worked up about who looks great or whatever, but it really doesn't matter at all. Literally. Nobody wins a job based on a good performance against a Malaysian side or something.

You're joking, right? That'd make him probably the most expensive defender in history...for a player that's played 35 professional games in his entire career, and has no appearances for his national team. You want to pay elite striker money for an unproven CB. Just when I think people can't overrate potential and youth any more than they already do, someone proves me wrong. He would be worth a bid and may very well have a very bright future, but he's not worth half of what you are willing to pay for him right now.

Absolutely. In the right system, he'd be there.

Except De Bruyne has never played a game in the Premier League and Oscar hasn't played at all in central midfield. There's no way either makes the team yet IMO. The only Chelsea players that would certainly be in the best XI are Cech, Cole, Luiz, Hazard, and Mata. I can see an argument for Azpilicueta as well.

Except you're saying "for example" and using pretty much all his good games. Over the course of the Premier League season, he has 2 goals and 0 assists in 14 games with us. That's awful. Yes, his movement, at times, was better than Torres, but Torres was better at drawing away defenders wide (which also opens up space), at crossing the ball, at playing through balls, etc...I have been one of Torres harshest critics on here and still am convinced that he's not good enough for Chelsea, but he was actually overall better than Ba was with us last season.

Why is his goal versus ManU indicative of his general play when he played 14 Premier League games and scored only 2 goals and had 0 assists? You can't pick a season highlight and say "that's the way he is" anymore than you can say Torres' goal against Arsenal is indicative of HIS play. I think Ba would be a good (always second) striker to have for a team that tries to cross the ball in the box a lot because he is quite strong, but his play outside the box (defensive effort, crossing, holding up the ball, etc...) is generally quite poor. T

Why??? He had a good few game stretch. Literally, a stretch of a very good few games as a defensive midfielder but then they stopped and he stopped getting starts not because RDM became manager but because AVB stopped starting him. He also had a bunch of games where he looked completely out of his depth. When you take into account missing a year due to injury, I'd have him way down the depth chart to start. You are massively overrating where he is right now.

There is no doubt that Cavani would demand more than 140. I'd think somewhere in the 170-200/wk range would be realistic.

Good signing but IMO this is why FFP won't ever really work. The loan system allows big spending clubs to buy up young talent, loan them off to sides who pay their wage bill and the players' values will almost inevitably rise. (Buy any 19 YO with talent and give them a good loan opportunity and their value will rise). Chelsea have spent something like 40-50M pounds in the last 3 years on players who haven't really played for Chelsea yet. The average Premier League team spends a fair bit less than that on all their players (and they have to sell players to make it happen.) The loan system allows not only bloated rosters, but allow top clubs to buy up an infinite amount of young talent. Happy about the signing but I don't think this sort of thing is good for football overall.

This is not even a contest. Rooney according to this would cost 28M pounds less! That's an elite player less than Cavani. Straight up, would I rather have Cavani? Yes, but not by much and certainly not by that substantial a margin. Even playing out of position, Rooney was still one of the best players in the Premier League last year. 12 goals and 10 assists in just 22 starts. That's fantastic. For the difference in cost, really, no comparison.

Not really. Because if we got Cavani, we'd have four strikers in what would likely be a one-striker system. We wouldn't be paying 50M or whatever for Cavani to play him part-time. He'd start about 45 games. That leaves 15 starts and sub appearances. Whoever the second striker is will get a lot of time, but after that, it will be minimal. In the past, managers including Mourinho have been able to get strikers more time by adapting systems but that would only work by giving less time for our attacking midfielders which is our strongest position. Do you really want to take of Schurrle or Oscar in order to shoe-horn in a second striker on the wing?

Pretty simple. We're likely going to play a 4-2-3-1 and Hazard and Mata both had excellent years which Oscar didn't and are definite starters which leaves one position (presumably on the right) open. We have Schurrle, De Bruyne, and Oscar for that position with Oscar being the least natural winger of the three. He's going to be a regular fixture and an important player for Chelsea, but if he's part of our best XI is certainly up for debate.

Welcome! We do have other posters from Arab countries (such as the great one above me) but new posters are always welcome here. Have fun and as always KTBBFH!!

The issue with any statistical analysis is sample size. For one particular game, 60% passing might actually be good if they do lead to goals. However, over the course of a season, these sorts of things even out. When you're talking about a number of passes in the range of 1,500, then the special cases become irrelevant because the sample size is big enough to render them statistical anomalies. If you're 60% passing over the year (as say, a midfielder) you're doing a horrible job. As I've said, judgement and watching the game is crucial and will always be crucial, but statistics are being used by everyone for a reason. Yes, they can be misconstrued and some of them are difficult to understand, but this "you can't understand football through statistics" is nonsense because it's already being done. Yes, you have to balance the statistics with what you know already, where a player fits into a team, what his role is, and so on, but the statistics are already here and they are not going to go away, they are going to become even more widely used. We're not talking about the notion of good and evil or anything abstract and unanswerable, we're talking about something finite and measurable. In this case, how many times a game does a player concede possession? Possession is not everything but conceding possession is undoubtedly a negative just as winning back possession is a positive. You can measure someone's success in long balls, someone's crossing success. Someone's total distance run. Someone's peak speed, etc...Everything that can be measure is being measured and is being analyzed. Here is an interesting article on statistical analysis in football. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/writers/jen_chang/04/29/performance.analytics/index.html Of course, the analysis they use is already so far ahead of what we have access to. I'll also quote from a conference on football analytics done last year (rest of article is bleh). (This is not a defence of my own statistic which is more fun than anything, but of statistics in general). Importance of situational context A majority of analytics done today seems to be of the ‘aggregate’ nature like pass completion, statistics around the shots vs goals etc., However this information has limits on its utility without the context. For example, pass completion % under pressure from two defenders is a more telling stat than the overall pass completion. StatDNA seems to be one of the few companies working in this area. Companies like Opta seem to have more real-time data which suits the media much better than companies’s who cannot collect and analyze data in real-time. Role of traditional talent scouts The traditional talent scouts still play a big role. Analytics is not a substitute to the old-school scouting methods. But analytics can play a big role in reinforcing the work of the talent scouts. As Steven Houston pointed out, if a team is looking to sign a right back and the scouts have a list of top-10 right backs, analytics can be used to justify or dispute the presence of a player in that list. Analytics adds an extra dimension to the data and helps teams make more informed decisions. Challenges The biggest challenge is getting good data to work with. Soccer analytics is still in its early stages of growth. A lot of work is going on in the area but what we are seeing is a very thin slice of the whole pie. Most of the work is happening under wraps. Teams are trying to get an advantage over the rest with their custom in-house data collecton and analysis, for obvious reasons. Almost all companies in this field are privately owned and all of them hold their data close to their heart. A single repository of data even at a league-by-league available publicly could do wonders to drive research and get more enthusiasts on-board. It is not to say that it is impossible to get data today but it isnt straightforward and is definitely an entry barrier.

I said from the outset that it's not like baseball. That football is a team sport and that statistical analysis is just part of it. However, I dealt with this thing in baseball too-people who think that the game is all about passion, tradition, etc with no place for statistical analysis...The present and the future involves statistical analysis. The A's who brought sabermetrics into the fold were not the best team in baseball. Not even close but their way of thinking changed everything. Statistical analysis is just here to stay. You think that teams that invest millions and millions in players aren't also all investing in it? Every single top team uses it.

It does work to at least some degree and I guarantee you every single club uses statistical analysis as a big part of their scouting, their understanding their own players, and their tactics.

I think there are two different stats. Offensive contribution and defensive contribution. I didn't add negative defensive contribution (such as missed tackles, being dribbled past, own goals, etc...) For offensive contribution, the problem is weighing things. A goal and a key pass are both important but a goal is obviously much more important. How do you combine both of these things into one statistic?

I used whoscored. @choulo19. Thanks! Ideally, the statistic would be even more advanced to be divided by position in the field as well as by per/90 minutes. @theskipper. Yes, the PER for the NBA is a very useful stat. Any stat that isn't baseball (i.e. team sports) is going to be flawed but I think it really does help the understanding of the game. For example, how efficient is Real Madrid's strategy of using Ronaldo as their go-to guy for everything. Yes, he scored an enormous number of goals but...he takes 7 shots a game. Ronaldo took more shots than our top three shooters Lampard, Mata, Hazard combined (and they scored more). 34 goals looks less impressive when you factor that in. Would they be better off trying to spread the shots around the pitch? The NBA still has that "Player X was huge, he had 35 points but then you look at the boxscore and see he was 13-35 shooting so he actually had a terrible game).

The problem is that you don't know how many of the other possessions would also have led to a goal or saved a goal conceded. If the player had passed to better targets and completed a higher percentage would it also have led to a goal? Obviously, in the case you site above, it's worth it because a goal a game is enormous, but hitting 5 out of 15 long balls in reality is never going to be worth it.

I think it's a good idea...The formula would be complex and need a lot of tinkering but would be fun! (Offensive contribution positive/negative and defensive contribution positive/negative)