Why Soccer Analytics Works Like Volatility Arbitrage Trading

American sports fans have long been comfortable talking in the language of stats and analytics. Soccer embraced the 'moneyball' revolution later; the sport was once perceived as too complex to model analytically — there were too many players on the pitch, the game's progression was too random and chaotic to reliably predict. That's no longer the case, and soccer watchers are well aware of stats like xG (Expected Goals) and each match is an opportunity for a team to mine data, whether its tracking data, on-ball data, or even analyzing body poses and movement. Today, we speak with two soccer analytics veterans, Mike Treacy (head of risk at Apex Fintech Solutions) and Joris Bekkers (a soccer analytics consultant). Treacy's background includes a stint in analytics for a Premier League team and he's currently advising the MLS team Austin FC while Bekkers has built software that analyzes raw soccer data and he's worked with the US Soccer Federation. We talk to them about how VAR has affected the sport, how data analytics can capture ineffable things like hustle, how European leagues and the MLS differ in their analytics strategy, and why chess and soccer are not so dissimilar. Read more: The Lawyer Taking On StubHub Over World Cup Ticket Sales https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-14/stubhub-world-cup-ticket-complaints-spur-legal-claims-from-fans?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=odd_lots&utm_content=article Polymarket Partners With Crypto Firm During World Cup https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-14/polymarket-partners-with-crypto-firm-during-world-cup-semifinals?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=odd_lots&utm_content=article Only http://Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots https://www.bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots?in_source=oddlotspodcast Subscribe to the Odd Lots Newsletter http://bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots Join the conversation: discord.gg/oddlots https://discord.gg/oddlots See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 0:00Joe Weisenthal?

  There are some market stories where you want every detail. Tracy and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis, but sometimes you've only got 10 minutes and need to know what's moving markets and why. That's the Barclays Brief Podcast. Every week, experts from Barclays Markets and research get you up to speed on what matters and what to watch next. About the time it takes to grab a coffee, so search Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts.

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• 2:02Joe Weisenthal?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

• 2:06Tracy Alloway?

  And I'm Tracy Alloway.

• 2:07Joe Weisenthal?

  Tracy, I have a question. I know you spent a lot of your youth overseas.

• 2:11Tracy Alloway?

  My youth.

• 2:12Joe Weisenthal?

  Did you ever go to many baseball games as a kid?

• 2:15Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, so I was in Chicago for a few years, so I went to the Cubs games. And then I was in Japan and the baseball scene in Japan is amazing. Like the best vibes of a live sports event that I've ever, ever witnessed or encountered.

• 2:29Joe Weisenthal?

  I was just talking to someone about this last night. I've always wanted to go to a Japanese baseball game.

• 2:34Tracy Alloway?

  Highly recommend.

• 2:34Joe Weisenthal?

  This actually like, if we ever do a live show in Tokyo, let's try to schedule it during baseball season because that is like, I sort of think that's a bucket list thing. But anyway, the reason I ask this question is I have this really vague memory as a child going to see Detroit Tigers games with my grandfather, like probably when I was like, maybe these memories are probably from when I was younger than like six or five. But there used to be a non-trivial number of people who would go to the games and they would keep score and they would write down every single at bat and they, the outcome of every single one.

• 3:08Tracy Alloway?

  I'm pretty sure I've seen that, not in person, but like maybe in movies or something like that.

• 3:12Joe Weisenthal?

  It doesn't really happen anymore. Like I never see it. There may be a few like old timers who still as a hobby or habit do that. But it was like a non-insignificant number of people. And it's interesting to me, you know, I've been to a couple of soccer games this year. There is no equivalent way you could do that, right? Because it's like baseball is filled with all of these discrete events. Pitcher, who is the pitcher? Who is the batter? Hit, not a hit. Single, not a, strikeout, walk, et cetera. Like, what would even be the equivalent in soccer?

• 3:42Tracy Alloway?

  So this has been a long running debate in soccer. And I remember when Moneyball came out and you know, sports analytics became a big thing, especially for baseball, because as you point out, it's these sort of discrete events that have a lot of statistics embedded in them. A lot of people were saying that soccer, you could never use data analytics in the same way for soccer. Like it's too chaotic, it's too fluid, there's too many variables, there's not enough goals. That complaint comes up a lot whenever we talk about, are we going to say soccer or football, by the way?

• 4:11Joe Weisenthal?

  You know what? Let's just say soccer.

• 4:12Tracy Alloway?

  Okay. All right. I'll try.

• 4:15Joe Weisenthal?

  We can say football. I actually don't feel strongly about this one.

• 4:17Tracy Alloway?

  But that said, we do see soccer analytics on the rise, right? Like now we get all these stories about like tiny clubs that are using data to source, you know, specific players in very Moneyball style ways. We obviously have prediction markets where people are doing a lot of sports betting. And so all the analytics seem to be like becoming more important. And I will just say, I read this crazy stat right before we came on from the law firm Morgan Lewis. And they were saying in the 2026 FIFA World Cup, match-based data is going to be something like, so it's 104 matches generating more than 90 petabytes of data.

• 5:00Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 5:01Tracy Alloway?

  Which is a 45-fold increase over the volume produced in the last World Cup in 2022. That's stunning.

• 5:08Joe Weisenthal?

  So this raises a question, and I know we're going to get to this in the conversation. And it almost is like a philosophical question, which is, okay, we see the game of soccer is like very fluid, right? There's no, we just said there's fewer discrete events. Like in theory, is something that's fluid, a series of like microscopic discrete events? You know, could you get a million frames per second and actually turn it into discrete events? Like that is sort of like an interesting question to me. A parallel that I think of in this conversation is chess is like all discrete events. And that was seen as like a very difficult thing to crack, but then like over 25 years ago.

• 5:47Tracy Alloway?

  But now it's like, yeah, of course.

• 5:49Joe Weisenthal?

  They cracked it, but then you would think, okay, well, like, what is the opposite of chess? Which would be language. And you say, okay, you can't, that's fluid and that's all over the place. And yet computers seem to be understanding language pretty good.

• 6:00Tracy Alloway?

  My inner Luddite says there must still be a secret like unmodelable, I can't talk, when it comes to like football, the beautiful game. But you're right, that technology may prove me wrong very quickly.

• 6:13Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, as you mentioned, you know, soccer analytics growing. And obviously the interest now is for obvious reasons. There's all the betting on the World Cup. People talk about the XG of like, I don't know, a situation or a player, the expected goals.

• 6:28Tracy Alloway?

  Now we have body posing analytics as well, which kind of blows my mind.

• 6:32Joe Weisenthal?

  And when our producer Kale introduced me, I hadn't seen them before earlier this year. Like the momentum charts that show like, you know, how dominant a team is at any given moment, you see it go in waves and stuff like that. So there clearly is a lot of work being done. I don't know how much it works. I don't know how much like momentum charts consistently predict who is going to be the winner. But just this question of like the ability to model deeply fluid things, the beautiful game, like it's an art, right? Like can you, can computers actually model this? And then like if they can, what does that say about the ability to model a bunch of other things? Strikes me as just like a very relevant question right now because it's the World Cup, but also relevant question in general about.

• 7:16Tracy Alloway?

  For markets and finance.

• 7:17Joe Weisenthal?

  For markets and finance, exactly. So I'm, I'm curious to know like how it works.

• 7:22Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, let's talk about it.

• 7:23Joe Weisenthal?

  How the Moneyball revolution, where we are in the arc with soccer. Anyway, I'm really excited to say, we really do have two perfect guests because they do sit right in this space and also at the intersection of everything that we're talking about. We're going to be speaking with Yoris Becker. He is a soccer analytics consultant, a professional soccer analytics consultant for the last decade. As well as Mike Tracy, he's the head of risk at Apex Fintech Solutions. He used to be a volatility arbitrage trader at Peak Six. And he also does soccer analytics for the club FC. So literally the two perfect guests to talk about some of these questions that are arising right now. So Mike and Yoris, thank you both so much for coming on the podcast.

• 8:05Speaker 05

  Thank you for having us. This was a great introduction.

• 8:07Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, thank you. You know, Mike, let me start with you question. A lot of people, I think, have, for good reason, an intuitive feel that like sports analytics and trading markets are adjacent ideas. That like, we know this, we know that the, a lot of the prop shops and market makers do both and so forth. And how would you articulate based on your career, the sort of overlap between the skills and techniques you've developed as an arbitrage trader, a volatility trader, and the overlap of skills that they're like, okay, this thing that we'll get into that we call soccer analytics?

• 8:47Speaker 05

  Well, soccer is unique because I'd say every aspect of the game is distribution.

• 8:53Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 8:53Speaker 05

  When you look at on pitch, the performance by a team, when you look at performance by an individual player, when you look at the seasonal outcomes and this unique component that is promotion relegation. So your finances are highly variant year over year. And so there's a lot of overlap between volatility trading and working in soccer. In that you are making.

• 9:25Speaker 05

  Highly levered bets on often imperfect information that's not necessarily predictive, like other sports such as baseball.

• 9:34Tracy Alloway?

  Can I ask a very basic question, which is, what is the point of soccer analytics? So if we go back to the markets analogy, we talk about price discovery, right? Like you're trying to find the right price for a particular asset. With soccer, are you trying to price players, improve the training, make more successful predictive bets? I imagine it's a bunch of different things.

• 9:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'd say everything. I think you said, what are the things you're trying to do? And I think from an investor operator perspective, it's what are you trying to not do? You're not trying to get relegated and you're not trying to spend 30 million pounds on a player that is going to be terrible and you'll have to get rid of in two years.

• 10:17Joe Weisenthal?

  Yours, why don't you talk, from your perspective, I mentioned you're soccer analytics pro. Actually, our producer, by the way, just put in the chat, the Bloomberg style guy does football.

• 10:26Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, there you go.

• 10:27Joe Weisenthal?

  Which is, maybe we'll just switch to, yeah, let's stay in a company style. You're a football analytics pro. Tracy asked, like, what is the point? Is it more on the team's side of things in terms of identifying talent, et cetera? Or is it more on, I don't know, I guess, like the sort of the betting side? Like, what is the problem you, in your professional capacity, are trying to solve?

• 10:47Speaker 06

  So it highly depends on the organization, right? So my organizations might want to, like Mike said, make good hires, make sure that they don't lose millions of pounds. Some organizations might use soccer analytics to try and improve their strategy. So they might look at like in-game data and try to figure out if there's some optimization that they can make based on like where the passer should go or where players should be, what play styles make more sense, or what yields more expected goals, if you will. And then I guess the third one is entertainment. There are a lot of apps out there, websites out there that provide fans with some sort of information.

• 11:28Speaker 06

  And even back in the, let's say in the 90s, they would have these overlays on the TV where they show number of corners, number of yellow cards and possession percentage.

• 11:38Tracy Alloway?

  I remember that.

• 11:39Speaker 06

  It doesn't mean anything, but it's, it's interesting. So you can only imagine that you can go much deeper with that and people will still be engaged.

• 11:47Joe Weisenthal?

  Wait, actually, just say more on that. You said it doesn't mean anything. Is that something that has always been understood? Or is this something in 2026, we could say that a few of these stats that they like to put on the TV were just extremely like low signal data points?

• 12:04Speaker 06

  Yes. So when I, when I, when I say they don't mean anything, I don't think those were necessarily predictive of the outcome of the match.

• 12:11Joe Weisenthal?

  Got it.

• 12:12Speaker 06

  Corners might, because it's an indicator of which team has the overhand in a game. But I'm quite sure most of the others, like possession percentage, don't mean all that much when I'm trying to look at game outcomes.

• 12:24Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, so we touched on this in the intro, but like the perceived wisdom in the sort of early 2000s was that soccer was far too complicated to be given the baseball, Moneyball style treatment. What actually changed to get us to this point where we're not just talking about things like expected goals, but we're also talking about like body movements and posturing and things like that?

• 12:49Speaker 05

  You know, baseball had Moneyball in 2003 and soccer had two things in the 2010s. So in 2013, Chris Anderson and David Sally published this book called The Numbers Game that distilled soccer down to more of a weakest link game. And then the other thing that happened was, I would say, we had a bit of this revolution on Twitter, which you kind of spoke about recently, Joe, where ideas were incubated. And it, I give Michael Kaylee a lot of credit for this. He's been on the pod, but every Saturday in the Premier League, you'd have six matches and then you would wait 30 minutes and Kaylee would just post a stream of every expected

• 13:34Speaker 05

  goals chart. And it started to stimulate this discussion of, does this represent what should have happened, what should have been the outcome? And I think it started to lead us down this path of where is XG flawed? It only registers when you have a shot. And so there is much more to the game than simply which shots occur. There's possession and the threat of each possession. There's match momentum and there's changing styles. So it's evolved from on-ball data to tracking data to now we're going to that deeper layer

• 14:16Speaker 05

  of body pose and what movements can prevent or create opportunities to score.

• 14:21Speaker 06

  I think what goes hand in hand with that is when I, when I started 10 years ago, soccer, football was perceived as too complex. There were 22 players, there was a ball, people were doing interesting analytics research and applied research already in basketball. And what was said was, well, there's five players on each team, so it's, it's a lot less complex, there's more games, and we have more data and there's more scoring. So you could derive metrics a lot easier. And I think the evolution in just how AI was applied in data availability, so going from like Mike said, only on-ball events where we know which player made the pass, which player made the shot.

• 15:06Speaker 06

  But we always had to say, well, we don't know where all the other players are because those are not recorded. And now we have the ability to do, make highly complicated artificial neural nets with this positional tracking data where at 10 frames per second or 25 frames per second, we know where all the players are and we know where the ball is. And then additionally, at some point, we will get full body pose, so we know where, like the whole skeleton of all players are basically like, that sort of went hand in hand and it felt like it was inevitable, but also the game is just more complex. So it needed more compute, it needed more data, needed more knowledge.

• 15:56Tracy Alloway?

  There are some market stories where you want every detail. Joe and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis, but sometimes you've only got 10 minutes and just want to know what's moving markets fast. That's the Barclays Brief podcast. Every week, experts from Barclays Markets and Research get you up to speed on what's happening and what to watch next. Concise, focused, and brief. Search Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Some people treat ChatGPT like some kind of smart search engine and some use it to get work done. ChatGPT work is a new way of working in ChatGPT that can take action across your apps and files, stay with a project for hours if needed, and turn a goal into finished work. It's designed to help you move from a chaotic starting point to a reviewable first version. So all the source materials, briefs and scattered information that you have to grind through to turn into something useful can just become something useful. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting work mode, available on Plus and Pro plans.

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• 17:57Joe Weisenthal?

  Tracy, Mike mentioned that, you know, just looking at a shot on goal, it's not going to tell you so much. For example, it doesn't tell you if the referees are going to revisit a call made a minute before the shot halfway on the other half of the screen and take away the goal.

• 18:13Tracy Alloway?

  This was going to be my question, which we were talking about before the podcast recording, but like, how do you factor in, let's say, the occasional randomness of the game and perhaps some erratic, I'm trying to be diplomatic here, erratic decision-making by referees and footballing bodies?

• 18:31Speaker 05

  I think it's control the controllables. That's a fixed parameter within the game is that uncertainty that you can't control and it's hard to predict. There is human error, obviously, and it's impossible to isolate when that's going to happen in a match and how it will. You just, you just sort of play the game.

• 18:54Speaker 06

  You also don't look at individual events per se. You might from an analysis perspective, but if you're building a basic predictive model for football outcomes, you might just take all the scoreboard results from the last 10 years and then all those things cancel out. Like if one team has a red card somewhere, you wouldn't even know from these models, but you can build some interesting, let's say rudimentary predictive models with just the outcomes of games.

• 19:21Tracy Alloway?

  Out of curiosity, has VAR changed football analytics at all or presented new opportunities for data?

• 19:27Speaker 05

  It presents new opportunities for data because that is an event that happens. If a player is fractionally offside because his hand is ahead of the last defender, that doesn't take away from the fact that he still got into a good opportunistic position, possessed the ball, turned and struck the ball in the net. And often that data is nullified because of the VAR, but in theory, it's something that you should consider in your data set. Within the raw data itself, there's tons of data that you could add or censor out.

• 20:05Speaker 05

  You know, yours mentioned red cards and a lot of our models, we censor that out of our data set. There's a, there's an infamous match from three years ago between Chelsea and Tottenham where Tottenham went down to nine men and their response was to play a very high line, meaning they put all of their defenders up near midfield and tried to catch Chelsea offsides. And as one would expect, Chelsea proceeded to score multiple goals

• 20:45Speaker 05

  later in the match. And one player in particular, Nicholas Jackson, had three goals in that one match. And when you look at his seasonal outputs for that entire season, that three goals was probably around 20% of his total goals. So when something like that happens, when you have a irregular game state, it is wise to sort of manipulate your data and remove that to give you a full picture of what does this game look like at an equal game state?

• 21:19Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, that's interesting. So it's not like that game in particular was a rich fountain of data. It's important to sort of like recognize that the data from this particular game is not going to be particularly predictive about other games. And therefore, you know, a guy who scores three goals in that match is probably not going to continue to score three goals a game for the rest of the

• 21:43Speaker 05

  It was a rich fountain of bad data.

• 21:44Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 21:45Speaker 05

  And so at the end of the season, when you see people analyzing the player, they often analyze their season and what do they do per 90 minutes of football? And so you have this highly skewed data set by some really poor data.

• 22:02Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 22:02Speaker 05

  And so there's a, there's a lot of data mining involved in the process of building a model when you evaluate a team and individual players.

• 22:13Joe Weisenthal?

  So here's a question I have, and you're talking about using neural networks. And it's like, eventually, like, you know, we'll have the compute to like have the position of every player's body flashed, maybe, you know, hundreds of images, frames per second and so forth. And then you feed it all into a model and then we learn something about who's more likely to win. But one of the things that happens in a lot of like other domains, and here I'm thinking about like chess or Go, for example, is that you can have these models that are extraordinary, but they don't speak English or they don't speak any human language. And so the transmission of like what was learned from these events

• 22:53Joe Weisenthal?

  to something usable by, say, a coach who's thinking about strategy or a general manager who's thinking about player selection. Talk to us about like, when you think about these machine learning models that can't really communicate their findings in any way in a language that humans can understand, how you sort of bridge that gap to where this is useful information for a team or a manager?

• 23:17Speaker 06

  This is generally be understood, I think in the last couple of years or the last eight years as what the biggest problem. You can build these models, these neural nets already exist. The main thing is the translation, like you said, from model outputs to coach. And I think in the last couple of years, most, most teams have found is that they need an expert analyst, a data analyst to do this conversion or this translation step where the coach isn't fed the data directly.

• 23:46Joe Weisenthal?

  Sure.

• 23:47Speaker 06

  The coach is fed just the information that the analyst finds from the data. And that could be, in the end, that generally still boils down to having video clips. So you can use the data to find video and then you can show the video to the coach, which then from bottom up, you have this approach.

• 24:03Joe Weisenthal?

  That makes sense, but the part about, okay, we're going to use the data to find video. So all of this makes sense. You have the data specialist who translates, you have the video so that there's something tangible. But talk to us about that specific step where the data analyst sees some sort of model output and then is able to use that to find the relevant clip to show the coach something potentially instructive. Cause that seems like the hard part to me.

• 24:29Speaker 06

  Yeah. So the model output could be many things. It could be outputs from a classification model that says in this given 10 second or 15 or 20 second window, this team played in this sort of buildup or they had this type of structure. It could also be a little bit more advanced where you can simply say, well, in this instance, we had a high probability of conceding a goal and that could be just from an expected goal shot. If you're looking at only event data, but you could also have model outputs from something we call an expected possession value model or an expected trend model where you measure the chance that a team is going to score in, let's say, the next 30 seconds or the next possession. And then you can find this fight there and either measure when your team is likely to

• 25:11Speaker 06

  concede or measure when the other team is likely to score. And you can use those kind of signals to boil it down to video.

• 25:17Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, this is something I wanted to ask, actually. So you mentioned speed just then. Like, what is the actual latency that we're talking about? Since we're using all these market analogies?

• 25:26Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:27Tracy Alloway?

  Like, are we talking about an insight that's actionable within seconds? Like, you're going to sub a player on after your model spits something out like live during the game? Or is it more realistically that you're reviewing the model and the analytics after a game and sort of tweaking, I guess, when, when things have calmed down?

• 25:48Speaker 06

  Apparently, most of this does not happen live. So most of it happens either pre-match or post-match, but you can still do it. There's, there's enough live data to make these instances worthwhile.

• 26:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'd say most of those types of adjustments based on data typically happen at halftime or if you're in the World Cup during a higher duration break. And in the derivatives world, I always think of expected outcome versus realized outcome. So what is the market implying? What do you expect? And then what is actually happening? And that is sort of the nexus of how teams prepare for matches. They come up with their own expected outcome. How is our opposition going to play? How are we going to play? And then that live in game is your, your realized outcome. And so you're receiving that data

• 26:44Speaker 05

  and it's being transmitted to analysts who can then communicate it down to the bench to discuss with the manager who can then make those changes at halftime.

• 26:54Tracy Alloway?

  It's interesting, the game of two halves, Joe, is now the game of four quarters.

• 26:59Joe Weisenthal?

  I know.

• 26:59Tracy Alloway?

  Offering up more opportunities to make model-based adjustments.

• 27:02Joe Weisenthal?

  That's right. We, we have, we used to have two discrete events in a game, the first half and the second, and now we have at least four. So I guess that, yeah, that, that creates more data as well as maybe more ad revenue.

• 27:14Tracy Alloway?

  Adjustment opportunities and ad revenue.

• 27:16Joe Weisenthal?

  As well as more ad revenue. You know, obviously in baseball, at least according to Michael Lewis, right? That there was this period where, you know, you had the old time scouts and they're like, oh, this guy has good hustle, right? Or this guy has a good heart. There was like no data behind any of it. He may have just sort of had the, you know, the swagger of someone who looked like maybe a star player. And then it's like, oh no, but he looked at his like on base percentage or that's, or his VORP or whatever. And then they get promoted. But it was like a culture thing. Has there been a similar cultural clash within sort of soccer scouting where what the data says about what constitutes

• 27:58Joe Weisenthal?

  a player does not map to traditional intuitions?

• 28:02Speaker 05

  I think a lot of clubs look at it from, from two perspectives. I don't think there's this old school scouts versus the data guy mentality. I think it's a very collaborative. I think what a lot, you know, what a lot of clubs do is they have an individual scout who will go watch a player and give his assessment and his rating. And then they will have their own internal model with data and they will look at the deltas between those two different models. And if something seems off, you often have collaboration between the data person and the scout and they figure out who's right, who's wrong. And then to your point about

• 28:46Speaker 05

  hustle, let's call it.

• 28:48Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 28:48Speaker 05

  There are Swiss Army knife ways to quantify that in soccer, in certain instances. If you look at game state, say the game state, you know, game state is essentially zero, plus one, minus one, plus two, minus two, plus three, minus three. And so say you're in a plus three, minus three game state and win probability for one team is 98%.

• 29:18Speaker 05

  You can manipulate the data and only look at how players are performing in that game state. You're out of the game. Are you still competing? Do you still care? Are you in the right position?

• 29:31Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh.

• 29:31Speaker 05

  Now, that may not align with the old school scout saying, you know, this guy has grit. But again, there's there's Swiss Army knife ways to give some type of indication. You know, I'd say soccer data creates questions. It doesn't give us answers.

• 29:48Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, just to better understand this.

• 29:50Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 29:50Tracy Alloway?

  Can you give us like an analytics framework? If you were trying to judge the best, this is a loaded question, but it comes up on every discussion. But you're trying to judge the best soccer player either of all time or currently. Like, what would the analytics framework for that actually look like?

• 30:07Speaker 05

  Jude Bellingham.

• 30:08Tracy Alloway?

  Okay. Say more.

• 30:10Joe Weisenthal?

  Like, really, seriously, this is a great question. Like, walk us through what the math says about Jude Bellingham and how you would derive that.

• 30:16Speaker 05

  Well, Jude Bellingham can play four or five different positions. Right? Most players, they have the number nine and their role is is number nine. But if you think of the game as this book with different chapters within the story, Jude Bellingham can perform whatever task he needs to perform at every single chapter throughout the book. And he does it at the highest level. He could play any position on the pitch besides goalkeeper.

• 30:48Joe Weisenthal?

  And just sorry, like, how is this established? Like, someone could say, oh, this guy, they say this in baseball, too. He's a good all around player, whatever we can see. But like, what is the data that actually establishes that Jude Bellingham can play at high levels in a wide range of position? How do you derive that conclusion quantitatively?

• 31:10Speaker 05

  So from a data lens, we think of it two fronts, in possession and out of possession.

• 31:16Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 31:17Speaker 05

  So in possession is is how you're progressing the ball into threatening areas and obviously creating high probability opportunities. Then then out of possession is how are you preventing a team from moving the ball into threatening areas? Since it's a very tricky question, sports, because you're trying to quantify the value of an event that does not happen. So let's say, Joe, you have the ball out on the wing. Tracy, you're right in front of the box. Jude Bellingham.

• 31:47Joe Weisenthal?

  He would be both of us.

• 31:47Speaker 05

  Always moving into that passing lane. He is right in between you guys at the right moment.

• 31:52Tracy Alloway?

  Jude guy, so annoying.

• 31:53Speaker 05

  And we have the ability to to quantify the value of of those movements and the closure of of these lanes as players move out on the pitch. And then you'll obviously get to the next phase where it's how do they do this with their feet?

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• 34:30Joe Weisenthal?

  We started talking about this sort of translation from what the model says to a coach or something like that, and that still seems tricky. For a better, someone who's betting on sports, that might be totally irrelevant. Like, they're just like, here, the model says this, this team is better. The line doesn't match up with this, therefore going to bet on this team. I don't know why the model says, my model says this team is better, but it does. So the translation is unnecessary if you're just betting. Like, are we at the stage where we're getting close to the stage where you could, for example, feed a model the first five minutes of a game, scoreless 0-0, and tell the players like, oh, this looks, this looks like a competitive match. It's going to be good, both sides. But models are able to detect something that we can't articulate that says, oh, no,

• 35:15Joe Weisenthal?

  this team is playing. And even though it looks like a tie game and a competitive one, actually, for reasons that we can't put into English, put into language, this team looks like they're going to win the game. They have a 70% chance. Is that a thing or is that a phenomenon? Or is that a realistic thing to expect?

• 35:33Speaker 06

  And there are in game with probability models.

• 35:35Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 35:36Speaker 06

  Which start with just a pregame team strength. So both teams have some value. Perhaps you can think of an Elo rating.

• 35:43Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 35:44Speaker 06

  And they boil down to a win, a draw and a loss percentage. And then those percentages can in game be updated, but they won't swing all that much because you have this prior information. So maybe after after the first minute, one team has some XG, or maybe after the first five minutes, let's say, some team has created some high probability chances and that team might be the underdog team. This was highly unexpected, I guess, since since the Elo rating said that the other team would would be have the overhand. So you can you can slightly update your beliefs there. I don't think it's like changing the needle or moving the needle all that much, given that it's just five minutes of information. But you can definitely update your beliefs throughout the game, given a chances created,

• 36:28Speaker 06

  expected possession value, as we just talked about, or momentum or something in between, depending on the data you have available to you.

• 36:35Tracy Alloway?

  Mike, I wanted to ask you, given your involvement with Austin FC, we know that there are obviously differences between Major League Soccer and European leagues. And some of those are, you know, things like salary caps, designated players, roster rules.

• 36:52Joe Weisenthal?

  Lack of relegation.

• 36:53Tracy Alloway?

  Lack of, yeah, that's a big one. Does that actually make soccer analytics and MLS like a little bit cleaner in some ways? In the sense that, like, in the European leagues, the money is, again, trying to be diplomatic here, but it's very free flowing. There's a bit of rule stretching going on at times when it comes to to salary restrictions and things like that. Like, compare MLS analytics versus European analytics for us.

• 37:21Speaker 05

  So in European analytics, you have essentially recruitment and then first team analysis. In MLS, you have recruitment, first team analysis, but you have this third vector that I call portfolio management, right? This cap structure in the MLS is put in place with the intention of creating parity. And and as you mentioned, it's highly complicated. The best way for you to understand it would be like me saying, Tracy, I'm going to give you $10 million. You can spend $2 million on Nvidia, $7 million on Walmart, and $1 million on a speculative biotech stock.

• 38:04Speaker 05

  And so you have to think of each player from a relative value perspective based on where they slot in your cap structure.

• 38:15Joe Weisenthal?

  Has that worked? I mean, with MLS, so it's like, I understand you have this new league that, you know, you don't want some really rich team to win all the time. And then, I don't know, only Miami wins and then fans lose interest in the rest of the country. I'm just, I don't know what the actual, I think my understanding is Austin in particular is a very big fan base. But has that worked in practice to sort of create an equal level of like fan affinity that's geographically distributed?

• 38:43Speaker 05

  Well, at Austin, we're only nine months into our project here, and we just had some turnover with our sporting department. And so I would say that we have yet to integrate and improve this portfolio management theory and the impact on success and points in the table. But as a market participant, when I read these rules, I like, my brain immediately goes to the markets and portfolio allocation.

• 39:14Tracy Alloway?

  Okay, so we have to watch Austin FC as a test case for the portfolio management thesis in football.

• 39:20Joe Weisenthal?

  But wait, just to be clear, so this portfolio management thesis, which you obviously have a strong intuition for, having traded volatility for a long time, this is the framework that you're bringing to your work in Austin?

• 39:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, correct. Every player has a designated slot. So a player that could come in as a DP. Could be terrible, but if he's gonna be

• 39:47Joe Weisenthal?

  What's a DP?

• 39:48Speaker 05

  A designated player.

• 39:50Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, okay.

• 39:51Speaker 05

  But that same player, if he is going to be a senior minimum salaried player, could be in the top percentile of talent for that specific slot. And then within the league itself, you, you know, you have different roster construction strategies. You can either have three designated players or you could opt for two designated players and four U22 players. And the way the league works is they have a, they have a salary cap, but it's, it's, it's more of a salary cap charge.

• 40:32Speaker 05

  So whilst Lionel Messi may be making over 20 million dollars in salary, his salary cap charge as a designated player is going to be much lower than that. It could be 750,000.

• 40:46Joe Weisenthal?

  Wait, I don't understand that.

• 40:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, it, it's confusing. There's a salary cap charge based on these roster designations. So every slot has a dollar charge associated with it. So you have to work within that framework of what is the charge for each player? And your finite amount of capital you're allowed to spend.

• 41:08Tracy Alloway?

  So the designated players are the ones you're allowed to pay more.

• 41:12Joe Weisenthal?

  Got it.

• 41:13Tracy Alloway?

  Because this is the legacy of like LA Galaxy, getting David Beckham and wanting to pay him

• 41:18Joe Weisenthal?

  Right.

• 41:19Tracy Alloway?

  lots and lots and lots and lots of money.

• 41:21Joe Weisenthal?

  This is helpful.

• 41:22Tracy Alloway?

  Okay, so one of the criticisms of modern football, I guess, is that it's dominated by the wealthiest clubs, like whoever has the most money can buy the best players, certainly in Europe. And so the big just kind of get bigger. And I could certainly see an argument where if analytics becomes more important to actually playing the game, then whoever has the most resources, the most compute, the most engineers, I guess nowadays, is gonna have an edge here. But on the other hand, we have had technology before that has a sort of democratizing effect.

• 41:57Joe Weisenthal?

  That was the Moneyball story.

• 41:58Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, we have open source models, all of that. And I think there have been some instances of the smaller clubs actually like using this technology to perform better. But which way are we gonna go? Is it the big get bigger or maybe we see some smaller clubs level the playing field here?

• 42:15Speaker 06

  I hope it's the latter.

• 42:17Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, same.

• 42:17Speaker 06

  So you, you mentioned open source models that actually build open source software to help these smaller clubs. I guess it's also helping the bigger, bigger clubs. But it allows them to build these craft neural nets and these expected possession value models. And then also load this, these tracking data, this tracking data, which has been a big task just in general because of the data structure and the data size. And the software that I, that I work on helps clubs, any club basically get, get started. So, so I hope by doing that, it will help the smaller clubs, help data providers, I guess, provide better insights to level the playing fields. But I'm, I'm not sure, not sure that it is working out necessarily.

• 43:01Speaker 06

  Because getting the knowledge, like we talked about before, actually distilling the knowledge from the data is still, I think, one of the, one of the problem acts.

• 43:10Tracy Alloway?

  Oh yeah, so this reminds me, I wanted to ask as well, like who actually owns the data here? Where does the data come from?

• 43:16Speaker 06

  It depends.

• 43:16Tracy Alloway?

  Okay.

• 43:17Speaker 06

  And I think some of it is a gray area. There are a lot of data providers, some have licenses, some don't. Yeah, it's a, it's a big question mark at some, in some, some instances.

• 43:26Speaker 05

  I, I want, I'll tell you a story about when I first started building models for AFC Bournemouth back in the Premier League in, in 2016. I had no idea where I could find the data. And so I went on Upwork and I posted an ad. And I just said, I need a developer who has worked with European football betters. And a gentleman named Dimitri in Ukraine replied to me and he said, yeah, I've, I've worked with many professional betters. And I said, give me all the data that you can find.

• 44:05Speaker 05

  And so it was very skunk works, but, but Dimitri was able to find a way for me to get access to all of the on-ball data across the world at the time to start building my models.

• 44:18Joe Weisenthal?

  What is the data? So it's like, okay, you find some data provider or Dimitri in Ukraine collects data. Is this numerical data? Is this a series of frames? Like what can, when you say, okay, you need to go out and get the data? What form are you getting it? What does that mean? Like, what does it look like?

• 44:38Speaker 05

  So it, it, it's varied throughout the years, but the most prevalent generic data out there is, is on-ball data.

• 44:47Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 44:47Speaker 05

  And on-ball data, if you're just to put on your Excel hat and think about what it looks like in an Excel spreadsheet, has every single event tagged. So you have, it just goes down a series of events, pass, pass, pass, dribble, shot, goal, pass, pass, dribble, tackle. It has the event, it has the player or players involved. It has the X, Y coordinate on a pitch and it has the time. And so when you have these raw data points, you can conditionally put together a, a mosaic of, of what is happening on the pitch.

• 45:32Speaker 05

  Because you can measure the events, the speed and the location. Tracking data is, is a bit more nuanced. I'll let yours touch on that.

• 45:44Speaker 06

  So you can, you can still imagine it, an Excel spreadsheet, but I don't think your Excel spreadsheet would like it very much if you tried to load in this data. It's basically a player identifier, a team identifier, and then X and Y coordinates for all players at 10 or 25 frames per second. So that means, I guess, 25 rows for a single frame. We, we never really touch, let's say, the raw data in the sense that we don't get the pictures of the game and then try to figure out ourselves where the, where the coordinates are or what the coordinates are. So there are a lot of data providers out there that either put cameras in the stadium or use the broadcast footage to extract this data. So they, they will have different models.

• 46:26Speaker 06

  One of the models would be first identify where all the, the pitch markings are. So they have a way to, to understand like where all the players are relative to the pitch markings. Then they know where all the players are and you can convert all of that into coordinates. They know where the goals are, obviously. And then you'll get that in a single file for a single game. Some providers might give you one file per minute, they might give you one file per half. And then that's just the, the raw data with the identifiers and the coordinates. They might get an additional file that has all the metadata that says this identifier belongs to this player, this identifier belongs to this team. If you're lucky in your tracking data, you get an identifier that says which team is actually on the ball. Because that's highly relevant, but some, sometimes it's not included.

• 47:09Speaker 06

  And you have to figure it out yourself, like calculating the distance to the ball for each player. And then obviously you have skeletal data, which is, I guess, 27 times more dense or maybe even more because you have 27 coordinates, one for each body pose points or body points. So you might have one for your left shoulder, for the tip of your nose, for your left ear, for your right ear, for your right foot, for your ankle. And that gets into the millions and millions of data points. So when you talked about in the, in the introduction about these petabytes of data, I assume it's gonna be mostly skeletal data because that data is incredibly rich.

• 47:43Tracy Alloway?

  How do players actually feel about all of this? Because, you know, like if people were watching me do my job and monitoring like my neck movements.

• 47:52Joe Weisenthal?

  They are.

• 47:52Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 47:52Joe Weisenthal?

  That's the thing, they are, Tracy.

• 47:54Tracy Alloway?

  All right, but no one's, no one's modeling like what I'm doing with my hands or my feet at all hours of this particular recording. Like I would have mixed feelings about it, right? Like, do you have any color on how players actually feel about, I, I guess, the rise of statistical analysis in football?

• 48:12Speaker 05

  I think they, they find it useful. I think something that yours has worked on this specifically is, is eyesight. What, what can they see and what they cannot see? And so when you look at the data and you think about opportunity cost, decision making, and you make a suboptimal decision, when you go and talk to the player, they might just simply tell you, I couldn't see it. And then you move on to, you move on to the next. So it's, it's very complex. I find most players to embrace the data. There's curiosity around it, but you know, they likewise know the limitations.

• 48:51Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, we started this talking about, oh, soccer is fluid. It's a beautiful game. It's an art. I totally agree. But like, people actually did say this about chess 30 or 40 years ago. And there was actually some people who held out the belief, computers will never be able to beat humans in chess because it is an art. And it almost seems hilarious that like this view held on for as long as it did. But it turns out that no, chess is just a calculation problem. And when you have enough data and compute, you can solve the game, kind of. Is soccer, in the end, like, is it just a series of lots and lots of discrete events that our eyes are not capable of? But at the end of the day, with

• 49:32Joe Weisenthal?

  sufficient compute and data collection, is it just like chess and that it's just a lot of micro binary decisions that can all be summed up? And is this therefore how life is?

• 49:44Speaker 06

  When you work with this data as long as I have, and with this tracking data specifically, in the beginning, it seems very overwhelming, because it's just an infinite stream of coordinates. And so I struggled with that a little bit in the beginning. I was wondering what I should do with this. How are you going to model any of this? But I totally agree with you. You can discretize this. So you can discretize it into, let's say, very minor events where we use the on-ball event data. And if we align that with the positional tracking data, we might know every single moment where a player may surpass. And then you might know the next moment where a player makes a reception. So that could be discretized into one event that might last two and a half seconds or three seconds. The next step

• 50:25Speaker 06

  would then be, the player receives the ball, they make an on-ball action, that also lasts two and a half seconds. That would then be your next discretized event. And then you have all these small events, which are micro movements by players, counter movements by defenders. And if you go these, let's say, sequences, one at a time, you can still make aggregated metrics from this, but using all the tracking data that you have at your disposal. But it's actually still understandable for you. So you might say, well, this player made this many dribbles, and it gained the team this much in terms of added value to scoring a goal. And you can do the reverse for defenders, where you can say, well, this

• 51:05Speaker 06

  defender was always close to the ball, so he was hoping not concede a goal. And if you go back to the analysis part, where you want your video analysts to look at this, you can, they also do this, just discretized. And discretizing it like this will help significantly.

• 51:22Tracy Alloway?

  So I have one more question, which is, it is obviously World Cup season, which means it is also a sell-side analyst publishing World Cup prediction notes and research season. And in my experience, they tend not to be very good. Like, often, they will publish that England or the USA are going to win whatever World Cup.

• 51:44Joe Weisenthal?

  Does the Nomura strategist predict Japan?

• 51:46Tracy Alloway?

  That, not to my knowledge. But you know, they often get it wrong. If we think about statistical modeling data, I mean, the sell-side firms, they should be pretty good at this. And yet, do you have a take on, on why they seem to struggle with soccer predictions every four years?

• 52:04Speaker 05

  I don't, like, honestly, for them, I have no idea what, what data they're using, whether they're using an Elo model, whether Nomura has on-ball event data, tracking data. There's different ways that you can come up with these predictions. But I think, you know, I like to stay, stay in your lane. And I think sell-side analysts should stick to sell-side analyzing.

• 52:29Speaker 06

  Isn't that simply the age-old problem of, if you have a good model, you wouldn't publish it? You would just beat the bookies?

• 52:35Joe Weisenthal?

  Right. There's a, there's often criticism of people who publish things for a living. Mike and yours, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. Learned a lot there. And I really appreciate your time and enjoy the rest of the World Cup.

• 52:47Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 52:47Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 53:00Joe Weisenthal?

  Tracy, I have to admit, I find it a little depressing that probably most things in life are probably just computation things. You know what I'm saying? It's like, I want to think that like, that there is something called art and beauty and intuition and something. It's probably just computers all the way down. Binary events that can be chunked and analyzed by microchips.

• 53:19Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, you know, the question I would have asked, but we ran out of time, was the idea of like, good arts law, which is like, once you have a measure, like, the measure is, yeah, because you see this criticism of sports analytics, which is, like, players start focusing on their stats, coaches are focusing on the player's stats, and then they get the players with the good stats, and then they just focus on improving their stats more. But the stats don't necessarily translate into like, wins all the time.

• 53:48Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, you know, I was thinking something that Mike said in the beginning, which is that, like, particularly, like, an English Premier League team, there's multiple things they could be optimizing for. So they could be optimizing for profit. They could be optimizing for avoiding relegation. They could be optimizing for avoiding relegation. They could be optimizing for wins. Those are all distinct things. But you see this when a sport gets over-optimized. Didn't come up. A good example is like basketball. When I was younger, it was like, the game was fun because there were lots of slam dunks. And then everyone realized that three-point attempts were not being taken enough. And so suddenly, the game is dominated by three-pointers, which may be a better way to play. But it's not necessarily a more fun fan experience

• 54:32Joe Weisenthal?

  than watching a dunk. So you think like, okay, could the game get better formally, but it becomes less entertaining? There's a lot of criticism.

• 54:38Tracy Alloway?

  I think that's a possibility, because people are already talking about convergence and like, actual football play style.

• 54:45Joe Weisenthal?

  Totally. And you see this, like, you know, there was a lot of criticism in the, like, people were very critical of how Paraguay played, right? Like, play to just survive into penalty kicks, then hope that the variance of the penalty kick period allows you to beat France. But it's like, no, that's like, the, the game theory optimal, or just the game optimal play, if you're considered to be the weaker team. So it does feel like there's all different things, you know? Again, going just to the core of the question, stats, like, what are you solving for? Solving for winning is very different from solving for profit, is very different from solving for a gambler. And there are different answers to each one.

• 55:21Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, you win, but no one's paying for it or happy about it.

• 55:24Joe Weisenthal?

  It seems plausible. Although, for now, people are paying crazy amounts of money still to go see soccer games, so.

• 55:30Tracy Alloway?

  All right. Shall we leave it there?

• 55:31Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's leave it there.

• 55:32Tracy Alloway?

  This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alockway. You can follow me at Tracy Alockway.

• 55:37Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at TheStalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at CarmenArmond, Dashal Bennett at Dashbot, Cale Brooks at CaleBrooks, and Kevin Lozano at KevinLloydLozano. And for more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com/oddlots, where we have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots.

• 56:00Tracy Alloway?

  And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we talk about stochastic soccer modeling, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

• 56:52Speaker 09

  If you enjoy Bloomberg podcasts, you'll love listening to Bloomberg 991 FM in the DMV. Hi, this is Joe Mathew. Here in the DC area, the story is always changing. From the White House, Capitol Hill, to K Street, Wall Street, and the Fed, Bloomberg 991 keeps you connected to the news that's driving decisions in the nation's capital and around the globe. Check us out at 991 FM, or stream us anytime on the Bloomberg Business app.