I've been posting football "content" over on the other side, and this one I like enough to share over here

A thread on these frauds from West Midlands

This might be the most bsky-coded comment of all time.

And then I guess the other thing I'd say is that it's not that I think that it's impossible for slighter players to be successful in the PL, it's that the adaptation for it is much longer and probably requires some changes in playing style.

Granted, reported footballer weight is pretty unreliable, but Modric is both listed as 7-10 kg heavier than Simons and also last played in the premier league more than 10 years ago when I think it was a very different league in terms of athleticism.

not a top player. Both these opinions can probably coexist. I'm not going to press this issue, I'm sorry for taking a shot at your writing and best of luck.

You know what, on this point, I actually agree. I should not have done that. I think we're coming at this from different angles. You think Simons would be better in a better tactical context - that's probably true. I think that even in this context he's demonstrated enough to convince me he's

I've read this post 3 times, for which I blame no one but myself, and not only do I not have a better an understanding of whether Palhinha+Bentancour are effective together, I don't even have an idea of how to use the framework you presented to reach that understanding.

This is, to quite my teenage son, waffle. "I'm just asking questions here", "I've demonstrated nothing here, but wrote a lot of words laypeople who are not subject matters experts will find very impressive" waffle.

And I think it's entirely valid to ask why he produces less than other Tottenham attacking players, all hampered, I assume, by the same system, despite having as many touches on the ball per game as the rest of them (and more, in some cases)

My initial point was that he has inherent physical limitations that will prevent him from being a productive player on a top end team regardless of tactical context. I don't think he'll be a 0.16 xG+xA player on Chelsea. I think he'd be about 0.25 xG+xA player for Chelsea. Which is still very bad.

The burden of proof is on you to justify why it's not merely interesting but useful. Your piece hasn't done that.

There's a million different ways to present that data. If you're going to suggest deviating from the heterodox way of presenting it, you have to make the case why your way is better.

No, I would expect it would look better. But not "this is a good player" better

My second constructive critique is that if you think the image on the left is a more useful graphical representation of passing relationships in a game than the image on the right, then please do read, like, just a single book by Edward Tufte

If you want substantive critique, my substantive critique is that eigenvector centrality is somewhere between irrelevant and misleading in extremely small, fully connected networks like passing graphs and is probably highly correlated to just the number of passes a player made

Also, goal scoring is just a bad analogy in general because it's a high variance event that requires far more games to demonstrate any kind of statistical significance.

Correct. If you scored 1 goal in 1 game that would likely not pass muster in terms of statistical significance. If you scored 5 in 5, I'd probably have some ground to say you're a better goalscorer than someone who scored 6 in 13.

P90 metrics are specifically meant to address the case of a player with limited minutes because they're meant to be representative in the context of the minutes played. They only become irrelevant if the minute sample is so small as to not be statistically significant. This is not the case here

That's not me having a go at you.

Me having a go at you would be asking what university are you a professor at, so that I know which one to swerve for my kids education, because arrogance and ignorance is not a good combination for an educator.

The analogy is not applicable to this case.

Which hypothesis do you think is more likely to be proven true?

A. If Xavi Simons played ~50% more minutes, his p90 output would drastically improve?
B. If Xavi Simons played ~50% more minutes, his p90 output would stay roughly the same?

In all seriousness, I want to get back to long form writing, but I don't want to support substack because of the Nazis

I'm just back temporarily. I'm too busy setting up a substack where I present a relatively in-the-weeds concept from my chosen field to football audience without ever making a coherent argument on why it's useful in the football domain

So do I, buddy. So do I

He has not played in one game, he's played 61% of league minutes available to him, and before he got benched in the last few games, that percentage was higher. Claiming that this sample is unrepresentative is disingenuous.

I should start a substack. You can apparently get a decent following there calling yourself an analyst despite not understanding why p90 metrics are useful to analyse player performance

The wider context is that Spurs touch distribution between their own players isn't unusual. Of course Chelsea players have more attacking touches - they have a much better attack. But within Spurs attack, Xavi isn't starved of touches, relative to other Spurs players

Nope, definitely second

I have news for you - that's how the touch distribution for *all* teams looks like. Attacking players get less touches than midfielders and defenders. Here's Chelsea. The highest attacking player is Neto in 8th place.

Except that is simply not true. He sees the second highest amount of touches in the attacking third when he's on the pitch. Yes, all spurs players get less attacking touches but you can still compare them to each other and he does less with more share of these touches than all his teammates