Happy Thanksgiving!

To everyone back home in Canada, Happy Thanksgiving! Please save some stuffing for me...

As seems to be becoming a regular occurrence, all has been quiet on the blog front of late. There have been a few things I've been tempted to post, a few stories/opinions/details about the radio silence that I considered voicing, but I elected against it. Work on my ambushing research, as well as a number of concerns outside of work and research and the like, have kept me away from BSM a bit longer than I would have liked, and certainly longer than I had planned. But, it's time to move forward.

For anyone who knows me or follows the blog, it will likely come as little surprise that I have two great loves in my life: hockey, and football (or soccer for my turkey-eating friends and family). This past week may well prove to have been a fantastic week on both accounts, though to what extent remains to be argued in a British courtroom this week. As well as stepping back out onto the ice and beginning the new season finally on Monday and Tuesday, it was announced this week that New England Sports Ventures, the owners of the Boston Red Sox and a number of other top sports properties state-side, has agreed a sale for my beloved Liverpool FC, pending a legal battle between the club's current beleaguered owners and the LFC board.

Should the sale go through, and court find in favour of the board, NESV's arrival at Anfield has been suggested as ushering in a new way of thinking into Liverpool's football operations, and extending the current growth of statistics and performance measures currently being used at clubs like Arsenal. NESV, who turned the Red Sox's fortunes by employing one of the founding fathers of sabremetrics in baseball, and a GM who studied under Moneyball's biggest proponent, Billy Beane, may well attempt to employ the same measures and metrics into Liverpool's football operations, it has been suggested, following the template which brought the Red Sox their first World Series' since the Curse of the Bambino.

Whilst in baseball, the use of metrics and moneyball-style performance tracking and measurement has become increasingly common, in other sports it remains a growing trend, but an interesting one. How it will impact and translate to a sport such as football, which is much more free-flowing and dynamic than more statistics-friendly sports like baseball remains to be investigated in earnest, but if the use of metrics in hockey are any indication, there would appear to be some value in its application. Over at Kukla's Korner (mandatory reading for any self-respecting hockey fan), the use of sabremetrics in hockey has been employed and studied increasingly over the past year, providing some suggestion of the value it may offer football clubs.

That said, dynamic sports such as football and hockey remain particularly difficult to measure in statistics alone. Greater exploration of the applicability and nature of metrics in sports such as hockey I think would be extremely useful, and I look forward it. Whilst we can measure a goalie's save percentage, and even adjust the percentage for a number of factors which may prove more telling in evaluating performance, can we or will we also adjust for the competition? For the players in front of the goalie? For the difficulty of shots? For the situation/context of shots and saves? All of this is possible, and how much it is in use already I don't know, but I think the deeper we look into performance measures in this way, and the better we explore and understand WHY metrics are used, and HOW, the more we may understand just how valuable NESV's secret weapon may be in restoring Liverpool to past glories.