Spend a vision with me: Great Chariots of Fire! Marcelo Bielsa to the Red Devils (please)

Moneyball (1) has been used by many “data science” people to justify why they should get into professional sports, including football.

Today most large football employ “sports analysts” to understand the potential performance of players, monitoring fatigue, risk of injury – the famed red zone (2), PhD theses have been written about the factors that can be used to monitor and predict performance (3)…

A whole industry has developed around monitoring the physical fitness of players.

For example STATSports is one of the leading purveyors of sensors(4). At the heart, they do GPS tracking of players, to which they have attached a heart rate monitor, so you can track the location, and easily – as long as your location is accurate – derive the speed acceleration. They also provide an app to visualise the data, a vest to hold the sensors in place(5)...

Another one of their offerings transmits the data to the cloud using ultra wide band and even had on-board memory to retain data in case the device is not able to connect to the cloud.

Amazing huh?

Would cost you a few hundred bucks.

Or you can build one yourself sourcing different components, some of the guys who worked with us last year on the cricket thing would recognise this. Of course industrial made ones are more compact, but it depends if you are willing to pay the price. For a professional club, it certainly seems to make sense.

What does that have to do with Bielsa, the chariots and the Devils?

Basically I am making the point that in professional sports today, using data is very common, and if you add to this the controls on diet and activities that go with the tracking (6), then you can see it can be quite intrusive for the player.

The chariots come in when I mention professionalism.

One of the sub-stories in the movie is the fact that Abrahams hired a professional coach, whereas the Olympics were restricted to only amateurs at that point in time. (Some sports still follow this rule such as boxing). What is not said is also that the coach tried to get his athletes to take less than common pills including cocaine lozenges. (7)

What does professionalism mean in sports?

Does it mean doing as much as you can, within the limits of legality to get an advantage? We have seen complaints in many areas, such as the length of running blades in the Paralympics (8), to taking drugs which are usually only taken for a very short period of time (9), to banning female athletes (or worse demanding mutilation from such athletes such as “cutting out gonads and partially removing their clitorises”) if their testosterone levels are thought too high (10).

Bottomline, professional sports is serious business for individual sportspeople.

A quick look at Wikipedia will show why it is so serious(11), across sports, being part of the elite can mean access to amazing amounts of money, whether directly through earnings or via endorsements. What is also interesting is that the top earners come from individual as well as collective/team sports.

Rank	Name	Sport	Nation	Total	Salary/Winnings	Endorsements
1	Floyd Mayweather Jr.	Boxing	United States	$285 million	$275 million	$10 million
2	Lionel Messi	Association football	Argentina	$111 million	$84 million	$27 million
3	Cristiano Ronaldo	Association football	Portugal	$108 million	$61 million	$47 million
4	Conor McGregor	Mixed martial arts	Republic of Ireland	$99 million	$85 million	$14 million
5	Neymar	Association football	Brazil	$90 million	$73 million	$17 million
6	LeBron James	Basketball	United States	$85.5 million	$33.5 million	$52 million
7	Roger Federer	Tennis	Switzerland	$77.2 million	$12.2 million	$65 million
8	Stephen Curry	Basketball	United States	$76.9 million	$34.9 million	$42 million
9	Matt Ryan	American football	United States	$67.3 million	$62.3 million	$5 million
10	Matthew Stafford	American football	United States	$59.5 million	$57.5 million	$2 million

If you look at teams, from Forbes (12):

Rank	Team	Current Value ($bil)	2017 Rank	Sport
1	Dallas Cowboys	4,800	1	NFL
2	Manchester United	4,123	3	Soccer
3	Real Madrid	4,088	5	Soccer
4	Barcelona	4,064	4	Soccer
5	New York Yankees	4,000	2	MLB
6	New England Patriots	3,700	6	NFL
7	New York Knicks	3,600	7	NBA
8	Los Angeles Lakers	3,300	9	NBA
8	New York Giants	3,300	8	NFL
10	Golden State Warriors	3,100	20	NBA
10	Washington Redskins	3,100	11	NFL

Ok, you get the picture, professional sports is big business.

So again, why Bielsa? And what does that have to do with data?

Bielsa has been reminded by his team Leeds United, of “integrity and honesty”(13). What was his crime? Did he get people to attack the opponent’s bus (14)? Did any of his players get caught for doping (15)? Did he ask people to hack into the servers or break into the premises of opponents? No, there was no breach, all he did was that an employee of his was seen, in a public area, watching opponents train.

Note, the employee was watching from a public area.

My question is “so what?”

This is an ethical question; in the words of Mr Bielsa himself: “I understand (Derby manager) Frank Lampard is angry because he thinks I'm someone who is cheating… I understand he draws this conclusion. But I don't feel I cheated because my goal was not to get an illegal advantage… I can explain my behaviour but my intention is not to be understood or to justify it. I have to respect the norms in the country where I work.”

This is definitely a question of ethics. Mr Bielsa thinks he has done no wrong, and I support his view.

Mr Lampard thinks it was wrong for Mr Bielsa to ask someone to gather information about Mr Lampard’s team. Mr Lampard even went to the extent that he’d rather not coach than spy (16). May be, but it does seem hypocritical given that as a player, he benefited from such tactics; Andres Villas Boas said that this was part of his role for Chelsea, then managed by Jose Mourinho, with a certain Frank Lampard as midfielder (17).

Compare this with the reaction of Hoffenheim coach Nagelsman when a drone was found recording his team’s training, “I'm not really angry at the analyst doing his job. It's commendable if they're doing everything they can, trying to spy on the opposition” (18). The best part is that it can be said that a drone is invading private space, but the Leeds United staff was in public…

A few nice stories can be found where this practice is not uncommon (19).

Mr Bielsa has produced fantastic results for Leeds United this season; they currently lead in the Championship with 54 points with 27 games played (20) compared to last year when they ended up with 60 points for 46 games played.

If the management team at Leeds United thinks he is causing trouble, doesn’t get along, then please, let history repeat itself, unwanted personel at Leeds United have a way of finally reaching their true potential with the Red Devils (21).

To summarise

Professional sports is serious business ad should be treated as such. I do not see many ethical questions around gathering information that is available to the public. It is actually a legitimate way of gaining an advantage over the opponents. A lot of the reaction has been overreaction or hypocrisy; and if Leeds United does not appreciate the efforts of Mr Bielsa, then he should be the next member of the Leeds team to join the Red Devils and I can see him having the same impact as the one who made the same journey in November 1992. (22)

Spend a vision with me

Tuesday, 15 January 2019

Great Chariots of Fire! Marcelo Bielsa to the Red Devils (please)

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