Leicester City: Dirty Dozen or Harvard Case Study?
bloombergview.com
bloombergview.com
The article doesn't mention that Jamie Vardy is the third-highest scorer in the league, which combined with brilliant individual performances from Mahrez (just awarded the PFA award for player of the season), Kante, Drinkwater, Huth, Morgan and more, has seen some superstar performances that have made a real difference against teams that would have been seen as superior last season.
I'd suggest that Ranieri's success as manager has been as much to do with man-management as tactics. He was very careful to get the team focused on staying up, on getting 40 points to survive. It was only in the past few days that he told his squad to go for broke and push for the title. They responded by beating Swansea 4-0, despite being without their top scorer.
The Leicester tale is magical, and incredibly unlikely, but I would challenge anyone who said that they don't deserve it.
Next season's going to be a lot more taxing for them in terms of games played.
What may matter is the strength of that squad. "Bigger" teams can afford to have stronger players on the bench, something that arguably Leicester don't have.
However look at their last match in which Vardy was suspended: they won 4-0. They also got Demarai Gray in the January window who has barely played for them but looks to be an excellent talent (and indeed is only 19). That said, there's certainly a bit of fortune in the way their injuries have panned out this season.
But the player I'm most delighted for is Kasper "you'll never be as good as your dad" Schmeichel.
Schmeichel throws it almost to the centre circle to where Mahrez picks it up, takes a couple of touches and feeds it to a sprinting Kante who controls and passes to Vardy. Vardy finishes with a ruthless shot and it's still less than 15 seconds since the ball left Schmeichel's glove.
Yes huge amount of luck. I think there is more luck that many would like to admit in professional football (or sport). To some extent you make your own luck of course but our lack of injuries, limited suspensions and the fact that several of our players seem to have reached that sweet spot in their career at the same point have contributed.
Ranieri is an extremely experienced manager, the fact that he has had to make limited changes to a team which was on a tremendous run before he arrived has been important.
The tactics have changed subtly throughout the season, Vardy was the force that won us some many games early on. Then the defence took over, we've gone 1-0 up in some many games recently it makes it very difficult for teams to come back at us without conceding more.
I hope it opens the league up for others to have a go next season. West Ham, Stoke, West Brom, Southampton, teams like that. When you see 30 BBC pundits all predicting the same five (basically four) teams in the top four places you have to wonder what ramifications this has for the long term appeal of the league.
I'm rooting for Leicester!
It's a keen eye for a good player, often from foreign leagues or lower divisions where high-quality statistics aren't so easily available, that makes the difference. All of those players listed are worth a fraction of what Manchester City paid for Raheem Sterling (~£50m), and he's barely made an impact.
Source: I have a brother working in the space.
Of course, Leicester have just shown you can assemble a team good enough to win the league (You're not getting 5/1 now, nevermind 5000/1) for next to nothing. I hope they've all got incredible win the league bonuses in their contracts anyway.
Maybe that's why bringing in Ranieri was such a good call? He's been quite vocal about his non-involvement in the transfer policy and purely focusing on building a team with the players he has.
The reason I'm hopeful for these kinds of strategies is that we might get more Oakland A's and Leicester Cities because seeing money dominate the sport over and over gets kinda boring.
When Oakland did so well, all the other teams were doing analysis too, but they were looking at different stats.
Winning the league with players bought for very little money surely means Leicester are on to something?
The more subtle is that their squad does not reflect the English fixation on player pedigree and that fixation is exactly where moneyball offers an advantage. Vardy is a prime example of what I would call the Rickie Lambert problem, players who score lots of goals not considered for the Three Lions unless they're fortunate enough to play in the Premier League -- for both Vardy and Lambert, it was only after their teams earned promotion to top flight that they were deemed quality.
Despite his current form, Vardy is on the bubble for the Euros behind forwards in poor form but of pedigree, Sterling, Sturrage, Rooney, Walcott, Wellbeck. Good players all, and several hundred million in transfer value.
Moneyball happens at the ownership level because that's where the money and vanity concentrates. Hiring Ranieri and sacking Pearson during the summer reflects sophisticated and unconventional footballing philosophy. Not splurging in the past to transfer windows does too. Maintaining continuity is again against footballing tradition, one needs only look at the post-Fergeson chaos in Manchester to see the price of discontinuity.
Leicester staying up this year means they collect on the new TV contract. Finishing top of the league means their slice of cake is bigger with UEFA Champion's League group stage eurobucks for icing. If that ain't moneyball, it will do until moneyball shows up.
No-one saw this coming. Not Leicester's players, who were bottom of the league just over a year ago. Not Leicester's manager, for whom 17th place would have been a success.
Jamie Vardy scored 5 goals last season, the team had a below average defence, Ranieri's career to date had done nothing to predict this turnaround.
They're style of play isn't innovative, though it was unfashionable relative to other styles. Note too that they almost flipped their style 180 part-way through the season, from gung ho football to extreme counter attacking. There was no grand plan.
For every argument in Leicester's favour of how they've done it, you can find many similar examples across other leagues, without anything like the success.
Leicester's season has been incredible and remarkable. We're going to just have to enjoy it, because we cannot analyse it.
Starting with Ranieri, a manager who has not had the career he might have hoped, but with flashes of brilliance. These include rebuilding Chelsea into a squad that would compete for the next decade. Frank Lampard credits him with keeping the team in the premier league. He also somehow brought Juventus from Serie B to third place (coincidentally foreshadowing his run with Leicester). He certainly made some bad decisions as well, but it's unfair to say that 17th would have been a success for the manager. For the team, perhaps, yes.
As to their style of play, that strikes me as their greatest success. Ranieri was not tempted by "modern" possession focused styles, but rather adapted his team to the pace of Vardy. The emergence of Mahrez and Drinkwater and the addition of the excellent N'golo Kante in the midfield also meant they were able to adapt when team's started to narrow to counter Vardy, using Vardy's pace to create space. In addition, when this adaptation happened Leicester organized the defense, keeping more clean sheets and using increased width to drive players like Fuchs forward. I don't think any of this is a "fluke", but rather working with the players you have to find what works best.
There is no doubt they've had a great deal of luck, as well. The careers of both Fuchs and Huth were both considered failures of the promise they once offered, and certainly Vardy will not maintain his level for very long. They have also avoided injuries, not testing the depth of their squad, especially in the midfield. But you do not win the Premier League on luck alone. Leicester will compete for a Champions League spot next year if they can make three or four signings to address their depth and keep the core of Mahrez/Kante/Drinkwater together in the midfield.
Many, many teams have played counter attacking football and not done nearly as well. Ranieri himself, even until very recently, said the target was 40 points.
I purposely never said that Leicester's success is luck or a fluke. The point I raise is that how can we begin to unpack their success? For every point in their favour this season, there are many examples of teams who have adapted very similar policies.
Counter attacking, ball-winning indefatigable midfielders, pacey strikers, treating the players with a caring hand, scouting for players in the lower French leagues, thoughtful managers, creative wingers, colossal centre backs – these are old tricks.
What lessons can we take from this success? Arguably, none.
I could just say "Get better players, play hard".
But saying we can't learn anything is just false, considering there are teams that aren't doing these things and are successful, and teams that aren't and are not successful. Crystal Palace lacks any sort of pace or attacking threat, despite having a number of skilled, creative players. Manchester United have arguably better players, but are tactically limiting them by insisting on possession based football (or at least were until about 2 months ago) rather than a counterattacking approach. Clearly if it was obvious, all teams would be successful, no?
Saying we can't unpack their success is the Big Sam school of football tactics, it's all just instinct and good ol' English grit and longballing, nothing else to say.
One of the factors that most people don't mention but has played a vital part (also one that separates Leicester from Tottenham, who are 2nd right now) is that no PL team parks the bus or plays for a draw against Leicester.
Many teams come into the games against big clubs (including Tottenham) expecting to lose and hence they play defensively hoping to steal a point. This makes it difficult for the big clubs (they are expected to break tight defenses almost every game). But any team that plays against Leicester is expected to play their normal game and try to win it. This helps Leicester in executing their strategy and hit teams on counter. Again, nothing to take away from Leicester here. They deserve to win the title this season. And it makes every sports fan happy.
It will be interesting to see how teams approach Leicester next season.
Perhaps one of the biggest moments of the season was Chelsea's pursuit of John Stones from Everton coming to nothing. In another year, he'd have gone, but this year Everton could afford to hang onto their asset.
There's now more scope for teams like Leicester to assemble squads of above-average players and hold onto them. They haven't fallen into the trap of teams like Villa, who at one time have had really top players, only to lose them and have to replace them. Or Spurs in the past with losing players like Bale. Or Southampton, who I think had to basically rebuild an entire side three times?
There's no longer a huge gap between the top four and the rest, and that gap is no longer reinforced every year by the same teams getting money for being in the Champions League.
As such those sides weaknesses are now being more exposed. Man U could well be in long term decline post-Ferguson, Chelsea are an ageing side, Arsenal have long term structural weaknesses in their side which they appear unwilling or unable to address, and Man City in the Premier League often seem to be always a little less than the sum of their parts.
We might look back and see the first 20 years of the Premier League as being an anomaly where only a few sides were capable of winning the league.
But I'm not sure this applies to Leicester. They signed a few players but none that really stood out as surprising apart from Gökhan Inler, who has hardly played all season.
It amazes me that Mahrez is the subject of so much transfer talk when Kante is a really game changing player.
All this talk about Ranieri overlooks the fact that Pearson started their comeback last season, Leicester was all but relegated. The squad he chose was a typical PL side, physical football with little flair compared to Arsenal and Manchester City. Mahrez barely got a look in last season. The stars aligned and Pearson was booted due to the controversy and Ranieri inherited a young and able lineup good enough for a mid-table finish.
I also disagree on the anomaly aspect – Man City are still on track for a top 4 maybe top 3 finish, a position they've held since 2010. Arsenal for 4th, their designated position thanks to Wenger. Spurs a top 5 side have stepped up at the expense of a fellow London club. Man United still hanging around the top 7 as they've since Ferguson's departure.
Leicester have been incredibly lucky and have calls gone their way, as have Spurs as well.
Although EPL has usually been open compared to other top leagues in Europe where you could decide the winner before the Season kicks off (Bundesliga - Bayern, Ligue 1 - PSG, La Liga - Barçelona)
[Disclaimer: Manchester City fan, so there might be some bias]
Overall, I think they've recruited well, been managed well and have all played to a level most people didn't think was in them. All of that combined with the other top teams all having horrific seasons means the stars have aligned for Leicester. It would be a tragedy if they didn't go ahead and take the title now.
Leicester seeking out gems from unexplored areas is what gave them these bargain signings. They wouldn't have been able to sign these players if they had to go toe to toe with big clubs.
Here's a nice editorial(?) written by the manager, Claudio Ranieri.
>Now, we are fighting for a title. The Leicester fans I meet in the street tell me they are dreaming. But I say to them, “Okay, you dream for us. We do not dream. We simply work hard.”
The American sports have no relegation system, but on the contrary have a loser-to-winner system of drafting. You even hear about potential conspiracies to come last when a guy like (no pun) Luck is available.
In Europe there's also no salary cap. When my team played Barcelona a few years ago pretty much all their players had a market value exceeding my whole team. That doesn't happen in the us sports because of the cap, and so when you look at various halls of fame you find a nicely spread set of clubs that the best players played at. This also makes the patriots quite a special franchise.
So why Leicester? Without having the stats available, I can see a couple of things.
First, the premier league pays huge salaries. That means even middling clubs are big fish on the European market. But while there's plenty of stats to say who is good at playing, it isn't easy to put a value on the relative merits of players. So you may think Raheem Sterling is a great player, but how much more should you pay for him than a Mahrez? Hard to say. And you also have the brand recognition problem. You buy Mahrez for 1M, he bombs, you lose your job. Or you buy Sterling for 50, he bombs, people think he had an off season or they think of some other excuse.
Second, even very good players are wary of competing for spots. Leicester are not a team of amateurs. They are full time professionals, many with national team experience. Perhaps the prior probability of 1 in 5000 needs revision. It may have made sense back in the days where some teams were playing local boys vs international stars, but not in the pro era. I remember years ago one of the teams in the Danish league went bust and had to field amateurs. They were caned every match.
Third, it's not easy to go from individual performance stats to a team plan. It's actually incredibly hard to build a model of how they'll all work together.
Ranieri has imbued a sense of mission and it's very refreshing to see a team all fighting towards one goal. I used to play competitive sports and whenever their was a great team spirit, we all seem to have upped our game substantially. Mainly because you never want to let the guy/girl next to you down. Spurs, the next best team, seem to have a very similar team spirit running through them.
This is not to take away from the other important aspects, but it seems that this is where they stand out. All other teams have good players, scouting, resources, etc. but not all of them have the same sense of 'need' to win as Leicester. This spirit is essential.
Nottingham Forest won promotion to the top division at the end of the 1976–77 season after finishing third in the Second Division, but no-one could have predicted how successful Clough's team would be over the next three seasons.
Nottingham Forest became one of the few teams (and the most recent team to date) to win the English First Division Championship a year after winning promotion from the English Second Division (1977–78 season).
In 1978–79, Forest went on to win the European Cup by beating Malmö 1–0 in Munich's Olympiastadion and retained the trophy in 1979–80, beating Hamburg 1–0 in Madrid
They also won the European Super Cup and two League Cups.
My parents ran a supporters club out of their pub. Would you believe the club dropped it off and came back for it the next day !
Some random facts:
- Football is notoriously lax about drug testing. IIRC you get urine tested maybe every 6 months, if even that much. Urine tests are very easy to skirt around compared to the gold standard, which is blood tests.
- Leicester barely survived relegation in 2014/15, they clung on by a single point. They've apparently gone from Premier League bottom feeders to world beaters in one season.
-Jamie Vardy, Leicester's star striker and latest England darling ahead of the Euros in the summer, basically burst out of nowhere at 29, scoring just 5 goals in the 2014/15 season, but an astonishing 22 goals in 2015/16[1], including breaking the Premier League record for goals scored in consecutive games. Players are generally not know for having breakout seasons so late in their career.
- Leicester have a very consistent starting 11 every week over a grueling season, and been "lucky" with injuries. Some comments from a BBC article:
"It is the Foxes who have been by far the most impressive, though, because they have been able to keep playing at a high tempo from the start to the finish of matches.
Leicester have scored 10 goals in the final 15 minutes of Premier League matches this season, which have earned them 12 points. The Foxes have also conceded nine goals in the final 15 minutes but only one of them has cost them points - Rudy Gestede's equaliser for Aston Villa in January.
Again, that shows whatever they are doing in training is right, because I know from experience you do not just stay that fit over many months of the season.
Some people have said they have been fortunate not having many injuries. But is it luck, or is it down to a really good medical staff and a training regime that keeps the players fit and at the level of fitness required to play the way they do? I don't think it is a coincidence they have managed both.
Sure, you need some luck along the way too but I certainly think their fitness levels are far above most of the other top-flight teams.
That has made their style of play more effective, which has made them harder to beat. You cannot wear them down or just wait for them to tire."[2]
- There's been other PED scandals in football that have been swept under the table, even buried by judges in Spain. Here's a great Reddit comment heavily implying that Real Madrid and Barcelona have been/are doping[3]. When a lab in Spain was raided, Nadal's tennis performance dropped dramatically, Barca's form dropped, the Spanish national team's invincible streak (2008-2010) dropped off a cliff. There's other stuff too like Gareth Bale, who became ripped as hell quite suddenly: "While many of his Real Madrid team-mates were away strutting their stuff during the World Cup, it appears Gareth Bale was busy working hard in the gym. The Wales midfielder took part in Real's training on Thursday looking rather bulky in comparison to last season."[4]
None of this on its own proves anything. But if you put all what we know together: lax drug testing, huge financial incentives to dope, the romance story of an unknown club surviving relegation by one point in 2014/15 to becoming world beaters the next season, the lack of injuries, the non-stop, almost inhuman energy levels over a long season in one of the most physically demanding football leagues, the massive FIFA scandals and the joy of a footballing romance story for the fans, you begin to wonder....
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Vardy#Club
[2] http://www.bbc.com/sport/football/35553082
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/3s9a9d/how_prominen...
[4] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2718823/Re...
It's only been a month since what should be one of the biggest doping scandals in history (world's biggest sport and affecting top teams) and the sport and especially the media, are not mentioning it.
This is the article: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/british-doctor-claims-he-d...
Is it the case that football clubs are "too big to fail" and this all gets quicly covered up, or have I got it all wrong?
I mean how is it possible that the likes of Messi and Ronaldo batter domestic teams on the weekend and batter European opposition mid-week, week in, week out for years and years at a stretch and almost never get injured? How does Giggs play football at 40 like he's 20 years younger? How does Leicester play high tempo, counter-attacking football at breakneck pace against teams with x10 the budget? Maybe it's Ranieri's special pizza toppings and some statistical voodoo that somhow the Arsenals and Manchester Uniteds of this world are too stupid to realise.
As mentioned elsewhere there's been a fair amount of rug sweeping in football (Spain, Italy, UK libel laws quoted against investigative journalists, Chelsea blood spinning) and plenty of incentive to keep it looking clean. But none of that is specific to Leicester.
I've read elsewhere that certain PEDs can shave weeks off injury recovery times.
Don't you find it unusual that many other major sports (tennis, cycling, athletics, baseball) have had high profile PED scandals, and that football doesn't? Why do you think that is? Is the most popular sport in the world, and one of the most lucrative, magically free of doping?
If you read the reddit thread I posted above, there's links where footballers of previous eras admitted to being given "vitamins" or whatever. Do we simply choose to believe that this simply doesn't happen anymore? The answer is obvious to me, the reality is that no one likes to face this question. I think there's a MASSIVE scandal on the horizon, on the scale of the Sepp Blatter/Qatar World Cup abuses or bigger.
There's tons of potential evidence to start looking at if the football world decides so.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operaci%C3%B3n_Puerto_doping_c...
That's not to say there isn't drug taking going on; but to imply that's the reason for Leicester's success this season is indeed controversial, and as far as I can see, without merit.
Chelsea have had a startling decline from champions last year to mid table fodder, this year. Does that mean they've stopped doping?
> to imply that's the reason for Leicester's success this season is indeed controversial, and as far as I can see, without merit.
There's indeed no evidence, but you have to ask yourself: do I want to believe that Vardy burst onto the scene at 29, or is there the slight possibility that something else is going on?
Wenger has said in the past: "sport was “full of legends who are in fact cheats” as he called on Uefa to improve its drug testing programme. "Honestly, I don’t think we do enough [on doping tests],” he said. “It is very difficult for me to believe that you have 740 players at the World Cup and you come out with zero problems. Mathematically, that happens every time."[1]
It's publicly known that Barcelona paid for Messi's treatment of a growth hormone disorder with human growth hormone[2]. Can you honestly say you would be surprised if they also use HGH to help their players recovery from injury? They were implicated in the Operation Puerto case, but there was deliberately no further investigation in that case[3].
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/nov/10/arsene-wenge...
[2] http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1492546-lionel-messi-and-...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operaci%C3%B3n_Puerto_doping_c...
Your comment is less a lesson in statistics and more a lesson in how people confuse probability and statistics.
5000 to 1 means the WORST team in the pl wins the league once in recorded history (roughly). if this sounds right to you, you're welcome at my poker table anytime.
The odds offered by bookies ate in part based on statistics, probability and business reasons.
I'm rather unusual in the office as I'm the only one into computers and watching league football (I blame my dad for that one).
For the record, I thought Leicester City were stylistically the worse team I've seen since Stevenage. 90 minutes of long ball until Vardy got a lucky bounce. ugly, ugly, ugly.
I hope Spurs win, at least they played football against us.
Up the Cherries.
Er, so Man City and Arsenal are not "big clubs", apparently. Nice "submarine" insult there.
EDIT: another gem: "All teams have always counterattacked, but few have based their game so completely around it."
That's utter drivel. Go read up on Italian teams of the 60s, which were pretty successful at doing exactly that. With all due respect to Claudio Ranieri, he's not really close to the genius of Nereo Rocco or Helenio Herrera.
The innovation of Leicester City is that they used statistics to identify players who could fit this style better than the average, and they recruited a manager who knows how to manage this style of play better than the average. Whether this combination was an accident or not, I think it's still open for debate -- they had a very successful run of games with the previous manager as well.
The funny thing is that Spurs are also having a fantastic season, if it wasn't for Leicester this article could have been written by a Spurs fan about their amazing rise up the league.
As an Arsenal fan, I couldn't disagree with you more. Arsenal have had an awful second half to the season, if they hadn't had a strong start they'd be mid table:
http://metro.co.uk/2016/04/14/revealed-arsenals-terrible-lea...
Many Arsenal fans are somewhat livid with how this season has played out, with the majority of the anger being directed at the manager and the board.
The reason we lost key ties against West Ham, Spurs and Liverpool was fielding players that are defensive liabilities vs. defensively sound ones – Kolarov and Yaya rather than Clichy and Fernando. He also didn't adapt to the game and stuck with his gameplan so there weren't any comebacks in the league. Surprisingly we came back more than twice in our CL campaign, against Sevilla and Borussia Mönchengladbach.
Yeah, I only really follow Arsenal's games and get bits of other news here and there, but I knew about Aguero being injured as I play fantasy football as well, and he's been doing me proud since he returned from injury. ;-) That said, now that you mention Pep Guardiola it does ring a bell. Has Pellegrini announced who he's managing next? Speaking of managers, I'm gutted that Mourinho may be coming back to the EPL, not a fan of the way he winds people up.
How many times have they been the best team in the first half of the season only to fall apart by February?
It's a normal season :(
(For the record: I'm a Swindon fan and like watching Arsenal in the autumn and Liverpool when they're 2-0 down in Europe).
Know what you mean, I missed seeing it but I heard that Europa league game you're referring to was amazing. I still think the best game of football I've ever seen was the 2005 Champions League final, I have nothing but respect for Liverpool for pulling that off.
Almost everyone at Leicester I've heard talk about their success attributes it in some part to Nigel Pearson as well.
The amount of pundits (former Liverpool, United players) in the media is indeed an important reason for that narrative.