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Comment by jdrock | Hacker News Reader

Soccer should be much harder to quantify with stats because the game is basically a set of two continuous events.

As a contrast, baseball is easier to quantify with stats because it's a series of discrete events.

In most sports statistical analysis, you try and drill down to a discrete event. In baseball, it's something like at-bat or on-base. In basketball, it's per-possession (though this isn't enough). But in soccer, what can you do? Per-possession is difficult because it overlooks the 21 other players on the field. Everything is team-oriented.

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Baseball is even better than that. It's a bunch of discrete events that are built out of many, many nigh-identical repetitions of even smaller discrete events.

The other point to make is that baseball controls the combinatorial explosion by either having the players act in relative isolation (when fielders handle the ball) or by grouping them in tiny groups of two or three (pitcher, batter, and to some extent the catcher), one of whom is generally a constant in any given game (the catcher), and one of whom only changes a few times per game (the pitcher). This is a fairly restricted set of possible matchups, and these are replayed over and over to get better stats. That's why baseball is the statistician's dream.

Similarly, in basketball there are fairly few players on the floor, and they tend to match up with each other fairly predictably. And while American football puts 22 players on the field, most of them never touch the ball, and most of the remaining players do the same sort of job over and over in the same relatively small part of the field, interacting with the same small subset of players on the other team.

But soccer is all over the place. ;)

In a top-class soccer match, you can't take your eyes off the action or you will miss something crucial. You could probably doze off for 20 minutes and miss little in a baseball game. Each to their own.

Just because you don't understand soccer isn't reason alone to describe it as "all over the place". It's a very exciting team sport (when played properly) and full of formations and tactics that coaches constantly try to innovate with:

The classic 4-4-2 formation

Beckenbauer's/Dutch football's 4-3-3

Jose Murinho's 4-5-1...Google em!

Also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formation_(football)#Common_mod...

You appear to have misinterpreted my sentence as some sort of insult. There's nothing wrong with being "all over the place"! No two minutes of soccer are exactly alike, but that is scarcely a bad thing!

Could it be that just the current stats collected are not enough to matter as much as the stats in baseball? Granted, it may be easier to identify stats that matter in baseball due to the discrete vs. continuous events you mention.

Maybe new stats collected at a later date will matter as much as those collected in baseball... or maybe not.

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