As a US sports fan, in particular a long time baseball fan, the looming Mslintat exit hurts in a very pointed way. In the early aughts baseball went through a big change in how front offices assessed value. It’s cliche now, but “Moneyball” (the book) was the emblem of that change, when analtyics and value became heavily tied to each other, and the early adopters flourished. But the early “Moneyball” era here has passed – from a revolution in the early days – to the status quo. Hardball scouting utilizing and privileging data-centric assessment is much more the norm, and in a much more mature place. Everyone’s doing it.
In football, leaning on statistical analysis seems much more in a period of infancy. Even if some purveyors have been at it a for a while, with public data much more accessible than in the past, the sport is still catching up to hardball and the deeper measurements that allow us to compare players against each other. So when Arsenal hired Mslintat it seemed as though, even as he wasn’t a true unknown and had done great things elsewhere, we were ahead of the curve. This was a big move, a real moment of futurism from the leadership at the club.
But now, with what sounds like a regressive move back to Raul Sanllehi’s “relationship”-centric model (where analytics may not be ignored, just de-centralized), it seems like we are willingly giving up a competitive advantage. “Moneyball”, as Michael Lewis framed it, was centrally focused on the exploitation of market inefficiencies, not just on specific statistics. And Arsenal, in hiring Sven, identified a market inefficiency, smartly. Not xG, or distances run, or the statistics he looks at. The inefficiency was that we had a guy like this, while many others did not. Not only did we hire an elite, inventive scout who knew his way around the data, but we did it at time when these types are rarer in the EPL.
Soon this type of hire will be commonplace. The market inefficiency will have evaporated. In baseball most teams got wise, making the advantage of having Mslintat-types smaller. Front offices now have to be that much better in their analysis, just to keep up with the Joneses. And we are relinquishing that head start, in a moment when the advantage is far greater than it will be over time.
For someone who has seen the fields level in baseball it hurts to see Arsenal seemingly dis-inviting themselves – intentionally and knowingly – from the revolution.