As a self-confessed statto, I really enjoyed The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Football Is Wrong by Chris Anderson and David Sally.
It wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea, especially for people like me who were brought up on the Celtic tradition of open, attacking football, but it is well worth a read.
Amongst other things, the authors suggest that football is a weakest link game, ie any team is only as strong as its weakest link.
Statistics suggest that it is far more important to not concede a goal than it is to actually score a goal. In a league match, not conceding guarantees at least one point, while scoring a goal is a guarantee of nothing.
That being the case, so the theory goes, defensive players are far more valuable than attackers, and if you have a player who regularly makes mistakes that lead to conceding goals, it can, and frequently does, prove fatal to any ambitions of silverware.
One way of assessing a team is to assign a value out of ten to each player, 1 being least and 10 best.
Football being a weakest link game, the stronger of any two teams is the one whose weakest player is better. For example, a team consisting of nine 8's, a 10 and a 4 may look stronger than a team consisting of eleven 7's. But in practice, over the course of a season the first team will lose more matches because that '4' will result in so many mistakes being made, goals conceded and points dropped.
The eleven steady players will not hand out regular thrashings, but they'll drop fewer points due to less mistakes being made over the season.
Now it should go without saying that unless Celtic gets really lucky in uncovering a hidden gem, we cannot afford to buy 10's. 10's cost way too much in transfer fees and wages and if we do manage to sign a 10 before anyone else realises he is a 10, he will soon be on his way when playing for Celtic reveals his true worth to our friends in the south.
The good news though, if The Numbers Game is correct, is that we don't need any 10's anyway. It is much more important to avoid signing 4's or 5's than it is to sign even 8's or 9's.
Dave Jones once said that Joe Ledley is at least a 7 every match and he certainly never let Celtic down, while never really being spectacular. Perhaps that is the kind of player Celtic needs to fill the team with to maximise our results/progress in Europe.
Celtic can afford to buy 7's. Celtic has a chance of holding onto 7's. Celtic can pick up 7's for a reasonable price.
Maybe what our scouting and coaching teams should be doing is avoiding signing 5's and 6's. The kind of players who try to make mazy runs out of defence. The kind of players who run into trouble in midfield due to poor decision making. The kind of players who lose their man in the penalty box because they are ball-watching. The kind of players who lose possession because of a poor first touch, or lack of confidence to hold onto the ball long enough to pass it on to a teammate.
We're talking about the basics here. Can you take to the field and do the simple things well?
Just as all you want from a goalkeeper is that he saves the shots he should save and the Hollywood saves are a bonus, maybe that applies to every position on the pitch.
Maybe all we need is a striker who scores the goals he should score, we create enough chances after all. Any spectacular overhead kicks, gravity-defying diving headers and breath-taking 25 yard volleys are a bonus.
If you go through the Celtic team that faced Maribor in your head, I'm sure you'll very quickly form a picture of who the 7's were and who the 5's and 6's were. However you compare our players to the Maribor line-up, it can't be denied that on the night, we had a 5 or two in our side, while they did not. It was a weakest-link game and our weakest-link was not as good as Maribor's weakest-link no matter how well Callum McGregor or Virgil van Dijk played.
Moving forward, Celtic do not need to splash millions on 8's or 9's to qualify for the Champions League and make an impression when we get there. We need to stop signing 5's and 6's, of whom we have too many.
We don't need to buy that expensive striker to improve the team, we need to replace those weakest links who are costing us so dearly.
Friday, 29 August 2014
Thursday, 28 August 2014
How Much Can We Expect From Celtic?
For the first time since 2011 there will be no Champions League campaign for Celtic this season and this has led to some serious questions being asked of the board and the manager. Much of the criticism is undoubtedly justified but as long as Celtic plays in the SPFL, can Champions League qualification ever be guaranteed, or even expected, every year?
The main complaint levelled at the board is that no money is being spent on buying established players, ready to take a starting spot right away and immediately improve the first team.
Celtic has taken in huge amounts of money from transfer fees and Champions League qualification in the past four years, starting with the sale of Aiden McGeady to Spartak Moscow in 2010, but income does not equal money to spend on buying players. The club has running costs to meet and bills to pay before money can be spent on players. The actual amount Celtic can afford to spend on transfer fees and wages for players is a lot less than many supporters seem to think.
The club has actually spent a lot of money in the past three years on transfer fees but another common complaint is that too many mediocre players in the £2-2.5m range have been signed. I agree wholeheartedly with this point, but the fault here lies with the scouting and management staff rather than the board. Quality can be had in this price range, Virgil van Dijk being the perfect example, but too many average players have been bought too.
There is an argument that the club should buy one £5m player, guaranteeing quality, instead of two £2.5m players. The problem with this argument is threefold.
First of all, a £5m price tag is no guarantee of quality, witness Shane Long signing for Southampton for £12m - a striker who has scored just 67 league goals in 274 appearances since 2005. After signing for Hull City in January this year, he managed just four league goals before joining Southampton this month. Despite this, I suspect more than a few Celtic fans would have been delighted if we'd matched the £4.5m West Bromwich Albion shelled out for this goal-every-four-games striker in 2011 when we were reportedly interested.
Secondly, if a player is bought for £5m, he will demand wages of at least double those paid to a £2.5m player. A transfer fee of £5m could easily commit the club to spending £12m overall on a player over the duration of a 3-4 year contract.
Thirdly, spending £5m on a single player, even if it does turn out to be a successful signing, will be no guarantee of either Champions League qualification or progression. In Champions League terms, £5m is chicken feed. We'd be breaking the bank for a return realistically limited to reaching the Last 16, which we have proven ourselves capable of three times already since the big-spending Martin O'Neill era ended. An era when despite the huge amounts spent on building a team, we never qualified for the Last 16.
The biggest problem Celtic faces is a structural one, largely outside of the control of the board.
Our income is dwarfed by that of even the lowliest EPL club. Southampton is now a more attractive proposition for footballers than Celtic; even for players who have experienced first hand how special a place Celtic Park is on Champions League nights.
We have to be realistic about this. It has to be faced and understood. When we want to sign anyone, if Southampton want him, we cannot compete with them. We will lose out on that player because Southampton can pay a far higher transfer fee, far higher wages, and offer a far more exciting professional challenge week in week out.
On those occasions when we do manage to spot talent before it comes to the attention of any EPL clubs (Wanyama, Hooper, van Dijk), the most we can hope for is two, possibly three seasons from them before the EPL clubs come calling as they WILL do given the exposure the players will get from playing for Celtic.
What this means, whether we like it or not, is that for the foreseeable future Celtic's business has to be spotting unnoticed talent, developing it, and selling on at as big a profit as possible. The alternative is to lose it for nothing at the end of the contract.
We are going to find it incredibly hard to build a team capable of challenging for a Last 16 spot in the Champions League, or some years, even just getting there. We cannot hold on to our best players for long enough to do that. So what can Celtic do?
We can do what we appear to be trying to do with Ronny Deila - implement a system from the lowest age groups to the first team to that relies on a well-drilled unit composed of incredibly fit players, playing a high-intensity game that allows a great degree of interchangeability in personnel. This will take time to achieve.
Our only hope of holding on to good players is to have a good number of Scottish and/or Irish players who have some form of emotional attachment to the club. Even then there will be more Charlie Nicholases than Paul McStays, more Lou Macaris than Danny McGrains. We're hoping for Kenny Dalglishes at best, in the sense that they'll give us a good six or seven years before heading off to test themselves in England.
Don't look on Henrik Larsson as an example of a foreign player who stayed at Celtic out of a love of the club. He hung around for seven years because we paid him top dollar to do so, at a time when Celtic was a far more attractive proposition in comparison to lower level EPL clubs. The consequence of that was seeing him leave for Barcelona for nothing in 2004. We have neither the financial muscle nor the football environment to repeat that.
So we have a problem. Any top class foreign youngsters we sign will have no emotional attachment to the club and will leave at the first opportunity. Scots/Irish youngsters *might* hang around longer, but Scotland simply does not produce talent in the numbers we once did and Ireland is heavily scouted by EPL clubs. You'll find the vast majority of Irish youngsters will regard Celtic affectionately as a second club who play in a second-rate league. They'll mostly support Manchester United/Liverpool/Arsenal or even, God help us, Chelsea. Most will sign for an EPL club given the chance.
Celtic unavoidably is a holding operation at present. Not until the Ibrox tribute act "returns" to the Premiership (I know!), but until the financial situation changes, whether that means a move to another league, or a transformational financial recovery for Scottish football.
We cannot afford to spend any more than £2-3m on a single player, and even if we could, those players don't want to play in Scotland if an EPL club is interested.
Top class players can be had for £2-3m, but we cannot hold on to them for more than a season or two because they will be off as soon as an EPL team come sniffing around. It makes no sense at all to not sell these players for a profit, because the alternative is to lose them for nothing once they unhappily see out their contracts.
So how can the likes of Maribor qualify for the Champions League with a far smaller budget than ours? Well that's a failing on the part of our scouting and coaching staff, not the board. It's actually an argument against spending more, because as we have seen, you don't have to spend tens of millions of pounds to get there. But Maribor very rarely qualify for the Champions League, and Legia have never been there.
Celtic is caught between two extremes. Nowhere near wealthy enough to guarantee Champions League football every year, but unable to regularly make our financial advantage over the minnows of European football count due to our close proximity to a financial giant.
Our best hope at the moment is to ensure the money we do spend is spent wisely. We need more Wanyamas and fewer Baldes. Above all, we need to get behind the Ronny Deila project which is a long-term one, the benefits of which will not become apparent for a year or more. We need to accept that we will not qualify for the Champions League every year in the current climate, and we need to hope that our football environment changes for the better sooner rather than later.
The main complaint levelled at the board is that no money is being spent on buying established players, ready to take a starting spot right away and immediately improve the first team.
Celtic has taken in huge amounts of money from transfer fees and Champions League qualification in the past four years, starting with the sale of Aiden McGeady to Spartak Moscow in 2010, but income does not equal money to spend on buying players. The club has running costs to meet and bills to pay before money can be spent on players. The actual amount Celtic can afford to spend on transfer fees and wages for players is a lot less than many supporters seem to think.
The club has actually spent a lot of money in the past three years on transfer fees but another common complaint is that too many mediocre players in the £2-2.5m range have been signed. I agree wholeheartedly with this point, but the fault here lies with the scouting and management staff rather than the board. Quality can be had in this price range, Virgil van Dijk being the perfect example, but too many average players have been bought too.
There is an argument that the club should buy one £5m player, guaranteeing quality, instead of two £2.5m players. The problem with this argument is threefold.
First of all, a £5m price tag is no guarantee of quality, witness Shane Long signing for Southampton for £12m - a striker who has scored just 67 league goals in 274 appearances since 2005. After signing for Hull City in January this year, he managed just four league goals before joining Southampton this month. Despite this, I suspect more than a few Celtic fans would have been delighted if we'd matched the £4.5m West Bromwich Albion shelled out for this goal-every-four-games striker in 2011 when we were reportedly interested.
Secondly, if a player is bought for £5m, he will demand wages of at least double those paid to a £2.5m player. A transfer fee of £5m could easily commit the club to spending £12m overall on a player over the duration of a 3-4 year contract.
Thirdly, spending £5m on a single player, even if it does turn out to be a successful signing, will be no guarantee of either Champions League qualification or progression. In Champions League terms, £5m is chicken feed. We'd be breaking the bank for a return realistically limited to reaching the Last 16, which we have proven ourselves capable of three times already since the big-spending Martin O'Neill era ended. An era when despite the huge amounts spent on building a team, we never qualified for the Last 16.
The biggest problem Celtic faces is a structural one, largely outside of the control of the board.
Our income is dwarfed by that of even the lowliest EPL club. Southampton is now a more attractive proposition for footballers than Celtic; even for players who have experienced first hand how special a place Celtic Park is on Champions League nights.
We have to be realistic about this. It has to be faced and understood. When we want to sign anyone, if Southampton want him, we cannot compete with them. We will lose out on that player because Southampton can pay a far higher transfer fee, far higher wages, and offer a far more exciting professional challenge week in week out.
On those occasions when we do manage to spot talent before it comes to the attention of any EPL clubs (Wanyama, Hooper, van Dijk), the most we can hope for is two, possibly three seasons from them before the EPL clubs come calling as they WILL do given the exposure the players will get from playing for Celtic.
What this means, whether we like it or not, is that for the foreseeable future Celtic's business has to be spotting unnoticed talent, developing it, and selling on at as big a profit as possible. The alternative is to lose it for nothing at the end of the contract.
We are going to find it incredibly hard to build a team capable of challenging for a Last 16 spot in the Champions League, or some years, even just getting there. We cannot hold on to our best players for long enough to do that. So what can Celtic do?
We can do what we appear to be trying to do with Ronny Deila - implement a system from the lowest age groups to the first team to that relies on a well-drilled unit composed of incredibly fit players, playing a high-intensity game that allows a great degree of interchangeability in personnel. This will take time to achieve.
Our only hope of holding on to good players is to have a good number of Scottish and/or Irish players who have some form of emotional attachment to the club. Even then there will be more Charlie Nicholases than Paul McStays, more Lou Macaris than Danny McGrains. We're hoping for Kenny Dalglishes at best, in the sense that they'll give us a good six or seven years before heading off to test themselves in England.
Don't look on Henrik Larsson as an example of a foreign player who stayed at Celtic out of a love of the club. He hung around for seven years because we paid him top dollar to do so, at a time when Celtic was a far more attractive proposition in comparison to lower level EPL clubs. The consequence of that was seeing him leave for Barcelona for nothing in 2004. We have neither the financial muscle nor the football environment to repeat that.
So we have a problem. Any top class foreign youngsters we sign will have no emotional attachment to the club and will leave at the first opportunity. Scots/Irish youngsters *might* hang around longer, but Scotland simply does not produce talent in the numbers we once did and Ireland is heavily scouted by EPL clubs. You'll find the vast majority of Irish youngsters will regard Celtic affectionately as a second club who play in a second-rate league. They'll mostly support Manchester United/Liverpool/Arsenal or even, God help us, Chelsea. Most will sign for an EPL club given the chance.
Celtic unavoidably is a holding operation at present. Not until the Ibrox tribute act "returns" to the Premiership (I know!), but until the financial situation changes, whether that means a move to another league, or a transformational financial recovery for Scottish football.
We cannot afford to spend any more than £2-3m on a single player, and even if we could, those players don't want to play in Scotland if an EPL club is interested.
Top class players can be had for £2-3m, but we cannot hold on to them for more than a season or two because they will be off as soon as an EPL team come sniffing around. It makes no sense at all to not sell these players for a profit, because the alternative is to lose them for nothing once they unhappily see out their contracts.
So how can the likes of Maribor qualify for the Champions League with a far smaller budget than ours? Well that's a failing on the part of our scouting and coaching staff, not the board. It's actually an argument against spending more, because as we have seen, you don't have to spend tens of millions of pounds to get there. But Maribor very rarely qualify for the Champions League, and Legia have never been there.
Celtic is caught between two extremes. Nowhere near wealthy enough to guarantee Champions League football every year, but unable to regularly make our financial advantage over the minnows of European football count due to our close proximity to a financial giant.
Our best hope at the moment is to ensure the money we do spend is spent wisely. We need more Wanyamas and fewer Baldes. Above all, we need to get behind the Ronny Deila project which is a long-term one, the benefits of which will not become apparent for a year or more. We need to accept that we will not qualify for the Champions League every year in the current climate, and we need to hope that our football environment changes for the better sooner rather than later.
Monday, 11 August 2014
Celtic Owe Legia Warsaw Nothing
The fallout from the decision by Henning Berg to field a suspended player in the second league of Legia Warsaw's 3rd qualifying round tie with Celtic continued over the weekend, with Legia attempting to put a guilt trip on Celtic over their exit from the tournament.
First off, I sympathise with Legia to a certain extent. They thoroughly deserved to win the tie, having played exceptionally well in both matches, and they have lost their place in the tournament, and the potential £15-20m windfall that goes along with it, because of an administrative error.
That's as far as it goes for me. I feel sorry for them, but it's just tough. End of story.
UEFA's rules on fielding suspended players are crystal clear - if you put one on the pitch, you forfeit the match.
It doesn't matter if he was only on for a few minutes or even a few seconds.
It doesn't matter if you already have the match won when he comes on.
All that matters is that you have fielded a player who is banned from playing in that match.
In that situation, UEFA has no room for leeway. There is no range of sanctions open dependent on the severity of the breach, or how far the outcome of the match was affected. There is only one possible sanction, and that is the match is forfeited by a 0-3 scoreline.
It's easy to forget, especially given the inaccurate reporting surrounding the issue, that Legia were not expelled from the Champions League for fielding a suspended player.
That leads us to the hand-wringing over the "disproportionate" punishment. The punishment was actually entirely proportionate and any attempt to mitigate the forfeit of the 2nd leg with resort to, "the match was already won," or "it made no difference to the result," sends you straight down the Sandy Bryson route, where "sporting advantage" has to be determined before clubs are properly punished for fielding banned players.
That way lies a cheats' charter where clubs can afford to take a chance on fielding banned players, knowing that they could very possibly argue their way out of forfeiting the match, as it was obviously merely a simple administrative error, and the criteria for determining the punishment would be entirely subjective.
When we consider how hard done by Legia are, we need to remember that the moment they fielded a suspended player, they forfeited the match. It wasn't a punishment inflicted by a UEFA disciplinary panel, it was the consequence of fielding the suspended player.
Regardless of how well Legia played on the night, regardless of the minimal (or none at all) impact it had on the result, the match was forfeited by Legia, through their actions in fielding a suspended player.
It is as if the 0-2 defeat Celtic suffered on the night never happened. We actually won the match by a 3-0 scoreline because Legia forfeited the match by fielding a suspended player.
Never let it be forgotten that it was Callum McGregor's goal in Warsaw that earned us our place in the play off round.
Now Legia want us to give up our place in the play off because THEY made one almighty cock-up on the night.
What Legia did was sheer, unadulterated, gross incompetence.
If they didn't know the rules of the competition, no matter how obscure they may be, then that is entirely their own fault. Legia's co-owner should be looking at his own role in this fiasco rather than attempting to morally blackmail Celtic.
He presides over a shambolic, amateurish organisation that went into the Champions League completely ignorant of how to register its players correctly and ensure suspended players have served their suspension before using them.
It is not Celtic's responsibility to ensure Legia Warsaw, or any other opponent, know the rules of the competition.
Legia Warsaw now need to take responsibility for their own gross incompetence and stop trying to coerce Celtic into taking that responsibility for them.
First off, I sympathise with Legia to a certain extent. They thoroughly deserved to win the tie, having played exceptionally well in both matches, and they have lost their place in the tournament, and the potential £15-20m windfall that goes along with it, because of an administrative error.
That's as far as it goes for me. I feel sorry for them, but it's just tough. End of story.
UEFA's rules on fielding suspended players are crystal clear - if you put one on the pitch, you forfeit the match.
It doesn't matter if he was only on for a few minutes or even a few seconds.
It doesn't matter if you already have the match won when he comes on.
All that matters is that you have fielded a player who is banned from playing in that match.
In that situation, UEFA has no room for leeway. There is no range of sanctions open dependent on the severity of the breach, or how far the outcome of the match was affected. There is only one possible sanction, and that is the match is forfeited by a 0-3 scoreline.
It's easy to forget, especially given the inaccurate reporting surrounding the issue, that Legia were not expelled from the Champions League for fielding a suspended player.
That leads us to the hand-wringing over the "disproportionate" punishment. The punishment was actually entirely proportionate and any attempt to mitigate the forfeit of the 2nd leg with resort to, "the match was already won," or "it made no difference to the result," sends you straight down the Sandy Bryson route, where "sporting advantage" has to be determined before clubs are properly punished for fielding banned players.
That way lies a cheats' charter where clubs can afford to take a chance on fielding banned players, knowing that they could very possibly argue their way out of forfeiting the match, as it was obviously merely a simple administrative error, and the criteria for determining the punishment would be entirely subjective.
When we consider how hard done by Legia are, we need to remember that the moment they fielded a suspended player, they forfeited the match. It wasn't a punishment inflicted by a UEFA disciplinary panel, it was the consequence of fielding the suspended player.
Regardless of how well Legia played on the night, regardless of the minimal (or none at all) impact it had on the result, the match was forfeited by Legia, through their actions in fielding a suspended player.
It is as if the 0-2 defeat Celtic suffered on the night never happened. We actually won the match by a 3-0 scoreline because Legia forfeited the match by fielding a suspended player.
Never let it be forgotten that it was Callum McGregor's goal in Warsaw that earned us our place in the play off round.
Now Legia want us to give up our place in the play off because THEY made one almighty cock-up on the night.
What Legia did was sheer, unadulterated, gross incompetence.
If they didn't know the rules of the competition, no matter how obscure they may be, then that is entirely their own fault. Legia's co-owner should be looking at his own role in this fiasco rather than attempting to morally blackmail Celtic.
He presides over a shambolic, amateurish organisation that went into the Champions League completely ignorant of how to register its players correctly and ensure suspended players have served their suspension before using them.
It is not Celtic's responsibility to ensure Legia Warsaw, or any other opponent, know the rules of the competition.
Legia Warsaw now need to take responsibility for their own gross incompetence and stop trying to coerce Celtic into taking that responsibility for them.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)