It's the incentives, stupid

A couple of weeks ago, I wondered whether analytics should have made football be played in a radically different way to how it currently is. A recent episode of the Double Pivot podcast reminded me of an oversight: football might not have a three-point line for goals (and an associated NBA-type change in shooting behaviour) but it does have a three-point rule for points.

The change was designed to improve the incentives for teams, after a period of doldrum-esque scoring in 1970s England. In the start of that decade, the English men’s top division saw four seasons in a row with an average goals per game of around 2.5 or under. This was a huge fall from a time in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s when the average could be north of 3.5 per game.

Goalscoring alone probably isn’t the best metric to judge the rule change on, but the top division’s scoring rate picked up before the change came into effect in England in 1981. It stabilised at around 2.6 per game, until a hop upwards in the 2010s. The 2023/24 season saw the first average of over 3.0 goals per game since the ‘60s.

But this isn’t about goals.

The above is something of a riff on a theme:

Even at this high level - the level supposed to be about long-term thinking - it seems long-termism can be more theory than practice. Possibly because the incentives at play are job security at an individual level and, increasingly if not wholly, investment value at an ownership level. Regular readers of Get Goalside will identify a bias here, but ‘driving wedges between clubs and their long-standing communities removes an important incentive to generational long-term thinking’ does not sound an unreasonable hypothesis.

But this isn’t about club ownership per se either.

By coincidence, the past few days have thrown together these reminders of incentive structures with something else. On YouTube, a glimpse into Burnley’s data-gathering operation on their academy footballers, and on social media, a post about high-school American Football tracking data. Add these to the consumer products selling the dream of being scouted from afar, and soon we will be telling uncomprehending children of the days when we played sport and left behind no record other than the score. What do we do when there are no datapoints left to conquer? And what of the data already being coerced into databases?

There will, or should, of course, be data protection policies in place. But though Get Goalside is pretty pro-data, the push for player data rights is important. And it should extend to youth football. The power of data is often in its quantity, which leaves individuals - in successful data-gathering operations - as mere specks in the whole. Valuable as part of an aggregate, inconsequential on their own terms. There are football ownership models where groups will buy clubs, or large stakes in them, as a means to gaining a foothold in that continent’s ‘talent development market’ - how passé. A scouting network is such a twentieth century concept. Cycles of age group teams entering one’s data warehouses, training talent identification and development plan algorithms: that’s an investable future.

As the saying goes, football is the most important of the unimportant things. The latter half of this may be a good thing.

By coincidence, modern football coaching mirrors the now-famous line from James Clear’s book Atomic Habits: “you do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.” In football more broadly, what systems are those to fall back to? Do we trust the incentive structures in place?

Nick De Marco KC, barrister (on Twitter, responding to a hearing on Premier League rules around ‘associated party transactions’): “All that I can say is we are living in the most exciting time for sports law. I have never myself been one to celebrate the greater commercialisation and therefore legalisation of sport and its regulation, but it is a real fact of life and economic activity, such that this tendency for greater scrutiny of sports regulation is inevitable.”