Football owners are still trying to find a winning Moneyball strategy: Here’s what its inventor Billy Beane thinks
Alamy | Executive vice president of baseball operations and minority owner of the Oakland Athletics, Billy Beane (centered).
Immortalised in the book and film, Moneyball, the data-driven approach of Oakland Athletics’ executive Billy Beane showed how it could drive David v Goliath results in sport.
Speaking to European club executives last month, Beane has shared some of the secrets of his success and how he believes football can utilise “Moneyball” ideas.
Why it matters: Football owners have been obsessed with finding their own “Moneyball” solutions for two decades, some with more success than others. Beane links his philosophy to Warren Buffet’s investment strategies.
The perspective: Football has been run according to subjective criteria for 150 years. Clubs suddenly adopting quantitative decision-making processes default to emotional reasoning when things go wrong – “You can't be a hybrid.”
3 April 2023 - 3:23 PM
For 20 years football has been trying to utilise the ideas he made famous in baseball, but what does Billy Beane really think about football’s quest to find the winning “Moneyball” formula?
For the uninitiated, Beane found recognition as an early-noughties baseball executive with the Oakland Athletics. After being ordered by his team’s owners to slash costs, Beane applied sabermetric principles to obtain undervalued players. In essence, Beane sought to maximise performance with play
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