This is a bit of fun to speculate and think what may be going in behind the scenes. I am not trying to say what is and what isn't - just trying to piece some things together to guess the secrets. I've been thinking about what Cryne and Hecky have said recently about people only knowing part of the secrets to our success implementing 'the plan' which is a take on Billy Beane's moneyball strategy. So I was wondering what the other missing pieces were and so far I have come up with the following.. 1 - Goals v Runs The moneyball plan was adapted to change runs to goals - we looked at adding goal scorers into the team. This was evident when you look at the signings wilson made and we have done it again to seome extend. Last time it was Conor, winnall, the lad from cambridge, etc.. and this time weve added Mallan, McGeehan, (shoud have added mcburnie) etc... If you have players that can get you goals you can outscore the opposition. 2 - The Model The blueprint for the team and its parts. Baseball is obviously different to footy so in order to come up with the right formula for a successful team that plays the type of football the Barnsley fans like to see we needed a model. I believe that model was taken from the 96/97 promotion team. We took each position and the best player in that team position and modelled their attributes. We then turned that position into a number or formula that could be used to identify lower league players with the same numbers or better for that component in the model. The thing about this one is when wilson came back and we signed the players we did everyone automatically started mapping those players to the 96/97 team - conor was our redders, fletcher our wilko, winnall hendrie, scowen shezza etc etc... 3 - Machine learning.. I also wonder how deep James Cryne went with the model? Has he used techniques like machine learning to create and test the model? Machine learning is one thing i've wondered about for us to spot patterns and test ideas (potential players) and how they would fit with the model (the plan). It also allows us to sift through enormous amounts of data from things like opta stats etc to do the work of hunderds of people to find the players that match our model that we can then go and scout. Those are some ideas I have come up with and wonder if anyone else has any ideas what else could be the secret sauce? Its all quite intriguing and I wonder if Patrick has already documented this to be released when the time is right... Who knows but i find it interesting.
I also wonder if we are using the model in some way to know which youngsters to target? Not sure how it would be applied to kids but i know teams like man utd etc look at things like size of certain bones and weight and speed etc and then try to map that into the future. Not sure how you map talent though! Surely it is the trained eye to spot a gem of player at a young age.
