Now though it seems like things are going to dissolve into the same old macho posturing. It seems like the diehard soccer fans care more about how many fans stand up during a game than how their team is doing and that “atmosphere” is the most important dynamic in getting people to attend a game.

The thing about soccer in Europe is that its appeal isn’t limited to a particular class, it attracts people from all levels of society. You do get this macho posturing (and indeed the occasional homophobic/racist elements depending on where you go) but there are just as many liberal minded fans, or people who are interested in analysing the game. It’s a cross section of society and it so happens that the most visible sections of a crowd are also the least desirable.

I wouldn’t agree with this to be honest. Beane may have had a relationship with Comolli, but if you look at the players Spurs actually acquired under his guidance many of them violated Beane’s philosophy. Under Comolli the primary characteristic of Spurs’ transfer activity was a willingness to sign highly overvalued players with huge reputations for huge transfer fees – Bent, Bale, Hutton, etc. He certainly didn’t identify many players with undervalued skillsets.

cool. Sandy Koufax pitching on mlb.com this morning in Game 7 of the 1965 World Series.

As a subjective viewer, I can easily tell that many, many non-goals involve significantly more impressive play than many other goals. Many touches or short dribbles or moves are jawdroppingly complex even if nothing results, while more than a few goals or other successful actions are purely opportunistic and not that impressive at all.

Isn’t that true of baseball too though? Many times I’ve seen hitters hit line drives that go straight to a defender and are caught but I’ve also seen tons of little bloops that somehow drop in and score a couple runs.

I’m a weird soccer fan in that I love the game but I absolutely hate “soccer culture.” It’s the same songs and the same insults with an overlay of rather annoying sexism and homophobia. I used to love going to Sounders games when they played at Memorial Stadium and no one really took it all that seriously. For some reason the coach of the SF Bay Seals and I had a rivalry that lasted the entire season which led to me being given a Bay Seals hat by their players who hated their coach. That was fun.

Now though it seems like things are going to dissolve into the same old macho posturing. It seems like the diehard soccer fans care more about how many fans stand up during a game than how their team is doing and that “atmosphere” is the most important dynamic in getting people to attend a game. Maybe I’m weird, but when I’m at a sporting event, my attention wants to be drawn to the team, not what the crowd is doing.

You can certainly create rules or guidelines for them. Though of course, ultimately human variability remains, as is the case with any observation-based system. It applies to the advanced zone-oriented defensive metrics, and even to ball/strike calls for that matter (at least until umpires are replaced with Questec robots).

Standardization is possible, enough to make such a system at least reasonably reliable. And if the inputs can be defined, it should also be possible to analyze data based around the outputs. Even if you only get as far as finding different probabilities of a still-uncertain outcome, it’s about the same place as batted-ball distributions.

And bedir, you’re going to have to do a lot worse than that if you want to offend me! It’s all in the conversation.

Sadly, for most of this season in the Prem there has been a foolproof way to tell who the better players are: look for the ones playing against Tottenham. My Liverpool-supporting spouse has become insufferable lately. Go Sounders!