Yorkshire Moneyball

[Peebles Rover]

Interesting article on the Barnsley model

Barnsley’s dream team give football club sporting chance
https://on.ft.com/3tTdL5w

[DonnyOsmond]

Paywall

[tyke1962]

I'm always a little wary when publications who wouldn't normally give us too many column inches jump on the bandwagon so to speak .

The article is behind a pay wall but I suspect it's very positive and gives the impression our recruitment team can turn water in to wine .

The truth is they probably as a percentage get as much wrong as they do right , last season we recruited , Luke Thomas , Patrick Schmidt , Mambo Diaby and Malik Wilks for around £4m and none of them were any great shakes .

This season they've done remarkably well , Helik , Brittain , Morris have been absolutely sensational signings with only Herbie Kane not as yet up to speed .

I won't include Daryl Dike because he's on loan and the chances of signing him pretty much depend which league we will be playing our football next season and even a place in the PL won't guarantee his signature given the interest from some very big PL clubs .

In reality we do all right but we haven't exactly invented anything either with this system .

What I will say is that the club have a very astute strategy with the high press style of play and recruit players,who they feel fit this system and hire HC's with a solid record of playing this style of football .

This provides the stability at the club because as we know players and HC's come and go but the playing style remains and prevents a patch work quilt scenario when players and HC's  leave and new ones are recruited .

To conclude the real merit in the model is possibly sticking to a style of play that's played at all levels within the club rather than any geniuses in the recruitment department because as I've said they have got just as much wrong as they've got right over the last two seasons at this level .

[Peebles Rover]

Ah sorry didn’t realise you guys couldn’t read the article. I’ll try to repostit

[tyke1962]

To be fair there is method behind the data led approach to player recruitment .

Billy Beane who heads our recruitment and has a minor stake in the club is a Baseball man as many of you will know from the film Moneyball .

However the analytics behind it do transfer to football because all you do is look at the data with football glasses on .

In fairly layman's terms what you are trying to achieve is attempt to have the same success on a small budget as a big budget club should enjoy .

An example would be from last season in Alexander Mitrovic of Fulham , a £30m footballer on £40k a week and his 26 Championship goals clearly cost Fulham a great deal of money .

What we say is we can replicate that , so we recruit Woodrow and Chaplin for £2m and pay them £8k a week and between them last season they got the 26 Championship goals that Mitrovic scored for Fulham .

That's how they at least attempt to narrow the differentials in budgets .

[Donnyjim]

Billy Beane was played by Brad Pitt in the film Moneyball. great film and great story. Barnsley have done well to acquire his skills.

[Donnyjim]

Would it be worth our board offering Beane a 10% share in the club? The moneyball principle seems to have worked for the Tykes. Nothing to lose really.

[Peebles Rover]

http://barnsleyfc.org.uk/threads/we%E2%80%99ve-even-made-the-financial-times.304591/

Here the article in full from Barnsley forum

[Peebles Rover]

Lee has refined Moneyball. Barnsley almost always buy players under 24, whose value is likely to rise. They rarely take loan players, so as to forge a team ethic from regulars. And they play the same tactics whoever the manager is.

Don’t know why this para was missing from original article. But thought this was particularly telling for our situation

[tyke1962]

Lee has refined Moneyball. Barnsley almost always buy players under 24, whose value is likely to rise. They rarely take loan players, so as to forge a team ethic from regulars. And they play the same tactics whoever the manager is.

Don’t know why this para was missing from original article. But thought this was particularly telling for our situation

The club actually started the data led recruitment in 2015 a good three years before the current consortium bought the club .

The data led approach led to the capture of Connor Hourihane for £250k from Plymouth , sold to Villa for £3m .

Marc Roberts £15k from Halifax , sold to Birmingham for £3m .

Alfie Mawson free , sold to Swansea for £6.5m .

This enabled the club to settle it's loans to then owner Patrick Cryne ( around £8m ) and become debt free and sustain its self under its own steam .

This in turn attracted the present consortium to the club when Patrick Cryne looked to sell the club after his terminal cancer diagnosis .

Given the club were already using a data led approach Billy Beane become involved and took a small stake in the club with the other members of the consortium .

I think the biggest success with this approach is yet to come with young Callum Styles , bought from Bury as an 18 year old for £500k three years ago , anything less than £10m and we've had our pants pulled down , the lad is a massive talent .

It's frustrating at times to see our best players sold on , to say the least .

Some harsh lessons have been learnt along the way as to when sell and when not to , losing Pinnock , Lindsay and Kieffer Moore in one window two years ago would have cost us our championship place in almost every other season last year , a remarkable stroke of good fortune .

It will be interesting to see how we go on this summer if we don't get promoted to the PL .

I fear the offers for a number of our young players such as Styles , Andersen , Helik and Brittain will be just too good to turn down and no doubt the players heads will be turned as all of them will attract bids from PL clubs .

However with a sizeable transfer budget we'd at least have half a chance of retaining our championship status as a minimum .

[idler]

Burnley in the 60s/70s then later Crewew and Wimbledon got by for some time by unearthing talent and selling on handsomely. Eventually the conveyor belt stops and that is the worry with all clubs using this method.
Hopefully you can keep a good scouting system and a good reputation for bringing players through.

[tyke1962]

Burnley in the 60s/70s then later Crewew and Wimbledon got by for some time by unearthing talent and selling on handsomely. Eventually the conveyor belt stops and that is the worry with all clubs using this method.
Hopefully you can keep a good scouting system and a good reputation for bringing players through.

I certainly believe there's a limit to what you can unearth in the transfer bargain bucket Idler .

At the present moment we recruit below a threshold of £1.3m , this is to keep player wages at a minimum even though we've the cash to go way beyond that figure , £3m footballers come with £3m wage expectations unfortunately .

It's extremely interesting to see where we go with the model from here .

A £100m plus bounty from a single PL season throws the whole point of our model out of the window to a large extent .

Remaing in the championship this season would also see potentially a huge amount of money coming in when our young talent is sold on , it's hard to imagine how we can keep a number of players at the club and build on the season we've had and go again next season .

It could be said that this seasons come a bit too quickly for us and raises some concerns on where we go from here rather than the model delivering slow but sure progress as was initially intended .

For me the best strategy should we found ourselves in the PL next season would be to spend as little as possible , give these young lads the opportunity to play in the PL , take the money and stick it in the bank and use it to sustain ourselves as a decent championship club with the odd flirtation with the high end of the championship .

There's absolutely no way would we survive in the PL next season even if we spent ridiculous amounts of money , the gap between the championship and the PL is just too big to bridge for a club of our size .

You only have to look at Bradford City , Huddersfield Town and Blackpool as examples of how it can go spectacularly wrong from having achieved a PL place .

There's some real conundrums on the horizon this summer and I sincerely hope we can negotiate them whilst retaining our model and identity .

[idler]

I’m hoping that you do go up tyke and hopefully stay a year or two. Bradford City went haywire when having stopped up Paul Jewel returned from holiday to find the chairman Geoffrey Richmond and his son had drawn up a wish list of players that they would be signing.
Players mainly past their best but on big money.
West Brom do it right. Go up and don’t overspend and then go again if you do come down.

[tyke1962]

I’m hoping that you do go up tyke and hopefully stay a year or two. Bradford City went haywire when having stopped up Paul Jewel returned from holiday to find the chairman Geoffrey Richmond and his son had drawn up a wish list of players that they would be signing.
Players mainly past their best but on big money.
West Brom do it right. Go up and don’t overspend and then go again if you do come down.

Huddersfield Town's wage bill last season in the championship was £50m and it's reported that Bournemouth's wages this season have come in at £108m .

The pitfalls of PL football are all too clear to see for club's of our size .

If we are successful in the play offs and only attain 10 PL points then so be it , it won't be an easy watch by any means for 9 months but the reality is its the most sensible way and spend the absolute minimum .