Championship At Best!

Rich made a very good point yesterday that strikers will generally fare better off the bench than from the starting lineup. Indeed, this holds true for us (including Clint Dempsey's appearances through January, since he was mostly played in the midfield after that):

Last season, about 59% of all goals scored in the league came in the second half, and over 26% came in the final 15 minutes. Should teams start games with their best goalscorers on the bench, and let a McBride or Helguson try and wear down the defence for 60 minutes? That's probably not the best tactic for most games (as a majority of goals are still scored by starters), but in situations where you may be overmatched and playing for a draw, it might be a way to steal a few points.

I think I see the beginnings of a stamina rating.

Even though I've set a policy for myself to ignore any transer rumors that do not involve a manager naming a player or a player naming a team, I felt the need to do a little digging after a usually-reliable poster on TIFF named Marlon Harewood as a target. As one other poster pointed out, Harewood scored 5 goals this season, despite only starting one game for Aston Villa. I found that interesting - sounds like a very good backup/bench player, so I checked the numbers:

I'd welcome that kind of contribution to our squad. He's really only had one bad year (2006/07), and West Ham were awful that season. Obviously, I'd prefer to see him coming off the bench, but we could do worse. We all expect Roy to dig up some unknown continental player (and why not? - they are generally cheaper and better values), but Harewood seems to have dropped off of everybody's radar after rough 06/07 season, so he may fall under that same "value" umbrella. Depending on the asking price, of course - there is still a risk (is 06/07 his true form?), and thus £4m would probably not be the best value. Cut that price in half, and it's a deal.

A lot of people prefer goal differential to points as a method of evaluating the overall quality of a team. I do too, but there are a couple other ways of looking at it. I've gotten a little carried away in some new statistical analysis of the season recently, but I'd like to share some of the basis behind it.

The first few columns show the final league table as we all know it. MG represents "Marginal Goals" - more on this a bit later. Next is Real Win %. This is each team's W-D-L record represented as a percentage. For this, a draw counts as half of a win. Pythagorean Win % is the results of a simple formula used to predict how many games a team should have won:

Pythagoras didn't really have anything to do with this, but the name comes from the formula's resemblence to his theorem.

Bill James (who else?) applied this to baseball originally, and later took it a step further while developing his Win Shares statistic, which quantifies individual player contributiion to his team's record. This is where MG comes into play. Marginal Goals is the sum of a team's goal differential and the league average goals scored. In 2007/08, this was just over 50 goals. If we divide MG by 2 times the league average goals, we get another predicted winning percentage. This one generally isn't quite as accurate as the Pythagorean method, but it generally does a good job for teams who win between 30% and 70% of their games. More importantly, it gives us something to break down further and evaulate individual performance.

A "marginal" team can be described as a team of players at the lowest level of quality in the league. Think of players who would do well in the Championship, but would be lucky to make it off the bench for an average Premiership team. Sunderland of 05/06, who finished that season only 4 goals better than a marginal team, is the best example in recent memory. For most teams, 2-3 goals scored or prevented will earn another win. This season, Fulham averaged 2.007 MG per win, so every two goals we scored/prevented above that line in the sand we call "marginal" would have earned us an additional win. Manchester United, who had plenty of wins already, would need 3.6 more goals to win one more game. Derby County's negative total shows that they really didn't belong at this level, something most of us knew. Fulham, Newcastle, and all other teams who gave up points to them at any point in the season must have really been off on those days.

Right now, none of this (at least on its own) means much. The Pythagorean formula is nice to tell us where we should have been on the table, and it works for predicting future performance. Marginal Goals tell us how much better we are than a very bad, non-existent team. The real good stuff is when we use this to determine individual player value.

Awhile back, I mentioned that our reserve keeper has switched his international affiliation from England to the Philippines. This month, he has started 3 games for his new side in the AFC Challenge Cup qualifiers (a qualifying tournament of sorts for the 2011 Asian Cup), and kept 3 clean sheets. Not a bad start to an international career. Slightly reminiscent of Pascal Zuberbühler's World Cup performance in 2006, they went out in the group stage on goal differential, despite not conceding a single goal.

To me, yesterday's game felt much like the Aston Villa win. Back then, we saw Aaron Hughes score an unfortunate own goal to put us down 0-1 in the second half, but I just couldn't see us losing that game. The clock continued to roll, but I had a strange, confident feeling that we would pull off the unthinkable. We had come so far, being relegated on a 0-0 draw just seemed wrong. It wasn't a matter of if we would score, it was when. As we approached the 80th minute, I was still without thoughts of Championship football. We were getting chances, and one of them had to go in. Then, there it was. Jimmy Bullard's free kick floated into the box in slow motion, and one of several Fulham players were right there to be on the receiving end. Danny Murphy's was the first to reach the ball, and it was in! We had done it! I couldn't be happier for him. All season, Murphy has had difficulty finding his way into the hearts of the fans, despite very little wrongdoing. His career mercenary label may be somewhat deserving, but he just may have found a permanent home.

Weeks ago, I had called for us to mail in the rest of the season and start preparing for next year. I was wrong. I don't blame Roy for not wanting to give up his £1m "staying up" bonus, and I'm thrilled that he didn't. We're lucky to have him, and I hope he stays on long-term.

I've been slow to keep the team stats updated since my laptop's power jack quit working, but I hope to get everything caught up in the next couple of days.

Finally, I don't know if we're going to Europe, but we have a good shot. I mis-read the table, and we're a bit further than two yellows behind, but we definitely made up some ground. Yesterday's perfomance by Man City didn't exactly scream "positive play", and their fans' mini-riot after the game certainly won't help their cause. We find out tomorrow, supposedly.

oh and these guys

Be sure to save your work often! Last week, I had a detailed spreadsheet with every Premiership club's 2007/08 transfers, and where they came from. Long story short, my program crashed before I had saved. So, I present to you the contents of my copy/paste buffer:

Above are all "source" countries with more than one transfer to England this season. Mostly self-explanatory. Appearance per year shows us the number of games played divided by years with the club. Cost per year is the average transfer fee divided by the appearance per year average.

For most countries shown, there is not really enough of a sample to make any conclusions. Russia's numbers are greatly inflated by Roman Abramovich's new £9 million butler Branislav Ivanovic, who is yet to play for Chelsea. If we went back to last season, the inclusion of Alexey Smertin alone would normalize things considerably. So, that's the next step. When I looked at Fulham and Arsenal, I looked at all of their players. Breaking down every team's roster by transfer source would give us a good sample.

One thing we can say, though, is that England-based players still don't look like a good value. While they do give that warm fuzzy feeling of a "proven" player, you can see that this season, Scottish, Dutch and Danish players have averaged more appearances per year.

Arsenal is a successful club. They don't spend much money on transfers, but they have found great success in buying value players from other countries. A vast majority of them are signed from clubs outside of England, and most have logged over 100 games with the club. Roy Hodgson seems to share this thinking, which is why I hope to see him retained beyond this season.

Here, we find the value we get from our transfer fees by dividing the total by the number of appearances for the club (players who signed for an undisclosed fee not included):

Doesn't this seem wrong? We've paid more than twice as much for England-based players, but the foreign-based players have more than twice as many appearances! Of course, none of this takes wages into consideration, which is a, um, considerable consideration. It does, however, show us that it is possible to put together a winning club on a modest budget. I feel like I'm pointing out the obvious, but the number of struggling clubs with squads full of career England-based players is astounding.

So, if English players are overpriced, where is the best place to find new talent? Watch this space.

It was brought up awhile ago that we could possibly qualify for Europe via the Fair Play table. Unfortunately, we quickly fell a few spots, making this possibility seem less likely. Now, we've made up some ground and are back within one place of qualification.

The way I look at it, there are 3 plausible ways we can qualify:

• Fulham move ahead of Man City in Fair Play table.
• Portsmouth wins FA Cup, Man City finishes 7th in the Premier League (currently 3 points behind Aston Villa) and wins Intertoto Cup.
• Cardiff City wins FA Cup, but the FA denies UEFA Cup bid due to their being Welsh. Man City finishes 6th in the Premier League (currently 5 points behind 6th place Portsmouth).

There are others, but they are much less likely.

Reserve keeper and former England youth international Neil Etheridge has switched international allegiance to the Philippines. I expect that he should jump right into their starting lineup, and any full international experience can only help if he is to be our third keeper next season. The Philippines have a couple of friendlies coming up next month, so we'll have to watch and see if he features.

Additionally, there were some questions raised yesterday about the training pictures posted on the official site that featured loanee Ismael Ehui. A Carshalton Athletic official has informed me that Ehui is still training with Fulham, but will continue to play matches with Carshalton. Mystery solved.