Johan Lange Thread | Page 4 | Vital Football

Johan Lange Thread

Isn’t the point here that the board hopes/ believe they have appointed someone who can identify quality players or players with potential who can either justify their fee and wages or develop further. Whether the players are then sold on at a profit is a second consideration if we have out grown them and their abilities. Maybe the age of the Micah Richards & the McCormacks is at an end.

Too many have stolen a fortune off Villa in recent years and it’s time the club tightened up on waste and activity a return on those we no longer need. Bree, Nyland, Kalinic And more come to mind.
 
He’ll be working off a completely different budget to the one he had at Copenhagen. I would be very surprised if he’s making purchases for 950k and expecting them to be playing premier league football. If he can identify the next big thing for 15-20m then all is good. I do wonder how much Sporting directors actually do. Surely it’s collating scouting reports of players who they think will fit what we need then recommendations and see if the manager etc want them.
 
His age is in his favour in that he’ll still be very ambitious. This is a big step up for him, crap players cost 10m in this league. On the other hand if, like Wenger, he can identify players that have a special first touch that takes them away from trouble we could be in business. I think it’s called quality. Let’s hope he has a gift for spotting quality.
 
Pangloss said:
Moneyball has been behind everything Liverpool have done, let's hope we can emulate that.
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Well it‘s worked for them then but their money ball is a different beast to the one we’ve been using.
Van Dijk 76 m. Mane 34 m. Salah 42 m. Fabinho 39 m. Keith 48 m. Oxlade Chamberlain 35 m.
Shaqiri was a modest 13.5 m and Andy Robinson was a snip at 8 m and definitely looks a moneyball success.
Our versions have looked a lot more modest and less successful.
 
Good luck for the future. I thought they would have Suso,s replacment lined up. The statement from the owners suggest they dont expect to be hanging on by their fingertips again any time soon. A wish we all share. Now rustle up some signings pronto please.
 
antvillan said:
Thanks for the link, interesting read.

It does make me worry a bit that we’ll be pursuing a buy low, sell high ‘moneyball’ approach. However, the owners are saying how ambitious they still are and they have certainly backed up the talk with the money so far. Let’s hope this is a stroke of genius! As always I reserve judgement though, considering who he follows wasn’t the shrewdest appointment.
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Posting this again

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/oct/15/brentford-owner-matthew-benham-hates-moneyball

"The Brentford owner, Matthew Benham, whose club has been a pioneer in the use of analytics in football, says that he hates the term Moneyball being applied to his team because it is so often misused and misunderstood. "

“Moneyball’s idea wasn’t about using any old statistics but statistics as an academic and scientific exercise to see what stats actually helped predicted things. The Moneyball label can be confusing because people think it is using any stats rather than trying to use them in a scientific way.”
Benham said that statistics could be helpful when recruiting players – and explained why he would be wary of signing a striker who had scored 20 goals in a season from only 40 attempts on goal because they would be unlikely to sustain such a high conversion rate. But he stressed that context was always key.

“I used to be very sceptical about using individual stats for players,” he added. “I am now slightly more open to them. There are pluses and minuses. The good things is that sometimes a player might be very good at tackles and interceptions but you don’t really realise it because some players who make a lot of tackles by getting in quickly don’t tend to stick in the mind as much as a Stuart Pearce-type player. On the other hand, is a player making a lot of tackles because he is badly positioned in the first place? So these can have a lot of use but they always need context.”
 
The Fear said:
I guess he might be here on a new remit. If it is the same remit, it rarely works and all clubs would love to buy, use, develop and sell any player at a profit, apart from the ultra rich like Man City.

I live in hope and am trying to do a bit of digging with my contacts, but this doesn't really scream a giant leap forward.

I hope he understands, as the last poor efforts haven't, that a team needs a balance and a blend to make it a team. Experience as well as prospects.
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Don't think it can be the same remit, at least as regards recruitment. A key aim of ours is to build a team which can compete in the upper levels of the PL, not make a profit on players to sustain the financial side of the club. However, maybe it's thought that his overall recruitment experience and contacts will be good for us.

As Sporting Director though he has a wider remit than recruitment, essentially building the "Aston Villa way" (horrible phrase). Maybe that's an area where Suso didn't have much effect.

I think this is intended to be much more than just transferring the Copenhagen basics to Villa.
 
You'd hope so now. With the core (give or take) in place, it's now about sensible tweaking, building the depth, building the 'next generation' to come through in 12/24 months, so it has to be a mix of developing for the first team and developing the future profit 50/50.

As opposed to, we bring one or two through and let the entire remainder of the age group go on freebies at the end of their contracts.
 
It has to be. I know they want to follow through the style of play from the academy upward, like a good few of us (including some decent staff who never got listened to) have said should be done for years. Some of the idiot managers really didn't want to connect the dots, which is ridiculous.

But the youth without proper experience, to sell on, although a nice plan on paper, only works if you get, as I said earlier, the right blend of youth and experience. We rarely buy a top prospect and keep them long enough TO sell on a profit, there are a few over the last four or five years who seem to be plying their trade fairly well elsewhere who we labelled 'shit' and sold at break even or a loss!
 
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