The Norseman Season 9 Part 6

Just a short one to wrap season nine up for me but one that has given me a lot of ideas and excitement going forward!

League round ups, for me, are very difficult when I’ve not been in charge for the whole season. I’m unable to really dig into team and player stats because half of them are generated under a different manager, who, certainly in this case, had a different ethos and style. That being said, the past seven games have been a great indicator of just what we can do, if I get things right. We’re still a bit unsteady in certain areas of our game and do look likely to concede quite a few more goals than we actually do. At the other end, we can be a little unconvincing, to say the least, with a far-too-regular occurrence being an xG total of less than, or close to, one. That being said, we’re making some great progress and I am excited to see – statistically – how things are matching up to the playing style that I’m spending a lot of time watching live.

With some mandatory purchases from loan deals, I am already starting to get an idea of just how much I’ll have to play with in order to make this squad mine over the summer!

  

I saw this amazing blog by Andy (@TacitcalFool on X) and immediately felt like I’d been missing something! Gone are my days where I spent endless hours on Excel, calculating things that I’ve now skinned into my game but also gone are the days of really being able to calculate what I want. Now that I’m a little more knowledgeable around the building of certain formulae, I have been able to create more complex calculations to do this. Above, you can see the grading of my squad, split into positional areas and a calculation that I can now use going forward to recruit and also identify those who may be more suited to my style. As Andy mentions in his blog, a higher percentage score here doesn’t immediately indicate a better player, but does show me areas where I can build upon or where things such as individual foci, mentoring or even smarter recruitment could allow us to improve.

Building on my recruitment strategy of young, good personalities and from local non-big 5 leagues (plus Japan and other parts of Asia, which has – historically – always served Germany well), I have created a percentage score for the fit with the Bayer DNA – which encompasses the aforementioned non-attribute areas as well as First Touch, Determination, Decisions, Technique and Pace as I aim to create a dynamic and intelligent team. A harmonic mean, multiplied five times (so that I can better punish those with extreme attributes (see how Schulz drops by 24 points on this scale because he has the top speed of a fridge) then gets multiplied by an amount three times – called the multiplier – with 1 being the greatest, on each area I rate as important. These figures are my own interests or, for the personalities, areas that I’ve garnered knowledge on and are by no means either set in stone or factually correct. I can then create some nice little exportable profiles, too, as seen below:

  

Whilst it does not replace a statistical view for signing and developing players, it does give me a nice idea of who is most suited to what I’m trying to build here, it does, immediately, show that I have some players who are just not suited to the team; Neuer and Porciani lack the technical ability to make it, whereas players like Boniface and Krejci are older. That doesn’t mean to say that I shouldn’t be keeping them but it does show that they are maybe not the players who I want to have here long, long term as they’ll be unable to contribute. Again, the bias for German youngsters means that my best rated player is actually a youngster out on loan: Archie Reckert. Whilst I believe he will be great, it is purposely there to make me aware of their fit, not their overall quality.

I’ll be taking this suitability score into the summer transfer window and applying it to my incoming and outgoing signings, hopefully moving the club closer to the ideology that I have!