Should other Premier League teams copy Brentford's tactics? - ESPN

Soccer will never be solved in the same way that baseball and, to a lesser extent, basketball were.

Baseball teams got so good at figuring out what actually leads to winning -- strikeouts, walks, home runs -- and then aggressively ignored everything else, targeting those areas through better player identification and player development. In fact, they got too good.

The "Moneyball" revolution made the sport much worse to watch because games took forever and the ball was rarely ever in play. Things got so bad that Theo Epstein -- the executive who built the curse-breaking Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs teams and, along with Billy Beane, was one of the faces of the sport's head-first dive into analytical decision-making -- was eventually hired by Major League Baseball to figure out what rules to change and save the sport that he and others accidentally might have destroyed.

In basketball, it's a simpler story: Three points is worth more than two. Twenty years ago, the average NBA team attempted 14.9 3-pointers per game. Last season, the average NBA team attempted 35 per game.

Soccer should be mostly immune to this for a number of reasons, but mainly: There are barely any goals, and each game is a dynamic, free-flowing mess immune to pre-planned movements and in-game coaching. And since there are so few goals, the first goal in every game is insanely valuable -- it drastically shifts the incentives of both teams in a way that's just not true in either baseball or basketball.

The team that scores first in a soccer game wins about 2.3 points on average -- that's not too far off the full three points from winning a soccer game, and that rate would come out to about 87 points per Premier League season, or just about the same rate as Manchester City over the past five seasons. So, if you were going to try to solve soccer, you'd try to find a moment in the game when you can draw up a play. And you'd want that moment to be as early in the game as possible -- before the other team gets a chance to score the first goal themselves.

In other words, you'd want to do exactly what one Premier League team has done, four weeks in a row.

Have Brentford discovered soccer's cheat code? What does it say about everyone else in the Premier League, and should other teams be following Brentford's lead?

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