Why Do Soccer Clubs/Leagues Seem to be Run So Poorly Compared to North American Counterparts? Fresh fom Reddit

Now, I'm not trying to do some "HUR DURR MURICA!" thing here so please hear my argument out:

I'm a huge baseball fan. In my opinion, baseball is the most similar NA sport to soccer in regards to the business side of things. There's no salary cap, teams (for the most part) develop their own players, there's limited TV revenue sharing, etc.

My hometown team -- the Pittsburgh Pirates -- was, for 20 years, the most moribund franchise in NA professional sports. 20 straight losing seasons! A record! In 2007 a new ownership group came in with a new front office. They promptly gutted the organization, trading virtually all current assets to stockpile future assets. They also brought in a cutting edge analytics team. We had our first winning season in 2013, and now some experts are predicting us to win the world series.

Point is, despite a payroll 1/3 of the New York Yankees, we've been the more competitive team the last few years. Using ingenuity to outwit your deep-pocketed rivals has been happening all over NA sports. I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with the Moneyball Oakland A's.

Why does this not seems to happen in soccer? I realize there are some counter-examples -- Southampton, Atletico -- but for the most part it seems money is 90%+ the deciding factor in soccer. Why hasn't some team been able to use innovative methods to achieve some level of sustained success? Why does soccer seem so resistant to the statistical revolution that's been happening all over NA sports?

It would seem when making decision that could potentially have $100+ million dollars of impact, you'd want to user every available method to help with these decisions. Is there a soccer equivalent to the Sloan Analytics Conference?

Some might say the nature of soccer is too different for analytics to matter. Hockey, which IMO is the NA sports most similar to the flowing nature of soccer, has recently been undergoing their own analytics reovlution. MLB has recently installed a revolutionary system for tracking defensive plays. Many hope this will lead to new methods to quantify defense - an incredibly difficult thing to do.

Maybe my entire premise is wrong, maybe teams are using these methods and I'm just unaware. Maybe the Porto's and Saints of the world disprove my point. Maybe the business side of things are so vastly different that it's not a valid comparison. Maybe FFP will will revolutionize the game in which these methods have to be adapted since you can no longer just throw money at the problems.

Sorry for the long post, but I've always been baffled at people making million dollar decisions not attempting to milk every competitive advantage out of those decisions. There has to be a way to run a soccer club in which innovation trumps money. Or maybe not.

Submitted March 21, 2015 at 03:56PM by KeepItApathetic http://ift.tt/1AXAcEB