Player Performance Benchmarking

Arne Engels- Celtic's record signing used as a case study to explain this exercise

One of the transitions being made as we launch this Substack is to migrate and consolidate content which was primarily distributed via Alan’s blog and Twitter to this platform.

In addition, this venue also offers the opportunity to provide more robust granularity vs Twitter, which is why we have dedicated a specific section to the player benchmarking exercise I have been sharing on Twitter over the past several years.

As has been stated with these posts in the past, these are intended as an exercise with which to try and ascertain a profile of players, with a goal to look for signals of potential relative strengths and weaknesses. Generally speaking, the exercise has yielded pretty good accuracy, but it is just a starting point for analysis.

The basis for the exercise is derived from the concepts within performance benchmarking, contribution, and attribution analysis which is endemic within the investment industry.

I will use Arne Engels to flush out various issues and concepts, as his profile is a complicated one. His tenure at Augsburg was playing at a club with relatively low resources in a top 5 league, and during his age 19 and 20 seasons.

Each metric is sourced from Wyscout or derived from other metrics within that platform: