Risk Versus Reward in Midfield

Today’s column is a return to a topic that is often discussed on the Huddle Breakdown platform:

Risk versus Reward

For investors, reward is a financial rate of return, while risk can be defined in multiple ways.

For example, how volatile the prices of what one owns day to day, week to week, month to month, and/or year to year is a very common way of defining and measuring “risk.”

How can we think about the topic of risk versus reward in football, and specifically, Celtic?

For the purposes of this exercise, I am using possession value data, which models the value of every single action that takes place within games, and how similar actions contribute, or do not, to chance creation.

For example, a pass from Liam Scales out to Greg Taylor that progresses the ball X number of yards towards the opposition goal carries a modest positive value towards the probability of a chance being created, where as a Nicholas Kuhn through ball over the top to Daizen Maeda that leads directly to a chance will carry a materially higher positive value.

Conversely, a misplaced pass by Greg Taylor centrally intended for Callum McGregor, but that an opposition attacker intercepts in our defensive third, is a material negative value within a possession value model - i.e. it increases the probabilities of the opponent scoring versus that of Celtic.