"the very exercise of drawing up lists and rankings can be misleading for the probabilistically-illiterate because it seems to imply set-in-stone certainty about who the best player is, who the second best is, etc.; and this rigid numbering masks the underlying concepts of probability. And yet, drawing up player lists is key for the recruitment workflows of clubs, be it in drafts or transfer windows, or even just to set up a schedule for their scouts. [..] In the passing motif methodology Iâve used so far, the vector representing each player has 45 entries or numbers. The key conceptual bit is that when you have this type of vectorised representation, you can imagine each player as being in a âspaceâ of some sort. [..] What this entry tried to show is that there is solid evidence that a playerâs position in the 45-dimensional space determined by the passing motif methodology encodes a good amount of information which determines how many key passes he ought to have given a sort of âpassing abilityâ. That doesnât mean it encodes all the information. Perhaps the vectorised representation is missing out on what it is that makes Coutinho great. Nevertheless, once weâve accepted and understood that the list will offer us, I doubt any club could claim that a list like this from different leagues from around the world is of no use to their organisation just because they might miss out on the Serbian Leagueâs Coutinho (sadly, such is the âglass half emptyâ prejudice that analytics face). [..] This entry began by taking a vectorised representation (passing motifs vectors) and established that if we look at the number of key passes each player made, the playersâ vectorsâ position in this space seemed to encode this info. On the other hand, it didnât seem to encode the information pertaining to goalscoring. That isnât to say it might not encode information regarding other metrics. Expected Assists maybe? It also doesnât mean that other vector representations donât encode some of this information better than my own passing motifs representation. Itâs a bit of a 3 step thing really: 1. Find a vector representation, 2. Check what sort of information it seems to encode well (especially information that isnât explicitly available elsewhere), and 3. Find a way to give players a rating using this fact."
