Colly2 wrote:
I think that this shows that (a) no coaches at the top of British rugby league have read Moneyball and (b) these lads don't have (much of) an agent.
I will be fuming if these lads are lost to the game.
Lots of people have read Moneyball but very few seem to have understood it. TBF though, RL just does not have the kind of statistical analysis that baseball and american football have, which is the starting point for building a squad using advanced analytics, meaning that no-one has yet established what the KPIs are and how they influence the game. That's partly because RL is a small sport with few resources for this kind of study, but then even the National Hockey League hasn't really nailed down what it's looking for and it has both much greater resources and a history of using detailed statistics. Phil Clarke has been doing a lot of work on this - forget the half-arsed stuff used on Sky that the buffoon Eddie Hemmings likes to joke about - via a company he set up with Ian Lenagan. It might result in something useable, especially as IL has a background in maths and manpower-related businesses. That said, you could still use some of the basic principles of Moneyball in building a squad even without the detailed analytics required to perfect it.
Actually, while I think about it I'd suggest Wigan are using something akin to Moneyball principles, even if it's just in a loose way. Over the last few seasons they've consistently lost big name players who've gone to the NRL (or Union) for more money, and replaced them with home grown players and signings from other clubs. Often these guys were seen as being substantially poorer quality than the departed players, and yet Wigan has still maintained their position in the game.
Sorry - completely off topic!
But you're right, on the face of it Krasniqi and Dollapi not finding clubs seems ludicrous.
