BY GABRIELE MARCOTTI
On Tuesday night's ESPN FC show, I got into it a bit with Ale Moreno over one of my pet peeves: the notion that "it's all about results."
The genesis of the discussion was Louis Van Gaal talking about how Manchester United lacks speed on the wings, but the point is a much broader one. The notion that if you win it means everything is fine and you're doing a great job is both misguided and short-sighted. The point of the game isn't results; it's playing well.
Now, let's get one thing straight off the bat. Playing well doesn't mean entertaining, though that can be a by-product and it doesn't necessarily mean attacking football, either. It simply means executing well. And there are many ways to do it.
The nice thing is there are 22 guys on the pitch, each manager gets to tell 11 of them what to do and the permutations on how you might play well are many. You can resurrect "uber-Catenaccio" from the 1960s and put 10 men behind the ball, hoping to snatch a goal on the break. You can press maniacally high up the pitch. You can stack your team with goliaths and lump the ball continuously into the air. You can hang on to the ball and tiki-taka your way to a shot.
You can choose any combination of the above or indeed many others and, if you're clever, you'll do it based on the personnel at your disposal and, perhaps, on the opposition and circumstances. But your goal -- your endgame -- will be the same. You will look to minimize the chances you concede and look to maximize the chances you create. And because not all chances are created equal, you will try to create more quality chances for yourself and allow fewer for your opponents.
That's the purpose of the game. That's what you try to do when you attack and defend, and far more than results, it tells you whether you're executing well and, crucially, whether what you're doing is working.
Why? Because football is a low-scoring game. Luck, happenstance and individual error (by players or referees) play an enormous part in determining results.
We see it every weekend: Barcelona or Bayern or Manchester City will play opponents with a fraction of their resources, and not a single guy who would make their matchday squad (let alone their starting 11), and still, with uncanny regularity, they'll either fail to win or will win by a tiny margin. And that's at the top, despite the fact that a variety of factors have conspired to make the game as polarized -- with an elite group of clubs far better-resourced than the vast majority -- as it has ever been.
There are folks who track this stuff for a living. Both analysts and professional gamblers (whose livelihood depends, literally, on getting it right) assess teams, broadly speaking, on chances created and conceded. They'll adjust for many different factors -- pitch, weather, opponent, personnel, score effects, quality of chances, shot location (which is one way to get that expected goals metric) -- but the fundamental benchmark for measuring how well a team is doing its job remains unchanged.
It's down to how effectively and how often do you come close to scoring and how effectively and how often your opponents do it. And they do this not because it's fun, but because it's the best possible measure of how a team will perform in the future. A team that ranks well according to these metrics tends to have a greater chance of winning going forward than one that does not. It's far more predictive than results or what the table says, and we have years of data to back this up.
It's funny because this one thing unites both the numbers-heavy analysts and gamblers and many of the old-school football folk. The latter -- regardless of whether they're romantics like Jorge Valdano or Kevin Keegan or pragmatists like Jose Mourinho or Tony Pulis -- understand the concept of playing well beyond the actual results.
Luck, happenstance and errors do not automatically even themselves out at the end of the season. There is no rational reason to think that. Incidents for and against will converge over the long run, but it's not as if God hits the reset button at the end of May. If you understand, then you can understand how even the final league table with its 38 games can be deceptive. You can finish fifth and be the third-best team. And vice-versa. Sometimes that swing can be much greater.
That's why it matters to play well, what your plan is and how well you execute it. And that's also why properly-run clubs make decisions to keep or sack their manager based largely on these factors. They help answer the most basic question an owner (or a fan) wants to know: How will I perform in the next game?
(Of course, there are also plenty of clubs where folks freak out and sack a manager based on results when they ought to keep him. And there's the reverse as well, managers who stick around longer than they should because the results happen to be meet expectations.)
Alejandro did make a good point about winning. When you're getting results -- regardless of how you're getting them -- it's easier for a team to continue working. Confidence is higher, the coach gets listened to and there's simply a better environment in which to work. That's human nature but it's also somewhat extraneous to the debate, though it does reaffirm the fact that if you're playing well but lose every game, you're going to run into trouble. It might make it harder for your team to keep playing well because folks will lose belief in what you're asking them to do.
It sounds mind-numbingly obvious, but if you play well based on those criteria, you will get results in the long run, though in the short term, anything can happen. Good managers -- at least privately, given that what they say to the public may differ for many reasons -- understand this.
So next time you hear a good manager say "We didn't play well, but the important thing is that we're getting results, so I'm happy," look really, really closely. You'll see his nose grow just a little bit.
Gabriele Marcotti is a columnist for ESPN FC, The Times and Corriere dello Sport. Follow him on Twitter @Marcotti.
http://www.espnfc.com.au/blog/marcotti-musings/62/post/2708448/why-playing-well-matter-more-than-results