Two Bocconi professors defend their Capello Index

Francesco Bof and Sergio Venturini, professors at Bocconi school of management, worked out a system that objectively evaluates football player performance in real time. Its testing at the World Cup in South Africa was however cancelled following objections by the English Football Association, but the project is to be extended to analyze league players in other countries

June 2010. The presentation of the Capello Index last month caused quite a stir in the English press. The idea that the coach of the English national side had developed an index to measure player performance – and wanted to test it during the World Cup in South Africa – was seen as a disturbance to the team.

But it’s really an attempt to inject some scientific objectivity into the world of soccer, and important roles are being played by Francesco Bof, professor of sports management at SDA Bocconi, and by Sergio Venturini, who teaches quantitative methods at Bocconi University and SDA Bocconi.

“Our work began more than a year ago”, says Bof. Fabio Capello and Francesco Merighi, an entrepreneur in fantasy sports games and soccer social networking, had the idea of an index to measure objectively the performance of players on the field. The intention was to use it in fantasy football or as a support for coaches and managers considering roster changes. Bof was brought in because of the book Management del Calcio that he wrote with Fabrizio Montanari and Giacomo Silvestri in 2008.

 “The first time we met, Capello already had a table of criteria that reflected his conception of how to measure soccer performance”, explains Bof. “Over the months, this became a list of over 500 possible events in a match that could affect a player’s evaluation.” The events involving a player during a match are worked through statistical algorithms to produce a grade similar to those published on the sports pages and useful to a professional audience. Each match updates the overall grade of a player, and the system works up dozens of statistics that show strengths, weaknesses and trends of play, over a season or a career.

Bof, who became chief index developer of the company designated to manage the index, oversees its structure and content, as well as the resources to run it. He and Venturini develop the algorithms for crunching the numbers, and their goal is to make the data available two hours after the end of a match.

It is a remarkably large project, when one considers that to analyze a match live requires two technicians and a supervisor. After initial testing once the World Cup is over, the entrepreneurs look to be fully operational for league play in Italy and Spain. Germany and France are also very interested. England may be left behind.
 
About Bocconi University
Founded in 1902 in Milan, Bocconi University was the first university in Italy to offer degrees in economics and is widely recognised today as Italy’s premiere institution of higher learning and research in the fields of management, economics and law.  Located in Milan’s urban centre, Bocconi’s five Schools (Undergraduate School, Graduate School, School of Law, PhD School, and the SDA Bocconi School of Management) offer an extensive selection of undergraduate, graduate and post-doctoral, programmes (both degree and non-degree) in English and Italian.  The SDA Bocconi MBA was ranked 38th in the 2009 Financial Times Global MBA ranking and 15th in Europe.  Bocconi University has formal partnership agreements with 156 universities and schools in 46 countries throughout the world and is a member of CEMS (The Global Alliance in Management Education) and PIM (Partnership in International Management).  www.unibocconi.eu

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