It’s interesting that people are treating the movie money ball as if it were full of radical new ideas. The statistical revolution in baseball wasn’t even new when the book was written. But the central idea of ​​the book, taking advantage of market inefficiencies, has been around forever, since the first time someone made a lopsided transaction at the local bazaar.

I, like thousands of other baseball fans, was aware of all the statistical analyzes described in money ball in the 1980s while reading Baseball Abstracts by Bill James. I was practicing law at the time, but I applied for a job with the Kansas City Royals scouting department with the idea of ​​applying some of these methods. I was rejected for being overqualified, which in the case of the Royals was probably true. They have arguably been the most stat-hostile organization in baseball, which is a losing strategy for a small-market team. I’m not even sure they really believe in the modern statistics that are in common use in major league baseball today.

Goal money ball It’s not really about stats vs. explorers or old vs. new. Sure, there was some disagreement about which stats are the most important, but everyone in baseball has always used stats. What Billy Beane was really trying to do was what all businesses try to do: take advantage of market inefficiencies. Because Beane thought other organizations were using the wrong stats, he thought he could get players that were just as good, albeit in a non-traditional way, for less money. On-base percentage was underrated, so he focused on that. Athletes who didn’t “look the part” were undervalued, so he focused on that. But all he was really trying to do was get more bang for his buck.

The same philosophy can be applied to football pools. There are all kinds of market inefficiencies in sports, situations where players are incorrectly valued due to bias or misinterpretation of statistics. Short quarterbacks (too short, see Drew Brees), high-scoring basketball players (too tall, see Allen Iverson), baseball players who walk a lot (too short, see money ball). So what is the market inefficiency in a soccer pool?

Every week in an NFL season, there’s a series of games where pretty much everyone picks the same team. If you continue the game, even if the selection is correct, you win nothing. You are just floating in the water. In order to win the pot in that given week, you must correctly pick the most games out of all of the pot. You can’t just pick the teams that everyone else is picking. So the key to winning soccer groups is to identify the games each week where the public almost unanimously predicts one team to win, but in reality the other team has an excellent chance of winning. Your goal each week should be to find every 50-50 games that you can that the crowd thinks is going to be a thrashing and take the underdog.

For example, in week 3 of the 2011 season, if we use a money ball we would choose Buffalo over New England, something virtually no one else in the world would do. This would take advantage of a huge market inefficiency to get two games (our win plus their loss) over everyone else in the group in a game we qualify as a virtual draw. Sure, if the Patriots had won, we would have looked like fools. But we’re not trying to impress people with our picks. We are trying to win the pool. And you don’t win groups by choosing a team that everyone else in your group is also choosing. HAS money ball The system is specifically designed to identify those games where everyone and their mother are on one side, but actually the game is pretty even.

Now, if the team the public really likes should be heavily favored, go ahead and pick it. We are not crazy. But if your analysis predicts a close game and everyone else in your group picks one team, you should pick the other. It’s what Billy Beane would do. And then one day maybe Brad Pitt will play you in a movie too.