Why Soccer Analytics Works Like Volatility Arbitrage Trading

**Mike Treacy** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:18)
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:22)
And I'm Tracy Alloway.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:24)
Tracy, I have a question. I know you spent a lot of your youth overseas.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:27)
My youth.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:28)
Your youth.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:28)
Right here.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:29)
Did you ever go to many baseball games as a kid?

**Tracy Alloway** (0:31)
Yeah, so I was in Chicago for a few years, so I went to the Cubs games, and then I was in Japan, and the baseball scene in Japan is amazing. Like the best vibes of a live sports event that I've ever, ever witnessed or encountered.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:46)
I was just talking to someone about this last night. I've always wanted to go to a Japanese baseball game.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:50)
Highly recommended.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:51)
That's actually like, if we ever do a live show in Tokyo, let's try to schedule it during baseball season, because that is like, I sort of think that's a bucket list thing. But anyway, the reason I asked this question is, I have this really vague memory as a child going to see Detroit Tigers games with my grandfather, like, probably when I was like, maybe these memories are probably from when I was younger than like, six or five. But there used to be a non-trivial number of people who would go to the games, and they would keep score, and they would write down every single at bat, and the outcome of every single one.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:25)
I'm pretty sure I've seen that, not in person, but like maybe in movies or something like that.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:28)
It doesn't really happen anymore. I never see it. There may be a few old timers who still has a hobby or habit do that, but it was a non-insignificant number of people. It's interesting to me, I've been to a couple of soccer games this year.
There is no equivalent way you could do that, because it's like baseball is filled with all of these discrete events. The pitcher, who is the pitcher? Who is the batter? Hit, not a hit. Single, not a strikeout, walk, et cetera. Like, what would even be the equivalent in soccer?

**Tracy Alloway** (1:58)
So this has been a long-running debate in soccer. And I remember when Moneyball came out and sports analytics became a big thing, especially for baseball, because as you point out, it's these sort of discrete events that have a lot of statistics embedded in them. A lot of people were saying that soccer, you could never use data analytics in the same way for soccer. Like, it's too chaotic, it's too fluid, there's too many variables, there's not enough goals.
That complaint comes up a lot whenever we talk about, are we going to say soccer or football, by the way?

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:27)
You know what? Let's just say soccer.

**Tracy Alloway** (2:29)
Okay. All right. I'll try.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:31)
We can say football. I actually don't feel strongly about this one.

**Tracy Alloway** (2:34)
But that said, we do see soccer analytics on the rise. Like, now we get all these stories about tiny clubs that are using data to source specific players in very moneyball style ways. We obviously have prediction markets where people are doing a lot of sports betting. And so all the analytics seem to be becoming more important. And I will just say, I've read this crazy stat right before we came on from the law firm Morgan Lewis. And they were saying in the 2026 FIFA World Cup, match-based data is going to be something like... So it's 104 matches generating more than 90 petabytes of data, which is a 45-fold increase over the volume produced in the last World Cup in 2022 That's stunning.

**Joe Weisenthal** (3:24)
So this raises a question, and I know we're going to get to this in the conversation. And it almost is like a philosophical question, which is, okay, we see the game of soccer is like very fluid, right? There's no, we just said there's fewer discrete events. Like in theory is something that's fluid, a series of like microscopic discrete events, you know, could you get a million frames per second and actually turn it into discrete events? Like that is sort of like an interesting question to me. A parallel that I think of in this conversation is chess is like all discrete events. And that was seen as like a very difficult thing to crack. But then like over 25 years ago, they cracked it.