General Football forum • "The Stats and the Facts": Football Media Analysis
Their claim insisted it was almost entirely due to the fact that young English players are now taught a much more rounded game in training, rather than the positional-specific training of strikers over earlier years, and this has negatively impacted their progression.
They presented this graph as proof:
They maybe deliberately ignored, or missed completely that the influx of foreign strikers into the league, often at a much cheaper rate than English equivalents, began at pretty much exactly the same time, and proportionally followed a near identical trajectory, very closely correlated.
Is it causation, that the fewer minutes played by english number 9s was solely down to a change in the approach to training? Or perhaps more driven by a financial consideration of clubs who were able to purchase equivalent or much better quality for half their £s spent, and as the EPL grew to become the dominant league in world football, this attracted the best from all around the world, where in the early nineties it was far from an international league?
Could be a mix of these, but I'd suggest the latter are more likely, and the numbers, amongst other reports, back it up.
Published Football media is voluminous and not always great in quality, but it's fresh and new, so it must always be right, huh? And the chancers on twitter and the like are often considerably worse.
a) make a claim, take an angle
b) find some data that appears to back it up, and graph it
c) rely on the readers to accept it as gospel.
d) count the eyeballs on said article.
I know they have to get X# of stories out per week, and football is a subjective topic, but media is full of this sort of stuff, and unfortunately it goes down in history as recorded fact, or worse, often to the uncritical eye it becomes the fan's spoken truth.
Statistics: Posted by Cods — Fri Nov 29, 2024 2:23 am