The One Thing Aspiring Cricket Analysts (And Team Owners) Need To Read!

Cutting corners with analysis can only result in teams being left behind...

This article may polarise opinion, but it needs to be written.

One of my biggest motivations is to pay things forward for others (e.g. this Substack, Twitter, spending time on calls/Zooms with aspiring analysts). If I can help others make good career decisions from this article, I’ve achieved that target here too.

Readers who take it the right way - things need to change and that there are huge competitive advantages for teams who enact that change - will understand what I am saying. Others who don’t take it the right way, well, they were never going to enact change anyway.

Recent examples of finances in the Cricket analysis industry

This week, I was asked if I would be interested in an overseas franchise role. To do the job properly, it required considerable preparation work ahead of the recruitment event (draft/auction), both in terms of model building, creation of databases and depth charts, decision trees and also assessing the specific dynamics of the league and player pool to establish market value for players.

In addition, it required long-haul travel and attendance at the recruitment event, plus remote support during the tournament (as I have other commitments during that time).

A consultant in any other industry would be charging £1k plus per day, plus business class flights. How much do you think I was offered for the entire project (around 15 days work)?

$1500-$2000 (before tax).

In the UK, this isn’t far off the average monthly mortgage payment (a quick google search suggests this is £1441). How can this role be viable?

We didn’t even get onto flights. But I’m sure they wouldn’t have been business class. My feedback was to put a zero on the end of their offer.

In addition, I saw a role advertised by an English county which was essentially a full-time job for a Masters student, with seemingly zero cost taken on board by that county. They also need to have a car (no mileage payment advertised).

I shudder to think of the average debt of a Masters student. And with such roles implied as ‘door opening opportunities’, and the majority of county analysts earning below the UK average national wage, it’s a real struggle to understand how they can get ahead financially in life even in a decade’s time.

My message to owners and people running teams

From an expected fraction of points per game advantage, the cost for a team to achieve the best analysis department in their league is highly likely to be far lower than any other departmental spending.

This is because the bar to having an analysis department better than the rest, or even simply better than average, is so low. Even 16 years after the start of the IPL, the opportunity to be an early adopter is somehow still available.

In the IPL, I see one team - Rajasthan Royals - leading the way, having hired people from the ECB and football analytics company StatsBomb, but on a general basis I see a lot of poor strategies from most of the other IPL teams. Either their analysis department isn’t very good, or they aren’t listened to.

A regular reason put forward by cricket teams is that they can’t afford investment in decent analytics/data provision. My argument would be that they can’t afford not to.

Cricket teams have so much financial wastage. How much do they pay ‘Mentors’? What do ‘Mentors’ actually do? As another example, counties basically buy lottery tickets on players in hope that they make it, without any analysis of the profile of players who actually do make it.

Any analysis of players in county cricket will tell you that there is regular 6-figure wastage of salary in a player at academy level with a skillset that basically never makes it (e.g. an off-spinner who doesn’t bat in the top 6/7 - the released lists are littered with these type of players) who gets a rookie deal, and then a pro deal, and then gets released. Not to mention the time and effort of coaching staff into the player. How about counties invest that money into analytics instead?

Plus, the sunk cost fallacy in cricket worldwide is a thing. Players often get one contract too many, or one year on their contract too many, because coaches want to be proven right and have an attachment to their projects.

Just yesterday (see here) I wrote about the per ball value of players in this year’s IPL. Four of the 10 players with the highest per ball match involvement cost (Kumar Kushagra, Shubham Dubey, Alzarri Joseph, Sameer Rizvi) were bought in this year’s auction.

While Joseph has undoubtedly disappointed for RCB, the likelihood that the other three players - particularly Kushagra and Rizvi - were going to play much despite their huge auction cost. Could predictive analytics have established that they were poor value at their sale price one year before a mega auction (a phase in the auction cycle where investing big sums in young players makes little sense because the chances of retaining them are very small)? 100% yes.

It is vital that teams have more of an independent voice enabling them to make unbiased decisions, and the money that this saves is highly likely to be far greater than the cost of that independent voice.

In short, my message to owners and people running teams is simple.

If you cut corners with your analytics department, or think it’s a low-cost part of your team, you are falling behind. Right now, you have a one-time opportunity to get a huge competitive advantage over your rivals by doing things differently.

My message to aspiring analysts

Have a think about what I said earlier about the likelihood of getting ahead in life when working in this industry unless you are independently wealthy.

I am literally inundated with questions from aspiring analysts (probably 20+ per week) and the first bit of advice is to try to do work on building up a profile of work in analytics (writing, podcasting, etc) in conjunction with your day job. Essentially, do it as a hobby with future prospects. The second piece of advice is not to invest in expensive courses with no guarantee of a well-paid job at the end of the course. Closely behind is a recommendation not to do jobs for ‘exposure’ or ‘because it might lead to more opportunities’.

The vast majority of the time, it doesn't.

Do as much research as you can into financials, in terms of where you’re likely to be in a decade. It might be ok to earn below-average wages while you’re single and living at home with your parents, but in 10 years time, if you’re married, have children, and want a mortgage, it’s not going to be easy without huge career growth. With inflation of house prices continually rapidly outgrowing inflation of wages, this situation is only going to get worse.

In other sports, particularly American sports but increasingly in European football as well, non-playing talent is becoming more and more sought after. As demand rises, so do salaries. They have more evolved industries than cricket.

I want to help aspiring analysts have a realistic understanding of what they are signing up for. Just yesterday, one said to me they needed to make a decision as to whether they try to get involved with working in the cricket industry now, or to wait until it has evolved in the future and work elsewhere for the time being. The good news is that aspiring cricket analysts do have skills transferable to other industries.

Cricket - you are losing out on talent to other industries!

I might sound like the cricket version of Gary Stevenson when I write this, but it will probably require a collective effort to enact these changes. Hopefully this is the start.

Anyone interested in discussing how I can help their team with strategic management and data-driven analysis, or contribute to any media work, can get in touch at sportsanalyticsadvantage@gmail.com.