Lifelong baseball fan here. I wouldn't equate Leicester with the Moneyball approach as I just don't see their signings following any particular trend in finding undervalued talent. I suspect the one commonality between those Oakland A's teams and Leicester, though, is the use of PEDs. The A's two most prominent hitters were proven to have used them throughout their time in Oakland and went from being marginal players to perennial All-Stars. Fitness levels and recovery rates at LCFC are intriguing
Alright lads, Leicester fan here. There are two different points in this that I'd address
First off, I'd say there is a bit of a money ball approach to what we do. Lots more at play than just that obviously, but our recruitment does lean heavily on stats, as well as the excellent eye of Steve Walsh. If anyone wants to read up on some of what we did, there are some excellent articles that talk about our scouting setup on the Sky Sports website by Rob McKenzie one of our Analysts who went to Spurs middle of last year.
Couple of examples I can give off the top of my head were Albrighton, Okazaki and Kante. When we signed Albrighton, we'd looked at crosses and chances created per minute stats, they were one of the highest in the league for his final season at Villa (even though he'd only played the about a 1/3 of the games). Similarly, Kante had the highest number of tackles in Europe and Okazaki had an exceptional work rate, but could score a few in Germany as well.
What we did was identify how we wanted to play, then sought players to fill those gaps who excelled at a certain job. Kante - tackling, Albrighton - Crossing, Okazaki - Work rate, Vardy - Pace, Huth - Aerial ability and so on. Those players might not excel in other areas of the game, so they don't have a rounded set of skills you might find at the top clusb. But they excel at those certain things.
The key thing Ranieri has managed to do, is to set us up in such a way that each player uses exactly what they are good at, whilst not being over exposed to their weaknesses.
Secondly, our fitness levels are no different to anyone else. Yes we have one or two exceptionally fit players, but if that's what you look for when you scout someone... that's what you get. There isn't a single stat that shows we're any fitter than any other team. We were 8th in distance run stats last time I checked.
As for recovery rates, again I'd like to see information you have on our recovery rates somehow being better than others. When people have been pulled out of the team, they have often been a precaution and the club has stated straight off they would be back in one or two games... guess what, they were back in one or two games. People seem to have a weird idea that we've had players doing hamstrings and appearing a week later, it's nonsense.
Again, there are lots of good articles on what we do behind they scenes that goes above and beyond what other clubs do. I think there is something on the bbc website about our setup behind the scenes... if people would like to educate themselves on us, rather than chuck about lazy drug use stuff.
