source:
Scotland on Sunday Scotland on Sunday
Sun 3 Apr 2005
No substitute for keeping team continuity
MURDO MACLEOD
mmacleod@scotlandonsunday.com
IT IS the dilemma faced by all football managers whose team is heading for defeat or a frustrating draw; should they shake things up with a substitute?
A new study by German scientists suggests that they should grin and bear it, and that a tactical substitution will only make the game worse.
Research of hundreds of soccer matches has shown that most substitutions are a waste of time and are more likely to lead to blunders than to a magical Roy of the Rovers transformation.
Researchers at the University of Bonn studied 306 soccer matches in the nation’s top league, the Bundesliga, in order to find out what happened after each of the 1,700 substitutions were made.
Dr Christian Grund and Oliver Gürtler analysed what kinds of players were swapped and what effect they had on the match to develop better understanding of how risk-taking works in business and how bosses can make sure that their staff take risks that pay off in terms of profits.
They found teams that brought on an extra striker rarely managed to snatch back a goal. Instead, they usually conceded a goal because the extra attacker meant they were stretched thinner in defence.
The substitutions that worked most effectively, they found, were those where the manager swapped exactly the same kind of player, for example, a striker for another striker, which meant that the overall strategy remained exactly the same.
Grund said: "The central message of the study is that risk is a bad thing. A soccer coach whose team is losing should stick to the initial plan - he will have a better chance of turning the game around that way."
Gürtler added: "It seems that many mangers in the Bundesliga overestimate the chance of getting a win through switching to an offensive strategy. In most cases they would have had a better chance of winning had they stuck to the original game plan."
The researchers cited two examples where the home team were worried that they were failing to make an impact and brought on an extra attacker in order to break the deadlock. Far from being the decisive advantage the home manager hoped for, both examples led to two-nil defeats.
The study had led to the academics being attacked by some in the German press who have cited one of the bitterest results in the nation’s recent soccer history as a proof that the academics should give their statistics the red card.
As every Manchester United fan will remember, and every Bayern Munich fan will want to forget, the 1999 European Champions League final was won in injury time by goals from the United substitutes Teddy Sheringham and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.
Asked how the result fitted in with the research, Grund said: "This actually supports our research. In each of these cases, the players whom Alex Ferguson brought on the field were of the same position as the ones they had substituted.
"In our analysis that is a safe substitution and not the kind which causes a team to lose goals."
