Moneyball Applied: Econometrics and the Identification and Recruitment of Elite Australian Footballers

Abstract

The best selling book Moneyball posited a theory on the success of a Major League Baseball franchise that used detailed match data to identify inefficiencies in the market for professional baseball players. These statistics were then exploited to the advantage of that team. An important part of this strategy involved using mathematical techniques to identify which player statistics were most associated with team success, and then using these results to decide which players to recruit. This paper uses a similar approach to analyze elite Australian Football, making use of various types of regression models to identify and quantify the important player statistics in terms of their affect on match outcomes.