xP hacking

What Sam Kerr said is distracting too many people - including her ostensible defenders - from the fact that she was arrested for something she said.

Advanced analytics give football fans a way to wriggle past reality as though they had a tarantula in their shorts (forgive the mash up, Ray). "We were the better team all game - 2.7 more expected goals than the other guys." "OK, but you still lost." "Sure, but we had 23 more forward passes into their 18-yard box." "Right, but you lost." "Look beyond that. We held them to an average of 4.1 passes per defensive action." "And yet you couldn't hold them to fewer goals than your team scored."

Each successively deeper reach into the analytical well moves the conversation further away from the one stat that ultimately matters: the result.

In my group of football friends, there's one guy who tolerates no distraction from the W-L-D-Pts columns. You can cite any stat, moment or trend that you want to, but as soon as you enter "Yes, [acknowledge result], but..." territory, he cuts you off and returns you to the scoreboard and standings. Interestingly, this friend is a self-described degenerate gambler. He understands probability and the roles of luck and randomness better than most. But his indulgence of likelihoods and stochasticity ends with the final whistle. When potential becomes actual, he is an Actual Ultra.

Every circle of football banterers needs someone to play the role of my friend, stating matter of factly: "But you lost." He holds the line on reality, and, in sport and life, we all need someone like him to ensure we don't lose touch with what matters in trendy loops of sophistry.

Sam Kerr led Chelsea in actual and expected goals in her first three full seasons at Chelsea FC, along with a handful of other offensive advanced analytics. She led the Women's Super League in many of the same during her first two seasons. Kerr scored four goals (outperforming the 3.1 xG) in eight Women's Super League games and five goals (nearly doubling her 2.8 xG) in four Champions League games this season before suffering an anterior cruciate ligament injury in January.

Kerr's most recent batch of headlines stems from her arrest for a "racially aggravated harassment of a police officer."

If you're not sure what that entails, it is, at least in part, "using insulting, threatening or abusive words that allegedly caused alarm or distress." If you're still not sure, she allegedly called the police officer a "stupid white bastard," although she may dispute the "bastard" (and, to be fair, unless the officer mentioned his parents, how would she know?).

Like a fan who'd rather not confront the scoreboard and takes cover in shot-creating actions per 90 minutes (SCA90), articles about Kerr's arrest bypassed the fundamental issue and went straight to fractally reductive sophistry.

Befitting a No. 9, much of the conversation centered on power. Who was on what side of the power imbalance: Kerr or the police officer?

The police officer acts with the authority of the state, and even an unarmed officer has a legal monopoly on the use of force. The accused in this case is a professional athlete, which carries cultural and social power, often sufficient to garner judicial leniency. The athlete in question is a woman, and the officer is a man. As we know, the officer is white, and Kerr is of partially Indian descent. If a partially non-white person uses "white" epithetically towards a white person (presuming that person is "fully" white, and is anyone else getting as uncomfortable as I am?), is that racism, or is it racial but not racism if you agree that power is a necessary component of racism?

Like a variety of shots taken from different positions with either feet or the head, we're now tallying fractions of power units for each party, so as to come up with an expected power differential (xPD) for the interaction, all of which may or may not weigh on the relevance of the racism vs. racial question in adjudicating the charge against Kerr. And all of which are irrelevant next to the fact of the charge.

Janet Albrechtsen is a conservative Australian journalist, who performed a similar analysis as I did here for much the same purpose. She, too, elevates the irrelevancies while conceding both the premise and the Enlightenment. "Kerr reportedly is planning to argue she didn’t use the word bastard. That misses the point. If Kerr referenced the London bobby’s skin colour, that’s where she went wrong," Albrechtsen wrote.

If we're being generous to Albrechtsen, we can say that she is giving Kerr some legal advice: when charged with a "racially aggravated" offence, dispute the racial epithet, not the mild slur.

But Albrechtsen gives us no reason to extend her that generosity. Nowhere in her essay does Albrechtsen oppose the fact that Sam Kerr is facing criminal charges and potential jail time for speech. That places Albrechtsen firmly alongside Kerr's detractors and xP analyticos. The only difference between them is how they weight a few different components of the xP equation, hacking out the coefficients for being mixed ethnicity, female, and famous, akin to asking whether the xG assigned to a shot should differ between a player shooting with her dominant or non-dominant foot, and then whether it should matter if that foot is goal side.

They stick to sports now?

Give the football world partial credit for recusing themselves from these power plays; and for treating Kerr no differently than they treat ordinary people who fall under their custody, their fans and supporter.

That latter credit is deeply negative, though, and sinks their balance sheet.

The footballing institutions that have a professional relationship with - and a duty of care towards - Sam Kerr have surrendered her to the premise that speech is a crime, just as clubs across England have done with fans charged with tragedy chanting, gender critical tweeting, and shirt wearing. These institutions are products of their culture and fall under the purview of the state in a way that is every bit as anathema to a student, product and beneficiary of the Enlightenment and what were once Anglo political values (this guy) as a speech crime. In that sense, you can almost excuse them leaving their fans out to dry. But to sacrifice a star player is not a commitment to law, nor to equality, nor to what passes as contemporary civic values in England and Australia. It's a betraying admission that "You work for us, but we work for them, and we owe you nothing." Or, shorter: We know what side our bread is buttered on.

Chelsea owner Todd Boehly had only a few weeks between the Sam Kerr news and the Shohei Ohtani news. For better or worse, Boehly's attention will be firmly on the west coast and not west London for the foreseeable future. Still, he had those few weeks, and neither he nor his deputies said anything during those weeks that would suggest that maybe, just maybe, English football's newest American owner had brought something with him from the US other than the idea of an all-star game.

English football needs a better response to Todd Boehly than "Damn Yankee"

To be fair, Boehly has never been particularly vocal nor held himself out as some kind of pantomime maverick. And Chelsea would have needed a much stronger leader than him if Kerr had any chance of her employer doing anything principled on her behalf.

As I wrote last September:

If any player, pundit, team owner, or league executive opposes the U.K.’s existing and metastasizing anti-speech laws, he or she is staying quiet about it. Maybe they fear that opposing anti-speech laws violates said anti-speech laws. Or they fear getting the Daryl Morey treatment from their bosses, peers and players. Every individual and entity in English soccer that has spoken about these laws has done so with enthusiastic support. The only aspects they are ever less than enthusiastic about are the remaining limitations on the prosecution of speech.

English football doesn’t have a Daryl Morey, and they definitely don’t have a Chris Pavlovski. Before long, they won’t have any residual unapproved speech. Not in culture, not in media, not in sport.

It's easy to figure out who has the most (all?) power when one party aggregates it and all others surrender it. Intersectional grievance math might give Kerr a large advantage in xP, with all the underlying components pointing decisively in her favor.

Meanwhile, a few of us are watching the scoreboard and standings, pointing out "OK. I see where you're going with this. But we lost."