How many players are slipping through Manchester City’s fingertips?

Leicester City’s Riyad Mahrez is on fire this season. He’s been performing brilliantly so far, with 12 goals and 7 assists. Mahrez looks like a world class playmaker. He looks dangerous at every moment, not only is he picking the perfect passes, he also looks especially threatening in front of goal. He came out of pretty much nowhere to tear the league apart and establish himself as a player to watch. As a Manchester City fan, I’ve always wondered, why does it seem like Man City never ends up with these players? City just signs superstar after superstar, never a player who comes out of nowhere to excel. Could it be possible that there are whole categories of great players that the club is missing?

According to former members of Leicester’s front office, they found Mahrez through advanced statistical scouting. They looked at wingers in their early 20s, and categorized them through playing style and characteristics. They finally narrowed down the list of players to a handful, then they extensively scouted the finalists, resulting in Mahrez. The question is, if Manchester City is a strongly statistically and scouting driven club like we claim to be, why didn’t we end up with Mahrez?

So let’s step back for a moment and go back basics. Let’s ignore other goals and simply say that football clubs are simply here to win trophies. Now to win trophies you have to win games, and to win games the team has to perform well. To perform well you need good players, and figuring out if someone is “good” is probably one of the hardest tasks in scouting. It’s not difficult to assess if a performance is good. We have plenty of scouting tools that exist to help us assess a performance, but that doesn’t mean we can assess how “good” a player is.

Anybody can put up a good performance occasionally. I don’t mean that an overweight couch potato can step on the premier league pitch and perform, but any top flight player can put on a good performance once in a while. The difference between a superstar and a benchwarmer for a bottom tier team lies in how often they can deliver these good performances. So uh, let me define the idea of “good player” as a player who can constantly put on good performances, the better you are, the more likely you are to putting on a good performance in a given game.

So is Mahrez a good player? Well considering that he’s had a brilliant half season so far, I would consider him to be an excellent player, but again, that’s the problem with assessing a player, you can never have a big enough sample size to really be confident on judging how good a player actually is. Maybe Mahrez stays this good, maybe he gets better, maybe he falls off, nobody can really predict how it would go. Clubs have whole teams of scouts who are focused on projections and yet major transfer blunders still happen all the time. To me the question isn’t Mahrez, but there is a whole class of players like him, players who play for lower level clubs who burst out of nowhere to succeed in the Premier League.

Manchester City is a top club with ambition and with it, expectations are sky high and the front office is under constant pressure to perform. This is why in a sense I believe that we will never end up with a Mahrez type player, the bargain find who comes out to dominate out of nowhere. It’s unfortunate, but it does seem like City will always let these players “slip through”.

It all comes down back to the problem of pedigree. Let’s imagine that Manchester City scouts found Mahrez in France, and the scouts have immense faith in his ability. Manchester City would probably still pass on him, after all, He still wouldn’t be given the same opportunities to succeed if Manchester City signed him. The pressure is just too high for Pellegrini to be playing unknown unproven players, especially if they are taking the place of someone like Jesus Navas, a player with the pedigree of being a World Cup and European champion.The important thing to remember is, a club will not be embarrassed if they sign an established star and he fails. But for title contending clubs to take a risk on a less established player, if he fails it would strongly negatively impact the club’s image.

For a club like Leicester, they really do have little to lose. Nearly missing relegation last season, they are the type of club to really pursue the risky, low floor, high ceiling types. For a club like them, their slogan should be “who dares wins”, as they can never hope to attract the big stars who are the high floor, high ceiling types. Manchester City on the other hand, isn’t really in the position to do this. For a title contending club, we should be bringing in the high floor, high ceiling types to minimize our risk. Even if we fail, it is probably better for the club’s reputation if they went all in an signed notable players than lesser known ones.

Moneyball actually made a great point about this. People in sports do things not because it is the most “cost effective” or even most effective but because a choice helps them avoid embarrassment. Signing players with pedigree is an easy way to avoid fan (and probably board) criticism. Every year there are players like Mahrez out there, but they simply pose too much of a risk for risk averse clubs like Manchester City. There could be players out there who are very good, but Manchester City simply is less likely to sign them because they well, it makes the club look stupid if they fail, a risk we won’t be taking if we sign players perceived to be good.

City loves to stress how good the club’s scouting and analytics department is. But at the end of the day, the club is still mostly focused on signing established stars for large fees. The club’s stature and image simply stops us from signing Moneyball-esque “undervalued” players. Instead, the club plays it safe and signs the established stars. Sure, we are missing out on whole categories of players due to the club’s unwillingness to take risks, but as a fan, I would be lying if I didn’t enjoy seeing the club bring in big new signings every season.