Any time we make a judgement about a given player, whether at the top or bottom end of the market, we make an assessment of their relativite risk and reward. Whether you’re a disciple of statistical analysis or you prefer to make your judgements based on the games you see, we’re still making the same assessments with regards to a player’s playing time, team-mates, positional deployment and a myriad of other factors. When sorting through this data we need to highlight the most relevant points and be careful to distinguish risk from uncertainty.
Risk is generally defined as something you can put a value on. Though statistical models are far from a magic bullet solution to forecasting, looking at factors such as shots taken and touches inside the box can all add up to give suggested probabilities of success for a given player, which over a period of time should lead to success. Uncertainty, however, is a trickier animal. Predicting whether or not Sergio Aguero will start a given game or whether a late injury to Nemandja Vidic will dent his defensive team-mates’ value are events which don’t seem to follow a logical pattern and thus are harder to quantify and deal with. All players have an element of both risk and uncertainty, but by reducing our exposure to unquantifiable uncertainty, we at least give ourselves a chance at correctly valuing the risk we’re taking.
This week’s player comes with risk – he wouldn’t be in this article if he didn’t – but the uncertainty appears to be as manageable as most players, particularly those in his price bracket. Though it took him a while to get going, since breaking into the first team Adam Le Fondre has played all but 10 minutes in four straight starts and with an uninspiring or injured collection of alternatives to choose from up front, Le Fondre looks about as set in his respective starting line up as anyone. Now, of course, there is risk here, as one would expect for a 4.9 investment, but even that is much lower than you’d expect.
