England Coach Introduces Capello Index

England coach Fabio Capello has introduced the Capello Index - a statistic intended to measure player performance.

No, really.

To this point we've only had the Castrol Index, which seems interesting but is completely inaccessible (and to a certain, related extent, unverifiable), but now that we have the Capello Index to finally guide us out of that statistical wilderness.

According to the Capello Index site, it takes the more than 500 different events a player can perform in a single match, score then from 20 to 100, and put them into a rating that looks something like this:

According to the site, the relative importance of those 500 events relies on Capello's experience and where they occurred on the pitch.

Fabio Capello, England manager and co-founder of the Capello Index, said: "Everyone who follows football enjoys debating the merits of particular players. I have sought to use my experience as a manager at both club and international level to identify the attributes and qualities that make players valuable to a team. Working in conjunction with Chicco Merighi, we have created a formula to objectively assess player performance beyond measurements simply based on gut instinct or raw statistical data.

"We wanted to align the existing metrics for measuring performance such as passes completed and ground covered with informed analysis of the impact and importance of a player’s contribution. Without context, we feel that the current statistics do not tell the whole story. Football provokes passion and debate, we wanted to create a system for measuring performance which fans could really relate to and would want to discuss. I’m excited by the prospect of fans from around the globe being able to see how the Capello Index rates their favourite players."

This seems a good time to bring up my theory that Terminator 2 is actually a documentary, and that things like the Capello Index are best explained as ways Skylab is testing us before sending back an army of Schwarzeneggers.