It’s not the loudest in the team that should get all the credit

November 11, 2010

When working as a team, it is usually the more confident and vocal people that seem to get the kudos for any successes. But a new approach perfected for the World Cup may offer a more nuanced way of seeing just who is contributing what.

Applying the same kind of approach used to understand social graphs in Facebook and other networks, researchers have developed a program that measures how much each player contributes to the game. As scoring a goal itself takes a lot of luck - as does launching a successful innovation into the marketplace - the most accurate way to measure contribution to success is how much each person gets the ball flowing towards the goal. The program was a great predictor of eventual team success when UEFA Championship League data was plugged in. “One of the issues with any kind of teamwork is assigning the right credit,” says Professor Amaral. “The wild, loud people get more credit, but with this analysis you can get a picture of how much an individual really contributes to an outcome.” You can read the paper here.