The Moneyball Of Tourism

There is an interesting debate going on in the world of sport at present. It is one being had principally in cricket and concerns the England team more than others. It has to do with the compilation of statistical information in guiding and setting tactics. The team is told that a certain score should guarantee victory. Bowlers are told to pitch a ball in a certain place with a certain style, as this will lead to a wicket being taken rather than other deliveries.

The England cricket team, a generally joyless and robotic formation, is currently enduring a period of massive underachievement and of resounding defeats. Blame for this is being levelled at all sorts of targets, with the use of statistical information and the reliance placed on it by coaches at the top of the list. Yet, there was a time, not so long ago, when stats had helped England to overachieve. The data collection was thus seen as having given England a competitive advantage over other sides. Now, and possibly for a variety of reasons - changes to fielding regulations, for instance - big data appears to be a hindrance; it is causing England to play in a restricted fashion and, more often than not, to lose and to lose heavily.

A root of this sporting obsession with statistics is "Moneyball", the book that was developed from the use of so-called sabermetrics analysis in baseball. But it is only one root. For many years, the English Football Association employed Charles Hughes as its director of coaching. His statistical analysis bred the "long ball", but Hughes insisted that the science of his analysis was beyond dispute.

The analysis that cricket has at its disposal gives evidence that is irrefutable. Every single delivery is analysed. A total picture of how runs are scored, how wickets are taken is formed. But cricket's analysis, the son of Moneyball, cannot be compared with baseball. There are vastly more variables in cricket than in baseball. The wicket and its condition (not a factor in baseball) is just one of them. Nevertheless, the science is sound. It has to be because of the completeness of the data. But then this was what Charles Hughes claimed, and Charles Hughes was wrong. In the pursuit of statistical perfection, the intangible was lost: the soul of the game, the moments of inspiration and genius, the tolerance of the individual.

Statistical completeness is thus nothing if it is not complemented by the beautiful recklessness of flair and the unorthodox. England's cricket team lacks a brutal creator, a De Villiers or Gayle, or a fearsome destroyer, a Johnson or Malinga. Indeed, it positively discriminates against the non-conformist, as Moneyball appears to insist that it does.

But what happens when the statistics are not complete yet are still held up as a type of Moneyball justification? Some of Mallorca's tourism statistics are complete. Airport arrivals can be calculated accurately, but what do they tell us? Who are these travellers? Where are they going? Why are they here? It is completeness without discrimination. Data without information. As annual scores edge up, they are cause for numerical celebration but no more. The tourism spend statistics, on the other hand, are not complete. They are extrapolations from samples, the validity of which the statisticians will defend. They may have some accuracy within an acceptable range of deviation, but if they are determined by wrong questions being put, by wrong things being measured, by an almost infinite variance on account of the who-where-why tourist mix, how can they be construed as showing the reality? They can't, and even the national secretary-of-state for tourism has accepted as much.

The statistics are a defence shield that obscures the painful orthodoxy of thinking, tactics and strategy. There were more "tourists", i.e. airport arrivals, in January. Hooray, the winter message is getting across. No it is not, and it won't while the flair of promotion as exhibited by others, e.g. Croatia, is inhibited and an automaton Moneyball preference for defining tourism through numerical software is valued over the human ware of original thought and a passion for innovation. The winter message, such as it is, is shackled by an orthodoxy of product offer which apes that of so many competitors, but it is compensated for by the array of summer statistics which dispassionately speak of incremental growth and of percentage increases.

Neither sport nor tourism can be calculated solely in statistical terms. They are human activities with all the emotion, difference, imperfection that these imply. But they are also activities in which the previously-thought impossible can take hold. England's cricket team is realising this, as it struggles to compete with the unconstrained joyousness of so many opponents not inhibited by a Moneyball straightjacket. There is a message for tourism. Think the impossible, rather than think only of the statistic.