The Red Bulls Front Office is Laughably Inefficient

Need ammunition against Red Bull/Erik Soler/Chris Heck/Hans Backe/the team in general? Well, Dr. Howard Hamilton over at Soccermetrics Research (yeah, I've never heard of them either) have put together a post on front office efficiencies in MLS.

It's wonky, but basically, what Howard did is calculated a team's "payroll utilization" or "player's salary weighed by the proportion of number of minutes played to the total minutes played by the team," then divided the marginal payroll cost per point earned by that number. From there, those numbers are ranked by efficiency gain above or below the league's average marginal payroll.

The Red Bulls have a front office efficiency of -336.33 percent. That's negative three hundred thirty-six point three three percent. Their incompetence is only eclipsed by Toronto FC's at -346.39 percent.

Given the weight of salary versus minutes played, the numbers almost have to be single handedly skewed by Rafael Marquez, who played 987 minutes in 15 games before so mercifully terminating his contract. That might seem like a cop out, but Marquez played in less than half the Red Bulls 39 games. All in all, that's 3,510 minutes, of which Marquez played less than a third while pulling in the league's second highest salary.

It's also probably further hurt by Tim Cahill, who joined in late July and has a reported $3.5 million salary and played 1,080 minutes.

But anyway, we didn't necessarily need quantitative economics to prove the inefficiency of the Red Bulls' front office -- our trophy case does that, thank you very much -- but here it is.

And for what it's worth, the LA Galaxy have a front office efficiency of -126.78 percent and they won the MLS Cup.

It's worth noting Dr. Hamilton is a D.C. United fan. Also, has a masters and PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford. But mostly a D.C. fan. So yeah, we don't need your stupid numbers, Hamilton. Just wait until you get rabies at RFK, then we'll see what your precious space math and Stanford-sanction paper are doing for you then.