Christoph Biermann - Football Hackers: The Science and Art of a Data Revolution

CHRISTOPH
BIERMANN

Published by Blink Publishing
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Trade Paperback 978-1-788702-05-8
Ebook 978-1-788702-35-5

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Copyright Christoph Biermann, 2019

Christoph Biermann has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.

Blink Publishing is an imprint of Bonnier Books UK
www.bonnierbooks.co.uk

For Birgit

How football has changed! Everything has become more complicated and more beautiful.

Xabi Alonso

Ive always looked up to Christoph Biermann: hes very tall, and Im not. But his physical height, by my cautious estimate, is only 4.83 per cent of the reason why hes considered one of the outstanding writers of his generation in Germany. If not the greatest.

Born in 1960 in Krefeld, Biermann lost his heart to unfashionable VfL Bochum, the kind of side Germans sneeringly refer to as graue Maus (grey mouse) while studying German and History at Bochum University. For 25 years, he went to see almost every home game of the self-proclaimed Unrelegatables theyre more like the Unpromotables now, having been stuck in Bundesliga 2 since 2010 but the rather mundane fare on show at the Ruhrstadion didnt put him off football for the rest of his life. On the contrary, Biermann has found himself hooked on the mystical grandeur and strong sense of meaning the sport radiates, especially in the (post-industrial) heartland of the game. We can find the whole world in football, and its easier to do so in the Ruhr area than in any other place in Germany, he wrote in Wenn wir vom Fuball trumen (Dreaming of Football), the most personal of his nine exceptionally brilliant, and multiple award-winning books to date.

Before starting to write about football, Biermann became music editor for a Bochum-based magazine and later recorded a seven-inch single in honour of his favourite team. The self-deprecating track (Deutscher Meister wird nie der VfL!, VfL will never be champions) was once played over the stadium tannoy, albeit in its even more absurd B-side version which replaced the lyrics of the chorus with an overly optimistic Only VfL will be champions! line.

His journalistic exploits were a lot more sound. After some well-received freelance work, Biermann was hired to adorn the pages of many highbrow publications such as Sddeutsche Zeitung, Der Spiegel and 11FREUNDE magazine with his original take on the game, cast in carefully crafted sentences coloured by affection. An unwillingness to look past footballs multitude of ills has made him no less entranced by the enduring magic of the game, by its archaic emotionalism and by its history and its stories. Hes got a very fine sense of humour, too. Especially for a German.

But more importantly than that, Christoph is one of those rare writers who is unerringly honest with his readers and with the subject he covers. Youll never find him smooth over all the countless incongruities until his account fits a pre-conceived, simple notion as snugly as a goalkeepers glove or attempt to extract significance where there isnt any. The football he describes is never just one thing, but the real thing a barely comprehensible melee of incredibly sophisticated ideas and clumsy inadequacies, of epic sensations and soggy banalities. Biermann lays bare the games internal contradictions, and with it, the fault lines in his own arguments.

In The Undoing Project, Michael Lewis gripping tale of two Israeli economists who detected the systemic flaws in peoples reasoning, we meet Daryl Morey, the general manager of the NBAs Houston Rockets. Morey, Lewis writes, had an understanding of how hard it is to know anything for sure. The closest he came to certainty was in his approach to making decisions. He never simply went with his first thought. He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it. Biermanns approach to writing about football, three decades into the job, is rather similar. He opens a door on his doubts, and his views are only all the more convincing and reliable for it.

This book, his first but surely not last to appear in English, profiles the loose network of data renegades obsessed with rendering football into a series of convention-defying numbers. I suspect he was partially drawn to their ingenious efforts because he has already mastered the games translation into words himself. But hed be far too humble to admit to that.

Football Hackers is ostensibly about codes, algorithms and statistical models, but ultimately, like all of his work, it is really about love. His love for football, to be sure, but more than that: Biermann is driven by the thrill of edging a little closer to knowing what might be going on in this simple, tangled, crazy game, and by the even deeper satisfaction that comes from sharing his wondrous discoveries.

Raphael Honigstein

THE ADVENTURE BEGINS

On an early summers night in 2011, I sat at Wembley with tears in my eyes. The magnitude of the moment had overwhelmed me. Four decades after entering a stadium for the first time in my life, a realisation had grown stronger with every passing minute of the Champions League final: I had never seen a better football match in my life. Manchester United, managed by Sir Alex Ferguson at the time, were very good against Pep Guardiolas FC Barcelona, but they didnt stand a chance. The Catalans had fantastic players, first and foremost Lionel Messi, the man of the match. Manchester United had some fine players of their own, but the artistry of individuals took a back seat to the beauty of Barcelonas collective splendour. They transformed the biggest games of the season into a demonstration of football that had reached a new level of evolution. Pep Guardiola brought out the genius of his players with an elaborate plan of unprecedented perfection. Manchester United might have only lost 31 on the night, but in truth, they had been hopelessly inferior.

Although planned, Baras football was free and easy, playful and elegant. It didnt cram their players into a tight corset, but gave them a framework for their creativity instead. It looked brand new, but it had deep roots going back to the Netherlands of the 1960s, when Johan Cruyff was first taught Totaalvoetbal at Ajax Amsterdam and later became its greatest catalyst. Influenced by those fundamental ideas, Cruyff had arrived in Barcelona where he developed his footballing principles further and had a decisive influence on the clubs youth development.