Anderson Chris - The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Football is Wrong

In sports, what is true is more powerful than what you believe, because what is true will give you an edge.

Bill James

Seven words have long dominated football:

Thats the way its always been done.

The beautiful game is steeped in tradition. The beautiful game clings to its dogmas and its truisms, its beliefs and its credos. The beautiful game is run by men who do not wish to see their power challenged by outsiders, who know that their way of seeing the game is the true way of seeing the game. They do not want to be told that, for more than a century, they have been missing something. That there is knowledge that they do not possess. That how things have always been done is not how things should always be done.

The beautiful game is wilful in its ignorance. The beautiful game is a game ripe for change.

And at the centre of that change are numbers. It is numbers that will challenge convention and invert norms, overhaul practices and shatter beliefs. It is numbers that let us glimpse the game as we have never seen it before.

Every world-class club knows this. All of them employ analysis staff, specialists in data collection and interpretation who use all the information they can glean to plan training sessions, design playing systems, plot transfers. There are millions of pounds and hundreds of trophies at stake. Every club is prepared to do anything it takes to gain the slightest edge.

But what none of those clubs has yet managed to do is take those numbers and see their inner truth. It is not just a matter of collecting data. You have to know what to do with them.

This is footballs newest frontier. It is often said that football cannot, or should not, be broken down into mere statistics. That, critics say, removes the beauty from the beautiful game. But that is not how the clubs who fight to win the Champions League or the Premier League or the nations battling to lift the World Cup see it, and neither do we. We believe that every shred of knowledge we can gather helps us love football, in all of its complex glory, all the more. This is the future. There is no stopping it.

That is not to say all of footballs traditions are wrong. The data we are now able to gather and analyse confirm that some of what weve always thought was true really is true. Beyond this, however, the numbers offer us further truths, make clear things we could not have known intuitively and expose the falsehoods of the way its always been done. The biggest problem resulting from following a venerated tradition and hardened dogma is that they are rarely questioned. Knowledge remains static while the game itself and the world around it change.

It was a simple question, asked in that bewildered tone Americans often use when discussing football.

Why do they do that?

Dave and I were watching Premier League highlights, and something had caught his eye. Not a moment of dazzling skill, or bewitching beauty, or even inept refereeing, but something altogether more mundane. Dave was baffled, like countless central defenders before him, by Rory Delaps long throws.

Every single time Stoke City won a throw-in within hurling distance of the opposition box, Delap would trot across to the touchline, dry the ball with his shirt or, when at home, with a towel handily placed for that very purpose and proceed to catapult it into the box, over and over and over again.

To me, as a former goalkeeper, the benefits of Delaps throws were obvious. I explained it to Dave: Stoke had a decent team, but one lacking a little in pace and even more in finesse. What they did have, though, was height. So why not, when the ball goes out of play, take the opportunity to create a chance out of nothing? Why not cause a little havoc in your opponents ranks? It seemed to work.

That did not sate Daves curiosity, though. It simply served to make him ask the next logical question.

So why doesnt everyone do it?

The answer to that was equally obvious: not everyone has a Rory Delap, someone capable of hurling the ball great distances with that flat trajectory, like a skimmed stone, that panics defenders and confuses goalkeepers.

Dave, himself a former baseball pitcher, tried another tack: But cant you try and find one? Or make one of your players lift weights and practise the javelin and the hammer?

There was a problem with this. Yes, Daves questions, like those of a persistently inquisitive child, were getting annoying; more irritating still, I did not have a good answer.

You could play the game the way Stoke do, I countered, if you have a Delap and loads of tall central defenders. But its just not very attractive. Its not what you do unless you have to.

Why? Dave responded, with crushing logic. It seems to work for them.

And that was it. All I had left, like a frustrated parent, was one word. Because.

Because there are some things you dont want to do when playing football. Because, even though a goal created by a long throw is worth just as much as one from a flowing passing move, its almost like it doesnt count as much. Because, to a purist, theyre somehow not quite as deserved.

But Daves endless questions Why? Why? Why? nagged at me. If it works for Stoke, why dont more teams do it? Who was right? Stoke, who were responsible for almost a third of all the goal-scoring chances from throw-ins created in the Premier League that year or everyone else, who clearly felt they did not need, or did not want, the long throw in their arsenal?

Why are there some things that are just not done?

Why is football played the way it is?

We attempted to answer these two very big questions by applying our knowledge and skills as a political economist in my case and a behavioural economist in Daves our discipline as social scientists, our experiences as a goalkeeper and a baseball pitcher, and our love for sports and for solving hard problems. The result rests in your hands a book about football and numbers.

Football has always been a numbers game: 11, 442, the big number 9, the sacred number 10. That will not change and we dont ever want it to. But there is a counters-reformation gathering pace that may make another set of figures seem just as important: 2.66, 50/50, 53.4, <58<73<79, and 0 > 1 will all prove to be essential for the future of football.

This is a book about footballs essences goals, randomness, tactics, attack and defence, possession, superstars and weak links, development and training, red cards and substitutions, effective leadership, and firing and hiring the manager and the way these relate to numbers.

The neat, unassuming, thoughtful types who make their way to Boston every March for the Sports Analytics Conference hosted by the prestigious MIT Sloan School of Management make unlikely gurus for anyone seeking a glimpse into footballs future or its essence. But these are the coaches, staff and executives of the worlds major sports teams who gather every year to develop, learn about and map out the numbers game.