Chris Anderson - The Numbers Games

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 soccer:

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

And at the center 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 soccers newest frontier. It is often said that soccer 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 soccer, 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 soccers traditions are wrong. The data we are now able to gather and analyze 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 soccer.

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 shirtor, when at home, with a towel handily placed for that very purposeand 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 practice 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 soccer. 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.