The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Soccer Is Wrong

by David Sally, Chris Anderson

Moneyball meets Freakonomics in this myth-busting guide to understanding—and winning—the most popular sport on the planet.

Innovation is coming to soccer, and at the center of it all are the numbers—a way of thinking about the game that ignores the obvious in favor of how things actually are. In The Numbers Game , Chris Anderson, a former professional goalkeeper turned soccer statistics guru, teams up with behavioral analyst David Sally to uncover the numbers that really matter when it comes to predicting a winner. Investigating basic but profound questions—How valuable are corners? Which goal matters most? Is possession really nine-tenths of the law? How should a player’s value be judged?—they deliver an incisive, revolutionary new way of watching and understanding soccer.

Genres: Sports, Football, Nonfiction, Soccer, Economics, Science, Amazon

400 pages, Paperback

First published May 30, 2013

About the author

An innovative strategist and behavioral economist. In 1995, he received his PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. His research in behavioral game theory has been widely published and informed his award-winning teaching of negotiations and leadership at Cornell’s Johnson School and Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business.

In 2011 David co-founded Anderson Sally LLC, one of the world’s first soccer analytics consulting companies, where he helps clients make the right investments and find a sustainable competitive advantage. He is the author of One Step Ahead: Mastering the Art and Science of Negotiation.

Reviews

[Eitaporra · Rating 2 out of 5]

It tries too hard. The data collected are, by themselves, interesting enough, no need to tamper or primp them. However, the authors had to spice them up to artificially make the findings more impressive.

Three exemples come up: 1) They used Spiegelhalter's study to state that chance, alone, is responsible for roughly 50% of a team's successs. The original researcher himself had concluded that only 26% of accomplishment was due to pure randomness. The trick? "Lying with statistics". Spiegelhalter measured variance, which is technically more appropriate. Sally, on the other hand, used standard deviation, as to inflate the number.

2) To support, once again, their thesis that skills account for only 50% of success, Sally and Anderson pointed out that good teams only win 50% of matches (comparing it to a flip of coins). Well, they could have very well pointed that bad teams percentage win is about 25% (the rest is composed of draws). It's not a flip of a coin since the good ones are twice as likely to win.

3) Recalling Martin Lames' theory that 44.4% of goals originated from luck. What's wrong with Lames's study? Nothing. However, they contradicted their own motto stated on the preface: information should be used to find the truth, and not confirm one's own bias. Why not recall studies that doesn't corroborate their assumptions?

Anyway, I recommend everyone to read "How to Lie with Statistics" before getting on The Numbers Game.

[Will Once · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh.

I had such high hopes for this book, but somehow it didn't quite deliver. The basic premise is fascinating and undoubtedly correct - the use of statistical analysis is fundamental to success at the highest levels of football.

But the execution is unfortunately quite turgid. We get page after page of argument which alternates between repetition and incomplete analysis. In one second the authors are telling you the same point over and over again. In the next breath they are making a deductive leap that I simply could not follow.

There are nuggets in the book - although not many that you probably don't know already. But does it live up to the hype of "why everything you know about "soccer" is wrong"? No, I'm afraid it doesn't.

Great premise, slick marketing, slightly dull book. Shame.

[Yousif Al Zeera · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chris and David are pioneers of 'football analytics'. Former goalkeeper and baseball pitcher respectively before turning into football statistics gurus.

Their book is for the "Big Data" folks, unleashing the "freakonomics" within them. A thought-provoking book that will completely change your understanding of the game, challenge your assumptions and, most importantly, ignite your passion towards the most popular game in the world.

Shall corners be taken short? Are teams as good as their worst players? Does changing manager affect anything after all? Is the game 50% luck? Is ball possession something valuable? What is the guerrilla style of playing? Why Stoke City were doing good for a decade with seemingly slow players? How many scouters do Udinese have? What is the futuristic formation that will put the 4-4-2 and 4-3-3 into the bin for good? How does Xabi Alonso view tacking? What is the Maldini Principle? Does a dog that don't bark make any sense?

Questions will not end. Because when they do end in the book, you will continue probing new ones yourself.

Disclaimer: You will start watching football in a different way. Unsure if this is a good or bad thing!

[Paul Brunger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting ideas in here, and a big reminder of how much stats I have forgotten, but some parts I enjoyed more than others.

Some of the most interesting pieces of thinking (for example that the level of the worst player in a team has more impact than the average ability, or the differences between turnovers and possessions) felt under-pursued - I'd like to have seen where they end up and the impact made more clear.

Some other pieces felt to me too much like declaring relationships causal rather than correlated. Does changing the timing of substitutions improve performance or is there something underlying the situation that actually drives the situation?

Whether this is valid criticism of the stats or not not sure I'm qualified to answer any more, but certainly this book doesn't explain itself as well as say Freakonomics. That said, it's interesting that a lot of the Goodreads reviews ask for less interpretation and less description! This must be the real statisticians!

[Ngee Poo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quite a few misleading interpretations of statistics provided.

- Soccer was compared to basketball, baseball, american football and handball, and that only favourites have "only" slightly over 50% chance of winning.
- but in all the other sports mentioned, there are no draws!
- Flipping this around, with odds of drawing around 25%, it means odds of favourites winning are twice that of odds of underdogs winning. That's significant.
- Comparing this to coin flipping is erroneous. Coin flipping has only 2 outcomes, soccer match 3 (unless in the case of cup matches).

- Authors also stated that some goals scored mean less compared to other goals, but what about goal difference? Its only true if we look at each match individually, and that matters for cup games, but not so in the league.

- Again, misleading interpretation. Authors quote that 51% of teams who score the most go on to win the league. This is again not a coin flip. In fact, in a league of 20 teams, this makes the highest scoring team the favourites by far .

- On managers: authors postulate that less goalies and defenders become managers because of less appreciation for defending. But doesn't this ignore the fact that there are less goalies and defenders plying their trades professionally to start with?

-long ball ratio to shots: teams that play more long balls and fewer shots tend to finish lower on the table. But is this a result rather than a cause? Perhaps weaker teams play long balls and shoot less BECAUSE they cant keep possession, rather than as a deliberate strategy?

[Kdawg91 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I get obsessed about things, I find something I like and delve face first into it till I am full of it, or tire of it or run out of things to know. I never liked sports eventhough I come from a family of sports lovers. A few years ago I jumped off into hockey and last year I fell in love with the beautiful game.

(Yes, that's alot of pointless exposition, but there is a purpose sorta)

Being a book whore, and having a new subject to pore over, I found several books on my new subject. The Numbers Game, being a study on a sport I was just learning and numbers (which I suck at)..common sense says I shouldn't enjoy this, But I did.

This book shows me in no uncertain terms why I enjoy this sport as a new fan. It is truly a beautiful game, there is a magic in the stats and a "beauty" in the skill and the players.

If you are a stat head, or just want to understand a great sport better, this is for you.

[Michael Powell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Soccer where 0 > 1 !! The 15% that was fascinating outweighed the 50% that was too complex and repetitious. 35% very strong. Since a book is (IMHO) a strong-link enterprise, this means this is a very good book.

[Tasos Manouras · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of those books that shower you with data and statistics, yet you are none the wiser having read it.

Moneyball is the book that all these kind of books aspire to be yet they fail to mention that once a team or an organization break a code of how a team can be operated, game changing as it may be, once everyone knows about it, it seizes to be unique and just becomes the norm.

Sadly even the author himself admits that soccer still has a way to go to bring a game changing approach.

[Dinesh · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book full of interesting analyses, snippets of information and stats that will make any football fan go 'whoa, I didn't realise that!' At times, the book went into personal stories about how football analysts came into prominence which I didn't care for too much. The part I liked the most was - 'The Forecasts' which predicts (quite accurately as the book was published in 2013) many trends in the footballing world purely through data-led patterns. A nice read for anyone interested in football and also like their numbers and data.

[Farzad Naderi · Rating 4 out of 5]

کتاب خوبی بود برای اونایی که فوتبال رو عاشقانه دوست دارن. با خوندنش فهمیدم چقدر فوتبال مرموزه، چقدر جذابه و چقدر از ورزشهایی مثل بسکتبال و بیسبال و هاکی تصادفی تره. همین تصادفی بودن یکی از دلایلیه که درطرفدارترین ورزش جهانه.
این کتاب در اصل در شروع عصر دیتا در فوتبال نوشته شده یعنی حدود ۱۰ سال پیش. الان استفاده از دیتا توی فوتبال خیلی گسترش پیدا کرده و من حس میکنم این کتاب الان داره دستی به ریشای سفیدش میکشه و مغرورانه میگه: دیدید فرزندانم؟ همونی شد که من گفتم.
از متن:
Counterfactual thinking is hard because of the way people form causal explanations from events. As a general rule, when trying to explain an outcome we see in the world, people tend to think harder about things that happen than things that don't.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is packed with interesting insights (some confirmatory, others counter-intuitive) backed by third party or the authors' own analysis.

Examples include: 3 point for a win encouraged long clearances and yellow cards not goals; a clear recognition that the beauty of football is the rareness and decisiveness of goals (and an excellent comparison to scores and chances of favourite winning in other sports); that key statistics (corners, shots, long passes, short passes, fouls) are identical across major leagues; corners only produce a goal every 45 or so corners; ; that possession and not losing it is important and that Stoke play a possession game, just one based on possessing the ball out of play; that in a game the weakest link is as important as the strongest player (especially as natural ability starts to come up against a barrier) but that over a squad and season having a range of abilities is optimal if the strongest players can inspire the weaker ones: having an ex player as a manager works where the player is of a better standard than the team he coaches; that sacking a manager produces an apparent upturn in results but that this is simply mean reversion and would be replicated by not sacking the manager; that an average player has possession of the ball for less than a minute.

However what is disappointing (at least in the early stages of the book) is that the authors are guilty of either incorrect or at the least sloppy characterisations of many of their findings.

Examples include: describing football as a game of 50/50 when that actually means 50 percent is luck and 50 percent skill (so more like 75/25); stating that the best team only wins a little over half the time, but ignoring the draws (at one stage they quote a finding from a very different study that the worse team wins 45 percent of the time as being the same thing); saying that 1 goal equates to 1 point on average means a goal "virtually guarantees a point. Similarly some of their recommendations are unrealistic – for example that teams should not allow a new manager to have any new players to as to produce a controlled experiment on their skill.

Interesting analysis of football – as well as reproducing lots of insights as above the book has a strong theme about the growth of data and analytics (interestingly its closing contention is that the next generation weaned on football simulations will think this is automatic – AVB being one manager who apparently learnt his skills this way).

[André Pinto · Rating 2 out of 5]

Despite some interesting facts and statistics, the book falls short to its name. The authors try too hard to prove that some common beliefs in football are wrong, and often misplace causal relationships.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed particularly their discussion about Stoke and Rory Delap's throw ins and some of the forecasts about football analytics in the future, that already part have proven correct.

[Benjamin Underwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book gives a good perspective of soccer from a statistical/economical view. While I think it can be a little reductive to boil soccer down to a handful of numbers, the authors still provide fresh analysis into what makes a team stronger or successful.

[Jackie Chang · Rating 4 out of 5]

amazing book

[Jussi Eskola · Rating 2 out of 5]

No ei tästä kyllä kauheasti oppinut. Kulmapotkut on vaarallisempia itselle kun vastustajalle ja silloin kun pallo on ilmassa niin se ei ole vastustajallakaan. Graafit oli enimmäkseen turhia.

[Eric Michel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bringing data to the beautiful game! Loved it.

[Sunny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating book about numbers and statistics in football. Here are the best bits:

This also means that possession requires a collective, rather than individual, effort. It is a measure of team competence, not a specific player's brilliance. To see this more conclusively, we can look at data analysed by Jason Rosenfeld of StatDNA. Rosenfeld was interested in working out how much a player's pass completion percentage is determined by skill - something the player has control over - rather than the situation he finds himself in when making a pass. Rosenfeld's hunch was that pass completion percentage had less to do with the foot skill of passing the ball and more to do with the difficulty of a pass the player was attempting in the first place. It was not, he thought, so much what you did as where you were. To test his intuition, Rosenfeld turned to the numbers: specifically, 100,000 passes from StatDNA's Brazilian Serie A data. To assess a player's passing skill, he had to adjust pass completion by the difficulty of the pass being attempted. Surely passes in the final third of the field and under defensive pressure were more difficult than passes between two central defenders with no opponent in sight. Once he had taken into account things like pass distance, defensive pressure, where on the field the pass was attempted, in what direction (forward or not), and how (in the air, by head, and one touch), a curious result emerged: 'after adjusting for difficulty, pass completion percentage is nearly equal among all players and teams. Said another way, the skill in executing a pass is almost equal across all players and teams, as pass difficulty and pass completion percentage is nearly completely correlated.' Think about what this means. It is virtually impossible to differentiate among players' passing skills when it comes to executing any given pass (at least at the level of play in the Brazilian top flight). Everyone can complete a pass and avoid a turnover in an advantageous position on the pitch if they are without pressure or playing the ball over only a short distance. As a result, at the elite level, the particular situation the passer finds himself in determines a player's completion percentage, not his foot skills. While their passing skills may be highly similar, this doesn't mean that players have identical possession skills. The data do not describe what happens before the ball arrives. As Rosenfeld observes: Is Xavi an "excellent passer" because he can place a pass on a dime or is it more his ability to find pockets of space where no defensive pressure exists to receive the ball, with his ball control allowing him to continue to avoid pressure and hit higher value passes for an equal level of difficulty? Many play-duput themselves in difficult passing situations because they dwell on the ball too long and upon receiving the ball are not ale to reposition their bodies in a way that opens up the field. Possession football, in other words, is more than just being able to pass the ball - at the very top of the professional football pyramid, it has relatively little to do with that: it is mostly about being in the right place to receive it, helping a teammate position himself in the right place in the right way, and helping him get rid of the ball in order to maintain control for the team. As countless coaches have yelled to many a struggling player, you don't pass with your feet, you pass with your eyes and your brain. Football is a game played with the head. A good team, when further up the pitch, manages to create and find space for both the passer of the ball and his intended target, making the passing situation easier. A poor team, in the same place, would not create as much space, so the passing situation would be harder. Good teams are not better at passing than bad ones. They simply engineer more easy passes in better locations, and therefore limit their turnovers

Sunderland, Brentford, Brighton, Stoke, Liverpool, Millwall and many others all have owners who do not place a bet or invest a penny without examining the numbers first.
That is the true power of data: to change our relationship with the game.

In the game, the ball changes his hands 400 times says Chelsea‘s Mike Forde

When Liverpool signed Stewart Downing and Jordan Henderson in the summer of 20II, more than sixty years after Reep first took pencil from pocket and set his system to work, the pair's final third regain' percentage was one of the key statistics used to assess their worth; Barcelona and Spain have based much of their recent success on the pressing game.

Zlatan Ibrahimović the player in question is a serial title winner. Between 2003 and 2011 the giant Swedish striker won ague championship every single year, wherever he prayed.
That's eight straight titles, including one in Holland, one in Spain and six in Serie A. He is more than just a good-luck charm: only once did he fail to score more than fourteen goals in a league season. Ibrahimovic is not a passenger, along for the ride; he is a difference-maker.

During penalty shootouts: scientists have found that the more anxious a player is, the more likely he is to look at the goalkeeper - something that is there - rather than the space around him. 16 Players who are told not to shoot within the keeper's reach are even more likely to look at him, an effect known as an ironic process of mental control, when the effort not to do something makes doing it even more likely. This bias towards seeing what is there and ignoring what is not makes valuing defence difficult. Attacking has one simple best outcome: a goal. But defending is quite the opposite: there, the best outcome is a goal that is not conceded, an event that does not actually happen.

Opta sports collect such a stat to denote teams winning control possession though the term for them is recoveries. Over the past three seasons of the Premier League, Opta's data show that teams gained possession in this way about 100 times in a typical match, for a match total of around
200. So on the conservative end, teams have at least 100 possessions of more than just a transient touch of the ball - a number similar to that of basketball teams.

In the course of one football match, nobody plays ninety minutes of football. According to Opta Sports, the ball was in play for between sixty and sixty-five minutes in a typical match across the four top European leagues in 2010/II. In the Premier League, the average was 62.39 minutes." Yet for matches involving Stoke the average amount of time that the ball was in play that season was 58.52 minutes.

It's these managers who have given us all of football's great innovations: the W-M - reportedly invented by Arsenal manager Herbert Chapman after losing 7-0 at Newcastle - catenaccio, zonal marking, the long-ball game. They are all attempts to upend convention and surprise the opposition. Knowing more, knowing better, knowing something new and knowing something different can help engineer wins or avert defeats. Aside from talent, hard work and swift feet, intelligence and innovation - on the pitch and off it - are key ingredients in success.

Kremer's original article from 1993 was called 'The O-Ring Theory of Economic Development'. The name originates from the rings of high-tech rubber that were designed to seal the tiny gaps between the stages of the booster rockets that would lift the Space Shuttle Challenger into the sky in 1986. The rings, though, froze in the cold overnight temperatures at NASA's Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, and failed, allowing hot gases to escape and strike the enormous external fuel tank, eventually causing an explosion and the demolition of the entire vehicle, as well as the deaths of all seven crew on board. The failure of that one small part caused a sophisticated, complex, multimillion-dollar machine to malfunction. The O-ring was the weakest link in a system whose components and sub-processes were all integrated.

Lobanovskyi was a trained engineer, and a pioneer of the numbers game. Early in his coaching career he brought Dr Ana-toliy Zelentsov to his side in order to collaborate on a scientific, systematic approach to football. Lobanovskyi had studied cybernetics, a field whose central concept is circularity, and which deals with problems of control and regulation in dynamic systems. He and Zelentsov viewed a football match as an interaction between two sub-systems of eleven elements (players), whose outcome depended upon which sub-system had fewer flaws and more effective integration. The key characteristic of a team is that the efficiency of the sub-system is greater than the sum of the efficiencies of the elements that comprise it? 16 In another interview Zelentsov said, Every team has players which link "coalitions", every team has players which destroy them. The first are called to create on the field, the latter - to destroy the team actions of [the] opponent." Using different concepts, this describes an O-ring production process.

As David Goldblatt explains in his authoritative history, The Ball Is Round, catenaccio as a system of play was first developed by the Austrian-born coach Karl Rappan at Servette in the 1930s. His innovation was to withdraw a player from his forward line and play him behind his three centre backs. He had no direct opponent to mark; instead, he would protect space.

Through a very simple series of tests performed on members of the Berlin rowing club, Köhler had demonstrated that teamwork could produce significant gains in motivation. First, he tested how long each standing rower could, while holding and curling a bar connected to a weight of forty-one kilograms, keep the weight from touching the floor. Then he doubled the weight, paired the rowers and tested how long they could curl the heavier bar together. This is a weak-link task because the weight was too great for any single person to hold up: the eighty-two kilograms would hit the floor when the weaker partner's biceps gave out. Köhler found that weaker rowers would endure significantly longer when they were paired than when they were solo. In doing so he had isolated one of the key characteristics of psychology: the gain in enthusiasm and effort and perseverance that comes from being on a team.

It is better to have a team of all 70 per cent players than it is to have a team where two players are 100 per cent, the majority are 7os and then there is one bumbling 50 per cent and one dreadful 30 per cent. Strong links don't win matches. Weak links lose them.

Football, as a more complex team game without a form of real possession, is largely about triangles. One such triangle might be the player currently touching the ball, the one about to receive it, and the off-ball player currently causing the great est deformation in the defence's shape. Triangles might replace ball events as the key unit of football analysis. The use of networks to construct interacting webs of players and formations is already infiltrating the sport.

English players play football the same way the best Argentines do, then recruiting in Buenos Aires may sound glamorous but may not be particularly cost-effective compared to recruiting in Bristol, Leicester, or Preston. The sport in England and across the globe has settled into a competitive equilibrium.

Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of this is the way teams work together to produce wins, draws and losses. In basketball one superstar is 20 per cent of the starting team; football's giants make up a much more meager 9.1 per cent of the total team. This means that the door is wide open for the team's poorest players and its most tenuous on-field relationships - the weakest links - to play a decisive role in determining a team's fortunes.

Finally, unlike American baseball teams - in a league with guaranteed membership and stable revenues - football clubs face a purer capitalist system: relegation and the shadow of bankruptcy and administration. This kind of downside risk makes most decision-makers more conservative and less likely to try new ideas.

[Johannes Laitila · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you like to watch football, this one at least makes you watch it in a slightly different way. Well popularized book about a popular subject.

[Stace · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Numbers Game is a book written about two things – numbers and sport. Data science is growing in importance within the sports arena. Whilst people have been studying the numbers for around a hundred years, no one has really known what the numbers mean, or how to get the best from them. Even today, we are learning, but what we have learned so far is presented very well in this book.

This book isn’t written with the head of sports analysis at Chelsea in mind. It is written with you, the fan, the critic, the better, the armchair manager in mind. By reading this book, you will see that football is full of nuances that you didn’t know existed! The truth is being uncovered and this is a great presentation of the truth so far.

Ever wondered why your accumulators don’t come in? Why did Manchester United win the Premiership with unnerving regularity? What is the winning formula for your favourite football team? The honest answer, as discovered within this book – Luck! By analysing statistical data available, Anderson and Sally provide insightful detailed information showing that your sure thing isn’t quite as sure as you might think!

The book is very well written, with all points being very easy to follow and sometimes quite humorous. Graphs are presented clearly throughout the book to highlight key points and make them easy to visualise. If you have an interest in sports betting, or simply enjoy "The Beautiful Game", you must read this book.

[Nick Davies · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very interesting book - combining football and mathematics (two of my favourite beautiful things!) in order to tease out some of the aspects of the game which could be enhanced, 'Moneyball style' by modern analytical statistical techniques.

There's a lot of content, and the book will certainly stand up to repeated re-readings. If I had one criticism, however, it would probably be that the subjects chosen for data analysis felt a little less novel than in other books of a similar ilk ('Moneyball', 'Why England Lose' and some other more sociological economics type ones I've also read) and hence the conclusions drawn were less quirky and less surprising. I did also find myself slightly itching to shout "correlation is not causation!" at various points, when page after page claimed X caused Y (as opposed to, as I suspect, is just correlated with it). In addition, the massive role of luck and wealth in the game made me wonder just how big a difference analytics could make to the small amount of 'readily influencable' stuff left.

[Edwin Setiadi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Football from the lens of statistics

You know that moneyball approach in baseball that has since copied elsewhere after the success story of Oakland A? This book is the story about its implementation in football (soccer).

The book highlights the fascinating world of data-analytics that are already rampant in baseball, basketball, and American football, but often previously overlooked in football. Using heavy sets of data, the book provides some interesting statistical angles that we will definitely miss if not pointed out, angles that could change the way we sees football and perhaps more importantly could change the way managers and players approach the game.

Now, this is an old(ish) book, published in 2013 during a time when data-analytics was still new in football, with the arguments made in the book are already a little outdated today. But the good news is, in hindsight we can immediately see which prediction came true or which arguments render to nothing.

For instance, by the time the book was published, Liverpool - whose new owner is none other than John Henry whom successfully applied the moneyball approach on his baseball franchise the Boston Red Sox - had just started implementing the data-analytics approach. Liverpool began the approach through the trial and error era of Brendan Rogers, and carried forward into great heights by Jurgen Klopp in his throphy-laden and records breaking reign. A success story. But the unsuccessful side of the aproach also saw Roberto Martinez did not quite make it in implementing it in Everton, while another hero in the book, Stoke City, eventually got relegated to the Championship.

Moreover, the book provides a glimpse of what data analytics can do to assist decision makings: Why Chelsea should have bought Darren Bent instead of Fernando Torres in January 2011, why did Alex Ferguson really sold Jaap Stam to Lazio, how catenaccio was designed to protect the team’s weak links, why Andre Villas-Boas failed at Chelsea, why according to Xabi Alonso tackling happens when something goes wrong and not right (and sense of positioning is more important), and what Tony Pulis did with Stoke City and Sam Allardyce did with Bolton: to use long-ball style of play to help maximize their resources and compensate what they lack (they will never be the possession-controlling type with those sets of players).

The book also tells several never-been-told stories, such as English football’s true innovator: Jimmy Hill. He was the person whom in the 1950s campaigned to scrap the Football League’s maximum wage (20 pounds a week) that led to the slow inflation of salaries until today’s millions. He was also the one who commissioned England’s first all-seater stadium, and the 3-point rule (which would be followed by FIFA as late as 1995 where it commands for all its constituent leagues award 3 points for victory).

Furthermore, every now and then the book told few stories in a slight deviation away from football, such as the amazing story of Major League Baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays whose majority owner, president, and head of operations had all been Wall Street guys, and they run the club using sports analytics looking for “positive arbitrage” possibilities. With only 2% edge they could brought the team to the play-offs in 4 of the last 6 years even though their total wage bill was the 4th lowest in the league, way down on the sums paid out by New York Yankees or the Boston Red Sox. In football terms, it is as if Sunderland is reaching the Champions League knockout stages 3 times in 5 years.

And of course, the book provides us with plenty of tales from the footballing archive. Such as the story of Arrigo Sacchi in AC Milan, where in trying to prove his theory (that 5 organised players would beat 10 disorganised ones), in training he took 5 organised defensive players (Giovanni Galli in goal, Tassotti, Maldini, Costacurta and Baresi), and clash them against ten players (Gullit, van Basten, Rijkaard, Virdis, Evani, Ancelotti, Colombo, Donadoni, Lantignotti and Mannari). “They had fifteen minutes to score against my five players”, said Sacchi, “the only rule was that if we won possession or they lost the ball, they had to start over from ten meters inside their own half. I did this all the time and they never scored. Not once.”

And when it comes to longevity, statistically speaking, the greatest manager according to this book is not Jose Mourinho or Alex Ferguson, it’s not Marcello Lippi, Vincente del Bosque, Fabio Capello, Marcelo Bielsa, Arsene Wenger, or Pep Guardiola. But Jimmy Davies. Who? Exactly. That’s moneyball for you.

Football is passion, football is tactical prowness meets luck. It’s chaotic and often messy. It’s about those magical moments that were created time after time that does not make sense - Roberto Carlos’ goal for Brazil against France in Tournoi de France, the two goals by Man Utd in stoppage time 1999 that won them the Champions League, that Roberto Baggio penalty miss in 1994 World Cup final after brilliant previous performances, that Aguero goal at the very last minute of 2011-2012 season - moments that from statistical point of view should not happen. And then of course there’s the mother of all outliers, Leicester City who won the Premier League by beating a 5000/1 odds in 2014-2015 season.

But for everything else, football is measurable. It is a set of habits and repetitive moves that form a predictable pattern, pattern that can be analysed in great depths using statistics. It gives that extra edge in an increasingly tight matches, where even throw ins, or when to best introduce a substitute (minutes 58, 73, and 79), or where the goalkeeper should stand in a penalty shoot, or the choice between in-swinging or out-swinging corner kick can make a slim margin of difference on the outcome of the game.

And while we already know that today the usage of data-analytics are spreading rapidly within football, this book shows us why and how. This is why this book is sublime.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Numbers Game tries very hard to be the Moneyball of football (i.e. soccer). And it comes pretty close except that Moneyball was built around the story of a single team. The Numbers Game presents a bunch of numbers and why what you thought about football performance might not actually be true. The authors also make a case for the game being at a tipping point, as a generation of managers like Ferguson and Wenger retire, while younger numbers-friendly managers like Moyes and Martinez take over bigger teams. They're probably right. But all predictions are just predictions.

Did the book change he way I watched games? Well the season started yesterday and I can confirm that my heart was still my guide (C'mon Everton!). But it was a fun read nonetheless.

Follow me on Twitter: @Dr_A_Taubman

[Caio Santos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Um livro que peca pelo romantismo.

Levanta questões muito importantes, abre caminho para discussões fundamentais. Mas com algumas argumentações fracas e manipuladoras. Precisa ser lido mais criticamente que outras leituras. O leitor não pode aceitar toda e qualquer linha do texto como verdade fundamental, apesar do livro às vezes tentar te manipular com a objetividade dos números. É apenas um aperitivo pra uma nova visão do futebol.

Não pode ser nem o primeiro nem o último livro sobre estatísticas que alguém leia. Sendo o primeiro, pode pegar um leitor muito maleável. Sendo o último, pode fincar algumas questões frágeis e rasas, que precisam de mais pesquisas e fontes para formar uma opinião concreta.

Em alguns momentos, tenta quebrar a objetividade do assunto com "tiradas" leves. Às vezes funciona, relaxa o leitor de uma leitura de muitos números e dados. Às vezes, não.

[Abhinav · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Numbers Game" by Chris Anderson & David Sally has quite a few insightful observations & interesting theories about football (0>1 or the 58>73>79 substitution rule, to name a couple of them that spring to mind) but mostly gives the impression of being a handbook for propagating the concept of 'Moneyball' into the workings of the Beautiful Game as well.

Nevertheless, this book should appeal to aficianados of football statistics & analytics, akin to the kind of insight provided by Simon Kuper & Stefan Szymanski's "Soccernomics". Recommended.

[Alexander · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read Net Gains Instead

After reading Net Gains prior to this, I don’t feel like this was worth the time it took me to read. I found it to be less engaging and have less “actionable” insights when compared to Net Gains.

I may have given this a 3/5 if I had read it first, but its impossible for me to remove that bias. My apologies to the authors.

[Thomas Bodenberg]

Good read- I would have liked links to some of the literature, particularly journal articles with statistics...had Sally's father as a math professor in college.

[yen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book: The Numbers Game

p40
"There are two routes to success in football, we have found. One is being good. The other is being lucky. You need both to win a championship. But you only need one to win a game. The correspondent from Die Ziet was right: the history of football is a record accidents that follow Cruff’s dictum. Toeval is logisch"

Toeval (chance/coincidence) is logisch (logical/consequent), as to mean in any seemingly random events, there’s an underlying pattern. Less pretentiously: football is still highly predictable despite it being random.

p82
Authors refer the diffusion of football overtime to the today’s various car brands that are not so unique among them in both economic and manufacturing terms. The ‘power and wealth’ of a select few clubs, if anything, improves the game of the puny ones at a rate deserving of respect. Good returns diminish and although it’s not so visible of an effect that you can finally see teams other than Barca, Real or Bayern reaching finals yet, the Premier League of today (and the last 5 years) just shows. All due to the bridging of skill and management gaps among the clubs that becoming increasingly cross-regional.

p90 - 128
“The differences between nations are cosmetic, shallow. The game is the same across the world’s elite football leagues. If it was not for the shirts, you would not be able to tell them apart”


FOOTBALL COMPASS

By Luis Menotti's treatment, whereas left-wing football sustains football creativity, its right-wing counterpart is fearful football only obsessed with results. Right-managers see their players as assembly of robots with 2 fundamental build-up: 'to obey and function'. It only suggests suffering and that applies for their unlucky fans.

While the modern game is about balance, Menotti doesnt mix different forces together. A gameplay can be mainly defined by 2 modes--light and dark. Assault and defense.

‘Ganar, gustar, golear’as the general motto is defined in Argentinian football scene.

But is it that much easier to score, or to not concede? The leading team’s scoreline being kept at 1-0 (1 less than 2) is them still scoring. An ongoing kind of scoring, But it’s absent. .

There’s a bias in what is present and ignoring what absent. For offense, the goal is the best outcome. But what of defense? Not conceding. The limited praise the defensive aspects of football usually get may be understood by the sports psychologist Gilovich’s way of showing this with 2 boxes. We are to find an O in a bunch of Q’s from one box, and vice versa. The first challenge will prove much more difficult in locating an O, which is just a Q in the absence of a line stuck to it, than locating a Q from the second.

Hence scoring is a present form of dominating; not conceding, an absent one. Since nothing else indicates the fan otherwise except for when the ugliest set of events at any progression of the game gone wrong one time is reminisced.

- - -

p132
All that usually comes into making an attack ‘are easily spotted, coded and counted’. Where and how the ball is being led are easy for us to track. There’s continuity in what either ends up as a either pathetic attempt or sublime conclusion. Tackles, blocks and duels, ‘have the feel of one-offs, preventive actions’ than passes, shots, and goals are. How do you begin to spot excellent marking of Klopp’s (as the manager himself described of his style once) ‘metal football’? The dispossessed’s efforts should be just about as collective as the attacking team, except the ball is there to guide us through the latter’s decisions.

Defenders at best are respected. Goals, for their rarity, relished for entirety. One unfair consequence of this is the general unlikelihood of goalkeepers and defenders coaching ‘the world’s top clubs,’ as the authors write,

‘Simply because defence is neither well understood nor highly valued’

...'The game is schizophrenic in that its as much about not losing as it is but pretends otherwise.'

To me its almost apparent that the set of actions on the one with the ball is much higher than the nearest other without. If we suppose that this breadth of freedom is really what permits creativity, then the rather dull treatment on defence including other ideas of 'securing' something stands as no surprise. The other side is where artistry is--or at least easily seen.

From baseball statistican Bill James:

'Defence is inherently harder to measure. And this is true in any sport. In any sports, the defensive statistics are more primitive than the offensive statistics. It's not just sports. It's true in life. It would be true in warfare and true in love.'


BEYOND THE YIN AND THE YANG

The number of passes goes hand in hand with successful passes. Plotting every teams passes vs pass completion per game for all games throughout the season, the correlation should be obvious--volume has everything to do with skill. So we’ll give that one to being selfish with the ball.

Is a team then to set out on dominating the open play at the opponents’ territory, or to do same except relying on open plays? Here’s a well-it-depends:

Almost all goals are from open plays. Frequency of how these goals come about holds a different meaning from the actual odds dictated by remarkably different situations: penalties, for one, grant 65% more chances of scoring than a shot from an open play.

It’s less of trivial answer when you ask why, despite almost twice the efficiency shorter moves (characteristic to long-ball games) have over longer ones (a goal in every 9 shots vs 15), does the possession-based team prevail.

Clue: More opportunities, less efficiency--and vice versa.

Answer: Shots -- its higher volume yields better odds of scoring; and it is the longer passing sequences that ultimately provide the most output in the very shots on goal. Pit two teams of the same style--direct or possessive--expect the most productive in shots to come away victorious.

p214
Promising runs favour team chemistry (sub-system) over individual skills (elements). A season is a confluence of events that largely accounts for the unpredictable--player injuries, superstar egos, crowd behaviour, weather, 40-yard stunners, 90th minute goals, impossible saves. Motivation runs out. Form fluctuates. Overcoming these contingencies goes beyond acknowledging how great of an impact they have on the team keeping itself afloat: talent pool. Almost a different kind of investment than one-off star purchases. It is the breadth of quality players at the right manager’s disposal that isnt concentrated to only few positions but that which ticks off every one of them--Forwards, Defenders, Midfielders in between. Goalkeepers!

Through Lobanovskyi, the game is of two subsystems overcoming each other for an outcome that favors the fewest flaws and best integration. freeing an eager side from bad returns requires measures be put in place for the chain of 'coalition' where strength is no longer binding.


‘...errors multiply rather than add up’

Therefore it’s the gap between the team’s weakest positions versus its better majority that make triumph seem more grueling.


TEDDY BEARS AND THEIR PLAYERS: WHEN TO SUB ONE OFF THE PITCH???

p239
Managers tend to wait for one moment where his already under-performing player fails terribly before substituting him. Whats happening is the delay due to the disconnect of observation and the manager’s prior evaluation of his player from before the kickoff. By the time the manager calls it out, the authors say it’s usually too late--basing it on the < 58 < 73 < 79 substitution rule (made out to be universally principal by the authors) to reduce errors and alleviate late-game lethargy. This bias could be forgivable, as the players are quite the self-trained ‘experts’ themselves at fooling their managers.

p253
Football views leadership of the modern manager as a soft teddy bear, i.e impactless. It really just means a closing gap between players and managers in their influence over the club and path to celebrity status that current times allow.

p262
Evaluating their worth two pages further, managers were compared to FT Global 500 CEO’s. They write:

‘The manager is the de facto organizational leader: the man who makes the decisions that affect product, the guy who hires and fires, and who is the public face of the club.’

Being the face of the club spawns cults behind the manager. Behind this obsession is ‘what might be nowadays termed the ‘Great Person Theory’’, Variant of the abandoned Great Man Theory of History. Turns out the figure for the manager’s influence ‘on the fitness of a football club’ (15%) is approximately close to that of the average american company CEO’s profit contribution. (14.5%)

p267
After the morbid studies of CEO deaths’ effects incurred by among a thousand Danish companies on their successive performance, the conclusion that the manager is more than just a stuffed teddy bear is reached.


FURTHER IDEAS

p306
The last chapter discusses the predictions of the authors, with one being the growing competition at the highest level of the game that allows for more interchangeable players, managers, and systems. They say goals are rare but they will not get any rarer. The notion that 'football is defined by chance and by rarity' is to remain.

p311
The impact of analytics on football may only be significant in its politics. Directing the game grows more detached from the real experience of having played the game at all and im starting to think soon enough the players will be no more than command-executing bots. They maintain that we are not losing the rollercoaster of a sport the sport is.

p316
Authors make the case for the much purer capitalistic nature of football where unlike in American baseball clubs are subject to relegation, bankruptcy and administration. This makes a perfect excuse for the club officials and directors to stay true to the game's traditions.



-----------------------------------------------------------

Enjoyed reading this! I only think The game’s complexity is for its dynamism. But the authors’ main message on the latter half of the book seem to hint at the need of solving football. But i suppose most are just fine with where it’s at, its mysteries giving just enough to keep us avid fans peering through the numbers for patterns. Trends fade and reappear again and when that happens i should already be looking forward to seeing what's next.

The best approaches--tactics for a game, or strategy over the course of a season--are subject to change.

[Nkbejalovarhr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Više o nogometu u Hrvatskoj.

U ovom članku ćemo pogledati još zanimljivih i korisnih informacija o svijetu nogometa u Hrvatskoj! Za vas ljubitelje hrvatskog nogometa ovdje će biti zanimljivo čitati o nogometnim stadionima u Hrvatskoj.

hrvatske lige

Najviša liga u Hrvatskoj je Hrvatska prva nogometna liga, koja se na materinjem jeziku zove Prva hrvatska nogometna liga. Poznatija je kao Prva HNL ili 1. HNL, au vrijeme pisanja ovog teksta nosi naziv Hrvatski Telekom Prva liga iz sponzorskih razloga. Osnovan je 1992. godine kada je rasformirana Jugoslavenska prva liga, au nadležnosti je Hrvatskog nogometnog saveza. Liga je mnogo puta mijenjala format tijekom godina, s dva boda za pobjedu do početka sezone 1994.-1995. To ima smisla, naravno, jer nova liga treba stajati na nogama i odlučiti o vlastitoj strukturi. U hrvatskoj piramidi sedam je nogometnih razina, a prve dvije su glavne. Svi su povezani kroz sustav napredovanja i ispadanja.

Današnji format lige relativno je lako razumjeti. Postoji deset momčadi koje igraju jedna protiv druge jednom kod kuće i jednom u gostima u dva nogometna kola u ukupno 36 utakmica svaka. Na kraju sezone momčad s najviše bodova pobjeđuje, dok momčad s najmanje bodova gubi. Devetoplasirana momčad ulazi u doigravanje protiv drugoplasirane momčadi Druge hrvatske nogometne lige, odnosno HNL-a. Pobjednici lige ulaze u Ligu prvaka (ovdje) u fazi drugog pretkola, a drugoplasirani idu u Europsku ligu u trećem pretkolu. Trećeplasirana ekipa ulazi u isto natjecanje u drugom pretkolu, a četvrtoplasirana u 1. pretkolu.

Reprezentacija Hrvatske

Neposredno prije raspada Sovjetske Savezne Republike Jugoslavije početkom 1990-ih formirana je hrvatska momčad kakvu danas poznajemo. Iako tek trebaju osvojiti veliki međunarodni turnir, osvojili su mnoge pohvale tijekom godina. 1994. i 1998. proglašeni su FIFA-inim "najboljim igračem godine"; nagrada koja se dodjeljuje momčadi koja je najviše napredovala na FIFA-inoj ljestvici tijekom kalendarske godine. Kad je Hrvatska ponovno primljena u FIFA-u, bila je rangirana kao 125. najbolja zemlja na svijetu. Hrvatski uspjeh i kasnije treće mjesto na Svjetskom prvenstvu 1998. doveli su do trećeg mjesta na ljestvici FIFA-e, što ih je učinilo najnestabilnijom momčadi u povijesti. To je akumulirano kada su završili na drugom mjestu u Francuskoj na Svjetskom prvenstvu 2018.

Dio uspjeha Hrvatske tijekom godina temeljio se na domaćoj formi. Između 1992. i 2008. Blazersi, kako ih zovu, odigrali su 36 utakmica kod kuće i ostali neporaženi. Te su utakmice dijelili zagrebački stadion Maksimir i splitski stadion Poljud, a povremene utakmice igrane su na manjim terenima drugdje u zemlji. Među pobjedama koje je Hrvatska upisala bila je pobjeda nad Engleskom od 2-0; momčadi koja je na kraju prekinula taj nevjerojatan niz bez poraza kada su 2008. pobijedili Hrvatsku 4-1.

Povijest nogometa u Hrvatskoj
Olimpijada Jugoslavija protiv Švedske

Povijest kaže da se nogomet u Hrvatskoj prvi put zaigrao 1873. godine kada su emigranti iz Engleske radili na industrijskim projektima u gradovima kao što su Rijeka i Županja i sa sobom donijeli nogomet. Lokalni timovi osnovani su 1907. godine i tada je uveden i prijevod Pravila igre.

Iako su brojni neslužbeni hrvatski timovi sudjelovali u utakmicama tijekom godina, Hrvatska je službeno bila dio prvo Kraljevine Jugoslavije, a potom Socijalističke Federativne Republike Jugoslavije. Hrvatski igrači predstavljali su svoju zemlju u turnirskom nogometu i na Ljetnim olimpijskim igrama 1956. i na Svjetskom prvenstvu i Europskom prvenstvu do neovisnosti 1991. Posljednja jugoslavenska momčad koja je imala hrvatske igrače suočila se s Farskim otocima samo nekoliko dana prije referenduma o neovisnosti.

[Haider Hussain · Rating 3 out of 5]

At its core, The Numbers Game is about the importance of sports analytics. Data is not everything, but trends cannot be offhandedly ignored either. Unlike baseball, basketball and US football, analytics is relatively a new phenomenon in football as the clubs continue to rely mostly on old school methods (Moneyball vs Trouble with the Curve, if you catch my drift). Data analytics can sometimes lead you to a conclusion remarkably different from what conventional wisdom suggests. For example, note these impressions hardly supported by data: corners are good, richer clubs have polarized the game, top four leagues are very different from each other, higher possession means higher the chance of winning, etc. Authors used a lot of interesting data charts to put their point across. One claim I particularly liked is that randomness play more important a role in the outcome of a match than we realize (perhaps more than skill) – a misplaced pass, a lucky player just happened to be there etc.

However, on balance, there are multiple wisdom bites presented as myth-busting facts that any semi-serious football viewer would already know. For example: a team is only as strong as its weakest link; or marquee signings cannot guarantee a win. So the book title might be just a little misleading.

In the end, authors make some very interesting forecasts about football, some of them might already be happening. For example, football has found its equilibrium in terms of average numbers of goals in a match; difference between salary and transfer fees of strikers and defenders will shrink; managers will start relying more on data than their experience as former players once the number flow will increase, which means some of their importance will be replaced by data analysts.

BUT, the good news for viewers is that the strength of randomness and chance mean that the game itself will not change fundamentally, only how it is managed.

An enjoyable read overall.

[John Matthew IV · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good book but a bit dated by now.

p. 17: "teams scored with roughly one of every nine shots they took."

p. 20-1: "For James, the point was to take the numbers and find out what truth they contained, what patterns emerged, what information could be extracted that might change the way we think about the game.

"Repp's quest to use the numbers to inform strategy fell short because he was an absolutist, determined to use his data to prove his beliefs."

p. 22: "Take the 'fact' that teams are most vulnerable just after they have scored. It's a statement found in soccer all over the world, and one born of the tricks played by our minds."

p. 23: "It is immediately after they have scored that teams are least likely to concede."

p. 24: "The correlation [between goals and corners] is essentially zero."

p. 26: "Corners are next to worthless, given the risk of being caught in the counterattack, with your central defenders marooned in the opposition's box, their value in terms of net goal difference is close to zero."

p. 38: "Soccer isn't figure skating. There are no points for style.

"Beauty can be a by-product of successful teams, but just as is is not sufficient for winning games, neither is it necessary."

p. 40: 50/50: "Half the goals you see, half the results you experience, are down not to skill and ability but to random chance and luck."

p. 130: 0>1: "Goals that don't happen are move valuable than those that do."

p. 154: Johan Cruyff: "Without the ball, you can't win. If we have the ball, they can't score!"

p. 188: "Imagine though if David's stones missed their mark; his funeral would have been sparsely attended and his obituary intensely critical."

p. 230: Zonal Marking

p. 233: The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer: authoritative history

p. 271: Arrigo Saachi: "I never realized that in order to become a jockey you to have been a horse first."

p. 313: onfooty.com
p. 313: 5addedminutes.com
p. 322: soccerdata.com