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

by Chris Anderson

Football, they determined, was a stochastic (i.e. random) process: one in nine shots yielded a goal, but which one of them would go in was hard to say.

He knew that teams scored once every nine shots; and he knew that a vast portion of goals scored came from regains in and around the opposition’s penalty area. And so he concluded, sweepingly and without doubt, that teams were – statistically speaking – better off if they spent less time trying to string together passes and more time moving the ball quickly and efficiently into their opponents’ box. And so the efficiency of the long-ball game – minimum input and maximum output – was confirmed.

Analytics is not about trying to use the numbers to prove a theory, but to see what the numbers actually tell us, to discover if our beliefs are correct, and if they aren’t, to inform us what we should believe instead. As with any journey of discovery, challenging accepted wisdom can be unsettling.

Corners are next to worthless; given the risk of being caught on the counter-attack, with your central defenders marooned in the opposition’s box, their value in terms of net goal difference is close to zero.

there is a consistency to the randomness that defines the sport.

And we have come to the conclusion that football is basically a 50/50 game. Half of it is luck, and half of it skill.

football isn’t figure skating. There are no points for style.

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.

what appeared senseless, random, is actually subject to a predictable pattern.

Bernoulli’s basic rule is this: if you do something for long enough, every possible outcome will occur.

The lower the odds, the more unlucky the favourite for any game has to be to lose, and the more their opponents have to rely on luck to win. When two teams are similar in quality, then luck and on-the-day form decide the contest, and the two teams’ odds of winning in the eyes of bookmakers will be identical.

Bookmakers, in other words, pick favourites less successfully in football than in any other sport.

Put in plain English, Skinner and Freeman’s data suggested that half of all World Cup matches are decided by chance, not skill. The better team wins only half of the time. Football results resemble a coin toss.

Football is a sport of chance and fortune, in which all we can hope to do is make the best of what little influence we have.

That says a lot about the nature of the game we love. Where once football was purely an attacking sport, it is now focused on developing a symmetry between scoring and not conceding.

‘In many situations animals and human beings have surprising difficulty noticing and using information provided by the absence or non-occurrence of something … Non-occurrences of events appear generally less salient, memorable or informative than occurrences.’

Maldini never had to get his legs dirty because he was always in the right place to cut off the danger. The best defenders are those who never tackle. The art of good defending is about dogs that do not bark.

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.17

Our memories and our minds may let our eyes trick us into placing greater significance on what we can see, but it is dangerous to overvalue attack at the expense of defence. Yes, one goal for is greater than not scoring, 1 > 0, but keeping a clean sheet is more valuable than scoring a single goal, 0 > 1. Those multimillion-pound strikers are only worth investing in if your back line is solid.

‘The ball is round, so that the game can change direction.’ When the ball is in play, he meant, anything can happen.

on average, players had the ball for a total of 53.4 seconds and ran 191 metres with it during the course of a match. To put these numbers in perspective, the time – less than a minute – that the average player spent with the ball made up only about 1 per cent of the time he spent on the pitch. The numbers are also striking if you consider that the total distance covered by the average player in a match is around eleven kilometres – so running with the ball made up about 1.5 per cent of the total distance each one covered.

While the amount of possession Carling recorded varied by position, the critical part of the story is that players did very little that actually involved the ball – 99 per cent of the time they didn’t touch it, and 98.5 per cent of the time they ran without it. When they eventually did touch the ball, it was gone in an instant.

Football is not a possession sport. It is a game of managing constant turnovers.

The typical Premier League side has almost 200 fresh opportunities every game to do something with the ball. Most of the time, whoever has it tries to pass it. The single most common action players perform are passes in all shapes and sizes: short, long, with the head or the foot, crosses, goal kicks, flick-ons, lay-offs – passes account for well over 80 per cent of events on the pitch. The next largest categories of ball events, at 2 per cent or less each, are things like shots, goals, free kicks, dribbles and saves. Possession, boiled down, is delivering the ball to a teammate. Possession is turnover-free passing.

Good teams are not better at passing than bad ones. They simply engineer more easy passes in better locations, and therefore limit their turnovers.

Pass completion percentages are nice, but avoiding turnovers is the most potent weapon of all. The teams that had less than half the turnovers in any given match won around 44 per cent of the time, while those that gave the ball away more won only slightly less than 27 per cent of the games. Having the ball is good. But not giving it back is better.

David could have taken Saul’s armour and his helmet and tried to fight Goliath toe to toe. He didn’t. He chose, instead, a very different stratagem.

‘Deconstruct tactics, and you find that basically it’s a way to minimize a team’s weaknesses while maximizing its strengths.

Your strategy is what you plan to do over the entire season. Your tactics are what you do to get you there in the course of an individual game. To fulfil your strategy, you must get your tactics right; and your tactics must always fit your team and your opponent.

If you want to build a team for success, you need to look less at your strongest links and more at your weakest ones. It is there that a team’s destiny is determined, whether it will go down in history or be forever considered a failure. And that makes a football team really rather like a NASA space shuttle.

In the United States, organ donation is rare because you have to tick a box on your driving licence if you wish to donate; in Europe, donation is common because you have to tick a box if you wish not to.

‘I never realized that in order to become a jockey you have to have been a horse first’; the best students may not make the best teachers. Many of the foremost managers of the current era – Mourinho, Wenger, Benítez – were either mediocre players or didn’t play at all.

The idea that sacking managers is a panacea for a team’s ills is a placebo. It is an expensive illusion.

Note that buried in the player’s phrase ‘bring out the best in me’ is the regression to the mean – he was underperforming, he got yelled at, and then he played better. But that does not mean he got better because he was yelled at.

talent as deliberate practice.

‘Practice as much as you feel you can accomplish with concentration. Once when I became concerned because others around me practiced all day long, I asked [my mentor] Professor Auer how many hours I should practice, and he said, “It really doesn’t matter how long. If you practice with your fingers, no amount is enough. If you practice with your head, two hours is plenty.”

‘We were in a position where we could try anything and no matter what happened we were probably not going to end up any worse.’

Often only desperation, marginality and a lack of money can create the conditions that support innovation. It is easy to draw the parallel in football. There, too, we can expect necessity to become the mother of invention.

Goals may not be the most reliable performance metric. When a team can do all the right things and can still end up losing, goals are not the best gauge of whether they played well.