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

by Chris Anderson

They discovered that a team’s odds of completing a pass were generally only as good as a coin toss – around 50 per cent – but that they diminished with each additional pass completed. 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.

our data show that the average corner is worth about 0.022 goals, or – more simply – that the average Premier League team scores a goal from a corner once every ten games.

In football, it’s only a slight majority: a little over half. In handball, basketball and American football the favourites win around two-thirds of their games while in baseball it’s a solid 60 per cent. Bookmakers, in other words, pick favourites less successfully in football than in any other sport.