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

by Chris Anderson

Corners are next to worthless; given the risk of being caught on the counterattack, with your central defenders marooned in the opposition’s box, their value in terms of net goal difference is close to zero. Next time your side wins a corner, think twice before urging your tallest players forward. It may be better to play it short, to retain possession, than to hit and hope. The numbers can help us see the game in a different light. What we have always done is not necessarily what we must always do.

I've always wondered at the British tradition of cheering corners with such enthusiasm

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

So then what are good teams better at? Positioning? Luck? Less body odor?

longer passing sequences mean more shots for the attacking team, but they also mean lower rates of conversion of shots into goals.

This was a joyous moment, in which I understood an important truth about the world: because we tend to reward others when they do well and punish them when they do badly, and because there is regression to the mean, it is part of the human condition that we are statistically punished for rewarding others and rewarded for punishing

We're wired to ignore regression to the mean.

Because managers do not take into account the concept of regression to the mean, they simply tend to regress to being mean.

Can generalize to more than soccer. Work, parenting, etc.