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

by Chris Anderson

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.

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 shirt—or, when at home, with a towel handily placed for that very purpose—and proceed to catapult it into the box, over and over and over again. To me, as a former goalkeeper, the

benefits of Delap’s 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.

Soccer has always been a numbers game: 1–1, 4–4–2, the big number 9, the sacred number 10. That will not change and we don’t ever want it to. But there is a “counters-reformation” gathering pace that may make another set of figures seem just as important: 2.66, 50/50, 53.4, <58<73<79, and 0 > 1 will all prove to be essential for the future of soccer.

This is a book about soccer’s essences—goals, randomness, tactics, attack and defense, possession, superstars and weak links, development and training, red cards and substitutions, effective leadership, and firing and hiring the

When Liverpool signed Stewart Downing and Jordan Henderson in the summer of 2011, 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.

This was where Reep differed from another outsider who attempted to analyze his sport: Bill James, the baseball statistician whose work—as made famous in the film Moneyball—went on to influence Billy Beane, the Oakland A’s, the Boston Red Sox and the entire game of baseball. 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.

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.

Think of all the soccer matches you have seen: in the overwhelming majority of cases, when a team has gone ahead it has not surrendered the lead immediately. Sometimes it happens, and in spectacular style.

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.

your team buys the best players and hires a great manager, the trophies will follow. In our attempts to discover how great a role chance plays in soccer, we came to a very different answer, however. We have visited betting parlors and laboratories, and we have encountered many of those scientists who share a passion for the beautiful game. We have examined tens of thousands of European league and cup games over the course of a hundred years and World Cup matches played by dozens of countries since 1938. And we have come to the conclusion that soccer is basically a 50/50 game. Half of it is luck, and half of it skill.

The high priest of Total Football was clearly ready to excommunicate Nigel de Jong and John Heitinga. But Cruyff’s analysis misses the point: Holland’s approach in Johannesburg would have paid off in spectacular fashion had Arjen Robben not fluffed a chance to give Bert van Marwijk’s side the lead in the eighty-second minute. The beasts would have done what the beauties never could, and taken the World Cup back to the Netherlands. It may not make for good viewing, but ugliness is no barrier to success. To paraphrase Reiner Calmund, the bombastic former sporting director at Bayer Leverkusen, soccer isn’t figure skating. There are no points for style.

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

There are two routes to success in soccer, 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.

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

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. Soccer results resemble a coin toss.

There are two histories of soccer. One is a tale of wonderful players, of ingenuity and guile and wizardry, constantly finding new ways to improve on (what at the time looks like) perfection. It is supported by Colvin’s theory and by our FA Cup data, and it explains the great defining geniuses who have illuminated soccer’s various ages: Di Stefano, Pelé, Maradona, Zidane, Messi—all finding new horizons, new ways to improve, to take the game to the next level. And there is a second history, one of the men who did all they could to stop them. Not the defenders, but the managers, who dreamed up catenaccio and zonal marking and the sweeper system and all the rest: all of it designed to stop the virtuosos showcasing their talents. Even the tiki-taka style honed and perfected by Barcelona and adopted by Spain has been labeled a primarily defensive approach—passenaccio—because its emphasis is on starving the opposition of the ball. Players have improved as the game has matured: they run faster, they shoot harder, they dribble quicker and they pass more accurately. And as they have improved, so structures have been built to contain them. These structures—offside traps, pressing, zonal marking, triangular passing—are the reason that goal scoring has largely withered on the vine. Tactics and strategies have become more complex, cutting off the supply of goals. As individuals have stretched the limits of their own abilities, so teams have found ways to counteract them.

Over time, soccer was discovered as a game that is fundamentally about avoiding mistakes and punishing the other side for theirs.

This is one of the great misunderstandings about soccer: that fans come to see goals. That was what was behind the change in the offside rule, the introduction of three points for a win, or the abolition of the back-pass—a misguided belief that all supporters want to see are goals. What they really want to see are matches in which every goal is essential and potentially decisive.

For many years soccer has been played in different styles, expressions of the personality of each people, and the preservation of that diversity is more necessary today than ever before.”11 It is an evocative sentiment, beautifully expressed, but one that is open to misinterpretation. Across the world, there is a powerful belief that foreigners, outsiders, immigrants, often fail to grasp the intricacies and subtleties present in their new league. In England, this credo finds itself crystallized in the “rainy night at Stoke test”; that is, the belief that certain types of players cannot be viewed as Premier League material until they have shown they can cut it under a downpour at the Britannia Stadium.

Houston, a former insurance analyst who trained in sports at the Houston Rockets of the NBA, is one of soccer’s first “technical” scouts, a man who uses data to assess the opposition, potential recruits and his own players.

Germany, the Germans said, was different, just as the English think the Premier League is a class apart, and the Spanish and the Italians believe that their type of soccer is unique. In some ways, perhaps they are. Perhaps styles change or the frequency with which the referee blows his whistle varies a little. But when it comes to what really matters, they are not unique at all. The strongest leagues in the world, those in Germany, England, Spain and Italy are distinctly similar when it comes to their key traits. In fact, our data show that, despite superficial differences, the most elite leagues are incredibly alike. Everything that rises must converge.

Consider the types of formations typically employed by teams in the Premier League and La Liga. Data from Opta Sports show that Spanish clubs used a 4–2–3–1 formation in 57.8 percent of all matches they played during the 2010/11 season, while English teams did so in only 9 percent of theirs. By contrast, the preferred formation of English clubs was a classic 4–4–2 (used 44.3 percent of the time). And while the second most preferred formation of Premier League clubs was a 4–5–1—used in 18 percent of all matches—La Liga clubs used 4–5–1 in a negligible 1.3 percent of games. If nothing else, these differences point to contrasting tactical approaches to the game.

When it comes to goals, though, all those findings, and Galeano’s philosophy, do not stand up. It does not matter whether your league has more foreign players or is reliant on homegrown talent; it does not matter if your tactical blueprint was originally inspired by Rinus Michels and Johan Cruyff or by Nereo Rocco and Helenio Herrera, the grandmasters of catenaccio; it does not matter a jot if your league is infused with imports from northern Europe and France, like the Premier League, or Brazil and Argentina, like Spain and Italy, or Eastern Europe, like Germany. It may or may not be true that English players are fair, energetic and robust, that Argentines are wily and erratic, that Brazilians are rhythmic and inventive, and that South Koreans and Japanese players are hardworking and well organized. None of it is important when we look solely at goals in soccer’s top leagues.

one of soccer’s true innovators: Jimmy Hill. In his later years, Hill became familiar as a television presenter and pundit, but there was a time when, as chairman of the Professional Footballers’ Association in the 1950s, Hill was far from part of the establishment. In many ways he was a revolutionary. It was Hill’s campaign to scrap the Football League’s maximum wage—a paltry £20 a week—that led, slowly but surely, to the inflated salaries of today’s Premier League stars. Hill became chairman of Coventry in 1961, as the maximum wage was being abolished, and masterminded the Sky Blue Revolution that transformed the club; the color of their kit changed, they sold the first-ever match-day program and he even gave them a club song. Later, he would commission England’s first all-seater stadium. His most significant legacy, though, is the three-point rule. Hill had long thought that soccer had become too defensive and dull, too uninteresting for spectators. He felt instinctively that goals had become rarer with every passing season. This needed to change for professional soccer to thrive. Hill’s solution was as simple as it was far-reaching: he proposed that victory should be rewarded with three, rather than two, points to make wins more valuable—the equivalent of shifting from silver to the gold standard. After a trial run in the Isthmian League for a few years in the 1970s, Hill won over the Football Association and convinced them to give three points for a win a trial run in...

The experiment was judged such a success that, in 1995, FIFA followed suit, commanding that all its constituent leagues award three points for a victory. Sepp Blatter, general secretary of the game’s governing body, called it “the most important sporting decision taken here, but it rewards attacking soccer.” The reward, the theory went, was 50 percent greater, so teams would take more risks, leading to more goals, more entertainment, more fans.

The real hero of this list is Darren Bent. Indeed, if Chelsea had analyzed goals using our methodology, rather than a simple count of who had scored the most, perhaps they would have realized that the way to turn around their desperate league form in January 2011 was not by splashing £50 million on Torres, but by paying half that for Bent, the most consistent marginal points producer each of the two seasons. And if Roman Abramovich had taken time to notice what proportion of his team’s points were directly down to Bent’s goals, his mind would have been made up. Here, too, Bent’s star is in the ascendant.

Premier League matches see fewer interruptions and are played faster than Serie A matches, but the end result turns out to be very similar.

There are two strategies for producing points in the Premier League: you get more points if you score more goals, but conceding fewer is equally effective. The steepness of our trend lines is similar, and both sets of points cluster tightly to those lines.

But soccer’s obsession with attack does have one negative consequence: the role played by defense, and defenders, is underestimated and misunderstood. Remember our earlier discussion of the dismal performance of defenders and goalkeepers in the Ballon d’Or balloting. There are deep psychological reasons for this; reasons that give us an explanation for why we remember the goals that were scored more than those that were not, and, by extension, why we believe that attack is more important, more worthy, than defense, even though the numbers suggest that is not the case at all.

In truth, although Ferguson didn’t say this publicly, the sale was prompted partly by match data. Studying the numbers, Ferguson had spotted that Stam was tackling less often than before. He presumed the defender, then twenty-nine, was declining. So he sold him.”11

Ferguson has called the decision the biggest mistake of his career. No doubt to some the story would serve as a warning as to the dangers of reducing soccer to a stream of numbers; to us, though, it simply proves that defense is not just undervalued in soccer, but valued entirely incorrectly. This is because of another psychological phenomenon that gets in the way of understanding defense: we remember, and place undue significance on, things that do happen while ignoring those that do not. As the psychologist Eliot Hearst explains: “In many situations animals and human beings have surprising difficulty noticing and using information provided by the absence or nonoccurrence of something . . . Nonoccurrences of events appear generally less salient, memorable or informative than occurrences.”

As a result, people discount causes that are absent (things that didn’t happen) and augment the importance of causes that ar...

not only do we consider the goals that our team score more important than the goals they do not concede, but we value the tackles they make more highly than those challenges that their preternatural sense of positioning, their game intelligence, mean they do not need to make. That is where Ferguson went wrong. He needed to engage in counterfactual thinking: Stam was not doing as much, but that was not a sign of weakness, it was a sign of his quality. But because Ferguson could not see those unmade tackles, he did not value them.

Xabi Alonso, the Spain and ex-Liverpool midfield player, understands this instinctively. He told the Guardian that he was surprised to see so many young players at Liverpool herald “tackling” as one of their strengths. “I can’t get into my head that [soccer] development would educate tackling as a quality, something to learn, to teach, a characteristic of your play,” he said. “How can that be a way of seeing the game? I just don’t understand [soccer] in those terms. Tackling is a [last] resort and you will need it, but it isn’t a quality to aspire to, a definition.”14 To Alonso, tackling happens when something goes wrong, not right.

The best defenders are those who never tackle. The art of good defending is about dogs that do not bark.

So soccer is a schizophrenic game: it’s as much about not losing as it is about winning but pretends otherwise. Why is that? Some soccer cultures value artistry over results. But by definition this means that winning and losing are secondary. Historically, Germans and Englishmen saw this as a foolish approach, something adopted by unpredictable, indolent Latins.

Soccer is not alone in its neglect of understanding and valuing defense. As Bill James, the godfather of baseball statistics, pointed out: “Defense is inherently harder to measure. And this is true in any sport. In any sport, 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.”

As Johan Cruyff said of the Italians: they can’t beat you, but you can lose to them.

Herberger is the man who coined the phrase “the next opponent is always the hardest.”

Having more possession of the ball is no guarantee of victory. In fact, that day in May when Arsenal visited the Britannia and enjoyed almost 75 percent possession—completing 611 passes to Stoke’s 223—they lost 3–1.

That is far from an isolated example. Take Barcelona, widely regarded as the finest club side in the world, contriving to lose on aggregate to Chelsea over two legs in the 2012 Champions League semifinals. Pep Guardiola’s side, brimming with the talents of Lionel Messi, Xavi Hernández, Andrés Iniesta and the rest, had 79 percent of the possession in the first leg and 82 percent in the second. They won neither match. It was the same that season against Mourinho’s Real Madrid: Barcelona had 72 percent of the ball, and lost. The ball is round, as Herberger would say. The unexpected does happen.

A follow-up analysis by Hughes and his colleague Steve Churchill based on the 2001 Copa América confirmed that successful teams played a different kind of soccer from unsuccessful teams. Among other things, successful teams were able to keep the ball for longer and create shots after possessions that lasted more than twenty seconds with more frequency than unsuccessful teams. They also were significantly better at transporting the ball from one end of the pitch to the other and into prime shooting areas.

In the course of one soccer match, nobody plays 90 minutes of soccer. According to Opta Sports, the ball was in play for between 60 and 65 minutes in a typical match across the four top European leagues in 2010/11. In the Premier League, the average was 62.39 minutes.

Stoke have been a Premier League mainstay since 2008. They did what Watford and Wimbledon did before them. They found a way to beat the big boys by using the tools they had at their disposal rather than imitating everyone else.

as Brian Clough memorably said, “If God had meant [soccer] to be played in the air, he would have put grass in the sky”—but

That is the chief difference between success and—if not failure—lack of success in soccer. As may be seen in Figure 36, teams such as Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester City—the sides that we found to play a possession-based game—had a similar conversion rate ( goals from shots on target) to more direct sides; indeed, Stoke were actually more efficient in front of goal than Arsenal, whereas relegated Blackpool were roughly as effective as champions Manchester United. The difference is that Arsenal and Manchester United have 50 percent more shots every game than those teams.5

The effect of this is clear: long-ball clubs have fewer chances to score and therefore score fewer goals, and they end their seasons battling relegation. Sides that treasure possession tend to be at the other end of the table, contesting titles (Figure 37). Those exceptions—from Pulis’s clock-watching Stoke in Figure 37 back to Bolton under Sam Allardyce, who was among the first to apply analytics to the long-ball game—have found a style that helps them maximize their resources and fulfill their ambitions.

There is no winning formula. But try telling Watford, Wimbledon or Stoke that the long-ball game doesn’t work; try telling the Greece of 2004 that attacking soccer wins out more often than the defensive variety; try telling Barcelona or Spain to clear their lines. To each their own. As Bob Paisley, the Liverpool manager, once said: “It’s not about the long ball or the short ball, it’s about the right ball.”

Not every team wants to be Stoke. Not every team can be Barcelona. But every side can find a way to win, if they use all the intelligence at their disposal: that of their own talents and that offered to them by the numbers.