Football for Sceptics

The beautiful game is steeped in tradition. The beautiful game
clings to its dogmas and its truisms, its beliefs and its credos. The
beautiful game is run by men who do not wish to see their power
challenged by outsiders, who know that their way of seeing the
game is the true way of seeing the game. They do not want to be
told that, for more than a century, they have been missing
something. That there is knowledge that they do not possess. That
how things have always been done is not how things should always
be done.
The beautiful game is wilful in its ignorance. The beautiful game
is a game ripe for change.
And at the centre of that change are numbers. It is numbers that
will challenge convention and invert norms, overhaul practices and
shatter beliefs. It is numbers that let us glimpse the game as we have
never seen it before.
Every world-class club knows this. All of them employ analysis
staff, specialists in data collection and interpretation who use all the
information they can glean to plan training sessions, design playing
systems, plot transfers. There are millions of pounds and hundreds
of trophies at stake. Every club is prepared to do anything it takes to
gain the slightest edge.
But what none of those clubs has yet managed to do is take those
numbers and see their inner truth. It is not just a matter of
collecting data. You have to know what to do with them.
This is football’s newest frontier. It is often said that football
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 football, in all of its complex glory, all the
more. This is the future. There is no stopping it.
That is not to say all of football’s traditions are wrong. The data
we are now able to gather and analyse confirm that some of what
we’ve always thought was true really is true. Beyond this, however,
the numbers offer us further truths, make clear things we could not
have known intuitively and expose the falsehoods of ‘the way it’s
always been done’. The biggest problem resulting from following a
venerated tradition and hardened dogma is that they are rarely
questioned. Knowledge remains static while the game itself and the
world around it change.