Football Analytics is a fast-developing method of looking at football. It is both surprisingly old and relatively new. This book explores the field from it's early false starts, to it's more recent developments and move towards acceptance. This is a book about attempts to analyse football in a statistical way that extracts important and useful information about the game beyond the traditional numbers such as 1-0 and 4-4-2.
The authors spend a great deal of time asking if accepted truths about football are true. For example, does the team with the best defence always win titles? Does a team's star player make a bigger difference to the team's performance than their weakest? In the attempt to answer these questions it's clear that football analytics is still trying to answer a fundamental question - what do you measure?
While exploring what to measure, the book points out how Stoke under Tony Pulis were often an exception to a rule the data suggested. A significant chunk of the book is spent exploring just how much Stoke were an exception, being more successful than the data suggests they should be. This illustrated nicely a couple of points - firstly that analytics is still developing and trying to work out what it is that's important to measure, and secondly that there is not one way to win, multiple ways can be successful.
A disappointment from the book is the misleading subtitle - 'Why Everything You Know About Football Is Wrong'. Many of the conclusions were already things I knew, the book merely put a number on it. For example, players spend far more of the game without the ball than with it. This is obvious so I'm not sure what was achieved by measuring it.
Despite this I did find this an interesting and enjoyable read. Football analytics clearly has some way to go before it's fully developed, but as an alternative way of looking at the game it is already providing useful insights.
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