DRIVING WITH A DASHBOARD: IN SEARCH OF NEW TRUTHS ABOUT FOOTBALL
A few years ago, the data department at Manchester City carried out a study of corner kicks. City hadn’t been scoring much from corners, and the analysts wanted to find out the best way to take them. They watched more than four hundred corners, from different leagues, over several seasons, and concluded: the most dangerous corner was the inswinger to the near post.
The beauty of the inswinger was that it sent the ball straight into the danger zone. Sometimes an attacker would get a head or foot to it and divert it in from point-blank range. Sometimes the keeper or a defender stopped the inswinger on the line, whereupon someone bashed it in. And occasionally the ball just swung straight in from the corner. Of course, you wouldn’t want to take every corner as an inswinger. It’s a good idea to hit the odd outswinger too, just to keep the opponents guessing. This is what’s known as a mixed strategy. But all in all, the analysts found, inswingers produced more goals than outswingers.
They took their findings to the club’s then manager, Roberto Mancini, who like almost all managers is an ex-player. He heard them out politely. Then he said, in effect: ‘I was a player for many years, and I just know that the outswinger is more effective.’ He was wrong, but we can understand why he made the mistake: outswingers tend to create beautiful goals (ball swings out, player meets it with powerful header, ball crashes into net) and beautiful goals stick in the memory. The messy goals generally produced by inswingers don’t.
At first Mancini didn’t change his thinking. But sometime around 2011, when City were again having trouble with corners, his assistant David Platt came to chat with the club’s data department. The analysts told Platt about the corners study. They heard nothing more about the matter, but soon they noticed that City had begun taking inswinging corners. In the 2011/2012 season City scored 15 goals from corners, more than any other team in the Premier League. Ten of those goals came from inswingers, including the header from Vincent Kompany against Manchester United that effectively sealed the title for City.
It’s a story that captures where football is today. On the one hand, the March of the Geeks has advanced fast since we first published Soccernomics in 2009. Football is becoming more intelligent. The analysts who now crunch ‘match data’ at almost all big European clubs (and at many smaller ones) are just one symptom of the shift.
Today’s plugged-in clubs know stats like ‘pass completion rates in the final third of the field’, miles run in each phase of the game and pace of sprints for all their players. These numbers increasingly inform decisions on which players to buy and sell.
On the other hand, as Mancini’s initial rejection of the data about corner kicks shows, there is still widespread suspicion of numbers in football. John Coulson of the data provider Opta told us, ‘There are still maybe a lot of teams that view data as a threat rather than as a tool.’ Statisticians don’t always make the best communicators. Baseball has had its Moneyball revolution, but in football, the transformation is still just in its first phase.
This new, updated, expanded edition of Soccernomics uses data to clarify our thinking on topics ranging from tackles through transfers to why England lose and why China might start winning. We have a new chapter on crooked business; one on how the biggest clubs might now finally be turning into serious businesses, and why that isn’t a good thing; and a final chapter arguing that the game has never had it so good (though the smartphone could bring everything down). We have also expanded our thoughts on some mystifying questions, such as: ‘How do clubs use data to judge, buy and sell players?’ and ‘How powerful are agents in the transfer market?’ In every chapter of the book we have found stories and analyses to update, and new thoughts to add.
We’ve watched fans and media shift to our point of view on certain issues: most people now recognize that hosting big tournaments doesn’t make you rich, and also that England shouldn’t expect to win those tournaments. (We wish we could claim responsibility for shifting global opinion, but we can’t.) On other issues, we’ve changed our mind somewhat. In 2009 we were confident that the rest of the world would soon catch up with the best Western European nations. That hasn’t happened, so we’ve had to rethink what’s going on. We’re with the economist John Maynard Keynes: when the facts change, we change our minds.
It’s a long way from Soccernomics’s beginnings in the Hilton in Istanbul one winter’s day in 2007. From the outside the hotel is squat and brutalist, but once the security men have checked your car for bombs and waved you through, the place is so soothing you never want to go home again. Having escaped the 14 million-person city, the only stress is over what to do next: a Turkish bath, a game of tennis, or yet more overeating while the sun sets over the Bosphorus? For aficionados, there is also a perfect view of the Besiktas football stadium right next door. And the staff are so friendly, they are even friendlier than ordinary Turkish people.
The two authors of this book, Stefan Szymanski (a sports economist) and Simon Kuper (a journalist), met here. Fenerbahce football club was marking its centenary by staging the ‘100th Year Sports and Science Congress’ and had flown us both in to give talks.
The two of us had never met before, but over beers in the Hilton bar we found that we thought much the same way about football. Stefan as an economist is trained to torture the data until they confess, while Simon as a journalist tends to go around interviewing people, but those are just surface differences. We both think that much in football can be explained, even predicted, by studying data – especially data found outside football. We decided to write a book together.
When we began writing, Stefan lived in London and Simon in Paris, so we spent a year firing figures, arguments and anecdotes back and forth across the Channel. As we talked more and began to think harder about football and data, we buzzed around all sorts of questions. Why was football such a terrible business? Might the game somehow deter people from killing themselves? And are fans really monogamous?
Applying data to these questions felt like a new project. Until very recently, football had escaped the Enlightenment. Football clubs are still run mostly by men who do what they do because they have always done it that way. These men used to ‘know’ that black players ‘lacked bottle’, and they therefore overpaid mediocre white players. Today they discriminate against black managers, buy the wrong players, and then let those players take corners and penalties the wrong way. (We can, incidentally, explain why Manchester United won the penalty shoot-out in the Champions League final in 2008. It’s a story involving a secret note, a Basque economist and Edwin van der Sar’s powers of detection.)
Entrepreneurs who dip into football also keep making the same mistakes. They buy clubs promising to run them ‘like a business’ and disappear a few seasons later amid the same public derision as the previous owners. ‘I screwed up,’ Tony Fernandes, chairman of Queens Park Rangers, told us. Fans and journalists aren’t blameless, either. Many media headlines rest on false premises: ‘Newcastle Land World Cup Star’, ‘England Underachieve’ or ‘World Cup Will Be Economic Bonanza’. The game is full of unexamined clichés: ‘Football is becoming boring because the big clubs always win’, ‘Football is big business’ or ‘The big money will turn fans off’. None of these shibboleths has been tested against the data.
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