The authors argue that weaker players have a bigger impact on a team's points tally than stronger ones, and claim convincingly that success in a single match is as much about luck as skill. Anderson and Sally examined 8,232 matches in the major European leagues from 2005-2011 and found that the team that has more shots on target only wins between 50-58% of the time, depending on the country. Corner kicks have little effect when it comes to increasing a team's chances of scoring, and even having more shots on goal doesn't guarantee success. These minutes are, in fact, when a team is least likely to concede. That a team is most vulnerable immediately after they score has been a staple of TV commentary for decades, but the data shows it to be false. Pundits, armchair and professional, will find that several of their long-cherished truisms are not true at all. The Numbers Game begins with a question, asked by Sally, a behavioural economist and football novice, of Anderson, who played in the German fourth division before becoming a politics professor: why, if Stoke City have had repeated success with long throws, haven't other teams copied them? Anderson's answers prompt further questions and encourage the pair to chronicle the history of football analytics from pioneers such as Charles Reep – who in the 1950s published his theories in the magazine Match Analysis – to the present day, debunking several myths en route. So in what way is "everything we know about football" wrong? The mere mention of the word "data" makes some football fans' eyes glaze over. What's more, the experts are yet to convince the masses or all of the managers. With football, the situation regarding analytics is far fuzzier – the game is more fluid and much more complicated to track and analyse. The As went on a 20-game winning streak, a league record. Other teams' hand-me-downs, players ignored or undervalued, were recruited. Instead of listening to grizzled scouts with prejudices as ingrained as the varnish on the bleachers, they trusted in statistical models and metrics. A tiny budget – the third smallest in the league – forced the Oakland Athletics to become revolutionaries. The story of how Billy Beane, and the maths wizards he appointed, transformed decades of major league baseball methodology is gripping. In America, at least, almost everyone is a Moneyballist now. Each year the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics conference, founded in 2006 and affectionately dubbed Geekapalooza, gets bigger and more prestigious. It is now shorthand for the use of detailed statistics in sport, particularly around recruitment – these days, a great many elite sport teams accept that fracking raw data produces insights the human eye, no matter how experienced, will miss. Michael Lewis's book, published in 2003, was a sports-business biography that became a movement. The Book of Genesis for analytics in sport the tome which lifted the darkness on the face of the deep.
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