Hello and welcome back to the last blog post of this wonderful journey that you and I have gone through during these past 4 months. Today I will be finishing off my quartet of blog posts by discussing the future of football and the future of football tactics
Statistical analysis has been instrumental in football since the early 2000s but what many people don’t know is that the craze of gathering data in sports events began back in the 1950s. The first influence of statistical analysis in sports was an accountant - Charles Reep. After World War II football stagnated, and Charles as a big proponent of the game began brainstorming ways to revive it, so he came up with statistics. The first grand and important statistic Charles produced was that he noticed that most goals were scored from 3 or fewer passes, which correlated to the increased use of the 4-4-2 formation(read more in blog 2). As good as Reep’s research was, he could never bring his results to the right conclusion, which led to most of his works being discredited as time went on. Despite this, he was still the first statistical analyst.
Charles Reep not only started a football revolution but also created many new job opportunities. In the modern football world, every professional scout has performance analysts, scouts, recruitment analysts, and statistical analysts. The rise of football statistics led to professional clubs needing the right conclusions being made about the presented statistics and the right statistics being presented. Right now statistics serve many purposes in football - smart scouting, xG, xGA, performance analysis, and e.t.c. This data is important to coaches because it allows them to understand how to best arrange their training, their tactics, and therefore their matches. For example, if a coach knows that most of his players have an xG(expected goals) of 0.81 per game but only get 1 goal per game he will work on the finishing of his players, e.t.c.
Every club has at least 3 scouts working for them, as in the modern game smart scouting is essential. Smart scouting is an idea that suggests that when you buy a player, he will perform for you at the highest level possible, and afterward you will be able to sell him on for at least 3 times as much profit. For this blog post, I will take Brentford Football Club as an example of smart scouting. In “The Expected Goals Philosophy” by James Tippet, the author created a table with Brentford’s transfer activity from 2014 to 2020. This is what it looks like:
We can see that every time Brentford sold a player they made at least 3 times as much profit as what they bought him for. They managed to do that through the statistical analysis of each player and therefore knowing exactly which player to buy. We can see that statistical analysis applies not only to in-game situations but also to the behind-the-scenes.
In the past years, what set apart a successful team from an unsuccessful one is money and the interpretation of statistics. Coaches who know how to base their tactics and training of statistics like Jurgen Klopp, first of all, manage to scout players smartly and therefore get good players and furthermore they know how to interpret the statistics of given players. From this information, we can infer that statistics is the future of footballs, as technology is progressing statistics will too.
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