Instead, this is a history book about some of the people who tried to introduce data to the industry, and how they had a hard time doing so because of the conventional wisdom that only previous professional players could really have a say about the game. The two wrote a book ‘The Numbers Game’ about how statistics could be used in football and then moved to England to use their insights.

In his own words, an appreciation of xG requires only “an open mind and the mathematic understanding of a fourteen-year-old”. I can't give it full marks because I found it too shallow in its treatment of the metrics being used by the teams to achieve their goals. In Denmark, they are now even trying to apply the same approach to one area that would seem immune to it: the psychology Of players. The glory of football, but also the flaw in it, is that there are so many ways to enjoy it,” Smith says. For someone who regularly checks football analytics stats this was a very interesting read to learn more about how the American sports analytics influence is influencing the European Leagues, particularly the Premier League, in addition to American increasingly having shareholdings in Premier League clubs.

Football has always measured success by what you win, but only in the last twenty years have clubs started to think about how you win. Perhaps that is because the author was not able to get access to a Brentford or a Brighton, who hold their cards very close to their chest - but without the example of a club using data extensively (difficult to use Liverpool due to the influence of Klopp in my view), I am not sure the book's title quite fits the narrative.

But) I spoke to Ashley in Manila and it struck me that all of it begins with a person tapping a button. We think the players can't get thinner or fitter or run more or work harder, so this must be it' he said. He is a long-time contributor to FourFourTwo and has authored seven books, including the best-selling Highbury: The Story of Arsenal in N5, and Get It On: How The '70s Rocked Football was published in March 2022. There is a lot that has been disre-garded, Ankersen said, whole areas of the game that nobody has ever really tried to improve. that the greatest challenge to the use of data in football was not - despite received wisdom running to the contrary - that the game was too fluid to be quantified, but that it was occupied by a group of traditionalists and conservatives who would see the empirical truths offered by the numbers as a threat to their power.But that is also part of the Moneyball way of doing things, according to Beane himself; that record-breaking signing makes sense if the data says the value is there, bargain or not. So this book, sitting squarely at the intersection of my personal and professional interests, was pretty much guaranteed to get my full attention. Midtjylland - and Brentford - run on data; everything is checked and assessed and verified according to the data: the players they sign, the way they play, the decisions they make. Expected Goals charts his remarkable journey into the heart of the modern game and reveals how clubs across the world, from Liverpool to Leipzig and Brentford to Bayern Munich, began to see how data could help them unearth new players, define radical tactics and plot their path to glory.