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Expected Goals: The story of how data conquered football and changed the game forever

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Spurs partnership with Decision Technology ended in 2018 and it is fair to say they’ve not hit the same heights since then and Liverpool have somewhat flattened out as Klopp’s influence has grown the data seems to have taken a back seat there too. We are all quite protective of the way that we enjoy the sport and secretly, deep down, we think the way we enjoy it is the ‘right’ way to enjoy it.

There were concerns in the wider public about the German’s last season at Borussia Dortmund, where the team had finished a lowly seventh. It is a bit of a fun riot of a read if you like soccer and even if you just maybe even heard about analytics that one time at the pub, but don't expect a direct analog to Moneyball.The problem though is there is no central club and character in Oakland and Billy Beane respectively to really make it as effective a book as MoneyBall. 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. This could be based on the number of games or shots taken but it’s also important to consider the number of actual goals against the expected goals. This book is an excellent insight into not only the power and value of data and information, but an indictment of the incredibly poor, short sighted and incompetent people managing a multi billion dollar business and losing most it, due to poor decisions in recruitment, strategy, tactics and investment. xG can not only be used to predict the winner of a soccer match, but also which player might score or assist a goal.

In 2016, Smith became the chief soccer correspondent of The New York Times and is a former journalist for The Times, Independent,and Daily Telegraph.I just found the content pretty meaningless without diving into the details of how data is changing team compositions, style of play, formations, etc. Tippett provides good detail on how bettors can analyse xG stats to inform their betting throughout the book, such as the fact that it not only can it be used to predict the winner of a soccer match but also which player might score or assist a goal.

Smith expertly puts together these seemingly disparate vignettes to paint a vivid picture of football’s innate resistance to change, the role “outsiders” played in this revolution, and explain how data has increased the sport’s accessibility. The clubs that parse the data best will, if the early years of the digital era have illustrated anything, make more good decisions or, at the very least, fewer bad ones. However, most of the stories just weren’t that engaging, or the ‘pay off’ didn’t justify the journey. Tippett describes how Smartodds produced their own expected goals model to identify value in betting markets and place money on teams that the model had recognised as having a better chance of winning than the bookmakers’ odds suggested.Obviously, the resistance to data and their interpretors such as mathematicians, physicists and others, has decreased seeing that more clubs hire a broad scope of people without any prior experience with football to analyze and interpret matches. 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. But) I spoke to Ashley in Manila and it struck me that all of it begins with a person tapping a button. Over the last couple of years, I have developed a disdain for the suffusion of data ino the sport, primarily born out of my inability to understand or appreciate the changing lexicon of footballing discourse. As an employee of the German data analysis company Impect, Flores “tags” games—putting in every action by a player and tabulating this on pre-specified metrics.

There’s the incredible story of the Ivy League academic Chris Anderson, who moved to England to put his ideas about a data-driven approach into practice and briefly became the managing director for Coventry City.All the stories follow a familiar path of some person usually in a stable white collar job but with a gut instinct that data should be somehow useful in football and with little to no knowledge of how football operates they set about accomplishing their goal including quitting their stable jobs. He charts the data revolution in football, the way statistical analysis has become central to how clubs operate. The structure of the book was similar to The Blind Side in that it followed the individual story of Chris Anderson across the book, while covering the story of analytics in general.

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