I’m not really sure if there’s much more they can do, short of randomly throwing some numbers together and pretending that they mean something. Baseball is good at doing that, though, so I guess it’s not completely out of the question. But play in a game of flow (like soccer, basketball, or hockey) are inherently more difficult to quantify than it is in games of short chunks (like football and baseball), and there tend to be fewer meaningful correlations between individual statistics and team performance.

s/are/is

But Dan, don’t you think it’d be great to see the kinds of passing charts I’m talking about?  It’s partly about trends and partly about being able to tell the story of the game visually, you know?  I think it’d make a huge difference.

I dunno. I think of passing charts a lot like I think of shot charts in NBA games. Interesting but largely irrelevant. Seeing a display of all the passes a player made over the course of the match doesn’t really tell you how plays developed, or how that player contributed to them. It’s just a collection of information, presented without any sort of narrative attached to it. A play-by-play for a baseball or football game is a lot more useful, since it at least presents the action in the order it actually occurred.

If there’s a sport more keen to embrace ‘tradition’ than footy, then I’m just not familiar with it…

Like Dan suggests, baseball and A. Football can use such stats because those games are highly dependent upon situations. Even basketball and hockey lend themselves more toward tracking situational statistics.

But soccer. Never. Stops. And tracking stats that involve more than two players at any one time will likely become a nightmare. Plus, even if it was possible, it’s a game that wouldn’t be able to capitalise on it particularly well. What good would it do to know a player is especially effective at passing the ball from deep in his end on the left side of the penalty area to the mid-field circle?

I think you are just seeing a national tendency.  Americans like stats, the English don’t care as much about them (I’m a dual national, I claim to know what I’m talking about).  When I moved to the US at the age of 24 as an all-round sports nut I was simply fascinated by the amount of stats, it never occurred to me to think about sports like that - because we really think of it as more art than science in England.  I personally really like the stats dimension, but I just like math (maths) anyway.

Cricket has always used stats, but not really any other English sport.  I do see more stats on (proper) football sites nowadays than I used to (how far Frank Lampard ran in the game, what percentage of his passes were accurate).  But I still think the national attitude means broad statistical analysis - at least from the source - will be unlikely.

I certainly agree with Santa that tracking these stats would be difficult.  And Dan, maybe you’re right about the shot charts.  But I also admit to looking at them for basketball games I miss that I care about.

In the end, though, I do wish I could sift through information about players, positions, teams, and tendencies.  Whether or not that makes me a dork.

Holy shit, the Guardian has “interactive chalkboards.”  It’s like a dream come true!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/chalkboards

David Hamilton is correct.

In my youth, I used to write sports simulations for the computers of the day.  (In fact, I still have the simulation of American football that I wrote back in 1975, and it still works.  Been recompiled a few times.)  I wrote one for basketball in college that impressed the first year coach that his team could beat the #2 team in the country…  I had it as Duke 55 UNC 52, the final was Duke 66 UNC 65 in OT.

I wanted to write this kind of simulation for football.  I went looking for the kind of detailed statistics that I needed, things like possession, foul rates, etc.  I called the Football Association in London (at the time, it was about $1.50 per minute) only to be told that the only stats that were kept were the number of games played and the number of goals scored…  Because that was all that mattered. 

I eventually wrote something that I used as a grad student in Scotland to play the pools…  Never won. :-(

This tracking technology is available, and widely in use at the top level of football. Sky Sports, for instance, calls its version ‘prozone’, and it’s similar to the eponymous engine in the crystal-meth-like addictive game Championship Manager (-08 and onwards), although it’s obviously real.

It’s not that hard, given all the cameras on the pitch and data recognition systems these days, to click on a player and have a program generate 90 minutes’ of data. Football is, after all, a huge business these days, and clubs use this sort of thing to focus on improving their players. European match coverage often shows, for example, how far a player being subbed has run. (Rooney 65min, 10.7km. Berbatov 89min, 3.1km, if we’re lucky.)

However, it’s probably quite expensive to generate, I’d imagine you’d have to have an analyst look at the stats for each player for 90 mins to ensure the computer model was accurate, and so on, hence it’s not widely available. Opta stats are paid for by some UK newspapers and sites like Sky Sports, and occasionally trotted out if a journalist wants to make a particular point, or for Fantasy points, but I haven’t found them widely published anywhere.

As it happens, I’ve applied for a job at Opta, so if I get an interview, or better still the job, I will try to find out directly.

Oh, and emotively speaking, while there is a place for stats, it’s never going to replace your gut feeling as a fan. If you watch your club week-in, week out, especially if you can watch the full games and not part of a highlights package, as a fan I feel you develop an instinctive idea of who is the best passer, hardest worker, or whatever, and the stats would just prove you right, mostly.

And what they don’t tell you is often more important - like who plays the BIG games well. The perma-tanned Cristiano was often accused of being a ‘flat-track bully’, ie great against the minnows, but uninmpressive when it mattered, although I felt that was harsh. Stevie Gerard, I hate to say, is the sort of player who raises his game for the big matches, but if his pass accuracy was 5% lower than that of, say Carragher, who generally just knocks it from defence to a midfielder, would the statistics suggest that?

Rowinio, I am completely with you re: first-hand knowledge being a far better gauge of truth in sport than stats. I have argued this in American fantasy football for years—my column the last two years at Footballguys.com was dedicated to highlighting what the stats missed each week. However, stats can still help you translate what you see qualitatively into something quantitative.  I think my post on Gerrard and Bolton’s marking of him is a decent example. 

And more importantly, when you didn’t get a chance to see anything because you missed a match, stats can help you fill in the small details of what happened (as opposed to the highlight package).  If you’re new to a game, stats also help you know what to look for from different players at different positions.  And every once in a while, stats will open your eyes to something you hadn’t realized before.  They are an excellent tool to have in the belt, even if they’re not as important as seeing something yourself.