Statistics in Football

Football is the most popular and widely played sport on Earth, with over 5 billion people who are involved with the sport in one way or another. With such a vast audience, the footballing world has always incorporated new technological advances and innovation to the game to keep it interesting for the fans in a bid to create a sport that supersedes time. Statistics is a huge part of the game, the way it is played and the advances in technology that are being incorporated into the most widely played sport. Over the last decade, statistics has been incorporated heavily into football. Players and clubs now have data on their minute-to-minute performance which enables them to better improve their game and perform at their peaks for longer.

Football has come a long way in terms of how it has been played over the past few decades and statistics and data analytics have been at the forefront of this change. The game of football revolves around numbers, from the simplest data such as goals scored to more complex metrics such as expected goals (xG) per game or goal probabilities (what the probability of scoring a goal is from a particular play and a certain part of the pitch), statistics has changed football for the better. It was not always this way; Initially, football was more resistant to the analytics revolution than any other sport. European teams generally rejected the emergence of numbers and graphs, choosing the intensely imbued subjective nature of the game and the intangible grit of players on the field. But in the first decade of the 2000s, teams established new analytics divisions charged with data collection, and by the end of the decade, analytics had become ubiquitous in the top leagues. For example, ball possession, a very basic metric that tells us how much time each team has the ball in their possession in a game, was calculated manually until about 20 years ago. 

Today, audiences are spoilt for choice when it comes to the data that they want to access on any match, team, player or even a coach. The greater advantages though, lie with the coaches and teams. The bigger the club, the more analytics and data they use to improve player and team performance. Big clubs like Bayern Munich, Barcelona, and Real Madrid use data analytics in very specific ways to improve player performance. According to one report, clubs are now able to tune their player’s training and diet plans in such a way that they hit their peak performance levels during a particular time of the season. Additionally, tactics and the way teams play has also been impacted by the advent of statistical technology in football. Clubs now hire specialized data analysts to help improve their play and devise tactics against specific clubs depending on the way their opponent has played historically.

As the world of sports continues to evolve, so does data analysis in it. Everyday large companies such as Opta and Amazon Web Services strive to come up with new metrics with which the game can be improved and made more intuitive. Statistics has revolutionized the way football is played and perceived around the world. And as the world ushers in the new age of big data and technology, the beautiful game is sure to follow suit.

~ Gunavanth Mahendra