‘LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND STATISTICS’ - A POSITION ON THE IRRELEVANCE OF STATISTICS IN FOOTBALL
The cold hearted, emotionless prevalence of statistics permeates every aspect of our post-truth lives. Where nothing means anything unless it's quantifiable. The halls of business and government hum with the air of 'metrics' and these 'quantifiables' - yuck. For these sectors it's understandable. Capitalism and state control have an easier job when it reduces people to the very basics of how they'd like us to behave - as a number or a couple of lines of code. But football, football is sacred. Glorious and emotional, unexplainable, and unexpected - concepts which fans, from this writer’s perspective - cannot rationalise with anything other than their hearts and minds.
In the Potter era, especially last season, statistics have been regularly used as a salve to soothe the concerned. ‘But look we should be higher up the league based on... (some unintelligible series of case sensitive letters (xG?) or unromantic phrases such as ‘shot creating actions’)’. The unfortunate and understandably difficult reality for our fanbase is that we knew how well we were playing - without accumulating a reasonable return of points.
The rise of statistics over the past twenty years or so is in part based on the explosion of online betting. Bookmakers have created a culture of wagers on any number of situations or instances such as ‘who will win the next corner?’. You can bet on anything and people certainly do. Screens are furiously tapped away at while flat lager is served and squelched into the carpets of pubs by disinterested 30-something blokes like me who just want something to shout at on their dreary Saturday afternoons.
The same can be said of Fantasy Football, a game-within-a-game where you ‘score points based on those players' actual statistical performance or their perceived contribution on the field of play’ (Wikipedia). Fantasy Football and online betting are marketed and played to make otherwise irrelevant matches exciting and meaningful for the swelling customer base that is the modern football fan. Rating players on their stats creates an attitude that the result doesn’t matter, ‘as long as Danny Ings scored it’s all good’.
The rise of this culture has contributed to the idea that the game can be summarised or understood as a series of unrelated data points. Self-serving statistics are now a component of a game which, in its televised format, feels at times purely put on for the benefit of digital betting companies and broadcasters. Reducing watching the game down to a series of metrics dims the vibrancy of football as this meme demonstrates:
Gordon Greer at Pride
I get it, I do. Statistics and their bed-fellows gambling and Fantasy Football create another way to connect to a game which has been pulled away from its roots - as a theatre for the working class - and replanted in pubs or on television sets globally by the money men. The ‘premier league’* and their media associates have successfully marketed their product, first nationally and more recently globally, to fans who don’t have a tangible connection to a team. It reinforces their marketing message that the only thing that matters is the ‘premier league’. A casual fan will, for example, be able to tell you what KDB’s xG is more confidently than the name of Oldham’s ground. And that’s the way ‘the premier league’ want it.
The suits clamour for more exciting ways to increase engagement with their distant customers and draw them in by serving up what the internet calls ‘content’. This clamour for 'content' and the myriad online accounts which regurgitate this analysis propagate the myth that stats mean anything. For some it's a way to add colour to a game they can’t really ‘feel’. A futile attempt to replace the instantaneous emotion being in attendance creates and to rationalise a game which is essentially random and subjective to intangibles - confidence, weather, beach balls, slips, tufts of grass, pitch-invaders. I get it! But think it’s worth about as much as the change Alan Mullery chucked on the floor against P****e in 1976.
There’s a very definite place for @oilysailor style, Super Freakonomics-esque ridiculousness, see: Vardy is now only six PL goals behind Brighton and Hove Albion from September 2020. Curios such as this undoubtedly add colour and humour to an otherwise dull data set of ‘analysis’.
The case for statistics in football also certainly makes sense from the inside. Football clubs looking to create any competitive advantage in games or recruitment where every percentile matters will of course use the statistics. But what is the value from the outside in? What worth does it have to a fan who really loves the game? It’s not cricket, that’s for the summer, and it’s certainly not baseball, that’s a nice background to eat hot dogs to.
Ultimately football has a definitive way of establishing success or not – the league table, ordered by points acquired by results. In football the only numbers relevant are the few displayed on the scoreboard at full time and the accumulation of numbers displayed on the league table. Think of Ceefax, or the heartwarming tone of James Alexander Gordon (RIP). He scored, they lost, they drew, they won, that’s it. The rest is irrelevant.
*A note on style: The writer, on principal, refuses to refer to the brand name of the conglomerate formed in 1992 to more effectively market top-flight football in England. It will be referred to exclusively as the ‘premier league' without any titular capitalisation and with inverted commas in order to indicate the top-flight of English football is neither 'premier' or the premier league. Which league is premier is a completely subjective point and certainly not the decision of Rupert Murdoch et al. The Premier League™ is a brand name and the writer will not do lip service to promoting its registered trademark. LOL.
This article was first published in Dogma / Issue 3 and has been slightly amended here.