Soccermatics: Mathematical Adventures in the Beautiful Game (Bloomsbury Sigma)

What football had not witnessed, Anderson and Sally felt, was an analytics revolution. Plenty of people were reading the numbers and taking note of what they said: these are the players who have sprinted the most, these are the number of shots we have taken and the rest. But nobody – as far as they could tell, at least – was trying to find out what

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Football, as a more complex team game without a form of real possession, is largely about triangles. One such triangle might be the player currently touching the ball, the one about to receive it, and the off-ball player currently causing the greatest deformation in the defence’s shape. Triangles might replace ‘ball events’ as the key unit of footb

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But then the counting started, and with it came an explosion of new information. The advent of modern sports analysis techniques means that now data is collected on every detail of every ball in every First Class or List A cricket match in the world. For many of those matches and for all internationals and major T20 leagues we also have Hawk-Eye (o

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