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

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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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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