In 2016, Smith became the chief soccer correspondent of The New York Times and is a former journalist for The Times, Independent, and Daily Telegraph. As well covering how and why it is calculated, Tippett illustrates that the value of expected goals data comes in the fact that it provides genuine insight into a team’s performance whilst simplifying the process of measuring it. The glory of football, but also the flaw in it, is that there are so many ways to enjoy it,” Smith says. The Justice Table ranks teams in a division according to the Expected Points (xP) they have accumulated over the course of the season.

It’s a fascinating subject to be sure, but the football man vs data boffin debate continues to rage even now in what should be more enlightened times. One chapter of the book is devoted to xG’s role in soccer scouting and the example of Brentford, owned by Smart-odds founder Matthew Benham. This is the story of modern football's great data revolution and the group of curious, entrepreneurial personalities who zealously believed in its potential to transform the game. Starts off strong with insights into the first teams that started to introduce data and the theories etc they were applying.Smith says this “ is always a more compelling idea” than trying to break down what an algorithm does.

Obviously, the resistance to data and their interpretors such as mathematicians, physicists and others, has decreased seeing that more clubs hire a broad scope of people without any prior experience with football to analyze and interpret matches.Shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award 2022 Football has always measured success by what you win, but only in the last twenty years have clubs started to think about how you win. These tagged games are packaged and sent to Impect’s clients, which include some of the world’s biggest clubs, like Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich. Spurs partnership with Decision Technology ended in 2018 and it is fair to say they’ve not hit the same heights since then and Liverpool have somewhat flattened out as Klopp’s influence has grown the data seems to have taken a back seat there too. His aim: to infiltrate the strange, insular world of professional football by establishing a club whose entire DNA could be built around data. The company's foundational metric - the piece of information it is looking for from a game - is known by the slightly uncomfortable anglicism of packing.

His suggestions to improve the current system include placing chips in player’s boots and using Hawkeye technology to more accurately measure the trajectory of the ball. This is a human story after all; one embracing the beginning of a revolution that has yet to really soar. It was something of a relief that I didn't have to switch on parts of my brain that I turn off at 5pm. He discovered that football was a game not of possession but of turnovers, and that those turnovers were disproportionately valuable: long before Jürgen Klopp and Ralf Rangnick and even Marcelo Bielsa made it the bedrock of their playing philosophies, he could claim that the most sure-fire way of recording a shot on goal was to win the ball back in or near the opposition penalty area, and he had the data to prove it.But) I spoke to Ashley in Manila and it struck me that all of it begins with a person tapping a button. Brentford get a passing mention and it would have been more insightful to develop their story and how they have surpassed the achievements to of much better resourced clubs with intelligent use of data, making them the Oakland A's of the book. Glass’s Aberdeen side were profligate in front of goal and leaky at the back, but I imagine the data league table made probably put a good sheen on things as they were a team creating chances and not conceding many albeit they were high percentage chances inevitably put away by the opposition as we found ourselves on a string of 1-0 defeats or rather uncreditable draws. In today’s game, many clubs pay statisticians vast sums of money to (hopefully) give them an advantage when it comes to the transfer market or analysis of player performance.

Money-ball' was about exploiting inefficiencies in the market; paying premium fees was the very definition of an inefficiency. It is our first love: Fútbol, then our mothers (and believe me, they are well aware of their place).However, how clubs work with all the "newly" available data is so well kept secrets that it wasn't really a theme in the book. Smith expertly puts together these seemingly disparate vignettes to paint a vivid picture of football’s innate resistance to change, the role “outsiders” played in this revolution, and explain how data has increased the sport’s accessibility. Aberdeen have been forward in advising that data has contributed to the signings of the likes of Duk, Miovski, Ramadani and more latterly Rubezic and Sokler. He also saw that a third of his team’s goals came from set pieces and that keeping 15 clean sheets in the season helps avoid relegation. The celebratory, revealing, inspiring, and enter