Football and statistics

I’ve been reading the weekly secret footballer in The Guardian. Last Saturday the column, which is written by an anonymous premier league footballer, described the growing use of statistics in football. The description was of a game that was being fundamentally changed by new forms of measurement and analysis. The piece described how certain forms of measured activity were statistically more likely to lead to victory in the match. As such players who performed such activities and had good statistics were highly valued. And generally players were instructed to do certain things on the pitch, with their effectiveness then being measured. The consequence seemed to be that the game itself was transformed by metrics, measurement and analysis. The data created about the game recursively fed back into the actual playing of the game. What is valued seems to be related very closely to the type of play that can be measured – and then shown to be related to positive outcomes. So it sounds like football is being changed by statistics about football.

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