The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Soccer Is Wrong

Chris Anderson, David Sally

Penguin, Jul 30, 2013 - Sports & Recreation - 400 pages

Moneyball meets Freakonomics in this myth-busting guide to understanding—and winning—the most popular sport on the planet.

Innovation is coming to soccer, and at the center of it all are the numbers—a way of thinking about the game that ignores the obvious in favor of how things actually are. In The Numbers Game, Chris Anderson, a former professional goalkeeper turned soccer statistics guru, teams up with behavioral analyst David Sally to uncover the numbers that really matter when it comes to predicting a winner. Investigating basic but profound questions—How valuable are corners? Which goal matters most? Is possession really nine-tenths of the law? How should a player’s value be judged?—they deliver an incisive, revolutionary new way of watching and understanding soccer.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - beearedee - LibraryThing

My boyfriend bought this book for him to read, but I decided that I would read it as well. I recently got into soccer (less than a year) and I am still learning so much about it. I dabble in ...

THE NUMBERS GAME: Why Everything You Know About Soccer Is Wrong

User Review  - Kirkus

Using data to better understand (and improve a team's odds of winning) the Beautiful Game.Analytics, the use of data and statistics, has grown exponentially in the world of sports in recent years ...

Contents

• Soccer for Skeptics: 1
• Riding Your Luck: 33
• Soccers Rare Beauty: 66
• They Should Have Bought Darren Bent: 93
• Light and Dark: 113
• Piggy in the Middle: 135
• The Deflation of the Long Ball: 161
• Guerrilla Soccer: 177
• O Why a Soccer Team Is Like the Space Shuttle: 197
• How Do You Solve a Problem Like Megrelishviliº: 223
• IO Stuffed Teddy Bears: 250
• The Young Prince: 268
• I2 Life During the Reformation: 297
• Acknowledgments: 333
• Notes: 339
• Bibliography: 367
• Index: 377

About the author

Chris Anderson is a pioneer of soccer analytics and a professor at London School of Economics in the U.K. and Cornell University in the U.S.

David Sally is a professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Soccer Is Wrong; Penguin original: Sports
• Authors: Chris Anderson, David Sally
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Penguin, 2013
• ISBN: 0143124560, 9780143124566
• Length: 400 pages
• Subjects: Games & Activities / Fantasy Sports; Sports & Recreation / Reference; Sports & Recreation / Soccer