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

Front Cover
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.
 

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
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Megrelishvili?
223
Stuffed Teddy Bears
250
The Young Prince
268
Life During the Reformation
297
Acknowledgments
333
Notes
339
Bibliography
367
Index
377

O Why a Soccer Team Is Like the Space Shuttle
197

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About the author (2013)

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.

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