Numbers Now Add Up For Patient Bees

IN FOOTBALL only one statistic really matters: the final score.

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However, such is the desire to influence or anticipate that reckoning, the game has now followed the US path to statistical obsession with everyone from directors of football to gamblers taking an ever-keener interest in the game’s numbers.

Sometimes the sums add up to produce useful conclusions, but at others they confuse, obscure or mislead.

The original Moneyball, as featured in Michael Lewis’ book and the subsequent film, was successful for Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s.

However, baseball is a sport in which every play starts with a fixed point of action, usually involves only four people (pitcher, hitter, fielder, baseman) and has restricted possibilities. Beane also looked for very specific indicators to find undervalued players.

Statistics

Football, a fluid sport with 22 players always engaged and almost unlimited variables, has proved much harder to quantify.

Passing statistics, for example, are largely meaningless, unless boiled down to specific types of pass put into a game context (which, increasingly, can be done, but often is not).