If you were only just getting to grips with the concept of 'expected goals', then brace yourself: football analytics is getting even more sophisticated.

The use of heat maps and touch graphics everywhere, from the touchscreens of Match of the Day to these very pages, is proof that data has become an integral part of everyday football conversation. True, scepticism still exists — a point underlined in a scene in the documentary Sunderland ‘Til I Die in which scouts Glynn Snodin and Sandy Miller write off a potential signing because “he’s got gloves on and it’s not even cold” — but that is now the exception.

Last October, in the bowels of Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge, some of the finest thinkers in football data came together for Statsbomb’s Innovation in Football Conference to discuss how analytics in the game can move to the next level.

At Barcelona, even expected goals are considered old-fashioned. Now, the killer metric is something they call Expected Possession Value (EPV), which determines the quality of the players’ position on the pitch relative to others.

As head of sports analytics, Javier Fernandez, says: “At every instance we can observe where a player is better located to receive the ball in order to increase the expected value of the possession.” This kind of analysis has been common in basketball for years but is only just making its way into football.