These are the things I learnt from this book or strated to think about:

How do you rate football players on their performances? As Biermann demonstrates journalists (professional football ones) differ in their judgements from 2 to 5 during one single game.

How would that then work in refereeing - how do you really make a difference between a good referee and a great one as subjective feelings are always misleading.

Why really good teams go through bad patches even if they are not playing that badly

These are the things I learnt from this book or strated to think about:

How do you rate football players on their performances? As Biermann demonstrates journalists (professional football ones) differ in their judgements from 2 to 5 during one single game.

How would that then work in refereeing - how do you really make a difference between a good referee and a great one as subjective feelings are always misleading.

Why really good teams go through bad patches even if they are not playing that badly?

Or why then some good referees go though bad games and decisions?

Is there a fairer way to measure the quality of a team performances over the result or standard things like possession and attempts of goal. Something like Expected Points or Expected Goals?



To be successful you have two ways to go about it - either be the best in the business in whatever field you are in or try to solve the issue from a completely different angle. Like in high-jumping Dick Fosbury reverted to the now universally used "flop" style.

The biggest change in football and how it is understood and interpreted has come from the rise of video analyses. Firstly it has enabled brilliant coaches like Guardiola or Van Gaal or Tuchel or Klopp to study extensive videos on their oppositions and their own team performances to come up with new ways of succeeding. It has also enabled them to learn from other coaches and derive how successful their methods are.

Secondly they now have material to show the players exactly what they want them to see and explain their methods. Gone are the days when "tactical training" required tedious sit-throughs of whole games. With the help of video analysts this has now been cut significantly to only those moments that matter.

FC Bayerns Head of Department of Match Analysis (8 people) Michael Niemeyer says: "For me a good coach is also a good analyst"



It is fascinating though that if in 2010 when video analyses and big data really went widespread - the world of soccer statistics seemed to be the future. However today still the big leap into big data and statistics has not happened. There are a few teams making use of it (like FC Midtjylland in Denmark as one example.), but generally football looks at it with suspicion.

One of the problems of football data has been its non-uniformity. Numbers are gathered but not in the same way and not measuring the same exact things - thus they are not always reliable. Or you can look at statistics from a match (Like Brazil vs. Germany in 2014 WC semi-final 1-7) and see that Brazil won all of the statistical battles like possession, shots, tackles, corners, dangerous attacks and still suffered the heaviest defeat in the WC semi-finals ever.

In short the answer to using statistics then is to collect even more data, and try to analyze it from others aspects and from different angles. Come up with models that really demonstrate effectiveness on the field of play. "Packing" is one such possible metric. For example in the EURO2016 34 of 51 games were won by teams who had bypassed more players (essence of packing) than the opponents and only 3 teams lost and there is a much stronger correlation between packing and winning than between possession or passing stats. Another similar metric is "controlling space" (how much space you have around you when you receive the ball and how much space you allow your opposition when they get the ball) and "dangerousity" (how much danger did a team create and how much were they exposed to).

As computers learn they will do all the measuring work and provide data which then can be interpreted and analyzed and put to use by clubs and coaches.

One field in football that already today heavily relies on data is scouting and the best scouts (using the best systems) are heavily sought after like Sven Mislintnat (from Borussia to Arsenal).



Cognitive football

Hoffenheim coach Nagelsmann makes his training sessions so complicated that his sports psychologist Jan Mayer says about the players "We want their head to spin during training" - and you only learn when your brain has to work hard.

Sandro Wagner on Nagelsmann "He takes a complicated game, takes it apart into different sections, rehearses those and then puts it all back together, step by step"

Together with SAP Hoffenheim have created game apps that aim to improve perception, understanding and decision-making for the players. Some players like goalkeepers come in twice a week, youth team once a week, outfield players when they want to.

Another really interesting trend (used by Midtjylland and Tuchel for example) is psychological profiling of players and how different players work together. So that your team needs a balanced amount of fighters, artists, engineers and social workers on the field (similar to Belbin).

Future strategies

Really interesting idea is that of Ghosting - a game is played and based on the data feed into the computer previously - the computer offers an ideal route for the player to take in that situation. So for a defender to either close down the opposition or stay put on the 16m area line. And you can see live the difference between the two. Same can be applied to refereeing if we know from which positions referees make the best calls - so with ghosting we could teach referees where to position.

It is clear however that the more detailed the analyses gets, the more expensive it gets and the danger is that the top clubs (Liverpool, Bayern etc) buy the systems and work with them behind closed doors so taking them out of the public domain. Could that happen in refereeing so that the smaller countries will stay more behind the leading ones?