Last year, The Athletic’s Ben Baldwin wrote a piece detailing the 10 Commandments of numbers-based analysis of the other football. The one with the funny-shaped ball. The beautiful game lends itself to plenty of analysis using numbers, too but just because the data is there, it doesn’t mean that it’s always used correctly.



This guide will give you a better appreciation of the context required when talking about teams and players, which numbers to focus on and how to better question what you’re seeing.



Here are The 10 Commandments.



1) Thou shalt not use save percentage to evaluate a goalkeeper’s shot-stopping ability



Example: “Martin Dubravka has been the eighth best shot-stopper in the Premier League this season with a save percentage of 73.9 per cent”



Why it’s misleading: The equation for save percentage is shots saved/total shots faced. Straight away, there’s no accounting for the...