Remember when Manchester City lost four matches in a row for the first time in Pep Guardiola's career? While pundits scrambled to explain how a team with 68% possession could lose 4-0 to Tottenham, I reached for a dusty 2013 book that predicted this exact scenario. The Numbers Game by Chris Anderson and David Sally doesn't just explain City's November nightmare—it warned us this would happen the moment we started treating football like a spreadsheet rather than disciplined chaos.
The book's most controversial claim? Football is "basically a 50/50 game"—half skill, half luck. Not 80/20 like the data evangelists swear. Not 70/30 like your mate who treats xG as scripture. Straight down the middle: 50/50. And before you close this tab in disgust, remember City's collapse arrived while they dominated every meaningful statistic except the only one that matters.
Here's why the book still matters in our age of statistical saturation. Anderson and Sally analysed why favoured teams win only 50% of the time in football, compared to 75% in basketball. The answer isn't comforting for clubs spending millions on data departments. Football's low-scoring nature—averaging just 2.6 goals per game—means a single random bounce can outweigh a thousand completed passes. It's poker when you only get three cards all night. Skill matters, but when you barely get to play your hand, chaos reigns.
Consider their heresy on corners, blasphemy in the era of Arsenal's set-piece supremacy. The book claims corners are worth exactly 0.022 goals each—essentially worthless. "Only 1 in 50 corners result in goals," they write, urging teams to go short rather than sling hopeful crosses. Yet Arsenal have scored 22 goals from set-pieces this season. Are Anderson and Sally wrong? Not really. Arsenal aren't beating the statistics; they're exploiting the variance the book identified. By choreographing routines that maximise confusion—multiple runners, blocks, traffic in the penalty area—they're not making corners more valuable; they're making randomness work for them. It's the tactical equivalent of buying more lottery tickets: the odds per ticket haven't improved, but you've increased your exposure to beneficial chaos.
The book's masterstroke is the "weak link theory," built on economist Michael Kremer's O-Ring principle. Football isn't decided by your best player but by your worst. "If you want to build a team for success," they argue, "you need to look less at your strongest links and more at your weakest ones." They recount Arrigo Sacchi proving five organised defenders could beat ten disorganised attackers—including Gullit and van Basten—in training. Not once did the attackers score. Order beats glamour. Every time.
Which brings us back to City. While Guardiola perfected possession and pressing triggers, he missed the book's quiet warning: "Goals that don't happen are more valuable than those that do." Clean sheets produce 2.5 points per match on average; scoring earns just 1 point. City optimised for control but left themselves exposed to the sport's hard-wired randomness. When Joško Gvardiol makes one mistake against Tottenham, when Rico Lewis gets overwhelmed against Liverpool, the whole system shudders. The weak link snaps, and all the possession stats in the world can't fix it.
Key Lesson for the Modern Game
The enduring insight isn't that statistics don't matter—it's that we're measuring the wrong things. While clubs hire physics PhDs and boast about their data stacks, they're essentially trying to predict coin flips with calculus. Anderson and Sally grasped something we've forgotten in the gold rush to quantify everything: football's beauty lies in its refusal to be solved. The same randomness that lets Leicester win the league or Luton beat Arsenal is what makes every match worth watching. Modern football's obsession with controlling chaos through data has made teams more vulnerable to it, not less. The solution isn't abandoning analytics but accepting what they tell us—that half of what happens on a football pitch is beyond anyone's control, and the teams that thrive are those that make peace with chaos, not those who pretend they've conquered it.
Who Should Read It?
Anyone who's ever screamed "HOW DID WE LOSE THAT?" at a television needs this book. Data sceptics will find ammunition, stats lovers will discover humility, and everyone will understand why football resists our attempts to solve it. Essential reading for the fan who wants to sound smarter than the Twitter tacticos quoting xG without context.
Turns out the real numbers game isn't about collecting more data—it's about accepting that half the game can't be numbered at all. Share this with that friend who thinks football manager video games reflect reality, and subscribe for more content that explains why the beautiful game stays beautiful precisely because we can't predict it.
Cheers,
The Gaffer