Expected Goals: The story of how data conquered football and changed the game forever

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But as we shared thoughts about yesterday's Champions League tie to break the ice, it was clear he had an incredibly sharp tactical mind. This way you can conclude which players are over-performing, how adept they are at getting into the right positions and who is benefiting from (or being hindered by) the quality of their teammates.

I didn't expect any math of formulas per se, but maybe more elaborate definitions followed by concrete examples would have sufficed. Highly recommend this book, a must for those looking to understand why and how elite football clubs are moving to incorporate stats increasingly to dictate player recruitment and marginal gains. These tagged games are packaged and sent to Impect’s clients, which include some of the world’s biggest clubs, like Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich.The narrative never makes it clear how data was used in decision making, it just claims that an individual used data to make some decision. The problem though is there is no central club and character in Oakland and Billy Beane respectively to really make it as effective a book as MoneyBall. As stated in the title, the book is way more about "how data conquered football" than about what specific techniques are currently used, though there is some discussion of the types of measurements and metrics used and how the data is collected and labeled. In his book, using real life data taken from previous season’s Premier League and Championship, Tippett looks at how xG highlights trends in both players and teams and the way they build attacks.

Tippett describes how Smartodds produced their own expected goals model to identify value in betting markets and place money on teams that the model had recognised as having a better chance of winning than the bookmakers’ odds suggested. Moneyball focusses on Billy and his story (with some sidelines on the players and team around him), and has a reasonable amount of discussion on his data and analysis; this book follows too many people (with pacing that is fairly inconsistent), and has next to no discussion on the techniques that brough about the revolution. Whether you belong to a football club, are a Premier League fan, or simply just interested in learning more about the football world, our list of the best football audiobooks captures what draws so many people to makes ‘the beautiful game’. There is a lot that has been disre-garded, Ankersen said, whole areas of the game that nobody has ever really tried to improve. Smith relied heavily on Chris Anderson, credited author of The Numbers Game, to provide details of how football owners operated during his doomed efforts to become a footballing Billy Beane, but he had also spoken to many people who developed or used analytics tools.

Expected goals describes how Ram Mylvaganam started ProZone, one of the first companies to use video for game encodings.