Moving the Goalposts: Why Maradona Was Really Useless . . . How to Win a Penalty Shoot-Out . . . and 65 More Astonishing Statistical Football Revelations

Introduction

I’ve read a lot about sport. I’ve read several books about cricket though I’ve never once attended a cricket match in all of my 40-plus years. I’ve read about baseball and athletics, about ice hockey and tennis. I’ve also read more books about football than I care to count. But, in all of these shelf-metres of books, I’ve yet to find a football book that satisfies my appetite for statistics and analysis in the way that Ken Dryden, Bill James or David Frith did with their respective sports.

While I wouldn’t categorise myself as the bespectacled, dressing-gown wearing Statto of Fantasy Football League fame, the numbers behind and within sport, combined with a thirst for wanting to know why things happen the way they do on the pitch, make me closer to a football nerd than a lads’ mag reader. I find some things that are written and said about football insanely frustrating, and it makes me want to shout in the face of the so-called experts to stop them spouting rubbish and misinformation. They may have played the game but they sometimes seem to know absolutely nothing about it. Having contained my irritation for so long I have now decided to do something about it, which is why you’re reading this book.

I get irritated by people re-writing history. One well-received and supposedly definitive history of world foot­ball recently stated that Bob Paisley had John Barnes in his side for Liverpool, that Croatian legend Zvonimir Boban was a defender and that Stuart Pearce’s Italia 90 penalty miss was blasted wide. I only glanced through the book but knew (and have subsequently double checked for fear of falling flat on my face) that John Barnes signed for Liverpool in 1987 while Kenny Dalglish was manager (Paisley had retired four years earlier), Boban was a central midfielder and Stuart Pearce’s penalty against West Germany went straight down the middle and was saved by Bodo Illgner’s feet.

It did make me wonder what else was down in print as historical fact. Perhaps I’m being a little harsh, I know typos can creep into manuscripts, but what about some of the things decreed by the ‘experts’ as part of their TV ‘analysis’? The analysis rarely goes beyond stating the obvious these days and the overseas guests at major international tournaments usually put their home-bred counterparts to shame. This dissatisfaction is a growing feeling among fans and even prompted a national daily to print a cartoon showing two testicles with microphones discussing a match. That catchphrase was pretty easy to decipher.

Early in Euro 2012, when Gary Lineker said that the Italian side wasn’t [paraphrasing] ‘like the ones of old in that they couldn’t hold on to a 1-0 lead like they used to do’, you just know I had to get my record books and calculator out (the results of my findings are printed elsewhere in this book).

While watching a Premiership match on ESPN I was listening to the comments of co-commentator Chris Waddle. He mentioned time and again that one side was keeping possession while the other was giving the ball away too easily. I wasn’t sure that he was right because I thought the other side was passing the ball well. A few minutes later a graphics box appeared at the bottom of the screen showing that indeed, the team that Waddle thought was being wasteful actually had a successful passing percentage 20% better than their opponents.

There was silence from the commentators for a few moments and I actually thought my TV had lost its sound before the Waddler said: Well, that’s a surprise. You wouldn’t have thought that by watching the game. But I, along with probably thousands of others watching at home, had thought exactly that. Why was it that someone who had played the game so well was unable to see what was happening before him? Do I need to mention what was said in my living room after the four wise monkeys on Match of the Day wrote off Andrei Shevchenko at half-time during Euro 2012 and he then went and scored twice in the second half? It’s the closed shop mentality of some ex-players that grates. They played the game so they must know best is the attitude, but it’s so often not the case.

But things are changing. Spurred on by the success of the book Moneyball in the USA, English football clubs are now analysing more and more aspects of the game. Moneyball told the story of baseball manager Billy Beane and his struggle to allow baseball analysis to take the place of the opinions of old-time scouts who ‘knew the game’. The result was a revolution in American sports and it spread across the globe.

Some younger managers in England have taken the Moneyball model and tried to apply aspects of it to football. They’ve had some success but once they come up against the Premiership it’s pretty much a case of who has the most money wins in the end, no matter what small advantages you give yourself along the way.

The business of football analysis has come a long way. In 2003, Aiden Cooney, the head of sports data collectors OPTA, sent a copy of Moneyball to all 20 Premiership managers. He didn’t get a single response. Now OPTA provides information around the world, every manager in the country has heard of Prozone (which tracks player performance) and everyone is looking to get an edge any way they can.

Purists, whatever that means, have argued that football cannot be analysed in the same way as baseball because the game flows. Well have they ever counted the number of times the ball goes out for a throw-in or corner, or is stopped for a free-kick? All of these stoppages mean the ball is usually only in play for about 60 minutes including any added time during any game. These stops and starts actually make it easier to analyse what happens at each re-start. That isn’t to say that football doesn’t have a high proportion of randomness (but then again so do many other sports), as Billy Beane says: All you can do is put yourself in a position to benefit from the randomness.

Aiden Cooney tells a good story about this in relation to Liverpool buying Andy Carroll. Glenn Hoddle said it took the striker six attempts to score a goal, he explained. He used the stat as a negative, in fact if he’d bothered to study it, that gave Carroll one of the best ratios in the Premiership. At the time of writing, for whatever reason, Hoddle hasn’t had a manager’s job for six years. I’ll be analysing his club and England record in the book.

Moving the Goalposts hopefully provides a refreshing look at the aspects of football that have previously been overlooked, ignored, taken for granted or just plain misinterpreted. It aims to uncover numerous hidden truths about the game and explain why certain myths survive to this day. For instance, do managers realise that corner kicks are less likely to get their team a goal than a throw-in? It looks at the undercurrents beneath a wealth of footballing stats. Are left-footed penalty takers inherently less successful than right-footers? Is it true that titles are decided in the games between the top four teams or relegation battles in games between the bottom six? What about the time off between games? Conventional wisdom tells us that a slightly longer break between games is favourable and we often see managers complaining that their opponents had an extra day’s rest. But the truth is very different, the exact opposite of mainstream thinking. Do some footballing icons really live up to the hype?

The book is light-hearted in places, technical in others. It isn’t always easy to understand, but that’s part of the point. It doesn’t make things difficult for the sake of it but, equally it won’t be dumbing down the text or the ideas within it. In a previous life I was a research chemist where I used what now seem to be primitive computer programs to analyse numerous variables that could influence a chemical reaction. The same principles can be applied to football and that’s exactly what I’ve done.

I’ll be trying to settle arguments once and for all. Who was the best, the worst, the most innovative, the most successful, the luckiest, the most unlucky? Who really were the greatest teams and greatest players? The book will also show that you can compare players and teams from different eras.

Over recent years statistical data has been used to analyse player and team performance. This book will show where this is relevant, where the data-gatherers have got it wrong, and where they’re now getting it right; what is and isn’t really important and why many traditional measures of the game are redundant; why certain methods of play do or don’t work, and what is really required for a team to be successful.

A quick word here on the nomenclature I’ve used. I have generally standardised all games having two points for a win and one for a draw. Unlike many UK papers and TV channels that use win percentage as the percentage of games won (ignoring draws), when I use win percentage (Win Pct) it means the amount of points gained from the maximum possible available (using two points for a win). Simply put it’s points won divided by points available. So if a team won four out of four it would have a Win Pct of 1.000. A team that won one, drew one and lost two would have a Win Pct of 0.375 (i.e. three points out of a possible eight). It’s important to use the method I do because it takes into account draws and as two draws equate to a whole win it gives a better indication of a club’s or player’s record.

I will also refer to second and third tier to avoid confusion between the like of First Division, Second Division, Championship, and so on, which have all been used for the second tier of English football.

I have a healthy dislike of using friendlies in cal­culating win percentages, especially at international level. They are increasingly meaningless and often do not in any way reflect the abilities of the countries involved. England’s 2012 win over Spain at Wembley is the perfect example. So I only use competitive games (European Championship and World Cup qualifiers and finals games for internationals and league and cup games at club level), unless otherwise noted.

The book is split into several broad areas of research such as league analysis, internationals, players and managers and these have been broken down into bite-sized discussions. I might spend more time than is healthy discussing why the second group games of a World Cup tournament produce most draws but on the other hand I’ll find out whether Bill Shankly’s top flight Win Pct (0.644) really puts him up there with the greats?

I know I’m not the only one interested in these issues. Just look at the ever-growing pages of statistics and tactical diagrams in the Sunday papers to see that there is a thirst for this kind of knowledge. This isn’t a book which is meant to be read cover-to-cover in one go (though please do so if you feel so inclined), but it’s something to pick up and flick through until you find something interesting, something that you hadn’t noticed before. Read it and agree or disagree and argue about it, let me know ([email protected]) if you’ve disproved anything, proved it even more conclusively or have ideas for further exploration. I might upset a few people with my findings, but remember these aren’t my opinions about players and teams, these are the historical facts. Many of these things have changed the way I look at the game and hopefully after reading this, you won’t look at football in the same way ever again either.

Rob Jovanovic

Summer, 2012

Thanks And Acknowledgements

Among certain groups of my friends this book has caused lots of debate over the past few years. Hopefully it will do the same for you.

I’d especially like to thank Paul Camillin, Jane Camillin and all at Pitch Publishing for recognising what I was trying to do and going for it.

Along the way I’ve had input from many people, but I’d like to single out the following: Graham Palmer, Gino Farabella, Steve Hodge, Duncan Olner, Derek Hammond, Christoph Rabe, Uwe Baumann, Chris Barlow and Simon Jarvis.

PART 1: THE LEAGUE

I would not be bothered if we lost every game as long as we won the league.

– Mark Viduka

While ‘soccer’, a word derived in England, is often used dismissively as an unwanted Americanism, the use of league structures which are often thought to be a very British way of fairly producing a champion was actually an innovation ‘borrowed’ from either American football or baseball (depending on who