Where’s My Joy?

Is Football Lost To Stats & Safety?

Sometime last Wednesday evening, not long after Liverpool had found a way to turn their latest corner (who’s to tell if this one is another cul-de-sac, or whatever it translates to in Dutch), I logged into my account on a popular Liverpool fan forum to have a read about people’s thoughts on the game. I’m opinionated, and I think most of the time I can back it up, but I generally like reading whats on there; the place has existed for more than twenty years, and there’s a variety of people on there of all ages and backgrounds – I think one gets a much stronger breadth of feeling from forums than the shrieking nonsense that often pervades social media.

Anyway, I clicked on, and found something depressingly familiar. In amongst all the ‘played well, but Qarabag were rubbish’ (edited slightly to keep me on this site), and ‘yeah, decent result’ types were the newest, and most tiresome, breed of football fans. The xG bores. ‘Well, we only had five shots and all five went in, that’s not sustainable football’ (sounds like something Just Stop Oil would approve of, rather than zip-tie themselves to goal posts), ‘it’s a good win, but our xG wasn’t good’…good lord.

Now, I can’t tell you the expected words or xW for this piece, sorry. You’ll have to read the full article to see how long I go on about this, but I’ll try and restrain myself.

Open enough threads on a forum, or spend enough time scrolling through people who surely can’t be real on social media, and you’ll see ‘xG analysis’ or ‘pitch tilt’ or ‘OPPDA’ – something I always thought was Bulgarian – referenced.

Somehow, it’s all so sterile. There’s a place for stats in football. It arguably won my club a Premier League title, but the constant harping on numbers drives me insane. Does anyone really care about how many goals their team might have scored? Or do they care about what their team did? It reached its nadir for me last season, with a particular Manchester United blogger’s first remarks on a 3-0 defeat to Liverpool being ‘did you see the xG?’ – as though a .54 difference in xG would erase the pain of losing to your rivals.

It’s not just them, though; there’s a peculiar brand of po-faced analysis, under the guise of being ‘unemotional’ or ‘honest’, that in my view sucks the joy from football. Sorry to use my own club again, but take Federico Chiesa as an example. For reasons no one fully understands, he’s got a place in most normal fans’ hearts. He’s full-throated, runs his legs off, and seems to genuinely love the game and playing for the club, whether he’s actually any good or not. He scored on Wednesday, and I think most normal people were pretty pleased to see it happen. Not the staterati. ‘Well, he’s still a terrible fit in Slot’s system, he’s neither a 10 nor a winger…’ ‘Well, he’s not got explosive pace any more, and he can’t cover those minutes’ and so on, and so on.

That got me thinking – where’s the fun? Is that why so many of us are losing interest in the game? Ultimately, when people talk about a loss of interest in football, or say ‘the game’s gone’, I’m not sure they mean what they think they mean. Sure, there’s stuff like VAR – but they seem to forget the prior decades they whinged about refereeing decisions. In England, we’ve made a habit of it, hounding referees like Urs Meier and the poor sod who didn’t see Lampard’s shot go over the line in 2010 (spoiler alert: we would’ve been battered anyway). So I’m not sure I’ll take that one up.

I don’t think it’s money, either. People will point to an era before money n this supposed ‘golden era’, football as a ‘business’ was largely the same, albeit not as outwardly obvious as it is now - but for every Saudi ‘investment fund’ that’s an arm of the government, there’s an Abramovich or a Sheikh Mansour. For each of them, there was a Jack Walker or Manchester United PLC.

But maybe there’s a simpler answer staring us all in the face. It’s not that there isn’t some merit in some of the arguments. I get there’s a market for it, and good tactical analysis is both rare and worth its weight in gold. I’ve learnt so much about the game and what it means from so many great orators and analysts, but somewhere along the way, everyone decided they were one, and football lost its best asset to a spectator.

Belief in something. Joy. Call it what you will.

The fact is, football’s at its best when it truly loses its relationship to its numbers, and things happen that make very little sense. Leicester win the Premier League. Greece win the European Championship. Macclesfield knock out Crystal Palace in the FA Cup. A team containing Djimi Traore wins the Champions League. Darwin Nunez spanks two in against Brentford in injury time to hand Liverpool the initiative in the title race. Alright, so maybe the last two are personal picks, but the latter in particular might be the best example of what I’m talking about. I loved Darwin. Did I know his goal output didn’t bear relation to his xG? Yes. Did I care? No.

It was about the journey, the fun, the unpredictability; the sheer joy of watching someone play who could either blow a defence or themselves up, and knowing that not even the statistics would tell you which. But that was the fun. Emotion’s a part of football – believing in a player only you rate, trusting the big number nine who only you feel can see his potential…football is so much more fun when you’re invested with your heart, not your head.

In addition, I’m sure it’s not a coincidence that at the same time statistics and po-faced analysis took over football, the game became safer, pasteurised, if you like. The increasing focus on set pieces, the safe possession football, the lack of long-range efforts (low xG, can’t be having that), and contempt for anything involving individual skill that doesn’t lead to ‘key contributions’ followed. That’s turning football stale. You only need to see this season’s Premier League to know that, and maybe even the years prior. For all the advances in tactics and football that this era has brought us – and despite the stick he gets, some of Pep Guardiola’s sides have produced some of the best football I’ve ever seen – it’s increasingly replaced most of what we love about football with a mechanical, robotic, by-the-numbers, game.

It doesn’t have to be this way. I’m begging you – put down the stats, put down the models and video analysis, stop the think-pieces, and enjoy the ride. Return joy to football, one step at a time.