Lies, damned lies and statistics!

... football's numbers don't add up.

… it’s all Hector Enrique’s fault!

In fairness to Hector Enrique, he has always seen the funny side of it. Now a coach in Dubai, the 62-year old Argentine World Cup winner has been quoted as saying, ‘how could he fail to score from a pass like that?’

‘He’ was Diego Maradona, the ‘pass’ was the short stab of Enrique’s right foot that placed the ball under the sorcerer’s spell in the 55^th minute of ‘that’ quarter-final against England in the Azteca. 11 touches and 11 seconds later, Maradona had scored his ‘other’ goal… the one ‘you have to say’ was magnificent.

Hector Enrique got the assist.

Football is art, not science. I’m a commentator, I like a stat. But there is nothing truly quantifiable about the game beyond the final score. If it were possible to calibrate the result in advance, we would all have the same Fantasy XI and the betting companies would be out of business.

I don’t know what’s going to happen next… and I don’t want to. Stop trying to tell me.

I was involved in CBS Sports’ US coverage of the final night of the Champions League preliminaries last week. There was a special studio designated to following the impact of 18 simultaneous games on a single league table and no end of bants about Carra and Micah taking advanced mathematics courses in preparation.

It really wasn’t that complicated. You just needed an app.

Listening to 5Live on Saturday afternoon, there were 40-odd simultaneous games in several different leagues punctuating Ian Dennis’s commentary of Bournemouth versus Liverpool. Denno doesn’t have a data science degree but he can read out football scores and check out the changing League 1 promotion picture on the BBC website far beyond the recognised limits of male multi-tasking.

There is something quite bewitching and hypnotic about listening to an avalanche of information with the excited audio backdrop of a football crowd getting excited about something else completely… something we can’t see. The tantalising drama of the fans in the Vitality raising their collective voices at the same moment Ian transports us 175 miles north for an update on Walsall versus Salford City is well, bloody annoying to be honest.

What is the last piece of broadcast football data that you can recall or repeat?... beyond a score update of your team’s progress. In an age of alerts and notifications, is there a morsel of information relevant to your own matchday mental wellbeing that you cannot source for yourself? Do we love football enough to love everybody’s fluctuating fortunes or are we simply besotted with our own team?

CBS Champions League coverage features the live streaming of every game across the Paramount Plus platform. During the commentary of ‘my’ game, I am encouraged to tease some updated scores from other games occasionally by way of promoting the range of the service. When I peruse my Twitter account later, there are invariably a couple of complaints that I’ve ruined someone’s life by referencing a match they had recorded for future viewing. The Likely Lads are alive and well somewhere in Middle America.

Spoiler alerts are a thing of the past in football media consumption. Nobody looks away now anymore. You have a better chance of avoiding news of the end of the world than you have of escaping an update on Marcus Rashford’s body language. I just think and hope that we are becoming more selective about the latest intel attack. Maradona’s goal didn’t need or have an ‘assist’ worth recording.

Driving away from the City-Bruges game last week, I heard Statman Dave frothing at the mouth over the multitude of passes John Stones had completed. Er… centre-backs populate every list of pass cumulations. Usually, passes to each other and back again. Great passers don’t have great pass completion numbers because they are continually attempting difficult, delving passes. Possession is becoming a plague of the modern game. Stones is good with the ball but Bruges would rather he had it than De Bruyne or Foden.

XG is designed to grade basic statistics by adding a quality assessment to the equation. Programmers have trained neural network prediction algorithms with a large dataset in order to provide outcome explanations beyond the result of what is a low-scoring sport. If you understood that last sentence I copied and pasted you are probably one of those very programmers! Too much information.

I recently did a recording for a project that is looking to use my voice to create bespoke commentaries for an event. I concluded the session by reading a chapter of ‘The Great Gatsby’. A few days later, the producer sent an audio file of me commentating on a fictional penalty shoot-out. It was Clive alright. There were none of the same words I’d read out of F Scott Fitzgerald’s 100-year old novel but AI had worked its scary magic. It could have been me. It was me!

As far as I know, AI still needs programmers… human programmers with prejudices and jealousies and infatuations and all of the other flawed features that keep us individual… and keep football human too. The nonsense that Ruben Amorim’s 3-4-3 is in itself the solution is that football systems still have to be enacted by defective players (and he’s got a few of those!). Designing a ‘shape’ is for Turner Prize hopefuls.

Football’s fabulous reality is that it’s played by the inefficient and the inadequate… played by, coached by, refereed by (humans operate VAR) and commentated by people with hang-ups and fuck-ups in tow. The more complex the science gets, the less we trust it.

Manchester City are still top of the Premier League possession stats, Spurs’ excellent XG numbers are no consolation to their fans. The tidal flood of data is a tool we can use, we must not let it use us. Every time they get those offside lines out at Stockley Park, we are amazed by the miniscule margins that decide games. And no amount of technology can control the bounce of the ball. Accept it, enjoy it.

It is a recurring source of smugness that when broadcasters publish the graph of viewing figures for football, the vast majority of the audience turns on for the game and turns off when it’s over. Football is our passion, football results are our thermometers, football analysis is an aside.

There will be a statman prepared to defend Hector Enrique’s right to his assist. And an analyst intent on blaming Peter Beardsley for losing the ball in the first place. But we know better, don’t we? As Mark Twain reputedly said… ‘lies, damned lies and statistics’.