Do you like football stats?

Football stats are unreliable..

Take possession as an example, what do you suppose Opta means by possession? I would have expected it to be based on the length of time each team spends with the ball. But with Opta, time doesn't even come into it.

This is how Opta work out possession...

During the game, the passes for each team are totalled up and then each team’s total is divided by the game total to produce a percentage figure which shows the percentage of the game that each team has accrued in possession of the ball.

The amount of time they have the ball doesn't come in to it all, it's basically completed passes shown as a percentage.

So if, for example, team A made 1 complete pass and 500 failed passes and team B made 0 complete passes and made 500 failed passes the stats would show that team A had 100% possession over 90 mins even though they didn't actually have the ball all the time.

Then for other stats, number of throws, fouls, free kicks, tackles, dribbles, crosses, corners, offsides, chance creation, interceptions, clearances, failed tackles, passes, completed, key, saves, shots on, shots off, headers, blocks, slides, ariel duals, woodwork and so on (3000 separate events per match) they have two guys sat in a box watching and inputting all the data - one team each.

How can two people possibly watch the match and record all that data live without an awful lot of guesswork and generalising?

Think how quickly things happen in football.
How do you realistically and accurately decide at full match speed what to categorise each event as?

Next time you watch a live match on TV keep a tally going in your head of shots on or off target -and get your mates to do the same. At the end of the game, none of you will have the same number and none of you will match the official stat either. Which I hope shows my point that if we can't agree on shots then how can we expect that somebodies interpretation of a key pass is correct?

80% of all stats are accurate 47% of the time.

Keegan wrote:80% of all stats are accurate 47% of the time.

You just made that up! 73% of all stats are just inventions

Brian Fantana: They've done studies, you know. 60% of the time, it works every time.

rammywhite wrote:

Keegan wrote:80% of all stats are accurate 47% of the time.

You just made that up! 73% of all stats are just inventions

That's only true, 61% of the time, Rammy.

According to Prozone,I'm dead.