Soccermatics summary

When most people think of soccer, they think of the stars of the sport; everyone knows about the likes of Messi, Ronaldo and Ibrahimovic. Week after week, these exceptional players give breathtaking performances. But what makes them stand apart from the rest?

In the case of the Swede Zlatan Ibrahimovic, it’s a surprisingly accurate sense for Newton’s laws of physics. For instance, in a friendly match between England and Sweden in 2012, Ibrahimovic scored an incredible goal. He was 30 metres out with his back to the goal and executed an astonishing bicycle-kick volley that soared over the goalkeeper and ended with the ball in the back of the net.

Nowadays, scientists can collect and analyze the motion data from sensors in a player’s cleats or a goalkeeper’s gloves. This is a major boon for tactics and strategies, because this data has a lot to tell us.

In-game data suggests that counterattacks offer the best opportunities to score, and here’s how we know:

Soccer is a team sport and having lots of superstars isn’t enough if they can’t work as a team, investing in the collective effort. Successful coaches believe in and instill the collective spirit in their teams, and to do so, they must build an atmosphere in which individuals will readily sacrifice themselves for the greater good.

Just take Louis van Gaal, the renowned former manager of Bayern Munich and Manchester United, who believes coaching is all about building team spirit and self-discipline. And van Gaal wasn’t alone in his support for this theory – in fact, it grew to become the predominant soccer philosophy in the Netherlands, where Van Gaal grew up, during the 1970s and 80s.

Have you ever heard of the wisdom of the crowd? It refers to the mathematically supported fact that the average of a group’s predictions tends to be closer to the truth than individual guesses. This knowledge has been used to outperform experts in a number of fields, and it is likewise invaluable for making predictions about soccer.

But first, a little bit about how solid the predictions of a group can be. The first experiment testing such performance was conducted by Sir Francis Galton in the early twentieth century. His study consisted of visiting a commercial fair and asking both expert and amateur attendants to estimate the weight of an ox. And guess what? The average of all amateur predictions outperformed those of individual experts.

It’s always a challenge to do better than the crowd, but it’s still possible to make a bit of extra cash on bets – and here are a few pieces of advice that can help:

First, only bet when your subjective probability of winning beats the odds. The odds offered by bookies tell you how much money you’ll win if a particular outcome occurs; to ensure a fair chance of consistently winning, you should only bet if your perceived likelihood of winning is higher than the bookies’.