Football History
Total Football, Quantified: What the Metrics Would Have Captured
Cruyff's Ajax and the 1974 Netherlands played a game decades ahead of the data. What Total Football was — and what modern metrics would have captured.
Category · 4 articles
Football History
The game's past, re-examined through data.
Football has a long memory and a short attention span. These articles revisit the moments and eras that defined the modern game and ask what the underlying numbers actually said at the time — about the improbable champions, the tactical revolutions, and the seasons we've decided to remember a certain way.
Historical facts, rule changes and tactical shifts are stated plainly; anything presented as a specific statistic is pulled from real data and dated, so the history holds up.
Football History
The 10 Most Statistically Improbable Seasons in Modern Football
Ten seasons that defied the numbers - from Leicester 5000-1 to unbeaten title runs - and what made each one a genuine statistical outlier rather than just a good story.
Football History
How Pep, Klopp, and the Data Era Rewired Tactics: A Statistical History
How positional play, gegenpressing and the analytics revolution reshaped modern football tactics - and how the metrics we now take for granted both drove and tracked the change.
Football History
Leicester 2015-16 Revisited: What the Underlying Numbers Really Said
Leicester won the title at 5000-1 on 81 points - but their expected points ranked only fourth. Revisiting 2015-16 through xG shows a more complicated, and more interesting, story.