Moneyball was the breakthrough in baseball across the pond and quickly adopted, but football is another story.

Expected Goals is replete with such stories, spanning decades, of people spread across the football pyramid.Over the last couple of years, I have developed a disdain for the suffusion of data ino the sport, primarily born out of my inability to understand or appreciate the changing lexicon of footballing discourse. There is a lot that has been disre-garded, Ankersen said, whole areas of the game that nobody has ever really tried to improve. Expected Goals charts his remarkable journey into the heart of the modern game and reveals how clubs across the world, from Liverpool to Leipzig and Brentford to Bayern Munich, began to see how data could help them unearth new players, define radical tactics and plot their path to glory.

The author is also well read on the subject and does not presuppose he is the first to cover such ground. Once the data were there then analysts started to use the data to work find players who were likely to be stars and how the game could be better played. g., Brentford, Midtjylland, RB Salzburg, Liverpool, Arsenal) so I will probably never get the insight I find most interesting without being on the inside of a club. Half-time team-talks are influenced by text messages sent to the coaching staff, detailing how the team is performing according to a prescribed series of performance indicators. Instead, we're left with a flabby narrative that could have been compressed into about a third of its length.The formula used to calculate expected goals and other related stats are explained in a straightforward manner by Tippett and are accompanied by easy to follow examples and graphics.