By Zach Slaton, Contributor

It has been nearly two months since The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Soccer Is Wrong was published in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, meaning that soccer quants in North America have had to pay for international shipping if they wanted to get their hands on the book.  The need for such expensive shipping ends on July 30th, 2013 when the book is published in both the United States and Canada.  While the authors of the book, Chris Anderson and David Sally, have been very pleased with the book’s reception in Europe they are looking forward to what they hope is a slightly different reaction in North America.  David Sally explained, “I think we are really glad with the reaction in the UK and The Netherlands where the book launched a few weeks ago.  I think we’re hoping the reaction is going to be even stronger in the US because there is more of an appetite for statistics in sports.  It’s a more natural audience.  I think there is also the coolness and hipness factor to soccer.  A lot of people are trying to understand the game more deeply, and we hope the books serves as a way to get even deeper into the game.” Chris Anderson believes North Americans’ appetite for numbers combined with soccer being a less popular sport than it is in Europe makes the book perfect learning material about a game that is rising in popularity. “[Dave and I] are Americans, and we love American soccer.  We’d love to see the game grow in the US, so in whatever small way the book can tell them something about soccer they didn’t know but they wanted to know and will help them understand and make sense of what’s going on on the field when they’re watching or their kids are playing.  If we can contribute to helping grow soccer in the US in whatever small way I’d personally be really excited about that.” The way Anderson and Sally approach learning about the game is by asking repeated, intelligent questions, answering them with the best available data, and then asking the next logical question that comes from the answer to the previous question.  In laymen’s terms, they end up pealing back the layers of the soccer onion.  The duo divides their examination of the game into three parts: Before the Match, which examines the larger patterns within the game that seem largely immutable: luck accounts for 50% of the outcome of a match, frequency of scorelines are relatively consistent between top leagues, and the rarity of goal scoring makes the game somewhat unpredictable and the value of goal scorers dependent upon when they score their goals versus the scoreline of the match. On the Pitch, which explains how the game is a balance of strategies.  Preventing a goal is more important to earning points than scoring one, the game is about managing turnovers, and the game can be controlled by both tiki taka as well …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest