Football By Numbers

Introduction In 1955, when the Sunderland A.F.C. was in the running for both the FA Cup and the League Championship, the club’s first-team players held a meeting in which they discussed which competition they should concentrate their efforts on. When one player suggested that they should go all out for both, captain Len Shackleton dismissed the proposition. “Can’t be done,” said the international inside-left. “Never been done.” The players agreed that the Cup, then the compet

Introduction At its beginning, association football was only barely an organised sport at all. In the FA’s first set of laws, there were no stipulations as to the number of players, or how long they were expected to play for. There were prohibitions against holding, hacking, tripping, pushing and certain kinds of footwear; but there were no fixed penalties for breaking these laws and no match officials to enforce them. The only mention of a free kick was in Law 8, which gave

Introduction Now that I’ve analysed the relative merits of different tie-breakers by comparing their correlations with primary performance indicators, I thought I’d go one step further and turn the microscope on those primary indicators themselves. From the Football League’s first season in 1888-’89 until its eighty-second in 1980-’81, it operated on the twin assumptions that a draw was half as good as a win, and that no one game in a round-robin competition should count for

Introduction In 1888, twelve of England’s most prominent professional football clubs agreed to arrange home-and-away fixtures amongst themselves each season. The driving purpose of this exercise seems to have been not competition but collaboration: by ensuring that each member of this self-selected elite would be able to host a minimum number of games against opposition good enough to attract the public, the clubs in question could help to secure one another financially. Nev