Money, data, technology and football's new schism
The paranoid football ramblings of an unravelling mind
ITV Football’s EFL Highlights show is rubbish.
I understand the challenge. Editing and presenting a giant glut of football matches in the space of a few hours is a task and a half. But ITV’s (it's IMG, really) attempt is a shambles.
Football culture in England runs deep. There are clubs among the 72 in the EFL that pull in tens of thousands every week. They are all, by definition, clubs of a certain status. The difficulty involved in providing an adequate highlights show for them might justify it being bad. It doesn’t explain why it’s getting worse. I didn’t think it was possible.
I didn’t really want to dwell on this but I watch this show every week and it’s been driving me up the wall. The production decisions that go into this programme are extraordinary. Even the theme music is just weird.
Let’s compare 2022/23 and 2023/24.
Last year, the show was primarily studio-based. On a typical Saturday we’d endure the worst of England’s jobbing pundits and Hugh Woozencroft fumbling his way through a series of links beginning without exception with “well…” or “so…”, a disease that somehow also infects the otherwise demonstrably more accomplished Jules Breach when she fronts this mess.
This year, the show is primarily stadium-based. On a typical Saturday we endure Hugh Woozencroft fumbling his way through a series of links beginning without exception with “well…” or “so…”, only now it’s all outdoors.
With a handful of Championship matches in focus, League Two is tossed off with all the enthusiasm of the legal disclaimer at the end of a radio ad.
What unites the two years is lazy, error-strewn production with gaffes in the graphics and cock-ups in the commentary as standard.
It’s absolute bobbins. Stop it.
With (extremely limited) apologies, I’ve decided to dip into my archives for the main article this week.
In the last three days I’ve volunteered at two football matches and I’m still catching up on life after a slight emergency situation last week. Sue me.
Money, data, technology and football's new schism
There was a conversation on Twitter recently in which a football supporter declared and repeated that he didn't enjoy xG.
According to The Analyst, xG – Expected Goals – “measures the quality of a chance by calculating the likelihood that it will be scored from a particular position on the pitch during a particular phase of play. This value is based on several factors from before the shot was taken.”
By now, followers of elite-level professional football will be familiar with the concept. By football analytics standards, xG is mainstream. It’s used by the media every day and after every game. Sometimes it’s for colour. Sometimes it’s to back up or debunk an argument. Sometimes it’s to defend a performance. Always it’s there, front and centre.
The aforementioned Twitter user was questioned about his scepticism but not about why he thought xG was there to be enjoyed. Despite its use and abuse by the football media, xG is essentially a functional metric as opposed to a source of entertainment. Its ubiquity is a side effect of its simplicity and the appetite among some sections of football fandom for data.
While there’s no particular reason for xG to be kept from the public, we shouldn’t judge it on its public worth. Its purpose is performance analysis. It exists because the analysts behind the scenes at football clubs consider it valuable along with all the other data available to them.
The proliferation of data might not be a meaningful front in the battle between science and tradition at the top end of English football, where nothing any observer can say will ever persuade those inside the game to shun useful information, but it is one of the three pillars of the game's future history.
Money. Data. Technology. These are the fault lines set to trigger the earthquake that splits the game not only on a preference basis but one of access. The universality of the game – to my mind its greatest attribute – is long dead. What comes next will only exacerbate existing differences.
Money has influenced football since the word go.
The push towards professionalism in Victorian England shaped the sport we know today. The abolition of the maximum wage in 1961 and the inaugural Premier League season in the early 1990s are just two of the historical landmarks that helped make wealth a sporting advantage.
Rich folk have always been able to lead the most successful football clubs because they have the means, desire, clout and ego to do so. They can pay the most. They can attract the best. And the outcome – at least in leagues without wage or salary caps and in plenty of those that do – is an uneven playing field.
That’s hardly news. Yet money is more significant in football than ever. Extreme wealth is now in play and has brought with it a widening of every gap in the game. Crucially, the clubs owned by multinationals and nations are innovating around the pitch as well as becoming formidable on it.
Red Bull and City Football Group are changing the game. When it comes to the numbers involved today, money doesn’t just increase spending power – it offers freedom of strategy and limitless opportunities to build clubs in whatever image the owners desire. It’s a world away from so much of the game that one has to wonder whether divergence is possible.
With money comes the need to win, and with the need to win comes data.
Football analytics is big business, a burgeoning industry with many more detractors than advocates but an unshakeable place within the game. It’s fascinating stuff, this collision of data science and sports performance, and lazy interpretations of its value from those of us on the outside don’t make it any less so.
These numbers and analyses are about creating an advantage. Analytics, in that sense, is as much a part of the modern game as nutrition or set piece training. Indeed, both of those and more are themselves influenced and evaluated by analytics.
But access to data is another fault line. Not all matches are covered by a data provider. Not all clubs can afford devices to track their players. Not all would know what to do with the data if they could. These are differences destined to increase.
Technology is also having an outsized impact on the game itself.
Again, nothing new there. From the crossbar to Adi Dassler’s screw-in studs, technological developments are as old as football. But, like money, the pace of change is amplifying the existing divisions between, well, divisions.
Some have goal-line technology. Others do not. Some have to put up with VAR. Others do not. Some have semi-automated offside decisions. Others do not.
The more elite football embraces these technologies and acceleration of change, the more isolated it will become from the rest of the game. The same is true of money, and of data. That’s not a value judgement – it’s just what will happen.
It can't be ruled out, but it's unlikely football will split so fundamentally as to spawn two or more codes. The effect of the looming schism will probably be that the great structures of the game remain while the divisions within grow and different types of football emerge without entirely breaking away.
Football romantics, traditionalists and historians – I am all three, without shame – warn against these developments. We talk about the heart of the sport, about what it means, about what it is.
Resistance to change is a frequently levelled accusation but it's not the change that's the problem. The threat, at least as I see it, is when change threatens the universal essence of the game.
Mine is just one standpoint. It's equally valid to see not division, but choice. There's a flavour of football for every fan and we decide what to watch and where to go accordingly.
Regardless of one's outlook, the expanding faults within the game are inevitable. The evidence is beginning to reveal itself in the disequilibrium between Premier League and non-league, for example, where the standard is bound to be different but we're seeing material differences between one football and the other.
Money, data and technology are the drivers of that. The result is a game of haves and have-nots.
Money might be an unavoidable influence but when every result comes at a cost we're paralysed by consequence.
Data might be a positive evolution in the elite game but when chaos becomes order we're limited by predictability.
Access to technology might be the natural intersection of money and data but when VAR is the destination we should question whether we were on the right journey.
For these reasons and more, the have-nots might just have more fun. Isn't that what all this is supposed to be about?
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“We have to state that Ms Jennifer Hermoso lies in every statement she makes against the president. The facts are what they are; and, no matter how many statements are made to distort reality, it is impossible to change what happened. The peck [kiss] was consensual. The consent was given in the moment with the conditions of the moment. Later you can think that you have made a mistake, but you cannot change reality.”
In a now-deleted statement, the RFEF – Spain’s football federation – admits to not understanding the concept of consent.
Salty beef extracts
The Long Read: Southend United's 18th nervous breakdown (Unexpected Delirium)
Bukayo Saka: ‘Nothing worth having is easy. It’s about how much you want it’ (The Guardian)
Sheffield Wednesday: No Cloud Without a Silver Lining (Football Paradise)
Dessert
The Mizuno Morelia II in white, fiery coral and bolt. Tick, tick, tick and tick.
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