In the early 1990s, there was a welcome campaign urging people not to leave dogs in parked cars due to the dire consequences the nation’s favourite animal could face if the weather was hot.
I mention this because on the landmark date of August 15, 1992, I convinced my parents to leave me in their car all afternoon while they did holiday stuff so I could listen to the first ever afternoon of FA Premier League football on Radio 2. The windows were shut (it wasn’t too hot and I had a CapriSun, don’t worry) but my mind had never been more open to the sheer possibility of what football could, and would, become.
It’s become fashionable among traditionalists to denigrate the 1992 reformation of the English top flight but the truth is that, at the time, nearly everyone was wildly excited about the reshuffled division.
Blackburn Rovers, fuelled by mysterious steel-industry money, had spent more than £3million on a Southampton player called Alan Shearer (now a colleague) but had partly offset it by selling a player called Duncan Shearer to Aberdeen in the same window. ‘Well, isn’t that an interesting name-based coincidence’, a young me mused, barely noticing that Arsenal had led Norwich by two goals at half-time at Highbury but still lost.
I’m sure it was just as possible to fall in love with football in 1892 or 1982, but 1992 made it easy.
Match Of The Day was back as a weekly show, the scoreline (a type of stat!) was now radically displayed on-screen during games and within a season we’d have the aesthetic joy of squad numbers and players’ names on shirts.
I spent much of that decade noticing things, remembering things, spotting things. ‘What’s this? A GCSE geography question about Portsmouth FC and whether they should rebuild Fratton Park or relocate to a new location in the town? Here’s an unnecessary 500 words on the history of the club, focusing heavily on their post-war heyday, for precisely no benefit.’
Fast-forward to the early 2000s and I am, via a series of fortunate breaks, working in the very early days of UK football data with Opta.
The subject matter is seen as a curiosity, an affectation, a space-filler. Match stats become an addendum to match reports, a receipt that the reporter had watched the game, perhaps. Some of you might remember Sky’s Player Cam, which exclusively followed a single participant for the entirety of the game, close enough to see your favourite footballer swear at the referee but too close to see anything they were doing in the context of the match.
The player cam is now focused on Falcao. Available on red button & Sky Sports Xtra: http://t.co/Lm9wVqQwwY #MUFC #QPR pic.twitter.com/xIFfOaBjVH
— Sky Sports Premier League (@SkySportsPL) September 14, 2014
Statistics were layered onto this confusing kaleidoscope but only served to make matters even more bewildering.
That was football data in the 2000s — nominally available but invariably serving up more doubt than insight.
Something had to change and, in the early 2010s, it did.
One of the eternal debates in football is about whether anything is actually new or just a rebranded version of what happened before. But what if it’s both?
In Martin O’Neill’s recent autobiography, he mentions that before his first game as Nottingham Forest manager, away at Tottenham in an FA Cup tie, Brian Clough told him, “… and one more thing, don’t be shooting from 30 or 40 yards out… that’s a waste of your time and it’s definitely a waste of mine”.
So yeah, many people implicitly understood the concept of expected goals in the 1970s, but it took 40 years until it could be collected, accurately, on a huge scale, packaged up, flung out instantly and analysed in a sensible way.
O’Neill (bottom row, second right) looking a bit glum in an otherwise happy Forest dressing room in 1975, perhaps remembering Clough telling him not to shoot from long range (Photo: Evening Standard/Getty Images)
And the history of football in the past 10 years has been one of ever-increasing amounts of football information amassing in front of our eyes as we witness inexplicable events, such as Leicester City winning the Premier League in 2016, and wholly explicable events, such as Liverpool harnessing data in a way that allowed them to flap their way back to the perch they had been knocked off in the early 1990s.
We have at last moved into an era of intelligent analysis, of using data as wisely as possible to find trends that actually explain how football works.
We have gone beyond the time when a newly-appointed Peterborough United manager pledged to fans that his team would perform a minimum of 600 passes and 25 shots in every single game — benchmarks even a Pep Guardiola side would find almost impossible to reach. In some ways, that’s a shame; but in many more ways, it isn’t.
In the last few years, The Athletic has led the way in taking the myriad information that football generates and turning it into compelling analysis, whether that’s through data insights, tactical analysis or just brilliantly-researched stories. And the key element in any of that is authenticity — because football fans know their club better than anyone.
It’s super-exciting to be joining an editorial team who not only understand this but whose entire focus is on creating the best football content available anywhere in the world.
I’ll be making sure our data content continues to excite and evolve while you’ll hear, see and sometimes read me in a variety of places across The Athletic.
These days I don’t need to sit in a locked car to enjoy football… but I probably still would.
(Top photo: Duncan Shearer left Blackburn Rovers in the summer of 1992 to make room for namesake Alan. Allsport UK)
