Daniel Chapman: Stats are a road map to beauty - ask Leeds United, but perhaps not Wigan Athletic

Without much else happening, a bumper, bored crowd tuned in to watch Leeds United Under-23s play Derby County. For half an hour, anyway.
Kalvin Phillips or Andrea Pirlo for Leeds United?Kalvin Phillips or Andrea Pirlo for Leeds United?
Kalvin Phillips or Andrea Pirlo for Leeds United?
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Needing entertainment, some popped on an old season review DVD. Some went to non-league games. Ezgjan Alioski, ruled out of international duty, ate a lampshade, probably.

Still others looked at a spreadsheet. It had colours at least but it was mostly numbers, a big grid screenshot for Twitter, ranking every team in the Championship for such exciting pastimes as ‘deep completions’ and ‘expected goals’.

Leeds United's beautician - Marcelo BielsaLeeds United's beautician - Marcelo Bielsa
Leeds United's beautician - Marcelo Bielsa
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The European qualifiers were dull, so this would have to do.

Is a spreadsheet the way anyone would choose to satisfy their football craving? Numbers instead of netbusters, equations instead of last-minute equalisers, calculating functions instead of flippin’ gerrin’ into ’em?

Well, maybe. Sometimes, watching Paul Heckingbottom’s Leeds I wished I had a heavy maths textbook with me, if only to bang my head against. But back when I was a kid, there was a book of football stats in the school library that was my bible during wet playtimes. It had every result and league table going back to the start of the Football League, and many happy hours were spent sneezing away the dust from its pages and reading what it said about Leeds United.

Those stats raised a lot of questions, and the answers taught me a lot about the club. Where were Leeds United before 1920/21? What was a ‘Leeds City’? Why am I seeing ‘2nd place’ so often?

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That’s the power and the joy of good stats. They inspire curiosity and reveal new perspectives. These days, thanks to mobile apps and data feeds, there has never been more to see. The table from Twitter, mentioned above, had a lot to say.

Some you know already, like how Leeds should be top scorers – those pesky expected goals – but are underperforming there worse than anybody. Some are more surprising.

Leeds are excellent at passing: possession, success, passes going forward. But Fulham are better in every passing category except deep completions, matron, also known as passes received near goal.

That’s interesting, as is the madness going on at Preston: 20th for deep completions and 17th for shots taken, suggesting they can’t get near the goal. But they’re top for scoring; in other words, every shot they hit from miles out is going in, and that’s put them in the promotion places.

If you can’t be good, be lucky, I guess.

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Despite these points of interest, in some quarters there’s an almost violent revulsion to data.

Pundit Craig Burley once threw a glove at expected goals and reached for his pistols as if they were an insult to his family name, rather than a more complex way of talking about shots on target. The argument goes that you don’t get points for expected goals, so what’s the point?

Well, you don’t get points for corners, but those have been counted for years, and used to say whether a team got forward a lot. Now you can work out how many goals your team can expect to score from those corners. In Leeds United’s case: none.

That last might be the biggest problem with breaking the beautiful game down into numbers. They are, in essence, statements of the visible, also known as the obvious.

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They put, in graph form, things football fans already know – or pride themselves on thinking they already know. Do I need data to know that Leeds pass the ball a lot, don’t score as often as they should, and have a strong defence? Not really; I watch them every week.

Is the argument that Kalvin Phillips is a better player than Andrea Pirlo settled by a calibrated comparison of their passing statistics? Not if, like me, you want to take their haircuts into account. In a game of aesthetic beauty, that’s a valid part of watching them play.

I do like my stats apps, because I’m a contradictory soul, but you always have to go back to the game. The best stats give you a road map to beauty spots, and the Championship chart reinforces that too. For beauty, avoid Wigan. But you knew that already.

Daniel Chapman has co-edited Leeds United fanzine and podcast The Square Ball since 2011, taking it through this season’s 30th anniversary, and seven nominations for the Football Supporters’ Federation Fanzine of the Year award, winning twice. He’s the author of a new history book about the club, ‘100 Years of Leeds United, 1919-2019’, and is on Twitter as MoscowhiteTSB.