Football Hackers: The Science and Art of a Data Revolution Paperback – May 30, 2019

I hope Mr Biermann will see this review:I’d like to thank him for putting so much effort to provide us, students of the game, with the newest concepts in football data revolution. Hopefully we’ll get in contact to exchange some ideas.This is a MUST READ!

The author illustrates the advances, the good, the bad and the ugly of analytics in football clearly and vividly. Cannot recommend enough to anyone who is interested in the topic.

Football Hackers: The Science and Art of a Data Revolution (2019) by Christoph Bierman is an excellent read about the modern application of statistics to soccer. Soccer, or football as it will be referred to from here on, is very difficult to apply statistics to. Possession, shots taken and passed made can all be deceptive.Prior to the modern era of ubiquitous digital footage of thousands of games and the availability of cheap computing power coming up with better football statistics has not been possible. Charles Reep’s simplistic counting of passes being the best known failed example. But today with annotations available for thousands of games a year being done more sophisticated analysis has become possible.In the book Bierman talks to a number of modern football statistics innovators and describes their influence on the modern game. To anyone who is familiar with these ideas the first new metric Xg or expected goals should be familiar. But other concepts such as ‘packing’, PPDA, dangerousity and others are likely to be new. The book has lots of examples from Bierman’s home country of Germany and quite a few from other places.Football Hackers is well worth reading for anyone interested in how to apply statistics to a complex, flowing game. For anyone interested in getting a feel for what’s coming in modern football it’s highly recommended. It’s also well written and flows well from concept to concept and person to person.

This book is entertaining, thought provoking, and insightful. It provides a solid window into the way that soccer is changing, and into how decisions are made. If you love soccer and data, this is an absolute must.

Fabulous. Insightful. Makes you want to delve deeper into the subject.The footballing world needs more work along these lines. Fans need to understand the game better beyond the mere lazy narritification of things.

Great inside info

This book gives You examples of how Big data is being used on Football

This book introduces you to some people who use quantitative methods to analyze football. It tells you almost nothing about the actual insights. Whether that's because they wouldn't tell the author or whether the author didn't understand or want to pass along the information, we will never know. Save your money.