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Book Review - The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Football Is Wrong, by Chris Anderson and David Sally

2013-06-17T19:19:12Z

Judging a book by its cover is widely agreed to be something that one should not do in polite society. How about by its subtitle?

"Why everything you know about football is wrong" is meant to be provocative. It's meant to be eye-catching. It's meant to make the prospective reader think 'ah, man, I thought I knew loads about football. I should buy this book immediately!' It's aggressive: straight from the off, without having even opened the book, the reader is already aware that the authors of the book stand above them. This isn't unusual, of course - the author of a book tends to know more about their subject than the reader, since otherwise the book would be largely pointless - but it's not often put in quite such stark terms: You, dear reader, are wrong in every respect, and must sit down and pay attention while we tell you why.

It's ... well, for all that it's doubtless meant to be tongue-in-cheek, it's mostly just a bit annoying.

What the subtitle does is place Anderson and Sally firmly on one side of the ongoing culture war between the nerds and the jocks, the savants and the savages, the iconoclasts and the establishment. This story has baddies: the mouth-breathing troglodytes that insist football works like football because football has always worked like football and must carry on in much the same way, because football. And it has goodies: brave mavericks who preach a football based on sound principles derived from the rigorous analysis of data, data, and more data. Football analytics - the numbers game - will:

wash away old certainties and change the game we know and love. It will be a game we view more analytically, more scientifically, where we do not accept what we have always been taught, but where we always ask why. The game will look the same, but the way we think about it will be almost unrecognizable.

Which sounds terrifically exciting, if rather unlikely. After all, the ur-book of the genre, Moneyball, may have shaken the practice of baseball in fundamental and far-reaching ways, but it hasn't transmuted the entire fanbase into ultra-informed, ultra-sceptical, ultra-rigorous analysts. Anderson and Sally, like most other authors who write about analytics, do rather rest on the unspoken presumption that football is, fundamentally, a riddle to be solved, a mystery to be unpicked, a system to be scrutinised until its secrets are revealed. Obviously football can be that, as it can be anything, but it doesn't follow that it is so for everybody. It can also be many other things -- a source of hilarity, a mine of anecdote, a window into cultural anthropological insight, an excuse for a fight -- that don't require or even take note of an analytical approach.

This presumption suffuses the first third of the book, and takes them to some odd places: places that are populated by men with a faintly strawish aspect. After setting out the mission behind the analytical "reformation" -- their preferred term -- they begin the serious business with a discussion of the role of luck in determining the outcome of a football game. Their analysis and conclusions are both interesting and illuminating, but the assertion that this will be "a surprising finding to fans who believe a team's skill entirely controls what happens on the pitch" prompts only the thought: do such fans exist? Perhaps a particularly credulous seven-year-old might truly believe that their team being better is all that matters, but in general there is no section of humanity so alive to Lady Luck's inevitable mood swings as the football fan.

Better perhaps to say that their conclusions may be surprising to any football fan that believes a match is mostly or primarily determined by skill, a more modest and more accurate proposition. For it will be no shock to anybody that "there are two routes to success in football ... One is being good. The other is being lucky. You need both to win a championship. But you only need one to win a game." But it might well be news that, by Anderson and Sally's reasoning, that the split between luck and fortune is roughly 50/50.

Perhaps this is the "you" that the book is addressed to: the fan who believes skill controls everything; the fan who only loves football because goals are rare; the fan whose support only makes sense if there is "a logic to the game". This doesn't really sound like any football fan, let alone every football fan, and it's a shame the authors felt the need to address this caricature: their findings, once the book settles down a bit, are persuasive on their own merits. It helps that unlike much writing about analytics -- most notably Simon Kuper and Stefan Syzmanski's Soccernomics, which suffered at times from an overwhelming joylessness -- Anderson and Sally are able to keep their tone conversational and their prose convivial, and even remember to include the occasional joke.

Once the privileged place of luck has been established -- and this section really should be compulsory reading for anybody that's ever attempted to squeeze an over-arching narrative from a couple of cup games -- the book proceeds along familiar structure: first take an accepted piece of footballing 'wisdom', then analyse the underlying numbers, then discover that they don't support the initial thesis, then propose a modified or alternative formulation, which can sometimes be illustrated with a suggestion that, were it not for the numbers, might seem comical or ludicrous. So we learn that it's more important to sell Zurab Khizanishvili than to buy a superstar; that Chelsea should have eschewed Fernando Torres in favour of Darren Bent; that the only thing that distinguishes the Bundesliga from the Premier League is the shirts and the geography; and so on and so forth. There is also analysis of the idiosyncratic, counterintuitive, and successful methods of "Stoke manager" Tony Pulis and "Wigan manager" Roberto Martinez, which suffer only slightly for having fallen foul of Harold MacMillan's famous mantra: events, dear boy, events.

That the book ultimately fails to live up to its subtitle is not the fault of the authors' work so much as the fault of the larger debate into which this book has been published, a debate that demands overstatement because, well, it's an argument. Whoever's idea it was -- and it may be instructive that the cover of the Kindle edition features a different, less grandiose mission statement: Why Corners Should Be Taken Short, Teams Are Only As Good As Their Worst Players, and Changing Manager Doesn't Change Much -- and for all that it may just be marketing, it misrepresents this book as being some kind of key to a higher level of footballing consciousness. It isn't: it's mind-engaging, mind-stimulating, and even a bit mind-expanding. But mind-blowing? No.

From the ordinary fan point of view, the wider question is more-or-less moot: if you like systems, and analysis, and figuring out how things works, then this book will fit neatly into the burgeoning library of online and offline writings, and you'll enjoy it. If you don't, then you can safely ignore it without missing too much. As illuminating as much of this is, anybody nursing the idea that greater acceptance of analytics into the mainstream will put an end to people saying and believing incorrect things about football is being naive. Perhaps a few cliches will die a death, perhaps one or two columnists will set aside some established truths, but the broad sweep of footballing chitter-chat will retain its fundamental character, and be defined by plenty more than just the vitally-important-yet-terribly-reductive question of who is and isn't any good.

As for the technical side of things, well, that war is done. The reformation (as the authors profess to favour), or revolution (as their occasional references to Robespierre implies they might prefer), is more or less over. The authors may be correct to suggest that so far the financial pressures of relegation and the need for short-term sustainability have kept football clubs from embracing data-driven methods, but ultimately the need for an edge, any edge, means that analytics will be first embraced and then subsumed into the game just as nutrition, psychology, and not-drinking-sixteen-pints-of-lager-on-a-Friday have been. Early in the book, Anderson and Sally describe Everton's analytics operation, and express surprise that they sit not "near the centre of Everton's universe, right next door to the manager", but instead "along a corridor next to the canteen". One suspects that, had it been a question of office arrangements, Martin Luther might have confined himself to a sarcastic email.

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Stop England, start England again

2013-05-31T13:34:39Z

On Wednesday night, at Wembley, England played Ireland. For the home team, the most pleasing aspect of the evening was that the crowd didn't sing about the IRA; at least, not in sufficient numbers or at sufficient volume to be noticed by the television cameras. Ireland scored a good goal. England scored a spawny one. So predictable was the actual football that the sentence after this one was written three hours before kick-off. It was a draw, and it wasn't very interesting.

Post-season friendlies are difficult things. If the experience of going through the football season is roughly akin to being beaten close to senselessness by an unforgiving and cruel assailant, then these tacked-on exhibitions are the unforgiving assailant's small friend running up to your prone and battered body and, just at the moment you thought the punishment was over, kicking you in the ankle. (If it's not, then it isn't. The joy of conditional similes.)

But that problem notwithstanding, there is something extra-grueling about England these days, a kind of bilious miasma that follows the national team around, coating every soul it touches with a patina of low-level misery. It's not just in the football, though Roy Hodgson's ongoing efforts to prove Liverpool fans right aren't helping. It's all the ancillary stuff: the endless rows about The Armband, the cynical and exploitative kit launches, the hostile press conferences, the lunatic headlines, the unhinged opinion pieces, the vacant seats on the halfway line, the relentless maximisation of New Wembley, the pompous vacillating about about England fans' naughty chanting versus Foreign fans' naughty chanting, the flouncing retirements, the preening un-retirements, the tubthumping, the xenophobia, the delusion, the snark. In many ways, that band are the perfect summation of England and their attendant fuss: an inescapable and witless parping.

It pollutes everything, even the football. If England win, momentary happiness is either rationalised away in favour of laughing at the FIFA rankings and nit-picking over the manner of the victory, or subsumed into a tsunami of hype. If England lose, then heaven help us all, even those of us who don't support the team but just happen to live here. And if England draw, limply, against a team who don't have quite the quality but at least look a bit sparky? Well, it's just a bit ... depressing. So drab was the result against Ireland that even Gary Lineker managed to have an actual opinion.

Radical action is needed. England, starting today, should close themselves down. Apologise to Sunday's opponents Brazil, withdraw from World Cup qualifying, and chain the gates of Wembley closed. Say to the world, and to the nation: look, this isn't going particularly well. No pleasure is coming from this. Nobody's having any fun. And while football shouldn't be about guaranteed fun -- losing sucks, and has to suck -- it should be, at the very least, about the possibility of fun. It sometimes feels as though the only way the national side could be enjoyable again would be in the event of a trophy win, which is a terrible state of affairs.

This would be quite a good time for a break. England won't be doing anything relevant in Brazil, if they even get there, and so the only downsides would be a few holes in next season, and the possibility that Frank Lampard might not make it to 100 caps. These can be solved, respectively, by people doing something else, and by people laughing at Frank Lampard; that last might be a shame for the man himself, but this is about the bigger picture. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his symbolic bauble for his nation's mental well-being.

Give the nation a year or two off to relax, and then get it all going again once everybody's calmed the hell down. Let the underage teams potter along, they're fundamentally harmless, and James Milner deserves the chance to pick up a few more caps. And then, once it's back -- say, the beginning of qualification for Euro 2016 -- make a few important, detoxifying changes. Just the one new kit every two years. Take England back around the country again. Publicly announce that the captain's armband, and its accompanying tossing responsibilities, will go to whichever player has the most caps, or alphabetically in the case of a tie. Treat autobiographies like drug offences: a two-year ban for the first; a life ban for the second. Take all the most egregious, dispiriting features of modern England, and draw the poison.

At this point, were this piece appearing in a proper newspaper, I would conclude by saying something like "of course, I'm not really calling for England to stop completely; it's just that England needs to think about how to get some of the fun back into following their national team." But it's not, and I'm not. I'm serious. The England team and its attendant circus is a toxic growth on English football and English culture and needs to be cut out and destroyed with fire. Take away the trumpets, let blessed silence ring out. Knock down Wembley, and salt the earth. Start again. Do it better.

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The FA Cup wouldn't and shouldn't have saved Roberto Mancini

2013-05-17T15:07:52Z

"Is it ever acceptable to sack a manager that has just won a trophy?"

"Yes, obviously. Let's suppose they were caught match-fixing, or doping, or skimming off the profits of an elaborate scam involving the purchase of players with long surnames and the printing operations of the Megastore. Stupid question. Don't know why you asked it."

"Right. Is it ever acceptable to sack a manager that has just won a trophy for not being good enough?"

"You get trophies for not being good enough these days? Arsene Wenger joke!"

"This dialogue conceit isn't really working."

"Oh, don't say that. C'mon, ask me another."

"No. I don't know how Socrates put up with this."

***

Exciting times for fans of chaos. Noted fringe-botherer Roberto Mancini has been sacked as manager of Manchester City, apparently for gross disappointment, and Malaga's Manuel Pellegrini is expected to replace him imminently, or at least shortly, or if not shortly then at some point in the not-too-distant. Though given the way that the footballing news cycle has been freewheeling downhill for the last few weeks, it wouldn't be much of a shock to find the job going to Rafael Benitez, or a corner flag wearing Malcolm Allison's old hat, or Stuart Pearce's lucky stuffed horse, or Stuart Pearce.

On the one hand, sacking a manager who finished 5th, 3rd, 1st, and 2nd in the league, and who reached two cup finals, winning one, seems harsh. On the other, this season has been an exercise in slack-jawed crown-surrendering, remarkable largely for a European campaign of surpassing inadequacy and persistent reports of friction within the squad. Add to that the availability of the well-respected Pellegrini -- apparently; apparently -- and it's not difficult to see why the thought of a change is tempting enough to act upon.

News of Mancini's imminent defenestration has been dribbling out for months, but was substantially leaked in the run-up to last Saturday's FA Cup final, which suggests two things. One, that the nexus between City's directors and the press contains more than a few people who aren't too keen on His Bescarfed Ex-Majesty. And two, that even a thundering City triumph wouldn't have been enough to change the decision. That second is the most interesting, because the idea of sacking a manager who's won a trophy feels strange and counterintuitive. That's the point of the whole thing, after all. Go and win something. Oh, you did? Well, not good enough. Get your things.

The thing is, there are trophies and there are trophies, depending on who you ask. Take Kenny Dalglish's second spell at Liverpool, which ended with a League Cup winner's medal and a P45. On the one hand, glory! On the other, well, Liverpool's league form was morbidly mediocre. Doubtless there are other examples, perhaps involved those masters of the precipitate sacking, Real Madrid. Managers who did what they were put there to do, or at least did what the popular notion of a football manager would suggest they were put there do, only to find out that they were meant to be doing something else.

This is threatening to collapse into a "so what is the point of football anyway?" piece, which would be messy. Let's say that there are many possible points to football - that sounds right; there may be as many as there are people who give a toss - and conclude that it shouldn't be a massive surprise if the people that own football clubs and appoint football managers have different ones to those that support them. After all, these are different types of people doing different things for different reasons, and perhaps the only thing that an owner of a team has in common with any random individual fan of that team is that come Saturday, 3 o'clock, they'd both like the same result.

This is not to presume homogeneity of football owners' (or fans') motives, or to reduce this down to: "why oh why are the rich incapable of human love?" (They are, of course, but that's for another day.) But when Arsene Wenger refers to fourth-place as a trophy, he's not just attempting to put a sunny slant on Arsenal's self-trimmed ambitions, though he definitely is doing that. He's re-purposing football's language of achievement to reflect a new hierarchy of triumph. So is every relegation-threatened manager who's counted the cup finals left to safety. One man's victory is another's irrelevant bauble.

It should probably be acknowledged here that cup competitions are a dreadful way of answering the question: who is the best football team? A happy confluence of accident and design ensures that they are malicious, temperamental, untrustworthy things, so ludicrously prone to the slings and arrows that it's a wonder anybody can find the energy to write those 'CHAMPIONS LEAGUE FAILURE: IS THE PREMIER LEAGUE DYING?' pieces. There never was a cup win that didn't owe something to luck, usually something substantial. (As an aside, while leagues are obviously a better test, they are still some distance from being scientifically rigorous. This is good. Science is a terrible spectator sport.)

Winning a cup doesn't always rock financially, either. A team that wins the FA Cup but gets relegated from the Premier League is going to suffer, unlike a team that finishes a safe fifteenth and plummets out in the third round. See also: the Europa League. It's lucky for Wigan fans that Dave Whelan has a particular attachment to the oldest pot of the lot - he once broke his leg with Budweiser; you may have heard - otherwise their moment of transcendent joy might well have been shaded by boardroom mutterings of distraction.

So what does it mean that City were (probably, maybe) intending to sack Mancini regardless of the FA Cup final result? Being generous, perhaps, we might decide that they were taking a long-term view, and had simply decided that Pellegrini (or whoever) was a better bet for all their bright and shiny tomorrows. Being pragmatic, it might be that they reasoned that beating the 18th best team in the Premier League wouldn't be much of an achievement, regardless of the occasion of said beating, and the weight of external evidence was such that it didn't matter. Being realistic, we should probably admit that the only top-end English trophies that matter any more are the Premier League (which for most competing clubs means simply staying in it) and the Champions League (which matters most not in the winning but the qualifying, is deliberately league-like in its early structure, and is for the majority of clubs perfectly and permanently irrelevant).

This is a loss. The point of a cup is not to establish who is the best, but who did the best, which may sound like a semantic point but is terribly important. The value of supporting a team that wins a cup comes not from the knowledge that your team is the best in any abstract or general sense, but from knowing that when your team was asked to do something, it did, and when it was asked to do the next thing it did that as well, and on and on through the season, until eventually the world ran out of questions and rewarded your persistence and fortune with a medal and a ride in an open-top bus. It's a test and a triumph of doing, not just of being.

To be human is to be a mess of memory and affection, and to be a football fan is just the same, and to win a cup is to have those affections and memories coalesced into one glinting, irreducible object of triumph. They didn't carve WIGAN WOZ ERE into the FA Cup on Saturday, except they definitely did, and they carved it into the memories of everybody watching and the hearts of everybody supporting Wigan. Had City won, it would have been the same (albeit less surprising and less pleasing for the neutral). But in this post-cup world, a club's place in the hierarchy of the important (read: profitable) competitions is the priority, if indeed you can have a priority in a list of one. Memories are a weak and feeble currency. If Mancini had won the FA Cup, his dismissal would probably have been the right move, by all the relevant, current criteria. But what a cold and narrow righteousness this is.

***

"Football's rubbish, isn't it?"

"Yeah. I wish I didn't like it so much."

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The Alternative PFA Team of the Year

2013-05-03T16:36:29Z

Tradition is a marvellous thing. This PFA Premier League Team of the Year, for example, comprised David de Gea, Pablo Zabaleta, Jan Vertonghen, Rio Ferdinand, Leighton Baines, Gareth Bale, Juan Mata, Michael Carrick, Eden Hazard, Robin van Persie and Luis Suarez, a good safe selection from the usual suspects. Upset Arsenal fans can perhaps take some joy in their contribution to Van Persie's development? No, no, maybe not.

But when the most striking inclusion – Carrick – has spent the entire season playing well for the eventual champions, well, perhaps it's time to start looking for something else in the awards. Something bold. Something daring. Something really, really, stupid. Here, then, in accordance with a tradition of almost exactly one year, is the SB Nation Alternative PFA Team of the Year.

Loose cannon: Hugo Lloris (Tottenham)

We established, last year that small goalkeepers are fun. Lloris has a bit of that; while he's no Super Vorm, he's not averse to bouncing around his six-yard box if the situation requires it. But Lloris doubles down on the entertainment by playing sweeper-keeper with a demented commitment to speed. This means two things. One: Tottenham play a lot better when he's in goal, as he provides defensive security while helping them advance up the pitch. Two: at some point he's going to get sent off twenty yards outside his box, which is always funny.

Example to us all Benoît Assou-Ekotto

Nothing to do with his football, particularly since he spent a decent chunk of the season crocked. Everything to do with this Guardian interview, in which our hero, among other things, either appears or affects not to have noticed the whole Suarez-Ivanovic 'incident'. "He did what? Il a mangé?" Just imagine being blessed with such an attitude. Imagine not giving, and not feeling the need to give, a toss. Bliss.

Bloke at the back to do that serene strolling thing that makes British football fans feel faintly angry and nauseated: Matija Nastasic (Manchester City)

Precocity, or precociousness, whichever it is, is annoying. It's bad enough knowing that footballers of around one's own (rapidly increasing) age are devastatingly superior to you in every way; when a nineteen-year-old – born in 1993! – slips into Premier League football like it's his favourite pair of trousers, then there really is no hope. Bring out the bath chair and the tartan blanket, and turn on the television. It's Watercolour Challenge time.

Bloke at the back to do the heading: Clint Hill (QPR)

Bear with me here. This is a not a choice made on the basis of Hill's titanic performances at the back, since there haven't been any. Nor his marshalling of an excellent QPR defence, since they've been a smouldering pile of hot bobbins. Not even his inspirational leadership, since QPR spend most weekends looking like a group of strangers thrown together for a package holiday, with nothing in common bar a passing curiosity about the same small slice of geography, feigning interest in one another's careers while they wait for the retsina to kick in. But there are other kinds of achievement beyond actually being good at things, and this season has seen no achievement more remarkable, more singular, than Hill's uncanny ability to stay in the team while all around him chopped and changed. Death, taxes, and Clint Hill looking confused and cross as the opposition score, again and again and again and again and again.

Adorable scamperer Rafael da Silva (Manchester United)

Mythologically speaking, twins have often been used to evoke dualism, to embody two related but opposed forces, like good and evil, or night and day. Apollo was the Greek god of the sun; his twin sister Artemis, goddess of the moon. The parallels are obvious in the Premier League, which this season was driven by the two opposing concepts of Playing For Manchester United and Playing For QPR. At one end of the table, Rafael destroyed all the concerns about his quality and established himself as the first-choice right-back for his title-winning club, finding time along the way to score an utterly delirious goal against Liverpool. At the other, Fabio lost his place to Armand Traore and grew a silly beard.

Introverted wide-man: Santi Cazorla (Arsenal)

He just seems far too nice for this league. What's he up to? What's he planning? What lies behind that apparently open, pleasant grin, and carefully-endearing, slightly-silly haircut? Is this two-footed thing a sly dig at the inadequacies of England's footballers? Is this letting Theo Walcott take free-kicks thing an attempt to drive up the blood pressure of half of north London? Questions, questions ...

Bloke in the middle to do the smouldering: Claudio Yacob (West Brom)

Oh Claudio! With your dark eyes and your dark arts! With your stern countenance and stern enforcement! With your middle-of-the-road 'Personal Life' entry on Wikipedia – the Beatles and Adele – and your middle-of-the-park anchoring of a thoroughly decent and impressive West Brom team! Oh Claudio!

Bloke in the middle to do the passing: Erhun Oztumer (Dulwich Hamlet)

Some people might question just how the mighty Hamlet's tiny Turkish genius ended up in this list, since it's a Premier League team. Those people – having of course acknowledged his obvious class, paid tribute to his remarkable skill, and noted the crucial role he played in Dulwich Hamlet's glorious Isthmian South title triumph – might query whether he is in fact eligible for such a prestigious award. They might even go on to suggest the faintest trace of, well, bias, given that your correspondent spent a recent Saturday running around the Champion Hill pitch, waving a pink-and-blue scarf and singing, badly. But, well, that's just how good he is.

Perverted winger(s): Not-Antonio Valencia, Not-Ashley Young, Not-Luis Nani (Manchester United)

For virtually the entire of his time at Manchester United, Alex Ferguson, that most adaptable of managers, has held tightly to a faith that sustained Paul McCartney's recording career well beyond its sell-by date: wings are the business. But this season, albeit not by his design, the wide spaces of Old Trafford have been strange and desolate places. Ashley Young (when fit) has refined his mediocrity to new levels of underwhelming, Good Nani is losing the battle with OhforGod'ssakewhatareyoudoing Nani, and Antonio Valencia, if you'll forgive me (a) recycling a joke and (b) the joke itself, has looked more and more like Antonio Villareal. When Ferguson's best wide options are Danny Welbeck and Ryan Giggs, something's gone badly wrong somewhere.

False nine: Michu (Swansea City)

HE ONLY COST TWO MILLION POUNDS! TWO MILLION POUNDS! DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH ANDY CARROLL COST? DO YOU? MORE! HE COST MORE!

True nine: Christian Benteke (Aston Villa)

It's not just the goals, though they've been plentiful, varied and excellent. Nor is it just the importance, though without him Brad Guzan and Andi Weimann would have had thundering nervous breakdowns around Christmas time. It's the goals, and the importance, and the fact that Benteke – who's keener on crosses than any Christian has a right to be – is a centre-forward in the proper style, built to do all of the scoring. Some strikers are precise, others are powerful; Benteke, ideally, is both. Plus, he's Belgian, and all teams need a Belgian. It's going to be depressing when he goes to Spurs and turns rubbish.

Completely serious exclusive preview: FIFA 14

2013-04-19T16:39:57Z

"We've gone back to basics."

It's that time of year again, folks. Winter is loosening its cruel grip on the land. The sun has been sighted behind the clouds, and optimistic trees are starting to blossom. The football season is screwing itself tighter and tighter, or at least it would be, were it not for the lack of excitement in most of Europe's title races. But away from the actual football, this is also a time for the virtual game, as EA Sports starts to talk about the the latest edition in its universe-devouring FIFA series.

"This is the part where, for us, it gets really exciting," says Liturgy Plantpot, FIFA 14's blue-sky thinker. "This is the time where we get to present our new ideas for the game to the world, to excite gamers with our vision. And while I know we say this every year, I genuinely feel that this next FIFA game will be the finest we've ever made."

Your correspondent has been lucky enough to spend two hours with the new version of the game, and while we've only been able to play an early build, the changes are remarkable in their scope. Whereas recent versions of FIFA have felt, at times, like over-priced squad updates with hasty, poorly-thought-through 'innovations' tacked on, there is every chance that this new iteration will represent a genuine step forward.

Let's start with the cosmetic side of the experience. The first thing that gamers will notice is that menus have been stripped down to the barest of bones, and those bones have then been thrown out of the window. That baffling labyrinth of options, modes, preferences, tweaks, and counter-tweaks, which saw sub-menu sprout from lurid sub-menu like a cross between a Mandelbrot set and a migraine, has gone. No more Career Mode, no more Seasons, no more Ultimate Team: either you play a game of football, or you go and do something else.

Absent, too, is the music, that focus-grouped confection of terrible dance, terrible indie, and incongruous dollops of 'world' that virtually amounted to a new genre all its own. 'FIFAcore', the new sound of the suburbs, is no more, and Kasabian will have to try and sell their records on their own merits now. The very best of British with that, lads. Commentary has also been junked, replaced by EA Sports' new user-generated self-determined oral content system FaceNOISE(TM), which you may know better as The Shrill And Hectoring Sound Of Your Own Damn Voice.

Moving to the in-game experience, the presentation is all but unrecognisable. Where recent versions of the game have proudly boasted accurate stadium models, in-game match officials, simulated pitch conditions, scoreboards, streakers, and so on, here everything is stripped down to the absolute minimum. There's a pitch, two goals, and a ball. Only one choice of ball, too, which may frustrate those curious souls that like to devote hours to choosing their Nike advertising vehicle of choice (though personal modification may be possible). As for the pitch, EA have introduced a new Pulp and Press (or PaPre) modelling system for the playing surface, though some tearing was apparent in the early version.

Perhaps more controversially, EA have also removed the ability to choose your team, or even to distinguish between specific players. Generic graphical representations provide the basic outline, and Plantpot hopes that gamers will do the rest. "There were two reasons for this decision. One, we decided that, paradoxically, the more we attempted to provide options, the less freedom gamers actually had. In the last edition you were limited to only the teams we provided, though we provided a lot; here, by contrast, you are limited only by your imagination. We wanted to recapture some of the joy of dice cricket, and see not just Manchester United against Juventus but Mars against Venus, or Bald against Bearded, or Looney Tunes characters against an invitational XI of hopeless schoolday crushes. The possibilities are endless.

"And the second reason, of course, is that it will stop twelve-year-olds playing as flaming Barcelona every time."

But enough of all that, I hear you cry. How does it play? Well, stop crying, and I'll tell you. In essence, FIFA games have moved from one kind of irreality to another. The players used to glide over the surface of the pitch, unbothered by such trifling concerns as the rules of physics; nowadays they slog, hard, as though the move from an arcade experience to one with pretensions toward simulation had sunk the footballers up to the knees in custard. Initially, says Plantpot, EA Sports were focused on yet making yet another tiny step towards authenticity.

"But then we realised that authenticity, in the way we'd been imagining it, was complete nonsense. Most of the time, football's rubbish. Stoke are authentic. So we decided to make something that would be thoroughly unauthentic but hopefully fun. Which is why you move the ball around using cards."

Yes, everything is done with cards, right down to the success (or otherwise) of corners and the tactical advantages of a quick free-kick. Spread the play, counter-attack, waste time by your opponents corner-flag. This is obviously a radical departure from previous editions of FIFA, which have required some kind of gaming platform, but Plantpot is confident that they've regained the spirit of the series.

"Our second problem with authenticity was the sheer weirdness of the idea. If our gamers wanted the authentic football experience, they'd get up and go outside and run about. But they don't What they want, deep down, is the experience of existing as a kind of controlling entity within a footballing world, defined by them, that runs according to their wishes. They want, essentially, to be a meddlesome god.

"So once we realised that, we figured that we could just spend a few bob on buying the rights to this old sixties card game, let their imaginations do most of the work, and siphon the rest of the massive budget off into a series of untraceable offshore bank accounts. Between that, the plastic surgery, and the identity documents, you'll never hear from me again."

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Scotland vs. Wales: Five classic matches

2013-03-21T17:46:31Z

23 March 1878, Scotland 9-0 Wales

The first two teams in the history of international football, England and Scotland, found a nice competitive balance from the very outset. First they drew 0-0 in Glasgow, then England beat Scotland in London, then Scotland had revenge back north of the border. But Wales, when they became the third team onto the international stage, didn't fare quite so well: they lost their first three games, all against Scotland, by an aggregate of 15-0. This was the third, and it remains Wales' heaviest ever defeat.

Not that this was particularly surprising. Scotland's side were chosen from some of the strongest amateur sides playing the game, including Queen's Park and the Vale of Leven, and their innovative approach to the game -- hey, guys, let's try passing the ball! -- was already irritating ~~English people~~ traditionalists. Wales, meanwhile, drew most of their team from clubs around Wrexham and Oswestry, as the south of the country hadn't really caught on to the sport yet. All told, it would take Wales another 11 years, and ten further defeats, before they managed even a draw against the Scots, and they wouldn't beat them until 1905.

(A general lack of match reports from the time precludes any detailed description of the action. However, Scotland fielded five players all called James -- Messrs Duncan, Phillips, Lang, Weir, Watson -- which must be some kind of record.)

25 October 1930, Scotland 1-1 Wales

Back in 1930, the club vs. country debate was a much simpler business: there wasn't one. The Football League had forbidden English clubs to release their players for this game, held on a Saturday during the league season, and so Wales travelled to Ibrox with nine debutants, three of whom were amateurs, and four of whom played non-league football. Though Scotland had their fair share of debutants as well, they were expected to win easily; bookmakers were offering the Welsh a five-goal handicap.

That Wales emerged with a 1-1 draw -- and deserved better, according to the Daily Mirror -- was down in large part to Fred Keenor, legendary captain of Cardiff and all-round inspirational hard-nut. Phil Stead, author of Red Dragons: The Story of Welsh Football, describes how Keenor took charge:

He spent the morning playing music to relax his team-mates before spending half-an-hour on basic tactical instructions. When the time came to face the partisan Glasgow crowd, Keenor offered a pre-match exhortation: "There's eleven of them and eleven of us, and there's only one ball, and it's ours."

His words worked. The Mirror's match report praises Wales for a "delightful exhibition of the low passing game", and the visitors took the lead in the sixth minute, before the Scots equalised just before half-time. After holding onto the draw, the side were christened ‘Keenor's Unknowns', and Stead records that the hero of the hour was presented with an Airedale dog by a Scottish fan. Sadly, the dog ran away from the Welshman's home a few days later.

4 November 1953, Scotland 3-3 Wales

Back in the 1950s, the British Championship doubled as qualification for the World Cup, lending the traditional cross-border dust-ups a little extra edge. Scotland had started the tournament strongly, beating Northern Ireland 3-1 in Belfast, while Wales had been picked apart 4-1 in Cardiff by England. So it was no real surprise that the Scots -- whose line-up included legendary Liverpool winger Billy Liddell alongside Bobby Johnstone and Lawrie Reilly, two of Hibernian's post-war Famous Five -- dominated the first half.

Blackpool's Allan Brown gave Scotland the lead after 20 minutes, and Johnstone scored the second after 35; the latter "a sizzler" according to the Pathe commentator. Early in the second half, 21-year-old John Charles "nearly broke the net with a terrific shot", but Reilly immediately re-established Scotland's two-goal advantage. Swansea Town's Ivor Allchurch halved it again just after the hour, but it looked as though Scotland would hang on for the win.

But then, in the last minute, Charles broke past Scottish debutant Willie Telfer and scored the equaliser. It was Telfer's debut, and he was widely criticised after the match for not committing a professional foul to protect the victory. According to the Evening Times, Telfer later claimed not to have done so out of respect to the Scotland jersey. He was never invited to wear that jersey again.

12 October 1977, Wales 0-2 Scotland

Scotland and Wales were drawn together in qualification for the 1978 World Cup, alongside then-European Champions (and then-unified country) Czechoslovakia. Scotland lost the opening match 2-0 against the Czechoslovaks, but then beat Wales 1-0 at Hampden Park. Wales bounced back from that loss by beating Czechoslovakia 2-0 in Wrexham, which left the two British teams competing for qualification.

Between the two games against Wales, Scotland had dispensed with their manager Willie Ormond and replaced him with the relentlessly, terrifyingly positive Ally MacLeod. "I'm a winner", he told his first press conference, and a victory over England at Wembley -- Scotland's first since Jim Baxter's jugglery in 1967 -- seemed to prove his point. Meanwhile, the Welsh FA, for reasons connected to money and the maximisation of same, decided to play the game not at Wrexham's Racecourse Ground but in England, at Anfield.

The decision backfired. As the eventual villain of the piece, Joe Jordan, would put it later, "Anfield became a mini-Hampden that night and there were so many Scots in the ground that you couldn't hear a Welshman sing." Or, presumably, complain. In the 78th minute, Asa Hartford threw the ball long into the Wales penalty area. Jordan jumped with David Jones, the ball hit a hand, and the referee blew for a penalty. Never mind that the hand belonged to an arm that was covered with a long, dark blue sleeve.

Wales were first baffled, then furious, but the decision stood. Don Masson sent Welsh goalkeeper Dai Davies the wrong way, Kenny Dalglish quickly added a second, and the Scots were through to Argentina. Confidence was high. Asked what he planned to do after the World Cup, MacLeod replied "Retain it." Oh hubris!

18 February 2004, Wales 4-0 Scotland

There was a time, not too long ago, when Mark Hughes: Football Manager wasn't a general figure of fun. I know, right? Anyway, Wales and Scotland both went into this game having both reached and then lost qualifying playoffs for Euro 2004. But where Hughes' Wales had lost narrowly to Russia over two legs, having beaten Italy in group games, Berti Vogts' Scotland had opened their campaign by drawing with the Faroe Islands and ended it with a 6-0 shoeing in Amsterdam.

So the last thing the fragile Scots needed was to concede after 43 seconds: Gary Speed's through-ball dissolved the Scottish back-line, Robert Earnshaw took one touch, then tucked the ball home. Scotland had chances to equalise, but Wales overwhelmed them. Earnshaw went on to complete his hat-trick with goals either side of half-time, and Gareth Taylor capped the rout off. Poor Rab Douglas in the Scottish net had conceded ten goals in 180 minutes of football. After the game, Vogts reflected that "They were three yards quicker than my boys, and I can't do anything about the pace." "Neither could his defenders," snarked the Guardian.

It was the beginning of the end for Vogts, who was gone by October after a disastrous start to World Cup qualifying. Hughes left Wales in September to join Blackburn Rovers, though it's fair to say that things haven't quite gone to plan since. The match also ensured Earnshaw's place in football trivia history: he stands alone as the only player to have scored hat-tricks in all four divisions of English league football, the league cup, the FA cup, and at international level.

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Jerzy Gorgo*n: The greatest central defender in history

2013-03-15T17:38:34Z

Quick quiz: name the greatest non-British central defenders of all time. Go! Done? Good. Franz Beckenbauer plus one of the Italians, right?

A Twitter poll returned Beckenbauer and Franco Baresi as clear favourites, with other Italians nominated including Paolo Maldini, Giuseppe Bergomi, Fabio Cannavaro, Gaetano Scirea and Alessandro Nesta. Other nominations from across Europe included Marcel Desailly and Lillian Thuram of France, Carles Puyol and Fernando Hierro of Spain, Ronald Koeman and Jaap Stam of the Netherlands, and the Republic of Ireland's Paul McGrath. Argentines Roberto Ayala and Daniel Passarella also featured. The usual lot, in other words, along with Pascal Cygan, Jose Fonte, Steve Gohouri, William Prunier, Efe Sodje, William Gallas, and Zurab Khizanisvili, because people on the internet are hilarious.

Nobody, however, voted for 6'4" Polish stopper Jerzy Gorgon. This is because Kevin Keegan isn't on Twitter.

Gorgon -- a pretty scary-looking mother -- played most of his career for Górnik Zabrze between 1967 and 1980. He was part of the team that won five straight Polish Cups between 1968 and 1972, and as well as winning a couple of titles they reached the quarter-finals of the European Cup in 1968, and lost to Manchester City in the final of the 1970 UEFA Cup. Internationally, he played 55 times for Poland and won gold in the 1972 Olympics, and silver four years later. He was also part of the side that finished third in the 1974 World Cup.

Anyway, Gorgon doesn't have much to do with the game any more; he lives in Switzerland, he is an ambassador for Górnik, and he inaccurately predicted that Poland would easily beat England in their recent rain-delayed World Cup qualifier. However, way back in 1979, Kevin Keegan decided that he was just the man to partner Beckenbauer in his Greatest Not British XI of All-Time.

Keegan, as English footballers are wont to do, had decided to alleviate the tedium of being a professional by writing himself a book. Written with the Sunday People's Mike Langley, Kevin Keegan -- Against the World isn't quite the usual account of ‘what I did on my incredibly expensive holidays'. Chapter 2, for example, is called ‘The Decline of England', and opens rather wonderfully: "I danced in a Doncaster pub-disco one summer evening nine years ago neither knowing or caring that, thousands of miles away, Bobby Charlton's champagne had gone flat."

Having dealt with the failures of his nation and delivered his thoughts on Don Revie, goalkeepers, supporters and Germany, Keegan goes on to select his Greatest XI's -- one British, one Others -- to face off in the Keegan Cup. Of those Forriners, Keegan wrote "The team is packed with scorers," and he wasn't kidding: his four-man front-line reads Pelé, Johan Cruyff, Gerd Müller and Mario Kempes. Behind them he picked Brazilian genius Rivelino and AC Milan attack-dog Romeo Benetti, as thunderingly-moustachioed a midfield as was ever conceived. The full-backs were Giacinto Facchetti and Berti Vogts, who apparently used to be a footballer before he became a Scottish figure of fun. Sweeper was Franz Beckenbauer, and alongside him, winning the ball for the Kaiser to use, Gorgon.

Keegan's own explanation for his choice isn't particularly illuminating. Where Beckenbauer gets four paragraphs, an anecdote, and a healthy dollop of awe -- "Beckenbauer is not normal; he could see, or perhaps sense, everything behind me" -- his notes on Gorgon's entry read, in their entirety:

Jerzy Gorgon of Poland is my centre-half. ‘A donkey' was Brian Clough's assessment, but I think that Gorgon copes most effectively with his technical limitations. He is a strong stopper with some skill and would balance with my sweeper, who is best partnered by a big man willing to attack the ball.

Faint praise, they call that. While many of the traditional pantheon of All Time Great central defenders -- see that list above -- were yet to come. Even looking for a man to play alongside a sweeper, it's an interesting call to pick the big Pole ahead of, say, Scirea's club partner Claudio Gentile. Even more intriguingly, it doesn't appear that Keegan ever played against Gorgon*.

* If this is wrong, please let me know.

Michał Zachodny, co-editor of Ekstraklasa magazine, suspects that Gorgon's style -- "similar to English defenders of the time" -- may have played a part in Keegan's choice. "He was a hard-tackling, fine-heading, long-punting central defender with a good turn. Apparently his opponents were simply scared of him." Zachodny also points out that Gorgon bumped up against English opposition on two notable occasions: the aforementioned UEFA Cup final, and playing for Poland in qualification for the 1974 World Cup.

England were expected to qualify easily from a three-team group comprising the Poles and Wales, but the first game, away in Chorzow, ended 2-0 to Poland as Gorgon and company defended stoutly and took advantage of a sloppy performance from Bobby Moore. Then, for the notorious Wembley return, Moore was dropped by Alf Ramsey. The match itself, a 1-1 draw, is part of footballing folklore -- here's Brian Clough calling Jan Tomaszewski a clown, there's Norman Hunter giving the ball away for Poland's goal -- though the nostalgic clip shows tend to elide Martin Peters's post-match confession that England's equalising penalty might not have been wholly warranted. "He barely touched me but I went flying. I dived. It wasn't a penalty, but the referee didn't see it that way". He, of course, was Jerzy Gorgon, who later recalled:

Fans and players were screaming 'animals' at us and it could break few with not as strong mentality as ours. Even though we were knackered after game with Cardiff, they were kicking us much harder than the Welsh team. We knew what to expect though. After the game they didn't even want to shake our hands.

Those qualifying games occupy a deeply sensitive place in the collective memory of English football: it was the first time the national team had failed to qualify for the World Cup since they'd deigned to grace FIFA with their presence, and it was the end of both Moore and Alf Ramsey, icon and overseer of the 1966 triumph. Keegan had made his debut in first game against Wales (Wales 0-1 England, described by Ramsey as "Neither exciting nor entertaining") and also played in the second (1-1, England booed off at Wembley), but missed both matches against Poland. His book is sadly silent on whether he spent the time watching the games, or in a bingo hall in Darlington, but you can see why the defensive heart of the team might have made an impression.

Back to the question of the all-time best centre-back. It's odd that the recollections of footballers often vary from the wider, accepted pantheon. Gorgon isn't the only player along these lines to have been lauded by his certain of his peers but neglected by history. Pietro Vierchowod, an Italian defender of Ukrainian descent, was named by both Gary Lineker and Diego Maradona as their toughest opponent. Linker described him as "brutal and lightning quick", while Maradona said "He was an animal, he had muscles up to his eyelashes". Yet he's another name generally missing from the conversation.

Obviously, elite footballers have knowledge not available to mere mortals: professional expertise, personal respect (or contempt), understanding of what the whole business involves, and so on and so forth. Doing something gives you a perspective on that thing that outsiders don't have. This doesn't make their views necessarily better or right -- there's more to it than that, and there are plenty of thick footballers -- and it certainly doesn't justify Alan Shearer, Pundit-at-Large, but it does mean they may approach a question from a different angle and arrive at a different conclusion. That's why so much time is spent interviewing them: the hope of insight. An entertaining recent example of this was provided by Carlos Tevez, who was asked, as one of the few people have been teammates of both Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, who he considered the best he'd played with. Paul Scholes, he replied.

Even more generally, we might perhaps acknowledge that the pantheon is perhaps not quite as rigorous as we might like to assume. Entry depends not just on talent, or even what a player does with that talent, but also where he does it, how he does it, who he does it with, and what notice everybody else takes. Fashions come and go, and players are lost to the tides of history. If a footballer wins a trophy in Poland in the 1970s, and only Kevin Keegan is watching, does he make a sound?

Maybe, in another universe, Jerzinho Gorgonzola's mound of domestic and international silverware sees him estimated alongside Beckenbauer by the world at large, not just by a former England striker trying to pad out his book. Maybe footballing greatness is, at heart, an uncertain exercise dominated by luck, circumstance, and imperfection to a far greater extent than those of us who like telling stories about it would ever care to admit. As Gorgon's international coach Kazimierz Górski put it: "You can play football for 20 years and play 1,000 times for the national team and nobody will remember you."

With thanks to Michał Zachodny. Please note that the picture accompanying this article does not show Jerzy Gorgon, because we couldn't find one that did.

Happy In Off The Crossbar Day everybody!

2013-03-08T15:31:14Z

You may have missed it. It was overshadowed by something called World Book Day, which apparently involves children dressing up as literary characters and all sorts of other page-inspired entertainment. But yesterday, March 7, was the inaugural celebration of In Off The Crossbar Day, an annual celebration that in no way emerged from that most malign of all equations, Twitter plus boredom, and is certainly not being mentioned here simply to provide this collection of videos with a contrived introduction.

That's that out of the way! Now, here are loads of videos of the very best kind of goal. Enjoy. And why not dress your child up as your favourite? We're coming for you, books. Your reign is at an end.

Tony Yeboah Leeds vs. Liverpool, 21 August 1995; vs. Wimbledon, 23 September 1995

For all that England owes its greatest footballing triumph to a goal (that probably wasn't) like this, mention "in off the bar" to anybody that isn't, like, totally ancient and the word "YEBOAH!" will be out of their mouth before they even know they've heard you. The second line of Yeboah's Wikipedia page reads, at the time of writing, "Tony Famously had a thigh measurement of over 1m." Presumably that helped him do this.

Alan Thompson Celtic vs. Rangers, 29 August 2004

Doing this at any time is impressive. Doing it in the 85th minute of an Old Firm derby is, well, very impressive.

Roberto di Matteo Chelsea vs. Middlesbrough, 17 May 1997

Which makes doing this in an FA Cup final very, very impressive. (Ruined the game, mind.)

Zinedine Zidane France vs. Italy, 9 July 2006

And which makes doing this in a World Cup final even more impressive still. The stones on the man. Just a shame that Zidane was so quiet for the rest of the game.

Harry Kewell Leeds vs. Sheffield Wednesday, 30 April 2000

Once a upon a time, before his name (rather unfairly) became a byword for injuries laced with cowardice, Harry Kewell was a seriously good player. (Should the timestamp not work, it's at 1:25.)

Rui Costa Portugal vs. Republic of Ireland, 15 November 1995

Rui Costa was absolute filth. He barely even kicks this.

Oleksandyr Aliyev Ukraine U21 vs. Turkey U21, date unclear

Oleksandyr Aliyev, on the other hand, kicks this really quite hard indeed.

Eric Cantona Manchester United vs. Sheffield United, 9 January 1995; vs. Arsenal, 20 March 1996

The coolest that there ever was, doing it twice two different ways.

Paul Scholes Manchester United vs. Aston Villa, 23 December 2006

The best thing about this goal isn't the astounding purity with which Scholes connects with the ball, or the ridiculous dip, or even the general air of oh ... my that descends on the stadium. It's the Villa goalkeeper, Gábor Király, who just for a second thinks 'if I can get to it, I'll claw it out, and nobody will notice ... oh, everybody's noticed. Ah.'

Eder (and then Zico) Brazil vs. Argentina, 2 July 1982

A near miss now, which we include simply because the fact that this doesn't go in first time, along with the fact that Brazil didn't win the tournament, stands as the final proof that the universe is a cruel and heartless place. O crossbar! How could you?

Ronaldinho Barcelona vs. Sevilla, 2 September 2003

And we have, of course, saved (possibly) the best until last. Ronaldinho's Barcelona probably weren't as good as the current incarnation. But they were a distance more fun. Two different angles, one from the crowd, of this goal scored at about 1:30 in the morning. Laughably, laughably good.

Marvellous.

With thanks to everybody on Twitter who suggested the above.