Soccermatics

'Football looked at in a very different way' Pat Nevin, former Chelsea and Everton star and football media analyst Football – the most mathematical of sports. From shot statistics and league tables to the geometry of passing and managerial strategy, the modern game is filled with numbers, patterns and shapes. How do we make sense of them? The answer lies in the mathematical models applied in biology, physics and economics. Soccermatics brings football and mathematics together in a mind-bending synthesis, using numbers to help reveal the inner workings of the beautiful game. This new and expanded edition analyses the current big-name players and teams using mathematics, and meets the professionals working inside football who use numbers and statistics to boost performance. Welcome to the world of mathematical modelling, expressed brilliantly by David Sumpter through the prism of football. No matter who you follow – from your local non-league side to the big boys of the Premiership, La Liga, the Bundesliga, Serie A or the MLS – you'll be amazed at what mathematics has to teach us about the world's favourite sport.

Is there a secret formula for getting rich? For going viral? For deciding how long to stick with your current job, Netflix series, or even relationship? This book is all about the equations that make our world go round. Ten of them, in fact. They are integral to everything from investment banking to betting companies and social media giants. And they can help you to increase your chance of success, guard against financial loss, live more healthfully, and see through scaremongering. They are known by only the privileged few - until now. With wit and clarity, mathematician David Sumpter shows that it isn't the technical details that make these formulas so successful. It is the way they allow mathematicians to view problems from a different angle - a way of seeing the world that anyone can learn. Empowering and illuminating, The Ten Equations shows how math really can change your life.

Well written and thoughtful. Takes us on a tour of some of Europe's most innovative football thinkers - Financial Times The future of football is now. Football's data revolution has only just begun. The arrival of advanced metrics and detailed analysis is already reshaping the modern game. We can now fully assess player performance, analyse the role of luck and measure what really leads to victory. There is no turning back. Now the race is on between football's wealthiest clubs and a group of outsiders, nerds and rule-breakers, who are turning the game on its head with their staggering innovations. Winning is no longer just about what happens out on the pitch, it's now a battle taking place in boardrooms and on screens across international borders with the world's brightest minds driving for an edge over their fiercest rivals. Christoph Biermann has moved in the midst of these disruptive upheavals, talking to scientists, coaches, managers, scouts and psychologists in the world's major clubs, traveling across Europe and the US and revealing the hidden - and often jaw-dropping - truths behind the beautiful game. 'A book full of exciting ideas and inside views on modern football. The most exciting book in an exciting time for football.' Thomas Hitzlsperger

How and why animals produce group behaviors Fish travel in schools, birds migrate in flocks, honeybees swarm, and ants build trails. How and why do these collective behaviors occur? Exploring how coordinated group patterns emerge from individual interactions, Collective Animal Behavior reveals why animals produce group behaviors and examines their evolution across a range of species. Providing a synthesis of mathematical modeling, theoretical biology, and experimental work, David Sumpter investigates how animals move and arrive together, how they transfer information, how they make decisions and synchronize their activities, and how they build collective structures. Sumpter constructs a unified appreciation of how different group-living species coordinate their behaviors and why natural selection has produced these groups. For the first time, the book combines traditional approaches to behavioral ecology with ideas about self-organization and complex systems from physics and mathematics. Sumpter offers a guide for working with key models in this area along with case studies of their application, and he shows how ideas about animal behavior can be applied to understanding human social behavior. Containing a wealth of accessible examples as well as qualitative and quantitative features, Collective Animal Behavior will interest behavioral ecologists and all scientists studying complex systems.

The Expected Goals method is football's best-kept secret. The metric gives unparalleled insight into which teams and players are performing at the highest level. Professional gamblers have used Expected Goals to make millions through football betting. Club scouts have used Expected Goals to identify hidden gems in the transfer market. And the media have recently started using Expected Goals to offer more profound insight in their broadcasts. Despite this, most ordinary fans still don't understand what the Expected Goals method is - or appreciate the significant impact that it is set to have on the sport in coming years. Expected Goals (otherwise known as xG) was originally conjured up by a small corner of the online football analytics community. It didn't take long for professional gamblers to begin using xG to predict match outcomes. These bettors utilised the Expected Goals method to turn over hundreds of millions of pounds from the bookmakers. Before long, football clubs had caught on to the ground-breaking insight given by xG. Brentford FC were leaders in this field, managing to assemble a Play-Off-reaching squad on a shoe-string budget. In the last five years, the small West London side have turned over more than £100m in transfer revenue from their use of the Expected Goals method in player recruitment. More recently, the Expected Goals method has been adopted by the media as a form of insight. Fans are finally catching on to the pioneering means of football analysis. Soon enough, anyone who doesn't understand the Expected Goals philosophy will be left behind. "This book will make you watch football differently" - Tobias Pedersen "Possibly the most ground-breaking football book ever written" - Football Impact "A brilliant account of the history and future of Expected Goals" - StatShot

Do you ever think you’re the only one making any sense? Or tried to reason with your partner with disastrous results? Do long, rambling answers drive you crazy? Or does your colleague’s abrasive manner rub you the wrong way? You are not alone. After a disastrous meeting with a highly successful entrepreneur, who was genuinely convinced he was ‘surrounded by idiots’, communication expert and bestselling author, Thomas Erikson dedicated himself to understanding how people function and why we often struggle to connect with certain types of people. Surrounded by Idiots is an international phenomenon, selling over 1.5 million copies worldwide. It offers a simple, yet ground-breaking method for assessing the personalities of people we communicate with – in and out of the office – based on four personality types (Red, Blue, Green and Yellow), and provides insights into how we can adjust the way we speak and share information. Erikson will help you understand yourself better, hone communication and social skills, handle conflict with confidence, improve dynamics with your boss and team, and get the best out of the people you deal with and manage. He also shares simple tricks on body language, improving written communication, advice on when to back away or when to push on, and when to speak up or shut up. Packed with ‘aha!’ and ‘oh no!’ moments, Surrounded by Idiots will help you understand and communicate with those around you, even people you currently think are beyond all comprehension. And with a bit of luck you can also be confident that the idiot out there isn’t you!

Trading can be intensely rewarding. But it is also one of the most mentally and emotionally challenging activities anyone can pursue. As in other high-performance domains, those who are serious about mastering their craft and staying in the game spend serious time working on their game, including training their mind and body. Steve Ward has spent the last 15 years working as a performance coach with financial traders and investors at some of the biggest and most successful investment banks, hedge funds, asset managers, commodities trading houses and proprietary trading groups across the globe, helping them to perform at their best, to navigate the highs and lows of trading and investing in the markets, and to sustain high performance for the long run. As one hedge fund client put it to him, “It’s about becoming bulletproof”. Becoming a bulletproof trader is forged over time through experience, and by applying the latest insights from biological and psychological sciences, the best that practical philosophy can teach us, and a healthy dose of pragmatism – doing what actually works in the real world of trading the markets. This book brings together all of Steve’s latest insights into how to deal with stresses and setbacks and sustain high performance in a comprehensive, accessible and unmissable book, so that you too can become a bulletproof trader. Don’t trade without it.

Data Analytics in Football provides students, researchers, and coaches with a firm grounding in the principles of modern performance analysis. It offers an insight into the use of positional data, exploring how they can be collected, modeled, analyzed, and interpreted. Introducing cutting-edge methods, the book challenges long-held assumptions and encourages a new way of thinking about football analysis. The book seeks to define the role of positional data in football match analysis by exploring topics such as the following: What is positional data analysis, and how did it emerge from conventional match analysis? How can positional data be collected, and which technologies can be used? What key performance indicators based on positional data should be used? How can traditional match analysis be complemented by using positional data and advanced KPIs? How can these new methods evolve in the future? Based on data collected from active leagues and fully revised for the new second edition, the text now also examines data collection in relation to other sports, how a data-driven approach in decision-making is achieved by professional teams, the potential of the new methods of data collection, and how they could evolve in the future. Accessibly written, packed full of examples from elite football, and supplemented with expert interviews, Data Analytics in Football is a thought-provoking, rigorously evidence-based guide to the use of data analytics in football performance analysis. As such, it is a vital resource for any student, researcher, or coach interested in performance analysis and skill acquisition, or anyone interested in football more generally.