Book Review: Football Hackers: The Science and Art of a Data Revolution by Christoph Biermann

When browsing a feature in a football publication one will increasingly come across data tables and graphical illustrations. These use esoteric metrics, such as Expected Goals (xG) or Passes per Defensive Action (PPDA), to illustrate a statistical point or wider performance trend of a player or team. Finding these features and their underlying metrics challenging to comprehend but interesting nonetheless, I read the German author Christoph Biermann’s book Football Hackers to try and understand more about football’s data-analysis revolution.

Biermann explains how the use of numbers, metrics and analysis has offered innovators a new insight into the game. With a more objective viewpoint based on data, improved decision making and a competitive advantage are a possibility. Using thematic areas such as luck, opportunity, scouting, player development, brain training and the need for a narrative, Biermann traces data’s impact against the conventions of football, its traditions and underlying cognitive biases.

The concepts and ideas in Football Hackers are well explained with good illustrations (xG for example is much clearer to me now). It’s a pleasant read; Biermann has a clear and objective style along with a winning, self-effacing personal touch. Attached are many observations and reflections from the innovators, generally nerdish and cerebral outsiders or marginal figures: for example the pair of Bundesliga pros who, dissatisfied with the existing subjective player rankings came up with their own sophisticated metrics; or the professional gambler who invested in two middling clubs in order to (successfully) test his insights.

Football Hackers is a fascinating and absorbing book. It successfully explains new ideas and enables you to appreciate and apply them. Hopefully more of Biermann’s work can be published in English.

Film February #25 – In Bruges

UK/USA 2008

Martin McDonagh’s violent black comedy In Bruges is a film that comes at you out of nowhere; a blast of profanity, depravity, violence and (at the same time) human emotion and playfulness. It manages to take most of your pre-conceptions about genres and values (about humdrum Brit gangster flicks, the value of Colin Farrell’s career, the use of gratuitous euro-locales) and boot them 100 yards into touch. Dependent on your sensibilities, it’s a wildly amusing and impressive film.

The heroes of In Bruges are a pair of Dublin hitmen, Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson). Ken is an aging, shambling, heavyset, phlegmatic fellow, kind and friendly on the surface. Ray on the other hand, is young, virile, violent and breathtakingly uncouth, possessed of a belligerent incuriosity and contempt. When an honour killing on a child-abusing priest goes horribly wrong, their offscreen (and audibly deranged) boss, the London crime lord Harry Waters (Ralph Fiennes), packs them off to the offbeat environs of medieval Bruges to lie low for a fortnight.

They mooch around Bruges’ historic sights, Ken’s touristic enthusiasm rousing nothing more than an X-rated shrug from his colleague. The script’s sardonic flourishes between the double act are very funny. This incongruity seems to be the main joke at first, but McDonagh gradually reveals and blends Ray’s torment into the gloomy but gorgeous setting, well realised by Eigil Bryld’s photography and adorned by Carter Burwell’s slender but elegiac score.

We learn that it was Ray who botched the killing and the consequences hang heavy upon him. Weighed down by guilt and depression, it dawns on him that this weird city, which he detests, is in fact his purgatory. Farrell is revelatory, a coiled spring of physical and comic presence as Ray careers through Bruges. By day bored rigid with the sightseeing, at night Ray persuades Ken to go out for a drink, and gatecrashes a film set with childish abandon. He falls for the beautiful but dodgy Chloe (Clemence Poesy) and becomes perversely amused by Jimmy, the film-within-a-film’s obnoxious dwarf star. McDonagh’s script takes what appears at first to be a crime caper more and more into off-kilter territory, as the perverse plot and character elements flow along within the film’s world towards an ending bleakly dark and hilariously ironic.

Gleeson is superb too as Ken, a man relishing a break from the moral bankruptcy that his profession requires. Genial but deadly serious, and sorrowful at being in the autumn of life, Ken chooses to act as a father figure to save his younger partner. While Ray takes Chloe out to dinner, Ken stays behind in their cramped hotel room to deal with the baleful Harry’s irate messages, learning the real reason for their presence in Bruges. Ken’s ultimate (and noble) response then brings Harry into the fray to deal with the situation in the final quarter of the film; a droll and memorable performance from Fiennes as the mad but weirdly honourable Harry. In Bruges is a heady mix of gratuitous artifice and human drama that may be too bizarre and brutal for some, but in its perverting of convention it is, strangely enough, a breath of fresh air.