The Discipline of Data: Why a Good Football Analyst Must Learn to Say 'Insufficient Information'

A twelve-page document sat on my desk. I read it from the first line to the last and came away with nothing: no competition, no club, no player, no scoreline, not a single metric. Every cell in the analysis table carried the same line — "insufficient information to assess". No source. No date. A blank space presented so carefully it was almost solemn.

The person who wrote that report fabricated nothing. They refused to fill the gaps. In nearly half a century in this trade, I have read thousands of analyses, and most share one habit: conclusion first, data second — and when the data is missing, conclude anyway, just to fill the page. That empty report did the opposite, and it accidentally touched the exact disease of football analysis today.

Over the past fifteen years, the way people talk about football has changed at the root. xG, PPDA, prediction models, positional heat maps — all of it has become the common language of both the analysis room and the terraces. The trend has a fair reason: football is a sport of probability, and probability must be measured, not merely felt.

But there is a paradox few are willing to name. The more data there is, the less people admit when they have none. Abundance breeds the habit of filling gaps with assumption. A match that has not been played already has a forecast. A player who has not taken the pitch already has a verdict. A manager who has lost two games is dissected as if his career were already over.

In 2026, at the age of 56, I published a prediction that drew plenty of laughter: Liverpool's attacking trio of Mohamed Salah, Roberto Firmino and Sadio Mané would score at least 84 goals in all competitions in the 2026-18 season. I did not pull that number out of intuition. I sat down, counted every shot, every movement, every minute the three of them played, and cross-referenced it with how Liverpool organised their attack under manager Jürgen Klopp.

By the end of the season, the trio had scored 91 goals: Salah 44, Firmino 27, Mané 20. A sports platform republished the piece, and it drew 120,000 views in its first week. People called me reckless, but the numbers have never known how to lie.

Yet precisely because I lived through that moment, I understand better than most that data does not automatically produce truth. It produces truth only when someone reads it properly.

I was once wrong about the 2026 World Cup. And that remains the most expensive lesson I own. During the Croatia-Denmark round-of-16 match, I mispronounced the name of midfielder Ivan Rakitić three times in a row on live broadcast. No one corrected me on the spot. I only found out when I reviewed the footage the following night.

My way of fixing it was not a rushed apology. I spent nearly a month re-watching every Croatia knockout match and logging the passing of their midfield. The result: the trio of Luka Modrić, Ivan Rakitić and Marcelo Brozović completed 89% of their passes in the knockout stage, well above their group-stage figure. I wrote a piece arguing against myself, explaining why Croatia — the side rated lower — reached the final.

That incident taught me two things. The first: what I had to fix was not a name, but the habit of speaking before checking. The second: a mistake dug into properly yields more understanding than ten shallow correct calls.

That is also why I hold a clear position on VAR. Review times are too long, and they shred the rhythm of the match. Two minutes of waiting is enough to cool a goal that had just blown the roof off the stadium. Based on my experience watching matches across many seasons, I have found that a crowd's emotion is not built to wait in silence — it needs to be released at the moment it is born. When a system demands absolute accuracy, it must pay with the very thing that makes football football.

The real discipline of analysis lies not in finding an answer, but in telling apart the questions you have enough data to answer.

That twelve-page report, then, was far from useless. It is a reminder that in football, blank space is also a data point. When a centre-back completes 94% of his passes but only dares to pass sideways, that 94% is lying in a very polite way.

I have watched football since 2026, from local radio commentary to modern data-analysis rooms. Across nearly five decades, I have learned that the tools change but people do not. They still want a single answer to a game that has no single answer.

Take xG. A team with 2.5 xG but only one goal is usually called unlucky. But look closer: if two of those chances came from long shots outside the box, where the scoring probability was already low, the unlucky verdict becomes loose. The metric is not wrong. The person reading it can be.

Home advantage is no longer a fortress. The pandemic proved it, and the data since has kept confirming the decline. Across recent seasons in Europe's top leagues, home win rates have fallen noticeably against the previous decade. Home advantage is dead, at least in the form my generation once believed in.

A major tournament is approaching, and I know exactly what will happen. Let one national team win two group games, and an entire content ecosystem will rush to build a "golden generation" story. Let one star miss a penalty, and people will write about psychological decline as if they held a medical file. Those conclusions do not come from data. They come from the need to tell a story.

Data does not kill emotion. It gives emotion a frame. The problem is that many people use that frame to lock emotion away, then call it analysis.

I am not against emotion. Without emotion, I would not have sat in front of a screen for forty-nine years. But I am against using data as a medal to hide lazy thinking. Quoting a metric is not hard. Understanding the conditions in which that metric was produced is hard.

A striker scoring 25 goals in a season sounds impressive. But if 18 of them come from the penalty spot, and the other five come against the bottom three clubs, the story is entirely different. Same fact, two readings, two opposite conclusions. Football does not lack numbers. Football lacks people who know where to place them.

I write for readers on both shores: those following English football and those following it from afar. In both places I see the same disease: people prefer a tidy story to a complex reality. A tragedy with a clear protagonist always spreads faster than a stats table no one bothers to read to the end.

Here I must argue against myself. Perhaps I am wrong.

Perhaps that empty twelve-page report is not an intellectual virtue at all, but just a broken data pipeline. Refusing to conclude without data is right, but if all you can ever say is "insufficient information", the analyst is no better than a machine that defends itself. Caution can become armour for never taking responsibility for a judgment.

And I must admit something uncomfortable about myself. At 65, living in Liverpool, with a reputation and a network built over nearly half a century, my "reckless" statements are actually less risky than they look. Once you have standing, saying something controversial is no longer a gamble — it is a ritual. So I set myself a two-tier rule: for the big clubs, where I have enough data, I allow myself to provoke; for the smaller ones, where I lack information, I must stay quiet and watch.

There is a scarier temptation: using data scepticism as a position. Someone can write eloquently that data does not tell the whole story without offering a single fact to prove it. That is empty scepticism, and it is as dangerous as empty confidence. Both dodge the same duty: to make a judgment that can be tested.

Football waits for no one. It waits only for those who dare to ask questions.

I do not expect everyone to agree with me. I only ask them to check. In a football world where everyone rushes to conclude, the one who dares to slow down by a beat is often the one who sees the most.

I believe the next frontier of football analysis is not gathering more data, but asking better questions. One day, looking back at this era, people will judge analysts not by how many metrics they quote, but by how honestly they mark the gaps they cannot fill.

That empty twelve-page report will never enter any hall of fame. But it taught me something a hundred flawless analyses could not: sometimes the greatest courage an analyst can show is to say that he does not yet know.

My prediction: by the next World Cup cycle, a new generation of analysts will be valued not because they know a lot, but because they dare to say "I do not yet have enough data". And when that happens, football will be a little more honest — and a little less noisy.