… Yet how will this data-heavy approach translate to other sports, those based on more qualitative data, and what might this tell us about other arenas? How will it work for soccer — or rather, this being an Italian magazine and me being English, football. The performance of players in football is not hard to measure if you have lots of people to keep an eye on what is happening and report back. I have been lucky enough to work with Manchester City FC, and it is fair to say that little is missed by their analysts. Their reports will use a mixture of video, firsthand accounts and sports data from the dominant Opta and Prozone systems. Prozone in particular is virtually ubiquitous in football management, yet the notion of using data to support strategy in football dates back to the practice of “informational support” developed by Valeriy Lobanovskyi ¹ when he was manager of Dynamo Kyiv in the early 1960s, as made clear in Jonathan Wilson’s magnificently obsessive book Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics.