The writing itself was fast paced but with the odd 'couple of dozen' Americanisms thrown in as a nod to his main employers, along with introductions I associate most with US journalistic profiles*. For someone who regularly checks football analytics stats this was a very interesting read to learn more about how the American sports analytics influence is influencing the European Leagues, particularly the Premier League, in addition to American increasingly having shareholdings in Premier League clubs. Such league tables are explained in the context of manager’s keeping their jobs or as an explanation for why a manager should keep his job i.

Also, I don’t think I’m any more clued up about the specifics of the data that “conquered” the game than I was before reading this book. I'd say "like Moneyball, but for soccer" is too basic a take except for the number of Moneyball references in here.However, most of the stories just weren’t that engaging, or the ‘pay off’ didn’t justify the journey. I have left a few souls exasperated when they tried to use data to try to convince me that CR7 is the goat.

Obviously, the resistance to data and their interpretors such as mathematicians, physicists and others, has decreased seeing that more clubs hire a broad scope of people without any prior experience with football to analyze and interpret matches. I especially loved the detail of the business meeting where they went out to get Pret sandwiches - perhaps the whole football data world could have turned out differently had they elected for Tesco! But Liverpool’s Champions League and Premier League glory under Jurgen Klopp was helped by the cutting edge approach deployed by their ‘transfer committee’, which pitched for Roberto Firmino’s arrival in 2015.

As a data scientist, math, numbers, algorithms, and the hidden patterns woven in data, have pretty much guided my understanding of the world around me and given me a fulfilling, comfortable career.