I read a very interesting article in the Financial Times about football clubs now making more and more use of statisticians to collate the statistics that we see on TV, are the very least of what they are gathering, in terms of generally we are shown figures, of example, of how many kilometres a football player has run during the game.

The statisticians these days are looking at which players can run at extended bursts of more than 7 metres a second, and how often, which players retreat the fastest to get back into defence, which players complete the most passes and who makes the least mistakes. For example, their statistics indicate that any team who can keep their mistakes down to a 15% to 18% region for a game, is practically unbeatable and they are also looking at the speed that the player is running at in the final 20 or 30 minutes of a game, and many substitutions are based on the fact that certain players, as could be expected, while still running around at the end of the game, are running slower than in the first 70 minutes of a game and need to be replaced by a fresh pair of legs. It seems that a growing field of work with a lot of people sitting over computers analysing tackles, passes and a whole lot more than just shots on goal for the managers and the coaches.