If I were to just type that United are playing badly some United lifelong supporter is going to barge in whose father was a United fan, whose grandfather was a United fan, whose great grandfather was a United fan and tell you that the stats show that Ten Hag has scored more points than SAF or Klopp or Mourinho or whoever. When I see such people and there are millions of them worldwide and especially in the UK I automatically wonder if you have to be low IQ to be a football fan. You don’t need stats to tell you that United are terrible. If you have eyes you can see that they are scrapping through and not heading in the right direction. On the other hand if you can understand football you could have figured out that Chelsea on the other hand for all their defeats are headed in the right direction. They might be down in the points table but there is a plan that is slowly working at Chelsea. If you just give it time they will be in the reckoning sooner or later. How is something as basic as this not evident to people.
While I understand the disdain for people blindly using stats, the argument that stats don’t matter is ignoring that people have their own biases.
Both your opinion (which is all your “understanding” is - an opinion) and the facts (which is what the stats are) need to be put into context.
My opinion: comparing Ten Hag and Klopp is not putting the stats into the context of the jobs they started in but…
United want to play out from the back but have lost their best ball playing defender in Martinez and their two left backs which were inverted at the start of the season. Now he is using players he wanted to get rid of. This would make a huge difference to any team. Despite that, they are not that far off the top four and it’s important to consider that when all these calls of “sack him” are ringing through the media.
Chelsea have been playing well, just not finishing their chances likely because of their lack of maturity. They will improve naturally, not just because of the “direction” but they have heavily invested in a very young team that are going to improve individually over the next few years.
I have a bias that Ten Hag is a good manager and that I think young teams that develop together like Arsenal did can be very successful. None of those are facts and the stats will actually tell if I am correct or not in the end.
I’m a fan of neither of these teams but I think they have cause for optimism.
Absolutely. Stats open up a world of the game that evades the eye.
Stats are not everything, but stats are A LOT and definitely a lot more than the eye test.
However, stats in isolation lack context.
But I still believe you can understand more of a game with stats alone than eye test alone.
eg. Most united fans thought united are not able to create in the starting of the last season. Because they were not used to building up from the back. But data lays out a much accurate picture of how things were don’t he pitch