You'll have to tell that to every top club in the world who are investing in data experts and analytics applications.
It is however comforting that there appears to be a correlation between not rating Sterling and not appreciating advanced analytics.
It’s why Gundogan and Bernardo play in City’s team rather than us selling them and going for Bruno Fernandes who has better stats than both of them. de Bruyne has always said that stats aren’t important. Pep has said himself that he’d often rather see his players, in the final third, take a chance and it not come off than just keep the ball for the sake of it and to boost stats figures.
When Wenger started going down the “moneyball” stats route, he took Arsenal from challenging for titles to barely finishing in the Top4.
Stats are often insignificant because they only tell a tiny fraction of what football is all about. Some of the most important aspects to this sport don’t have stats. Football is a sport that has situations that might only happen once a game and never again in any game again that season, but are some of the most important things that happen in that game. There could be half a dozen of these individual things that occur that are all different to each other that just occur out of the blue that certain players always seem to be involved in because they are great players and understand the game, but will never attain a stat for them.
You don’t get a stats table for the assist to the assist to the assist to the assist even though it was the most important pass in that goal, or the movement that draws opposing players out of position, or one individual quick one touch pass that sets the tempo for a whole move, or knowing how to make runs to lose a marker, understanding where to run to get on the end of a cross, or where to position yourself when the opposition move the ball into certain areas of the pitch… there are no stats to tell us which players have the best concentration levels, or players who communicate all game and tie everything together with motivation and organisation etc.
But they could all be more important to football than anything you can show me in a stat.
Everyone knows the Agüeroooooo! goal, yet do you remember the most important thing that any player did in that goal? It wasn’t particularly Agüero scoring, it wasn’t Balotelli’s assist, it wasn’t de Jong breaking forward and passing it to Agüero before the 1-2… it was the run that Kompany made to move the defenders and create the space that Agüero eventually ended up in with a free shot at goal… what stat does Kompany attain for that? None at all, yet we don’t score that goal without that run.
Stats are often misleading and should never be used in isolation. A player can find himself doing three good things in three incidents that add up to 15 seconds in a game of 90 minutes and have an absolute stinker for the other 89 minutes and 45 seconds, but leave the field with a goal and two assists. The rest of the time, tripping over the ball, constantly giving it away, running down blind alleys and doing sod all defensively. Also, you can end a game - or a season - having the best passing stats in the game/league, but a player with the most passes and most successful passes might be dropped by Pep in the next game if those passes have been too safe, too many backwards passes, and too many that lacked incision and positivity.
Football isn’t like American sports where stats are king. US sports are played in bursts and are formulaic and robotic, where it’s all about stats. Football flows too much and has too many variables for stats to matter to the general influence on the game.
Stats are usually just the end result to a load of randomness. The person who attains the stats might have been provided with an easy chance to make an assist or score the goal with barely any influence in the randomness beforehand that set that situation up. The randomness comes from football being a free flowing game, stats are just the end product of all that. But what’s more important in football: the end stat, or the randomness to set the stats up? It’s the randomness, because without it there’d be no goal and assist.
Football is mainly about exploiting space. If you can influence the game to create space in the opposition’s defensive set-up, and exploit that space, you will win. There are no stats to tell you how much you exploited space in a game of football.
And I don’t think any City fan doesn’t rate Sterling. He’s been part of the best league side in English football history and is appreciated for it by us all. He’s provided us with some brilliant moments! But he can be a very frustrating watch, between the things you can attain stats for he can be anything from brilliant to abysmal and you never know which one you’re going to get. There have been periods of seasons where he’s been consistently poor and he’s useless to us, there have been times where he’s been consistently poor but got a load of goals and assists, there have been times where he’s been on fire and got no goals or assists or he’s been on fire and bagged a few of each.
That’s why I’ve changed my outlook on him; rather than expect too much, just take the rough with the smooth, and I try to not get frustrated with him. But I have in the past and it’s all worth talking about. But it has to be said, he’s nowhere near as good a-player as many others we’ve had.
