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OVER the next month, the number of soccer managers in the world is likely
to increase to hundreds of millions. The new recruits will be seated in
armchairs and the team that they manage will be on display a metre or so
away on the television. Their team will be one of 24 playing in Italy in
the world’s biggest sports competition – the World Cup. Unfortunately, the
undoubted wisdom of the armchair experts is likely to be overruled by the
24 men who actually manage the finalists but who, according to popular opinion,
are least suited to doing so. They make all the wrong decisions and play
the wrong players. They employ the wrong tactics and, for all but the one
successful manager, they fail to achieve their aim. No one doubts the enormous
pressure on national managers to succeed in the World Cup. Indeed, the mood
of a nation can depend on it . But this does not evoke sympathies among
passionate supporters faced with defeat. In their role as armchair experts
they can see only too clearly why their team wilts before inferior opposition.
Or can they? Mike Hughes and Tom Reilly at the Liverpool Polytechnic might
disagree. They have developed systems for analysing in detail the methods
that teams adopt in their attempts to win, including the tactics they use
and the contributions and fitness of individual players.

Over the past few years, Hughes has pioneered a computer system that,
in conjunction with videotapes of a soccer match, can help to expose a team’s
weaknesses and strengths. The system also reveals the patterns of play that
are most likely to secure trophies. Hughes has already applied the system,
developed at the polytechnic’s Centre for Sport and Exercise Sciences, to
analysis of the most recent World Cup tournament, staged in Mexico four
years ago. He compared the tactics of successful teams (defined as the four
that reached the semifinals) with those of the ‘unsuccessful’ teams. For
the analysis, Hughes divided the playing area into six equal strips, running
across the width of the pitch. Several trends emerged: For each period
of possession, successful teams played significantly more touches of the
ball (5.59) before losing possession than unsuccessful teams (5.22). This
led Hughes to speculate that superior teams succeeded through elaborate
passing movements that kept them in control of the match.

Unsuccessful teams lost possession of the ball significantly more in
the outermost sixths of the playing area, that is close to the goals, both
during attack and defence.

Successful teams approached the final sixth of the pitch by playing
predominantly through the centre of the pitch, while unsuccessful teams
played significantly more to the wings. According to Hughes, successful
teams in the 1986 World Cup kept possession of the ball longer than unsuccessful
teams. He says: ‘Top teams that have sufficient players to sustain controlled
possession can afford to play with the ball and wait for a ‘dislocation’
in the defensive formation before using a longer or quicker ‘through-ball’
as a tactical variation.’

Hughes also notes how the differences in the distribution of fouls –
when players concede free kicks to the opposition after tripping opponents
or illegally handling the ball, for example – for the two sets of teams
showed that the unsuccessful teams won more free kicks in areas towards
the wings.

This was probably due to the fact that the unsuccessful teams dribbled
and ran with the ball out of defence towards the wings. The successful teams
drove up the middle of the pitch, while the unsuccessful teams were forced
to play up the flanks.

Hughes achieves his analyses by entering 24 variables associated with
play into the computer. His ‘concept keyboard’ (see illustration, previous
page) consists of 128 touch-sensitive cells on which Hughes superimposes
a chart showing a ‘pitch’. Around the pitch are arranged a series of squares
that form the ‘keys’ of the keyboard. They bear the numbers of the eleven
players of the team under analysis, plus its two substitutes, and the symbols
for functions and outcomes, such as GK for ‘Goalkeeper Kick’, DRIB for ‘Dribble’
and LOST POSS for ‘Lost Possession’. Alongside the computer keyboard, Hughes
views a videotape of the game he is analysing. If player A passes the ball
to player B, he presses the key for player A, then presses the ‘pitch’ at
the point where the player makes the pass. Hughes then presses the key for
‘PASS’, and finally the key for player B and the point on the pitch where
he received the pass. Hughes has now done so many analyses that he can ‘copy’
a game almost directly from a videotape onto a computer, a bit like a secretary
touch typing. He can ‘log’ a whole match in 3 hours.

From this, Hughes gets a paper analysis, 3 centimetres thick, that shows
what each player does throughout the match, which is logged and mapped out
on a chart of the pitch, and what a team does as a whole. The final analysis
shows where players dribble, the distribution of passing, how possession
was lost and how free-kicks were conceded to opponents, for example. He
has applied this form of analysis equally to many other sports from karate
and horse jumping to rugby league and badminton, but the centre has focused
on soccer and squash.

Hughes has used the technique to analyse the playing patterns of the
Republic of Ireland, England and the Netherlands, three nations that will
be pitted directly against one another as part of the first round of the
tournament. The 24 finalists have been grouped into six ‘leagues’ of four
teams. The teams within each league play each other once and win points
accordingly. A winning team earns two points, teams that tie each earn one
point, and defeated teams receive no points at all. Once all the teams have
played one another, the points they have earned determine their position
in the league. The top two teams in each league proceed automatically to
the next stage of the competition, and are joined by the four teams that
finished most strongly in third position. The 16 survivors then engage in
a knockout competition that ultimately produces a winner. The tournament
begins next week, on 8 June, and finishes on 8 July.

Coincidentally, England, the Republic of Ireland and the Netherlands
were drawn together two years ago in a league in the first stage of the
finals of the European Championship. The Netherlands went on to win the
competition. The Republic of Ireland performed well and failed narrowly
to reach the semifinal, while England fared abysmally, losing all its games.
That the three have been drawn together again is an interesting fluke for
Hughes, who analysed the defensive patterns of play for all three teams
and who is now in a better position than most managers to appreciate how
the teams will fare during this World Cup competition.

So what do Hughes and colleagues detect that other soccer supporters
miss? ‘Sport is a very complex business, particularly soccer, and there’s
so much activity on the pitch that no one can analyse everything going on,’
he says. He pointed to studies by a Canadian analyst that found that national
soccer coaches in Canada recalled incorrectly up to 70 per cent of what
happened in games, when their accounts of incidents were compared with videotapes.
Also, says Hughes, the analysis is necessary for feedback ‘to improve understanding
of what you and your opponents are doing. The brain is not complex enough
to do it.’

Interestingly, the practice of analysing team performance ‘scientifically’,
or statistically, has caught on in countries outside Britain, although Hughes
and Reilly claim that their system for analysing soccer and other sports
by so-called ‘notational analysis’ is second to none. The two men reckon
that West Germany and Italy are likely to be the best prepared teams this
month, although Reilly says that Brazil is well prepared medically. Reilly,
professor of sports science at the polytechnic’s School of Health Sciences,
was one of the earliest exponents of soccer analysis in the 1970s. Since
then he has shifted his own studies towards the evaluation of physiological
factors that affect the performance of individual players.

Together the two have accumulated a wealth of data that would probably
be invaluable to Bobby Robson, the manager of England, and Jackie Charlton,
who manages the Republic of Ireland. ‘What Bobby Robson should have is a
bank of data on the Republic of Ireland, Holland and Egypt (the fourth team
in the ‘league’),’ says Hughes. We could provide him with the Irish data,’
he added. Reilly and Hughes say that Robson would have benefited by analysing
his team’s warm-up games before the tournament, because he experimented
with different styles involving different players, notably against Brazil
(which England won 1-0) and Czechoslovakia (which England won 4-2). Hughes
says that if Jackie Charlton or Bobby Robson wanted analyses of the four
match tapes of the first phase of the tournament, he could fax the material
to the managers in Cagliari, where the matches take place.

Reilly and Hughes say that their analyses both of the European Championship
finals and of the Republic of Ireland’s qualifying games for the World Cup
demonstrate the uniqueness of Jackie Charlton’s strategies. The Irish have
what Reilly describes as a ‘direct’ style: they attempt to harry the opposition
into a mistake, then capitalise on the error with a burst of long, but decisive
passes. ‘They like to clear their (defensive) area quickly then make a strike
out of three or four touches,’ says Reilly. Other teams, including the West
Germans, the Dutch, the English and many of the South American teams, prefer
instead to build up an attack more elaborately from deep defensive positions.
The difference between the English and Irish styles of play appeared in
analyses by Hughes of the previous championships where England’s ‘degree
of elaboration’ reached 5.49 on a special index compared with 3.54 for Ireland.

Reilly, whose interests focus more on the physiological aspects of play,
says that the Irish way of playing is extremely demanding physically because
the players have to ‘jockey and harry’ opponents into making mistakes. Reilly
notes that the Republic of Ireland’s demanding style tired the players noticeably
in the European Championships. They were most jaded in their final game
against the Netherlands, which they lost 1-0. Reilly expects things to be
different in Italy, because the intervals between games are longer, giving
players a chance to recover for forthcoming ties. He points out that the
Dutch team of the 1970s, which pioneered a new and widely admired style
of soccer that earned the label ‘total-football’, was also taxed to the
limit physically.

Reilly says that typically, a player carries the ball for less than
2 per cent of the 10 kilometres or so he will run in a game. ‘Most of the
running is sub-maximal, with an average sprint distance of 12 metres.’ Also,
patterns vary depending on a player’s position. Central defenders, for example,
spend more time than other players running backwards.

Reilly notes an interesting nuance in Charlton’s style that brought
the tactics of the Republic of Ireland manager into direct comparison with
those of Bobby Robson, the England manager. The comparison was helped by
the managers drawing on players from the same club team; Steve McMahon of
England and Ray Houghton of the Republic of Ireland are two of the hardest
working club footballers and both play for Liverpool, England’s most successful
team ever and this year’s national league champions. Reilly and Hughes’s
analysis of Liverpool’s style of playing shows that the club employs both
styles; ‘direct’, like the Irish, and ‘open’, like the Dutch and English.
Yet the combination of styles exacts a huge work rate that only Houghton
of the two players is expected to deliver this month for his country.

‘England’s players are undertaxed physiologically – they do not play
to their strengths,’ says Reilly. Hughes says: ‘There’s a media expectation
for (England) to mirror the skilful Continental game. If we played in the
summer, our players might develop those type of skills, but otherwise, we
should concentrate on exploiting the skills we develop in the wind, snow
and rain of our winter season, most of which rely on stamina. When English
players play for their country, it’s the only time when they don’t play
to the same pattern.’

Moving to the more domestic scene of British football, Hughes and Reilly
speak of resistance to analysis of soccer. They say that British soccer
is so backward that some teams, especially the London ones, video their
games but still often do not look at them and analyse them. ‘The technology
is ahead of existing attitudes in Britain,’ says Reilly. ‘By comparison,
the Germans and French are way down the road. The training of coaches and
managers is still very imperfect (in Britain).’

Hughes and Reilly, who are both launching books in the next few months,
are hoping that British managers will become more willing to accept the
notion that they can gain something through analysis that they would otherwise
miss. ‘If more managers get involved, it would be a natural progression.
Our systems are now getting more refined and quicker. Now, we have computer
programs (that) search for examples of specific kinds of ploy,’ says Hughes.

Another sign that the notion of analysis is becoming more acceptable
is that Liverpool Polytechnic is this year welcoming applicants for the
world’s first diploma in science and football. Meanwhile, the two men are
cautious about picking winners in Italy. They both favour Italy, the home
side, and Brazil, and ‘you can never rule out West Germany’. Hughes wonders
whether Belgium might be worth an outside bet. After all, they reached the
semifinals last time! Whatever happens, Hughes has promised to do a post-Italy
analysis.

* * *

The sport of pings . . .

BY THE time the World Cup begins on 8 June, for some people the real
competition in Rome will be over. This weekend in Rome, competitors from
31 nations will become respectively the winners of the junior and adult
‘Subbuteo’ World Cups, trophies awarded to the best table football players
in the world. Thanks to advances in camera technology, the highlights of
the two-day tournaments will be broadcast to television viewers in 80 countries.
They will be shown in Britain on 5 June, on Channel 4.

The game, invented in 1947, is a miniaturised version of soccer. More
than 5 million people play it around the world in more than 50 countries.
The pitch, about the area of a pool table, is of baize, and the figures
that represent soccer players are about 1 centimetre high. They are mounted
on hemispherical bases which means that the ‘players’ almost always remain
upright during the game. Exponents play the game by flicking the tiny players
against a small plastic ball the size of a marble. In this way, exponents
can propel passes from player to player, devise stratagems and score goals.
Equally, there are strategies to thwart attacks. The game attempts to mimic
the events that happen in real soccer. There are goal kicks, corners, fouls,
penalties, and offsides. But the practicalities of playing the game and
the speed with which the play progresses have until now made filming difficult.

Television, Sport and Leisure (TSL), one of Britain’s largest independent
producers of televised sport programmes, has cracked the problem by deploying
miniature cameras in strategic positions around the pitch that will not
obstruct the competitors themselves. Peter Gillbe, the producer involved,
explains that TSL will deploy the cameras in special positions around the
pitch to ensure that the players’ hands never obscure the action. To make
the presentation more like that familiar to soccer supporters, most of the
play will be viewed from one side of the pitch. This avoids confusion when
teams swap ends at half time and play in the opposite direction.

The cameras that TSL will deploy are no bigger than your thumb. Developed
by Panasonic, they operate on a single silicon chip. They are achieving
new uses regularly, but so far have proved most effective in sporting events
such as motor racing, where they are small enough to fit unobtrusively into
the driver’s cockpit, or in sensitive documentaries where covert filming
is required.

In trials before the Subbuteo finals in Rome, TSL worked out the best
way to film the sport. Gillbe and colleagues will operate two microcameras
in fixed positions that observe the goal areas at both ends of the pitch.
The cameras are mounted on slightly curved supports which bend upwards,
a few centimetres from the pitch, away from secure grips positioned close
to the corner of the playing area.

To generate a feeling of ‘reality’, another microcamera will be manoeuvred
along the touchline keeping pace with play as it shuttles from one end to
the other. The camera will be attached to a rod, about 1.5 metres long,
that the operator Clever filming will bring Lilliputian soccer to TV screens
in 80 countries will withdraw instantly if it impedes the players themselves.

An ordinary camera will be suspended in the so-called balloon position
above the centre of the pitch to give an overall view of the action. A conventional
camera, mounted on wheels, will record the expressions of the players and
give general shots of the event. Gillbe, who plans to record all the major
games, will be able to switch from camera to camera to achieve the coverage
he wants.

Derek Wyatt, the creative director at TSL, says that Italy are the favourites.
There are three professional leagues in Italy. Even the Carmelite nuns run
a league. The major players employ professional ‘finger’ physiotherapists
and their digits are heavily insured.

Companies snapped up the advertising space on the miniaturised advertising
hoardings around the half of the pitch in view of the camera. Wyatt says
that even though a single hoarding, measuring 1 centimetre by 7, costs Pounds
sterling 1000, the space available on the 12 to 13 pitches designated for
the two-day tournament sold out almost immediately.