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Pekka Luhtanen may not know which team will win the 1994 World Cup, but he does know what they will have done to beat everyone else. The most successful team, says the Finnish football professor, will be the one whose players exchange most passes, reflecting greater possession of the ball and dominance of the game. And going by his analysis of players’ performances from the past three World Cup tournaments, he estimates that about 500 passes per game should be enough to guarantee victory.

Luhtanen, from the Research Institute for Olympic Sports in Jyvaskyla, deep in the heart of Finland, has written a computer program to help him detail a football match right down to the sneakiest dig in the shins. Every pass, tackle and moment of magic is recorded on a laptop computer. The information is then transferred to a mainframe for a thorough analysis, which produces statistics about the game, calculated to the nearest metre and second. The system is similar to one pioneered in Britain before the last World Cup by researchers at Liverpool Polytechnic before it became Liverpool John Moores University (see ‘How to score goals and influence people’, 2 June 1990).

TRAINING DATA

With his system, Luhtanen can trace the movement of the ball and the distances run by different players, providing coaches with data for training and planning tactics. Luhtanen says the data can help teams measure the efficiency of their man-to-man marking system, pinpoint problems in the way they use the offside trap or hone in on the effectiveness of their fast, one-touch play.

Some national squads have already benefited from kick-by-kick accounts of their international matches. A report by Luhtanen and his team on the 1990 World Cup in Italy went to the national coach of every country that took part. Although the analysis isn’t foolproof – after all, it didn’t secure England a place this time round – UEFA, European football’s governing body, was so impressed with what it read, says Luhtanen, that he is going to do a similar analysis of this World Cup from the US.

IMPROVING SPORT

UEFA’s interest reflects Luhtanen’s motivation for the research. He is not so much interested in the prospect of being able to predict winners, as in the opportunity to explore ways of developing football to make the game more popular. And there are clear reasons why football needs to change, he says. The number of goals scored in the World Cup has decreased steadily since the 1960s, when Luhtanen himself was a player and coach in the Finnish football league, and the game has become more defensive and less spectator-friendly.

‘In a top international match, a player is injured every 30 minutes and a goal is scored only every 43 minutes,’ he estimates. ‘What does the crowd want to see – crude tackles or more goals?’ In his day, says Luhtanen, spectators could expect to see between 4 and 8 goals per game, and fewer injuries. He hopes that his research will show how changes to the rules of the game could lead to higher-scoring, less violent matches. UEFA has already started to experiment with the rules in an effort to make the game more positive, notes Luhtanen; in some youth tournaments, he says, players now reintroduce the ball into play from the sidelines with a kick instead of a throw.

Luhtanen’s program allows a superficial analysis of the action as a game progresses; detailed surveys take much longer. The full breakdown of the 52 matches at this World Cup will be made using video footage examined at the research centre in Jyvaskyla, with one analyst needing two working days to decode each match.

The coefficients and performance charts printed out by the computer have consistently been endorsed by match results, says Luhtanen. Statistically, a team may have lost out in some sectors of the analysis, but it usually dominated more important aspects and won the match.

PREDICTABLE FORECAST

Armed with his program, Luhtanen says he successfully predicted that Germany would reach the final of the 1990 World Cup and the final of the European Championship in Sweden two years ago. Of course, he admits, many football fans would have plumped for Germany anyway: it doesn’t take a pie chart, let alone a laptop computer, to work out the strength and effectiveness of the German team.

Luhtanen’s analysis showed how Germany swarmed into attack, often with as many as six highly mobile players at a time; other teams typically committed only four or five players into the third of the field around their opponent’s goalmouth.

Germany’s play during the 1990 World Cup was also the most intricate. The ball crossed from one side of the pitch to the other more times than any other team, and its players made more long runs with the ball – and without it, which helped to confuse the opposition. Germany had the most shots and headers near its opponent’s goal, and exchanged the fewest passes near its own. And Germany had more players who were prepared to attack and defend, regardless of the position they were playing. Furthermore, says Luhtanen, attacking moves by the Germans lasted the longest, and the team controlled areas of the pitch more efficiently than anyone else. Overall, German players were the best at working in small groups of two or three, for instance, to make overlapping and scissors runs, or to keep possession of the ball.

German players were also the most successful tacklers of all the participants at the 1990 World Cup, and went on to win the title. Argentina, who lost to Germany in the final, actually lost more tackles than it won during the course of the tournament, according to Luhtanen. He says the Germans lost few tackles during the last 15 minutes of most of their matches in the tournament, when many players are exhausted. Controlling this period of the game was essential, notes Luhtanen, because 26 per cent of the tournament’s goals were scored then.

SURPRISE RESULT

By Luhtanen’s calculations, Germany should have won both tournaments. In fact, Denmark beat Germany in the final of the European Championship in Sweden in 1992. Although the Danes figured strongly in Luhtanen’s statistical league table, he didn’t tip them for the top. However, tight defending and quick counterattacks, which yielded most of Denmark’s goals, produced the surprise result.

But he is the first to admit that luck and talented individuals can turn his league table upside down. Stars such as Diego Maradona, who led Argentina through the last two World Cups, can cause havoc with the best-laid plans. As England fans know only too well, it was Maradona’s notorious ‘Hand of God’ that palmed the ball into England’s net for a decisive goal in the quarterfinals of the 1986 World Cup in Mexico.

Pressed to give a tip for this year’s tournament, Luhtanen is again backing Germany. However, he says that the Brazilians and Italians are also in with a good chance. Luhtanen also pinpoints two outsiders that might spring a surprise: Bulgaria and Nigeria. ‘Bulgaria has perhaps the strongest attacking trio in Europe, with Hristo Stoitchkov at their head.’ And after analysing Nigeria’s games in the recent African championships, Luhtanen says that ‘their skills are very impressive’.

Timo Paukku is a science journalist working in Helsinki for the daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat.

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How to spot the winners

According to Pekka Luhtanen’s analysis of the 1992 European Champ-ionship, players had 13 or 14 attempts on average before scoring a goal, and they scored 25 per cent of the goals from outside the penalty area.

At the World Cup and European Championship competitions from 1986 to 1992, the Finnish football professor discovered that 39.6 per cent of goals came after fast attacks, 31.6 per cent resulted from rehearsed set pieces and the rest were scored following slow build-ups.

Players in top tournaments generally, says Luhtanen, score 37.5 per cent of goals from a distance of between 5 and 10 metres, and they use their right foot to score 59.3 per cent of the time.

More goals are being scored with headers, he adds. Before 1990, only about 1 goal in 10 resulted from a header. At the last World Cup in Italy, however, the ratio climbed to 25.2 per cent and was 21.9 per cent at the 1992 European Championship in Sweden.