Soccer: Playing the numbers in the game

Behind every team, both good and bad, lies a pile of statistics.

In heavily structured sports, this obsession is blatant.

American football, baseball, cricket, league - you only have to listen to the commentaries to know boffins are at work.

Number crunching and the use of computers and video for analysis might not be so obvious in soccer, where broadcasters still value broadbrush colour, and basic statistics are mainly confined to half and full-time summaries.

But rest assured - everything from patterns to passes are being studied in soccer laboratories.

What you get on television is the tip of a very large iceberg. Coaches and managers may use this information in diverse ways, and not all of them are as reliant on this side of the game as others.

In contrast to a highly statistical sport such as baseball, which can sound as if it was invented by Isaac Newton, there is way more going on in the soccer world than meets the eye.

In the major soccer leagues around the world, teams and back-up analysis firms discover everything and anything, to the point of excess. The only question now is how to use this effectively. Soccer, after all, is the beautiful game and not a robotic exercise.

The analysis during the World Cup will be limited because Fifa will prevent teams installing banks of cameras to track individual players. There may be tracking cameras at some venues, but this will be for Fifa's purposes.

Soccer players are not allowed to wear GPS signalling devices.

Individual tracking is done through the mass use of cameras, and clubs around the world achieve this by installing cameras at their grounds.

So the bulk of the video analysis done during the World Cup matches will apparently be based on the same coverage that is broadcast to the public.

Without the tracking, teams will not be able to discover things such as stamina levels. Still, each of the 32 sides will know an incredible amount, much of it gleaned before the tournament starts.

The All Whites have hooked into this by employing Chris Bradley, an Australian who works for French soccer analysis giant Amisco, for the warm-up games and the tournament itself.

The 37-year-old Bradley, a fringe squad member for Sydney club Marconi at the height of his career, described himself as a slow midfielder who could run all day. Nowadays, he would be able to tell you exactly how slow, and exactly how far he ran.

Bradley, the head of Amisco's British division, is doing a masters in sports psychology, and has football's A-level coaching licence.

Amisco supplies information to six of the top seven sides in the English Premier League, plus other big European clubs. They are working with about a fifth of the World Cup teams, the highly organised Germans their biggest client.

"Some of the bigger clubs have up to eight of their own analysts, specialising in recruitment, pre-match, post-match and live [the matches themselves]," says Bradley. "But it's not about how much info, it's about how you use it."

So what's available? You can find out whether a player dribbles left or right, how many times each player touches the ball, where they usually receive the ball, where they pass, how many times they accelerate, total distance run, where teams start their attacks from, where they like to start defending, where players make their most errors, whether a keeper deals best with the ball curling towards or away from him, and on and on.

Bradley offers a taster. In a recent Barcelona game, midfielder Xavi made more than 100 passes, of which 96 per cent were successful.

Bradley will be in the tunnel during the All Whites games, his laptop plugged into a live feed as he codes individual events for quick recall.

The All Whites' hotels are expected to have a dedicated video room and coach Ricki Herbert will be able to provide players with clips of opponents.

The most difficult part of Bradley's job may turn out to be locating match videos. He hopes to analyse the past 10 games of each of the All Whites' opponents. "What if a game is only broadcast in Paraguay - how do you get hold of that?" he says.

Recruitment is the area with the most remaining potential.

"Clubs pay millions of pounds for players, but have no objective data on them," says Bradley. "We can look at the past three seasons - whether he plays well at home, not so good on the road, fades in the last 15 minutes of games, first half v second half, all this type of information. We can give comprehensive reports, like due diligence on a business sale."

The final, moderating word on statistics goes to Raul Blanco, the All Whites' technical adviser.

The Argentinian who has been an assistant coach on two Australian World Cup qualification campaigns says: "I have to keep saying this, that football is about inventiveness and imagination ... the most important team to talk about is yourselves. I don't know if there is anything that we don't know because of analysis, but it is impossible to say exactly what another team will do."