Unlike American Sports, European football was late to the party in using quantitative measures and metrics to analyze the game. Due to the gospel of social media and funneling the attention toward the content creator, there is a haphazard nature to its usage of it. People in the mainstream media want to get the numbers out for the sake of it causing a diminishing quality and spreading some misinterpretation of the game.

For example, Ronaldo in the second half of the season has scored 13 goals in 15 games. Forget the nature of the opposition for a moment. In those 13 goals, there were 2 hattricks and 2 braces. One of the hat-tricks was a 4-goal haul. 11 goals came in 4 matches and in the rest of the game, the Portuguese blanked thereby giving his teams less chances of getting more points because 4 goals in 4 different games could get 12 points but 4 goals in a single game would get just 3. The distribution of the goals across games scored by CR7 has been reducing for quite some time now. Even his last stint at Man Utd was similar. This is a rudimentary example of how misinterpreted numbers ruin the game and why there is a need for the ‘eye’ test and a ‘feel’ to understand the game better.

The reading of defensive metrics is more questionable. In the modern game, if a top 6 Premier league centre-back stands top for tackles (not adjusted for possession), most fans would appreciate it. On the contrary, it is a probable red flag that a top 6 Prem team is either conceding too many chances on transition or conceding a lot of the possession for the defender to make so many tackles. But all is not lost with numbers in football as there are good metrics like PPDA(Passes per defensive action) indicating the pressing nature of the off-possession team, cumulative xG which considers the game state, etc. but those metrics are still not visible in the mainstream media for fans to better understand the game. Numbers are inherently beautiful until they are misinterpreted and made the villain.