Debunking your football theories

Chris Anderson, what is possession?

“People think possession is measured by the amount of time one team has the ball, but it’s not.It’s measured by the number of passes and the percentage of time the team passes the ball to one another. That means it’s correlated to time but it’s not measured in amounts of time. Even if we agreed on the definition of possession, though, the next question is this: does it matter? Possession is something we talk a lot about but without considering under what conditions it might actually matter — teams win on 25% of possession, say, which means it doesn’t matter all the time.

“But in turn that can make it harder for fans to appreciate useful statistics. It might help to accept that statistics can be used in a descriptive way, to tell us what happened without necessarily telling us why a team won.”