Long balls killed English soccer, so English soccer killed the long ball. At least, that's how the story goes.
One of the sport's first true analysts, the Royal Air Force accountant Charles Reep, would attend games while wearing a miner's helmet, equipped with a tiny little headlamp. He had a feeling something was wrong with the way soccer was being played. Too many short passes, he thought. Stop messing about and kick the ball up near the goal. But like any good accountant, he knew he couldn't trust his instincts until he had some cold, hard data that proved him right.
Back in the 1950s, most stadiums didn't illuminate the stands, so Reep used his miner's helmet to light up the notebook he'd bring to every game. He created his own kind of hieroglyphics, a near-unintelligible shorthand that allowed him to record, by hand, everything that happened over the course of a match. And once he created a big enough dataset with his scribblings, he confirmed his initial suspicions: more goals were scored from possessions with fewer passes -- in other words, quickly moving the ball upfield with a long ball -- than possessions with more passes.
Now, Reep fell prey to some faulty math. More goals were scored from possessions with fewer passes because there were more of these possessions in every match. But a higher percentage of the many-pass possessions led to goals. No one seemed to realize this at the time, and Reep's theories gained purchase within the English game, most notably with the young manager Graham Taylor. He came to similar ideas on his own but then doubled-down on Reep's data, using the long-ball game to launch Watford all the way up from the fourth division to as high up as second place in the first division. His success with Watford led to Taylor eventually being named England manager -- and then it all fell apart.
Under Taylor, England failed to qualify for the 1994 World Cup, and everyone blamed the duo's unsophisticated ideas around relying on long balls. The Sun published a picture of Taylor's face on a turnip days after England were eliminated. And various criticisms of Reep's nerdy philosophy trickled out over the next two decades. As one headline put it: "How One Man's Bad Math Helped Ruin Decades Of English Soccer."
Reep's one mistake overshadowed a life of ideas that were ahead of their time. Along with another analyst, Richard Pollard, he developed early expected goals and possession value models -- long before anyone even cared to count shots or corner kicks. Their core ideas about how soccer worked were mostly correct: accept randomness, get the ball near the goal as much as possible, shoot as often as you can. And you know what?
If Liverpool's current place at the top of the table and Bournemouth's shocking challenge for a Champions League place contention are any indication, they might have been on to something with the long balls, too. The long ball is still viewed as unsophisticated and is unpopular in the Premier League, but some of the most successful teams this season are using the tactic the most. What gives?