You don’t have a situation where one person is trying to track passes, tackles, shots etc for both sides in an entire match. That would be a near impossible task for one person.

I don’t know if he can even do such a thing for football like he did for baseball, but if he can it would be of great benefit for teams all across the globe. I’m sure it’s been attempted before.

Your argument is misdirected. It has absolutely no bearing on the “usefulness of stats.”

Rather, your argument points out the uselessness of some uninterpreted statistics. Well, that’s trivial. Statistics without context, without interpretation, are often mere counters. They are records of events. You cannot directly infer from a record of events to an evaluation of those events. That’s why you cannot infer from “Vinny Testeverde is 6th all time in passing yards” (or whatever he is) to “Vinny Testeverde is the 6th best QB of all time.” That’s just simply not what those statistics mean.

But of course they are not useless! If we do interpret them correctly, they will tell us a lot of information. Statistics are not the domain of losers. They are the tools that successful teams in all reaches of sport use to analyze the game from a scientific perspective, dealing with trends over time. They allow you to synthesize a large number of individual events into broader trends, trends that might go unnoticed to the human eye when it is only observing the individual events themselves. They simply are not the sort of thing which can be categorically useless. It’s a question of understanding their scope, and their limitations, and applying them thus.

But you are right in some ways YPC is a better indicator than total rushing yards.

There are certainly some stats that don’t tell you much. Citing Kartik’s example of rushing yards, total rushing yards for the season is not really meaningful but yards per carry can be more indicative of how both the back and the offensive line perform.

One EPL-related stat that I found very telling was the team mark for successful passes. The teams that are toward the top of the standings are also toward the top of the total successful passes. When I watch Arsenal, Chelsea or Manchester United, this stat rings true to me as they do tend to guard possession of the ball and are typically more accurate in their passing then a mid-table side like West Ham. Of course, there is always an argument to be made the other way in that it’s simply a matter of differing styles of play but that’s what I find helpful is that the stats can enhance or spark good discussions about football philosophies.

Opta also has a tracking feature that shows what the actual “shape” of each side was during the match. Those graphics often show where the winning side tried to exploit perceived weaknesses, etc.

Ultimately for myself, I find stats can be a nice way of reassuring myself that what my eyes are telling me is accurate. I agree with the comments that without context they lose a lot of meaning and they should only be used as one of many methods in both the analysis of games and scouting of players.

JM makes a great point about the future of stats. The same visual recognition technology that is now being employed by civil engineers to track and monitor traffic patterns will soon be able to give a whole new array of statistics in from football matches.

Yes stats are prevalent in baseball but that does not mean they are fully accepted as a scouting tool. They are still only a piece of the puzzle and as Alex Hleb suggests they have to be translated when a player moves from one league to another. Unlike dodgy scouts, statistics aren’t often wrong, they are just misinterpreted.