Aston Villa’s recent rise to sixth place in the English Premier League table has been nothing short of extraordinary, and as a devoted fan of the football club, I can’t help but be overjoyed.
It has been over a decade since the club achieved such heights. But since December 2022, Villa boasts a World Cup winner in the squad and, since mid-February 2023, it has won six out of seven games, with one draw being the only blemish.
What has been the reason for this meteoric rise? Most of the commentators online point to the team’s new possession-based playing style that builds from the back, preferring sharp, deliberate passes to midfield over long hopeful balls made under pressure. They also highlight the organised way Villa players drop into defence en masse, denying gaps for through balls.
These reasons could be correct. However, there are fine margins between winning and losing in football. If a few of those wins were draws or losses, then the narrative would be, “the build up is too slow”, or “the defence invites the attack”. It begs the question: Are Aston Villa currently genuinely good or just lucky?
Fortunately, we have the technology and access to large data sets that can help shed some light.
Over the last few years, there has been a rise in football data, including some good free databases. The one I use right now is called Fbref that works with data providers like StatsBomb and Opta to present selected data in a user-friendly format and allow people to download it. So apart from knowing who scored the goals and what the final score was, it will give additional detail. For example, for each shot taken during the game, it will also attach information saying how likely such shots usually are to go in, as well as how good the actual final shot really was.
And the truth is, once we crunch the numbers, we have to conclude that over the last two months, Aston Villa might have been luckier than their performance would suggest.
If you want to know the details: Instead of scoring 13 goals, we would have normally been scoring only 11 or 12 with the chances we had; instead of only conceding two goals, we would have been more likely to let in seven or eight; and instead of gathering 19 points out of 21, it should have maybe been only 12 or 13.
If true, this means that the string of good results that the team is getting right now is not sustainable in the long run. We will eventually start losing, and perhaps lose badly. So should we just lie back and wait for our inevitable demise?
My personal belief, based on decades of watching football and shouting at the screen, is that real success in football is not only about the games you win on the pitch but what happens off it.
Former Villa manager Dean Smith was a strong advocate of a culture of togetherness and collective responsibility, which undoubtedly contributed to the club’s promotion back into the Premier League in 2019 and its survival in the 2019/2020 season.
I get the sense that current manager Unai Emery is working to foster a similar sense of unity, while implementing a more complex playing style. He has even asked the fans to remain patient as the team strives to perfect this new approach, while insisting that we can do much better than we are now. I assume Emery reads the same data that we do, and knows the difference between being good and being lucky, and is still working to be good eventually.
This sense of patience and gradual improvement is something I think is lacking in a lot of things we do today. The convenience of the Internet, and now AI-assisted tools, has created a false sense of confidence that it’s easy to be good at what you do. However, I believe the maxim that “things worth doing are usually hard to do” still holds, even in this hypermodern age. It’s just that the bar for achievement is now higher.
Even though I can download football data from a website and have it create pretty graphs on the fly, that doesn’t mean I really understand what’s going on immediately. It’s like a team that thinks they can just buy expensive players and magically shoehorn them into a team that wins all the time (I’m looking at you, a certain club from London that wears blue).
Acquiring the data on my computer takes mere seconds. How-ever, understanding its meaning needs extensive cross-referencing. When the data suggest a keeper made a great save, did he really do so? Or was there a defender on the line that helped out?
If you want to understand why Malaysia can produce so many knowledge workers and yet still struggle to function as a knowledge economy, this is the reason. We don’t have the culture yet that values data-driven decision-making. Even worse, we believe sometimes these solutions should work straight away, while actually, we should cultivate and acknowledge the patience and perseverance needed for it to eventually properly succeed.
We need a shift away from emotive arguments and personal beliefs in policy discussions, towards a more balanced and evidence-based approach. And we should demand that evidence is transparent and accessible, instead of just waving hands and saying, “trust us”.
By the time this article comes out, Aston Villa would have played Newcastle United on April 15. Newcastle is in third place, and based on the data, it very much deserves its position in the League. So even if Villa loses by two or three goals, my hope is that we don’t see it as an aberrant result, but a reminder of our true position now, and how much we have to do to be better [Villa won three-nil].
In his fortnightly column, Contradictheory, mathematician-turned-scriptwriter Dzof Azmi explores the theory that logic is the antithesis of emotion but people need both to make sense of life’s vagaries and contradictions. Write to Dzof at lifestyle@thestar.com.my. The views expressed here are entirely the writer's own.
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