Outnumbered by David Sumpter

Author:David Sumpter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

CHAPTER TWELVE

Football Matters

My use of social media revolves around football. I have a Twitter account, @Soccermatics, where I talk to fellow maths-football nerds about the game, and the maths and stats used to analyse it. This small part of the Twitterverse is both a filter bubble and an echo chamber. I know that Twitter filters my feed so that the biggest geeks are at the top of my home page. Other football stats accounts, such as @deepxg, @MC_of_A and @BassTunedToRed all say things I am interested in, and Twitter makes sure I see their tweets first. My tendency to follow other like-minded geeks creates a bubble where we all agree about the need for maths and football to work together.

Occasionally, less nerdy Twitter users (usually Chelsea fans) who don’t appreciate my latest passing network visualisation, pop into my echo chamber and tell me I should, to choose a few representative examples, ‘go and wank over your spreadsheet’, or ‘meet girls instead, you fucking virgin’. But, since these statements don’t contain much scientific information, I usually ignore them or politely link the Chelsea fan to an article explaining the basic concepts behind football analytics.

I freely admit to living in a football analytics bubble. But I have noticed an interesting thing about this bubble. Some of us, like me, are Liverpool fans. Some support Everton. Some support Manchester United and others City. Some of us even support Chelsea. There are Real Madrid fans, Barcelona fans, fans of Italian and German football. And there are analysts who tweet about African football, about Asian football and soccer in the US. Instead of residing in a bubble for each team or even each league, us football maths geeks see and share information about all forms of football. I know just as much about Manchester City now as I do about Liverpool. I have learnt about Major League Soccer in the US (and Canada, as I found out recently) and even more about the women’s league, NWSL. I have also peeked outside the soccer bubble to the American football bubble, the ice hockey bubble and the basketball bubble.

Politics also seeps into my bubble. There is often a strong working-class, socialist ethos among many of the Liverpool fans I follow. But I also follow journalists at right-wing UK newspapers and media outlets. Many of the analysts I follow from the US tend to support the Democrats and retweet anti-Trump articles, but I also follow coaches working at a grassroots level across the country, who sympathise with Republican ideals and who are motivated by Christian beliefs. One analyst in particular, @SaturdayOnCouch, keeps me entertained with both his heat maps of German football and his friendly(ish) trolling of anti-Trump liberal football analysts.

I see calls for Manchester United to start a women’s football team, campaigns by Leicester City fans to stop homophobic abuse on the terraces and pleas by Borussia Dortmund fans to welcome refugees from Syria to Germany. I see political campaigning and stories about how dissatisfaction among working-class Americans led to the rise of Donald Trump.

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