Yo, King, I'm real happy for you and Imma let you finish...
It has always seemed to me that association football is just a very difficult thing to analyze statistically on a micro level in that there's no real good way to quantify most of the action that takes place in a match. Unless a particular offensive effort culminates in a goal or a shot on goal, it's difficult to explain how it might have contributed to a team's victory or defeat and to what degree. That isn't to say that what happens outside the goal-box is unimportant, but it may as well be to the statistician if he can only describe a game in terms of the shots made by the offense and by the goals saved or allowed by the keeper.
The more popular American sports seem so different to me not really because of the higher frequency of scoring, but because the nature of those games lend themselves to fanatically detailed statistical analysis. A game of baseball is subdivided into nine innings, several dozen at-bats, and hundreds of opportunities in which a pitcher can throw strikes and cause outs or in which a batter can get hits, reach the bases and score runs. Each player can be judged in his various roles over a sample size of thousands of pitches or at-bats or outs or innings, and we can describe a player's or a team's propensity to win future games in terms of ERA, OBP, WHIP, WAR - sabermetricians are always devising new statistical indexes and averages to make use of the vast quantities of data available to them in the service of predicting outcomes. On the other hand, gridiron football's obsession with measurement is brutally simple - the game is, after all, played on a 100-yard ruler painted into the grass, and every yard gained is a measurable and quantifiable achievement in pursuit of the next first down or touchdown.
Baseball and gridiron football reward their audiences constantly with intermediate indicators of the progress of the game. A strike, a hit, a yard and a down are all, in some sense, stepping-stones toward victory or defeat. Association football does not provide such continuous statistical gratification. The wonder of tactics, coordination and athletic achievement that is scoring a goal can be the logical and elegant culmination of a team's combined effort, though it might confound our desire to subject the game to the familiar tortures of statistics.
