Hope everyone is safe and doing okay? It has been a tough month with all the events in Nigeria, especially this week. Currently, I am caught up in the curfew in Benin City since Monday when my flight from Abuja touched down in the Edo State Capital. This has allowed me time to ruminate on the serious and the not-so-serious yet important stuff in life as a way of dealing with the multiple stress of 2020. Anyway, with the weekend almost here, I thought: why not share a football-related note? So, here we go: My top 3 (and boy, it was a real challenge to order these) reads.

1. Football Hackers: The Science and Art of a Data Revolution - Christoph Biermann

“A book full of exciting ideas and inside views on modern football. The most exciting book in an exciting time for football.” -  Thomas Hitzlsperger

Belter. Easily a 5 star read! A book about two things I enjoy Football + Data; applied to gain a competitive edge, improve performance? I was sold! These were the thoughts that ran through my mind when I came across this title from Twitter I think, on #worldbookday this year.

From Europe to the US;  coaches, managers, scouts, scientists - psychologists from major clubs and sports institutions share insights into the data revolution influencing modern football. Metrics, individual player assessment extensive match analysis into factors that explain team performance and victory. 

Christoph Biermann does an excellent job of explaining how matches are not won solely based on events on the training pitch and in the ground on game day anymore; he pulls back the curtains to share with readers the input of the board, Directors, the growing army of analysts, thinkers, rule-breakers and nerds contributing to the outcome of fiercely contested games.

2. The Mixer - Michael Cox

The story of premier league tactics: from route one to false 9s. A fascinating read chronicling the evolution of the game we love with a historical viewpoint to the morphing of how key club characters, influential coaches, players, and teams in the 25 years (2017) since the start of the premier league era - from Keegan, Ferguson, to Mourinho’s Chelsea and Pep and Klopp’s reign on Merseyside have shaped the game.

www.zonalmarking.net’s Michael Cox brilliantly narrates stories and influences behind premier league eras tactics: the long ball, tiki-taka, the Makelele role, and today’s pressing game.

3.The Away Game: The Epic Search for Soccer’s Next Superstar - Sebastian Abbot

First off, Soccer .  Football. There you go, fixed.

Sebastian Abbot’s book follows Josep Colomer and tells the story of three main characters: Bernard Appiah, Diawandou Diagne, and Ibrahima Drame. The quest for the next star takes readers from West Africa through to Belgium and Spain via Qatar’s Aspire and Football Dreams Academy tracking their many successes and failures on their journey from boys, trainees, and eventually pros.

Again, technology and data have driven analysis lending the possibility of more efficient youth scouting as it becomes mainstream and increasingly sophistication - moving beyond advanced statistics like expected goals and assists to sports analytics companies like Prozone, using player tracking data to model game intelligence to understand the complex interactions between players and factors like personality, intelligence, and luck.

“A talent, if there is a way to describe it, is the player who understands the game, who understands instantly what the game is asking”

...and this book does a great job of explaining the lengths to which the world’s top scouts would go to find talent.