The first data analyst in football: Charles Reep
Charles Reep was born in Cornwall on 22 September 1904. Charles was an accountant before he joined the Royal Air Force in 1928. His first analytical interest in football can be traced to a speech given by Arsenal’s captain Charles Jones who played as one of the forwards in Chapman’s WM formation, a tactical approach that fascinated him. He even started to implement this tactic into practice with a series of teams in RAF.
Reep working for English clubs
In August 1951, Reep made contact with Stan Cullis, manager of Wolverhampton Wanderers Football Club, for the purpose of producing weekly performance analysis as Wolves began to dominate English Football in the fifties. Cullis himself acknowledged the importance of Reep’s analysis that were evident in an unpublished letter written to the English manager in which Reep outlines a strategy to defeat the Hungarian titan Budapest Honvéd Football Club. Just a few days later Wolves went to be called “Champions of the world “ after overcoming the strong Hungarian side (3–2)on what is arguably considered as the most famous night in the European clubs history.
Reep spent three years as a full-time professional performance analysis for Sheffield Wednesday Football Club after retiring from RAF in 1955. During his first season, Reep has remarkable success as he helped the club get promoted to the first division. At the third season, he left the club after accusing the players to not committing to his long balls attacking system.
In 1980, Charles approached Watford’s manager Taylor Graham in order to provide match-by-match performance analysis of the team.
In 1962, Reep published two articles that showed how his notational system can bu used to asses the performance of a successful Tottenham Hotspur football club.
In 1968, him and Benjamin Bertrand published the first article of football to appear in a statistical journal. Where they pointed out that the number of passes completed in a passing movement could be modeled by the probability mass function of the negative binomial distribution, they also showed that the implementation of stochastic element in football should come as no weird staff to statisticians.
The Pioneer of the direct style of play
As he was obsessed with the development of an effective playing style based on all his match analysis. Charles Reep and Richard Pollard published an article “Measuring the effectiveness of playing styles at soccer” in which they declared that the effectiveness of different strategies during possession can be quantified and compared by the use of a quantitative variable, called the yield, that represents the probability of a goal being scored minus the probability of a goal being conceded.
After the 1974 World Cup, Charles published “League Championship Winning Soccer: The Anatomy of Soccer Under the Microscope”, in which he concluded that the ball should be moved forward as quick as possible in order to get a promising scoring position.We can clearly acknowledge that his conclusion favors the direct style of football over any other playing style.
His implications were widely misinterpreted and ridiculed as they were supposed to be killing the ‘Beautiful game’. Charles Reep died on 3 February 2002, his performance analysis and tactical conclusions are still present in English football and everyone who is operating in data analysis throughout the football industry owe much to Charles Reep.
An obstacle to English football ?
Personally, i think Charles stopped the progression of English teams both at international and club level when he described Germany’s dominance, short passing and fluidity play style as a pointless tactics even if they managed to trash England in a 3–1 victory. Favoring his direct style of play for the simple reason that goals were the only game variable fans were looking for.
But soon later Netherlands proved him wrong as they reached the 1974 World cup final implementing a system that became known as Total Football similar to that of Germany.
