Playing ball, with numbers
Playing ball, with numbers
What’s the fine line between seeing what happened on the football field and knowing what happened? As coaches, referees and statisticians will tell you, it’s technology. After a series of glaring gaffes by match officials at the ongoing World Cup, Fifa is under pressure to include technology in the decision-making process during a game—an idea that football’s governing body is determined to resist. But hundreds of computers, cameras and people combine every day to understand how matches are being played out at the Cup. They track distances, speeds, tackles, crosses, passes—everything that can be reduced to numbers and analysed is put through the technological sieve. Fifa puts up an amazing array of statistics every day on its website www.fifa.com/worldcup/statistics for the mathematically inclined.
Also See | Football Statistics
Here’s what the stats tell us about the best players at the World Cup after the round of 16—with the help of technology, of course.
Compiled by Rudraneil Sengupta.
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