Soccer teams can run... but can't hide!

Flip a perfectly weighted coin and the odds are 50/50 that it's going to land on heads with the exact same odds for tails.

But flip the coin 10 times and it's almost never going to land 5 times on heads and 5 times on tails. But... and this is the "big" but"... flip the coin long enough and the results will catch up with the odds and eventually you'll find the coin does indeed land on heads 50% of the time.

That's just the nature of statistics.

You can run from statistics but you can't hide forever. Eventually they always catch up with you and bring the results based upon the statistical probability.

You see this in sports all the time.

Good teams out-play bad teams and still lose. Bad teams catch a lucky bounce and win games they never deserved to win.

But over the course of a long season, and more so over multiple seasons, the teams that "play the odds", that do things right repeatedly are the teams that achieve long term success while the weaker "lucky" teams eventually drop off and settle into the lower positions they deserve.

The ball won't bounce your way forever and it eventually comes down to the numbers.

This last weekend, our soccer team was playing a weaker team and was dominating on every measure of the game i.e. time of possession, passes completed versus passes lost, shots on goal, corner kick opportunities, etc.

By every measure, we should have been crushing this team.

But 1 good cross and a bad luck "own goal" later, all that hard work was negated and we found ourselves down 0-1 half way through the 2nd half.

Nobody could believe we were actually losing to a team we so thoroughly dominated all game.

Fortunately for us, and unfortunately for them, the relentless grind of "statistics" finally wore the other team down and by the end of the game, we came out on top with a 2-1 victory. The ball stopped hitting the cross bar and going a foot wide and started hitting the back of the net.

The final results deservedly matched the performance of the 2 teams.

In years past, it hasn't always worked out this way.

Athletically, our team was always a soul crushing beast that shut down other teams defensively based upon sheer talent and individual effort. Not allowing opposing teams to score was a specialty of the team.

But not playing "proper soccer" was also a hallmark of the team and the statistics showed that the other teams were clearly playing "better soccer" even with less talented players.

While our team would win games, we also lost many games we shouldn't have lost and never played to the level the talent pool should have allowed.

The problem was the "statistics".

Time of possession was horrible because the passing ratio was worse than horrible. And the passing ratio was horrible because the ball was played disproportionately in a narrow channel in the middle 1/3 of the field.

Even the most talented players cannot overcome this type of poor ball management... they couldn't outrun the statistics.

Slowly but surely, the team lost games to players far below their abilities, were relegated down 2 divisions and lost talented players tired of consistency losing games. All the time wondering why the "good luck" balls weren't bouncing in their favor but never looking at the statistics to understand the true root cause.

Sound like a team you know?

• Do you know your team's performance statistics?
• Do you even look at them?
• Do you have a methodology in your club or is everyone flying by the seat of their pants and hoping to win with sheer talent and determination?

SocrPro can change all of that and is revolutionizing the science of soccer in ways that bode well for the coaches and clubs using the system and is going to greatly increase the performance separation between those that do not.

It won't happen in the first 5 flips, maybe not even in the first 50... but give it enough time and the statistical beast will wear you down and then eat you for lunch.

You just need to decide if you're going to be the beast or the brisket.

Gary Jezorski

SorcPro - Does it All!