When Billy Wright and Ferenc Puskas led out their respective teams at Wembley on a foggy afternoon in November 1953, few could have predicted how the game would unfold. Hungary were the 1952 Olympic gold medallists and unbeaten in 24 matches dating back three and a half years. England had a proud record of never having lost to a continental side on home soil, stretching back to the first visitors Belgium in 1923.
The Hungarian team had been developed under Deputy Minister of Sport Gustav Sebes since 1948. From zero to Olympic champions in four years, Sebes put together one of Europe’s all-time great outfits. They travelled to London with names that sparked fear in defences around the world: Czibor, Kocsis, Hidegkuti, Bozsik, Puskas.
England were mesmerised by the Golden Team’s constant pressing, interchanging patterns and shooting power. A 6-3 defeat was quite the way to lose an unbeaten-at-home streak and Hungary’s own winning run continued – at least, to the 1954 World Cup final. Many viewed the Wembley clash as Hungary’s short passing game outplaying England’s long ball tactics. While it’s true that the Hungarian players were generally more comfortable on the ball, statistics from the match clearly show that the visitors used the long pass as well as anyone.
Hungarian football had been embracing the use of data for over thirty years. Sebes kept detailed notebooks of formations and tactics while the state government held files of match and training information designed to help the team reach peak performance. Beginning in 1922, several major advances with football data were made. The Hungarian FA had only formed 21 years earlier and the national team had played at the 1912 Olympics. Even though the Great War caused the association great damage – they were barred from attending the 1920 Games – football grew in popularity. A dedicated sports newspaper Nemzeti Sport was also launched. It was published three times a week, then becoming a daily as circulation quickly grew. Many sports were covered, but football was the main focus.
In November 1922 Nemzeti published its first ‘Match Graph’ to illustrate the game between Hungary and Austria in Budapest. It was one of the most played international fixtures of the time; the countries’ ninth meeting in three years. On this occasion the visitors triumphed 2-1. At first glance, the graph resembled the read-out of a heart monitor with peaks and troughs travelling across the page, left to right.
What it actually showed was the movement of the ball up and down the pitch in timed intervals. When the lines reached an extreme at the top or bottom of the page it denoted an attempt at goal while a small icon indicated when goals were scored. The charts were prepared for each half and instantly conveyed the balance of play, the pressure leading up to each chance and the totals of attempts made.Used mainly for matches involving the national team, the popularity of these graphics soon elevated them to front page status, an intriguing addition to the written reports, especially in lieu of any match photos at the time.
Still one of the most appealing aspects of this work a century later is the fact the chart flows just as the game itself did. Rather than a mere snapshot, this allowed the viewer to see a whole match in a single image and follow the play with a finger tracing the ebbs and flows.
In 1925, the paper proudly announced that the use of such diagrams had spread to Sweden, Italy and beyond: “When we created the graph, we knew that what we did, had sport-historical importance.”
In the 1930s a second innovation sprang from the pages of Nemzeti Sport – the ‘Target Table.’ At a time when the counting of shots was being experimented with, the paper was able to expand on the simple concept and show where attempts ended up. With an illustration of goalposts at the centre, the accuracy of shots were scattered in and around the target area. Furthermore the ‘tokens’ to denote each attempt were shaded in ways to show goals, saves, and even the strength of the shot – classified as ‘power’, ‘semi-weak’ and ‘really weak’.
Despite paper shortages, Nemzeti Sport continued publication after the outbreak of World War II even when it was limited to copies of just six pages. It also managed to develop more methods of data collecting. In 1942, it unveiled a ‘New Target Table’. Adding a 2-D representation of the penalty area, it now showed where a shot was taken from, its path to goal and the point it reached the goal. This was nothing less than an xG plot seventy years before such a thing had been ‘invented.’
The use of such data, tactical innovations and training techniques made Hungary a world power in the 1950s but, despite a celebrated history epitomised in the humbling of England at Wembley, subsequent political upheaval has meant, to date, the ‘Mighty Magyars’ have never reached those heights again.
The First Football Analyst
The advent of the Football League in England in 1888 first gave rise to the keeping of records of team lists, scorers, and attendance figures (often estimated), though the older British Home Championships had been accompanied by league tables. In the UK, little progress was made with respect to gathering football data, beyond these basics, for half a century.
Enter David Francis Barrett, a writer for the St. Louis Republic, who had decided to notate football games to see what he could glean from the numbers. It was 1910 and while the American Football (soccer) Association was 26 years old, the sport was still only played in small regional leagues based around major cities such as New York, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and St. Louis.
Each year, these leagues published reviews in Spalding’s Official Soccer Foot Ball Guide, and Barrett submitted several pages demonstrating how he was ahead of his time. Not only did he record accurate and detailed match data but he broke it down by player and position giving a fascinating insight into football over 100 years ago.
“All that the average soccer fan pays an attention to in the game is the number of goals scored and who scores them,” he wrote. “He pays no attention whatsoever to the other fine points of the game.” Barrett felt that by collecting match data he could use it to educate the ‘average soccer fan’. “I decided to keep accurate record of every goal, foul, off-side play and every throw in, corner kick and goal kick during each game.”
Many things become apparent from these ancient scribblings, most startlingly that perhaps the game hasn’t advanced as much as we would like to believe. The rigid 2-3-5 formations of the semi-pro St. Louis leagues in 1910 produced 2.2 goals-per-game (compared to 2.6 in the Premier League in 2020), 48.0 throw-ins (compared to 45.0), 9.7 corners (compared to 10.9 per match today) giving rise to the question, has the game really changed that much at all?
From Póg Mo Goal Issue 8. Rob Haywood is the author of the book Many Impossible Things: The Ingenious Evolution of Football Data. With thanks to Attila Batorfy.
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www.manyimpossiblethings.com