Follow the money - Financial Times on stats in football

I don't browse through Financial Times on a regular basis but maybe that has to change.
Simon Kuper has written a really interesting ARTICLE on the use of stats in football. Or rather the future of stats in football.

We are already on that path as we are fed possession percentages and stats of corners, shots on goal, meters covered etc. etc. every time we watch a game. Also, Opta Stat and "Chalkboards" has fuelled quite a few of my discussions. But that is all descriptive stats feeding us the numbers, leaving us to be ignorant although on a higher level.

Mike Forde, Chelsea's performance director, talks about that in the FT article - the problem of using the numbers as a basis for predictions and actions. He gives an interesting correlation between possession ad outcome of a game, but I won't spoil that for you. You really should read the article.
The future is in feeding the right numbers into the right algorithms and to make the right deductions from them.

This is still in the far future I guess, and many would add "I hope" as this way of looking at sports has always turned people off.
Most people are content in believing the experts or their own analytical capacity.
Fair enough, but I'm off to buy "Moneyball"!
.