Swindon Town's quiet role in football's data revolution

RAF Wing Commander Charles Reep, stationed at RAF Yatesbury, was growing frustrated during the first half by Swindon’s slow tactics against Bristol Rovers and the wastefulness of their wingers. Whilst not in a position to do something about it himself, he began charting the number of attacks they had in the second half.

With that, Reep, someone with no football experience beyond a passion and playing in the army, he just began the first step of football’s data revolution. His actions that day at the Nigel Eady County Ground would, in a roundabout way, lead to Liverpool’s 2020 Premier League title win and also England’s failure to qualify for the 1994 World Cup.

Born in Cornwall in 1904, Reep was an avid fan of Plymouth Argyle in his youth, he became an RAF accountant, and through this came to watch a lecture from Arsenal captain Charlie Jones at RAF Henlow. Jones spoke about the team’s tactics under Herbert Chapman, himself a former Swindon player, and this struck a chord with Reep. On top of his W-M formation, the way he used his wingers, staying as high and wide as possible, this inspired the accountant.

Reep would head to Iraq in 1936 and implemented Chapman’s tactics with the army team, and they enjoyed great success, as did RAF Yatesbury when he returned to England with his strategy ‘loose balls in the goalmouth’, which would see wingers attack the far post and pick up easy tap-ins.

(Image: Andy Crook)

Then came that day at Swindon, leading him to use his accountant's brain to look at football differently and try to find the patterns. Using a miner’s helmet to be able to see at evening games, he would go on to record data on 2,500 games across 45 years, and he drew some interesting conclusions.

His findings were that: seven out of nine goals came from moves of three passes or fewer, moves starting with long passes from your own half made a goal twice as likely, more goals came from winning the ball back in the opposition’s third, and it takes on average nine shots to produce a goal.

From the Swindon game, he recorded 147 attacks during the second half, and averaging this out over a whole game, it meant that attacks had a 99.29 per cent failure rate, as only two goals a game are scored on average. He believed that, if you could use his other findings to boost this by 0.71 per cent to get three goals a game, you could practically guarantee promotion.

He was then moved to Bushy Park, and his success using this data with the army base team caught the attention of nearby Charlie Gibbons, who was manager of Brentford, after a scout told him: “There’s some crazy fellow who stands on the touchline with bits of paper taking notes. He produces a tactical plan which seems to work.”

After being brought in for their next game to Doncaster, Brentford’s fortunes took a big upturn. In the 29 matches before Reep was involved, they won nine games and scored 1.3 goals per game, in the 13 games after his arrival, they won nine and scored 2.9 goals per game.

Having moved to RAF Bridgnorth, he then helped Stan Cullis and his great Wolverhampton Wanderers team, even if he was still “regarded with uneasy suspicion by the directors”, and his methods would help them to a league title in 1953/54, before Reep then left for Sheffield Wednesday, and also ended up working at Coventry City, Torquay United, Plymouth, Stoke City, Chesterfield, and Cambridge United.

Even after his own work ended, many people had spotted the benefits of what he was advocating. Among them were AFC Wimbledon manager Dave Bassett and Cambridge’s John Beck, but also three very important figures in one of the worst moments in English football.

Reep’s methods, and the work of one of his analysts, saw Graham Taylor bring Watford all the way through the leagues, and also revive Aston Villa and eventually get the England job after Sir Bobby Robson, through the influence of another Reep acolyte Charles Hughes, the FA Director of Coaching.

(Image: Adver archive)

His struggling reign culminated in the failure to qualify for the 1994 World Cup, largely due to the fact that Norway were following the advice of Reep themselves, with Egil Olsen having travelled to Cornwall to talk with him about what he wanted. His play saw Jan Åge Fjørtoft and his teammates dump England out with a famous 2-0.

Fjørtoft explained to the It Was What It Was podcast about how much detail Olsen went into with his analysis of every game, inspired by Reep.

Reep has many critics of his methods, with most pointing out that his conclusions were drawn from “a basic misunderstanding of figures” as Jonathan Wilson put it in Inverting The Pyramid. It is argued that he never accounted for volume, as attacks with three or fewer passes were far more common, and therefore would always account for more goals, and if he had weighted it, he would have seen that longer passing chains actually have a better success rate.

He also does not account for the level at which a match is played, seemingly not understanding that what will work on a mud bath pitch in the Third Division may not be so suitable with elite players at the World Cup. Wilson points out that his own statistics demonstrate that long passing chains were far more common in World Cup matches.

However, many have also defended him. The BBC’s Rob Haywood wrote, “His innovative studies led to the basis of football data collection and analysis as we know it today, but the motivation behind his work was often incorrectly interpreted.

“Usually stereotyped as a long-ball loving zealot who ruined the game, his only goal was to uncover football's inner workings and ultimately establish the most efficient and attacking style of play, which he arguably achieved to a greater degree than anyone had before.”

But arguably, Reep’s biggest legacy is not his own theories, but his base idea of charting statistics and trying to find out more about what made teams successful. He died in 2002, the year data collection company Prozone was founded, and it was on his methods that Ian Graham helped to pioneer Liverpool’s data department, which helped them to end their 30-year wait for a league title. And all of it began at the Nigel Eady County Ground.