Synopsis
The hidden laws of chance that decide who wins in football – and how one man learned to exploit them.
Football is a game of skill and chance. Skill belongs to the individual, but chance controls the outcome – because football, at its core, is a team game.
Neil Lanham saw what no one else did. Working as a performance analyst in the English Football League, he uncovered the invisible laws of chance that govern team performance, then built a method to exploit them. Between 1980 and 2000, his analysis was instrumental in eight promotions and relegation escapes – a record no coach or player can match.
His method was simple: strip away myth and opinion, factually analyse every touch of the ball in every possession across thousands of matches and let the patterns speak for themselves. From the World Cup to the lower leagues, the same laws held. No magic formula – just logic applied to data before the data age had even begun.
Now, for the first time, Neil’s methods and the story behind them are published in full. Winning with the Invisible Laws of Chance reveals what those laws are, why they still matter in modern football analytics and how they can be applied at every level of the game.
Packed with sharp, funny anecdotes about figures including Dave Bassett, Graham Taylor, Steve Coppell, Jack Charlton, John Docherty and John Beck, this book is as entertaining as it is revelatory. An essential guide for anyone wanting an insight into match-winning football.
About the Author
Neil Lanham was born in 1938 and has lived all his life in Suffolk. After the death of his father at 5 years old, he went into a shell but became extremely observant of the things around him. Following a car accident, he was told that he should not play football again and realised that there was much happening that went unobserved on the football field, so he learned a method of taking every possession down in shorthand and eventually put over 4,000 games onto a computer. From this, Neil recorded that there are laws of chance that apply equally to all teams at every level however they play. They are the same today and this was used to help obtain back-to-back promotions by Wimbledon, Cambridge United, Sheffield United and success at other football clubs. Neil has read academic papers on the fit of chance in football at Eindhoven and Lisbon and on the oral tradition in Song and Story at Cardiff, Swansea, Aberdeen and Newcastle Universities as well as writing books on his life as an auctioneer.
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