Hello listeners, it's producer Ben. Now, you know that from time to time we like to drop special bonus episodes to you. And with that in mind, here's a conversation between your friend and mine, Tom Williams, and the German football journalist Christoph Beerman.

Christoph's latest book is called Football Hackers, and it's all about how data and metrics have become commonplace in modern football.

Whether you're an ex-g newbie or an opta fanboy, as you're about to hear,

this is an amazingly detailed book full of insights and anecdotes

about how we can now fully assess players' performances,

analyse the role of luck and measure what really leads to a last-minute victory.

But enough from me, take it away, Tom Williams.

Christoph, thank you for descending into the Totally Football Show, Jazz Dungeon.

I'm one of the warmest and sunniest days of the year. And congratulations on your book.

I read this in about 24 hours, and I absolutely loved it.

It's full of fascinating detail. We find out about how football's data revolution began, where it is now

and where it might go in the future. Obvious first question, why did you want to write a book

about data analysis in football and why now? I've already been interested in this whole data

thing for, I would say, more than 10 years, maybe 12 years.

And I've already written a book in German.

It's called The Football Matrix that was published 10 years ago.

And I was thinking already then that there would be a data revolution going on.

But in fact, it wasn't.

As you remember around that, 15 years ago,

a lot of data was collected. Like we knew about shorts, we knew about passes, and so on and so on.

And so we already had a lot of information, but in the end, it turned out that it not really helped because, I mean,

to have data is always better than to not have data, but it was not really going deep enough.

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