Cambridge, MA - In an effort to further confuse and enrage fans everywhere, statistics analysts with Opta and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have released an updated spectrum of soccer statistics with the effort of really trying to still explain things that can't be explained.
"We needed to create statistics that show more individual and personalized items for players. These advanced statistics need to be able to be drilled down to their country, what they ate for breakfast and if their bowel movement was sufficient enough before they played. For example we need to explain the statistics that show statistics about why a player won't move his body 6 inches to the right or to the left while he has possession of the ball in a vertical sense with a horizontal offense when the team is down 1 goal, on the road." said lead researcher David Foulks.
"It's important for us to clarify that someone had an expected wait time of .4 nanoseconds when considering passing options to eastern european midfielders and a .5 wait time of when considering passing options to Italian designated players to further correlate a bunch of bullshit into a general way of talking that serves only to confuse everyone further from the fact that some players and coaches aren't very good at their job."
Opta representative James Teddy said the following, "We just gotta get paid. If we keep up with providing the fans and coaching staff relatively meaningless statistics to argue about we will have done our job. I mean soccer isn't like Baseball. You can't just determine the better team or who should win by looking at possession numbers or passing numbers or whether a team completed more passes while in the opposition half. However, that doesn't stop us from trying to shoehorn in a metric for every possible play and player that allows us to really imbue the self-entitled know-it-all with a sense of righteous indignation that more people don't know about the .XGATRGERSVCDERDUDTWWADFC (expected goals allowed to rear German Slovakian center defenders expecting rapid defense under duress this week with accepted defensive frailties coefficient) percentage statistic. These statistics are enlightening and will allow you to berate other people that don't know the statistic into a comatose shell by your pure, howling rage as they fail to see how this explains .... like TOTALLY EVERYTHING."
TNN will continue to cover the statistical space race as it happens.