Rory Smith – författare

Shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award 2022 Football has always measured success by what you win, but only in the last twenty years have clubs started to think about how you win. Data has now suffused almost every aspect of how football is played, coached, scouted and consumed. But it’s not the algorithms or new metrics that have made this change, it’s the people behind them.This is the story of modern football’s great data revolution and the group of curious, entrepreneurial personalities who zealously believed in its potential to transform the game. Central to this cast is Chris Anderson, an academic with no experience in football, who saw data as an opportunity to fundamentally change a sport that did not think it could be changed. His aim: to infiltrate the strange, insular world of professional football by establishing a club whose entire DNA could be built around data.Expected Goals charts his remarkable journey into the heart of the modern game and reveals how clubs across the world, from Liverpool to Leipzig and Brentford to Bayern Munich, began to see how data could help them unearth new players, define radical tactics and plot their path to glory.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR.SUNDAY TIMES SPORT BOOK OF THE YEAR.From its late-Victorian flowering in the mill towns of the northwest of England, football spread around the world with great speed. It was helped on its way by a series of missionaries who showed the rest of the planet the simple joys of the game. Even now, in many countries, the colloquial word for a football manager is not 'coach' or 'boss' but 'mister', as that is how the early teachers were known, because they had come from the home of the sport to help it develop in new territories.      In Rory Smith's stunning new book Mister, he looks at the stories of these pioneers of the game, men who left this country to take football across the globe. Sometimes, they had been spurned in their own land, as coaching was often frowned upon in England in those days, when players were starved of the ball during the week to make them hungry for it on matchday. So it was that the inspirations behind the 'Mighty Magyars' of the 1950s, the Dutch of the 1970s or top clubs such as Barcelona came from these shores.      England, without realising it, fired the very revolution that would remove its crown, changing football's history, thanks to a handful of men who sowed the seeds of the inversion of football's natural order. This is the story of the men who taught the world to play and shaped its destiny. This is the story of the Misters.

THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERThis is a love letter to football shirts and fan culture, told through the world’s most sought-after kits. From greatest hits to modern classics, this book includes all of the most iconic shirts from the archive of Classic Football Shirts.Featuring hundreds of match-worn shirts from clubs around the world, from the early career of Ronaldo to the heights of Beckham at Manchester United, alongside shirts from iconic football moments, including Maradona’s infamous hand-of-God match, Pelé and Zidane’s world cup victories, the style and flair of Italia ’90 and Messi’s record-breaking season at Barcelona.In essays by sports journalist Rory Smith, Classic Football Shirts delves into the identity, history and fashion of football shirts, illustrated with hundreds of shirts from national teams, beloved clubs, World Cups, Champions League finals and footballing legends.Painstakingly researched and collected by the team at Classic Football Shirts over twenty years, in this book they have unlocked their vault, telling the story of football through its most iconic kits.