From the publisher:
For over twenty years, one man quietly shaped results up and down the English Football League - and almost nobody knew his name.
Neil Lanham was the analyst working behind the scenes: the man managers like Dave Bassett, Graham Taylor, Steve Coppell, Jack Charlton, John Docherty and John Beck turned to when promotion or survival was on the line. Between 1980 and 2000, his methods played a part in eight promotions and relegation escapes - a strike rate no player, manager or coach can touch.
Winning with the Invisible Laws of Chance finally lifts the lid on how he did it. Published here in full for the first time, this is the system Lanham built to exploit the "invisible laws of chance" that govern football results - decades before expected-goals models and data analysts became part of the modern game.
Packed with sharp, funny, warts-and-all stories from the dressing rooms and boardrooms of English football, this is more than a coaching manual; it's a rare, entertaining glimpse inside the sport from the man who helped to change how the game was played. Essential reading for anyone who wants to know what really wins football matches.
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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