““Though most fans would probably deny it, a love of soccer is often intertwined with a love of numbers. There are the match results, the famous dates, and the special joy of sitting in a café with the newspaper on a Sunday morning "reading" the league table. Fantasy soccer leagues are, at bottom, numbers games. In this book we want to introduce new numbers and new ideas to soccer: numbers on suicides, on wage spending, on countries' populations, on passes and sprints, anything that helps to reveal new truths about the game.””
![“Some people believe that football[soccer] is a matter of life and death. I'm very dissappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much more important than that.” quote by Bill Shankly](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/21a/bill-shankly-8304_death_some-people-believe-that-football-soccer_3201877.jpg)
