The least convincing part is the section on penalty shootouts, which claims that England have a better chance of winning one than Germany. Let’s hope that’s not put to the test. England have been involved in five penalty shootouts in major competitions, and have only won once. Germany have played six and won five: indeed, only one German (Uli Hoeness in 1976) has ever missed the target.  But before we dismiss JP Morgan’s efforts, it’s worth pointing out how much this kind of number-crunching has taken hold of sport. One of the earliest attempts came in the early 1950s, when Charles Reep, a statistician with a background in accountancy, started recording attacking moves at games he attended. He noted that most goals were scored after only three passes were made, and developed the theory of the long-ball game: that the best way to score is to get the ball into the opposition’s final third by any means necessary. His subsequent employers included Graham Taylor’s Watford team in the 1980s, which went from the Fourth Division to the First in only five years.  Although Reep’s tactics fell out of favour, the development of computing power and video recording has encouraged more and more data analysis in all sports. In 2003, Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball caused uproar in the world of baseball, by describing how the impoverished Oakland As had achieved enormous success by ignoring conventional measures of a player’s worth (such as home runs scored or catches made) and buying unfancied players on the basis of obscure statistical metrics. Most clubs, in every sport, now employ teams of statisticians: at every international cricket match there appear to be as many men with laptops as there are players (Andy Flower, coach of England’s world Twenty20 champions, is a huge Moneyball fan).  There has, of course, been resistance to the phenomenon. As the journalist Simon Kuper and I point out in our book on the science of football, Why England Lose, the measurements in our chosen sport are harder to determine: it’s one thing to count how many sixes were hit, another to know whether all those passes actually contributed to producing a goal. But Arsene Wenger of Arsenal has been using similar techniques for years: when Dennis Bergkamp complained late in his career that he was being substituted too often, the manager was able to prove that his contribution in the last 20 minutes was negligible.  Penalty-taking, too, is more a science than an art, and academics have developed some very good systems for getting the strategy right. But sadly for England fans, even the best-prepared coaches come up against the laws of probability. On average, England win about two thirds of their games. But to win a World Cup, you need to win about six on the trot. The probability of that happening is about 10 per cent, so it’s never very likely that England will win. If Fabio Capello has been listening to right people, England might just beat the odds. But I, for one, wouldn’t bet on it.  Stefan Szymanski is Professor of Economics at Cass Business School and co-author, with Simon Kuper, of Why England Lose (HarperSport)
J P Morgan is predicting World Cup glory &ndash; but never forget the penalty    shoot-out, says Stefan Szymanski .