It’s hard to imagine a revolution in understanding a popular sport that could entirely circumvent that sport’s followers. But that, weirdly, is what the soccer clubs seem to be aiming at: a great, obscurantist leap forward that will enable them to win more matches without anyone outside their own offices knowing precisely why. You can’t really blame the clubs for this; it’s their job to win more matches, after all. But in the meantime, fans are left looking in on a world of hidden complexity, a world in which experts sift through data we can’t see to make decisions we can’t understand. This isn’t exactly the bright beam of American math the media keep anticipating. Instead, it’s as if the more you try to quantify soccer, the more mysterious it gets.