In March 1950, an RAF wing commander and trained accountant named Charles Reep turned his eye for numbers to soccer. Reep, who had become interested in the sport in the 1930s and was fascinated by Herbert Chapman's pioneering Arsenal team, had returned from the Second World War to find that the tactical revolution he'd witnessed before had stalled. This story originally appeared on WIRED UK. Finally, at half-time during a drab Division Three game between Swindon Town and Bristol City, during which he watched countless attacks amount to nothing, Reep's patience ran out. He grabbed a notebook and a pencil and began furiously jotting down what happened on the pitch: He started counting the number of passes and shots in one of the first systematic attempts to use data to analyze soccer.