This book really wants you to think it is an airport bookstore book: vague handwaves about "digital transformation" and analytics and a mix of rigorous analysis and charming anecdotes that, in true Gladwellian fashion, are just convincing and propulsive enough to get you to finish the book and feel accomplished but not so convincing that you'll actually change your understanding of the world — or of football.
All of those things may be true! It certainly fits that archetype. But I really admired this book; it did not try to advance one grand unified theory of football and analytics, but instead tries to tell a couple unrelated stories about how analytics has changed specific firms and individuals, and largely leaves the reader to draw their own conclusions about what the gestalt really is. This strikes me as fundamentally honest in a way this genre of book rarely is: O'Hanlon is a storyteller first and a prognosticator second.
Three particularly salient points that have been festering in my mind since I finished the book a month ago:
It seems silly to say this out loud, but: one useful heuristic of how important a book is to you is the degree to which it makes you question your life choices. I finished this book and seriously spent two weeks thinking about how poorly-analyzed the field of software engineering is, and how much merit and value there was in my dropping everything to dedicate my life's work to software engineering analytics.
I'm probably not going to do that, but it's a thought that's been on my mind.