Every football bet is a probability wearing a disguise.

The Stat Man is the book for anyone who has ever stared at a coupon and wondered whether 13/8 was actually worth having, or watched a bookmaker shorten a price seconds before kick-off and had no idea why. It strips away the mystique and shows you exactly how the numbers work, from both sides of the counter.

Built chapter by chapter from the ground up: how odds convert to probability, how bookmakers build their margin and where it hides, how to read a market well enough to know whether it is actually wrong, and how to build your own statistical model of a football match with the same tools professional analysts use. Poisson distributions, Dixon-Coles corrections, expected goals: calibrated properly rather than eyeballed.

The later chapters push into new territory: how large language models can be put to genuine, disciplined use extracting signal from team news and match reports, and how the sharpest operators in the game, from Tony Bloom's Starlizard to the syndicates behind the world's biggest horse racing gambles, actually stake and manage their edge once they have found it.