Charles Reep

Thorold Charles Reep (22 September 19043 February 2002) was an English analyst credited with creating the long ball game, which has characterised English football.

Biography Reep trained as an accountant after leaving Devonport High School in 1923. He won the first prize in an entrance competition for the newly formed Accountancy Division of the Royal Air Force in 1928. He achieved the rank of Wing Commander in the Royal Air Force and retired from the service in 1955.

Reep attended a series of lectures given by Arsenal right-half Charlie Jones in 1933 and became fascinated by manager Herbert Chapman's style of functional wingers and rapidly moving the ball forwards. Posted to Germany at the end of World War II, Reep returned to England in 1947 and was disappointed to find that with the exception of the W–M formation, none of Chapman's ideas had been adopted.

His analysis caught the attention of Brentford manager Jackie Gibbons, and from February 1951 until the end of the season, he was employed part-time as an adviser. With 14 games to play, the club was in danger of relegation but after his arrival their goals-to-games ratio improved from 1.5 to 3 and they took 20 out of a possible 28 points, easily avoiding relegation. He concluded that most goals were scored from fewer than three passes: therefore he proposed it was important to get the ball forward as soon as possible. The quicker the ball was played to goal with the fewest passes the more goals would be scored. His theory became known as the long ball. Reep worked with Brentford in the 1950–51 season. Reep's analyses published in the News Chronicle attracted Stan Cullis' interest at Wolverhampton Wanderers.

Reep and Bernard Benjamin published a statistical analysis of patterns of play in football from 1953 to 1967 in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society in 1968. Their paper analysed two sets of game data. The first set comprised 101 games (42 First Division matches in the 1957–1958 season; 12 First Division matches in the 1961–1962 season; 36 Miscellaneous matches in the 1965–1966 season; and 11 World Cup matches from the 1966 tournament). Data from the 1957–1958 season were derived from games involving Sheffield Wednesday. Data from the 1961–1962 season were derived from games involving Arsenal. The second set of data comprised an additional 477 games. Data from both sets of game data (578 games) were used in the paper to analyse passing move distributions. A subsequent paper re-analysed some of the passing data. Reep and Benjamin found that 5% of all moves consisted of four passes or more and only 1% of six passes or more. Reep concluded that possession football was therefore undesirable.

Criticism

The writer Jonathan Wilson has strongly criticised Reep's work. Wilson said that Reep's analysis shows that 91.5% of moves in the games he studied had three passes or fewer and that logically, this would mean that 91.5% of all goals should come from moves with three passes or fewer. However, Reep's analysis found that fewer than 80% of goals came from moves with three passes or fewer. arguing that "passing sequence data cannot be used to give information about the relative merits of direct and possession play". His paper provided an alternative reading of Reep's work and challenged accepted wisdom about Reep.