I think the approach ought to be: Find a set of statistics about soccer Look at what they seem to tell you blind Extrapolate whether they in turn describe a given style The one major mind shift I would make here, is to not look at the probability of a team to beat another team, but instead look at the probability of a team to execute against a given game plan. Treat it like a chess match where a perfect game by white should always lead to victory. The statistic should show us which team is more likely to approach the perfect game. From there, maybe we could extrapolate the most likely winner