For the first time in the Catholic Church’s 1,300 year history the Catholic church has a Jesuit as its head. Officially known as the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits are the most intellectual order of priests. You could argue that the church, finally, has caught on with football that for a few decades has accepted geeks, nerds and intellectuals, people at ease with ideas and numbers.

In the book Soccernomics, journalist Simon Kuper and academic Stefan Szymanski write about the revolution that was pushed through by computers and number crunchers. It’s not a coincidence that one of the first modern managers to adopt this was the professorial Arsene Wenger, holder of a Masters degree in Economics and a “keen mathematician”.

Long before management consultancies like OptaPro and Prozone had become fashionable, Wenger was using a computer program called Top Score which “gave marks for every act performed during a game”. Now OptaPro collects match data for most leagues in the world. They know how many kilometers each player ran in each match, the tackles he did, and the passes he completed, with which foot. In fact, as Sean Ingle of the Guardian wrote, no club will sign a player without using these statistics.