Maths Careers: The mathematics of football
This collection contains a range of teaching materials to support the Maths Careers article 'The mathematics of football' by Hazel Lewis.
The resource collection includes a link to the full article as well as resources to explore mathematical concepts in football.
The mathematics of football
You might think football and mathematics have nothing in common. Prepare to be surprised by the five links between mathematics and the beautiful game highlighted in this Maths Careers article.
Crystal Shapes 1
This activity from Cre8ate maths explores the rotational symmetry of crystals. Students work with plain and coloured nets of cubes may use trial and improvement methods to find different possible rotations of symmetry, before exploring ways to be systematic in their investigation.
Students investigate then explores Euler’s formula, which is the relationship between the number of vertices, edges and faces for each crystal, before testing their conjecture on other solids.
Numberphile: How many panels on a soccer ball?
This eight-minute video applies the Euler Characteristic to a soccer football.
Football
This in-depth package is based around video clips of the Swanscombe Tigers youth football team training and preparing for a game.
The three activities ask students to decide which positions on the field the different players might be best suited to based on the players’ performances; consider the key factors involved in ensuring a successful pass or interception and explore hypotheses relating to areas of the goal that are ‘better’ to aim at to score a goal.
Graph Shots
This interactive game from the Association for Science Education (ASE) tackles the interpretation of distance/time graphs in the context of a football match.
Help students' develop an understanding of distance/time graphs by comparing graphs with written accounts and video footage of a football match, demonstrating a different key point at each level of the game.
Maths in sport - soccer booklets
These three Eigen publications booklets provide a range of data handling activities based on football. The booklets largely focus on calculation of means and the use of tallies, frequency tables and bar graphs. However, they also encourage students to look at rather larger amounts of data than they would meet in many texts and to comment on, and make sense of, what they observe.
Numberphile: Anatomy of a Goal
This Numberphile video explores how football matches are described using statistics.
Numberphile: Statistics on Match Day
A video looking at the work done by the company Opta who supply TV stations with football statistics for their broadcasts.
Maths career profiles
This booklet has been provided by More Maths Grads and it is designed to highlight the versatility of mathematics and to show that a degree in the mathematical sciences can take students anywhere; it can open doors, from developing software technologies to being a professional rugby league player. Working on exciting and innovative projects, mathematicians are highly valued and an essential element of any successful team.
