Is possession football everything...

Interesting stats that show how quickly teams move the ball back to front. As you can see two outliers Luton who were promoted, very direct and the small fishing village in the Mumbles who make sure everyone from the goalkeeper to the kit manager and every ball boy touch the ball to get it forward.

We sat in the middle.

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Pretty much proves that simply looking at the game in this way is too narrow and the one thing that really counts is quality.
Blackpool next to Luton and QPR next to Sheff Utd show that this analysis means very little.
Love the description of the unwashed from the west though

it depends, having possesion and passing it around like the jacks do to us, we end up pressing, and tiring ourselves out, or we just sit back and invite pressure. i think possession is important, but i do think its what you got up the end of the pitch, if you got someone who can put the ball away, then the possession stats look better. if you got someone who cannot finish, then the stats make for poor reading. City play with possession, and they are dominating, so its a case of drilling the players properly, and getting recuriment right more than anything else

You will get times when teams with less than 50% of the ball win leagues but it is fairly rare If you look at the premier league the top ten all had more than 50% of the ball Possession is one of the key factors to winning a league and getting promoted in the vast majority of cases
As pointed out it does depend on what you do with the ball as Swansea have shown in recent years But if you look at our league last year both the automatically promoted teams had more than 50% of the ball