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We’re in a golden age of rugby. The 2025 men’s Six Nations saw the most tries in the championship’s history, and the recent women’s World Cup was the best ever. The boon has been attributed to investment and professionalisation, but one factor remains under-appreciated: data.
Data, which has a short history in rugby compared with US sports or cricket, is prompting a revolution. Players now wear bio trackers that allow coaches to monitor performance, while smart mouthguards send injury alerts to doctors, and broadcasters use algorithms to predict goal kickers’ success. Data, once regarded as a luxury, is now present in almost every facet of the sport.
Attacking the Space, by the rugby analyst Sam Larner, is part of a trend aiming to satisfy sports fans’ demand for more rigorous, statistical punditry. It’s also the first book from a major publishing house to explore data in rugby.
It is essential reading for commentators — who should downplay the importance of possession and stop fretting about kicking
Larner has two central insights. The first is utterly counterintuitive: that if you want to score more points, you need to attack less. “This fallacy,” Larner explains, “stems from the idea that possession of the ball is like buying raffle tickets: the more you have the greater your chances of winning.”
In fact, as Larner argues, having the ball is a risk. At the elite level, where defence dominates attack, teams can only play an average of 5.4 phases before losing possession. When that possession is lost, the opponents’ counterattack can expose a team before the defence is organised.
To attack less, a team needs to kick more from open play. Kicking is generally unpopular (usually because it is considered less interesting than running with the ball) but, as Larner persuasively describes, kicking is what facilitates thrilling rugby. It is kicking — or even the threat of kicking — that forces defenders into the backfield, leaving more space out wide for the attacking team to exploit.
The data backs this up. Forty-three per cent of tries come from the first phase (when a team receives the ball from a set piece, a turnover or a kick, and before the ball is briefly stationary after a tackle) and 64 per cent come within the first three phases. As Larner writes, “Whether you like rugby for its romantic free-flowing approach or its chess-like complexity, kicking makes the sport better.”
It also makes a team more likely to win. About 75 per cent of matches are won by the team with the most kick metres (the sum of the distance of all kicks). Larner suggests one of rugby’s next innovations will be that teams pick two adept kickers (one left-footed and one right) to mitigate acute angles and maximise kick metres.
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Larner’s second key insight evokes the approach to baseball described in Michael Lewis’s Moneyball (2003), where an unsung metric — how often batters reach base — can predict the match result. In rugby, says Larner, the “killer stat” is the difference between the number of times Team A enters Team B’s 22-metre line, and the number of times Team B enters Team A’s. “This statistic,” he explains, “has the closest correlation to team success than any other stat outside of points scored and conceded.”
Attacking the Space is informally written; and although the prose is sometimes garrulous, it is a book for those who want to understand what really happens on the pitch. Ahead of the Six Nations, it is also essential reading for commentators — who should downplay the importance of possession and stop fretting about kicking. Larner’s book reveals rugby’s secrets, and distils why the sport has never been better.
Attacking the Space: Inside Rugby’s Tactical and Data Revolution by Sam Larner Seven Dials/Orion £25, 384 pages
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