In his influential book on the evolution of sport, historian Allen Guttmann highlights quantification as a key characteristic of the modern era. Though football has long been believed to be too fluid for statistical analysis, the recent proliferation of performance metrics has challenged traditional ways of understanding the game. This has been spurred in large part by the design of 'smart' technologies that offer insights into a side's positional tendencies or physical capacities. Hence, an endeavour that typically rested on the intellect of a manager has now shifted, in some sense, to the computer. This paper connects match analysis systems to the scholarly discourse on performance enhancement and two prominent issue areas related to doping: the ethos of sport and harm.

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In 1955, the US national soccer team landed at the Keflavik airport in Iceland for a government-sponsored three-match tour for the purposes of building goodwill. The exchange occurred as Icelandic public opinion mounted against the American military presence at Keflavik. With this tour, and a subsequent return tour of the Icelandic national team to the United States the following year, Washington used soccer to deal with the Keflavik situation specifically and the political realities of the region more broadly. The global game possessed a unique ability to cut across political lines, as evidenced in how the tours were mediated by Icelandic newspapers of varying political persuasion. It also explores how strategic mishaps—at the level of both federal and sport governance—were not enough to sully the goodwill-building potential of the venture on the whole.

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