If I were to just type that United are playing badly some United lifelong supporter is going to barge in whose father was a United fan, whose grandfather was a United fan, whose great grandfather was a United fan and tell you that the stats show that Ten Hag has scored more points than SAF or Klopp or Mourinho or whoever. When I see such people and there are millions of them worldwide and especially in the UK I automatically wonder if you have to be low IQ to be a football fan. You don’t need stats to tell you that United are terrible. If you have eyes you can see that they are scrapping through and not heading in the right direction. On the other hand if you can understand football you could have figured out that Chelsea on the other hand for all their defeats are headed in the right direction. They might be down in the points table but there is a plan that is slowly working at Chelsea. If you just give it time they will be in the reckoning sooner or later. How is something as basic as this not evident to people.
I would argue using both is probably the best: your head and stats.
Statistics are an invaluable tool in all aspects of life, don’t get me wrong. But they are never the whole picture
Statistics are like a bikini, they show a lot, but not everything.
Just like anything, context matters but you don’t get the whole picture without stats either. The socalled eye test is also flawed because people have biases and don’t look at games/players the same way.
Stats are a useful tool to challenge our own biases.