Listen to the full interview via the Off The Ball Football Show podcast.

"I won’t ever be going to a Top Four club because I’m not called Allardici, just Allardyce."

Sam Allardyce is very much aware of his perception among fans and the media.

Granted his teams play direct football and rely on set-pieces but he has also been an advocate for modern methods and the use of stats when managing a team.

Chris Anderson, author of The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Football is Wrong, was on Off The Ball tonight to chat about the real Sam Allardyce and how reliable stats are in the modern game.

"One of the interesting things about Sam Allardyce is that he is seen as a traditionalist. That's true in the sense of the kind of football his teams play. But he's not averse to modern methods. He has been an interesting fore-runner of modern management in English football," said Anderson.

"He was one of the first people to embrace Prozone which tracks players' movements on the pitch and he is very interested in sports science aspects of the game. But he is not given credit for being an innovator in that regard.

"The kind of football Sam Allardyce's teams have played is a function of who he is and how he was trained as a manager. They came out of the traditional English way of playing the game which is a long ball game. But you can do it by being clever about it and Allardyce and Tony Pulis have done it really successfully. If you don't have Barcelona players, you can't play like Barcelona."

While statistics have become more prominent, advances have tended to be seen in terms of player conditioning.

"We have seen a significant increase in the number of off-the-field staff at football clubs most notably in the last 3 - 5 years. A lot of that has centred around sport science and fitness. You have more staff and data in English football but it's had its biggest impact on the fitness side rather than the tactical side," explained Anderson.