On the morning of 1 April 2000, the Test Match Special commentator and Manchester United fan Dan Norcross woke up next to the West Ham fan who is now his wife. He nudged her awake to tell her about the vivid dream he had just had in which West Ham had taken the lead at Old Trafford, only for Denis Irwin to equalise before United won 7-1. He wasn’t clear on all the goalscorers but he knew Paul Scholes had got the fourth and Ole Gunnar Solksjær the seventh.

She punched him and he thought no more about it until around 4.45 that afternoon when he left an optician on the King’s Road and called a friend to ask the score. Sure enough, it was 7-1, West Ham had taken the lead and Irwin, Scholes and Solskjær had scored the requisite goals.

An odd coincidence, Norcross thought, but when, a couple of weeks later, he dreamed United would lose 3-2 at home to Real Madrid in the Champions League, he put £10 on – and won £660. Could it really be possible that he had absorbed so much football that his brain had processed it into an accurate narrative that pre-empted reality?

That anecdote came to mind this week when BT Sport launched its #Unscripted promotion which takes “some of the world’s foremost experts in both sports and artificial intelligence to produce a groundbreaking prophecy of the forthcoming season”. I was reminded also of the 1982 film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel Murder is Easy in which a computer scientist played by Bill Bixby enters the details of the case into a programme he has coded to give the name of the murderer (the 2008 TV version with Benedict Cumberbatch features no computers, crowbars Miss Marple into the plot and deviates even further from the original). As it turns out, the programmer knows this is nonsense and is merely trying to gauge the reaction of the heroine, played by Lesley-Anne Down, when her name flashes on the screen.

But this, of course, is not what data-based analysis is for. Its predictive element deals in probability not prophecy. It is not possessed of some oracular genius. (That said, it is an intriguing metaphysical question: what if you had all the data, not just ability and fitness, but every detail of players’ diet, relationships and mental state, the angle of blades of grass on the pitch, an assessment of how the breathing of fans affected air flow in the stadium … would the game’s course then be inevitable?)

BT knows that; this is a bit of fun for a marketing campaign. Bill Bixby’s computer scientist knows that and so does Dan Norcross. When an analytics company tells us before a World Cup that France have a 64% chance of winning, it may provoke a sense of unease at the unpicking of the rainbow but it shouldn’t. Character may be destiny, but data isn’t. And yet analysis still looms for many as some distant unknowable force, a deeper magic underpinning the universe.

Don Revie was the first manager in Britain really to take the study of the opposition seriously. When he became England manager the dossiers he prepared on opponents became notorious. His Leeds side were brilliant in their own right but, thanks to Revie’s homework, they were also extremely adept at preventing opponents from playing. Revie was, in a sense, Britain’s first scientific manager.

But science alone was not enough. Revie sought whatever assistance he could find. His roommate during his playing days at Sunderland, Stan Anderson, revealed how before going to sleep Revie would kneel by his bedside to pray, a strangely innocent image for somebody who later produced a team notorious for its cynicism. As a manager, Revie was, by his own admission, “the most superstitious man in the world”: he had “lucky” blue suits, insisted his wife wore her “lucky” suede coat to games and was terrified of ornamental elephants and birds.

That suggests the sort of insecurity that David Peace attributes to Brian Clough in The Damned United. The insistence on leaving as little as possible to chance, meanwhile, is redolent of his latest successor as Leeds manager, Marcelo Bielsa. Far more than the details he revealed about Derby County, what was striking about Bielsa’s confessional post-spygate press conference was his admission that the long hours he drives himself to work make little practical difference.

“These 20 people create a volume of information,” he said. “Absolutely not necessary. And it doesn’t define the path of the competition. So why do we do that? Because we feel guilty if we don’t work enough. Because it allows us not to have too much anxiety. And we think that by gathering information we feel we get closer to a win.”

Bielsa – who has his own tics, such as the habit he developed in Bilbao of crossing the technical area in 13 steps – is not unique in this. A point Ed Smith, the chairman of the England cricket selectors, has made repeatedly is the importance of working smart rather than necessarily working long. Anybody who has ever revised for an exam will know the feeling, forcing yourself to an allotted number of hours long after your exhausted brain has stopped absorbing information.

Yet Bielsa’s attitude does encapsulate the slightly odd position data holds in football. It is a very detailed record of past performance, no more, within which patterns can be discerned. As a predictive force, it probably is more accurate than the dreams of a cricket commentator. But perhaps what is most telling about sport and those involved in it is how a tool that by its nature is supposed to focus the mind on the factual becomes for many a psychological crutch.