The diet of football coverage for fans is vast and varied. Propelled by the emergence of Fan Media over the last handful of years, everyone is looking for new and interesting ways to cover matches.

Podcasts like my own, YouTubers, bloggers and Twitter accounts cover every aspect of the game and fans just can’t get enough.

Fan Media – as it’s called, has lead the way in football coverage and especially in the introduction of “data”.

The emergence of Fan Media and their interest in the numbers to take a deeper look into the game has left traditional media struggling to catch up.

You want to write a match report about a game? You better have that xG in there.

“Stats” used to mean corners, shots and throw-ins. Now we want PPDA, xA and nPxG. Keep up Grandpa!

Your average “hack” might be out there watching 11 men kick a ball about a park but the data boys are back here seeing the numbers run across the screen, like Morpheus in The Matrix. But is it more fun?

This week Celtic signed two players in Joe Hart and James McCarthy. Two guys with good careers, great pedigree, pretty big names. The sort of players a couple of years ago fans would be buzzing to see in person but no sooner had the ink dried on the contracts, social media was aflame with “the data”.

READ MORE: This is the kind of thing Jamie is moaning about

Joe Hart has saved 5% shots less than his expected saves. He’s missed x% shots from distance. His completed passes put him in the lowest x% in Europe for short, medium and long-range passing. McCarthy has an impressive duels win rate against teams at home but away from home his…STOP, please. I beg you.

I must admit, I sort of miss the days when I was left to find out if a player was rotten on my own. The heady days of rushing to the Celtic shop to get ‘Mizuno’ on the back of my shirt because I thought we landed the next Nakamura. Or being hyped about the arrival of Juninho.

I got the initial buzz of the new signing, a few weeks to work him out and then about a month or so later I got the joy of writing him off as “useless” and we all got to participate in the collective moan. Superb.

I’m not being anti-intellectual here, I dabble in data. On my podcast we devote hours of content to it.

Data does give you a better insight into how the game is played, it helps us form opinions that we may have missed when caught up in the emotion of 90 minutes.

But is data increasingly my enjoyment of the game? Nah.

So maybe leave it a couple of days data boys, or preface your tweets and blogs with “spoiler warning”, because some of us don’t want to find out if the hero dies at the end before the start of the film.

P.S. Bruce Willis is a ghost.