Statistics, in themselves, aren't a problem. I make a living through causal inference. "Arteta has completed 97% of his passes" doesn't necessarily imply he's a world class passer. But if someone's saying "Arteta keeps passing to the opposition", then this statistic becomes relevant. You're dealing with human behaviour and so trying to base predictions on past data is very difficult.
But I mainly use it for putting things into context. Quite often we don't watch other teams are closely (or regularly), and so seeing how the stats of our boys stack up helps to us to see what's considered 'normal' for the league and where we are very different.
