According to my findings and understanding, nothing in this world happens by accident or coincidence because everything that happens was triggered by a specific motion.
Back to your questions, statistics and history do work in the game of football, and it is just like doing a Technical analysis about the market through the use of previous activity to predict the market's next patterns and trends (which is technically valid since some occasions always replicate themselves). However, the football analysis through the use of statistics and history is done in a different way because the current potential and performance of the teams need to be considered.