Hello Football
Intro
This will be a blog on football data, visualizing it and generally geeking out about things we can do with it. I can hear it from across the internet: Data can be manipulated, football is too fluid to be interpreted through data, stats are meaningless and so on. I acknowledge your skepticism about football data. For instance who’s to stay that a player with stellar stats in the Bundesliga can translate those performances to England? Or that somoene with the most key passes in the premier league must be a good player and a transfer target for your club?
There are things we can never know for certain, but that doesn’t mean you can just dismiss data off-hand. A data revolution is quietly underway in football. Companies like statsbomb have revolutionized approaches around how data gets collected / analyzed. The location of every single touch, the angle of a pass, if the pass wasattempted under pressure, and a whole host of other metadata is collected by these companies. Researchers are using broadcast video and machine learning to infer these metrics automatically.
Still Unconvinced?
Here’s a profile on how AFC Brentford have risen through the leagues with liberal usage of football metrics.
And a NYTimes article on how Liverpool use data in transfer dealings.
So what are you waiting for? Dive right in and enjoy the ride.