FIFA's big, big plans (no, not the World Cups)
FIFA aren't just a tournament organiser anymore (although they'd like to do it more often). They're moving more into the tech and data world...
Mark Thompson
What's in the way of analytics solving football?
Sometimes newsletters are timeless, sometimes they age faster than the popularity of sea shanties. The intro to this one will make it a time capsule.
The nerds are ruining Wordle. Not just the tech sharks trying to monetise a game designed to be free, the coders algorithming up a guaranteed
Analytics in 2022: what now?
It's a new year in the Gregorian calendar, the year 2022 of the common era. What a wonderful collection of almost-binary digits that is.
2021 can be captured in this excellent blog post of links from Jan Van Haaren (some posts from this newsletter are featured there, so
Pick a sport, any sport, take ideas from it
We're into the festive period. Two years ago, I wrote the silliest things you could do with advanced football tech. If you weren't around back then I recommend it for a good mix of fun and insight into what kinds of data is around.
That'
Do we know football well enough to have good defensive stats?
Some problems
There's a fact I've always had trouble fully believing. The one about the ancient Greeks not having a word for the colour blue.
Ancient Greek texts had a curious absence of references to the colour. Sky was even referred to as 'wine-coloured'
So... everyone has pressure data now
They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Take the phone market: once upon a time you could get brick phones and flip phones and slide-y phones and Blackberrys. And now, almost certainly thanks to the success of the iPhone, every mobile on the market is a five-to-eight-inch
Release time, and expected expected goals
A question for you. Should the player on the ball in the screenshot below A) pass the ball backwards to the supporting player B) turn and play in the teammate on the right C) turn and shoot?
If you chose option A, reality was not your friend. The screenshot below