Decoding and demystifying football

Mark Thompson

Finding Messi-esque dribblers and making choices while clustering

Lionel Messi is to dribbling a football what Vincent van Gogh is to layering colour with oil paints: not simply a conventional expert, but with caresses of genius that mark the work as something different. Messi's ball-carrying and close control isn't simply effective, it's

Analytics is older than you think: (re)introducing Charles Reep

A blog by Sam Green from 2012 is often credited as kicking off the ‘expected goals era’ of football[1], but the first xG calculations are surprisingly older. As in, ‘almost as old as the Premier League’ older. The adage that there’s nothing new under the sun probably holds

Soccer at Sloan 2021: A summary

Greetings readers, it’s time for some analytics. Last month was the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. In pre-pandemic times, this was one of the big ones of the sports analytics conference circuit. If you’re into tennis, think of the Slams — it was one of those. (Also, if you’

London bus analytics conferences

Honestly. You wait all year for a football analytics conference/event and then two come along in the space of a week. On 17 March we had ‘StatsBomb Evolve’ and on 24 March we had the Stats Perform Pro Forum.[1] In all the weeks in all the months in

A fab early-February for football analytics aficionados

February 3rd & 4th 2021 were big days in the football analytics-sphere. It started off with a new piece on The Athletic about running stats. We don’t usually get running data in the public domain, but Sportlogiq — via the charts and texts of Tom Worville — had enough to keep

Where will 'analytics' go in 2021?

2020 has been the moment in time that best embodies the use of capitalisation to signify heavy intonation. It’s been, very much, A Year. It’s been a bit of A Year in the football analytics space, although for different reasons. Expected goals has succeeded in setting up shop

Why diving is bad

I must be old. The kids today, or the ones on my twitter feed, keep going on about this thing they love. It’s ‘diving’. I’d only just learnt why people like TikTok. I suspect that there’s some kickback against older generations in their appreciation of it. The