Decoding and demystifying football

Mark Thompson

Harry Kane, a symbol of English nationalism

A football pitch is a canvas on which teams can paint their glory; a football team is a canvas on which a manager can paint their likeness. The duality of Jose Mourinho was fully on show in Tottenham Hotspur’s 1-0 loss to Liverpool, his twin traits of 1) defending

Is analysis of one match supported by future results?

Jose Mourinho’s first game in charge of Tottenham Hotspur was, by all accounts, a success. For an hour, before collapsing with what Mourinho said was fatigue, they looked to be playing the Hammers off the park. Some facts: 1) Things haven’t quite continued in the trajectory that they

How good is 'good' and how 'good' is Messi?

It’s an unspoken necessity whenever you’re debating who the ‘greats’ of football are that you first need to define ‘great’. Not so much because the definition itself matters, but just so that everyone’s talking from the same starting point. I’ve been interested in that kind of

The silliest things you can do with advanced football tech

It’s Christmastime for those celebrating it [semantically, is it also Christmastime if you don’t?], and so I needed a newsletter topic that I could write well in advance. A recent conversation led to me having such a silly idea that I knew, just knew, that I needed to

Possession and anti-possession can be friends

I must be finding my subscription to The Athletic worth the (almost permanently 40% reduced) subscription fee because I’m using it yet again as the starting point for a newsletter. This time it’s Michael Cox’s piece on Newcastle vs Burnley, a game which everyone apart from me

Making predictions in an unpredictable age

It’s the UK General Election week and any comparison between the unpredictable nature of the British political landscape and the unpredictable nature of the Premier League table is probably best left unmade. And yet… At eight points, after 15 games, this is the joint shortest gap there's

Trust me. Just trust me.

I forgot to plug this in the past couple of weeks but my colleagues at Twenty3, Daniel Girela and David Perdomo Meza, were at the Barcelona Analytics Conference with a kickass poster featuring some of the cool work we/they are doing there. I’m taking the ‘standing on the