Decoding and demystifying football

Mark Thompson

Ralf Rangnick, and the value of practice

There are, arguably, only two lines you need to read from Michael Cox's recent column on Ralf Rangnick's time at Manchester United. "Ultimately, a huge red flag was that, in the decade before Manchester United appointed Rangnick, he had been appointed as a manager twice.

Research in Focus: DeepMind's fill-in-the-gaps tracking data

'Multiagent off‑screen behavior prediction in football', 19 co-authors from Google DeepMind and Liverpool FC (full list at end of piece) [Paper is available in full here] Why it's worth your time A Google DeepMind team getting involved in football analytics is definitely worth paying attention

Fear and fatigue in analytics modelling

Forgive me, for I have been watching Drive to Survive - the Netflix Formula One series - for the first time. And like a new convert, I'll be talking about it. The amount of footage and array of angles on offer make for an exciting show alone, never

Research in Focus

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When is data 'right'?

Sometimes data is different coming from one source to another, so when are the figures 'right'?

Research in Focus: Predicting attacking movement, inspired by Paco Seirul·lo

Francisco Peralta Alguacil, Javier Fernández, Pablo Piñones Arce, David Sumpter, 'Seeing in to the future: using self-propelled particle models to aid player decision-making in soccer' [Presented at the 2020 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference - link to the paper here] Why it's worth your time Firstly,

Pointing, shouting, scanning

There's a version of this newsletter that I could write in about three paragraphs. I'll try that, and it'll save you a lot of time. The tl;dr Pointing and shouting are skills - or 'skills' - that are often treated like