Decoding and demystifying football

Applying analytics

Do VARs dream of electric football commentators?

It's not often that Martin Tyler and the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference are mentioned in the same breath, so savour this newsletter while it lasts. At this year's Sloan, two folks from Amazon and one from Fox Sports got together to publish a paper, titled

Creating new data by stealing from basketball

An origin tale A couple of weeks ago, I read an article on FiveThirtyEight. It was about a bit of basketball tracking kit, the Noahlytics Data Program, which gives you data on the angle of shots and where they go through the rim. (I only partly mention this because the

The Who, The What, and The Why of bringing advanced stats to the public

Get Goalside is returning to a regular schedule for the new season. A new newsletter will go out (at least) every other Thursday. early October sees a couple of big analytics events so there may be an extra one or two that month. Subscribe to Get Goalside As far as

Not all duels are created equal, nor are they easy to adjust

It is 1694. Edward Wilson dies in a duel he asked for over the favour of a woman. It is 1804. Aaron Burr's shot tears through Alexander Hamilton's liver and into 21st century pop culture. It is an unknown year, close to the present. Someone decides

A smarter approach to squad-building

Scenario: You arrive at a club as a director of football. The squad needs an overhaul. How do you plan? As a starting off point, it’s worth checking out this visualisation from the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch, showing transfers from three big clubs since 2015/16 and the minutes

Has analytics made Liverpool boring?

Before we start, a quick note that the paper for mine and my Twenty3 colleagues’ StatsBomb conference project on ‘How to break down a set defence’ is available here. There are a few things that we know for certain about Liverpool Football Club and their men’s first team. 1.

'Possession adjusting': An essay.

Hello everyone, and I hope you’ve had a great Easter weekend if you celebrate it (religiously or culturally (yum, chocolate)), or just a great week if you don’t. I hear it’s Passover too! In England, the weather’s nice and M&S pre-mixed Mojitos are flying