High-fat data for low(er)-fat costs
Trying to label defensive players in StatsBomb 360 frames which don't have individual player ID info...
Defensive data
Articles about (either wholly or partially) defensive data. This gets a tag by itself as it's such an under-understood area
Everything you need to know about defensive statistics (well, the basics)
Defensive stats don't get as much attention as some other numbers, but here's what you need to know about them.
What if we didn't care about passes?
"If God had wanted us to play football in the clouds, he'd have put grass up there." — Brian Clough
"If God had wanted us to collect passing data, he'd have put abacuses in the press box." — Mark Thompson
A lot of people
Research in Focus: Make your own goalkeeper data
'Learning From the Pros: Extracting Professional Goalkeeper Technique from Broadcast Footage', by Matthew Wear, Ryan Beal, Tim Matthews, Tim J. Norman, and Sarvapali D. Ramchurn
[Link to the paper is here]
Why it's worth your time
Goalkeeper analysis might be the most overlooked area of them
Research in Focus: Ghosting
Hoang M. Le, Peter Carr, Yisong Yue, Patrick Lucey, 'Data-driven Ghosting using Deep Imitation Learning'
[Presented at the 2017 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (link) and in a slightly different form at the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (link)]
Why it's worth your time
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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'
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