Football Hackers: The Science and Art of a Data Revolution

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He’s all about finding a way into the box and creating superiority, with a position game. He would think for hours on end, sometimes throughout the night, discussing it with the analysis team. He would watch games himself as well, to come up with ideas for a strategy. Perhaps some work was done twice that way but it was necessary.’ Biermann is open minded enough not to foist opinions on what he presenting and let us decide if things make sense or are applicable to the game. It would seem at this point in time there isn’t a clear Moneyball stat that’ll let teams play the game in a more efficient way overall, but there are likelihoods attached with every action which will correspond with the xG and other similar stats. The biggest thing appears to be with transfers completed utilising data with Brighton an early adopter of the strategy exemplified by their signing of Pascal Gross in the book. LastRow — Similar to SkillCorner, but for a handful of goals scored by LiverPool. Good dataset for coming to terms with creating videos, working with tools like pitch control, or calculating simple metrics like velocity.

Football Analytics | by D. Lamb | Medium My 2020 Year in Football Analytics | by D. Lamb | Medium

It would be unthinkable today for the head coach of the Bundesliga champions to be scratching around for video footage of opponents ahead of a crucial Uefa Champions League tie. The head coach of Dortmund’s supremely successful women’s handball side of the era had instructed the team’s analyst Markus Schultz and a team of sports science students, to edit video material that had been painstakingly acquired from abroad. Henke now approached them for help doing the same with foreign opponents of the men’s football team. Secondly they now have material to show the players exactly what they want them to see and explain their methods. Gone are the days when "tactical training" required tedious sit-throughs of whole games. With the help of video analysts this has now been cut significantly to only those moments that matter. As Biermann explains, Niemeyer’s recollections are part of the myth that has developed around one of the sport’s most respected thinkers, and Niemeyer goes on to says that Guardiola, in his view, has changed the job description of a football manager in the process. Es un libro que explica cómo el desarrollo del análisis de datos se ha convertido en una área que día a día genera nuevos conocimientos en el campo del fútbol.A lo largo del libro el autor se entrevista con varios de los protagonistas de esta revolución, llevándonos alternadamente por famosos estadios, canchas de clubs de segunda división y salas de conferencias de startups en Alemania, Inglaterra y los EEUU para presentarnos a una serie de iluminados personajes. Asi conocemos las historias de innovadores DTs y outsiders --entre académicos advenedizos, blogueros aficionados y exiliados de otros deportes más matematizados como el basket y la Fórmula 1-- dispuestos a acabar con los sesgos cognitivos que dominan las discusiones, y no pocas veces, decisiones futbolísticas.

Summer books of 2019: Sports | Financial Times Summer books of 2019: Sports | Financial Times

Then main takeaway for me was that most clubs are moving beyond the initial stage of just understanding what's happening on the pitch and now using data science to predict what will happen next.Prior to the modern era of ubiquitous digital footage of thousands of games and the availability of cheap computing power coming up with better football statistics has not been possible. Charles Reep's simplistic counting of passes being the best known failed example. But today with annotations available for thousands of games a year being done more sophisticated analysis has become possible. In my view, use of such data is an aid to judgement and not a replacement for it. And interestingly that's how Borussia Dortmund used it under Klopp. Como lección de sus observaciones y entrevistas en el campo, Biermann concluye que la data, ya sea cruda o cocida mediante estadísticos que condensan en cifras objetivas diversos aspectos del juego, no es suficiente para tomar decisiones correctas ni para juzgar con justicia a un equipo o jugador individual. Se necesita siempre del contexto para su correcta interpretacion (p. 166) y, mas que números mágicos que desentrañen el secreto final del éxito, la data debe ser utilizada como un soporte de pequeñas mejoras sostenidas en el tiempo. FC Bayerns Head of Department of Match Analysis (8 people) Michael Niemeyer says: "For me a good coach is also a good analyst" Too many comparisons made between football and baseball due to the success of the popular book called Moneyball

Football Lines between hero and villain are blurred in new Football

Armed with OptaJoe archives and tonnes of data, he explains why Liverpool have had a lengthy trophy drought and reveals whether Messi is the greatest footballer of all time.

On the surface it’s this clear-cut David-and-Goliath story where a complete outsider gets some very resourceful people in trouble through quite a simple method,” says Borchert Holm. “It’s unbelievable how much Rui Pinto has revealed about the football business. But when I read about some of the other things that he had done, that’s when I thought: ‘This really adds another dimension.’ It becomes less clear who is the hero and who is the villain of the story.”

Football Leaks trial starts in Portugal - BBC News Rui Pinto Football Leaks trial starts in Portugal - BBC News

One of the main flaws was in David Sumpter’s use of behaviours in the natural world amongst organisms in comparison to players on a football field. For example, how animals or insects might congregate together and how this could be read across to the soccer pitch. Football is no longer a game of mere talent and strategy but has morphed into a sophisticated interplay of data analytics and human intuition. Our goal is to showcase and discuss interesting links regarding the use of data and analytics in sports. Think of us like /r/sabermetrics, but not specific to baseball.

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The Nowhere Men: The Unknown Story of Football’s True Talent Spotters by Michael Calvin. I think this should be required reading for anyone interested in Football Analytics. It was written during a similar time period as the Numbers Game (number 5), but you get to see the moneyball revolution from the perspective of traditional scouting methods. It also gives a lot of information on what scouts look for and how they write their reports. More importantly I think it humanizes a lot of things: the cost of the move to digital scouting techniques, and the human elements of players and coaches. This was a lovely read. The author provides a nice and concise overview of the development of new metrics to better understand football. The author brings with him a deep love of the game, a curiosity and drive to understand and explain and a human touch allowing him to really flesh out the many interesting figures he meets. Chris Anderson – a former goalkeeper who is now a football statistics guru – and David Sally – a former baseball pitcher turned behavioural economist – debunk the commonly misplaced myths about the game in this great book called The Numbers Game. The book will definititely help you look at the game more objectively, helping you to factor out the role of chance. More importantly, it helps develop a more tolerant attitude towards singular events, or a series of them which can sometimes span through the better part of a season!