An Open and Closed (skill) case – why James Milner is the player of the future

Preamble This article is following on from my promise a few months ago that I'd write a few psychology slanted articles and focuses on just how weird set pieces are when you think about it. The recent world cup, for example, was dominated by set-piece goals, with 42% of all goals scored coming from set … Continue reading An Open and Closed (skill) case – why James Milner is the player of the future →

Stats don’t know what it’s like – behind Bob Bradley’s eyes

At the moment I'm finishing up my notice period working in academia and moving into full-time sports analytics as a data scientist so soon my public analytics work will be limited. I've decided that my background in Psychology and Neuroscience could be used to look at how human perception feeds into traditional sports thinking and … Continue reading Stats don’t know what it’s like – behind Bob Bradley’s eyes →

Clustering Premier League Team Styles- Attack, Defence and getting the whole picture

Preamble Back in January, I wrote a StatsBomb article titled Measuring Changes in Attacking Style across the season for Premier League Teams. This built on some earlier work I'd done showing that clustering can be used to identify teams within similar attacking styles just from match averaged stats and some similar work looking at Championship attacking … Continue reading Clustering Premier League Team Styles- Attack, Defence and getting the whole picture →

How many Attacking styles are there in the EFL Championship? Tactical scouting through attacking stats with video examples

Recently we wrote a Statsbomb article showing that it's possible to use cluster analysis to figure out which Premier League teams have similar attacking styles and how they change over time. Since then a few people have mentioned that it would be interesting to apply this to the Championship, it's such a competitive league with lots of … Continue reading How many Attacking styles are there in the EFL Championship? Tactical scouting through attacking stats with video examples →

Clustering Styles of Premier League Teams Attacking Play

Preamble Recently I've been wondering about how different Premier League teams attacking styles relate to each other and what the best method to find relationships between them is. Cluster analysis is one way to group data points based few characteristics (e.g. passes attempted, shots attempted, etc.) that describe each data point. Cluster analysis attempts to … Continue reading Clustering Styles of Premier League Teams Attacking Play →

Direct applications of team shape tracking for football coaches and analysts

A while back we outlined how it is possible to flexibly measure the quality of team shape throughout a 90-minute football match on the fly, using only the x and y coordinate time series for each player. It was quite a lot to take in, but if you missed it I'd suggest taking a look … Continue reading Direct applications of team shape tracking for football coaches and analysts →

Team Shape from Player Tracking Data -Tracking What Happened and When

  Recently we attended a hackathon at FC Norsjaelland where we were tasked with gaining insight for three football matches using data in which every action was recorded and tagged. In addition we were provided raw player and ball tracking data. This came in the form of a stream of player and ball positions (in … Continue reading Team Shape from Player Tracking Data -Tracking What Happened and When →