I've blogged on a couple of occasions about the issue of in-match data in soccer that is collected by sports data companies and considered proprietary information. It presents a complication in soccer analytics because of the traditional lack of statistics surrounding the game. American sports have more historical team and player data of individual matches than […]
This is the second part of my week-long presentation of the Football Match Result Database project. Here are the other articles:Part I: Selected screenshotsPart III: Database objective, design, and featuresPart IV: Code releasePart V: Roadmap and call for contributorsI've looked back at my previous posts on the subject and I realize that I have been […]
There was a glowing report in yesterday's Jamaica Observer about the National Premier League's agreement with a sports management company in the USA and the UK to collect player data for an international soccer repository. The site is called SoccerAssociation.com and is operated from the United Kingdom. The article goes on to say that the […]
Major League Soccer is beta-testing its new website which is to be enhanced with in-match data from Opta Sports. There are more data presented than before, but consider me decidedly underwhelmed by the total package. First of all, there are no data that indicate where, specifically, on the field a match event occurred. It is true […]
On the heels of the Opta announcement is another opportunity for soccer analytics people that I found out about at the SSAC today. There is a startup called StatDNA that has devoted a lot of time to collect in-match data and develop statistical measurements that generate information from those data. They are organizing a contest […]
Several weeks ago I reported that Opta Sports were soliciting jobs for analysts who would collect in-match data for MLS league matches. (They're still looking, by the way.) Today Opta gave more details about the extent of their partnership agreement with the league, and if the news is accurate then league fans will have access […]
Staying with Sarah's site for another post, as she has posted her thoughts on the problem of data quality in football. All this is motivated by the controversial goal scored by David Villa of Barcelona, and the different offside pictures of the same event published by four Spanish media outlets. Her post also dovetails with […]
It was inevitable that Opta would seek to establish themselves in the American soccer market as match data providers. There is an ad at the Major League Soccer website seeking live match analysts for the upcoming season. It's a part-time job and applicants must live within commuting distance of Opta's NYC offices.Here's a video that […]
And now it's time to talk about the error-ridden Wikipedia page for the Championship. I use the results matrix to develop league tables from which I develop a Pythagorean table. I match up the league table against the table on the Wikipedia site to verify that all of the data line up correctly (sort of […]
I've been collecting results data from various leagues in preparation for my NCSSORS presentation, and despite the fact that not all leagues follow a double round-robin, result data are organized in a fairly standard way. That is, except for Major League Soccer.First of all, in previous seasons there has not been a balanced double round-robin […]
