The approval of the use of goal-line technology by FIFA’s International Football Association Board is a historic event in the evolution of the sport whose consequences may not be apparent over the near- or medium-term.First, the facts of the matter: the IFAB, which approves all changes to the Laws of the Game, unanimously approved the […]
Moneyball, the movie, premieres in Britain this weekend and there will be a private advance screening at Prozone tonight. As part of the advance preparation for the premiere here is an article from the Daily Mail on the impact that Opta and Prozone's data has had on how we understand the Premier League and assess […]
There is an informative interview on the Beyond the Pitch website with John Coulson and Duncan Alexander of Opta Sports about the collection of data in football and its growing use in the sport. Anto (the host), John, and Duncan talk for about 30 minutes on Opta's growth in the football industry, its data collection […]
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 […]
The current issue of IEEE Spectrum has an article on the current state of goal-line technology and the chances of a system being adopted by FIFA in the next two years. Nine companies will participate in FIFA's first round of testing in December, and a select group will be invited for a further round of […]
D. R. Brillinger, "A Potential Function Approach to the Flow of Play in Soccer", Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, 3(1): Article 3, 2007. [Link]How does one describe mathematically the run of play in a soccer match? In this paper, the author proposes a scalar potential to describe in time and space the sequence of […]
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 […]
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 […]
Analytics work in soccer has tended to focus on the performance of teams and players, but it is inevitable that attention would turn to match referees. Assessment of referee performance — especially concerning specific referees — is extremely important not only to the leagues and the teams, but also (let's admit this) to gambling interests. […]
