Blog roll: Some January reading
Links as far as the eye can see
Just some things I’ve been reading lately…
‘Estimating Shooting Performance Unlikeliness’ - Tony ElHabr
From several months ago, but couldn’t remember reading it at the time. A neat, data science-y look at gauging how likely a player’s over/under-performance compared to xG was, based on their previous shooting data.
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‘The Arsenal Corner Playbook’ - Ahmed Walid (The Athletic)
Spoilers, I found the five principles of successful corners that are drawn out here very useful for understanding corner/set-piece routines: orientation, disruption, misdirection, isolation, framing.
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Speaking of Arsenal, they just posted a very tech-y job ad for a Research Engineer. They’re looking for candidates with experience of PyTorch, deep learning techniques, and novel ideas about how to get the ball on Gabriel’s head.
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‘Football coaches could soon be calling on AI to scout the next superstar’ - Robert Booth (The Guardian) & ‘Artificial intelligence could transform football. So what might the future look like’ - Jordan Campbell (The Athletic)
It tends to be a useful heuristic to recoil when journalists write about ‘AI’, but articles do usually contain interesting nuggets, and this pair are better than the average.
Whether you categorise the following third-hand quote as ‘sincere forecasting’ or ‘sick of their colleagues’ is up to you:
“A recruitment source at one major English team, speaking on condition of anonymity to protect relationships, says that one of the main proponents of AI at his club recently remarked that scouts could start to be replaced by AI within the next two years.”
‘Artificial intelligence could transform football. So what might the future look like’**
‘Claude’s character’ - Anthropic blog
Yeah, I’m one of those people that Has An Opinion about Claude vs ChatGPT and a sizeable part of the preference for Claude will be related to this ‘character’ work. It’s very interesting, although a little unnerving what smart people with a lot of resources are able to do with these systems.
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‘The secrets of Scandinavia’ - Llew Davies (Scouted) & ‘Why deep runs are “probably the most important thing in football”’ - Mark Carey (The Athletic)
Fun to see these kind of tracking data-based stats from Skillcorner in things. It’s neat to see how they can open up data-y discussion of different parts of the game.
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‘Australian Open animado: la gamificación como nueva boca de expendio de los eventos deportivos’ - Marcelo Gantman (Big Data Sports)
A reminder that the Australian Open is really good at choosing its incubator projects to support and showcase.
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‘FIFA Innovation Challenge: Skeletal tracking ‘light’ challenge’ - FIFA
FIFA is throwing down the gauntlet to computer vision researchers to work out how to generate high-quality body pose data from single broadcast camera footage. Winners get tickets to the Club World Cup. Could be a fun project if that’s your sort of thing.
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Thanks for popping by. Any reading recommendations to pass along?