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Research in Focus: xG Replication with American Soccer Analysis
November 5, 2022
'The Replication Project: Is xG the best predictor of future success', by Eliot McKinley (American Soccer Analysis website) [Link to the article is here] Why...
Manchester United says 'hello world' to data science
November 4, 2022
"Sometimes you have a noisy neighbour. You cannot do anything about that." – Sir Alex Ferguson (2009), speaking about newly Abu Dhabi group-owned Manchester...
The analytics revolution is history now
October 29, 2022
kg-card-begin: html There’s only three ways to tell history. There’s ‘events, dear boy, events’ history, a focus on ‘important’ figures and/or ‘important’...
Research in Focus: Quantifying Finishing Skill
October 24, 2022
kg-card-begin: html Marek Kwiatkowski, 'Quantifying Finishing Skill', StatsBomb blog [Link to the article is here] Why it's worth your time A post from 2017,...
Research in Focus: Using data to identify unconscious bias
October 13, 2022
kg-card-begin: html 'Pace and Power: Removing unconscious bias from soccer broadcasts', by Sam Gregory, Devin Pleuler, Daniel Daly-Grafstein, Yang Liu, and...
If you owned a big club, would you buy Ajax?
October 11, 2022
kg-card-begin: html Some Get Goalside newsletters are very informative and verge on instructional; some are just weird blogs. This is one of the latter. With...
Ball control, space control, and why good teams play Pep-ball
October 1, 2022
kg-card-begin: html Manchester City in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Barcelona and Spain straddling 2010. Sacchi's Milan. The Dutch of the 1970s. Hungary...
Where is analytics? What is analytics? An autumn 2022 update.
September 22, 2022
kg-card-begin: html I hadn't been planning on writing a post-StatsBomb conference newsletter. Blame the train ride home. Part of the reason for not planning...
What if we didn't care about passes?
September 14, 2022
kg-card-begin: html "If God had wanted us to play football in the clouds, he'd have put grass up there." — Brian Clough "If God had wanted us to collect...
Football analytics is on the brink of a new world: 3D
August 27, 2022
kg-card-begin: html There are a lot of ways to describe the path that new technology takes towards being adopted. There's the typical 'life cycle' chart,...
Do VARs dream of electric football commentators?
July 16, 2022
kg-card-begin: html It's not often that Martin Tyler and the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference are mentioned in the same breath, so savour this...
Research in Focus: Make your own goalkeeper data
July 12, 2022
kg-card-begin: html 'Learning From the Pros: Extracting Professional Goalkeeper Technique from Broadcast Footage', by Matthew Wear, Ryan Beal, Tim Matthews,...
How football competitions are their own competition
June 28, 2022
"Father?" the little child said, looking out past their parent's face and into the distant sky, "do other football leagues proclaim themselves the Best In...
So... everyone has hybrid data now
June 12, 2022
kg-card-begin: html Previously on Get Goalside: "With the bombast of a start-up, StatsBomb talked about how their data was going to change the game. And the...
Ralf Rangnick, and the value of practice
May 30, 2022
kg-card-begin: html There are, arguably, only two lines you need to read from Michael Cox's recent column on Ralf Rangnick's time at Manchester United....
Research in Focus: DeepMind's fill-in-the-gaps tracking data
May 26, 2022
kg-card-begin: html 'Multiagent off‑screen behavior prediction in football', 19 co-authors from Google DeepMind and Liverpool FC (full list at end of piece)...
Fear and fatigue in analytics modelling
May 26, 2022
kg-card-begin: html Forgive me, for I have been watching Drive to Survive - the Netflix Formula One series - for the first time. And like a new convert, I'll...
When is data 'right'?
May 5, 2022
kg-card-begin: html data [noun]: information, especially facts or numbers, collected to be examined and considered and used to help decision-making...
Research in Focus: Predicting attacking movement, inspired by Paco Seirul·lo
May 2, 2022
kg-card-begin: html Francisco Peralta Alguacil, Javier Fernández, Pablo Piñones Arce, David Sumpter, 'Seeing in to the future: using self-propelled particle...
Pointing, shouting, scanning
April 21, 2022
kg-card-begin: html There's a version of this newsletter that I could write in about three paragraphs. I'll try that, and it'll save you a lot of time. The...
Research in Focus: Ghosting
April 14, 2022
kg-card-begin: html Hoang M. Le, Peter Carr, Yisong Yue, Patrick Lucey, 'Data-driven Ghosting using Deep Imitation Learning' [Presented at the 2017 MIT Sloan...
Research in Focus: Deep reinforcement learning decision-making
April 14, 2022
kg-card-begin: html Pegah Rahimian, Jan Van Haaren, Togzhan Abzhanova, Laszlo Toka, 'Beyond action valuation: A deep reinforcement learning framework for...
The Stats Perform Pro Forum 2022
April 7, 2022
kg-card-begin: html The Stats Perform Pro Forum is the analytics conference for the dreamers. Started nearly a decade ago as a place for hobbyist stats-...
Research in Focus: Karun Singh's Expected Threat
April 2, 2022
kg-card-begin: html [Link here] Why it's worth your time There are precious few pieces of work that have both an immediate and a long-lasting impact like...
Handy Resources
March 28, 2022
kg-card-begin: html A bunch of links to useful resources of various different types. They're split into three sections: conferences/research, which can help...
Get Goalside 100
March 21, 2022
kg-card-begin: html If the 'posts' figure in my newsletter dashboard is to be believed (and discounting a couple of subscriber survey requests) this is issue...
When will tracking data have its xG moment?
March 10, 2022
kg-card-begin: html Five years ago, I wandered into my first Stats Perform Pro Forum.[1] The Pro Forum, if you're not familiar with it, is like Davos for...
Everything you need to know about expected goals
February 24, 2022
Expected goals is everywhere, and it kind of has been for quite a while. However, that doesn't mean everyone's had it explained nicely for them. So here's a...
The Theory of Everything (in football)
February 11, 2022
kg-card-begin: html There was a point in time where people didn't write books on story structure. Nobody knew what an 'act' was, or what pathos was, or that...
Analytics Mailbag!
February 10, 2022
kg-card-begin: html Hello reader, For this edition of Get Goalside we're going for the trusty Q&A mailbag. I put out a call for questions, I got some...
FIFA's big, big plans (no, not the World Cups)
January 27, 2022
A lot of people scoff at The Phantom Menace for having a plot revolving around trade policy.[1] But I am pretty sure that you, dear reader, will have strong...
What's in the way of analytics solving football?
January 13, 2022
kg-card-begin: html Sometimes newsletters are timeless, sometimes they age faster than the popularity of sea shanties. The intro to this one will make it a...
Analytics in 2022: what now?
January 1, 2022
kg-card-begin: html It's a new year in the Gregorian calendar, the year 2022 of the common era. What a wonderful collection of almost-binary digits that is....
Pick a sport, any sport, take ideas from it
December 23, 2021
kg-card-begin: html We're into the festive period. Two years ago, I wrote the silliest things you could do with advanced football tech. If you weren't around...
Do we know football well enough to have good defensive stats?
December 2, 2021
kg-card-begin: html Some problems There's a fact I've always had trouble fully believing. The one about the ancient Greeks not having a word for the colour...
So... everyone has pressure data now
November 25, 2021
kg-card-begin: html They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Take the phone market: once upon a time you could get brick phones and flip...
Release time, and expected expected goals
November 11, 2021
kg-card-begin: html A question for you. Should the player on the ball in the screenshot below A) pass the ball backwards to the supporting player B) turn and...
Where to spend your analytics money?
October 21, 2021
kg-card-begin: html Let's say that you are an analytically-minded fan of a football team. You care about them doing well, and you think smart use of data...
Conference season, autumn 2021 - The What & the How
October 10, 2021
kg-card-begin: html We know what players do, but we don't know how they do it -- paraphrasing Vosse de Boode, Ajax's Head of Sports Science, speaking at...
Julian Nagelsmann's earpiece idea might not be so bad after all...
September 30, 2021
kg-card-begin: html Every now and then, somebody profoundly intelligent in one field of human endeavour says something that makes the world question how...
Creating new data by stealing from basketball
September 16, 2021
kg-card-begin: html An origin tale A couple of weeks ago, I read an article on FiveThirtyEight. It was about a bit of basketball tracking kit, the Noahlytics...
The Who, The What, and The Why of bringing advanced stats to the public
September 2, 2021
kg-card-begin: html Get Goalside is returning to a regular schedule for the new season. A new newsletter will go out (at least) every other Thursday. early...
Not all duels are created equal, nor are they easy to adjust
August 26, 2021
kg-card-begin: html It is 1694. Edward Wilson dies in a duel he asked for over the favour of a woman. It is 1804. Aaron Burr's shot tears through Alexander...
Finding Messi-esque dribblers and making choices while clustering
May 20, 2021
kg-card-begin: html Lionel Messi is to dribbling a football what Vincent van Gogh is to layering colour with oil paints: not simply a conventional expert,...
Analytics is older than you think: (re)introducing Charles Reep
May 13, 2021
A blog by Sam Green from 2012 is often credited as kicking off the ‘expected goals era’ of football[1], but the first xG calculations are surprisingly older....
Soccer at Sloan 2021: A summary
May 3, 2021
kg-card-begin: html Greetings readers, it’s time for some analytics. Last month was the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. In pre-pandemic times, this...
London bus analytics conferences
March 25, 2021
kg-card-begin: html Honestly. You wait all year for a football analytics conference/event and then two come along in the space of a week. On 17 March we had...
A fab early-February for football analytics aficionados
February 4, 2021
kg-card-begin: html February 3rd & 4th 2021 were big days in the football analytics-sphere. It started off with a new piece on The Athletic about running...
Where will 'analytics' go in 2021?
December 31, 2020
kg-card-begin: html 2020 has been the moment in time that best embodies the use of capitalisation to signify heavy intonation. It’s been, very much, A Year....
Why diving is bad
November 18, 2020
kg-card-begin: html I must be old. The kids today, or the ones on my twitter feed, keep going on about this thing they love. It’s ‘diving’. I’d only just...
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