Football Hackers: The Science and Art of a Data Revolution

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Sometimes it would be a hard, legitimate tackle, sometimes not legitimate but it was important to let the opponent know from the start that he was in for a long afternoon. The term ‘availability heuristic’ describes our mind’s flawed presumption that things that are memorised are also important.

Football Hackers : The Science and Art of a Data Revolution Football Hackers : The Science and Art of a Data Revolution

Coaches found it much easier to learn from their best colleagues and analyse their own games,’ he observes. There are a bunch of annoying grammar mistakes (simple things every now and then like substituting “that” for “which) and redundancies throughout the text (I am not sure how much of this is down to the translation from English to German). Soccermatics is a wonderful, in-depth analysis of how soccer can be brought down to a mathematical model. In the context of expected goals (xG), the result that the difference between Christiano Ronaldo and an avergage player is only about 2 percentage points (13.

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Summer books of 2019: Sports | Financial Times Summer books of 2019: Sports | Financial Times

Hundreds of articles were written based on the leaked confidential data, which alleged cases of tax evasion and dubious deals involving some top football clubs and star players. It turned out to be rather interesting, with a very long chapter dedicated to a number of metrics we have tried, with various degree of success, to deconstruct the sport, chasing a dream of finding a surefire way to build a data-drive, Moneyball like success story.

More importantly I think it humanizes a lot of things: the cost of the move to digital scouting techniques, and the human elements of players and coaches. At first, the scraps of overseas footage that Hitzfeld and his assistant, Michael Henke, found on German television did not really cut the mustard, while scouting trips that covered just one or two matches did not provide meaningful insights that could be shared with other members of staff.