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A collection from the Get Goalside football analytics blog over the 2024/25 season. Written by a football data nerd of over 10 years, and industry professional of over 5, Get Goalside talks about the potential of football data and the (often surprisingly muddled) parts of the football data industry.“If you’re new to analytics, and/or Get Goalside, fair warning that the newsletter is often grounded in the future and the past more than the present. That said, ‘The path to now’ will be a good catch-up on the history and ‘Who will win the processing war?’ will also, I think, be valuable if you seriously want to work somewhere in football.“Some pieces include:‘The path to now’ - A journey through the surprising history of football analytics, from the 1920s to the present day, and from Hungary to Wolverhampton to Japan to Liverpool.‘Who will win the processing war?’ - Questioning the fragmented nature of the data industry and pointing towards attempts to bring it together (attempts that may not be aligned with the interests of data companies).‘The wobbly chair of sports software’ - Some thoughts on the impact of code generation tools on professional football clubs up and down the football pyramid.‘Fishing for principles’ - Trying to boil football down to its simplest principles, in a way that makes difficult tactical concepts easier to analyse with data.In all, there’s 40+ pages of writing over thirteen articles and notes:1) ‘Data Progress’ - the evolution of data possibilities The path to now (data: a history) Video is all you need (video as unstructured data) Just run some more (movement data in the modern age) System stability (should football do chaos engineering?) 2) ‘Org charts’ - the way that the industry and clubs may organise themselves Data departments and data diffusion (four types of data department) Who will win the processing war? (how will data get easier to work with?) Positional Play and manager metrics (maybe style isn’t the best manager metric) The wobbly chair of sports software (genAI comes for sports tech) Lessons in genAI (thoughts on what makes genAI work well) 3) ‘What is football?’ - attempts to boil down football into simpler ideas to analyse. The four quadrants of football (ball and space control matrix) Building capacity and breaking lines (against ‘build-up’) Looking for stability (against ‘build-up’, part 2) Fishing for principles (are there fundamental laws of football tactics?) To sign up for the newsletter itself, visit: https://get-goalside-newsletter-archive.beehiiv.com/