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Recently read: The rise and fall of peer review

Goodbye 2022, Hello 2023

The Get Goalside newsletter looks ahead to what 2023 might bring football analytics

What if you let loose a data scientist on in-match decisions?

What are some very silly ways that you could use very advanced data to make in-match decisions in football?

Prompt: Write an article about potential AI use in football...

If you asked ChatGPT to write an article about how OpenAI and other technology could be used in football, this is what it might produce

An OpenAI Q&A about expected goals

Everything you need to know about defensive statistics (well, the basics)

Defensive stats don't get as much attention as some other numbers, but here's what you need to know about them.

What is midfield for?

Can we get a step closer to quantifying what makes a midfielder good by thinking through the theory? We'll see.

Research in Focus: xG Replication with American Soccer Analysis

What happens when you test out a piece of work from 2015 with new data? The 'Research in Focus' series turns its attention to an article that tried just that, from American Soccer Analysis

Manchester United says 'hello world' to data science

With news that Manchester United are hiring data scientists, Get Goalside looks at the directions a clean slate at a rich club could take you

The analytics revolution is history now

There’s only three ways to tell history. There’s ‘events, dear boy, events’ history, a focus on ‘important’ figures and/or ‘important’ events. There’s history of ideas, whether that be political or economic or societal. And there’s history of ‘the people’, those who might not have led

Research in Focus: Quantifying Finishing Skill

Research in Focus: Using data to identify unconscious bias

If you owned a big club, would you buy Ajax?

Some Get Goalside newsletters are very informative and verge on instructional; some are just weird blogs. This is one of the latter. With the recent death of Hilary Mantel I’m reminded of one of my favourite things about reading her Wolf Hall trilogy: characters can be two months removed

Ball control, space control, and why good teams play Pep-ball

Manchester City in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Barcelona and Spain straddling 2010. Sacchi's Milan. The Dutch of the 1970s. Hungary in the '50s. Scotland, in the late 19th century*. Every generation has its iconic teams characterised by their possession of the ball. *(From 'Inverting the Pyramid': "That success

Where is analytics? What is analytics? An autumn 2022 update.

I hadn't been planning on writing a post-StatsBomb conference newsletter. Blame the train ride home. Part of the reason for not planning to was not knowing how to write about a conference where you can see most, but not all, of the content. So this isn't going to be a

What if we didn't care about passes?

"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 passing data, he'd have put abacuses in the press box." — Mark Thompson A lot of people have spent a lot of time asking why

Football analytics is on the brink of a new world: 3D

There are a lot of ways to describe the path that new technology takes towards being adopted. There's the typical 'life cycle' chart, probably a product of business schools, the population (market) divided into (terminology may differ) 'innovators' (nerds), 'early adopters' (wannabe nerds), 'the majority' (normies), and 'laggards' (a stand-up

Do VARs dream of electric football commentators?

It's not often that Martin Tyler and the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference are mentioned in the same breath, so savour this newsletter while it lasts. At this year's Sloan, two folks from Amazon and one from Fox Sports got together to publish a paper, titled 'Sports narrative enhancement with

Research in Focus: Make your own goalkeeper data

'Learning From the Pros: Extracting Professional Goalkeeper Technique from Broadcast Footage', by Matthew Wear, Ryan Beal, Tim Matthews, Tim J. Norman, and Sarvapali D. Ramchurn [Link to the paper is here] Why it's worth your time Goalkeeper analysis might be the most overlooked area of them all, so anything in

How football competitions are their own competition

"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 The World? Or is it just ours?" In the olden days, football leagues were mere bureaucratic bodies. They organised matches and set rules. At some

So... everyone has hybrid data now

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 bombast was deserved. Because it did. Because, nowadays, everyone seems to have pressure data." It's time to talk about new data again. Like every time we

Ralf Rangnick, and the value of practice

There are, arguably, only two lines you need to read from Michael Cox's recent column on Ralf Rangnick's time at Manchester United. "Ultimately, a huge red flag was that, in the decade before Manchester United appointed Rangnick, he had been appointed as a manager twice. The people who appointed him

Research in Focus: DeepMind's fill-in-the-gaps tracking data

'Multiagent off‑screen behavior prediction in football', 19 co-authors from Google DeepMind and Liverpool FC (full list at end of piece) [Paper is available in full here] Why it's worth your time A Google DeepMind team getting involved in football analytics is definitely worth paying attention to, particularly when accompanied

Fear and fatigue in analytics modelling

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 be talking about it. The amount of footage and array of angles on offer make for an exciting show alone, never mind the

Research in Focus

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When is data 'right'?

Sometimes data is different coming from one source to another, so when are the figures 'right'?

Research in Focus: Predicting attacking movement, inspired by Paco Seirul·lo

Francisco Peralta Alguacil, Javier Fernández, Pablo Piñones Arce, David Sumpter, 'Seeing in to the future: using self-propelled particle models to aid player decision-making in soccer' [Presented at the 2020 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference - link to the paper here] Why it's worth your time Firstly, the paper's writers have

Pointing, shouting, scanning

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 tl;dr Pointing and shouting are skills - or 'skills' - that are often treated like a parody by some people. If a pundit

Research in Focus: Ghosting

Hoang M. Le, Peter Carr, Yisong Yue, Patrick Lucey, 'Data-driven Ghosting using Deep Imitation Learning' [Presented at the 2017 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (link) and in a slightly different form at the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (link)] Why it's worth your time 'What if the computer could

Research in Focus: Deep reinforcement learning decision-making

Pegah Rahimian, Jan Van Haaren, Togzhan Abzhanova, Laszlo Toka, 'Beyond action valuation: A deep reinforcement learning framework for optimizing player decisions in soccer' [Presented at the 2022 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (link)] Why it's worth your time Research into decision-making is always interesting, and is good to be aware

The Stats Perform Pro Forum 2022

The Stats Perform Pro Forum is the analytics conference for the dreamers. Started nearly a decade ago as a place for hobbyist stats-watchers to meet and present ideas, it's still fundamentally a party organised by a data provider who gift amateurs with interesting ideas the means to explore them. Now

Two experiments for the price of one

What is science if not experimentation persevering. We're going to have two experiments today. The first is a format of piece that I want to try out, which I'm calling 'Research in Focus'. Papers and presentations (the formats that big research tends to be delivered in) are designed for fellow

Research in Focus: Karun Singh's Expected Threat

[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 this one. People still talk about Expected Threat, and the blog is still linked to by others, from The Athletic to academic research papers. What it

Targets & why you should support

This page has three sections: * Why you should support * How to support * Targets Why you should support Get Goalside If you want to know more and think better about football analytics - and football in general - Get Goalside is your newsletter. Supporting is the way Get Goalside keeps going.

About

Get Goalside! is the newsletter that'll both keep you up-to-date with the football analytics world and make it simple to understand. There are posts explaining the true meaning of Moneyball, reviewing and summarising research papers from conferences, and trying to predict where the future of analytics might go. Oh, and

Handy Resources

A bunch of links to useful resources of various different types. They're split into three sections: * conferences/research, which can help keep up-to-date with the latest advances in football analytics * guides/courses, helping to get started with football analytics yourself (not an exhaustive list, but if it was it'd take

Get Goalside 100

As Get Goalside reaches 100 editions, we speak to some smart minds in the industry about what they've learnt during the 'Get Goalside era'

When will tracking data have its xG moment?

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 people who read Opta data feed specifications instead of public policy documents. A swarm of analysts, and increasing numbers of 'Head of Analytics'-es, get

Everything you need to know about expected goals

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. While Get Goalside does a lot of 'hardcore' analytics writing, it's also a newsletter for anyone just getting into football stats too. So this is

The Theory of Everything (in football)

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 a punchline goes at the end of a list of three. They just told stories, and a lot of those stories will have been

Analytics Mailbag!

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 questions, I answer the questions below. Some of the questions have been shortened a little for conciseness. The answers, slightly less so. There are

Ask away! Get Goalside mailbag edition coming soon

Hello dear subscriber - it's been a while, over a year, since I last did a Get Goalside mailbag/Q&A newsletter, so it's about time for another one. It'll be coming out on the 10th of February, so get your data/analytics/tech questions in before then and I'll

FIFA's big, big plans (no, not the World Cups)

FIFA aren't just a tournament organiser anymore (although they'd like to do it more often). They're moving more into the tech and data world...

What's in the way of analytics solving football?

Sometimes newsletters are timeless, sometimes they age faster than the popularity of sea shanties. The intro to this one will make it a time capsule. The nerds are ruining Wordle. Not just the tech sharks trying to monetise a game designed to be free, the coders algorithming up a guaranteed

Analytics in 2022: what now?

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. 2021 can be captured in this excellent blog post of links from Jan Van Haaren (some posts from this newsletter are featured there, so it must

Pick a sport, any sport, take ideas from it

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 back then I recommend it for a good mix of fun and insight into what kinds of data is around. That's exactly what we're going to

Do we know football well enough to have good defensive stats?

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 blue. Ancient Greek texts had a curious absence of references to the colour. Sky was even referred to as 'wine-coloured'. When this was first noted, it

So... everyone has pressure data now

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 phones and slide-y phones and Blackberrys. And now, almost certainly thanks to the success of the iPhone, every mobile on the market is a five-to-eight-inch

Release time, and expected expected goals

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 play in the teammate on the right C) turn and shoot? If you chose option A, reality was not your friend. The screenshot below

Where to spend your analytics money?

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 will be part of that. What should you be on the look-out for: who they hire internally, which data providers they use, or what third-parties

Conference season, autumn 2021 - The What & the How

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 StatsBomb Conference in 2021 It's the most wonderful time of the year With the nerds all assembling, The Voronois tending, To show up on screen.

Julian Nagelsmann's earpiece idea might not be so bad after all...

Every now and then, somebody profoundly intelligent in one field of human endeavour says something that makes the world question how wide-ranging their intelligence is. "American football is much more technologically advanced than soccer," Julian Nagelsmann recently said. "The quarterback has an earpiece to hear his coach; we absolutely need

Creating new data by stealing from basketball

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 Data Program, which gives you data on the angle of shots and where they go through the rim. (I only partly mention this because the

The Who, The What, and The Why of bringing advanced stats to the public

Get Goalside is returning to a regular schedule for the new season. A new newsletter will go out (at least) every other Thursday. early October sees a couple of big analytics events so there may be an extra one or two that month. Subscribe to Get Goalside As far as

Not all duels are created equal, nor are they easy to adjust

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 Hamilton's liver and into 21st century pop culture. It is an unknown year, close to the present. Someone decides to collect tackle data

Everything you need to know about 'pitch control'

When I was -- at a guess -- seven years old, there was a kid's TV programme that tried to make science cool. One episode they stretched out, to full length, some fake intestines. In another, they demonstrated the extreme knowledge of physics that David Beckham must have to be

Finding Messi-esque dribblers and making choices while clustering

Lionel Messi is to dribbling a football what Vincent van Gogh is to layering colour with oil paints: not simply a conventional expert, but with caresses of genius that mark the work as something different. Messi's ball-carrying and close control isn't simply effective, it's beauty -- the fact that it's

Analytics is older than you think: (re)introducing Charles Reep

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. As in, ‘almost as old as the Premier League’ older. The adage that there’s nothing new under the sun probably holds

Soccer at Sloan 2021: A summary

Greetings readers, it’s time for some analytics. Last month was the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. In pre-pandemic times, this was one of the big ones of the sports analytics conference circuit. If you’re into tennis, think of the Slams — it was one of those. (Also, if you’

London bus analytics conferences

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 ‘StatsBomb Evolve’ and on 24 March we had the Stats Perform Pro Forum.[1] In all the weeks in all the months in

A fab early-February for football analytics aficionados

February 3rd & 4th 2021 were big days in the football analytics-sphere. It started off with a new piece on The Athletic about running stats. We don’t usually get running data in the public domain, but Sportlogiq — via the charts and texts of Tom Worville — had enough to keep us

Where will 'analytics' go in 2021?

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. It’s been a bit of A Year in the football analytics space, although for different reasons. Expected goals has succeeded in setting up shop

Why diving is bad

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 learnt why people like TikTok. I suspect that there’s some kickback against older generations in their appreciation of it. The

On language, stats, and football

Americans call aubergines ‘eggplants’. For those familiar with the deep purple skin of the vegetable(?), this seems peculiar. To British ears, it’s one of those “oh, America!” things to roll ones eyes at and quietly mock, like ‘pants’ and ‘soccer’ and the missing ‘u’ in ‘colour’. And then you

xG in FM? What does this mean?

Hello reader, welcome to Get Goalside!. If you haven’t already seen it, here’s a video of an AI camera mistaking a bald linesman’s head for the ball. *Electronic Arts voice* Ex. pected. Goals. It’s in the game. Ok, so this isn’t about EA Sports, but

Where are all the English football players?

Hello reader, welcome to Get Goalside!. According to reports, the FA doesn’t make any sense. OK, let me try again: according to reports about what FA chairman Greg Clarke wrote to Premier League clubs, his letter makes no sense. With Great Britain going through the turbulence of Brexit, English

Is this the death of formations (as we know them)?

Our dark crime thriller opens… The shadow of Pep Guardiola looms large over the bleeding body of Formations. He covers the body with the cardigan he discarded earlier, now sodden, storing his bloodied knife in his cargo trousers. It was a methodical kill, but he doesn’t need to disguise

Are Man City muscling in on Liverpool's analytics crown?

In Captain America: Civil War (stick with me), the MacGuffin that drives the plot towards Cap and Iron Man throwing punches is a proposal: superheroes should register with a government authority. There follows, naturally, disagreement. The AI-made-flesh character Vision pipes up, pointing out that since Iron Man arrived on the

So, how did the pandemic transfer window end up?

Welcome to Get Goalside! I’m glad to see you. The transfer window. It is closed. Although in England it’s still kind of open for a little while longer for domestic moves (and as far as I know that could be the same elsewhere), so it’s sort of

The nerd's case for exciting football

Welcome to Get Goalside!. It’s good to see you. Times continue to be hard - consider giving to your local food bank if you are able. If you need to, you can find a foodbank in the UK here. Share The people who plug numbers into computers and point

Is football a 'weak link' sport?

Once upon a time, there was a book called The Numbers Game, by David Sally and Chris Anderson. In it, among other things, was a chapter on football and O-ring theory, teaching a young generation of nerdy football watchers two things. One: the story of the Challenger disaster, which tragically

Why we could be close to a return of hoofball

As the ex-pros from the ‘80s made us very well aware a few years ago, nothing is new under the sun in football. ‘Pressing’? They did that. And pretty soon footballers of the ‘90s will be lining up to tell us how they used to specialise in the trendy tactics

Join the Get Goalside! FPL league

The code is: qogsww Or you can follow the link: https://fantasy.premierleague.com/leagues/auto-join/qogsww

Working smarter, not harder, to pick a fantasy Premier League squad

Hello, welcome to Get Goalside! Bless your lives with a quokka every hour (they’re adorable). This week’s charity, prompted by Gary Lineker, is Refugees at Home. Donate to them to help them connect refugees or asylum seekers who need somewhere to stay with people who have a spare

The case against buying Lionel Messi for €100m

Hello, and welcome to Get Goalside!. Glad to see you, it’s been too long. This week’s charity is Macmillan Cancer Support. Please consider helping them if you can. After writing this late on Saturday 29th, I decided that due to the probably-fast-paced nature of this situation I’d

How can tracking data help defending analytics?

What would a tracking data approach to defending look like? I’m writing this fresh off (half)watching Arsenal’s Champions League quarter-final defeat to PSG, and Leah Williamson was caught out for both goals. In the first, she was an odd distance away from her marker at a corner,

Can you use data to predict tactics you have no data on?

Hello, and welcome to Get Goalside!. Take a break, you deserve it. This week’s charity is, again, Refugee Action, who support refugees and people seeking asylum in the UK. The idea for this post ‘Can you use data to predict the unpredictable’ came to mind before all hell broke

James Milner, Hugh Grant, and versatility

Welcome to Get Goalside! The first rule of Get Goalside! is that you’re always welcome to a second biscuit. This week’s charity is Refugee Action, who support refugees and people seeking asylum in the UK. At the weekend, I asked a question on Twitter. Who — outside of James

The return of the 'carry the team' centre-forward

Hey, welcome to Get Goalside!. Sit down, I’ll fetch a drink. This week’s charity is the Trussell Trust, a UK food bank charity. If you can spare it, please give the amount you’d spend on a meal out, or just a Big Mac. All stats in this

Could Tim Sherwood have got 'Moneyball' to work at Aston Villa?

Welcome to Get Goalside! I was hoping you’d be able to make it. This week’s charity is, well. Usually I’ve come across charities that I then point to here. Wiley’s antisemitic tweets have made me realise I don’t actually know any anti anti-semitism charities. The

The real meaning of Moneyball

“The first thing they did was run you.” That’s how Michael Lewis opens his seminal book Moneyball, which charts the story of the Oakland A’s 2002 season and the wider movement of data in baseball. It’s a good first line; it grabs you. But it has nothing

A smarter approach to squad-building

Scenario: You arrive at a club as a director of football. The squad needs an overhaul. How do you plan? As a starting off point, it’s worth checking out this visualisation from the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch, showing transfers from three big clubs since 2015/16 and the minutes

How would you play against the Invincibles?

As a person who plays with data, it’s always a treat when someone releases a free dataset. StatsBomb did that recently with their open data project: Arsenal’s 2003/04 Invincibles season. Due to the difficulty of getting match footage, it only includes 32 of the 38 league matches

3 fun looks at home advantage

Welcome to Get Goalside!, it’s good to see you. Nice face covering. This week’s charity is FND Action. FND stands for Functional Neurological Disorder, which FND Action raises awareness for. The first few matches post-lockdown created an excitement about the lack of home victories. It had all started

Liverpool 19/20: A historically great side?

What’s all this about the European top divisions being boring, we’re about to have a first-time Premier League winner, baby! *ahem* There are a variety of ways Liverpool can/will win the league within the next week or so. There’s not much point me breaking down how

Can you teach tactics in a lockdown?

Hello, and welcome back to Get Goalside!. Now that GG is back, we’ll be encouraging readers to donate to a different charity each week. This week’s is Mermaids, who support trans young people under 20 and their families, and provide informational resources. If an international pandemic wasn’t

A note

I don’t think there’ll be another Get Goalside! newsletter for a while. The latest, reviewing my opinion of a potential Harry Maguire transfer in the summer, opened with this line: Opinions are thrown out like bread to ducks: relatively cheaply, for only shallow and temporary benefit to yourself

Re-assessing my Harry Maguire take

People are often not very good at judging their own predictions. Usually this is because we forget them. Which is usually because we don’t put much thought into them. Opinions are thrown out like bread to ducks: relatively cheaply, for only shallow and temporary benefit to yourself and forgotten

What MUFC's future DoF should copy from Liverpool

I started this blog post as a thought experiment about what you’d do if you were hired as the Manchester United Director of Football (assuming you placed job over whatever club loyalty you might have and decided not to burn the whole place to the ground). But then I

The promise of Sam Kerr

The promise of Sam Kerr was that she’d score goals. No. The promise of Sam Kerr was that she was, is, one of the top forwards in the world and she was finally coming to England, still in her peak, after years in America and Australia. And that she’

Stats 101 and beyond mailbag!

Hello everyone! This week’s Get Goalside! is a bit of a mailbag. I know that there’s a lot of questions people might have about football stats and so… I’m answering them! I haven’t been able to get to all of the questions, so apologies if I

Harry Kane, a symbol of English nationalism

A football pitch is a canvas on which teams can paint their glory; a football team is a canvas on which a manager can paint their likeness. The duality of Jose Mourinho was fully on show in Tottenham Hotspur’s 1-0 loss to Liverpool, his twin traits of 1) defending

Is analysis of one match supported by future results?

Jose Mourinho’s first game in charge of Tottenham Hotspur was, by all accounts, a success. For an hour, before collapsing with what Mourinho said was fatigue, they looked to be playing the Hammers off the park. Some facts: 1) Things haven’t quite continued in the trajectory that they

How good is 'good' and how 'good' is Messi?

It’s an unspoken necessity whenever you’re debating who the ‘greats’ of football are that you first need to define ‘great’. Not so much because the definition itself matters, but just so that everyone’s talking from the same starting point. I’ve been interested in that kind of

The silliest things you can do with advanced football tech

It’s Christmastime for those celebrating it [semantically, is it also Christmastime if you don’t?], and so I needed a newsletter topic that I could write well in advance. A recent conversation led to me having such a silly idea that I knew, just knew, that I needed to

Possession and anti-possession can be friends

I must be finding my subscription to The Athletic worth the (almost permanently 40% reduced) subscription fee because I’m using it yet again as the starting point for a newsletter. This time it’s Michael Cox’s piece on Newcastle vs Burnley, a game which everyone apart from me

Making predictions in an unpredictable age

It’s the UK General Election week and any comparison between the unpredictable nature of the British political landscape and the unpredictable nature of the Premier League table is probably best left unmade. And yet… At eight points, after 15 games, this is the joint shortest gap there's ever been

Trust me. Just trust me.

I forgot to plug this in the past couple of weeks but my colleagues at Twenty3, Daniel Girela and David Perdomo Meza, were at the Barcelona Analytics Conference with a kickass poster featuring some of the cool work we/they are doing there. I’m taking the ‘standing on the

Mourinho: The One

It’s 2 July, 2004. In front of camera flashes, José Mourinho says “I think I’m a special one.” It’s 10 June, 2013. José Mourinho tells the press at his first press conference back at Chelsea “Call me the Happy One.” It’s 5 July, 2016. Mourinho arrives

A defence of early-analytics' mistakes

The analytics ‘movement’ gets a lot of stick sometimes (although generally from people who are never going to give it much credit anyway it must be said). The analytics ‘movement’ also over-thinks things too much. I’m going to indulge both by writing something of a review and an apology

Pass the parcel with Leicester City

G’day. This’ll be a significantly more ‘newsletter-y’ newsletter owing to the fact that, writing this on Monday evening, I’m very tired. Leicester City are interesting. I’m sure you don’t need convincing of that. (we should also probably mention the fact they’re riding their luck

Why the FB-to-FB switch is great, but why it shouldn't catch on

A quick note that my Twenty3 colleagues’ presentation on ‘How to break down a set defence’ from the StatsBomb conference on Innovation in Football is available to watch here. If you’re a subscriber to this newsletter then you probably know that full-back to full-back switches are one of the

Has analytics made Liverpool boring?

Before we start, a quick note that the paper for mine and my Twenty3 colleagues’ StatsBomb conference project on ‘How to break down a set defence’ is available here. There are a few things that we know for certain about Liverpool Football Club and their men’s first team. 1.

Attacking stats are role-dependent too

A quick note before we start. A couple of weeks ago my Twenty3 colleagues presented some research we’d done on ‘How to break down a set defence’ at the StatsBomb Innovation in Football conference. The full paper is now online here. For a good couple of years, it’s

Spending a Sunday with pressing stats

This past Friday was the StatsBomb Innovation in Football conference (I think I’ve remembered the official name right…), a fun day at Stamford Bridge listening to people who’ve spent a lot of time with data. There was me and my colleagues from Twenty3 delivering a talk on how

What could OGS do with United?

Apologies if this post is a little less structured or visual than usual, illness has struck me down but commitment to newslettering keeps me going. You may have noticed that Manchester United (among other clubs) are IN CRISIS. Depending how you define ‘crisis’. StatsBomb’s expected goals model has them

How to defend the KDB cross

Somewhere in the EA Sports FIFA offices, youngsters with coding degrees and Masters in Angry Birds are adding ‘the Kevin de Bruyne cross’ to next year’s game. By now, I think we’ve all seen that type of cross before: coming from the shoulder of the box, rather than

Send feedback to Get Goalside!

Hey there subscribers. May I ask that you follow this link to a google form and fill in the short form there? It’s just a tickbox about the last few newsletters and a space to add in any other thoughts or feedback you have. I’d really appreciate it,

How to avoid losing 8-0

Welcome to Get Goalside!, glad to have you aboard. If you’re not already a subscriber to this friendly neighbourhood football analysis newsletter, sign up below. Sign up now Manchester City, clearly peeved at being stripped of the title of ‘City’, came back with a bang to batter bottom-of-the-table dwellers

Nifty Norwich, the Guardiola-killers

Welcome to Get Goalside!, glad to have you aboard. If you’re not already a subscriber to this friendly neighbourhood football analysis newsletter, sign up below. Sign up now It’s official. ‘City’ means Norwich now. Like a WWE (or, its lesser sporting cousin, boxing) title belt, the shorthand has

Drowning at full-back with Davinson Sanchez

Welcome to Get Goalside!, glad to have you aboard. If you’re not already a subscriber to this top-notch content every Tuesday, sign up below. Sign up now It’s been international week in the men’s game and the start of the FA Women’s Super League in the

The basketballification of football

Welcome to Get Goalside!, glad to have you aboard. If you’re not already a subscriber to this top-notch content every Tuesday, sign up below. Sign up now It’s a good thing for us, Marcelo Bielsa aside, that robots don’t play football. Humans and their limits make things

EPL centre-back power rankings - THE TOP TEN

Welcome to Get Goalside!, glad to have you aboard. If you’re not already a subscriber to this top-notch content every Tuesday, sign up below. Sign up now Last week I ran down 20-11 in my centre-back power rankings (which is here, if you want it), with the headline news

EPL centre-back power rankings

Welcome to Get Goalside!, glad to have you aboard. If you’re not already a subscriber to this top-notch content every Tuesday, sign up below. Sign up now It’s two weeks into the season but it’s never too early for a power ranking. I’ve judged all 20

Interesting nuggets from EPL opening day

Welcome to Get Goalside!, glad to have you aboard. If you’re not already a subscriber to this top-notch content every Tuesday, sign up below. Sign up now The opening weekend of the Premier League season is like Christmas. Although, as Mike Goodman points out, it coming so soon after

Red cards

There’s something about the mechanics of tackling and what makes them dangerous that I’ve wanted to write for a while. Southampton vs Burnley finally provided the perfect example. In the modern age, we’ve grown used to the idea that studs high up on another person’s leg

Is this what we'll see from Man City this season?

Welcome to Get Goalside!, glad to have you aboard. If you’re not already a subscriber to this top-notch content every Tuesday, sign up below. If you work in football (I know you’re lurking!), let me know what you think. Sign up now Manchester City and Liverpool played out

The dangers of being frugal

Welcome to the Get Goalside! football analysis newsletter, glad to have you aboard. Like all historical figures, the legacy of Arsene Wenger will continue to be written and re-written for years to come. Given the warm glow that fell over the Arsenal fandom when he finally stepped aside, it may

The top teen centre-backs in Europe

Welcome to the Get Goalside! football analysis newsletter, glad to have you aboard. Every transfer window must have multiple sagas. It says something about how quiet summer 2019 has been that William Saliba, Saint-Etienne’s 18-year-old centre-back, was one of the main stories (at least in England) for a good

The value of 'certainty'

Welcome to the Get Goalside! football analysis newsletter, glad to have you aboard. There’s big money being spent in the transfer window. It doesn’t feel like too long since £130m would get you half a team; now, Manchester United look set to spend it on Aaron Wan-Bissaka and

Is Matthijs de Ligt too bulky?

Hello, and welcome to the Get Goalside! football analysis newsletter. Glad to have you aboard. Ajax getting to the semi-finals of last season’s Champions League was surprising. Their star youngsters immediately being preyed upon by Europe’s mega-clubs was less so. Frenkie de Jong’s move to Barcelona felt

How to sound smart about your new 17-year-old centre-back

Hello everyone. Thanks for joining if you’re new and welcome back if you’re not, I appreciate the bump in subscribers over the past couple of days and the nice words people have said about the newsletter. On with the show. Liverpool’s reputation as a buying club has

Learning from Van Dijk's move to Liverpool

I know that this isn’t the usual Tuesday scheduling, but this thought spun out from this week’s regular newsletter and was too interesting to delay spending time on. To set the scene: Virgil van Dijk moved from Southampton to Liverpool in January 2018 for £75m, a record for

Hmmm-ing about Maguire for £80m

A brief note of the very good stuff over on StatsBomb which I’ve been editing during the World Cup: last week I wrote about what we’d learnt about the contenders for the trophy over the first couple of games, Anushree Nande wrote about some of the stars of

Why I changed my mind on handball calls

Hello, hello to one and to all. Unless, that is, you happen to be someone in charge of implementing rule changes into football. In which case my greeting to you will be frosty. Yes, a combination of VAR and new rules/interpretations has made this summer’s Women’s World

World Cup fever

Hello, and happy World Cup to one and to all. As I mentioned last week, I’m editing StatsBomb’s World Cup content this summer. I’m writing this as the national anthems of Canada and Cameroon are playing in the background. World Cups are great. In the lead-up to

THESE ARE THE CHAAAAMPIOOOONS

Hello yet again. Or, if this is our first Get Goalside! outing, welcome. If it is your first, you join us at an awkward time as I take a second for some brief news. I’ll be editoring StatsBomb’s World Cup content for the coming weeks (the first piece

Copa del Rey? Copa del Yay.

I’d planned to write this week’s Get Goalside! about the Copa del Rey final in advance. And then Valencia won it and I thought “oh, this’ll be good, can’t wait to watch the game back”. And then I watched the game back. It’s not that

Fixture schedule

Hi everyone. First of all, a couple of weeks back this lil niche newsletter passed 300 subscribers, which I’m taken aback and grateful for. Thanks to all of you who’ve subscribed. Secondly, between work and not 100% over the weekend-to-Monday period, I’ve decided to postpone this week’

The Premier League finale grab-bag

I was hoping that the Premier League final day would be full of drama. It was not. Even though it took 28 minutes and going a goal down for Manchester City to score against Brighton, it was always going to happen. The first 15 minutes saw City take four shots

Would you have bought Van Dijk from Celtic?

Hello again. The fun thing about this newsletter going out on a Tuesday means writing it on a Monday, which means waking up and seeing all the disgruntled tweets about Game of Thrones. It sets a nice low bar for me to clear. A player who’s had to clear

The Chris Smalling special

I was watching the Manchester Derby and, while there were a lot of other things to watch out for, it was Chris Smalling that sparked me wanting to write. I’ve been watching Smalling closely for a long time (in the context of my ‘watching-football-closely’ life, of maybe 5 years

'Possession adjusting': An essay.

Hello everyone, and I hope you’ve had a great Easter weekend if you celebrate it (religiously or culturally (yum, chocolate)), or just a great week if you don’t. I hear it’s Passover too! In England, the weather’s nice and M&S pre-mixed Mojitos are flying off

Salah, Wan-Bissaka, and simulation

Hello, it’s good to see you again (or, if this is your first visit, glad to meet you). I’m gonna briefly plug a data visualisation I did and liked and then get right into the good stuff. Nifty. Anyway, on with the defending: * Stopping Salah’s magic strike?

Dortmund: Autopsy of a tragedy

“The greater the pride, the greater the need to subscribe to the Get Goalside! newsletter.” Howdy. There’s so much football on at the moment that I’m having a hard time keeping track of days, apart from to send this out on time. I’m starting to think that

Ten seconds in the life of Virgil van Dijk

^^ You can share this email as a web link by hitting that square with the arrow ^^. Share bits you like, all I’d ask is you link back. Hello! It’s been quite a busy week work-wise as Football Whispers helped out with the International Champions Cup launch for 2019.

Breaking down the international break

^^ You can share this email as a web link by hitting that square with the arrow ^^. Don’t hesitate to share bits of this that you like, all I’d ask is you link back. International break. People moan about the interruption to club football although that seems to have

When does good defending end in an own goal?

^^ You can share this email as a web link by hitting that square with the arrow ^^. Don’t hesitate to share bits of this that you like, all I’d ask is you link back. I opened the last newsletter, the debut, by saying I was flattered by the interest

The debut cap

^^ You can share this email as a web link by hitting that square with the arrow ^^. Don’t hesitate to share bits of this that you like, via screenshot or just quoting, all I’d ask is you link back. So here it is. I’ve been really flattered by

Making his debut

Hello! I’m (sincerely) glad you’re here! Exclamation marks may or may not adequately convey this! So, the way this is gonna go, I will start each newsletter with a short little hello - like this one, but better - and then put down a contents of what’s

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