Some reading, some vocabulary
If you’re following the news of the LLM world, you’ll be aware of an increasing number of protocols. The investors might be drawn in by the promise of god-like AGI, but the techies get drawn in by things that actually improve their lives.
A matter of days ago, a similar thing happened in the football data world. The Common Data Format could, like language model-powered agents, usher in a whole new world. It might not. But I’m gonna keep bringing things like this to peoples’ attention because, for one thing, it’s a recurrent theme of Get Goalside, and for the other, a common data format might make switching data provider easier, and switching data provider easier tests the established players. And either the giants are slain or they create better products - win, win.
However, the vocabulary of football data is still evolving and, more importantly, expanding. When was the last time you talked about entry speed and turn angle when talking about a player changing direction? Well, maybe you should (or, at least, read this paper on the subject). And I think there’s a lot more juice to squeeze out of the ball-carrying lemon too, in part because of the range in this piece from Lily Wood-Blake at Hudl.
Now, because I am approaching ‘old’ (30), I remember a decade ago when older football pundits had a little moan about the hype around ‘pressing’, because of course ‘closing down’ was par for the course in their days. They were, in some senses, correct - the German-Austrian pressing revolution was partly just a case of trends circling back around. In terms of terminology, the new lingo was a change of old vocab rather than extra vocab.
But I think as far as quantifying football in the present day goes, the vocabulary is going through a fairly rapid expansion. It’s only going to continue, and it’s gonna be here to stay. Which may test attempts like the Common Data Format, but is fantastic news for the writers.
On that note, you can still get a collected works of this season’s Get Goalside in a lovely PDF booklet. It’s a nice way of covering newsletter hosting costs - for £5 or your currency’s equivalent - because there are enough of you lovely subscribers to create that need.
Get Goalside 2024-2025
A collection from the Get Goalside football analytics blog over the 2024/25 season.
Happy reading.