Another soccer analytics newsletter!
Exactly what you didn't ask for.
I’ve been threatening to do this for a long time, and then Substack came along and I saw what others have been able to put together on this platform.
What I hope to do with this newsletter is fairly simple—I want to round up the latest links related to the analytics scene, as well as front office pieces, and try to piece together a coherent narrative from it all.
I’ve done this in a few other formats and places over the years. My interest in soccer analytics stretches back to 2012, when I was a soccer feature writer for theScore.com. Back then, I worked with other, much more talented writers who had a good grasp on data science as it applied to their respective sports beats, but from a more neutral perspective (neither for nor against).
Inspired by their work, I wondered what kind of coverage there was on data science in soccer. The answer at the time was: not much!
That, of course, has changed dramatically in the past few years. And yet, there is a sense, at least from the outside looking in, that the field has reached a kind of impasse.
Not that this is a bad thing, necessarily. Most of the work right now seems to be focused on fine-tuning a nice assortment of expected goals-related stats, as well as more speculative and complex tracking data-based approaches. Some of the math is getting more complicated, less easy for lay people to understand (and that includes on the club side of things). Even so, more teams are buying in to basic approaches to incorporating data science into how they do things.
But that wild west scene a few years ago, when any prospective analysts could waltz in with an interesting post and shake everything up, mostly seems to have calmed down. And most top clubs don’t quite seem as outright stupid as they once did in the way they run their business. So we’ve entered a new and somewhat more boring normal.
At the same time, I don’t think it’s good to leave the all the analytics writing to the analysts. While there have been a few non-data scientist journalists that have done a good job keeping tabs on this stuff, I don’t see as consistent coverage of the subject as I once did, and a lot of the more meta-stuff on analytics as an element of football seems to have been ceded to people who already either analysts themselves or true believers.
Yet most of the people who have to make the hard financial decisions at football clubs are still as mathematically savvy as the next lay person, and not every question they have about the utility of data science in football is naive. It’s important to try to see recent developments in the field from their perspective, and to take their skepticism seriously. That requires looking at data science in football from an outsider’s perspective, and as a philosophy graduate, writer and countertenor, I definitely have that.
Finally, this is a completely self-serving exercise, an excuse to try to dig a little deeper than whatever happens to be trending on Nuzzel.
My aim is to get this out at least once a week, and if it’s successful, perhaps more frequently. For now, I don’t at all plan to charge for any of this, so don’t worry (for now). So enjoy!