Throwback Thursday! Here is the first ever football analytics article I published, for FourFourTwo, back in 2015. Enjoy! Numbers are revolutionising football. Every match provides stats about the players’ pass completion, distance run and shot conversion. Fantasy football leagues assigns points to players for goals scored, appearances and assists. On…

Bruno Fernandes? Henderson? Kovacic? Grealish? Or John McGinn? We use tracking data to find out. — Who is the best passer of the ball in the Premier League? When it comes to midfielders there is (according to the numbers) probably only one correct answer: Kevin De Bruyne. Last season (and the season before) De Bruyne passing and dribbling topped all expected threat — which measures how…

One of the key questions for everyone interested in football — from coaches, through scouts to the fans — is how do we assess the quality of a player using data. If they score a lot of goals they must be good and, more recently, we have understood that finding…

It is difficult not to love Chelsea and France player N’golo Kante. He is unassuming, hard working and modest: always looking to help the team rather than for himself. But because he works so hard, continually putting pressure on the opposition, it is also difficult to quantify his contribution using…

The key problem when scouting football players is knowing how they contribute to their team’s performance. A powerful answer to this question comes from looking at how much a player’s actions increases or decreases the chance of his or her team scoring. This approach works very well for on-the-ball actions…

The Twelve football app evaluates players live during the game. Unlike almost all other ranking that claim to evaluate players, ours is based on a rigorous statistical model of how players increase (and decrease) thier team’s chance of scoring. It is based on The Twelve points system, which is a…

My 18-year-old daughter, Elise, has never been that interested in football. I sent her off to summer camps as a kid to try to get her interested. She played for a half season with a local team. And I took her to a few matches (most notably when she was…

What does Timnit Gebru’s firing and the recent papers coming out of Google tell us about the state of research at the world’s biggest AI research department. The high point for Google’s research in to Artifical Intelligence may well turn out to be the 19th of October 2017. This was…

Anyone working in tech will know the type: the mini-Elon Musk. The young man who thinks that his brilliant idea is going to be the next Uber, Spotify or Tesla. He presents himself with confidence and assurance, but you suspect that, deep down, he has no idea what he is…