Football is not baseball. Football is not basketball. Football is not American football. And football certainly isn’t cricket. Football is unlike any other team sport because, and I hope I don’t offend fans of these other sports by saying this, football is the most complex of sports. What do I…

I am going to explain what expected goals are, how they can be used to measure performance, and why we should be careful in the way we interpret these numbers. Expected goals (or xG) are the best-known metric in football analytics. They measure the quality of a chance created. When…

Whenever we see a TV program or film about statistics in sport there is nearly always a scene where we are shown a wall of numbers scrolling down the screen, sometimes on a computer monitor, other times as a special effects flow of numbers through the ether around our sporting…

After the 2016 summer Olympics, where gold-favorites USA crashed out after a penalty shootout in the quarter-finals against Sweden, the US Women’s National Team’s sporting organization vowed never to lose in this way again. Next major championship they would be prepared. They would take a scientific approach to penalty taking. …

The game of football is simple. If you have got the ball, keep it within your team. If you are near the ball, but one of your teammates has it, then support that player and make yourself available to receive it. If you are further away from the ball, think…

“What do you do during 87 minutes when you do not have the ball? That is what determines whether you’re a good player or not” — Johan Cruyff Since wingers and forwards can spend as little as 180 seconds on-ball during a game, what they do when they have the ball accounts for a very small contribution during the 90 minutes the ball is in play. …

Football analytics isn’t just about numbers. It is about creating the patterns of play that win matches. Here, we look at how coaches can work with data scientists to do exactly that. — In the previous article in this series, I looked at how single numbers, in the form of Key Performance Indices (KPIs) can help a whole club — the players, the manager and coaching staff, the board and even the fans — work together towards a clearly defined goal. The statistic…

This article originally appeared in Swedish in Svenska Dagbladet. It wasn’t until I’d known Watson for four years that he told me the story of how he came to go to school. He was nine years old when he noticed that many of the other children in his village, near…

At the Barca Sports Technology Symposium, I had the honour of chairing a session about taking data into the field in sports. The three participants were Sergio Oliva (Vice President of Strategy, Philadelphia 76ers), Charlie Rohlf (Statistics and Data Manager at NBA) and Ian Graham (Director of Research at Liverpool…