It can be difficult to be involved in football statistics and not sound like you’re recruiting for a cult. “Expected goals will change your life. It’s the true way to live. Pay me some money for my data feed and expertise and I can show the way to enlightenment and inner peace.” Actually, scratch the…
A town in Wales made the news recently when a graphic designer painted alternative measurements for social distancing on the pavement. Seven chihuahuas, 85.36 pound coins, 22 scones and 33.7 carrot cakes for the cafe. In other rural areas, the length of a cow has been used as a reminder of how much space two…
Three months is both lots of time and no time at all. Three months ago, there was no Premier League action, and now the season is at an end. But three months ago we were in the midst of various lockdown-related restrictions, and that, unfortunately, hasn’t changed as much as we’d all like. It seems…
In February 2013, Rami Moghadam pushed a domino that would change football. Rami Modhadam was, is, a designer and art director. And the domino was in basketball. Ted Knutson, of StatsBomb (then: blog, now: company), saw Moghadam’s radar charts and, along with Nat James’, applied the design to football. Although radars had been seen in…
At the risk of annoying fans of the other football, the NFL is quite a simple game to understand. You have big players who block, little brave players who run through them, fast players who can catch, and one player who can throw the ball. And then there are tight-ends. They line up on offence…
Regardless of whether you’re a Liverpool fan, the Reds winning the title has led to at least one good thing: the story of Harry Redknapp’s CD-ROM of data being made public. From The Athletic: “In [Michael] Edwards’ early days, [Harry] Redknapp called to ask why he could not get anything out of a CD-ROM filled…
Premier League football is back after a long pandemic lockdown and… well, at least it’s football. It might, understandably, not be of the highest quality, but it’s the sport we love and there’s plenty of it to watch. It’s felt noticeably different from the norm, but how much of that is a real change and…
A certain section of technology experts will live and die by Ray Kurzweil’s ‘law of accelerating returns’. Evolution happens exponentially, the theory goes, for technology as well as for anything. People build on the knowledge of what’s come before, and that knowledge helps them get new knowledge faster. This won’t be a post about that…
Data is a word with four letters but the way it’s used often makes it feel bigger than that. Sometimes people ask ‘how to use’ football data, as if there were One Single Way or a multi-step programme for how to live a more enriched, wholesome, data-guru life. There are definitely some things that should…
If you’re reading this blog post, you’re probably someone who likes, or is at least intrigued by, football data. If so, you’ve made a good choice. You’ve made a good choice because now you get a peek at the work we’ve been doing at Twenty3 to make data visualisations (a many-syllable way of saying pretty…