Chasing the prospect of veins of gold, the mid-nineteenth century saw some of the biggest voluntary migrations in the world’s history. Prospectors arrived from as far afield as Europe and China, making the fortunes and futures of cities like San Francisco and Melbourne, dreaming of finding that precious, precious metal. They travelled and they toiled.…
Google searches can be strangely nostalgic. A quick check online for how the world, at the start of February 2020, viewed Jose Mourinho vs Pep Guardiola (with Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester City merely a sideshow) reveals that many thought their rivalry was past its best. If their respective teams couldn’t compete with each other, then…
After 42 games last season, Leeds United occupied second place in the Championship with a three-point buffer to third. They’d won eight of the previous eleven matches, righting the ship after a difficult period from late December to early February. They didn’t win any of the last four games of the season. They managed only…
It’ll remain a curse of Liverpool’s 2019/20 season that, not only has the lockdown for the coronavirus put their Premier League title victory on hold, but that their last match before the world stopped was elimination from the Champions League. It wasn’t just that the 3-2 extra-time home defeat to Atlético Madrid dumped them, the…
If a weekly trip to the cinema was part of your life’s routine, you could have spent the last month only seeing high-class, innovative period adaptations. Little Women, The Personal History of David Copperfield, Emma.; films that take a classic and give it a new spin. And — as I always say — what’s good…
It’s one of the most important questions in football: if we expect our opposition to play in a certain way, what’s the most effective way for us to play against that? That’s what we at Twenty3 were trying to answer at this year’s Opta Pro Forum. The Forum is an event held by data provider…
Another week, another day reviewing the past few days’ games and looking ahead to the next round to come. The only thing more entertaining than football is no football, because we can talk about all the football. As much as we enjoy the latest clip of the to-remain-unnamed-pundit not knowing a basic part of a…
Here’s a prediction: in two years, expected goals will be commonplace in conventional match reports. Maybe not in all outlets, maybe not in every match, but they’ll be there. There’ll probably be a major outlet that tries outputting an expected goals scoreline below the actual scoreline. (This will be a bad idea). The better use…
There’s a special kind of excitement about seeing visualisations you’ve helped create on the screen of Sky Sports. Ego, mostly, let’s be honest. But it’s also been really interesting to see which visualisations they choose to use. At Twenty3, we have a whole toolbox of toys with various ways of displaying data. Heatmaps, shot maps,…