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…
Liverpool are reigning champions of the Premier League, Europe and the world. Jurgen Klopp, with the help of Michael Edwards and the recruitment team, has put the Reds back on their perch and it’s happened without the club spending eye-watering fees on a regular basis. Yes, the club did part with close to £130million to…
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…
In Timo Werner, Chelsea have signed one of the best young forwards in the world. But his arrival may give manager Frank Lampard one of the biggest headaches. The Germany international signed off on his RB Leipzig career with a brace against Augsburg to help Die Roten Bullen to a 2-1 win. The double took…
Liverpool are Premier League champions. Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mane are battling it out for the Golden Boot and Alisson Becker is leading the race for the Golden Glove. Then there’s Roberto Firmino, a player without a league goal at Anfield all season. In a team filled with overperformers, it can seem as though he’s…
During the summer of 2009, Real Madrid had one of the best transfer windows ever. Cristiano Ronaldo swapped Manchester for Madrid, Kaká traded Milan for the Spanish capital while Xabi Alonso left Merseyside to return to Spain along with team-mate Álvaro Arbeloa. Los Blancos also won the race to sign Lyon prodigy Karim Benzema ahead…
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…
Brighton and Hove Albion are one of the few clubs in the Premier League that invest a lot of time in using data to help drive their recruitment. It helped them identify the likes of Pascal Groß, Yves Bissouma, Leandro Trossard and José Izquierdo, along with many others. However, their shrewdest purchase might be that…
The Data Game series sees Twenty3 speak to prominent writers and figures in football to get their opinion on the use of data and analytics in the beautiful game. In the second instalment, we spoke to freelance football writer Chris Smith, who features regularly for our friends at Squawka and World Football Index. Here’s what…
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…