quantitative football analysis blogs

VoetbalWizard

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Some budding blogs that try to tackle more quantitative questions in football.

Many are written by americans; they're a decent read, though this field is no where near as mature as the analysis in american sports.

On Football

Soccer Analysts

Soccer By The Numbers

A Beautiful Numbers Game

Soccermetrics

I know many on here will have a laugh since most are written by americans, but the effort put in and the level of analysis is to be commended.
 

SmashedHombre

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I don't care who writes these things, but I do laugh at the idea football can be analysed quantitatively and I have to wonder why people put so much effort into trying to do so.
 

B20

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I don't care who writes these things, but I do laugh at the idea football can be analysed quantitatively and I have to wonder why people put so much effort into trying to do so.
All the major clubs rely on sophisticated computer analysis of players and games. They seem to think it has some merit.
 

B20

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OPTA, Prozone etc... Are very different to stuff like this though.
have you looked at it? Some of it is quite sophisticated and illuminating.

Either way, laughing at the thought of analysing football with numbers puts you out of the company of those who deal with football at its most serious level.
 

peterstorey

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He nailed it first time up:

A little over two years ago, I posed the question, "Can a 'Moneyball' approach be successful in soccer?" This was my answer at the time:

"While I believe that there are some very intriguing questions about the applications of statistics to soccer, in general I think the answer to the original question is no."
 

VP

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Trying to analyse a game of football by numbers is as pointless as taking a painting by Picasso and counting the number of brushstrokes or colours he used.
More akin to comparing different paintings from different artists using number of brushstrokes or colours. Will be a pointless exercise for lot of paintings but could equally be quite useful for others.
 

hungrywing

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He nailed it first time up:

A little over two years ago, I posed the question, "Can a 'Moneyball' approach be successful in soccer?" This was my answer at the time:

"While I believe that there are some very intriguing questions about the applications of statistics to soccer, in general I think the answer to the original question is no."
TBF a Moneyball approach won't work as nearly as well in most any other team sport, not just football. Sabermetric data analysis relies heavily on the "compartmentalized" nature of American baseball plays.
 

AVARiCE

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That was my immediate reaction too! :lol:

...We're both huge nerds, aren't we? :(

As for the actual topic itself, I'm torn. On one hand the "lad" in me looks at attempts to quantify football as stupid and dismisses it. On the other hand, I think of all the other things that were probably dismissed on the way to football becoming the game it is now and can't bring myself to rule it out completely.

While you can't completely quantify the game because of moments of magic alone, you can get pretty damn far. Plus some of these stats are actually very useful. Wenger recently shared one which I found fascinating, which was about the amount of time premiership players have to make a decision. I've forgotten the time but I remember it took me back a bit.

Overall? Ignore me, I have no idea what I'm on about.
 

SFraser

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I hope these quantitative football analysis blogs have our 19 titles in big bold words and numbers next to Liverpools paltry 18.