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pro time-wasting || liquid tree enthusiast || First XI: @Twenty3sport || 🥫Give to your local food bank🥫 || He/him
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For ages, while Big Tech was scrambling to copy ChatGPT, I was looking for an 'AI and football' topic I actually wanted to write about for my newsletter
In the end, I landed on the simplest one. Teach everyone - including myself - how 'AI' actually works
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Always nice to see hard work behind the scenes showing itself on the pitch. Great bit of synchronised drop 'n' rolling here from Vardy and Zeegelaar. Marvelous stuff.
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If I don't see that little clip of wan-bissaka getting past about 3 city players in a nice little gif i will be disappointed
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You can take the kid out of Dortmund...
Seven points ahead?
So Haaland... My head is finished. The team that has the terminator is SEVEN points behind
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Look, if everyone has to be two hours early to something, the start time is just two hours earlier
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The way this penalty disappears into the night sky is quite beautiful
A feast of penalties tonight in the FA Cup tie I was at.
Four penalties in the 90 mins, one scored by each side & a further two missed by Aylesbury United.
FT: Aylesbury United 2
Moneyfields 2
Moneyfields then won the shoot out 4-3 (after 7 pens each).
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Meryl Streep's only got a Best Actress Oscar nomination conversion rate of 2/17, the absolute fraud - you wouldn't want her in your movie!
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Related to this, told someone not in stats world this weekend that 'touches' are not actually all touches a player makes. They were mad.
Romelu Lukaku's SEVEN touches vs Crystal Palace - a new Premier League low! 🥴
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From a generic football content site this wouldn't be good, but it's a particularly bad thing for a coach-specific brand to overlook Sarina Wiegman, who achieved both of these things 11 months ago.
Gareth Southgate becomes the first manager to take England to two major tournament finals.
He is also the first to lead the team to a final outside of England. 🏴👏
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The rules of this award have really gotta be tweaked
BREAKING: The nominees for the Premier League Barclays Young Player of the Season award are in! 👀
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JUNE 2025?!?! They must be DAFT to give him a contract seven-; wait, five-; wait, three-and-a-half years long
Aubameyang signs a contract until June 2025 with an option to agree an early departure on June 2023.
His release clause is €100m.
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got a very sad image in my head of De Jong spending years thinking he doesn’t offer much at all on the football pitch and being very down on himself until some friendly data analyst showed him his xGChain figures
'I'm not the best for scoring most goals but through data I learnt I'm important in the build up to scoring a goal. I could show this statistical finding to others, and it changed their opinion!' -
@DeJongFrenkie21
⚽️📈
@FCBarcelona
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Oh, this is just like when [redacted] club gets a lovely big sponsorship deal from [redacted company linked to the ownership]
JUST IN: SpaceX purchases large advertising package from Twitter.
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@AFHStewart
@GraceOnFootball
Gonna have a hard time believing that this is a footballer and not a 13th century philosopher knight
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Guarding the door to Moisés Caicedo there are two agents, one who always tells the truth and one who always lies - you may only negotiate if you work out which is which
Everyone knew about Moisés Caicedo in 2021. The reason Brighton got him was because only they could figure out exactly who his agent was.
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A compilation of Maldini largely making sliding tackles
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This is the Guardiola equivalent of “Lads, it’s Tottenham”
Kevin De Bruyne: "The day before a game, we usually train tactically, based on how the opponent play. Before United, Pep said: 'We don't know how they are going to play. We shall see'. And we stopped training after 10 minutes or so..." [via MIDMID Podcast /
@HLNinEngeland
]
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My “has the confidence of credit rating agencies” t-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt
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the people asking for an Arsenal All or Nothing… may not have all been Arsenal fans
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when the replay operator lets you know that the on-field decision was offside
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content note: rape
This is the outline of the rape allegation against Cristiano Ronaldo I tend to link to:
It includes the line: In an early version [of a questionnaire], it appears that Ronaldo[...]explains: "She said no and stop several times."
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Can tell Sam Kerr’s an elite forward by how she took advantage of being in the idiot’s blind side to make this move
It is very important to watch this video with sound. (I have many questions about how this dude was just allowed to wander, but I also need you to watch this with sound.)
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My theory about how people create narratives about matches is that stuff like this has a disproportionate influence on our memories. The start of the second half was so eye-catching that it becomes the anchor of how we remember the rest of the game
They had a spell of dominance after the break. A 15-minute spell across the entire game.
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I love it when they play the hits
Jose Mourinho after Roma's loss to Milan: "If I speak, they will disqualify me. I don't want a disciplinary action against me."
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E.g. If a goalkeeper receives a backpass from a teammate under no pressure, carries it forwards ten yards, then boots it long, this will count as one touch in Opta's stats. Only the pass will count as a touch, not the controlling or ball-carrying touches
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In case people get worked up about Klopp, he also said (in the article)
"The decision was made by other people and if you want to criticise anybody then criticise the people who made the decision."
Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp believes footballers should not be expected to protest at the Qatar World Cup.
More from
@GarrickOmar
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There’s no way anyone, not even Ilkay Gündogan, is able to pay meaningful attention across three screens imo
The preparations never stop... 🤓⚽ Just a normal football evening at home 🤷🏻♂️
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Today's newsletter is different.
Liverpool's struggles struck me as a way to introduce football stats concepts like xG, non-shot xG, game state
There's a video:
And if you prefer reading, the article/script version is here:
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On a scale of 1 to 10, how much “Lads, it’s Tottenham” should we apply to analysing this match from a Manchester United point of view?
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Football stats glossary:
Am often aware that stats people speak about stats as a shorthand.
With
@AshwinRaman_
, and the direct or indirect help of so many who've written about football stats over the years, here is a glossary of nearly everything
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Quite besides how utterly depressing this is as a piece of coverage, what does it say that Jamie Redknapp thinks ‘if you go into the business dealings of a lot of owners we might not have a league’
🗣 "I'm not sure the majority of football fans really care who owns their club. If you were going to go in to the business dealings of a lot of the owners we might not have a league."
Jamie Redknapp on the new
#NUFC
owners and the backlash the takeover has received
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Newcastle’s performance against Arsenal is still on my mind for the - often simple - ways it was bad
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Arsenal were so good in 15/16 that they were the only serious title rivals to Leicester, failed so badly that people pinned the failure on *Tottenham* and called them Spursy for it, stoking a reputation that is now being used by Tottenham's current manager against his own players
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Is the art of defending really dying?
I spent some time watching some of the ‘all-time greats’ to find out
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crikey. hadn't realised quite what this looked like til I looked it up
England men's team wins in knockout rounds of major tournaments since Euro 96:
Denmark, 2002
Ecuador, 2006
Colombia, 2018 (pens)
Sweden, 2018
Germany, 2021
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"Alonso’s Chelsea team-mates Reece James, Antonio Rudiger and Romelu Lukaku have all been victims of racist abuse, but Alonso has not spoken to them or any other members of the squad about his preference to stand while they take the knee."
...
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The ‘what’ of what Rashford is doing off the pitch aside, this reads like if your boss continually gave you too much work to do, now recognises that it’s too much, but rather than lowering the workload is just saying you should drop your free time and spend that working instead
That third paragraph is nasty, nasty stuff, especially in the context of the first two.
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There are other ways to show solidarity with women's football yknow
Two ACL tears in three days to Madrid's two most impactful defensive players.
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I propose this as the moment we collectively put down our weapons (quote tweets) at the sight of reactionary anti-stats takes, safe in the knowledge that stats have — in all likelihood — won
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Remember when silly people were saying that Europe should've had a bunch more places at the World Cup instead of continents like Africa and that would make it a better tournament
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I hadn't gone into StatsBomb conference intending to write something about it
But six analogies, one Warholism, and 2100 words of thoughts later here we are
Some thoughts about where 'the edge' of analytics is in Autumn 2022
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I am, like, the epitome of Just A Guy On Twitter, but I feel like reaction to the Breakaway League has a lot of similarities to wider societal stuff. Feeling the rich can do what they want; stark change easier to spot + target than gradual, despite status quo also being not good
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Had to kill-your-darlings this joke from tomorrow's newsletter:
Guardiola & Tuchel walk into a bar; Mikel Arteta leaves immediately, because under the guidelines of positional play you can have no more than two people in the same horizontal and vertical plane at any one time!
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"Since 2008/09, Messi's never dropped below 1.0 goals+assists per 90 minutes. Never. Not one season. Most forwards long for just a couple of campaigns like that in a career."
On Messi, aspiration, and awe
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today's Euros feels like the football gods saw the tweets about England's 'voidball' yesterday and went 'fine, you want fun? take the goals. all of them.'
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Manchester United men might have 'a lot of talent on the pitch', but it's like bad body-building. All in the flashy muscles, not building the back of the legs up
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This stinks, in part because the 'play by our rules' that France wants, not even to foreigners but to anyone, includes the French football federation banning women wearing a hijab while playing, with attempts to pass it into law across all sports
Hugo Lloris on whether he will wear a rainbow armband at the World Cup:
"In France, when we welcome foreigners we often want them to play by our rules and respect our culture - and I will do the same when I go to Qatar."
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Ah, added time, or as we must now call it "the fifth quarter of the match"
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You know it’s a good goal when the co-comm can’t help but make a sound
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(do it anyway, eat the fine)
Also, Munich's city council demands that the Allianz Arena ought to shine in rainbow colours during Germany's game vs Hungary on Wednesday, partly as a sign against policies of Hungary's government. UEFA has yet to make a decision whether that will be allowed.
#EURO2020
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Dominant modes of European men’s football:
2008-2014: Possession-heavy
2014-2019*: High pressing
2020- : ???
*(The pandemic, imo, clearly put a big stopper in the high pressing game but I also think some teams were moving away from it anyway)
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The reason why we continually think ‘the state of defending’ (or other things) is worse in the present than the past is because we don’t have the benefit of forgetting everything we want to. Mythology starts when memory fades
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Not pictured: like 50 offside goals
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It's a failure of media rights that I've seen every Liverpool on my timeline shout about Matip scoring and I haven't seen a clip of it yet
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I would still watch the Premier League if the breakaway clubs were kicked out tbh
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The way Manchester City use possession when ahead is kinda extraordinary.
% of possession sequences that feature 10+ passes
• When losing: 6.8%
• When drawing: 9.7%
• When leading: 13.4%
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POV: you check the news app of the public broadcaster to find out what the news is in the country at the moment
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If Havertz is a late bloomer I must be approaching retirement age
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After watching some games last night, I am *fascinated* to see Cristian Romero at Tottenham
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New! The Get Goalside analytics newsletter has reached issue
#100
, just after its 3rd birthday earlier this month
To mark it, I asked a bunch of smart people for what they'd learnt in the past few years + what they might want to learn in the next few
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cackling at the English BT commentators worried about the level of physicality in this Atleti-City game
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This hits the crossbar three times. THREE TIMES!!!
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Why do football manufacturers keep doing this. For ages you couldn't get men's kits in women's cuts/sizes, now you can't get women's team kits in men's cuts/sizes. Let us all buy the product!
My high-school-aged son desperately wants this for his birthday tomorrow, but I just got off the phone with
@adidas
and they don't offer it in non-women's cuts or sizes.
whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy 😭
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Won’t be that different to a normal Champions League final then! 🥁
Manchester City and their opponents in the Champions League final in Istanbul will be allocated more than 4,000 tickets each for their fans to attend the showpiece under plans being drawn up by Uefa and local authorities |
@martynziegler
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A question to ask is what mechanism could have been put in place to allow Newcastle fans to displace Mike Ashley without needing a takeover from Saudi Arabia’s public investment fund
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Football analytics is well established now. So what do, and don't, we know about the sport?
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Doing defensive stats in football is hard, but I suspect that having a better theoretical understanding of the game will help
So I tried constructing a (sort of) theory of football
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I think this thread would be more convincing if it didn't spend most of its time talking about crowded boxes, a feature which (as the thread belatedly acknowledges) at least two of the large data providers account for, not just with proxies in their model, but *in their data*
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If you could propel one sport to the level of international enthusiasm, accessibility, money that football has, what'd it be
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This weekend's Premier League VAR feels like a double agent trying to destroy VAR from the inside
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A pioneer of data collection and football analytics. Accusations of misinterpreting his own data. An early (nearly quarter of a century old) approach to expected goals.
This is about Charles Reep, and about football analytics history:
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nobody would bat an eyelid if you wrote the City formation as a 4-3-3 where the RB inverts but it's being written as a 3-2-4-1 for... reasons
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So, I understand why run of the mill reporting leaves it out, but there’ll be pieces tonight written about Cristiano Ronaldo as a ‘character’ and a legacy, and in *those* pieces, ignoring is, imo, inexcusable
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Now let me never hear the quotes about Maldini never making a tackle or getting his shorts dirty again.
They say he floated on air. The majesty in his eyes made attackers stumble and gift the ball to his feet.
Go big or go home with your mythologising
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If you're into that kind of thing, football is a great way to learn about the world
2017: Saudi Arabia bans BeIN Sports, huge row over digital piracy and BeoutQ follows...
2022: Saudi Arabia lifts ban and Public Investment Fund wants to buy some of BeIN Sports
So what happened? And what does it mean for major players?
📝
@mjshrimper
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Hear me out, but
[Search 'Rooney drop into central midfield age final years of his career']
Find: Rooney, Wayne
Replace: Kane, Harry
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The conversation started because they asked me what a successful dribble was. They were not happy about that either
(In Opta stats, a successful dribble is a successful take-on. This one is more a case of users of Opta's data using dribble and take-on as synonyms than on Opta)
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New!
How to read a centre-back highlights reel, using Ibrahima Konaté as an example
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(the biggest difference between Guardiola and Mourinho wasn't the level of pragmatism but the philosophical starting point that their levels of pragmatism built from)
@LiamTharmeCoach
*Harrison Ford voice*
That's not what pragmatism means!
To be pragmatic is just to make the most practical decision based on the tools at your disposal!
You can be a pragmatic manager and end up in a situation where you play attacking football!
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When is a duel not a duel?
Why are some duels easier than others?
And when and for whom does it make sense to possession-adjust?
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Speedster dribblers with questionable end product are analytics twitter's version of a Bad Boy
Allan Saint-Maximin makes me wants to forget everything to do with football analytics and just watch him for vibes
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I was asked if I wanted to republish my piece on language, stats, and football on
@spielvercom
and of course said yes
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I wrote this with
@EuanDewar
on the stats behind City's dominance this season. They're really something else guys.
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Within about a week of each other: John Muller has shuttered spacespacespace for an as-yet-unnamed job; Tom Worville is leaving The Athletic for Leipzig; and (in NBA land) Owen Phillips has brought the F5 to a close for a job at the New York Knicks. Analytics content -> jobs 🤷♂️
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still feel a little uncomfortable about the (high) levels of celebratory tone around a player who an article like this has to be written about, with the specific “she said no and stop several times” phrase in it
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