Josh Hobbs looks into the relationship between success and squad ages to see if there is any correlation between age and performance in football. With speculation swirling around his future, Manchester United manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer made a very interesting selection decision for their recent game against Tottenham Hotspur. The...
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Josh Hobbs returns to his ‘Measuring Transfer Success Through Minutes Played’ article to see how TransferLab’s Goal Difference Added metric can clarify the findings. Last month, I published an article with Analytics FC looking at the idea of measuring transfer success by minutes played. The piece was inspired by...
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Josh Hobbs explores one way of quantifying successful transfers through looking at ‘Minutes Played’. Speaking at the recent Statsbomb conference at Stamford Bridge, Liverpool Football Club’s Head of Research, Dr Ian Graham, made the claim that, statistically speaking, over 50% of ‘big transfers’—defined in this case as those over...
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Eric Laurie creates a bespoke profile for wing backs in TransferLab. Recently, I looked at the role of the outside centre back, building a profile in TransferLab to assess which players might be suited to that role. To do this, I selected various metrics which I felt best represented...
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Josh Hobbs explores the idea of “attacking balance” and takes a look at how teams in the Premier League fare by that measure. “They’re a one-man team.” “If those two got injured at the same time, they’d have nothing going forward.” These are common criticisms that crop up all...
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Eric Laurie looks at the outside centre back role and explores the underlying data to see what we can learn about it. An interesting development in football throughout recent seasons has been the increased use of a back three/five with some of the clubs using this tactical feature becoming...
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Jon Mackenzie uses TransferLab to build a potential starting XI for England’s Round of 16 match against Germany. Perhaps this is the case whenever football fans are involved, but for England, the story of the European Championship so far has been selection issues. And it’s not hard to see...
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Alex Mahoney of 44SPORTS explains how fertile a source of recruitment Liga MX in Mexico could be for European clubs. Despite a handful of high-profile transfers to Europe from the Mexican league (Liga MX) and consistently solid performances of the Mexican National Team at virtually every World Cup, Mexican...
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Abdullah Abdullah looks at how the role of the centre forward is changing within women’s football. European football has a new name on its Champions League trophy. Last month, Barcelona Femini thrashed Chelsea Women 4-1 and in the process became the first team other than Olympique Lyon Feminin to...
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In this series, Josh Hobbs explores some of the novel metrics we have been able to develop using the TransferLab algorithm. One of the perennial problems using data to analyse football is the discrepancy that exists between those with the ability to manipulate data and those who understand what is taking...
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