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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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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Aditya Kothari looks at the ways tracking data can be used to quantify defending more effectively. The most commonly available data today are events data, and more specifically, on-ball data. When it comes to off-ball events, the kind of data available from a defensive point of view are tackles, interceptions,...
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Piotr Wawrzynów talks us through the process of creating a tool that profiles coaches in a similar manner to how you might profile players. I love talking about coaches: their ideas, approaches, philosophies. One of my favourite things is assessing a team’s early performances and trying to predict whether the...
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Alex Farnell looks at the impact that sacking a manager can have on a team’s performance and attempts to debunk some of the myths about ‘new manager bounce’. By the time the final whistle blows in many professional football matches, you wouldn’t be too surprised to hear disgruntled fans...
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James Nalton looks at some of the quirkier footballers within TransferLab’s database… Whether we like it or not, we use data all the time. In a pandemic age, graphs and charts have become an everyday occurrence. We check out local infection numbers. We are informed about R-numbers. Governmental press...
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Analytics FC Managing Director, Jeremy Steele, explores some squad planning strategies with an EFL Head Coach and shares some interesting areas to exploit using TransferLab data …… We’d like to let you into a conversation we had recently with a well known English Football League Head Coach. We were...
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Reducing transfer risk is a big part of any player recruitment strategy, and one of the biggest risk factors is the uncertainty about players transferring skills from one league to another. Analytics FC Managing Director, Jeremy Steele, delves deeper into the idea of “excahange rates” in relation to on pitch...
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‘Just how good is this 21 year old striker going to be in 5 years?’ ‘Has our 26 year old full back already peaked?’ ‘Should we be giving our 32 year old centre back a contract extension?’ Talk about a million dollar question – foresight in football is worth several times that given the...
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