Football Hackers: The Science and Art of a Data Revolution

Product Information

Some of the topics covered in this title include the emergence of positional data analysis and the benefits of a data driven approach to decision making in football.

Football Hackers : The Science and Art of a Data Revolution Football Hackers : The Science and Art of a Data Revolution

The author of this fantastic title – Christoph Biermann – has spoken with numerous scientists, managers, scouts and psychologists involved in the game to provide a balanced account of the growing influence of data within football. Arguably, player data is now integral to the decision-making process undertaken at most football clubs today. As I turned every page I kept saying to myself, “but I use those tools [voronoi diagrams]” and “I do that all the time [network analysis].While this all sounds very promising for video analysis, Biermann also highlights the roadblocks that data analysis faces, with Guardiola himself having reservations. Hoffenheim coach Nagelsmann makes his training sessions so complicated that his sports psychologist Jan Mayer says about the players "We want their head to spin during training" - and you only learn when your brain has to work hard. Defenders don’t get much tougher than ‘Chopper’ Harris, and as a striker you knew that if you came up against Chelsea in the 1960s or ‘70s that you would be in for a tough time.

Football Hackers The Science and Art of A Data - Scribd Football Hackers The Science and Art of A Data - Scribd

Biermann seamlessly crafts a narrative showcasing the dance of strategy, passion, and numbers in the modern football realm. If you are interested in football analytics, there is a course given by David Sumpter of Uppsala University that I really enjoyed. It didn't try to draw snappy conclusions like The Numbers Game but still felt closer to the actual world of football than Soccernomics or Soccermatics. But it would be absurd, in this day and age, to look for players without the use of digital pre-sorting facilities. Introduced a new perspective on the importance of narratives, both human and data-driven, in shaping the football world.If I was to pick and place one of the recommendations in this post above the rest in the list of the best football analytics books, I would vouch for Soccernomics; not only due to its overwhelming popularity among football readers, but also because it looks at analytics from multiple angles as opposed to most of the other titles. Biermann is open minded enough not to foist opinions on what he presenting and let us decide if things make sense or are applicable to the game. Players could literally see what type of opponent and patterns of play they were up against in advance.

Summer books of 2019: Sports | Financial Times Summer books of 2019: Sports | Financial Times

This instantly made me think of my contempt for Chris Wondolowski, who epicly missed the golden chance to take the US into the 2014 World Cup quarterfinals. Steilcast — Okay, not really an analytics podcast, but fun to listen to if you are interested in the Bundesliga.It would seem at this point in time there isn’t a clear Moneyball stat that’ll let teams play the game in a more efficient way overall, but there are likelihoods attached with every action which will correspond with the xG and other similar stats. In it, he considers how psychological phenomena such as confirmation bias, outcome bias, and the availability heuristic influence how we think about football.

English Football’s Top TEN ‘Hackers’ Of All Time? English Football’s Top TEN ‘Hackers’ Of All Time?

It's not that the side topics he discusses are bad, they would just be better utilized as footnotes so they don't fill up several paragraphs and cause the topic of the chapter to appear somewhat disjointed. Could that happen in refereeing so that the smaller countries will stay more behind the leading ones?

In 2018, football consulting firm 21st Club found that players from Ligue 1 were on average 17 per cent more expensive than players of a similar level from other leagues, like Switzerland, for example. Many experts in football – coaches, officials or chairmen – were football professionals themselves at one point. The author brings with him a deep love of the game, a curiosity and drive to understand and explain and a human touch allowing him to really flesh out the many interesting figures he meets.