#football-analytics

#football-analytics

What football fans expect from sports sites has shifted completely. Dry match reports about yesterday's game don't cut it anymore. People want real-time numbers, instant updates, and analytics they can actually dig into. Site owners who want to keep visitors around have no choice - static pages need to become living information hubs, and data visualization tools make that happen. High-quality infographics are becoming just as important an element as original articles.

The best right-wingers in the world might be the most difficult task of any position on the pitch. Historically, a certain Argentine has been king of lists ranking the best players in the world, but as Lionel Messi winds down, there are certainly plenty of stars waiting to assume his crown, with the top half-dozen sides in the world each having an elite star in that position.

The best left-backs in the world hasn't always been a pool of elite talent. In the olden days, you didn't even have to be left-footed: full-backs have long been mocked for being the worst players in any XI, yet that all changed with the likes of Roberto Carlos and Ashley Cole, ushering in an era of dynamic, exciting left-backs capable of offering creativity and stability. They're just as valuable a member of anyone else and these days,

Given the Danes are among Europe's most prolific coffee drinkers, chances are nearly every staff member will visit the one breakout area at FC Midtjylland's training complex several times daily. While there, not only will they receive their caffeine hit but also a reminder of the club's most important table, which sits directly above the machine dispensing espresso after espresso. It is not, though, the Superliga standings (which they have topped four times since 2015) but a graph showing Midtjylland's dead ball goal difference.

Expected goals (xG) is a metric used to determine how likely a player is to score a chance and to calculate how many goals a team is expected to score in a match. The metric was invented in 2012 by Opta's Sam Green and has become commonplace across football analytics. In xG, every shot a player has is given a score between zero and one.

And at this point, we have to acknowledge that Pep Guardiola is one of the principal reasons this kind of possession pornography exists in the first place: a serendipitous consequence of reinventing the game at exactly the moment we could start measuring the ways in which he was reinventing it, and exactly the moment we could beam it around the world in meme-sized fragments.