The biggest change in football and how it is understood and interpreted has come from the rise of video analyses. Firstly it has enabled brilliant coaches like Guardiola or Van Gaal or Tuchel or Klopp to study extensive videos on their oppositions and their own team performances to come up with new ways of succeeding. It has also enabled them to learn from other coaches and derive how successful their methods are. Clubs will want their athletes in tip top shape for matches and they can only be sure that their athletes are in the best physical condition by using the data at their disposal to keep an eye on their performance in training. Judgements made in haste are often faulty, as we vastly overestimate our own abilities to make the right call in a short space of time.

How Video and Data Analysis Are - Performance Institute

Biermann states that numbers could be useful in the field of fitness but that: ‘data’s usability for devising successful strategies with the ball and tactics was less clear-cut.’ The future of football will not simply belong to those with the best data, but those who draw the best conclusions from the information at their disposal." Well written and thoughtful. Takes us on a tour of some of Europe's most innovative football thinkers - Financial Times Many sporting directors or managers prefer to rely on their network of agents as far as signing new players is concerned.The term ‘availability heuristic’ describes our mind’s flawed presumption that things that are memorised are also important. The Tifo Football Podcast — This has great interviews and discussions about tactics. It is mostly about the English Premier League, but do go over other areas of interest. It would be unthinkable today for the head coach of the Bundesliga champions to be scratching around for video footage of opponents ahead of a crucial Uefa Champions League tie. Biermann goes on to explain that the VCR has influenced football more than any other technology over the past 25 years. ‘Coaches found it much easier to learn from their best colleagues and analyse their own games,’ he observes. ‘They could show players what they are doing right or wrong rather than simply talking about it. Visual learning engendered great improvement across the board. What’s more, no one ever went into matches blindly any more, not knowing what to expect. Players could literally see what type of opponent and patterns of play they were up against in advance.’

Sport Analytics Books (Specially Soccer) : r/sportsanalytics

Dortmund, like most of their Bundesliga opponents, are a sports club of which football is but one division. The solution would lie with the Borussia Dortmund women’s handball team. The European Game: The Secrets of European Football Success The Secrets of European Football Success by Dan Fieldsend. Not a soccer analytics focused book, but does include many sections on the topic as well as the advent of exercise science methods in soccer. Gives a really nice tour of European soccer leagues and some of the rivalries. Hopefully a new edition will come out eventually.It is fascinating though that if in 2010 when video analyses and big data really went widespread - the world of soccer statistics seemed to be the future. However today still the big leap into big data and statistics has not happened. There are a few teams making use of it (like FC Midtjylland in Denmark as one example.), but generally football looks at it with suspicion.

Football Hackers: The Science and Art of a Data Revolution

Introduced a new perspective on the importance of narratives, both human and data-driven, in shaping the football world. 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. 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. The biggest thing appears to be with transfers completed utilising data with Brighton an early adopter of the strategy exemplified by their signing of Pascal Gross in the book.Coaches are usually spot on when it comes to assessing their own team’s chances but they’re not nearly as precise when it comes to the opposition’s opportunities.’ Christoph Biermann has moved in the midst of these disruptive upheavals, talking to scientists, coaches, managers, scouts and psychologists in the world's major clubs, traveling across Europe and the US and revealing the hidden - and often jaw-dropping - truths behind the beautiful game. Sporting directors and scouts face the challenge of gauging player ability across different leagues. All sports who use analytics successfully do so because the clubs see it as part of the management strategy.’

Football Lines between hero and villain are blurred in new Football

This is one of those books I expected to love. I love football and data, after all. I really liked it in the end, but it didn’t start great. Many experts in football – coaches, officials or chairmen – were football professionals themselves at one point. It is an advantage for them to have experienced many potential issues themselves, no doubt, but their previous roles might also increase their difficulties in reaching sound conclusions and making accurate predictions. The author spends a lot of time in the beginning on xG and people who created mathematical models that could not be properly presented or explained. Then gets to the norm-breakers and talks about Tuchel and Guardiola, but towards the end of that section (with the importance of set pieces) it starts getting more interesting. First off, the book is pretty poorly edited." There are a bunch of annoying grammar mistakes (simple things every now and then like substituting “that” for “which) and redundancies throughout the text (I am not sure how much of this is down to the translation from English to German). Some thoughts that don’t really get wrapped up properly and the subject tends to jump around occasionally. He sometimes gets off on tangents and un-needed details which can cause you forget the subject of the chapter. 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. Because of this, the anecdotal portions suffer a little bit.

About this book

For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. There is no escaping from narrative, period. Humans are hard-wired to make sense of things by telling stories.