I’m grateful to The Athletic for this amazing opportunity - which to my mind is one of the most unique in football journalism in the UK as of right now - and hope you join me in my journey from this point onwards. The usage of data in clubs was in its infancy, and I was determined to spend my working life involved in football. I even got so bored on my year in industry at a management consultancy firm that I started a blog about my ideas of what football analytics is, how it can be applied and my own research. As can reading “The Numbers Game” and, shockingly, “Moneyball”. A module at university about the “Economics of Football” can take some of the credit for that. There’s a near life-sized poster of Cesc Fabregas at the foot of my bed, who made the trip back with me on one anxious bus journey home from school, after trying my luck at the local JJB Sports.įast forward several years and my connection with Arsenal softened (albeit I still wake up to Cesc staring at me when I go home) and I started to pay more attention to the numbers side of the game. I have an Arsenal badge painted on my bedroom wall back home. Yes, I got into football during the reign of The Invincibles.Įver the football hipster (or just one with a penchant for the new and shiny) my Arsenal shirts read “Van Persie”, “Hleb” and “Eduardo” on the back. How I wish I heeded that advice as a kid, when I chose Arsenal as my team. As I tried to explain to my girlfriend on a trip to Parc des Princes last year, it’s not all champagne before kick-off and 4-0 wallopings of lower-placed opposition. My love of football came later than most of my peers and, being honest, I probably set my expectations too high for what fandom was going to be like. I can’t wait to get started and collaborate with some of the best in the business to deliver some truly unparalleled storytelling. So there you have it, I’m here to tell visually appealing, data-driven stories, in a language for all to understand. If you’re reading my work, expect to see graphics, charts and visuals that illustrate the data in innovative ways. I’m a believer that you don’t tell data, you show it and I’ll be applying that passion to my pieces. I’m also joining The Athletic because they’ve welcomed the opportunity for me to make use of one of my passions on the site - data visualisation. Liverpool and Brentford’s well-documented use of analytics attests to that fact. There will always be detractors saying that “football’s not played on spreadsheets!”, but they do have their uses. Trust me - you’re more likely to have a productive conversation with a TV pundit if you don’t mention the words “logistic regression” or “xml feeds”.Īnd buy-in is key. The reason for this is obvious - I wouldn’t be able to get buy-in otherwise. I’d often describe my role as a translator because many of the conversations I’ve had in the past few years have come from needing to convert the technical and scientific aspects of what we were building into the language of football. Like it or not, I was part of the team that brought Expected Goals and Live Win Probability to your screens. In my previous stint at sports data company Opta, I was tasked with building metrics and models, and bringing them to a wider audience - be it professional clubs, national teams, broadcasters, or plenty of others in between. My job is to make sure that your experience of the number side of football is far smoother than that of Bob and Charlotte’s when trying to converse with the locals in Tokyo. Poignant why? Well, I believe I’m bringing something slightly different to The Athletic’s squad - a translator able to convert the number-dense and sometimes opaque world of football analytics into features, analysis and stories for all to understand and enjoy. I know, I know, it’s shocking I haven’t watched it before, but it was a particularly poignant choice given that today I join The Athletic as a Football Analytics Writer. On Friday night, I watched Lost In Translation for the first time.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |