Interesting article thanks. A little constructive feedback on some language in the conclusion. "Football is a game of space. That's why parking the bus can actually allow to win a match." The second sentence doesn't make sense unfortunately. Worse, it's not really possible to work out what it means either. It sounds like you mean "That's why parking the bus can be a good strategy" (or something like that). But the first sentence sets up the exact opposite expectation, a sentence like "That's why parking the bus is never a good strategy" would be compatible with the first sentence. Sadly the reader is left not knowing whether you're saying one thing, or the complete opposite.

I understand English is unlikely to be your first language. Please read this as a genuine attempt to be helpful.

There's a grammatical hiccup there with the 'allow' but the meaning is quite clear for soccer-fluent readers.

Completely unclear to me and I've been soccer (football) fluent for over 50 years. I know what parking the bus means (for non football fans - it means falling back and defending in numbers). If football is really a game of space it should be a poor strategy. Is the author saying parking the bus is good or bad strategy?

It's a strategy that gives up possession in exchange for denying offensive space to the opponent and relies on exploiting (through counter attacks) the defensive space the attacker opens. When executed well, it can win games but it's not amenable to the type of analysis presented in this write-up. That's what the bit is about.

Aha, so essentially he meant "football is a game of space, that's why parking the bus is an interesting strategy". Thank you. Too much binary thinking from me. I often struggle to discern the meaning of unclear writing. Which is probably why I spend disproportionate time on my own writing polishing and rewriting for clarity. But I still fail regularly, it's not an easy problem.

Glad it helped! I brain-pretzeled myself over soundness in this very forum just last year:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20196575

An interesting and educational thread

> "I've now come to understand the two chief weapons of the JIT remain surprise, fear, ruthless efficiency and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope."

I like this very much. Even adding nice red uniforms, it's still two chief weapons.

This is awesome. Where does the raw data come from? I'm curious how they collect such detailed data (e.g. is there someone tracking every time a specific player takes a certain action?).

There are some companies working in this space, like Opta and Statsbomb. As far as I know, they both use a mix of image processing and humans to collect the data.

It takes a lot of work, but also supports a huge and growing industry. E.g. data scouting is increasingly used by clubs to increase the pool of potential hires.

Did you do similar analysis to 2018 World Cup? Thanks for sharing your analyses of football/soccer, which is the sport that I'm passionate about.

I didn't, but the good news is that data is freely available here: https://github.com/statsbomb/open-data/

Try it!

I created a simple web tool to convert StatsBomb's json data to csv and download for any match: https://nr815jz59d.execute-api.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/sb/