
Advanced soccer analytics: building and applying a pitch control model in Python - rjtavares
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X1cSehLg6s
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rjtavares
This is a really niche topic (Football/Soccer analytics), although its reach
could be high, so let me contextualize a little bit (btw, I'm using the word
Football from now on):

Football statistics were traditionally based on specific event: passes and
shots. From these you can compute certain statistics like % of Possession
(contrary to what it may look, % Possession is calculated from passes, not
actual possession time) and Shots on Target.

Football is notoriously a low scoring sport, and shots differ in quality quite
a bit, so a measure was created to address this: Expected Goals (xG). This was
around 2010, and only this season hit the mainstream as the Premier League
broadcasters started to present those values (based on Opta's model).

More advanced stats, but similar in concept, were created since, like Expected
Assists and xG Chain (in this case, a value is attributed to each player that
participated in the possession chain).

But even shots are kind of rare (usually around 10 shots on target per match),
and these stats completely disregard the defensive side of the equation, so
increasingly full positional data is used in Football Analytics.

In 2018, William Spearman presented an influential paper at MIT Sloan Sports
Analytics Conference called "Beyond Expected Goals" (this video is an open
implementation of that paper)[1]. He was later hired by Liverpool FC as their
lead Data Scientist.

You can watch a video by Spearman himself about the Pitch Control Model and
recent innovations here.[2]

As you can see, this is pretty close to the state of the art in Football
Analytics. It's a huge moment that very few people noticed, so I'm trying to
get it out there.

[1] [http://www.sloansportsconference.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018...](http://www.sloansportsconference.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/02/2002.pdf)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9PrwPyolyU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9PrwPyolyU)

