Analytics

I arrived home this evening to a pleasant series of emails from Manchester City Football Club, specifically their analytics department. For those of you who are unaware of this department please take a look at their website. I too was unaware less than 24 hours ago until reading this post over at A Football Trader’s Path. Data analysis is what I do for a living (technically it is “Business Intelligence”) and this is the sort of project which interests me. I don’t have anywhere near enough spare time to replicate some of the more ambitious projects out there but I was hoping to do a few interesting visualisations with the data.  Exactly what these visualisations were I hadn’t really thought about so I was a little taken aback when I checked my emails.

Lacking inspiration but wanting  to dive right in, I remembered hearing about Theo Walcott moaning about wanting to be played as a striker. I decided it might be interesting to delve into his stats last season. As it turns out it wasn’t, he played every game out on the right wing. The only other player to play in the same position in the same formation over a reasonable number of games was Nathan Dyer. Theo scored more and set up more per game, their crossing accuracy was about the same but Dyer was much more involved, passing the ball successfully 50% more often. That was about as far as I got with that one before I realised I’d need to spend a significantly greater amount of time analysing the data before I got anything meaningful.

Undeterred I then remembered how much I dislike Scott Parker as a football player and decided to see just how often he passes backwards. Turns out there was only more disappointment there. The graph below is a scatter plot of all players who passed more than 200 times last season and the percentage of those passes which went forward. I marked out 4 data points. The black square is Scott Parker who was nowhere near the worst offender in the league with a massive 28.3% of his passes going forward. No, that prize went to Swansea’s (now of Liverpool) Joe Allen (red diamond) who sent only 15.4% of his passes in front of him. The other 2 highlighted points are  Luka Modric (green triangle) who sent 26.9% of his 2656 passes forward and Clint Hill (yellow diamond) who was the only outfield player to  hit over 60% of his passes forward (60.5% of 489). A slightly fairer graph is below the first that shows only midfielders playing in the most defensive midfield position available.

Not the most exciting piece of analysis, but after getting excited at the prospect of writing about how glorious or terrible Theo was I felt like I needed to write about something. Also I won’t in good faith be able to tell my friend who supports spur that Parker should go play for Barca because they can’t pass forward either. I will however be bringing Joe Allen up with my Liverpool supporting colleagues first thing in the morning. Hopefully over the next few weeks as I try and turn this flat file into something more usable I’ll be able to come up with some interesting statistics to share. Until then I’ll leave you with the news you’ve all been dying to hear, Beacher is now 52-0 against me.