StatsBomb: Advanced Football Analytics Through An Interactive Platform

STATSBOMB is a UK-based football analytics and data visualisation company introducing common data analytics practices seen in business and tech to the world of football analytics. Through their recently launched (February 2019) STATSBOMB IQ data visualisation platform they offer immediate accessibility to valuable football insights from all major leagues and players across the globe.

The company was founded in January 2017, after self-described data geek Ted Knutson - now CEO and co-founder of STATSBOMB - traded a decade in the sports betting industry to partner with Charlotte Randall - Chief Operating Officer - and “produce the best possible analytic toolset for football clubs to use in player recruitment, team analysis, and opposition scouting”. What started as a blog sharing ideas about applied statistics in football turned into a reputable business collecting vast amounts of football data and offering an interactive visualisation platform enabling them to establish a global customer based including major clubs, federations, media, broadcasters and gambling organisations. In their ambition to establish themselves as an industry leader, STATSBOMB has recently acquired Egypt-based sports data collection company ArqamFC, gathering over 5,000 data points per match. Ted Knutson claimed that this move will allow them to offer double the amount of data points than any other provider.

STATSBOMB’s new data visualisation platform STATSBOMB IQ is the latest pioneering move by the company. Their dashboards, charts and graphs follow a similar aesthetic, clarity and data blending to those displayed by Tableau, possibly the largest data visualisation package in tech. While most, if not all, charts come already built out-of-the-box, their interactivity and filtering tools allow for sufficient customization to answer a wide range of analytical questions.

Salah’s 2018/19 STATSBOMB Profile

Messi’s 2018/19 STATSBOMB Profile

The platform has an outstanding processing performance when switching between the various sections and quickly display vast amounts of data on the screen. From player radars to shot maps, shot distributions, defensive activity, xG trendlines, corner maps and even player comparison showing similarities or complementary skill sets, STATSBOMB IQ is a reliable and robust tool offering immediate access to a complete picture of the latest football data within the click of a button.

The company also offers consultancy services to ease users into their data tools and provide them with the right assets to navigate their platform. This assistance when interpreting their large dataset - they collect more than twice the events per match than their competitors - is key in order to make their service digestible. However, the easy navigation through the clearly defined themes makes this task quick to grasp. Some of these themes include:

• Pressure: analysing how players and teams press and how they perform under pressure

• Shooting: including the location of attacking and defending players to provide both attacking and shot defending insights.

• Goalkeeping: detailed actions down to goalkeeper positioning and movements that can be tied to the insights of gathered from the quality of the shot.

While the company does not intend to replace videoanalysis, it does emphase on the compatibility of their data visualisation features to reduce the time spent by analysts and coached reviewing player and team footage during performance evaluations. By spotting the right patterns and trends in the data, a more focused approach to videoanalysis can be adopted that will narrow down the areas to further investigate. One thing is certain, their stunning data visualisations bring a refreshing approach to football analytics providing invaluable insights and introducing tools to the field of applied sports analytics that are closer aligned to today’s available technologies.

Scout7, a bespoke software for scouting

Scout7 is one of the platforms offered by Opta to help decision making in the global recruitment and development of players. It offers clubs performance data on over 520,000 players across the world and the ability to watch over 3 million minutes of video footage on their performances. The advantage of Scout7 over similar platforms is that it is usually integrated in a bespoke manner into the club's systems, allowing it to be tailored differently for each club according to that club's needs.

More than just an extensive player database, Scout7 allows clubs across the general management of their data by providing them with clear organisation and access to their information and support various departments' needs. Under the umbrella brand Intelligent Sports Framework, the Scout7 platform offers three different services to not only help with scouting but also improve the video databases for the clubs as well as provide tools for training and player development. The iSF platform is constituted of ProScout7, Scout7.tv and TrainingGround, each offering a different set of features to complement the overall software. iSF enables a scouting team to create their own custom report templates and live data widgets so that the information most frequently needed can be accessed almost immediately.

Scout7 captures their own data from matches and players across the world that can be easily accessed by scouts through Scout7.tv, where Scout7 uploads all their high definition footage. Scout7.tv also offers many advanced filtering options to find specific players or game, analyse game statistics and also create your own clips of interesting players. On top of that, the data can be augmented with other compatible third party integrations if the club needs to do so, converting it in an even more complete platform for scouting. 

It is with ProScout7, another piece of Scout7's overall platform, where all the scouting information and actions take place. ProScout7 is a management system for scouting reports and assessment of players, where information can be flagged and shared to the rest of the scouting department for further analysis or decision making. In this section, scouts can create recommendation lists of players they wish to flag and rate each of the players the club wishes to pursue. These lists and player ratings can also be archived for later use. Similarly to Scout7.tv, scouts can also use advanced search functionality to find players of certain criteria and characteristics they are looking for, and compliment their assessments with reports from the Scout7 team themselves to consolidate a more complete view on particular players.

Lastly, the TrainingGround platform from Scout7 aims to take a more internal look at the club's current players and support coaches with development and injury prevention. From basic functionally such as planning training drills and reporting on performance of the team's matches to capturing physiological data of each player to run comparisons and deeper analysis as well as keeping a health record of injuries and treatments. While TrainingGround offers a simpler set of tools than ProScout7 and Scout7.tv, it demonstrates the attempt Scout7 is making to become the sole platforms for day-to-day club management in all areas and departments. Thanks to their close collaboration with the clubs due to its tailor-made integration of Scout7, they can find technological gaps in other areas of the club, get valuable feedback directly from the team and go back and build solutions that fit exactly those needs.

LEARN MORE ABOUT SCOUT7

Opta Sports: the leading sports data provider

Launched in 1996, Opta Sports has been the major player in data collection and distribution in sports for over two decades, offering statistical information and player performance data from major sport leagues all over the world to media clients and clubs themselves. After transferring ownership several times over the years, in 2003 Opta was acquired by Perform Group, a sports media company based in the UK who also own other brands such as Goal.com and Sporting News Media in the US. Perform Group itself is owned by Ukrainian businessman Len Blavatnik through his privately held multinational industrial group called Access Industries.

With over 400 employees around the world, Opta collects data on 60,000 fixtures a year across 30 different sports in 70 countries. While football is their main business, the company also collects data for rugby union, rugby league, cricket, american football, baseball, basketball and ice hockey. Their data varies in the level of complexity and depth, from simple live scores to augmented data through statistical modeling. They classify their data offerings in four different tiers:

• Core: live scores, updates and post-match content

• Classic: team and player-level aggregated data and statistics

• Performance: the most detailed and accurate level of data

• Advanced: analytical assessment and modelling on augmented data

But how do they collect all this data? Opta hires teams of full-time and part-time analyst to watch every single game that takes place and, with the use of their data collection video software, notate all the various events that occur on the field, often capturing up to 2,000 pieces of data per match. Opta's data collection software operates similarly to a video game, where each combination of buttons will represent an action by a certain player allowing the analyst to press the appropriate combination of buttons as they watch the live game. Three analyst will be involved in each game: one for the home team, one for the away team and a third one to double check the data. The data is then checked by a post-match team to ensure 100% accuracy.

Once the data has been collected, Opta offers different methods to distribute the data to its clients, such as feeds, widgets and apis. Feeds are one of the most popular method due to the level of flexibility and detail Opta can offer depending on its client's requirements, whether is live or historical data in a number of different formats. While Opta don't expose their feeds pricing structure, presumably to be able to adapt it based on client needs, it is suspected that it can range between £500 to £2,000 in a number of cases. However, pricing is stablished case by case and is highly negotiable. Opta takes into consideration whether it can form a strategic partnership with the client (ie. size of the business requesting the data), revenue model, type of data requested and other various factors before determining a final price for their feed service.

Aside from their raw data collection and distribution, Opta is also pioneering the development of new ways to look at sport through the creation of new metrics to augment the data captured. Their most popular metrics so far has been xG (expected goals), where they provide a value to a specific shot, or group of shots, to determine the likelihood of the shot being scored based on historical data of similar shots. In a similar fashion, they expended xG to create xA (expected assists), to identify the likelihood of a pass becoming an assist in an goalscoring opportunity. However, their most recent developments are sequences and defensive coverage. Sequences refer to the passage of play that takes place from the moment possession is gained to when it is lost, including by a shot on goal. Within sequences, they also look at possession, which is the number of consecutive sequences the team has without losing control of the ball (ie. a shot that ends up in a corner for the attacking team will mean 2 sequences in 1 possession). In terms of defensive coverage, Opta has developed a metric to measure the area of defensive actions by a player during a match.

Opta has established themselves as the leaders in football, rugby and cricket data around the world. Their client portfolio continues to expand and they are now working with major sporting organisations from media to clubs. Some of their most memorable partnerships include Sky Sports, Arsenal FC, Real Madrid, Manchester City, the MLS, BBC Sport and the All Blacks, amongst many others.

How Wyscout has evolved football scouting

Wyscout initially launched in 2004 in Italy as a Football Match Analysis and Advertising provider, amongst other minor services the company offered. It was not until 2008 when they launched their first user interface to offer access to their footballer database containing basic stats such as weight and height of players. Since then, the platform has experience rapid growth and popularity in the world of football and particular in the scouting field.

By 2012, Wyscout had captured videos and statistics of over 200,000 players around the world and was now actively being used by 300 professional clubs and 15 national sides, as reported by The Guardian newspaper right before the opening of the 2012/13 season's winter transfer window. Wyscout had established themselves in the forefront of worldwide scouting, ending with the most traditional methods historically used where scouts went to view players across the world with a notepad. With a platform like Wyscout, all the information and video footage they needed to know about their next multimillion signing or future youth academy star was as far as the click of a button.

However, as CEO of Wyscout Matteo Camponodico points out, the platform is not intended to replace scouts, as their roles continue to be crucial in shaping the future of clubs. Wyscout simply makes their job better by offering videos of players for them to review before or after they view them live. With the expanding range of functionalities the company continues to add, clubs can now list their transfer-listed players, examine footage of player trials, contact agents to discuss potential offers, view contract duration of players they are interested in signing and much more.

By 2016, SkySports reported that Wyscout had hire a team of 200 analyst collecting data for 1,300 matches a week and the platform had achieved a total of 32,000 professional users. With such a rapidly growing usage and user base, the demands for the data also continue to grow. Clubs asked Wyscout to go deeper into specific areas, to not only track major leagues worldwide but collect statistics in lower divisions too to sport future talent. Today, the company offers data for even semi-professional level players. The growing amount of data collected by Wyscout also increasingly requires smarter analytics to be applied to it. For example, to help digest and compare the wide variety of data offered, Wyscout develops indexing models to allow clubs to compare two team across completely different leagues using similar ratios.

Today, Wyscout is the main platform during transfer windows worldwide. The large majority of transfers in the world of football initiate and often get closed through Wyscout. But the use of the platform has also expanded to track player performance and even journalists are now using it to write articles about particular players. Even players are now making use of Wyscout to track their stats and those of their next opposition.

Matteo Camponodico's plans don't end here. He has an ambitious vision to continue the incredible growth of the platform and we are guaranteed to continue to hear a lot more about this great platform.