Football analysis is basically a question-driven retelling of a match: tracking the events that happened, and the ones no one saw. There is a lot of data that can get generated in every match—the events that happen on the ball, off it, coordination between a subsection of the team’s formations, and the battles that take place between each lineup. There is a unique importance to all of this.
On-the-ball events let us understand possession patterns, shots, and overall scoring-style metrics—the kind of thing you might skim on FotMob. Off-the-ball tracking lets us understand sustained pressure, possible threats in play, and it gives us an overall understanding of why an on-the-ball event would have happened. Every single on-the-ball event has at least four or five off-the-ball events that serve as its context—maybe that is part of why that kind of data is paid. Lineup data lets us understand the shapes and patterns behind a team’s attacks, defences, and transitions; that gives us a big-picture read on what is likely to happen next.
The most basic layer is to reconstruct the match timeline—goals, fouls, corners, offsides. Going a little deeper, we can understand possessions and the key phases of offence and defence.
If we ask the right questions, we can also understand transitional phases, build-up phases, and the role and behaviour of each player in the lineup. From there we can evaluate a player’s passing profile, progression metrics, actions, and role adherence. Combining it all, we can analyse the whole team and the whole game.
There is a lot we can question, and a lot of it will be asked and answered over this blog series.
Let us understand what the StatsBomb open data events are all about, and what we can do with them, taking the example of the La Liga match between Real Madrid and Barcelona on 2017-12-23, at the Santiago Bernabéu.