If you’re reading this post, you’re likely to be aware already of the importance of Statistics and data for various aspects of sport in general and football in particular. Nonetheless, I recently came across this short film, produced by FourFourTwo magazine, which gives a nice history of the evolution of data analytics in football. If you need a refresher on the topic, this isn’t a bad place to look.
And just in case you don’t think that’s sufficient to justify this post in a Statistics blog, FourFourTwo claims to be ‘the world’s biggest football magazine’. Moreover, many of the articles on the magazine’s website are analytics-orientated. For example: ‘Ronaldo averaged a game every 4.3 days‘. Admittedly, many of these articles are barely-disguised advertisements for a wearable GPS device intended for tracking activity of players during matches. But I suppose even 199 (pounds) is a number, right?