New season, same blog

The greatest benefit of studying history fudging the boundaries of time periods for your own benefit.

In 2017, FIFA launched its programme to benchmark electronic performance and tracking systems. In 2018, StatsBomb launched as a data company. Thus marks the New Age of Data Delivery.

In June, FIFA published a reflection on its EPTS programme. Also in June, it was reported that StatsBomb would be acquired by Hudl (Sportscode, Instat, Wyscout), a deal that was confirmed this month. The two make for neat markers, but beyond the surface-level coincidence there’s more of interest.

The number of GPS* and optical tracking systems being tested in FIFA’s EPTS programme has rocketed since the scheme started (the major growth coming after 2020). StatsBomb’s acquisition means it joins a major established ecosystem of products, whose new cousin, Wyscout, recently launched their own physical metrics.

*FIFA use GNSS, ‘global navigation satellite systems’, instead of GPS

I don’t actually have a lot to say about this, I just think the FIFA ‘Learnings’ paper/post is interesting.

Amusingly, there’s a bit of ‘plus ça change’: "as the number of new measures and use cases [of tracking data solutions] continue to grow, there are relatively few systems which have the capacity to offer everything.” And then, later on, when talking about the high levels of accuracy of these systems, “for companies wanting to find further differentiation from competitors, it will need to come from elsewhere other than solely accuracy."

You can see this differentiation happening.

Just the other day, I was watching a Lunch&Learn video from Atlanta United and GPS tracking company PlayerData, and an auto-substitution feature was mentioned, and I thought 'huh, that's neat'. Meanwhile, alphabetically similar company PlayerMaker - who have a foot-mounted sensor system - produce data not just of number of touches by each foot, but velocity too, which they say can help monitor players as they come back from injury. Not one but two Parisian-based tracking data companies, SkillCorner and Footovision, have had their metrics used in The Athletic in the past year or so. Not just ‘sprint distance per match’, stats that actually make you feel like you’re learning something.

It’s an exciting time, don’t you think?

This wave of tracking data companies might be coming at the perfect time for elite men’s football too. Or, I hope it is, because I need a third datapoint for a theory of mine - that dominant data ideas follow the tactical trends at the top of the game. Here’s how it currently shapes up:

You could argue that the pass-heavy football of Spain’s MNT and Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona smoothed the way for pass-based event data, both in terms of its investigation and adoption. The best teams passed a lot, passed in advanced areas a lot, had good players who passed the ball a lot. Many have recognised the limitations of those event datasets, and maybe that tactical moment maximised their utility.

The next tactical wave was intense counterpressing and just generally more strategic press strategies. Pressure data was a big selling point when StatsBomb first launched, and Get Goalside later wrote about how competitors joined the party.

Now here we are, in 2024. Sadly, I feel like there’s a bit of a midblockification in the air. Defensive solidity is largely boring, and takes the spotlight away from the true heroes, central defenders, but I digress.

There’s a bubbling focus on ‘line-breaking’, not just in Packing-originators Impect’s emergence as a mainstream event data provider (conference and all), but FIFA Training Centre articles like ‘Line-breaking solutions key to 2023 [World Cup] success’. But in a world of midfield-clogging and compactness, moving around the space is where the advantage will be (and the thing that will create the opportunities to break lines).

The other argument is that it’s all a matter of business and technology realities. But the tactical idea is more fun. It’d make better history.

For a bunch of teams, it’s time for a new season. Hopefully time to make some good history.

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As someone who’s known a bunch of people involved in StatsBomb for a long time, I’m predisposed to think highly of the company. When they launched, I’d never had much contact with data companies before; now that I have, I cannot imagine ever wanting to set one up. It would be more pleasant to bench press a giraffe.

There are many ways you could sum up the impact of the company’s work (which will continue, of course, even though this sounds like an obituary). The most concise is that it’s succeeded and thrived while being called something that could get it on advertising blacklists.

It’s like what I used to think about expected goals, when that term was being debated. The cases and names where the nomenclature matters are pretty small. If the product’s good enough, it sticks.