Talent, Football Analytics and Performance

In today’s game, finding an advantage by using knowledge gained from football analytics can mean the difference between winning and losing, or between buying the right or wrong player to enhance the team’s performance. Performance analysis in football has flourished at a dizzying rate in the past decade. Increasingly, it is becoming the cornerstone of team and player development.

Where teams once had a single performance analyst to cover all the bases, now they are supported by an army of specialists, from opposition analysts to recruitment analysts, who in turn are served by dedicated data scientists and data engineers.

This group of highly specialised staff are in place for a single reason: football intelligence. This intelligence consists of technical data that provides insight for coaches, managers, medical practitioners, technical directors, CEOs and owners to make more informed footballing decisions.

FIFA’s Performance & Game Analyst, Chris Loxston, explains how that data is gathered: “At present football analytics depends on two main data sources: tracking data and event data.”

Tracking Data

As technology has advanced, we have been able to capture the movement of players and match officials with ever-increasing precision. Tracking data allows the X and Y coordinates of each player or match official to be captured at a rate of up to 25 times a second. This data is collected either through non-invasive optical-camera tracking systems or through LPS (local positioning system) or GPS (global positioning system) devices worn by each player or match official. Traditionally, this data was used to collect physical metrics such as distance covered at various velocities. However, it is now also being used for tactical analysis to identify space and distances between players.

Event Data

In its most basic form, this data set captures the “on-the-ball” actions of players – for example, a pass or a shot. But event data is now evolving to capture more discreet actions, including the thousands of “off-the-ball” events. New metrics such as the pressure a player was under from an opponent or whether a player made him or herself available to receive the ball are bringing greater depth to this data set and enabling more comprehensive analysis. Sports-analytics software allows all these coded events to be linked to match footage, so that coaches and players can better understand the data. However, Loxston offers a crucial qualifier: “When utilising football data, you have to remember that context is king. Just having the most advanced technology won’t help your team win: you need to have the right people in place to make sure you interpret the data in the context of your team, or in the context of the match. The experts make the difference.”

Tracking trends

Data is also used at a macro level, helping to identify the technical and tactical trends in the sport as a whole that develop from one competition to the next. It tells us about coaches’ priorities, from the decreasing concern with keeping the ball to the growing involvement of goalkeepers in the women’s game.

FIFA World Cup™

With technology advancing rapidly year on year, gathering insightful statistical data has arguably become one of the most fascinating areas of development in how the game of football is analysed. Over the course of a match or an entire tournament, a plethora of collected data points serve football analysts to draw valuable conclusions from any given match. In addition, these insights are of the utmost interest to broadcasters and the press, who are now able to further engage football consumers by offering statistical nuggets. Just consider the examples below from previous editions of both the men’s and women’s FIFA World Cup tournaments.

FIFA Women’s World Cup™