New Data, New Boss, Same Great Content

Welcome to the new StatsBomb.com. Again. This time from the new guy. It’s impossible to do an introductory post without being at least a little self-indulgent, but I’ll try and keep it as brief as possible. I owe my career to StatsBomb. Well, I owe my career to a lot of things. One of them is definitely StatsBomb though. Five years ago, when StatsBomb launched the first time, I wrote a piece about Manchester City’s new manager Manuel Pellegrini and the ways his style differed from Roberto Mancini's. An editor at Grantland saw it. The rest, as they say, is history (provided history means getting to work with amazing editors, having an incredibly understanding family, and working my butt off). Having an outlet where I could spend an unnecessarily large number of words writing about how Manchester City’s volume of final third touches compared to the rest of the Premier League literally changed my life.  

A Different Landscape

In the intervening years the football and media worlds changed. Back then, football's statistical work was in its infancy. The barrier to entry was pretty low. All it took was an Excel spreadsheet, some half-baked ideas, a willingness to experiment and there was progress to be made. Lots of work was done in public, lots of it was done on personal blogs, and lots of it was done by hobbyists in their spare time. Those days are gone. Two things happened. First, as fearless leader Ted talked about yesterday, a whole bunch of people got hired to be professionals. It wasn’t just Ted at Brentford. A number of early stats bloggers got gobbled up. Clubs all over the world, from Roma to Toronto to West Ham, hired people who had at one point done at least some public work. Bloggers becoming club employees meant that they had more resources to do more groundbreaking work. It also meant that nobody but the clubs paying for it got to see it. Second, as analytics got more advanced it got harder for any old blogger to jump right in. When I started writing about analytics there were no public expected goals models. Now, they’re everywhere. Ideas like xGChain, which are currently nowhere near cutting edge, were then, at best, a theoretical possibility. All of these tools are great. They help teams make better decisions, both on and off the field. They help fans understand the game better. They also make it harder for hobbyists to do work publicly. When the models were simpler, and the methods less advanced, it was possible for hobbyists to get the data they needed simply by poking around on the internet. There’s plenty of free and accessible data to play with if your methods are simple. That’s still possible today. It’s still possible to do good work with simple stats like shots and passes. There’s still space to analyze teams, develop testable hypotheses and use publicly available data smartly. But, it’s also undeniable that the frontiers of analytics are moving. More complex modeling needs more granular data. Using analytics to help understand the game means using data that better describes it. Right now, public analytics work has slowed to a crawl. The people that have access to the tools to do cool new things are using them in private. The people working in public don’t have the variety of building blocks they need to produce groundbreaking work. Luckily, here at StatsBomb, as you may have heard, we happen to have some data lying around. I have been extraordinarily fortunate over the course of my career to work at outlets that have provided me with extensive data to use to help explain the game of football. Now, I get the chance to give that same opportunity to other writers.  

The Plan for StatsBomb.com

My hope for StatsBomb.com is to build a website that does smart football coverage. We’ve got a budget to pay writers and the whole suite of StatsBomb tools they can use to support the work they do. But good work isn’t just about numbers. It can’t be. The best analysis combines all sorts of different factors. The list of tools we have to analyze football is long and ever growing. Using analytics without understanding tactics is doomed to failure, so is the opposite. Research and reporting help broaden and deepen any understanding of what’s happening on the field. The best work, the smartest work, recognizes that the tools we have at our fingertips don’t detract from each other, they’re complementary. Now, obviously we’re a data company with a strong analytics background. And, of course, I’m going to be writing frequently, and what I do depends largely on using numbers to help explain what I’m seeing on the pitch. I'm super excited to start using all the cool new StatsBomb toys to that end. But, hopefully that kind of work is only a part of what we ultimately build on this here website. I want this to be a home for smart coverage of all types, a place that is not limited to StatsBomb’s data, but rather one that is reinforced by it. Do you want to see in depth tactical analysis? So do we. Scouting of prospects in lesser known leagues? Bring it on. Insight into the process of hiring a new coach? Heck yes. The areas of football that smart coverage can extend to are boundless, and we firmly believe that using StatsBomb tools makes all kinds of coverage better. Being smart about the sport is our ultimate goal here. Using our tools is a way to help do that.  

What That Means for You

That was a bunch of high minded mumbo jumbo about lofty goals and philosophical aims. Now for some brass tacks. As we relaunch the site you can expect to see content that’s a lot like the stuff you’re used to seeing here. There will be deep tactical breakdowns using the tools your used to seeing. We’ll have articles talking about statistics you know and are familiar with, and the usage of stats in general. Those kinds of articles will look exactly like what StatsBomb has always done. At the same time, we’re going to be rolling out some big new toys. At Wednesday’s launch event StatsBomb premiered a whole lot of heavy statistical artillery. We’ll be doing the work of breaking that down, making it accessible and bringing it to a wider audience. We’ll have video from the live event and continue to turn the data we’ve been collecting into interesting, understandable chunks. Now that we’ve got the data, it's time to start talking about what it can tell us. Those two tracks won’t stay separate for long. The more we talk about the new data we have, (and the more new data we have) the more it will naturally become a part of the general analysis we’re doing. When the concept of xG was new, there was a lot of writing about what xG was and how it worked. Eventually, what had been a newfangled curiosity of a statistic became something that people could simply use while doing other analysis. That’s what I expect to happen on StatsBomb. We’ll spend a while writing about our tools, but gradually we’ll begin using them as part of making the rest of our coverage better. And finally, if you would like to play with our fun toys and write about soccer and data, and do all sorts of smart analysis, I want to hear from you. The realities of the business of analytics mean that most data can’t be public, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t do a better job of supporting public work. We want this website to be a place where smart people can do good public facing work with our private facing data. So, pitch me at Mike.L.Goodman@statsbombservices.com. I can’t wait to get started.

Welcome to the NEW StatsBomb

Greetings and welcome to the new StatsBomb.com. The look is a bit similar to the old StatsBomb.com, but there are a lot of changes to the website and the business that I’m going to discuss today.

Bear with me on this one, because I’ve got a little *freeze frame, record scratch* discussion first. We need to talk about where we started in order to explain how we got here, and where StatsBomb is going next. That last bit is something you should be really excited about.

Flashback

I started writing about football stats for the first time in the first week of January, 2013. I was on chemo at the time for testicular cancer and couldn’t work, so delving into football stats was something to keep my mind distracted from weightier life issues. My early work appeared either on a personal blog or a Manchester City website called Bitter and Blue run by the esteemed Danny Pugsley.

I created StatsBomb in the summer of 2013 as a place to help centralise good analysis and give it a larger platform than people’s personal blogs. Those early days were mostly just myself and the great and prolific Ben Pugsley, along with a bit of Danny’s work and encouragement.

A lot of the early work was finding our feet with regard to initial research. Some of it was adapted from hockey analytics and game models, some from broader knowledge of sports (like predicting Manchester City might have trouble with the (age) curve), and plenty of it was pure new research about how football stats seemed to work. Mistakes were made, but it was incredibly fun to explore an entirely new sport through the lens of data analysis.

I think the absolute best thing we did that first year that has carried on ever since, were our Premier League previews. We wanted to write THE best team previews, and bring a data focus to them, something no one else out there was doing at the time. In my head, I wondered, “Could we produce better material than what The Guardian was churning out at the time, while having a bit of fun?” I think we did, and honestly, probably still do.

So year 1 was mostly myself and Ben poking around while reading some great work from the broader community and inviting them to write with us in the process. Colin Trainor’s outstanding work appeared on the site in year 1 because of that, and later we got a bit of Paul Riley, Constantinos Chappas, Will Gurpinar-Morgan, and Marek Kwiatkowski, all from that early community.

All along, StatsBomb was more than just myself or Ben - it was a place for good analysts to produce good work, and maybe get noticed. Over the years, that continued to happen to various authors, many of whom would go on to real jobs in media or even inside football itself.

In summer 2014, my work was enough to get me an interview with Matthew Benham, owner of Brentford FC and Midtjylland. That resulted in me going to work inside football for the first time. However, part of my explicit agreement with Matthew was that StatsBomb would continue to exist. I had seen what happened to a lot of the hockey websites when their owners were hired by clubs and I wanted to avoid a mass deletion. This was partly because I was proud of what we had built, but also because I felt StatsBomb was playing an important role in changing how the world talked about football.

Fast forward to May of 2015, and I was buried under Brentford work. I won’t say the site was dying, but I certainly had no time to put into it, so there was a danger it would fade to irrelevance. Thankfully, James Yorke offered to take over managing the website in my absence. This ended up being a great choice, since James continued to produce content for the site himself, and more importantly, continued to encourage new writers to come to StatsBomb and show off their work.

Last week James published this on Twitter.

As you can see above, James has now signed off as Managing Editor, and he has my greatest  thanks for all the hard work he put in the last three years. StatsBomb as it currently exists owes a huge debt of gratitude to his attention over the years. (And he's still with the company - he's just doing different things.)

I also want to thank all of the contributors, readers, podcast listeners, and champions that we have had. There have been many of you, and I doubt we would have continued to exist without all of the encouragement.

The Present

So uh… what now? Fans of the site may have noticed it being a little quieter than usual in 2018. Part of this was due to the fact that the Services side of StatsBomb has been very busy, but part of it was intentionally letting the site fall into a bit of a lull, while waiting for a big announcement.

That announcement came yesterday at our launch event in London, where we unveiled StatsBomb Data. We believe we have developed the best football event data in the market to pair with our market-leading analytics product, StatsBombIQ.

We even produced a new podcast (OMG TWO PODCASTS IN TWO WEEKS) to explain the unique elements inside the new data spec, so check it out if you get some time. You can also expect video of the launch presentations to appear here over the coming weeks, plus plenty of new info and explanations of what makes StatsBomb Data so special.

Yeah, yeah, spare me the business stuff - what does that have to do with the BLOG, nerdo?

Well, we have our own data now... Data that we can use and analyse and publicise however we like...

Which is different. And kind of A Big Deal(™).

Maybe we should do something with that?

In fact, having our own data is such a big deal, that we’re using it as an excuse to transform StatsBomb.com. This very website will transition from its laid-back life as an analysis blog into a content website that is going to deliver new content five times a week.

Leading this new content website will be one of our earliest writers. This is a gentleman who published one piece on SB then was immediately whisked away to write for the legendary Grantland website. He has also written for ESPN, FiveThirtyEight, and The Ringer among others.

His name is Michael Goodman (@TheM_L_G), and I’m delighted he has (re)joined the project.

Mike’s new role will see him publishing some of his own analysis every week on StatsBomb prime, plus talent spotting and editing new writers for the new era. These writers will receive access to all the same tools multiple Champions League clubs use right now in StatsBomb IQ, plus access to the new data. And… unlike any previous point in StatsBomb’s history as a blog… we’re going to pay our writers to do all of this.

Mike’s mission is to continue the tradition of quality set by all of the StatsBomb authors who have gone before. We want to deliver excellent writing and the best analysis on football players, teams, and leagues, five days a week. It’s a huge ask, but I think Mike is the best person for the job and has a great chance of pulling this off.


Ask anyone who has been around a while, and they’ll tell you StatsBomb changed how we analyse football. The way people talked about the game in 2012 isn’t the same way people talk about the game in 2018, and we share a small slice of credit in changing that.

  • It's normal to strip out penalties from player goal numbers now.
  • Expected goals is mainstream.
  • Numbers get adjusted for possession.
  • Age curves are kind of a big deal.
  • PPDA is a thing that exists inside football clubs.
  • Teams use stats to scout for players.
  • Radars are bloody everywhere. (Sorry, Luke.)

Now we’re going to change football data in a big way, and this website and the people who contribute will continue to be a major part of that.

StatsBomb is now a fully fledged business with customers all over the world. However, a piece of me will always view it as a place where smart people come to write clever things about football. That part isn’t going to change, except that I think from here out we will do it better, and more frequently, than ever before.

I hope you enjoyed the first five years of StatsBomb, and I hope you’ll stick around for the next five.

If our past performance is any indicator of our future, we’re going to change the game of football, and you’re going to want to be there when we do.

Ted Knutson Founder and CEO, StatsBomb @mixedknuts