Month: September 2021

One of Australia’s most decorated clubs, Melbourne Victory, have signed a deal with StatsBomb to advance their analytics operations, becoming the first club in Australia and Oceania to do so.

This is the first entry into the Australian market for StatsBomb, and another signpost of the fast global growth they’re currently experiencing.

Four-time A-League champions Melbourne Victory have signed up to use StatsBomb’s event data – containing over 3,400 events per game on average – and their IQ analytics software, the most advanced and customisable platform in the industry, to utilise in all sectors of the club, including in their performance, opposition, and recruitment analysis operations.

The Australian club will have access to StatsBomb’s deep data, which includes unique metrics such as pressures at a team and player level, pass footedness, pass height and freeze frames for shots, providing detailed defender and goalkeeper location information on every shot.

Melbourne Victory’s Director of Football, John Didulica, said:

"Melbourne Victory are excited to be partnering with StatsBomb.  The football data analytics provider is industry leading and will assist our club in staying at the forefront in the fast-paced world of Football Analytics."

StatsBomb Sales Executive Flavio Fusi said:

"We are proud that our first partner in Australia and Oceania is one with a rich history of success in the region. The analytics team at Melbourne Victory have shown they understand the importance of data and analytics in elite competition, and we're encouraged by their ambition to integrate the use of data in all sectors of the club."

About StatsBomb

StatsBomb is the world’s fastest growing sports data company. Founded by former analyst Ted Knutson, StatsBomb was formed to empower data analysis teams by ensuring they have access to the best football data set ever created. Having started as an analytics blog, StatsBomb initially progressed to consulting on data-driven recruitment and performance analysis for professional teams.

In 2018, having become frustrated with limitations of the data available at the time, StatsBomb acquired ArqamFC, a data collection company based in Cairo, Egypt, and started to collect and supply its own data. The introduction of StatsBomb data was a turning point for the analysis of football as it introduced previously unavailable metrics such as pressures, the height of the ball at the point of shot impact, goalkeeper positioning, freeze frames for shots and the foot with which each pass is played.

In 2021, StatsBomb improved this data even further with the launch of StatsBomb 360, adding a snapshot of all visible player locations to more than 3,400 on-the-ball events that are collected per match.

Having gained rapid traction since its inception, StatsBomb is now servicing customers across the professional game, as well as betting and gaming operators, and is active in over 20 countries.

StatsBomb is excited to partner with Catapult as a sponsor at the upcoming 2021 StatsBomb Conference, held on Friday 8th October at Stamford Bridge, London.

Members of the Catapult team will be onsite to discuss their performance analysis software, which aggregates multiple sources of video, audio, and telemetry data and displays the information in a digestible way for quick and easy analysis.

“We share StatsBomb’s passion for performance data and look forward to participating in their conference as it returns to in-person and allows for the collaboration and networking the industry craves,” says Simon Cuff, Commercial Director for Catapult.

MatchTracker performance analysis software brings together all the user’s performance data, including event data, camera-based tracking, GPS, biometric, and coach or analyst tagging. The data can then be combined with multiple video angles so that game moments can be viewed in context and performance can be compared with the opposition, the user’s previous games, and between players in the team.

“We welcome Catapult’s attendance at the conference, not least because many of our current customers tell us they combine the use of both StatsBomb event data and MatchTracker software as critical parts of their pre, live, and post-match analysis” says Simon Banoub, Chief Marketing Officer at StatsBomb.

The StatsBomb Conference is on Friday 8th October at Stamford Bridge in London. Full details of the event can be found here, with speaker lineup and agenda included. The list of speakers includes representatives from the pinnacle of sport, with practitioners from Champions League, Premier League, and EFL football clubs, as well as Daryl Morey, one of the most established names in NBA analytics. The calibre of speakers and attendees means the event will be the best networking opportunity in the calendar for members of the football data and analytics industry.

Tickets are available now from here. We look forward to seeing you there.

We're into September, which means football is once again in full swing. But that also means the StatsBomb Conference is only about five weeks away, and it is going to be fantastic. Today I am going to fill in the details around the event, and also explain just a few reasons why many people think this is the best football analytics conference of the year.

The event details 

• Date - Friday 8th October 2021
• Location - Stamford Bridge, London
• Time - 9.00 a.m to 6.00 p.m.

This event will be in person at Stamford Bridge on the 8th of October. As we did in 2019, much of the conference will either be broadcast publicly, or the talks will be posted on YouTube in the weeks after the event. However, not all talks will be available either live or online, as some of our speakers only have permission to give their talks to the people present in the room at the time.

Basically, if you want to make sure you see all the talks, you’ll need to show up. And we know from last time that the food should be great, so you’ve got that going for you too.

What to expect from the StatsBomb Conference 2021? 

• Your host - Ted Knutson
• Key talks from StatsBomb experts - Nicole Kozlova, Ukrainian National Team player and StatsBomb Data Science Intern + one talk from our Data Science Team
• Industry speakers (see list below) 
• Networking ops - around 600 attendees from across the football ecosystem 
• Research paper competition
  

A stellar line-up of industry speakers 

• Dr Ian Graham - Head of Research (Liverpool FC)
• Daryl Morey - President of Basketball Ops - (Philadelphia 76ers)
• Harry Moyal - Deputy General Manager (Olympique Lyonnais) 
• Mladen Sormaz - Head of Football Analytics (Leicester City)

I continue to be amazed at the quality of people who agree to speak at our event. Ian, Harry, and Mladen are all giving their own talks, while Daryl will be in more of a fireside chat format. I’ll ask him about his beginnings in basketball analytics, his interest in uh… “soccer” and his famed 'launch and squish' preferred style of play.

Not yet on the speaker list is REDACTED, Head of REDACTED at a Champions League club, who will be announced very soon.

Directors of Football Panel

• Victor Orta - Director of Football (Leeds United FC)
• James Cryne - Director and Co-Owner (Barnsley FC)
• Will Kuntz - SVP of Soccer Operations & Assistant GM (LAFC)

We’re also excited to have three key executives from some of the most forward-thinking clubs in world football, who will discuss their experiences in driving an analytics-based culture within their organisations and how the industry is changing.

Research Paper Competition ​​​​

Following an influx of highly impressive submissions for the research paper competition, we are pleased to announce the following speakers and the title of the papers that they'll be presenting on the Research Stage:

• Devin Pleuler - Tempo: another expectation model?
• Maaike Van Roy, et al - Optimally disrupting opponent build-ups
• Javier M. Buldú - The quest for the right pass: quantifying player’s decision making
• Hadi Sotudeh - Introduction of potential counter-attack
• Soumyajit Bose and Manas Saraswat - Turning with the ball and decision-making under pressure
• Samer Fatayri, Kirill Serykh, Egor Gumin - How to save efficiently: what drives the goalkeepers’ decisions?
• Max Odenheimer - Splitting GSAA: finding the best shot-stopper for your team
• Juan Camilo Campos - Determining the phases of the play using graph convolutional networks

COVID Info

What measures are we putting in place? The event will feel safe with reduced touchpoints and lots of ventilation. We are really excited that this is an in-person event and a chance to actually see people again.

• All attendees must be double-jabbed or provide proof of a negative test taken at most 48 hours before the event
• We will be providing StatsBomb branded masks upon entry - though the use of these inside the venue is up to the individual's discretion
• Detailed information around our Covid policy will be sent to attendees prior to the event*

Basically, the conference will be brilliant and - unlike most conferences in the football analytics space - ours is open to the public. We hope to see you there!

Tickets available here: The StatsBomb Conference Tickets, Fri 8 Oct 2021 at 09:00 | Eventbrite

---

 

*Stamford Bridge has their own Covid policy which we will be adhering to - the key points have been summarised above. If you'd like to read the full set of guidelines that we'll be following before, during, and after the event, you can read them here: Stamford Bridge Covid Policy