At StatsBomb, we are committed to supporting the development of the next generation of analysts. We regularly publish free datasets of our industry-leading event data, many including additional StatsBomb 360 player positioning data around each event, and provide further education and resources to begin using our data effectively.
Our previous data releases include Bayer Leverkusen's invincible Bundesliga season, Euro 2024 and Copa América 2024, historic datasets such as the 2015/16 Big 5 Leagues and the Lionel Messi Data Biography, and many, many more.
Recently, we hosted a webinar How to use StatsBomb free data in R to walk attendees through the process of using R to work with those free event datasets for the first time. In the webinar hosted by Oliver Walker, Marketing & Content Analyst at StatsBomb, we showed how to pull the free event data into your workspace, ask questions of it, and visualise your findings, with attendee feedback and questions answered live.
We know there is a high demand for education and resources to learn data analysis and programming languages. You might have ambitions to one day move into the sports analytics industry and get a job in sports analysis -- indeed, many of us at StatsBomb use R in our daily work, across data science, analysis, customer success and marketing. So, we’re making the webinar and resources available for free and on-demand.
Some of the topics covered in the webinar and supporting content include:
- What is R, and why use it?
- How to install R and RStudio
- Installing R packages
- Loading StatsBomb free data into your environment
- Working with the data
- Visualising your work in ggplot
- Visualising your work on a pitch plot
And plenty more, with detailed, step-by-step explanations and guidance throughout.
It’s important to mention that a lot of this resource wouldn’t exist without Euan Dewar, Senior Analyst at StatsBomb, who put many of the original guides, packages, and resources together.
How to use StatsBomb free data in R
All resources and documents sent to webinar attendees are available in this drive. The drive contains:
- Installing R and RStudio guide
- The Basics of R guide
- The Code: a pdf, document, and .R file containing all the code used in the webinar
We recommend following the installation guide and reading The Basics of R before you get started, as there’s a lot of foundational knowledge and advice within to make your learning journey smoother and faster.
To access the Installing R and RStudio guide, click here.
To access the Basics of R guide, click here.
To access the code used in the webinar in PDF format, you can click here, or to download the .R file to load in your R environment, click here.
And finally, to access the webinar, register here and you’ll be able to watch on-demand when you’re ready to learn.
Best of luck,
The StatsBomb Team
