StatsBomb's first ever conference will be held at Stamford Bridge stadium, on Friday October 11, 2019. The conference will be a mesh of speakers, panels, and research papers in football/soccer with potentially some cross-sport guests invited. Oh, and you fine ladies and gentlemen are all invited. Tickets will go on public sale in the next couple of weeks and will cost £225 + VAT. It's not a huge venue - attendance will top out at 350 people. There will also be a limited pack of half-price tickets made available for students. We're still locking down speaker engagements, but things that are definitely happening include:
- A research paper competition
- Multiple panels with high profile guests from around the industry
- Our first ever LIVE StatsBomb podcast
And in typical StatsBomb style, we will go out of our way to make sure it's great. Expect more details throughout the summer as they come available. StatsBomb Courses We will be teaching another Introductory and another Set Pieces course in London on the Wednesday and Thursday leading up to the event. Tickets for those will go on sale at the same time as the conference, and we will offer a significant discount to people who want to attend all three days. Feedback on these has been exceptional, and our London courses had attendees from all levels of football and fanalysts alike. Chelsea Fans On Saturday, I tossed a teaser for the conference with some beta art out on my personal Twitter account.
— Ted Knutson (@mixedknuts) June 29, 2019
This took off in a way I didn't quite anticipate - Chelsea fans were really excited that we might be working with the men's team in recruitment, opposition analysis, set pieces, and all the stuff we do via our consulting arm. Social media these days is not typically a home to huge volumes of positivity, but Chelsea fans seemed to think the combination of Petr Cech, Lampard, and StatsBomb would be a really good thing for the club. Unfortunately, as noted above, the teaser was about the conference taking place at Stamford Bridge and not about any potential partnership or acquisition by the club of our company. But I did want to say a genuine thanks from everyone here at StatsBomb for the vote of confidence. Football is changing very rapidly, and StatsBomb is a big beneficiary (and almost certainly a driver) of that change. Our data and analysis business stands on its own, and wants to serve as many customers as possible. However, I've been public on our podcast that the ideal situation for the consulting side of our business would be to sign an exclusivity agreement with a single club across multiple years, to help out with all of the things we do best, and to help that club find new edges to exploit now and in the future. The list of topics we think can help football teams perform better but have yet to explore is long. We haven't had the analytics budget of a team like Liverpool, but our public research has typically dovetailed with their actual moves, and we are on the cutting edge of a number of other improvements in football, some of which we've made available to course attendees. Anyway, the fact that a broad spectrum of fans were genuinely excited at the idea of adding a competent stats and data group to one of the biggest clubs in the world is another sign that the game is changing. Unfortunately we do not currently have an agreement with the men's side of the football club. I can't offer further details on it yet, but we have made an offer and would be proud to support the Chelsea Women's team with free Data and StatsBomb IQ though, so between that and a kickass analytics conference at Stamford Bridge, we'll be around. --Ted Knutson ted@statsbomb.com