Since Hudl Statsbomb formed as a company, we've been committed to educating and training the football analysts of the future, and we've thrown our weight behind the women's game to champion its development. We're delighted that our latest free data release serves both objectives.
The regular data releases remain central to what we want to do as a company. We want to see the grassroots analytics community continue to experiment with data and upskill themselves, potentially following in the footsteps of many professional analysts now working in the game that started in the same position. The role of the data analyst is becoming increasingly commonplace and necessary within football clubs at all levels, and there are still plenty of opportunities for amateur analysts to make their way in, with demand for data skills and literacy on the rise.
We also support analysts and coaches in the women's Big 5 leagues and NWSL with free access to our market-leading IQ analytics platform for their league, an initiative we’ve been running for several seasons. We've seen the uptake in our offer climb every year, and plenty of teams have moved from the free offer onto paid contracts that see them take other leagues as part of the package to aid their analysis and recruitment.
So it’s been hugely encouraging to see the increasing support of the women's game in recent years, particularly over the past season. There was a tangible feeling that the movement took a big step forward last week when England's Lionesses won the EURO 2022 tournament on home soil, the country's first major international tournament win since You Know When. But we know there's still a long way to go.
This latest data release commemorates a landmark moment in English women's football, but it also becomes a first for us. See, we've released women's data for free before. And we've released Hudl Statsbomb 360 data before. But we've never released Hudl Statsbomb 360 data for the women's game.
What is Hudl Statsbomb 360?
Hudl Statsbomb 360 is the next revolution in football event data. 360 data captures a freeze-frame showing the location of all players in the frame for every event we collect and allows us to uncover a host of new information about the game that was either difficult to see or completely hidden in standard event data.
Our customers have already increased their competitive edge with the extra depth this information provides. We ourselves have been generating new ideas and insights, some of which we have shared recently, looking at line-breaking passes, players that find space to receive the ball, and analysing corners and set pieces.
As well as the 360 frames, we'll also release the standard event data for Euro 2022 to go alongside it.
Accessing the data
To help you work with the data, we created the Using Hudl Statsbomb Data In R and Using Hudl Statsbomb Data In Python guides, and there's more advice and guidance available in the How To Get Started In Football Analytics article. We also created the StatsbombR and statsbombpy packages to make working with and manipulating Hudl Statsbomb data that bit easier.
*NOTE: If you have used StatsbombR before, please update or re-install it to ensure you have the latest version before working with the data.
Follow the code in our guides and you'll soon be creating things like this:
We also gave away free example code to teach you how to work with the 360 data in our Euro 2020 free data release. The code in that article will teach you how to work with the 360 data to identify the number and position of teammates and opponents around events, and also to be able to plot specific frames, such as Chloe Kelly's trophy-winning goal in the final.
This code is a starting point to get you going with your analysis. Mess around with the event types, filters, and plots to create your own vis — the possibilities of what can be discovered with this data are significant.
Lastly, it's important to note that if you intend to publish your work on social media - which we greatly encourage you to do if you wanted your skills to be noticed by professionals - then please do remember to abide by our user agreement and credit Hudl Statsbomb as your data source when doing so.
We hope you enjoy working with the data and look forward to seeing everything you create with it.
Best of luck,
The Hudl Statsbomb Team
