StatsBomb announces the release of the 2018 Men's World Cup on our industry-leading event data spec StatsBomb Data, for free. From the beginning, StatsBomb has been about fostering an analytics community dedicated to learning more about the game of football.
One of the major issues for new potential analysts is difficulty in obtaining high quality data at scale. The same problem exists for teachers who are responsible for training new data scientists. The World Cup data, along with our continuing release of women's football data, helps address this problem directly.
This data is the same industry-leading, professional spec that we collect for all leagues and includes a level of detail you won’t find from any other data provider, including:
- location of players on the pitch in any shot, including the position and actions of the Goalkeeper
- detailed information on ALL players applying defensive pressure on a player in possession – including how long the pressure lasted
- which foot a player passes with, and many more minor enhancements
Like the free women's football data we started producing this summer, this data will be available via our Resource Centre for non-commercial use. This is also the same data used by John Burn-Murdoch and the outstanding data team at the Financial Times while the World Cup was in progress.
NEW for our final @FT World Cup stats briefing: In Pogba and Kanté, France have the bestex player at progressing the ball, and the best at winning it https://t.co/yPXjJXtVnm #FRACRO Here's how the dominant duo compare to the best of the rest: pic.twitter.com/l3rmxHECmW
— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) July 13, 2018
You are actively encouraged to write about your analysis publicly and share it on social media.
Our only request is that you credit StatsBomb as your data source and where possible include our logo.
The analysis at the FT and on our own site set a high bar for World Cup coverage this summer, but now fans everywhere have data available to match those performances or even better them.
We heartily invite you to try.
Best of luck,
The Entire StatsBomb Team