Soccer Analytics 2022 Review

The soccer analytics community continues to thrive, attracting an increasing number of enthusiasts who are interested in the data side of the sport. Although professional clubs are increasingly seeking out talent for data roles in the community, a wealth of exciting soccer analytics research has appeared in the public space in the past year. However, with the growing interest in soccer analytics, it can be challenging to sift through all of the available content, especially for those new to the community. Therefore, I have compiled a list of my favorite research papers, blog posts, and news articles from the past year to help you navigate the abundance of information.

This blog post lists my favorite soccer analytics content from the past year. If you are looking for more soccer analytics content, I would recommend you to follow my list of soccer analytics people on Twitter and to read through my review blog posts from last year and the year before. I also maintain dedicated Linktree pages with sports analytics book recommendations and sports analytics career advice. If you believe your favorite research paper, blog post, or news article also deserves a spot in this review, then please share your favorite content via my personal Linktree page.

Research papers (35)

• Econometric Approach to Assessing the Transfer Fees and Values of Professional Football Players. Raffaele Poli, Roger Besson and Loïc Ravenel. Economies. December 2021.

• Expected Passes. Gabriel Anzer and Pascal Bauer. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery. January 2022.

• A Framework for the Analytical and Visual Interpretation of Complex Spatiotemporal Dynamics in Soccer. Javier Fernández. PhD thesis. January 2022.

• Transfer Portal: Accurately Forecasting the Impact of a Player Transfer in Soccer. Daniel Dinsdale and Joe Gallagher. arXiv pre-print. January 2022.

• The Use of Player Tracking Data to Analyze Defensive Play in Professional Soccer - A Scoping Review. Leander Forcher, Stefan Altmann, Leon Forcher, Darko Jekauc and Matthias Kempe. International Journal of Sports Science and Coaching. February 2022.

• Large Scale Analysis of Offensive Performance in Football — Using Synchronized Positional and Event Data to Quantify Offensive Actions, Tactics, and Strategies. Gabriel Anzer. PhD thesis. February 2022.

• Automated Detection of Complex Tactical Patterns in Football — Using Machine Learning Techniques to Identify Tactical Behavior. Pascal Bauer. PhD thesis. February 2022.

• Automatic Event Detection in Football Using Tracking Data. Ferran Vidal-Codina, Nicolas Evans, Bahaeddine El Fakir and Johsan Billingham. arXiv pre-print. February 2022.

• Detection of Tactical Patterns Using Semi-supervised Graph Neural Networks. Gabriel Anzer, Pascal Bauer, Ulf Brefeld and Dennis Fassmeyer. MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. March 2022.

• Beyond Action Valuation: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework for Optimizing Player Decisions in Soccer. Pegah Rahimian, Jan Van Haaren, Togzhan Abzhanova and Laszlo Toka. MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. March 2022.

• The Influence of Tactical and Match Context on Player Movement in Football. Sam Gregory, Sam Robertson, Robert Aughey and Grant Duthie. Journal of Sports Sciences. March 2022.

• Is It Worth the Effort? Understanding and Contextualizing Physical Metrics in Soccer. Sergio Llana, Borja Burriel, Pau Madrero and Javier Fernández. arXiv pre-print. April 2022.

• Contextualised High-Intensity Running Profiles of Elite Football Players with Reference to General and Specialised Tactical Roles. Wonwoo Ju, Dominic Doran, Richard Hawkins, Mark Evans, Andy Laws and Paul Bradley. Biology of Sport. May 2022.

• Multiagent Off-screen Behavior Prediction in Football. Shayegan Omidshafiei, Daniel Hennes, Marta Garnelo, Zhe Wang, Adria Recasens, Eugene Tarassov, Yi Yang, Romuald Elie, Jerome T. Connor, Paul Muller, Natalie Mackraz, Kris Cao, Pol Moreno, Pablo Sprechmann, Demis Hassabis, Ian Graham, William Spearman, Nicolas Heess and Karl Tuyls. Scientific Reports. May 2022.

• Estimating Transfer Fees of Professional Footballers Using Advanced Performance Metrics and Machine Learning. Ian McHale and Benjamin Holmes. European Journal of Operational Research. June 2022.

• Machine Learning for Understanding and Predicting Injuries in Football. Aritra Majumdar, Rashid Bakirov, Dan Hodges, Suzanne Scott and Tim Rees. Sports Medicine — Open. June 2022.

• Evaluating Sports Analytics Models: Challenges, Approaches, and Lessons Learned. Jesse Davis, Lotte Bransen, Laurens Devos, Wannes Meert, Pieter Robberechts, Jan Van Haaren and Maaike Van Roy. IJCAI 2022 Workshop on AI Evaluation Beyond Metrics. July 2022.

• Qualitative Team Formation Analysis in Football: A Case Study of the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Jasper Beernaerts, Bernard De Baets, Matthieu Lenoir and Nico Van de Weghe. Frontiers in Psychology — Movement Science and Sport Psychology. July 2022.

• Temporal Match Analysis and Recommending Substitutions in Live Soccer Games. Yuval Berman, Sajib Mistry, Joby Mathew and Aneesh Krishna. International Conference on Web Services. July 2022.

• Seq2Event: Learning the Language of Soccer Using Transformer-based Match Event Prediction. Ian Simpson, Ryan Beal, Duncan Locke and Tim Norman. Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. August 2022.

• SoccerCPD: Formation and Role Change-Point Detection in Soccer Matches Using Spatiotemporal Tracking Data. Hyunsung Kim, Bit Kim, Dongwook Chung, Jinsung Yoon and Sang-Ki Ko. Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. August 2022.

• Looking Beyond the Past: Analyzing the Intrinsic Playing Style of Soccer Teams. Jeroen Clijmans, Maaike Van Roy and Jesse Davis. European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases. September 2022.

• Team-Builder: Toward More Effective Lineup Selection in Soccer. Anqi Cao, Ji Lan, Xiao Xie, Hongyu Chen, Xiaolong Zhang, Hui Zhang and Yingcai Wu. Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. September 2022.

• Towards Expected Counter - Using Comprehensible Features to Predict Counterattacks. Henrik Rolf Biermann, Franz-Georg Wieland, Jens Timmer, Daniel Memmert and Ashwin Phatak. ECML/PKDD 2022 Workshop on Machine Learning and Data Mining for Sports Analytics (MLSA 2022). September 2022.

• Shot Analysis in Different Levels of German Football Using Expected Goals. Laurynas Raudonius and Thomas Seidl. ECML/PKDD 2022 Workshop on Machine Learning and Data Mining for Sports Analytics (MLSA 2022). September 2022.

• Analyzing Passing Sequences for the Prediction of Goal-Scoring Opportunities. Conor McCarthy, Panagiotis Tampakis, Marco Chiarandini, Morten Bredsgaard Randers, Stefan Jänicke and Arthur Zimek. ECML/PKDD 2022 Workshop on Machine Learning and Data Mining for Sports Analytics (MLSA 2022). September 2022.

• Let’s Penetrate the Defense: A Machine Learning Model for Prediction and Valuation of Penetrative Passes. Pegah Rahimian, Dayana Grayce da Silva Guerra Gomes, Fanni Berkovics and Laszlo Toka. ECML/PKDD 2022 Workshop on Machine Learning and Data Mining for Sports Analytics (MLSA 2022). September 2022.

• Evaluation of Creating Scoring Opportunities for Teammates in Soccer via Trajectory Prediction. Masakiyo Teranishi, Kazushi Tsutsui, Kazuya Takeda and Keisuke Fujii. ECML/PKDD 2022 Workshop on Machine Learning and Data Mining for Sports Analytics (MLSA 2022). September 2022.

• A New Performance Metric For Player Evaluation Based On Causality. Alessandro Cecchin. StatsBomb Conference. September 2022.

• Contextual Expected Threat Using Spatial Event Data. Greg Everett, Ryan Beal, Tim Matthews, Tim Norman and Gopal Ramchurn. StatsBomb Conference. September 2022.

• Estimated Player Impact (EPI): Quantifying the Effects of Individual Players on Football (Soccer) Actions Using Hierarchical Statistical Models. Tahmeed Tureen and Sigrid Olthof. StatsBomb Conference. September 2022.

• Reinforcement Learning for Football Player Decision Making Analysis. Michael Pulis and Josef Bajada. StatsBomb Conference. September 2022.

• Generalized Action-based Ball Recovery Model Using 360° Data. Ricardo Furbino Marques do Nascimento and Hugo Rios-Neto. StatsBomb Conference. September 2022.

• un-xPass: Measuring Soccer Player’s Creativity. Pieter Robberechts, Maaike Van Roy and Jesse Davis. StatsBomb Conference. September 2022.

• Controlling Ball Progression in Soccer. Catherine Pfaff, Emily Hunter, Haozhi Hong, Daniel Forestell, Ari Fialkov, Zoey Drassinower and Timothy Chan. arXiv pre-print. October 2022.

Blog posts (56)

• Analytics in 2022: What Now?. Mark Thompson. Get Goalside!. January 2022.

• How Much Do Newcastle Need to Improve in January?. Ben Torvaney. Stats and Snakeoil. January 2022.

• What’s in the Way of Analytics Solving Football?. Mark Thompson. Get Goalside!. January 2022.

• Developing New Metrics: Heading. Josh Hobbs. Analytics FC. January 2022.

• Measuring Pressing Success: Buildup Disruption Percentage (BDP). Soccerment. Soccerment. January 2022.

• Evaluating Football Dribbling Skill by Utilizing the Elo Algorithm. Ofir Magdaci. Towards Data Science. January 2022.

• Theory of Soccer Pt. 3: On Account of Bounce. Tiotal Football. Absolute Unit. February 2022.

• Part 1 — A Career in Football Analytics: The What. Benoit Pimpaud. Personal blog. February 2022.

• Everything You Need to Know About Expected Goals. Mark Thompson. Get Goalside!. February 2022.

• Creating the Patterns of Play That Win Matches. David Sumpter. Barça Innovation Hub. February 2022.

• Henshaw Analysis Player Ratings — Methodology, Discussion & Examples. Liam Henshaw. Henshaw Analysis. February 2022.

• Did Analytics Get Naby Keïta Wrong?. Grace Robertson. Grace On Football. Febriaru 2022.

• xG Playground: A Fully Interactive, Opposition-Aware Expected Goals Simulator. Charles William and Abhishek Sharma. xG Playground. February 2022.

• ‘Aannemen, Kijken, Spelen’ — Analyzing Player Pace of Play in Soccer. Lotte Bransen and Jesse Davis. DTAI Sports Analytics Lab. March 2022.

• Part 2 — A Career in Football Analytics: The How. Benoit Pimpaud. Personal blog. March 2022.

• Reframing Post-Shot xG. Devin Pleuler. GitHub. March 2022.

• When Will Tracking Data Have Its xG Moment?. Mark Thompson. Get Goalside!. March 2022.

• Interactive Digital Tactics Board. Joris Bekkers. Unravel Sports. March 2022.

• Get Goalside 100. Mark Thompson. Get Goalside!. March 2022.

• UEFA Champions League Restructure: What Impact Will It Have?. Omar Chaudhuri and Ben Marlow. Twenty First Group. March 2022.

• Is Football Becoming More Efficient Financially?. Aidan Reagh. Analytics FC. March 2022.

• The History of Football Analytics — Part 1. xfb Analytics. xfb Analytics. March 2022.

• Part 3 — A Career in Football Analytics: The Reality. Benoit Pimpaud. Personal blog. April 2022.

• How to Get Started in Data and the Football Industry. Liam Henshaw. Henshaw Analysis. April 2022.

• The Stats Perform Pro Forum 2022. Mark Thompson. Get Goalside!. April 2022.

• The History of Football Analytics — Part 2. xfb Analytics. xfb Analytics. April 2022.

• State of MLS Analytics Tier List — 2022 Season. Eliot McKinley. American Soccer Analysis. April 2022.

• When Is Data ‘Right’?. Mark Thompson. Get Goalside!. May 2022.

• The History of Football Analytics — Part 3. xfb Analytics. xfb Analytics. May 2022.

• Building a Win Probability Model in Python. Abhishek Sharma. Personal blog. May 2022.

• Upgrading Expected Goals. Dinesh Vatvani. StatsBomb. May 2022.

• So… Everyone Has Hybrid Data Now. Mark Thompson. Get Goalside!. June 2022.

• Introducing the Zero-Point — Part 1. Mats de Leeuw den Bouter. Impact Performance Coaching. June 2022.

• Designing a Player ID Matching System. Joris Bekkers. Unravel Sports. July 2022.

• The Replication Project: Is xG the Best Predictor of Future Results?. Eliot McKinley. American Soccer Analysis. July 2022.

• Europe, Money, and the Problem With Disparity. Eliot McKinley, Sean Steffen and Tiotal Football. American Soccer Analysis. July 2022.

• Football Analytics Is on the Brink of a New World: 3D. Mark Thompson. Get Goalside!. August 2022.

• A RAPM Model for Soccer Player Ratings. Phong Hoang, Edvin Tran Hoac and Boyuan (Gary) Zhang. CMSACamp — Data Science in Sports Analytics. July 2022.

• Offensive and Defensive Augmented APM for Soccer. Lee Richardson. Intraocular. August 2022.

• Introducing Goals Subtracted: Where You Aren’t but You Oughta Be. Matthias Kullowatz. American Soccer Analysis. August 2022.

• Introducing the Zero-Point — Part 2. Mats de Leeuw den Bouter. Impact Performance Coaching. August 2022.

• Modelling Team Playing Style. Conor Sharpe. StatsBomb. September 2022.

• Where Is Analytics? What Is Analytics? An Autumn 2022 Update. Mark Thompson. Get Goalside!. September 2022.

• StatsBomb Launch New 360 Metrics: Line-Breaking Passes and Ball Receipts In Space. StatsBomb. StatsBomb. October 2022.

• How Do We Tell the Story of Football Analytics?. Grace Robertson. Grace On Football. October 2022.

• The Analytics Revolution Is History Now. Mark Thompson. Get Goalside!. October 2022.

• Predicting the 2022 World Cup: Will South America Break Europe’s Winning Streak?. Pieter Robberechts, Deniz Can Oruç and Jesse Davis. DTAI Sports Analytics Lab. November 2022.

• Analytics FC Release Report Revealing Full Impact of Brexit on UK Football. Analytics FC. Analytics FC. November 2022.

• Price Versus Value: The Importance of Understanding the Difference. Aurel Nazmiu. Twenty First Group. November 2022.

• Football Insights from FIFA Data: What Comes and Goes with Age. Ofir Magdaci. Towards Data Science. November 2022.

• New Metrics: Transition Pass Data Added to TransferLab. Alex Stewart. Analytics FC. November 2022.

• New Metric: Dribble Plus Added to TransferLab. Alex Stewart. Analytics FC. December 2022.

• Everything You Need to Know About Defensive Statistics (Well, the Basics). Mark Thompson. Get Goalside!. December 2022.

• Estimating Goal Expectancy From Bookmaker’s Odds. Martin Eastwood. pena.lt/y. December 2022.

• The Role of Data in Sporting Director Hires: 5 Rules. Jordan Heath. Twenty First Group. December 2022.

• Track Football Players with Computer Vision. Piotr Skalski. Roboflow. December 2022.

News articles (15)

• The Five Kingdoms of Football. John Muller. The Athletic. January 2022.

• Mikkel Keldmann: From One Intern to Automated Analysis at Brøndby. Mikkel Keldmann. Training Ground Guru. January 2022.

• Penalties Are Too Generous a Reward. We Have a Solution… and It Involves Running. John Muller. The Athletic. March 2022.

• Passive or Aggressive? Spread or Smother? Using Body Poses to Understand Goalkeeper Technique. John Muller. The Athletic. March 2022.

• ‘There Is No Such Thing As a Free Signing’ — Why Transfer Fees and Player Values Are Not the Same. John Muller. The Athletic. March 2022.

• The Genie Is Well and Truly Out of the Bottle When It Comes to Data in Football. Mark Carey. The Athletic. March 2022.

• Quakes Epicenter Exclusive: All About the Earthquakes’ New Soccer Analytics Team. Jamon Moore. Quakes Epicenter. April 2022.

• Introducing Playstyle Wheels — The Athletic’s Way of Capturing Ways a Team Play Well (or Not). John Muller. The Athletic. May 2022.

• How Each Premier League Team Pass. John Muller. The Athletic. June 2022.

• Using Data to Analyse & Increase Player Graduation Rates in Academies. Simon Austin. Training Ground Guru. July 2022.

• The Former Player Who Built Arsenal’s ‘Unique’ Scouting Platform. Training Ground Guru. Training Ground Guru. August 2022.

• Edd Webster: Data Scientist Who Went From Manchester City to Lego. Simon Austin. Training Ground Guru. September 2022.

• From 1966 to Now: The Evolution of World Cup Football. John Muller. The Athletic. November 2022.

• The World Cup’s New High-Tech Ball Will Change Soccer Forever. Ben Dowsett. FiveThirtyEight. November 2022.

• The Ultimate World Cup Penalty Guide: Takers, Savers and Success Rates. Maram AlBaharna. The Athletic. December 2022.

Podcasts (6)

• Analytics FC - Elliott Stapley, Sports Interactive and Football Manager with Elliott Stapley and Jon Mackenzie. Analytics FC. April 2022.

• Training Ground Guru - Damien Comolli: From Tou-lose to Tou-win with Damien Comolli and Simon Austin. Training Ground Guru. July 2022.

• Post Script - Episode 1: The Spiritual Birth of Soccer Analytics Blogging with John Muller and Tiotal Football. Post Script. September 2022.

• Post Script - Episode 2: Imagining a Soccer Analytics with John Muller and Tiotal Football. Post Script. September 2022.

• Post Script - Episode 3: If It Wasn’t Blogged, Did It Even Really Happen? with John Muller and Tiotal Football. Post Script. October 2022.

• Analytics FC - Brexitball Report Special with Andy Watson and John Kiely with Andy Watson, John Kiely and Alex Stewart. Analytics FC. November 2022.

Books (2)

• Expected Goals: The Story of How Data Conquered Football and Changed the Game Forever. Rory Smith. HarperCollins Publishers. September 2022.

• Net Gains: Inside the Beautiful Game’s Analytics Revolution. Ryan O’Hanlon. Abrams Press. October 2022.

Events (7)

• MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (MITSSAC). Boston, Massachusetts, United States. 4-5 March 2022.

• Stats Perform Pro Forum. London, United Kingdom. 23 March 2022.

• Workshop on Computer Vision in Sports (CVsports). New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. 20 June 2022.

• Workshop on Machine Learning and Data Mining for Sports Analytics (MLSA). Grenoble, France. 19 September 2022.

• StatsBomb Conference. Wembley, London, United Kingdom. 20 September 2022.

• Cascadia Symposium on Statistics in Sports (CASSIS). Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. 24 September 2022.

• Training Ground Guru Big Data. Online. 6 December 2022.

Code repositories (10)

• floodlight Load, integrate, and process tracking data and event data from major data providers. Code. Documentation.

• football-data-analytics Collect, analyze, and visualize soccer data. Code.

• football-tracking-data-from-TV-broadcast Extract tracking data from broadcast video feeds using YOLOv5. Code.

• itscalledsoccer Query the American Soccer Analysis API. Code. Documentation.

• plottable Plot visually-appealing, presentation-ready tables with soccer data in matplotlib. Code. Documentation.

• roboflow Track soccer players using YOLOv5 and ByteTrack. Code. Documentation.

• soccerdata Scrape and parse soccer data from a multitude of soccer data websites. Code. Documentation.

• soccercpd Detect tactically-intended formation and role changes from tracking data. Code. Documentation.

• sport Estimate 3D body poses of soccer players using YOLOv7. Code.

• tfutils Parse, explore, and plot tracking data from TRACAB. Code. Documentation.