Soccer Analytics 2024 Review

Collection of the soccer analytics content that I liked the most in 2024!
Published

Sunday, December 29, 2024

Just a few months ago, I was concerned that this year’s review blog post might be rather sparse. However, two fortunate developments have ensured that the fifth edition of my annual end-of-year blog post is as comprehensive as ever. Firstly, veterans of the soccer analytics community have resumed their blogging habits. Secondly, the community’s migration from X to Bluesky has brought high-quality analytics work back into the spotlight. I am pleased to present you once again with an overview of the soccer analytics content that I liked the most this past year.

This blog post provides pointers to research papers, blog posts, news articles, podcasts, webinars, books, events and code repositories that are related to soccer analytics. The selection focuses on resources that provide new insights in the field of soccer analytics, address interesting challenges, propose new methods for analyzing the game, or apply existing methods in a creative or novel way.

If you are new to the field, you might want to skim through my blog posts from 2023, 2022, 2021 and 2020. You might also want to check out the Resources page that provides pointers to open datasets, Python libraries, book recommendations and career advice blog posts among others.

If you feel I may have missed a relevant resource, please feel free to drop me a message.

Research papers (51)

Blog posts (65)

News articles (22)

Podcasts (9)

Webinars (4)

Books (3)

Events (8)

Code repositories (10)

  • Football AI. Track the players and the ball in video footage of soccer matches using computer vision and machine learning. Code.
  • ingestify (version 0.1.3). Ingest data from different data providers, including StatsBomb and Wyscout. Code.
  • kloppy (version 3.16.0). Deserialize event data and tracking data from different data providers, including Opta, StatsBomb, Wyscout, Second Spectrum, TRACAB and SkillCorner. Code. Documentation.
  • mplsoccer (version 1.4.0). Produce different types of visualizations, including radar charts, pizza plots and pitch visualizations. Code. Documentation.
  • penaltyblog (version 1.0.2). Estimate team abilities and predict match outcomes using different types of statistical models, including Poisson-based models such as Dixon-Coles and Bayesian models. Code. Documentation.
  • scraperfc (version 3.2.0). Gather data from soccer websites, including Capology, ClubElo, FBref, FiveThirtyEight, Sofascore, Transfermarkt and Understat. Code. Documentation.
  • socceraction (version 1.5.3). Compute VAEP, Atomic-VAEP and xT ratings using event data from Opta, StatsBomb and Wyscout. Code. Documentation.
  • soccerdata (version 1.8.4). Gather data from soccer websites, including ClubElo, ESPN, FBref, FiveThirtyEight, Football-Data.co.uk, FotMob, Sofascore, SoFIFA, Understat and WhoScored. Code. Documentation.
  • statsbombpy (version 1.14.0). Load StatsBomb event data into a DataFrame representation. Code.
  • unravelsports (version 0.2.0). Convert tracking data into graphs to train graph neural networks. Code. Documentation.