A selection of academic and public analytics work
-
High intensity run counts—defined as the number of runs where a player reaches and maintains a speed above a certain threshold—are a popular football running statistic in sport science research. While the high intensity run number gives an insight into the volume or intensity of a player’s work rate it does not give any indication about the effectiveness of their runs or whether or not they provided value to the team. To provide the missing context of value this research borrows the concept of value models from sports analytics which assign continuous values to each frame of optical tracking data.
Co-authors: Sam Robertson, Robert Aughey, Bartholomew Spencer and Jeremy Alexander
Paper (PLOS One)
-
Statsbomb Conference Presentation highlighting what I’ve learned building an analytics department during my first two seasons at Inter Miami CF.
Presentation (Statsbomb 2022)
-
Player movement metrics in football such as speed and distance are typically analysed as aggregates, sometimes outside of any specific tactical or match context. This research adds context to a player’s movement over the course of a match by analysing movement profiles and bringing together tools from the sport science and sports analytics literature.
Co-authors: Sam Robertson, Robert Aughey and Grant Duthie
Paper (Journal of Sports Science)
-
This research challenges common stereotypes in professional soccer based on race and gender by employing computer vision based match recreations. We find evidence viewers are more likely to attribute athletic characteristics to Black players when they can identify the race of the players involved.
Co-authors: Devin Pleuler, Daniel Daly-Grafstein, Yang Liu, Paul Marchwica
Paper (2021 NESSIS)
Summary Article (FiveThirtyEight 2021)
-
A method for identifying and classifying off-ball in possession runs into similar groups to allow for more generalizeable analysis.
Presentation (2019 NESSIS)
Paper (2019 Barcelona Sports Analytics Conference)
-
Webinar presented with Devin Pleuler, Director of Analytics at Toronto FC, providing a framework for simple and insightful applications of player tracking data.