The rundown:

(in no particular order)

  1. 1.

    Paul Green, former general manager of Chelsea Women's, was announced as the new chief football officer of Bay FC. Green is very well regarded and his departure from Chelsea was seen as surprising. He joins as yet another hire from the English game, after Emma Coates and Gemma Davies joined last offseason. The club also recently hired Lucca Motta, former data analyst at Fort Wayne FC, as their head of data and analytics.

  2. 2.

    Sam Cunningham interviewed Dr. Clarie-Marie Roberts, director of human performance at McLaren F1, about pseudoscience in soccer for The Guardian. Roberts, who previously worked for the Premier League and Coventry, lambasts everything from canned oxygen to KT tape and cryotherapy. As Cunningham writes, "Often, managers who have been in the game for decades insist on practices they have adopted for years, or because another coach, with no scientific background, has heard about a revolutionary new product." In a take that has implications far beyond physical therapy, Roberts concludes: "'Football in general is very anti-intellectual and it has been for a long time. There are a few clubs that do it well, but the majority don’t.'"

  3. 3.

    Kieran Doyle, who is now on a hot streak of his own, published an analysis of the "hot foot" effect in soccer over at American Soccer Analysis. The results were interesting — it seems the fallacy isn't so much of a fallacy, and that even when controlling for game state effects on team aggressiveness, players get hot. The opposite exists for the NWSL, though: "apparently after a player scores they turn into a pumpkin, or goalkeepers take goals conceded personally," writes Kieran.1

  4. 4.

    Eliot McKinley posted an updated "Good, bad, and unlucky" chart for MLS, and SKC and Austin are in the dumps. Vancouver, meanwhile, aren't getting the credit they deserve — LAFC 2019 called, they want their xPoints back — while Nashville are pulling an Inter Miami-level overperformance. It is in these charts where I am constantly reminded that everything is fake and nothing is certain. We live in a weird and messed up world where CF Montreal aren't actually that much worse than league-leaders Nashville. Right.

  5. 5.

    Arman Kafai took a look at the newly released GAM numbers for MLS and found that NYRB are mega broke while Real Salt Lake are the epitome of dollar signs emoji.

  6. 6.

    Adam Race at Sounder at Heart took a crack at quantifying Seattle's injury crisis using a new metric called TERS. The metric itself is hardly complex, but effectively captures the vibes around missing players through injury. It got me thinking about how and where we use overly complex metrics when simple ones would do. I've read some meta analysis of soccer metrics before, and I'd love it if someone wrote a research paper about all the ways one might quantify injury impact, for example, and then compared the metrics against each other to find which one gets the most bang for your buck. This topic is fairly similar to one I discussed in my newsletter a few weeks ago — how do we evaluate our own decisions and metrics? If only I had infinite time and resources to do the work of figuring these things out... alas, they must wait. (For people newer to the industry, eager to make their first metric or come up with a big project, self-evaluation is hardly glitzy, but it's honestly one of the most interesting things to analyze, in my opinion. Is this metric actually capturing something other metrics miss, and if so, what?)

  7. 7.

    I missed the announcement a few weeks ago, but the PySport x SkillCorner analytics cup is back for year two, with registration open now until the submission deadline on December 18th. I didn't get a chance to participate last year, but the selected finalists' presentations are well worth the watch. Amar Shah's simulated annealing approach to optimal positioning is super interesting, and deservedly won the overall prize at last year's conference.

  8. 8.

    The Philadelphia Union are hiring a Senior Sport & Data Scientist. The posting skews heavily toward sports science and physical performance, but it's an interesting position nonetheless. No posted salary.

No closer look today as I'm out of ideas. So, for now, I'd simply like to thank you all for reading and following along. Also, keep posting things, and send me links when you come across something interesting (you would instantly become my best friend if you did that).

See you all next week!