The rundown:

(in no particular order)

  1. 1.

    The ASI Summit announced a call for proposals, with the deadline set for October 23rd. More on this later, but the research competition is a great way for students to get access to data and have the chance at presenting on stage at the Summit. I participated in the first research competition a few years ago and it was one of the best experiences I've had in the soccer analytics world. I highly recommend submitting! You can also sign up for email updates about the Summit here.

  2. 2.

    Another belated update, but Futi pushed a slew of new stats to the app a couple weeks ago, and the amount of data in the hands of regular fans is now way higher than it was before. Way more filtering functionality plus phase of play level breakdowns on stats — it's truly awesome. If you're not on Futi already, what are you doing?

  3. 3.

    Jake Burgess posted a piece on his substack about classifying possessions and using possession value plus data visualizations to better tell the story of how and why a team plays a particular way. The analysis is great and the visuals are awesome.

  4. 4.

    Manchester City were charged on 114 of 115 counts, which is 99.13%! #analytics

  5. 5.

    I've really been enjoying Andrew Beasley's data analysis for The Guardian, especially his very clean visualizations. There was this piece from a couple weeks ago that recapped the Premier League so far, and this piece about why Tottenham are struggling so much. Andrew's pieces are must-reads, and I selfishly love the proliferation of data in major publications like The Guardian.

  6. 6.

    Teamworks is hiring a Data Scientist II on the soccer team to work on machine learning models for player recruitment using event and tracking data. The requirements include 3+ years of research or professional experience writing code in R or Python, and the preferred qualifications include demonstrated public work (another reason to post publicly!). It's a remote role and the posting advertises a salary of $83K-$145k.

The closer look: conferences

With the recent announcement of the 2027 PySport x SkillCorner Analytics Cup, and the ASI Summit call for proposals, conferences have been on my mind. Full disclosure, for those that don't know, I'm on the organizing committee of the ASI Summit but I didn't make to the Analytics Cup last year. My goal for today's newsletter, however, was to share testimonials of people that went to these conferences as well as general info for those who haven't been to either one.

PySport Analytics Cup

The PySport Analytics Cup ran for the first time last year, with finalists selected to present at their work in Paris, France and compete for the grand prize. Rather than being built into a conference, the competition is stand-alone, but last year's final included several high-quality presentations from the finalists. The winner, by Amar Shah, presented on simulated annealing, which I mentioned in last week's newsletter. This year's competition will include two finals — one in Boston and one in Paris — which increases the accessibility of the final for non-European audiences (which is awesome). As mentioned, submissions are opened now until December 18th, and you can submit both as an individual and a pair. There are two sporting tracks, one for basketball and one for soccer, with the soccer dataset including 20 games of A-League SkillCorner tracking data alongside two games of pose tracking data!! The theme for this year's competition is defensive positioning for soccer and shot quality for basketball. The finals will be held on February 17th in Paris and February 24th in Boston.

To learn more about what last year's final was like, I asked my friend Zach Cochran, who was named a finalist and traveled to Paris, about his experience1.

It was extremely well run. They did a great job of helping me with all the travel and securing accommodations. Overall the conference was great, there were a lot of big name clubs there, so that was great to be able to get my name and work in front of them. Everyone there was super friendly and working on exciting stuff in the sports industry. The SkillCorner staff was great, they gave me a lot of suggestions on places to see in Paris. Overall it was a really great experience that really helped me expand my network massively and I'm looking forward to participating in it again this year.

Here are some details based on the competition description (keeping in mind I haven't attended!):

Who it's for: Students, researchers, and practitioners looking for to get their work in front of clubs in a competitive setting.

What you'll get out of it: Networking, exposure, potential prize money ($500 for finalists, $1,500 grant grand prize).

What makes it unique: Open source, two sports, two regional finals. Winning project gets turned into a Python package (or added to existing one).

ASI Summit

The ASI Summit began two years ago, with both previous editions taking place at the Rice University campus in Houston, Texas. The Summit runs for two days, with this coming year's conference occurring on March 26th and 27th. The Summit has a strong mix of industry and academic talks with past speakers including GMs, Heads of Analytics, and prominent researchers. Another core aspect of the conference is the research competition, with time built into the Summit for research competition presentations. There is an undergraduate and open track, with a heavy emphasis on creating opportunities for students to get hands on experience with high quality data. Researchers that are selected to complete their work are provided with SkillCorner data, and those that are selected to present at the Summit get paired with an industry mentor to refine their presentations. There is no final competition round at the Summit.

Since I am a little biased, I reached out another friend of mine, Anumita Jain, who was able to tell me a bit about her experience at last year's ASI Summit2:

I went into the ASI Summit as a newcomer to the soccer data world (still am!). Like most people in the soccer space, I thought that while data was cool, most of soccer could not be quantified so there was only so far that data’s applications could go. Two days later, I left the conference thinking that data was cool and that most of soccer WOULD be quantified sooner rather than later. Aside from meeting some of the smartest and most thoughtful people innovating in the soccer data space, I got to listen to amazing talks and presentations that opened my eyes to both what types of data are out there and how that data could be applied to quantify more aspects of the game than I could have ever imagined.

As before, here are some more details:

Who it's for: Club staffers and academics looking to make connections, learn from others' work, and share ideas, as well as anyone who is looking to learn more about the analytics industry.

What you'll get out of it: Learn from professionals in the industry and various academic disciplines; networking and conversing.

What makes it unique: Student research opportunities built in, women in soccer analytics reception, quantity of staffers from clubs and federations across the Americas.