August 12: Cultural Knowledge

The rundown:

(in no particular order)

Yesterday, the American Soccer Insights Summit announced that the 2027 edition of the conference will be held on March 26th and 27th at Rice University in Houston, TX. This is the third edition of the Summit and the first to occur in March; the change in timing is due to the MLS sprint season and shortened preseason. As such, the conference will take place during a FIFA men's international window. Full disclosure: I'm part of the organizing committee for this conference, but I attended the Summit as a student two years ago, which is what convinced me to get involved. While there are plenty of strictly academic conferences for sport analytics research in the US, the ASI Summit is the only soccer analytics conference that combines industry and academic presentations. We also have a robust student research competition — that I competed in two years ago! — which is an excellent opportunity for students to get their work in front of industry professionals and get experience using cutting edge data. I help coordinate the student research competition, so I'll definitely be sharing more details on this newsletter when that gets announced. Setting aside my role as an organizer, I am personally very passionate about this conference as well. I met two very close friends at the ASI Summit two years ago, and last year had the opportunity to hang out with so many ASA friends I had only ever interacted with online. I have also had so many conversations with a wide variety of brilliant people at the Summit, and it is truly one of the highlights of my year. There are all sorts of people at the conference, from students and hobbyists to researchers and club staffers, and the atmosphere really does feel inviting for all. Our tickets are also very reasonably priced and we've worked to include dedicated areas for women in soccer analytics, which I think is awesome. Registration is now open, and I highly recommend secure your spot for the 2027 Summit sooner rather than later. I look forward to seeing everyone there!

A few months ago, Sporting Kansas City posted a particularly interesting job titled "Vice President of Data and Analytics", and we now know who will fill that role. Per Training Ground Guru, Nottingham Forest's Head of Football Intelligence, Francisco Belo, is leaving the English club to join Sporting KC — a coup for the MLS side. According to the job posting, Belo will be reporting to KC GM David Lee, who was the former sporting director at NYCFC. This is a statement addition for Sporting KC, who last year ranked in Tier 3 of the ASA MLS Analytics tiers due to not having a single data-focused staff member. Belo previously worked for Everton and Wolves, and had been at Forest for two years. It'll be interesting to see how the data department develops at KC, but given Belo's title, I wouldn't be surprised if he begins building out a team in the coming months.

Evan and Eric at Expected Own Goals published a short interview with Kenza Dali, during which they show her her own VizHub player radar and ask for her thoughts on the data. Turns out, Dali is not a data-head. Her criticisms of the stats were well reasoned, and I agree with pretty much all of them (pass completion % is a long-hated metric among stats nerds). It's a pretty fun concept for an interview and it's admittedly cool to see my radar in the hands of someone as talented as Kenza Dali. I'm all for getting more pro player opinions on data!

Neel Shelat wrote a roundup of breakout WAFCON talents, which is a great read for anyone looking to learn more about the top talents in the region.

Sports Illustrated released their first ever women's soccer digital cover, with the story on Lindsey Heaps written by Jenna Tonelli. It's a great piece and I highly recommend giving it a read.

A slew of new tracking based visualizations could be coming to the mplsoccer python package thanks to the great work of @numberstorm.bsky.social . Mplsoccer continues to be the best package available for plotting soccer data, and it's cool to see new tracking stuff being added. Now let's get some more public tracking data please (looking at you, data providers).

A closer look: cultural knowledge

Last week, I talked about AI and how tempting it is to use coding assistance to build things quickly, but also how this strategy can lead to a lot of sameness in the work being produced. Turns out, people on Twitter are using AI to reinvent a wheel that was already built eight years ago! Awesome.

View post on Bluesky

This is kind of the exact thing I was talking about. Because AI is an aggregator, there's a huge risk of just doing the same thing other people have done in the past without knowing that it's already been done. In this case, someone used xT - xG to gauge decision making on shots, and treated it as if it were a scientific discovery. For those who know a lot about xT, xG, and the soccer analytics sphere, that probably seems silly. But I also want to look at the other perspective for a second.

I, too — very recently, actually — was someone just starting out in this space. I had to learn a lot of the history of this industry through stumbling across links and seeing references to papers, talks, or blogs and researching them on my own. There was no intro guide, and a lot of that discovery was purely self-driven out of curiosity. Many people will not have that curiosity, patiences, or drive to learn the history of the industry, and so they will inevitably repeat what has already been done, whether they use AI or not.

View post on Bluesky

Mark makes a good point here. The soccer analytics industry is no longer nascent. We are now 15 years removed from Sarah's 2011 NESSIS talk, 13 years removed from the founding of ASA, seven years removed from the first StatsBomb conference, and over five years removed from the introduction of VAEP and g+ into the public sphere. I was not around for any of these events. I had to learn about them from others and do my own digging to understand these parts of soccer analytics history.

I remember a conversation I had with @chloesainsbury.bsky.social a few weeks after the first ASI Summit in January of 2025. We were talking about possession value models, and I mentioned g+. Chloe didn't know what g+ was, so I sent her some links, got nerdy with the model specifics, and we ended up talking for a while about different EPV models. To many on Bluesky who have been around for a while, g+ or even the concept of an EPV model may feel like something that should be "known" by now. But as Mark says, just because these things are known by some people doesn't mean they're known by all people.

As I mentioned earlier, at last year's ASI Summit, there was a large contingent of ASA members. I recall many different conversations had over discord and in person about the topics of the presentations; what felt new, what was interesting, what felt like a rehashing of a pre-existing metric. A thought struck me during the conference. If no one from ASA gets up on stage — if no one from the "old guard" does the work of sharing this industry history — how will the newcomers know? How will the students who are wading into soccer analytics for the first time know what has already been done? That requires a sharing of knowledge. Many may argue that the knowledge already exists in blog posts and podcasts, but I ask you: who knows about these blogs and podcasts?

There is a StatsBomb blog archive, but it exists separate from the current Hudl StatsBomb website — you can really only find it if you're looking for it. For years, the ASA website hardly even had a search function. I worked on it a bit in WordPress to try and modernize the site as well as make it more searchable, but I know it's not perfect. These things exist and work only for the people who know they exist. Previously, the only way I would have been able to find or read about the Where Goals Come From project would have been by googling "Where goals come from ASA". Now, there's a button on the articles tab that takes you directly to every piece in that series. I illustrate this example to highlight how we can make this institutional knowledge more accessible to newcomers. I think that this is important work that cannot be overlooked.

I hope, in the coming years, that more ASA OGs get up on stage and share not just our history, but the history of the industry as a whole1. Tyler and Brian did that at the first ASI Summit, and even I learned a lot from their presentation. I hope that others who have been around for a while continue spreading knowledge, as well. In the past, I have asked in the ASA slack "has anyone tried this before?", and the answer is often yes. Not everyone has access to such a resource, and I would not have known without asking.

The newcomers will be doomed to repeat mistakes, successes, and everything in between if we do not do the work to share what has already been done with them. And as seen above, the increasing prevalence of AI means that many of these old discoveries are particularly susceptible to being forgotten. History gets forgotten, and so, rewritten.

I want to preface this by saying that I am not targeting anyone in particular nor am I saying that this is occurring broadly, but: we can't judge people for not knowing something that they would have no way of knowing. Yes, people should be more curious. Yes, AI makes people more lazy. But we still must work to extend our knowledge, embrace the mistakes that newbies will inevitably make, and take every opportunity to be guides rather than sitting back on our armchairs, content with what we have accomplished.

I was once a newbie. I am grateful for everyone who guided me and sat down for conversations and sent me blog posts to read. I would not be here without them.

The call to action is this: we must continue the work of opening up our spaces. We must share, catalog, and increase accessibility. We must help. Otherwise our work will be lost, since no one will know it ever existed.

I've told them as much!