Week Roundup (8/16/2020)

Competition

UCL Quarter Finals

An exciting week of European football climaxed with the ejection of Manchester City from the Champions league through the hands of Olympique Lyon. On Friday, Bayern Munich had put Barcelona to the sword, scoring 8 goals and conceding only 2(one an own goal). These results along with Leipzig and PSG’s triumph over Atletico Madrid and Atalanta respectively, meant there would be no English or Spanish club in the UEFA Champions League semifinal for the first time since 1995/1996 season.

History: This will be the first time two French clubs have made it to the semifinal of the Champions League.

APP Recommendation

IFAB App

The International Football Association Board (IFAB) “govern and develop the Laws of the Game of association football”. Their app is a must have for everyone who follows football. It contains the rules of football and updates as the rules modify. It is available in four languages, providing users added features like the ability to make notes in the app.

Android Download iOS Download

Article of the week

…at a certain point when you have had the second and fourth-best Premier League seasons ever and the expected goals models don’t really reflect that, maybe you’ve got some stuff going on that is beyond the model.

Ted Knutson

The Guardian article on Liverpool’s (over)performance over the last two seasons probes how accurately we can forecast football outcomes using a single metric (xG). A fine read to help appreciate the advances and challenges of football analytics.

Video of the week

We discussed youth coaching with Mamelodi Sundowns’ Youth & Methodology Head, Shawn Bishop. Building up on that we recommend Coaching In The Youth Development Phase from the English FA Learning channel.

Graeme Carrick (FA Youth Coach Developer), Paul Holder (FA Youth Coach Developer), and Paul McGuiness (FA Senior Game Coach Developer) explored Youth Development Phase in this webinar.

We've got to help them fall in love with the game...

Gareth Southgate

Week Highlight

Football analytics is growing. This was made abundantly clear in our chat with Peter McKeever of StatsPerform. It was an insightful session touching on his experience learning how to build models in Excel before transitioning to Python.