An exploratory statistical analysis of the 2014 World Cup Final
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I also have a github with more notebooks about football here: https://github.com/rjtavares/football-crunching
If you gave any questions about football analytics, hit me up.
(Gmail and Twitter are the same name as my HN account, if you prefer email or DM)
Try it!
It takes a lot of work, but also supports a huge and growing industry. E.g. data scouting is increasingly used by clubs to increase the pool of potential hires.
I understand English is unlikely to be your first language. Please read this as a genuine attempt to be helpful.
> "I've now come to understand the two chief weapons of the JIT remain surprise, fear, ruthless efficiency and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope."
I like this very much. Even adding nice red uniforms, it's still two chief weapons.
Something I watch that seems to differentiate players and teams at every level is what happens on the first touch when receiving a pass. When you first start watching this, you'll notice that as you move up the ranks, the ball just sticks to a pro's feet, preferably in front of them a couple feet away where they are ready to play it again. Watching Germany that year, their first touch was not merely excellent, but aggressively so. They took the ball and instead of settling it, turned it into a rolling ball in the direction they wanted to play. Or a first touch pass. Speaking in wild generalities here and I don't have numbers to back it up.
Statistically I would guess that their second touch was on average farther away from them than other teams of comparable level, while still being under control.
It reminded me of Tiger Woods when he burst onto the scene. He played the game far more aggressively and relied on his skills to keep him safe rather than traditional shot selection. Germany 2014 decided these slightly riskier touches are consistently possible in the long run and the benefit outweighs the risk.
It also seemed that with the aggressive play, there is just more football played -- more chances. The more chances that are generated, the more it favors the better team.
That turned their national side from a strong team into a strong team where all players have good technical skills.
2014 is where this led to the first great success (https://www.bundesliga.com/en/news/Bundesliga/confederations...), but they only could play like that because of that decade long process.
Football is "unstable" as a game. To dominate in a consistent way, you actually need to be overwhelming superior to your opponent in many different stages/aspects of the game. Any weak link and you are at the mercy of fate.
The remaining German matches were really close (The match agains France, mentioned below, was the real final of the tournament) and even the final was very close all the way to the end. Germany also struggled against Algeria.
I disagree, Brazil played great until Neymar got his back injured, he was by far their best player. Also the fact that their best defender and captain Thiago Silva was suspended for the game against Germany didn't help. These two were the best players on that squad. Remember - they beat Chile and Columbia who played really good in that world cup, while Germany barely beat Algeria and France.
Even thought to different results, Brazil is always a force to be reckoned with.
They are the only team (I think) that has constantly reached a certain point at the World Championships.
What I observed in their game, is that they play as a team (Contrary to what my country does) and at the same time, every single one of their players is somebody to be afraid of individually.
Regarding the world championships, if you ask me it wasn't Germany that won the 2014 world cup, nor it was Spain in 2010.
It was Pep Guardiola that won both.
I would be interesting to see whether this common narrative holds true in the data.
Also, follow Thom on twitter, he is one of the smartest and most knowledgeable person in this space.
If anyone is interested in getting started with soccer/football analytics, this is a good place to start: https://github.com/devinpleuler/analytics-handbook
The advanced stats as they are called (xG, xA, xPA, offense actions, defense actions) all end up as a mere tool for disregarding the actual result and providing arguments for which was the better team. Like team A won the match 1-0 but team B were the better team since they had more <<insert favorable stat>>. The idea behind stats should be to contextualize the game I watched a bit more, and not replace the game watching.
Then there is also comparing the stats across games. In football(and every other game) there is a different difficulty level associated with each game (fatigue, condition, team condition, opposition condition, tactics, opposition tactics, teammates, chemistry, opposition mistakes, opposition players, adjustments, pressure, and even sheer luck on occasions), which makes the comparison redundant. An offensive team would always have more shots and more possession than a defensive minded park the bus kind of team. Like you said, right now no stat is good enough to give us an idea of how well a team played. Football is a game of spaces, and a lot of things depend on player movements (or lack of) and vision. I find those reports helpful which tells us where a certain team had the advantage and how they maximised it though.
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You can perorate all you want about possession and passes completion but if I am a manager and you offer me a first half (who according the author was a Germany slaughter fest) as the Argentinians had it, I will take it every single time. Absent from the analysis are also the clear cut chances of Higuain and Messi (far better from anything than Germany had, despite all the possession) and the controversial disputed ball between Neuer and Higuain. Anyway, it was nice to see the exercise.
1. I would make the "Run this article as a notebook" more visible. On a first read, I've completely skipped that part as it's very similar to pop-ups on medium. Having an option to directly run/modify this blog would be pretty amazing.
2. The chosen color scheme of code formatting is a bit odd, but that might be just my subjective preference :-)
1. I agree, but there is a reason for this. We'll soon be adding the ability to run/modify feature even without the need to sign up so the whole thing will go away.
2. Thanks! We are experimenting with this (the default scheme is different, but we had a lot of people requesting dark mode so trying out different things for the published articles.)
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=sourcegr...
Deepnote is a data science notebook and we are capturing the up/down key events in the main app so that you can move inside the cells and also between the cells. This article is using the same codebase but in read-only mode. I forgot to disable it in this mode.
And here is an interview of the founder about his experience building the service and data infrastructure behind it http://datapeek.org/interview/alfadata
Jokes aside, pretty good article. I am an Argentinean, so consider that a lot.
Or are those things mostly proprietary?