Thread on one of the major projects we’ve been working on over at @Twenty3sport - we call it ‘Insight’. The idea behind it is this: in most of football data analytics, the objective is to collect data and make tools, viz or metrics that you can place in an analyst’s hands.

Hopefully these will enable him/her to go off in a search for insight that will help him do his job better. If he’s a club analyst he wants to find insight into the opposition or into a prospective recruitment - if he’s a journalist he wants to find a notorious story to tell.

We’ve already done many things along this line of thinking: general data interfaces, custom metrics and models like personas ( https://medium.com/football-whispers-engineering-and-data-sci/we-all-know-that-football-is-a-complex-subject-to-study-under-the-lens-of-data-analysis-and-112026fff66b) and data visualisations for our clients as @EveryTeam_Mark explains here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/power-data-visualisations-mark-thompson/.

In this paradigm the onus is v much on the user to find relevant insight amidst the set of possibilities. That’s fine, but we wanted more. Surely users also want to be pointed to interesting information and avoid missing valuable insight because he didn’t look in the right place.

Enter ‘Insight’. Our product is about changing the paradigm: its all about pointing users to insightful information found throughout the available tools. The landing page of the tool looks something like this with ’data driven stories’ that you can click through to:

The front page alone gives us some interesting talking points - like the fact that Capoue’s new year resolution was to defend more…

… or that Toulouse haven’t scored with their latest 85 shots in Ligue 1…

… or that Cagliari’s run of goals per xG was crazy for a while there and is now severely regressing.

The most exciting recent development is adding “data visualisations” to the list of criteria under which we surface insight (largely the awesome work of @girela_d ), like the example below showcasing that Andre Ayew is operating in different areas…

… or that the average positions of West Ham have radically changed since Moyes re-took the helm.

Obviously we’re only at the tip of the iceberg. We started with “stories about change”, but the headline objective stands: We want to automatically point users to where the insight is, and minimise what narratives he misses out on.

I can honestly say that the challenges involved in implementing this, from the mathematics, coding, flexible implementation, etc; have been HUGE - but I hope they will hugely pay off because I personally love what we’ve done here.

I’d love to hear more people’s feedback and naturally, if you’re interested in this type of product we’re developing over at @Twenty3sport, don’t hesitate to get in touch.