Why We Need Positional Data in Football

23 April 2017. El Clásico. Real were one man down and losing against one of the best teams in the world, with less than 15 minutes to go. The match seemed decided. But then, Real equalized.

Looking at the usually tracked events will paint a rather boring picture of the goal: Kroos passes to Marcelo, who crosses to James, who scores. But how did James get in such a great position to shoot from, and who allowed it? We can’t say.

In a guest post at the great Football Analytics blog Statsbomb, I write about possible metrics you can calculate with positional data — after going through the boring job of actually collecting it (yes, just by watching replays of the goal). You can read it here.

I also publish the data and code to generate the the metrics and the animations at the Football Crunching GitHub repository.