Euro 2020

The 30 men shortlist for Ballon d’Or 2021 is out. The list went through a lot of scrutiny from football fans, as is always the case. Since the sport has such a vast fanbase, it is impossible to satisfy each and every individual while handing out honors like these. On…

A predictive model for the European Football Championship — Introduction 2021 saw the postponed European Football Championship (Euro 2020) take place. In the leadup to the tournament, I set myself the challenge of building a model to predict the score of every match. My plan was to look at the historic performance of the competing nations and use this to…

Racism is one of the most extensive and long-standing issues in sports. While there have been numerous efforts by sporting bodies, most of them have largely been in vain. In other words, they are merely impactful actions only on the pitch and during times of low consequences. For instance, let’s…

Something I have always been fascinated by is the difference between international football and club football. As an avid football supporter, you will always get this sense that there is a different feel to the games, but it is difficult to quite put your finger on what that is. Opta’s…

NLP: Extracting the main topics using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) — It’s been almost two months since the final of Euro 2020 between Italy and England that was held in Wembley Stadium, London ended. The football fever is slowly declining but the recent 2022 FIFA World Cup qualification matches have brought my attention and interest to examine what do people say…

Improved delivery with the architectural approach OTT streaming services are experiencing record increases in consumer demand. It’s affected by the wide range of OTT media on a market, differentiated and genuine content, and still, a limited ability to travel in a pandemic reality. For many people, OTT applications or browser…

Success has many parents, failure is an orphan. The England men’s football team which has brought so much joy to a nation the past few weeks fell at the final hurdle. After defeat comes the post-mortem. …

I have noticed a lot of major issues in which people seem to be putting all their energy into talking about the symptoms and not the underlying causes. Perhaps the biggest example of this is taking the knee in support of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) moment. I understand the…

In a column under the heading “Brexit has unleashed something ugly here too” published in The Irish Times of 24 July, Jennifer O’Connell argued that Brexit might be engendering an atavistic anti-English reaction in Ireland. I am reassembling her “argument” from different parts of her column. Ms. O’Connell describes the…