Hi Tip-Sheeters,

The World Cup starts today!!!

I live in Kansas City, USA and we're one of the host cities for the World Cup games this year.

We're also hosting the training camps for the Netherlands, England, and Argentina so it's going to be an exciting month.

If you visit the airport, you'll see we are ready for the festivities to begin!

So this week I'm sharing a variety of World Cup and soccer / voetbal / fútbol / football links related to data and analytics.

I'll be rooting for the red, white, and blue -- give a quick reply and tell me what team you're following. (Remember this helps avoid spam filtering.)

World Cup articles, models, dashboards

Here are some data-focused views of the world cup:

• Dream Databall shares What I'm Looking Forward To At The World Cup.
• Andrzej Kończyk published a World Cup Power Index on his Substack. Spain is #1 and #2 is ... Morocco?
• Alex Marin Felices explains This is how you win world cup games on the xG Football Club substack.
• André Junqueira Cunha has a cool PowerBI dashboard with National team historical results and a LinkedIn post explaining the approach. Is it a coincidence that Brazil is "most successful" 🤷 ?
• Jacob Aronson and The Information lab shared a World Cup Preview Tableau dashboard highlighting the upcoming games. Choose your favorite team and check out their group.
• Bleacher Report ranks the 99 Best Men's Soccer players of All Time.

Soccer analytics, otherwise known as the search for xG

Beyond world cup, Soccer Analytics is a huge pastime and professional pursuit. Here's just a taste:

• When you talk soccer analytics, you have to start with one metric: xG or expected goals. A true analytics-minded footballer will tell you that you don't evaluate a team's or player's future on actual wins or goals -- after all reality is messy. The real predictor is xG, what should have happened based on their behavior or ability. Everyone's got their on xG model (not unlike how every serious Kansas City cook has their own recipe for BBQ sauce). Here's an alternative model from Marc Lamberts, a Dutch data expert and soccer analytics fan: Expected Shot Danger: building an alternative to xG.
• Hudl Statsbomb is an og leader in Soccer analytics. They offer a lot of Python tools, including their Statsbombpy library I wrote about in my book.
• There have been quite a few books about the analytics revolution of professional soccer. Don't worrCheck out a solid list here: football analytics books.
• I'm a big fan of Fantasy American Football -- I spend way to much time and brain cycles on this hobby. Why not check out some fantasy soccer? The big boy in the market is Fantasy Premier League, but other Big Five leagues have their own.

• OK because I couldn't help myself, here's an xG model for you from Gabriel Garau: Big Data in soccer: Creating an xG Model.​

⚽ Hope you reach all your goals this week. ⚽

Keep coding,

Ryan Day

👉 https://tips.handsonapibook.com/ -- no spam, just a short email every week or so.

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