Article by Ben Griffis Goalkeeper chains are one of the fastest-growing tactical trends around the world, at all levels of the game. Goalkeeper chains are, at a basic level, the goalkeeper being heavily involved in their team’s buildup, usually just outside their box (or in some extreme cases, much higherup), in order to create numerical overloads. For a more detailed discussion on the tactic, please read Neel Shelat’s brief introduction piece for Analytics FC, his in-depth follow-up with a host of examples, or for German speakers, René Marić’s seminal piece (which you can grasp the idea via t ..read more

Article by Ben Griffis In 1983, Peter Kraljic – a consultant with McKinsey at the time – wrote one of supply chain management’s seminal works in the Harvard Business Review. The article, entitled Purchasing Must Become Supply Management, is still widely read and cited today. Kraljic’s article focuses on the discipline of purchasing/supply management, one of the key pillars of supply chain management, and illustrates why firms should think of this act as strategic instead of merely operational. The article was published at a time when supply chain globalization was really starting to take off ..read more

Article by Ben Griffis I’ve been reading a bit on “flow motifs” recently, which were introduced in 2014 by Laszlo Gyarmati, Haewoon Kwak, and Pablo Gonzalez and expanded upon by articles like Håland et al. (2020) (which I based this work off of), Peña & Navarro (2015), and Bekkers & Dabadghao (2019) to name a few. I’ve finally cracked the code (literally) on how to make these myself, so want to introduce them to those who haven’t read about them yet and show some interesting visuals of team passing styles for not only UEFA Top 5 leagues, but also a larger sample of 18 global leagues. F ..read more

Article by Ben Griffis Knowing what leagues or clubs may be the most similar to each other is valuable for many reasons. One natural application for this information is player recruitment (as well as development, either loans or targets for sales). In the absence of (relatively quality) data to grade leagues against each other, we need to have decent knowledge of each league. This is possible on a limited scale, and something I’ve personally tried to gain knowledge on, particularly in the “less popular” European leagues and in Asia. But I couldn’t even begin to tell you where any league from A ..read more

Factions have formed in modern football circles. One faction is the “football is played on grass” trope. Another faction includes the people saying how you can do anything and everything with football data. Opinions are personal. We are welcome to hold any opinion we want, that’s the nature of life. And people can agree or disagree with our opinions, and bring evidence for or against any opinions. But the reality is that the data-vs-eyes debate in football is not a dichotomy but a spectrum. Of course, people can agree or disagree that data is useful, a good tool, necessary, or anything else, b ..read more

Article by Ben Griffis There are 60 teams in Serie C, Italy’s 3rd division. Only four teams win promotion to Serie B: the winners of each of the three groups, and the winners of the promotion playoffs, which contain no fewer than 28 teams. Needless to say, there are bound to be plenty of young players who could make the step up to Serie B (or other leagues abroad) even if their team does not win promotion in likely one of the most difficult leagues to win promotion from. I won’t discuss my exact method for everything in this article, as I already wrote that up in my first data scouting article ..read more

Article by Ben Griffis My process for finding players with interesting data profiles is, like, most, to cast a wide net and then work on paring the initial list down with more filters. It’s an iterative process and I have a few methods I use to find players, either by filtering raw datasets, making scatters, filtering event data, or generating player role scores. Usually, if I’m not just playing around but instead actively looking for a few players to spend time watching games of, I combine several of these methods. I’ve recently started getting into Spain’s second division, La Liga SmartBank ..read more

Article by Ben Griffis A while ago I explained some of my feelings towards defensive metrics. The widely available and used metrics are almost all bad for analyzing defensive performance. Percentages like tackle success rate & aerial win rates are about the only semi-useful available metrics. In that article, I also touched on some of my ideas of how we could start using data to not necessarily make new single-number metrics, but rather to begin analyzing defensive performances. Event data and defense aren’t exactly best friends like event data and and attack are, but there are some ways w ..read more

… And why they’re all misleading and/or faulty. Article by Ben Griffis Metrics that are widely used to analyze defensive performances in football are numerous. They all attempt to hone in on specific elements of defensive play: tackles, interceptions, clearances, aerials, etc. All of these metrics are inherently flawed and shouldn’t be used to evaluate defenders, and especially shouldn’t be used to make decisions with. Widely-used and available event-based defensive metrics simply cannot capture what most of defending is: stopping the opposing player/team. Why are they wrong? There won’t be to ..read more

Written by Ben Griffis Latvian striker Raimonds Krollis ended the 2022 Virsliga season as the top scorer, scoring 24 in 34 games, propelling Valmiera to the title. He’s just 21 years old and already captains Valmiera, who stormed the league this season en route to their first-ever title. While the entire team is stacked with young, promising players, Krollis certainly sticks out. In this article I’ll dive into Krollis’ data to profile him as a player and offer some videos for support. Overall, Raimonds Krollis is a strong striker who can do it all; finish, create, drop deep to impact plays… A ..read more