During the summer of 2009, Real Madrid had one of the best transfer windows ever. Cristiano Ronaldo swapped Manchester for Madrid, Kaká traded Milan for the Spanish capital while Xabi Alonso left Merseyside to return to Spain along with team-mate Álvaro Arbeloa. Los Blancos also won the race to sign Lyon prodigy Karim Benzema ahead…
Premier League football is back after a long pandemic lockdown and… well, at least it’s football. It might, understandably, not be of the highest quality, but it’s the sport we love and there’s plenty of it to watch. It’s felt noticeably different from the norm, but how much of that is a real change and…
Brighton and Hove Albion are one of the few clubs in the Premier League that invest a lot of time in using data to help drive their recruitment. It helped them identify the likes of Pascal Groß, Yves Bissouma, Leandro Trossard and José Izquierdo, along with many others. However, their shrewdest purchase might be that…
The Data Game series sees Twenty3 speak to prominent writers and figures in football to get their opinion on the use of data and analytics in the beautiful game. In the second instalment, we spoke to freelance football writer Chris Smith, who features regularly for our friends at Squawka and World Football Index. Here’s what…
A certain section of technology experts will live and die by Ray Kurzweil’s ‘law of accelerating returns’. Evolution happens exponentially, the theory goes, for technology as well as for anything. People build on the knowledge of what’s come before, and that knowledge helps them get new knowledge faster. This won’t be a post about that…
100 days after COVID-19 brought football to a sudden halt, the Premier League returns on Wednesday. But, not as we know it. The last Premier League fixture to take place before coronavirus paralysed Europe saw Leicester City thrash Aston Villa 4-0 on March 9. In the months that followed, life, as we know it, hit…
Jack Grealish is one of the most sought after players in the Premier League. The Aston Villa maestro has been perpetually linked with Tottenham Hotspur, Liverpool were rumoured to be keeping tabs on the 24-year-old while Manchester United have reportedly made the £75million-rated attacker their top target for the belated summer transfer window. On paper,…
Visualisations can, at times, be an afterthought in the world of content. They’re used to break up written pieces of copy or to add a bit of colour to social media. People use them because they feel they have to, not because they see the value in them. Because of this, you often see overcomplicated,…
Data is a word with four letters but the way it’s used often makes it feel bigger than that. Sometimes people ask ‘how to use’ football data, as if there were One Single Way or a multi-step programme for how to live a more enriched, wholesome, data-guru life. There are definitely some things that should…
The Data Game series sees Twenty3 speak to prominent writers and figures in football to get their opinion on the use of data and analytics in the beautiful game. To kick things off, we caught up with world football guru James Nalton, who has written for the likes of BBC Sport, Forbes, This is Anfield,…