Category · 6 articles
Profiles and scouting, by the numbers.
What separates a real breakout from a hot streak? How has the job description of a fullback changed when you look at what they actually do with the ball? This is where individual players and teams get put under the statistical microscope.
The emphasis is on frameworks you can reuse — radar and percentile profiles, role comparisons, and the under-the-hood metrics that survive once the highlight reel stops flattering everyone.
Two of these pieces are about players over time. Football aging curves asks which parts of a player's game decay first and which hold, because "past his peak" is three or four different claims wearing one coat. Anatomy of a breakout is the companion problem at the other end of a career: separating a genuine step up in level from a run of finishing that was always going to regress.
The rest are about roles — what a position now consists of, measured rather than asserted. The modern fullback and the sweeper-keeper track two jobs that were rewritten inside a decade; the false nine takes a label that gets applied to almost any forward who drops deep and asks what actually distinguishes one; and defensive line height and compactness moves up a level from the individual to the shape a team defends in.
Player-level analysis is the part of football data where confident conclusions are cheapest and most often wrong. Sample sizes are small, minutes are unequal, teammates and system do much of the work a percentile chart credits to one name, and the public event data underneath these pieces records what happened on the ball far better than what happened off it. So the pieces here spend as much time on what a metric cannot see as on what it can, and they favour distributions and ranges over rankings. Where a figure comes from a data pull I run, the dataset it was computed from is published on this site; where a number is a published record or a formula, it is cited instead. If you want to build the profiles yourself rather than read about them, the tutorials have the code.
How high a team defends and how tightly it stays connected decides how much space the game has. Measuring defensive line height and compactness.
Footballers don’t improve forever. What aging curves reveal about when players peak, which skills fade first, and why clubs pay for the wrong years.
The goalkeeper stopped being just a shot-stopper. How distribution and ground covered outside the box became measurable parts of build-up play.
A centre-forward who refuses to stay up front breaks a defence's reference points. What the false nine does, and how it shows up in the data.
How to tell a genuine player breakout from a hot streak before the market catches up — a repeatable framework built on role change, volume and regression.
The fullback went from defensive afterthought to one of football's most demanding roles. The statistical profile of the position transformed with it.