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The Guardian
03-06-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
The Belgian lab shaping modern soccer's data revolution
If you hope to grasp why modern soccer looks the way it does, or the long strides we've made recently in understanding how it actually functions, it helps to know about what's been happening at one of the world's oldest universities, in Belgium. That's where you'll find the Sports Analytics Lab at the Catholic University of Leuven, headed up by Jesse Davis, a Wisconsinite computer science professor. Davis grew up going to basketball and football games at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and didn't discover soccer until college, during the 2002 World Cup. When he was hired in Leuven in 2010 to research machine learning, data mining and artificial intelligence, a band of sports-besotted colleagues brought him back to soccer. Before long, Davis was supervising a stable of post-docs, PhD and master's students working on soccer data. The richness and complexity of the data lent itself well to the study of AI. The work they produced, and made available to anyone through open-source analytics tools, substantially advanced the science behind the sport, and changed the way some clubs thought about playing. It may also serve as an example of how funding university research can benefit the public, including the businesses working within the field being studied; a potential parable for the value of academia at a time when it is being squeezed from all sides. In the early days of the analytics movement in sports, it was broadly believed that soccer didn't lend itself very well to advanced statistical analysis because it was too fluid. Unlike baseball, or basketball, or gridiron football, it couldn't be broken down very easily into a series of discrete actions that could be counted and assigned some sort of value. Its most measurable action, shots, and therefore goals, make up a tiny fraction of the events in a given game, presenting a problem for quantifying each player's contributions – especially in the many positions where players tend not to shoot at all. But while soccer was slow to adapt and adopt analytics, it got there eventually. Most big clubs now have an extensive data department, and there's now a disproportionately large genre of (eminently readable) books on this fairly esoteric subject. The Sports Analytics Lab published its findings on the optimal areas for taking long shots or asking whether, in some situations, it's more efficient to boot the ball long and out of bounds than to build out of the back. Some of those papers carried inscrutably academic-y titles like 'A Bayesian Approach to In-Game Win Probability' or 'Analyzing Learned Markov Decision Processes Using Model Checking for Providing Tactical Advice in Professional Soccer.' Wisely, they also published a blog that broke all of it down in layperson's terms. This fresh research led to collaborations with data analysts at clubs such as Red Bull Leipzig, Club Brugge and the German and United States federations. The lab also worked with its local pro club, Oud-Heverlee Leuven and the Belgian federation. But what's curious is that a decade and a half on, Davis and his team, which numbers about 10 at any given time, are still doing industry-leading and paradigm-altering research, like its recent work fine-tuning how ball possession is valued. Now that the sport, at the top end, has fully embraced analytics and baked it into everything it does, you would expect it to outpace and then sideline the outsiders, as has happened in other sports. But it didn't. 'Elite sport, and not just soccer, has an intense focus on what comes next,' says Davis. 'This is particularly true because careers are so fleeting both for players and staff. Consequently, the fact that you may not be around tomorrow does not foster the desire to take risks on projects that, A, may or may not work out or, B, will yield something useful but not in the next six-to-nine months.' There is innovative work being done within soccer clubs that the outside world doesn't get to see, because what would be the point of sharing all that hard-won insight? The incentives of professional sports strains against the scientific process, which values taking risks and tinkering endlessly with the design of experiments, none of which might yield anything of use. What's more, it requires highly skilled practitioners, who can be tricky and pricey to recruit. The payoff of that investment may be limited. And if it arrives at all, the output of that work may not necessarily help a team win games, especially in the short term. Meanwhile, most of the low-hanging soccer analytics fruit – like shot value, or which types of passes produce the most danger – has already been picked. What remains are far more complicated problems like tracking data and how to make sense of it. Sign up to Soccer with Jonathan Wilson Jonathan Wilson brings expert analysis on the biggest stories from European soccer after newsletter promotion You may find, for instance, that while expected goal models have become pretty good at quantifying and tabulating the chances a team created over the course of a game, they do not work well in putting a number on a certain striker's finishing ability because of biases in the training data. Yes. Sure. Great. But now what? What are Brentford (or his potential new club Manchester United) supposed to do with the knowledge that Bryan Mbeumo's Premier League-leading xG overperformance of +7.7 – that is, Mbeumo's expected goals from the quality of his scoring chances was 12.3, but he actually scored 20 times this past season – doesn't actually suggest that he was the best or most efficient finisher in the Premier League? What's more, when a club does turn up a useful tidbit, they have to find a way to not only implement that finding, but to track it over the long term. That means building some sort of system to accommodate it, which entails data engineering and software programming. On the club side, this kind of work can take up much, or most, of the labor in analytics work. 'For some of the deep learning models to work with tracking data takes months to code for exceptional programmers,' says Davis. 'Building and maintaining this is a big upfront cost that does not yield immediate wins. This is followed by a cost to maintain the infrastructure.' Academics, on the other hand, have less time pressure and can move on to some new idea if a project doesn't work out or there is simply no more new knowledge to be gained from it. 'I don't have to worry about setting up data pipelines, building interactive dashboards, processing things in real time, etc,' says Davis. The research itself is the point. The understanding that issues from it is the end, not the means. And then everybody else benefits from this intellectual progress. There may be a useful lesson in this for how a federal government, say, may consider the value of investing in scientific inquiry. Leander Schaerlaeckens is at work on a book about the United States men's national soccer team, out in 2026. He teaches at Marist University.
The Independent
29-05-2025
- General
- The Independent
Why this Man United team could genuinely get relegated
It won't happen this season, obviously, but Manchester United's form this season has seen them slip to the usually perilous 16th in the table. But what if Ruben Amorim's had been in charge all season? And what do the underlying numbers this season predict for them in the next campaign? Adam Clery lost his entire Sunday night making some spreadsheets to find out.
New York Times
09-05-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
Fantasy baseball waiver wire pickups featuring Jordan Beck, Cade Horton and more
Even though it's very early into the 2025 fantasy baseball season, many of you might be looking at a roster that only partially resembles the team you drafted. Since roster churn is the name of the game, I'm running it back with your favorite speculator piece with my patented data-backed, formulaic approach to discover next week's waiver wire headliners … today. Advertisement Going position by position, I mine my favorite obscure player statistics regarding control, batted ball quality and swing-and-miss ability. Then I mash them together to identify some cheap gems to grab before the squares figure it out next week. At the bottom, I rank my favorite available players around the diamond, two-start pitchers and speculative adds. Access The Athletic's guide for abbreviations used in fantasy baseball. When it comes to hitting, opportunity may be king, but we still need production, which comes from underlying skills. Scores of studies have proven the impact of exit velocity and its direct relationship with slugging percentage, so raw power is always a great place to start. The list below utilizes contact frequency and quality, paired with advanced statistics to identify underlying hitting skills. Hitters in this table have +80% contact, +42% hard-hit, a +.335 expected weighted on-base average and at least 35 plate appearances in the past 21 days. After a couple of intense weeks in the waiver streets, things suddenly got pretty quiet without any major injuries or marquee call-ups. Well, I never stop churning the bottom of my roster, and anytime there's a possibility to hitch my wagon to Coors Field as the weather warms, I'm buying with both hands. After a multitude of injuries, plus poor performance in Colorado, the subsequent outfield carousel appears to have come to a stop. One player left standing who is worth your fantasy attention is 24-year-old sophomore Jordan Beck. A rough initial go at the majors in 2024 — 184 PA, .188 BA, .521 OPS, 32 wRC+ — spurred some negative narratives surrounding Beck, but I contend they were premature. Remember, MLB is hard, and lots of superstars started slow their first time around. Advertisement Since his late-April promotion, Beck has been 5×5 viable in a full-time role — .310 BA, 13 R, 11 RBI, 5 HR, 1 SB — hitting primarily second in the Rockies' order. Sure, there have been strikeouts (32.2% K), but the chase rate isn't disastrous (34.4% O-Swing), so I'm willing to hang in there given the elite elevated pulled batted ball approach (19.5% Pulled FBLD). So, yes, the homers all came in a bunch, but more than half were on the road. And the underpinning power metrics, especially in his past 64 plate appearances, cannot be sold short — 51.3% Hard Hit, 25.6% Barrel, .607 xwOBAcon. Wow. Without real competition for plate appearances, and given his track record for five-category production, there's no reason for Beck to be rostered in so few leagues (only 23% on Yahoo). Since I have the chance, there's another thing worth mentioning. One of fantasy managers' most common errors is complacency, usually on better teams. Many of us have been there — a roster's performing well, full of noteworthy names, but we might not notice someone in the active lineup losing playing time. Now, that doesn't mean it's necessarily time to cut these guys, but losing at-bats is never a good thing. It gave me the idea to start tracking notable names losing opportunities. *** = Prioritize for speed ^^^ = Riser Players from previous articles who are no longer under 50% rostered (Yahoo) and should be rostered first As far as pitching goes, the thesis couldn't be simpler — do our best to avoid any bias attached to surface stats (outputs) by instead focusing on underlying metrics (inputs). The most important SP skills are suppressing runs by keeping runners off base and striking out batters. Though simply showing up on this list so early may be noise, there's an argument this combination of skills signals an immediate call to action. Advertisement Pitchers in this table have a ≤3.50 skills independent ERA, ≤1.20 WHIP, +18.0% K-BB rate, with a minimum of 10 IP in the past 30 days. Sometimes, the minor leagues are the perfectly placed open window, just as injuries slam a fantasy door. The Cubs look fantastic this season, continuing to succeed despite losing SP1 Justin Steele. Now it's co-ace Shota Imanaga (hamstring) on the IL15, and I'm no longer waiting to add rookie Cade Horton. Determined to capitalize on the great start, Cubs brass should have already been on the phone with Iowa for a one-way bus ticket. The former first-round pick has been excellent throughout Triple A this season — 29.0 IP, 1.24 ERA. 0.86 WHIP, 30.6% K, .128 BAA — posting at least five strikeouts in every game started. Horton's inducing whiffs (14.1% Swing Strike) while suppressing hard contact (.445 OPS, 27.9% Hard Hit, 4.9% Barrel). He has very little left to show in MiLB, especially with a big club in contention needing impactful innings pitched. In desperate times like this, when most self-respecting waiver wires are devoid of any true pitching talent, it's OK to add a player on a good team now and ask questions later. Due to spotty command and home run issues in his MiLB track record, I've never really been the biggest Landon Knack guy. But we fantasy beggars can't be choosers. Knack will occupy a spot in the Dodgers' rotation at least until Clayton Kershaw returns, and even then, he could be part of a six-man staff. After getting obliterated by the Nationals on the road in early April, the 27-year-old righty settled in nicely against Miami (5 IP, 0 ER, 1 BB, 5 K), for whatever that's worth. His changeup is a legitimately devastating MLB offering (42.3% Whiff, .215 xSLG), and if he'd just start getting the curveball over for more strikes (50.0% Ball), Knack could level up to stick with a club that's going to provide plenty of wins. ^^^ = Riser Players from previous articles who are no longer under 50% rostered (Yahoo) and should be rostered first (Top photo of Cade Horton: Rick Scuteri / Imagn Images)
New York Times
07-05-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
Ten early season MLB numbers that could be cause for alarm
We're a little over a month into the season. In terms of sample, it's not a lot. The smart play on most struggling players or teams is just to point to the track record, point to the expectations, point to the things that have been true longer than a month and expect those things to be true again. But it's also far enough into the season where some indicators are starting to show us signals. Some players and teams are already telling us that something is wrong. So, with a focus on those numbers that are meaningful quickest, let's take a quick tour around the league and find 10 statistics that might actually matter — and aren't good news. Texas Rangers: 34 percent chase rate No team is swinging more this year when compared to last year than the Rangers. That's true no matter how you dice it. No team is swinging at more than half the pitches they are seeing this year other than the Rangers, and no team has increased their swing rate year over year as much as the Rangers, and no team has increased swinging at pitches outside the strike zone as much as the Rangers. Look at the individual leaderboard and you'll see prominent Rangers — like Adolis García and Wyatt Langford — reaching more than they used to, and more than the rest of the league. Chasing pitches outside the strike zone is not itself a marker of poor play. Some hitters are aggressive and make enough powerful contact that they can make the approach work. But on the team level, not chasing is a marker of success, probably because the slugging percentage on pitches outside the zone is more than 250 points lower than on pitches inside the zone. So when a whole team is chasing more, the diagnosis is that its hitters are pressing, and that explains everything down to the team's increase in strikeout rate to the decrease in walk rate to the missing slugging. And that's a state that's hard to get out of, especially when it's spread throughout the clubhouse. Baltimore Orioles starters: 97 Pitching+ If pitching can be broken down into having good stuff and locating it, then the Orioles' pitching staff is in trouble in more ways than their ERA alone points out. Here are the bottom rotations in the big leagues by Pitching+, which looks at the shapes of pitches (through Stuff+) and then adds in command (through Location+). Only the Rockies, Angels, Cardinals, White Sox and Diamondbacks are showing worse stuff right now than the Orioles' rotation. And though the command has been good, it hasn't been enough to save Dean Kremer and Cade Povich from poor results. Good command can be enough — certainly Tomoyuki Sugano isn't winning because of his poor fastball velocity or middling breaking balls — but poor stuff is the hardest to correct, especially mid-season. The market values stuff over command right now, so there just isn't a great way for Baltimore to pivot and find good stuff quickly right now, and even one offseason may not be enough. And when Zach Eflin comes back, he's not going to solve the stuff deficit on the team. The worst part about this is maybe not even what it means for this year, though. Because the team seems to have valued command over stuff in the rotation to this point, they'll have a lot of work to do to reverse course. This year's rotational Stuff+ leaders are the Phillies — think about how long it's taken them to amass Zack Wheeler, Aaron Nola, Cristopher Sánchez, Jesús Luzardo and Ranger Suárez. It's amazing how one month can uncover a problem that might take years to fix. Toronto Blue Jays: .686 OPS in the heart of the plate No team in baseball is worse right now on pitches in the heart of the plate. Maybe this stat isn't going to stay exactly the same. It doesn't seem like Anthony Santander and Andrés Giménez will continue to slug under .400 on pitches over the heart of the plate, at least. But when a team isn't doing well with the best pitches to hit, it's hard to bet on it to do better. Much has been made about Toronto's lack of power, and how it is last in the big leagues in home run output, and this might be the culprit. Somehow this team is swinging at balls outside the zone at the fourth-worst rate, too. The approach needs to change for the Blue Jays' hitters. Ryan Pressly, Chicago Cubs: 93 Stuff+ While starting pitching is more complicated than just investigating how good a player's stuff is, relieving is much more reliant on having good velocity. We've known that forever, but also as a statistical given once it was shown how much more tightly reliever aging is tied to their fastball velocity than it is for starters. So when you have a closer with iffy stuff, you've got a situation. Here are the relievers with three or more saves this year, sorted backward by Stuff+, to see the bottom of the list: Team-wise, the Cubs might be okay. Porter Hodge looks the part of a high-stuff, high-leverage reliever, and improving the pen is something that is exceedingly possible in-season. There are always relievers available. For the player, though, this isn't necessarily a list you want to be on. Pressly's declining stuff — he's lost velocity and ride on the four-seam, which has become more cutter-like, and his curve is his only remaining above-average pitch — will probably cost him the closer's role sooner rather than later. Los Angeles Dodgers: 157 innings by starters Going into Tuesday's games, Royals starters had already thrown 46 more innings than Dodgers starters this year. That means Dodgers starters are on pace for a bottom-five innings output of all time, and are going 4.5 innings, on average, while their Royals counterparts are going a full inning deeper in the game. That may not be surprising, given the injuries that have hit in Los Angeles this year (and every year). The Dodgers have had to turn to pitchers like Ben Casparius, who was a reliever his last time out. This isn't likely to change much either, as their three horses this year — Roki Sasaki, Dustin May and Yoshinobu Yamamoto — haven't had spotless injury track records either. It's just how things go in Los Angeles these days, and it's been successful for the Dodgers. But over the course of a full season, those extra 200-250 innings that the bullpen will have to throw for the Dodgers will tax them. Lewie Pollis looked at the number and found that managers are going to their bullpen too soon, and it's taxing the relievers. Los Angeles has had a top-three bullpen so far, but will it regress over the course of the season — and most importantly, what will it look like in October? Michael Toglia, Colorado Rockies: 40 percent hard-hit rate If you're going to be a 6-foot-5 first baseman who strikes out more than 99 percent of baseball, then you better do one thing really well: hit the ball hard. And last year, Michael Toglia did. He was in the 94th percentile for hard-hit rate (how often you hit the ball over 95 mph), and in the top 10 for all sorts of stuff. His Statcast profile was lit up red. 457 FEET! Michael Toglia DEMOLISHES this ball and ties it up for the @Rockies! 😤 — MLB (@MLB) April 26, 2025 This year? Not so much. Blue is the dominant color now, and his hard-hit rate has suffered the most. He's down now to the 38th percentile there, and doesn't have a single metric that's in the 90th percentile. Maybe it seems too early to sound the alarm here, but he's put 70 balls in play already, and that's a significant amount for most of these batted ball strength statistics. He also has a big hill to climb: Because of his strikeout rate and his home park, even last year's 25-homer effort was judged to be below-average by park-adjusted metrics. There's a little bit here that's damning of the entire Rockies offense, which was a huge contributor to the Rockies' opening month — one of the worst of all time. The Rockies strike out more than anyone, but have the 20th-best hard-hit rate to show for it. Missing a lot and hitting it softly is not a combination for future success. Nolan Gorman, St. Louis Cardinals: 70.5 mph swing speed The one thing Toglia still does that could save his season is swing the bat hard, as he's still in the 69th percentile for bat speed. The Cardinals' oft-whiffing power-hitting struggler can't say the same. Gorman's bat speed is down more than any other qualified hitter, all the way to the 29th percentile, down nearly three ticks from last year, when he was in the 70th percentile in that metric. Bat speed does a good job of describing raw power, though, and Gorman isn't a small-sample prospect any more. If there's hope, it's that he's still getting Barrels (64th percentile) and not chasing (86th percentile), so maybe this is just a blip. On the other hand, like Toglia, Gorman has some flaws. He doesn't run well, the defense is inconsistent, and he doesn't put the ball in play a lot. If the Cardinals second baseman isn't going to have plus bat speed, those flaws are only going to get more attention. Athletics: 172 home run park factor Right now, the easiest park to homer in at night is Sutter Health Park in Sacramento. Right now, the sixth- hardest place to hit a homer in during the day is Sutter Health Park in Sacramento. Over in Tampa, Steinbrenner Field goes from the sixth-friendliest park overall during the day to a neutral park at night. Michael Rosen over at FanGraphs pointed out that the Rays temporary home is likely to be the most wind-affected park in the big leagues, but Sutter could be close behind. Here's why: Major league parks are bigger, and the bigger structure creates more of a 'wind shadow' that reduces some of the effect that wind can have on the ball. These two parks are minor league parks, and so they shade their fields less, and so wind will be a major factor. One-year park factors are full of noise, but the signal here is the noise itself: The A's and the Rays will have the wildest swings in home run environment depending on that day's weather, and they're just as likely to see a no-hitter as a blow out from one game to next. That's got to wreak a little havoc on your team on the margins at the very least. Yusei Kikuchi, Los Angeles Angels: Minus-10 Stuff+ Here are the starters who haven't changed roles, have pitched at least 10 innings and have lost the most Stuff+ compared to last season. There's a lot of bad news on this table, but Kikuchi stands out, to some degree, because all of his pitches have gotten worse. His fastball has less ride and less velocity. His slider has less drop and less velocity. His changeup is two ticks slower. His curveball is three ticks slower and also has less break, which is hard to do. Usually, Kikuchi is a pitcher with good stuff that hopefully has just enough command to thrive. Not good when a pitcher like that loses his stuff. Cleveland Guardians: Minus-23 run differential Are the Guardians a good team right now? They've been outscored by 23 runs and their pitching staff has been all over this article, and not in a good way. They're the only team in baseball that's been outscored, is projected to be outscored and is also projected to finish over .500 by FanGraphs. That's a little bit of a statistical trick because that site says Cleveland will end up 82-80, but still — the rest of these teams with bad run differentials are either just bad, or projected to be better. Not really true for the Guardians. On the hitting side, José Ramírez has only been good, and should be better. Maybe Nolan Jones and Jhonkensy Noel can be better, but that's only a maybe given their short major league track records. Even if a few of their pitchers are going to be better, this staff doesn't have the makings of one that would make any positive bold predictions come true. They sit in between the White Sox, Nationals and Athletics when it comes to run differential. That's not usually the mark of a contender. (Illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic ; top photos: Daniel Kucin Jr. / Imagn Images, Ezra Shaw, Greg Fiume / Getty Images)
