The sports industry, like all industries, is becoming more data-driven than ever before.  Whether it’s the need to stay competitive, justify personnel expenditures, make a prediction, or just tell a compelling story, data are an integral component of decision-making in sport.

Association football has taken a long time to embrace quantitative measurement, but football clubs, sports agents, the media, and predictive markets are incorporating data to a greater degree and at a rapidly increasing rate.  We’ve moved from a situation 15 years ago where data in soccer were scarce and limited to one where everyone is literally swimming in rich and finely-grained match data.

But soccer analytics is not just a data measurement problem.

It’s also a data analysis problem.

Developing team and player performance analytics for a field sport as dynamic, decentralized, and interdependent as football is a significant technical challenge.  Yet the state of the art in match analytics hasn’t changed much despite the growth in data, and existing analysis tools merely scratch the surface of what’s possible from today’s match data.

I founded Soccermetrics Research to change that.

At Soccermetrics Research, we conduct research on advanced match analytics in association football and develop analytics software for the football industry. Our work encompasses topics such as quantitative analysis of player and team performance over all competition formats, valuation of players in transfer and draft markets, and marketing and ticketing analytics.  Our motto is soccer from first principles — melding a love and understanding of the sport of football with a solid foundation in mathematical and statistical first principles to formulate and develop credible and actionable information to statistical analysis issues in the sport.

We are engineers. We are software developers. We are basic researchers.  We are modelers.  But most importantly, we are football fans.  And we’re changing the way this wonderful game is viewed and analyzed.

Howard Hamilton
Founder, Soccermetrics Research