In late January, many members of our ASA community went to Rice University in Houston to discuss a lot of football analysis. ASA Slack was so busy that we thought we would convene the roundtable. To hear a podcast version of the conversation around the conference, Ben, Kieran and Harrison spoke to Arman Kafai about some of the cool things happening there.
Kieran Doyle, ASA show host: Good morning everyone! It seems like a lot of ASA faces made their way to the American Soccer Insights Summit at Rice University this past weekend. For those of us who couldn’t make it, anyone want to share their highlights or do a specific piece of research they were excited about?
Catalina Bush, owner of the ASA Vizhub: I’m biased on this because I was involved in the behind-the-scenes process, but I think SkillCorner’s research presentations remain a strong point of the Summit. I thought the quality was very high this year and everyone I spoke to agreed that they were really well done.
Matt Barger, ASA Contributor: The level of the presentations has greatly improved compared to last year. I loved the presentations on presses and network analysis.
Jamon Moore, ASA-OG: Lou Zhou, who presented after Devin Pleuler did a great job giving a fresh perspective on goalkeepers looking for balls and how to judge whether or not they should do so. Conceptually, tracking data could improve the g+ Claiming category a bit by answering whether or not goalkeepers should come out in different situations.
The one I’ll probably think about the most, probably will be the xShotby Jonathon Pipping-Gamon. It’s not the first time xShot has been considered as a concept, but the potential predictive improvement on xG alone is worth further exploration.
Kieran Doyle: GK Cross’s claim decision is interesting. I remember talking to clubs about using tracking data to create a physics-based model of: here are the players, here is the trajectory and pace of the cross, do you have a realistic claim for this? Like a souped-up xClaim.
Jamon Moore: There’s also a use case for getting out for throughballs and other balls up front. This was evident from the presentation.
Kieran Doyle: I think from the outside, and something that Ben/Harrison and I talked about on the pod, was that I was pleasantly surprised by the variety of approaches that we saw here.
Meredith Shea’s offball run paper gave me the same vibe as the truly groundbreaking one Borne/Fernandez off-ball movement paper at Barcelonaand I love defense so I loved some of the passing lanes and transition defense stuff.
Harrison Crow, ASA Council of Elders: I also enjoyed it very much Meredith Shea and “Off-Ball Run Value: Quantifying the Quality of Off-Ball Runs“Not only was it something unique and added to the conversation, but the presentation was so well balanced between approach, model and impact. I thought it was the most complete presentation.
My second place was “A geometric framework for measuring preventive defensive positioning in women’s football” by Luke Blommesteyn. I had the privilege of meeting Luke in the first ten minutes of the conference and was immediately enthusiastic about this presentation and it did not disappoint.
Nate Gilman, ASA Contributor: As an avid visitor, I headed into the weekend to learn about cool new things going on in the world of football, hang out and have interesting conversations about them, in no particular order. The two presentations Harrison mentioned, plus Maddalena Toricelli’s once-in-a-lifetime impact using tracking data and network analysiswere probably the most interesting to me in terms of what happens on the field at the beginning of the season.
More generally, for a casual user of data in football, it was very interesting to hear from experts talking about smaller pieces of the whole. So my bigger and somewhat unexpected takeaway from the weekend was how everything fits together in the effort to create football teams better. I hadn’t thought much about how teams structured their data processes and what impact these fundamental decisions could have on the field, but now I do.
Akshay Easwaran, American Football Data Engineer: Along those same lines, I felt like the theme of Day 1 / industry conversations was alignment: on the game model, on the terms, etc. Clubs can build a strong foundation by creating operational definitions for how they want to play / how they see it on video / how they measure and evaluate it through data / how that data is collected and being very, very picky about how those definitions are disseminated and used for coaching, development, scouting.
Game models are usually not unique, so the benefits seem to lie in how you adapt to micro/macro trends (in games / based on market trends), and how well you communicate and stick to the principles you have defined as an organization.
Kieran Doyle: Harrison and Arman both spoke at length on the pod about how open Carlos Vela from Alajualense was about their game model and the integration of data into it, which was a really cool topic.
Akshay Easwaran: Oliver had a good addition to that too: one of the points I took from him is that with so much data available (on Twitter, BSky, Fotmob, etc.), you need to make sure you and everyone around you knows precisely which metrics actually matter and why they matter.
Kieran Doyle: Someone posted a slide, maybe in the Discord or on bsky, showing the principle of the game model and its evaluation metric that I liked. It was a great example of what I think a ‘data-driven organization’ actually is. We normally think of this when we think of recruitment involvement, but I think this is almost as important.
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