The Belgian lab shaping modern soccer's data revolution
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.
Advertisement
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.
Related: 'It's a new world': the analysts using AI to psychologically profile elite players
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.
Advertisement
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.
Advertisement
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.
Related: What MLS can learn from the J League's growth in Japan
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.'
Advertisement
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.
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?
Advertisement
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.
Advertisement
There may be a useful lesson in this for how a federal government, say, may consider the value of investing in scientific inquiry.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
Rubiales forced kiss could drive Spain on in Euro 2025 final: England's Toone
England's Ella Toone admits Spain may have extra motivation going into Sunday's final of the Women's Euro 2025 after their World Cup triumph two years ago was overshadowed by events at the end of the game in Sydney. Spain beat England 1-0 in 2023 to win the Women's World Cup for the first time, with Olga Carmona scoring the only goal of the game. However, the headlines later were dominated by the forced kiss by former Spanish football federation chief Luis Rubiales on player Jenni Hermoso. Rubiales was eventually fined 10,800 euros ($11,670) for sexual assault in February this year. "It was a difficult period for the Spanish players and I think for what they did in the World Cup, for that to then be the main talking point, was really tough and something they shouldn't have had to go through," Toone told reporters in Zurich on Friday. "They should have celebrated what was an amazing tournament for them." Toone played in the World Cup final and is now hoping England can avenge their defeat that day, as well as repeat their victory in the final of the last European Championship in 2022. "Both of us want to win obviously -- they have their reasons, we have ours and I think it is going to be a very tough game," said the 25-year-old Manchester United midfielder. "We have so much respect for them and the quality they have, but we also believe in ourselves, that we can really step up." England have made a third consecutive major tournament final off the back of two heart-stopping victories in the knockout rounds in Switzerland. After coming back from two goals down late on to beat Sweden on penalties in the quarter-finals, they defeated Italy 2-1 in extra time in the last four. The Lionesses were trailing in that game in Geneva until Michelle Agyemang's 96th-minute effort forced extra time. Chloe Kelly then converted the winner in the 119th minute as penalties loomed. "I think we have it in us all individually and as a team that we want to fight, not stop running," said Toone, who scored England's first goal when they beat Germany 2-1 at Wembley in the Euro 2022 final. "You have seen that in games where sometimes you might feel like we are down and out and it is 90-odd minutes and then someone comes on and we take that moment. "We are competitive and we know what it takes to win and that is what has got us to a third consecutive final." as/nf
Scientific American
4 hours ago
- Scientific American
The Surprising Math and Physics behind the 2026 World Cup Soccer Ball
Every four years, soccer fans eagerly await the sport's biggest event: the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) World Cup. But before each dramatic kickoff, artists and researchers spend years designing, testing and revising the official match ball. Recently images of the planned ball for the 2026 competition were leaked, and its design incorporates math, physics and style in some surprising ways. Called the Trionda (Spanish for 'triwave'), the new ball celebrates the three host nations—the U.S., Mexico and Canada—for the first multinational-hosted World Cup. The ball is stitched together from just four panels, the smallest number yet for a FIFA World Cup ball. And it represents a significant reduction from the 20-paneled Al Rhila ball that was used in 2022. The design of any soccer ball hinges on an age-old question: How can one make rounded shapes out of flat material? Every FIFA World Cup ball so far has borrowed inspiration from some of math's simplest three-dimensional shapes: the platonic solids. These five shapes are the only convex polyhedrons built from copies of a single regular polygon. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. The icosahedron, which has 20 triangle faces and a relatively ball-like appearance, seems promising, but it's still a bit too pointy to roll around. If we cut off (or truncate) the points of an icosahedron, each of the triangles becomes a hexagon, and each of the points becomes a pentagon. This is the shape of the classic soccer ball, originally called the Telstar ball and used in the official FIFA World Cup match in 1970. The stark black-and-white color scheme was meant to increase visibility on black-and-white TVs, which were still prevalent at the time. The Trionda ball is also based on a platonic solid—the tetrahedron—which at first seems the least ball-like of all the famous shapes. A tetrahedron is made of four triangles, three of which meet at every point. The trick in the Trionda design is in the shape of the panels. Though they have three points like a typical triangle, the panels' edges are curves that fit together to give the ball a more rounded exterior. This method of making a pointy platonic solid rounder by curving the edges of the faces may be familiar to soccer fans; in fact, the design of the Trionda ball strongly evokes the Brazuca, a six-paneled ball based on a cube that starred in the 2014 World Cup. Basing the Trionda ball on a tetrahedron might be a risky choice; the last match ball based on that shape was highly controversial. The Jabulani ball, whose name means 'rejoice' in Zulu, might have been a bit too joyful. Players complained it was unpredictable in the air and didn't react the way they expected it to. The design of the Jabulani combined both methods of turning a platonic solid into a sphere: cutting off the corners to make eight faces and turning the edges of the faces into curves. It also had a unique feature, shared with none of the official match balls before or since: three-dimensional, spherically molded panels. The Jabulani may have been the roundest ball yet. So why didn't it work as intended? The answer has to do with 'drag'—the force of air particles pushing back on the ball as it flies through space. Typically, the faster a ball moves, the more drag it experiences, which can slow it down and change its trajectory. But each ball also has a 'critical speed' past which the drag on the ball decreases significantly. The smoother a ball is, the higher the critical speed barrier becomes. This is why the surfaces of golf balls have dimples: they lower the critical speed and help the balls move faster through the air. These effects mean that rounder and smoother isn't always better—and may explain the Jabulani's unpredictable behavior. The minimization of drag is likely why the Trionda ball has divots in its surface and offers another reason for its meandering seams. Ball designers use a combination of surface texture, seam length and seam depth to achieve just the right amount of 'roughness' so that players are comfortable with the ball when they step onto the field. While the amount of roughness is important, the placement of seams and surface texture can also affect a ball's reliability in the air. In particular, researchers are concerned about the 'knuckleball effect,' named after a kind of baseball pitch. When a ball spins quickly through the air, the placement of its rough elements matters less; the ball moves as if these features are evenly distributed. But if the ball is pitched or kicked in a way that minimizes spin, its rougher areas will feel different amounts of drag than smoother sides, causing it to move unpredictably. This effect is good for a baseball pitcher, who wants to make the ball more difficult for the batter to hit, but not so much for a soccer player, who wants the ball to go precisely where they aim it. To avoid this effect, soccer ball designers often try to make balls as symmetrical as possible; they want a ball to look the same from different angles as it rotates. Symmetry is one concern experts have about the Trionda ball; because it is based on a tetrahedron, it has fewer symmetries than, for example, the classic Telstar ball. Whereas the Telstar ball looks precisely the same in 60 possible positions, the Trionda ball only has 12 rotational symmetries. Players will be keeping a close eye on how all these qualities might affect the way the ball plays on the field. Keeping track of the ball developments and practicing extensively with the match ball is 'very important,' says Brad Friedel, a retired goalkeeper who played on the U.S.'s respective national teams in two World Cups and two Olympic Games. When testing out a new ball, he says, 'you just go through a normal training session and [see] what little nuances it has. Does it only have good grip when it's dry? Is it good when it's wet? What's the flight like on chip crosses?' Of different ball shapes in general, Julia Grosso, a midfielder for the Chicago Stars Football Club, who has played on the Canadian team in the past two Women's World Cups, says, 'It's more about how can we work together as a team to win rather than what kind of ball we are playing with.' But she adds that practicing with a particular ball before the game 'really helps' to get a feel for how it will react and adjust accordingly. Players aren't the only ones who are eager to get their hands on new balls. 'I'm dying to hold [the Trionda] to see what it feels like and what the seam structure is like and all that,' says sports physicist John Eric Goff of the University of Puget Sound. Once the ball is officially released, he and his colleagues will do wind tunnel tests to analyze its precise physical properties. While most soccer fans will be rooting for the players, entire networks of artists, engineers and scientists will be rooting for the ball.
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
Spain hero Aitana Bonmati reveals secret plan behind stunning winner in Euro 2025 semi-final
Aitana Bonmati revealed Spain had spotted Germany goalkeeper Ann-Katrin Berger's tendency to step away from her near post after scoring from the tightest of angles to send the world champions into the Euro 2025 final. The two-time Ballon d'Or winner broke the deadlock in the 113th minute of the semi-final when she squeezed a shot from close to the byline past the Germany goalkeeper, as Spain set up a World Cup final rematch with European champions England on Sunday. Barcelona midfielder Bonmati confirmed after the match that she intended to shoot after Spain had studied Berger's positioning and found she often left the near post uncovered in anticipation of a cross or a pull-back. Berger had signalled to her defenders with her right arm, pointing towards the space in the penalty box, just as Bonmati unleashed a fierce strike of power and accuracy to find the narrow gap Berger had left behind. "We had studied Berger and sometimes the first post was left empty,' Bonmati told Spanish TV station RTVE, as world champions Spain progressed to their first-ever European final. Berger had been Germany's hero in their penalty shoot-out win over France in the quarter-finals and had kept Germany in the game during the first half with a string of saves to deny Spain forward Esther Gonzalez. With the semi-final heading towards penalties, Bonmati broke the deadlock and the 1-0 victory meant that Spain defeated Germany for the first time at a major international tournament. "I'm proud because we deserve it,' Bonmati said. 'We had a tremendous championship. It was the first time we beat Germany, and on top of that, we reached the final." Bonmati has reached the Euro 2025 final after she was taken to hospital for treatment for viral meningitis the week before the tournament began. The 27-year-old only joined up with Spain's squad a few days before their opening game against Portugal but did not make her first start of the tournament until the third game against Italy. Bonmati has now produced magic moments to unlock both the quarter-finals and semi-finals for Spain, first setting up Athenea del Castillo's opener in the 2-0 win over Switzerland with a clever assist and then scoring from a tight angle to send Spain into the final.
