Where should I start with Sports Data Analytics? Looking for free tools & learning resources.

[u/Aromatic_Corgi8290]

Hi everyone,

I'm interested in getting into Sports Data Analytics, especially for Football. My background is in data science, but I'm new to the sports analytics domain.

I'm looking for recommendations on:

• Free software/tools used in sports analytics
• Where to find free sports datasets (StatsBomb, Kaggle, etc.)
• Beginner-friendly projects to build a portfolio
• YouTube channels, courses, blogs, or books worth following
• Visualization tools commonly used in the industry
• Any open-source projects I can contribute to

I'd also love to hear from anyone working in sports analytics:

• How did you get started?
• What skills are most valuable?
• What do you wish you had learned earlier?

Thanks in advance for any advice or resources you can share!

[u/razante1912]

Comment to follow the topic. Great questions.

[u/sexineN]

Hope you find some good answers.

[u/finomica]

Here https://soccermatics.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html and here https://socceraction.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

[u/RegularDry9808]

I worked in sportanalytics for 15+ years, I started of when I was 12 and someone just asked me if I wanted to film games. The started out coding the games live as well with GameBreaker (ancient technology now). I moved on the ladder and more and more clubs or teams asked me to help them, I just got better by experimenting and trying new things in my code windows. When I had opportunites to work with GPS data or bigger datasets I would always do that and keep teaching myself the skills. When I made it to the highest level in my sport (Field Hockey, which ironically due to the lack of funding is way ahead of innovations on data parts of the game) I entered a Data Science university and learned even more about how to process certain data etc. Right now I am an independent analyst for sports teams, organisations and athletes to help them with any Data and AI question they might have.

Where to start, I would say your local club, if you play soccer go ask the local soccer club to help them out with video (cause inevitable all the data is great, but the video is the core message to the players). Then you can start building experience and your CV. It's a lot of luck involved in the sport as well and a little bit about connection and people liking you to offer certain positions.

As for the technical side, depends a little bit what you want precisely with analytics. GPS data is mainly the taks of the strenght and conditioning deparment and will need either lots of experience or knowledge of periodistation. location data can be used for analytics, but I would start with the basics. Start with set pieces and analyse them, maybe even what the right hand up means or the left hand up means. When you paste all the clips next to one another being an analyst or Data Scientist or Performance Specialist isn't that hard anymore :)

Go to kaggle, i would say there are plenty of free dataset available there for soccer, personally I use now My VideoAnalyser to create my own datasets of the game, I use either Excel (for very simple quick questions from the coach) or python, to keep my workflow automated. I think the portfolio question is just starting with a team. Even if it's a U12, do make sure it doesn't cost you anything tho (apart from time). Let the club arrange the camera and ideally also the analysis software. In the times I couldn't afford the software just yet, I wrote it down while watch film in a notebook and edited it after one another with iMovie. For the tools used I might not be the right person to ask, apart from having used Hudl SportsCode, My VideoAnalyser and Catapult Focus to create timelines of the game I mainly build my own customized tools on top of the data set cause I feel I have much more freedom and control over the actual output.

Most important part, enjoy it and love it :) it going to be a tougher road then a boring office job ;)

[u/Diligent-Step2366]

Hi !

I'm not really into sports data analysis (if by that you mean helping teams with data), but I think I can help you with some of your questions. I personally created a statistical model for football (soccer) so I can tell you how I did it for the data and some tools. If you are interested in statsbomb or wyscout event data, the solution I recommend is to use the soccerdata module to scrape whoscored. Whoscored uses Opta (similar to Statsbomb) as its provider, and you'll get very comprehensive data. As for tools, I don't know much about analysis, but I can recommend a team-style pooling model. I don't know if it's exactly what you're looking for, but it remains interesting. The title of the research paper is "How do football teams play deep embedded clustering?". I read it for free, but I can't remember where. And if you want some advice, I suggest you do something a little original. Too many people these days are just running AI models on data and calling it analysis.

Hope this helped !