Scissors Kick

“Last years champions are struggling this season, a 1-0 loss to Bournemouth saw them fall to 14th in the table and more worryingly it’s not just bad luck. Some regression was expected, but they have played well below bookies expectations. The obvious problem is shot volume: this year they have the 16th most shots and shots on target after being 7th and 6th last year. They allowed the 6th fewest SOT last year, this year they are 16th. The problem isn’t possession or a lower completion%, both of those metrics have slight rises, so it must have something to do with the quality of those passes. That’s what we will do today, take a dive into what has changed so drastically when Leicester has the ball.” Stats Bomb

“On Wednesday, 23 December at 10am (GMT) we will publish the #IBWM100 for 2016 – our list of the most exciting young* players in world football. As always, we’ve stuck with the format that served Don Balon so successfully for many years; 100 names and details of where each player is from. We’ll revisit the list in twelve months’ time and assess how the year has panned out for each of the players concerned. The process we use for selection remains exactly the same. We talk to scouts, coaches, players, journalists, fans and bloggers from around the world to get a clear a picture of exactly who we should be watching and why.” #IBWM100 2016 – Introduction, #IBWM100 For 2016 – A Year In Review>/a>>

“11th June 2016. A moment I had resigned myself to never seeing had actually, finally arrived. In the magnificent Stade de Bordeaux Wales were about to make their European Championship finals debut and play its first match at a tournament since eight days shy of exactly 58 years earlier in the World Cup of 1958.” Football Pink

The Curious Geography of Welsh Goalkeepers
“With the news in the run up to Euro 2016 that Chris Maxwell had been called up to Wales squad as cover for Danny Ward it meant that Wales’s four first choice goalkeepers are north Walians. Russell Todd investigates the curious geography of Welsh goalkeepers.” Podcast Pêl-droed

“I was recently invited to send some of my work on passing motifs to be used for a Fink Tank column in The Times, but of course a dendrogram such as the one I linked in my previous entry wouldn’t cut it in printed media. Therefore, I thought the best thing to do was set out to answer some concrete applied questions the methodology might answer, which would be easy to display but interesting nevertheless.” Stats Bomb