“Imagine you’re at a soccer game, and just as the opening whistle blows, the power cuts out. The stadium goes black. Eventually someone rigs up a single spotlight and the game goes on, but the light can only follow the ball. You can see who’s making a pass or a tackle, but as for what the other 21 players are up to, you’re in the dark. That’s basically what most soccer data looks like: clear information about what’s happening on the ball and a total blank everywhere else. For such a big, messy sport, that can be a problem. No less an authority than Johan Cruyff once said the test of a good player is: ‘What do you do during those 87 minutes when you don’t have the ball?’ …” Five Thirty Eight (Video)

“The bond between football and the media has become so interwoven over recent decades that it almost resembles a co-dependent relationship. Media organisations need football’s never-ending supply of drama to fill their expanding sports pages and attract readers, while football would not have grown into the attention-seeking behemoth we know today without the media. Both are utterly reliant upon each other. Therefore, it may come as a surprise that the Football Association only appointed its first press officer in 1977. Football during that era could hardly be described as innocent; hooliganism was prominent while the first black players were met by monkey chants and thrown bananas. However, it does seem quaint that nobody within the FA felt the need before to appoint somebody with the responsibility of handling the media. The man they selected, Glen Kirton, proved to be an inspired choice. During twenty-five years with the FA, Kirton experienced some of English football’s most iconic moments from Italia ’90 to Euro ’96 and worked closely with some of the game’s biggest characters. …”
Football Pink

“Camera calibration is a fundamental step for multiple computer vision applications in the field of sports analytics. By determining the camera pose one can accurately locate both players and events in the game at any time point. Furthermore, increasing the accuracy of the camera calibration will in turn increase the accuracy of any advanced metric derived from the collected data. One of the applications where camera calibration is essential is player tracking. …”
StatsBomb

“You’ve been unveiled at the ground holding a scarf above your head. You’ve posed for photos with the chairman and been asked the awkward questions about that one player who appears to be running his contract down. Now what? The first and most important chore of any budding football manager is to bring your philosophy to life. Football Manager 2020 has a range of set templates and styles but trying to find a healthy balance between them can be like, well, trying to manage a squad of egos and prima donnas. …”
FourFourTwo

“At Liverpool, it was Brendan Rodgers. At Borussia Dortmund, it was Thomas Doll and at Mainz, Jürgen Klopp’s predecessor went by the name of Eckhard Krautzun. That’s not how Klopp usually describes him. ‘When he sees me,’ Krautzun explains, ‘and there are other people sitting around, he says ‘this is the guy who sent me to Tunisia, to a foreign country where I couldn’t speak a word of French to sit around in that stadium trying to scout a player!’’ It is just one of a number of anecdotes the 76-year-old is happy to tell about Klopp, whose subsequent reign at Mainz was regarded as a resounding success. In his first coaching job, Klopp saved the club from relegation after succeeding Krautzun, before taking them up to the Bundesliga for the first time three years later. …”
the set pieces

“The core of football tactics is the formation of the team. In football (soccer) the formations are classified in names consisting of numbers that represent defenders, midfielders and attackers (the goalkeeper is unnecessary to involve in this tactical aspect). Here are some of the most utilized formations in football presented in a historical overview. Formations are simplified ways to describe a team’s positional tactic schematically. As Jonathan Wilson writes in Inverting the Pyramid: ‘designations of formations can at times seem a little arbitrary. Just how far behind the main striker does the second striker have to play for 4–4–2 to become 4–4–1–1? And how advanced do the wide midfielders have to be for that to become a 4–2–3–1?’ …”
Football History

“Rarely has relegation proven to be as beneficial to the manager who failed to avoid it as that of Hull City. By the time that their drop from the Premier League was confirmed on the 14th of May 2017, Marco Silva had become one of the most highly regarded coaches in England. Relegation had looked inevitable when he got the job yet he managed to give the club some hope and pride through the attacking football he managed to impose on the team.” Footyanalyst