As the current Premier League season concludes, we’ve delved into the standout strengths of each team in England’s top flight. Echoing the sentiment of Spanish football coach Juanma Lillo, who stated, “What enriches you is the game, not the result. The result is a piece of data,” our analysis prioritizes the process and the unique style of play over mere outcomes.
This approach underpins our inaugural Football Style Awards, an event dedicated to celebrating the journey rather than solely the destination. While awards focus on tangible data, they serve to highlight the underlying mechanisms of success. In collaboration with a data scientist, we have developed a new football application named ‘futi’. This app utilizes detailed phase-of-play data and sophisticated models to not only identify skilled individuals and teams but also to quantify their specific areas of excellence.
This season, Manchester City has showcased exceptional dribbling capabilities, while Wolverhampton Wanderers have demonstrated a formidable counter-pressing game. These are just two examples of the diverse tactical approaches and individual skills that define the Premier League’s landscape.
English Translation:
As the current Premier League season draws to a close, we have examined what each team has excelled at this season in England’s top flight. Juanma Lillo, a Spanish football coach, once remarked, “What enriches you is the game, not the result. The result is a piece of data. The birthrate goes up. Is that enriching? No. But the process that led to that? Now that’s enriching.”
Let this philosophy guide the first annual Football Style Awards, a celebration of process over outcomes. These awards are not about who won, though they are based on data. A friend who is a club data scientist and I have spent the past year developing a new football app called futi. It measures not only who is good but also what they are good at, using detailed phase of play data and models that assess how teams and players perform.
