THE START OF MY DATA ANALYTICS FOR SOCCER JOURNEY
Greetings to you reading this. Thank you for taking the time and please enjoy the journey we are starting today.
A brief intro about myself, I am a B.Com Finance Grad (Class of 2018) currently working temporarily as an Internal Audit Assistant, Born and raised in Kenya.
I love Soccer, I loved Stats in Campus and I am loving Data Analytics and Visualization.
My road to data analysis started with my subscription to sentdex’s YouTube channel which has loads of materials and his python programming website(tons of useful materials available). Sentdex introduced me to the basics of python programming for Finance and Data Analysis but due to several factors, all this was at a hobby level.
Much later(2 years approximately), I came across David Sumpter through the Ten Equations lecture on YouTube. I am a fan of Science and through You Tube’s algorithms I was guided to David and Friends of Tracking and discovery of Soccer Analytics.
The practice of python previously, the knowledge of statistics acquired in Campus and my love for watching and playing soccer(I am a Chelsea fan and at least a semi-pro striker ), helped me understand the soccer analytics world so well. It made me string together the theory and practical parts so well to create a beautiful fabric to start my analytics journey.
MOTIVATION AND TOOLS OF TRADE
I regained back my confidence in learning analytics for I am in a good environment, both mentally and emotionally(this is in October 2021). I hope to turn analytics to be a full time job as I continue learning and practicing the craft.
In one of John Mckay’s videos he stated the importance of documenting progress and publishing work. This challenged me to start writing. This is my very first piece on the internet. (shivers)
I would like to thank the following teachers from whom I have gained a wealth of knowledge and insights for free. There is no order nor criteria of ranking thus no numbering below,
Friends of Tracking on You Tube. A good page for learning Mathematical modelling for football incorporating coding and visualization using Python and R while making use of various libraries.
Sentdex on You Tube and Twitter. Learn python fundamentals, Data Analysis, Machine Learning, Quantum Computer programming among many more others.
Rob Carrol on You Tube and on Twitter. Learn SQL , Excel and Tableau for sports analytics
Shashank Kalanithi on You Tube . Learn SQL, Python, Practical Statistics and get insights from a practicing Data Analyst
McKay Johns on You Tube and Twitter. Learn Python for soccer analytics including hands on tuts for developing beautiful vizes.
FC Python’s website and on Twitter. Learn Python basics, data analysis, machine learning among other lessons in relation to soccer analytics.
Sergi’s Blog. A very cool page to learn Webscrapping for analysis, AWS among other interesting topics highlighted.
John Muller on Twitter. Not only does John produce beautiful vizes, he provides an in depth analysis about Soccer.
Tiotal Football on Twitter a.k.a the absolute unit on substack. His mix of Finance and Football while incorporating other aspects like scouting and data analysis provides an interesting apporach to the world of Soccer.
Statsbomb’s Website & on Twitter and FBREF’s Website. Experts in everything soccer data and in-depth metrics
However, this is not a comprehensive list.
CONCLUSION
The Soccer Analytics community is welcoming and I aim to use this platform as my sports analytics journal for tracking my learning progress and hopefully make friends while at it. I hope to post at least one article per week. Wish me luck guys.
Feel free to contact me on the following platforms for any feedback or input On Twitter, Instagram and mail (deltaanalyticske@gmail.com)
Love you all. See you in the First Analysis.
