Course syllabus

Mathematical Modelling of Football

Course outline

The following is a rough timetable for the lectures and hand-ins. Here is what you need to get started on the course. Please go through this before the course starts.  

The first lecture is Tuesday 31st August 15:15 - 17:00. A Zoom link will be sent to course participants, which will be used for all the lectures.

At the start of each week, check the corresponding section of the course and plan your week from that. Lectures/tutorials will be Tuesdays and Thursdays 15:15 - 17:00. Please watch the videos for the corresponding section before you come to the, since these will be mainly a summary of the video lectures and will focus on active learning on your part.

Each week you should plan to work 10-15 hours on this course. 2-3 hours watching video material, 4 hours lectures/tutorials and 7-8 hours work on the projects. 

All of the coursework is project/hand-in based. In sections 1 and 2 it is individually assessed. In section 3 it is a group project. 

Each week we will focus on one topic, as follows:

Section 1: Event data

30^th August: Visualising football with event data.

6^th September: Expected goals.

10th September: Deadline for hand-in 1 (Individual)

14th September: Scouting and evaluating actions.

28th September: Simulating matches.

3rd October: Deadline for hand-in 2 (Individual)

Section 2: Tracking data

4th October: Player movements on the pitch.

11th October: Pitch control and Possession Value

18^th October:

.

29th October: Deadline for hand-in 3 (Group)

Assessment

The total points for the three assessments is 50. 10 points for assessment 1, 20 points for assessment 2 and 20 points for group assessment 3.

To pass the course (grade 3) requires 23 points, grade 4 requires 32 points, and grade 5 requires 42 points.

Why take this course?

This course is the most comprehensive education available in how to work with football data and understanding the game using maths and stats.  It is taught by Soccermatics author David Sumpter, with guest lectures and tutoring from world-leading practitioners and researchers working with data in football.

It was first developed during the Covid-19 lockdown in April/May 2020 by a group of club analysts and leading academics. These include lead data scientists at Barcelona (Javier Fernandez), Benfica (Sudarshan "Suds" Gopaladesikan), Liverpool (William Spearman) , Hammarby (Fran Peralta), The English FA (Alex Thomas) and the German DFB (Pascal Bauer), Soccermatics author David Sumpter and Harvard researcher Laurie Shaw. We initially made this work available at the Friends of Tracking Youtube channel. We will now expand on it in this course.

The course delivers state of the art of how mathematics and analytics are used on a daily basis within  clubs and national teams. As such this course is unique. We believe it offers the technical competence you need to get a job as a data scientist at a football club or in the football industry. Students graduating this course will be attractive within all parts of the football industry.

We designed the course contents and the learning goals on the basis of needs in modern football. The course utilises data from Wyscout, Statsbomb, Metrica, Signality and other leading data providers.

The course also reflects the state of the art in research on football analytics. Much of the work presented is based on recent work presented at, for example, Sloan Sports Analytics and The Opta Forum.

Who is this course aimed at?

This is a late undergraduate/Masters level course. It is aimed at students who already have studied university level introductory courses in data science, statistics and programming (see course requirements). There will be starter/refresher Intro to Python programming and statistics, but the learning curve will be relatively steep for those without this background. You are encouraged to watch some of the Friends of Tracking videos first to get a feeling for the level. You should also, of course, have an interest in football.

It will take 10-15 hours work per week. So it is possible to take as a self-study evening course. It will be challenging, but rewarding. 

Can I access the course material without registering?

Yes. All the videos, lecture notes and exercises are available for free on this site. These will remain after the course finishes. If  you are not registered you won’t have access to the tutorial sessions, project help and graded project work.

There is Slack group which you should join.

Recommended reading 

All course material will be provided during the course. But we recommend Soccermatics by David Sumpter for background on the approach taken in this course.