11 Questions with FC Python

The pursuit of wisdom in any walk of life quickly reveals that what you think you know is not nearly enough to get you to where you want to go. As I'm starting out in my football journey I challenged myself to reach out to those already working in various roles in football to answer a short list of questions. My goal wasn't to get answers but relevant perspectives on the game within the game.

Here is FC Python:

How did your first opportunity in football come about?

Depends how loose we want to go with ‘in football’! I was fortunate to get an internship with performance analysis company Prozone (now STATS Perform), in a customer support role - essentially installing software and fixing it when it broke.

From there, I was able to learn loads about the data/video collection process and also from the analytics team about their line of work. Direction and encouragement from colleagues during my internship (particularly @counterattack9) led to starting to learn the skills needed in this area and subsequent opportunities a bit closer to football and, later on, sports media & marketing.

What attracted you to coding/analytics? What’s more intriguing now names or numbers?

Initially, it was seeing the work that was being done in the football analytics space and aspiring to do similar. The vast majority of my data/programming skill set for my day job comes from project ideas related to sports analysis.

Very quickly there became two things that I enjoyed about coding. Firstly, it is magic… you put words in a line and cool visualisations, datasets, apps, whatever, appear - somehow this remains a relatively rare ability in lots of places. Secondly, and probably more importantly, you can automate so much of the boring parts of your job! Set up the repetitive tasks and do more important things with your time!

As much as I love reading the work put out by the analytics community, my bigger personal interest is in the world that revolves around what happens on-pitch. I’m fascinated by sports business, the growing geo-politics in sport, sports marketing and engagement, and so on. While analytics has its place within each of these areas, it is names (or rather, personal/team/brand/nation branding) that drives more of it.

What data concept fascinates you? Why?

There are plenty, but recently I have been really interested in Netnography - trying to understand interaction and behaviour on social media platforms.

Twitter provides the most open platform to gauge both opinions and influence (both ‘real’ & artificial). A recent example in sport has been the fan and press reaction to Newcastle’s alleged takeover. You could write books looking at the sentiment among fans towards both the takeover group and journalists critiquing MBS.

This goes far beyond sport, and anyone interested in political applications of this should check out @marcowenjones!

What is the biggest misconception you’ve found in this space?

It is normally a misconception that people place among themselves - that programming and data analysis is out of someone’s reach. Through FC Python and elsewhere, I have spoken with plenty of people that have created awesome things quickly after they break down the initial intimidation.

If you could start over what skill would you build on first?

If I could go back to choosing a degree - Computer Science, Statistics, Physics or similar.

If I started over today at 30 - probably web development. I think it has the quickest time from 0 to building something cool and useful for yourself or other people. I’ve found that the curve from beginner to getting an output is pretty crucial in whether or not people stick with their learning.

What is more important player development or recruitment? Why?

Probably a bit out of my area of expertise, but I think the answer depends on where you are. If you have the resources relative to your competition, you can take advantage of recruiting players further along their development and based on more playing time. However, if your current place in the transfer ecosystem is as a team that passes players upwards, development is clearly more important from both a performance and financial perspective.

What is your favorite sports moment? Why?

Brazil-Germany 2014. The archetypal example of process & plan beating emotion & expectation. So many small pieces of this throughout the game - from Neymar’s shirt aloft in the tearful anthem, to David Luiz being purposefully screened at the corner for Müller’s goal.

What coach/player/team inspires you? Why?

In my day job - Liverpool’s social media team. Obviously the recent success helps, but they have created a new revenue stream and stronger sponsor appeal which plenty of other teams are sleeping on.

In line with these questions - the Red Bull network. In football, as in their other properties, they demonstrate high performance on and off the pitch. Combine this success with being a first-mover in multi-club ownership, and I think that they are setting the direction for where world football is going.

What advice would you give to someone wanting to get into this space?

Development is not a straight line and it is absolutely normal to think things are going shit sometimes.

Help is out there for both specific programming problems and to talk through which direction you would like to go down. If it isn’t on Stack Overflow, lots of people are very friendly and will help where they can if you ask.

Who is your favorite athlete? Why?

Eliud Kipchoge. Try and run at a 2:50/km pace. Now keep that up for over 42km.

What is your favorite quote or saying?

“Sometimes taking time is actually a shortcut.”

― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

5 Questions with Kristof Bakos

The pursuit of wisdom in any walk of life quickly reveals that what you think you know is not nearly enough to get you to where you want to go. As I'm starting out in my football journey I challenged myself to reach out to those already working in various roles in football to answer a short list of questions. My goal wasn't to get answers but relevant perspectives on the game within the game.

Here is Kristof Bakos:

What is your first memory of football?

My first memories of football come from 2009, when I was 11. The first match I watched in my life was Debreceni VSC beating Levski Sofia in the Champions League play-off. This Debrecen is the last Hungarian side to qualify to UEFA CL group stage even until today. A week later, I attended a football match on the spot for the first time in my life, when Hungary was defeated by Sweden with a 94th minute Zlatan Ibrahimovic goal during the 2010 FIFA World Cup qualifying campaign.

What is the biggest misconception/cliche you’ve found in this space?

The thing which annoys me the most is probably the ignoration and/or simplification of tactics in the game. Most people think football is simple in the highest level as it was when we played it in our childhood. You should always watch football in its complexity, for example, quality of a given player can't really exist in itself- these things always depend on the context they are working in.
If you could start over what skill would you build on first?

If I started to be interested in football analysis today, I would begin it by analyzing matches by myself. When I started to be interested in this topic, I read a couple of books and articles about coaching as well as tactics, but didn't make so much effort to summarize it in a well-built thinking system. First, I rather concentrated on collecting as much information as possible, but often without realizing the connection between them. 

Then, I started to read Spielverlagerung which gave me a way of thinking which made me able to 'read' the game tactically and understand football in its complexity. Watching football matches shows you the game as it goes in real life, but you also need a complex way of thinking which gives you a correct interpretation of happenings on the pitch.

What three (3) football icons would you want to have a meal with? Why?

Pep Guardiola- the best coach in the world in my opinion whose philosophy impressed me so much

Kevin De Bruyne- one of the tactically most intelligent players I've ever seen, I would be really interested in the way he sees the game

Julian Nagelsmann- probably the most talented young coach, with a very innovative methodology.

What is your favorite quote or saying?

"Technique is not being able to juggle a ball 1000 times. Anyone can do that by practicing. Then you can work in the circus. Technique is passing the ball with one touch, with the right speed, at the right foot of your team mate." (Johan Cruyff)

5 Questions with Kyle O'Reilly

The pursuit of wisdom in any walk of life quickly reveals that what you think you know is not nearly enough to get you to where you want to go. As I'm starting out in my football journey I challenged myself to reach out to those already working in various roles in football to answer a short list of questions. My goal wasn't to get answers but relevant perspectives on the game within the game.

Here is Kyle O'Reilly:

What is your first memory of football?

My first memory of football was playing on the street against the wall either Wembley (every man for himself vs a keeper) or headers, around the age of 6, my earliest memory of "elite" football would be Euro 96.

What is the biggest misconception/cliche regarding coaching you’ve found in this space?

The biggest myth I think would be "The right way to play" referring to playing out from deep and prolonged periods of possession to "control the game". 

It seems to be a growing fashion and teams are implementing ideas without fully understanding why they're doing it, for me the games about efficiency in getting into the final 3rd and scoring , while stopping your opponent (it sounds simple I know !) So the right way, to me, would be the most efficient way of achieving those objectives, and being able to adapt accordingly in game and in preparation to games.

If you could start over what skill would you build on first?

If I had my time again I'd definitely look after my body better with nutrition, prehab and recovery work, players thankfully are more educated these days, equally I'd study tactical principles at an earlier age, I learned more about the game as a coach than I did from playing, purely from reading and watching videos. 

What three (3) football icons would you want to have a meal with? Why?

Good question, I could probably fill a banquet table! 

My 3 would be:

-Valeriy Lobanovskiy 

-Marcelo Bielsa 

-Sir Alex Ferguson

What is your favorite quote or saying?

My personal favorites are: 

"I'd rather lose trying to win, than lose trying not to lose" or "Fail on your own terms".

9 Questions with Moritz Kossmann

The pursuit of wisdom in any walk of life quickly reveals that what you think you know is not nearly enough to get you to where you want to go. As I'm starting out in my football journey I challenged myself to reach out to those already working in various roles in football to answer a short list of questions. My goal wasn't to get answers but relevant perspectives on the game within the game.

Here is Moritz Kossmann:

What is your first memory of football?

The first one I remember is in 1997, I was on holiday in Denmark as a small boy with my parents and some family friends. They were watching an international friendly between Brazil and England on tv. My dad asked me who i'd thought would win, and promised me a Fanta if I guessed correctly. I chose the Brazilians because of their striking yellow tops and guessed correctly, as they won 1:0. From then on I loved the game and Brazil was the first team I supported.

What attracted you to coaching? What’s more intriguing now, developing players or winning matches?

In the beginning it was just the passion for the game that attracted me to coaching, I started when I was 16 while actively playing myself. At the time, I thought it gave me another angle to approach the game, and I always enjoyed being around kids. As I started coaching more and more, the depth of the game of Football fascinated me. 

I felt that while I'd spend a significant portion of my days around football for a very long time, that in truth I knew very little about it. The quest for deeper understanding and knowledge of the game as well as how to teach it, is something that still drives me today and that is a huge passion of mine. Beyond that, I find football to be a very aesthetic game to watch when it is played at a good level. 

There are very few things that I enjoy more than watching my team pull off an amazing combination, in games or in training, or when a player comes up with an unconventional solution to a problem. Perhaps something I'd never thought about before, but that makes total sense situationally. I love those moments.

What is the biggest misconception/cliche regarding coaching you’ve found in this space?

I find it difficult to give a definitive answer there, but my guess would be the notion that football is ultimately a very simple game. The basics of football are very easy to understand yes and that's also why it is such a global phenomenon. However real in-depth understanding of the game and also how to coach it requires a huge continuous effort. 

A game where two teams of 11 individuals can move around in a relatively free manner inherently brings with it an endless degree of difference. 

If you could start over what skill would you build on first?

Thats a great question, especially for reflective purposes. I'd say to appreciate how great a tool the game itself is in order to teach the game.

What is more important domain knowledge or curiosity?

I think both are absolutely crucial, and it would be very difficult for me to choose one over the other. I reckon you need excellent domain knowledge to make a sustained success of yourself. 

However it is absolutely necessary to keep learning and to keep studying the game. Football is evolving at a massive rate on a daily basis, and those who are not curious will not evolve and might be left behind sooner or later. 

Also, as a coach, your best tool for teaching is often your own example. Therefore, if we preach a certain quest for improvement to our players, it is best if we lead by example and look to continuously improve ourselves. A certain curiosity makes that a lot easier. 

What is more impactful for a player: psychology or environment? Why?

Again I'd say both. A player continually interacts with his environment and adapts to suit it better. This is a continuous process. As coaches we can look to manipulate certain parameters in the players environment in order to provoke a certain response to that stimuli. It has got to be a holistic process where everything matters. Over-separation and isolation of certain factors is probably not the best starting point either.

What three (3) coaches would you want to have a meal with? Why?

There are quite a few guys out there who are doing brilliant work I reckon. For example, I'd certainly like to have a meal with the entire Spielverlagerung staff any day. If I had to choose famous head coaches, then i'd go for Thomas Tuchel, Jupp Heynckes and Juergen Klopp.
What advice would you give to someone wanting to get into this space?

Enjoy the process of learning and improving continuously. Be patient, reflect a lot and be prepared to challenge and evolve your beliefs about coaching as you go along. 

What is your favorite quote or saying?

I don't necessarily have an out and out favorite, but the following one is good and relevant to coaching I reckon:

'It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong'

Richard Feynman

9 Questions with Nahuel Beau

The pursuit of wisdom in any walk of life quickly reveals that what you think you know is not nearly enough to get you to where you want to go. As I'm starting out in my football journey I challenged myself to reach out to those already working in various roles in football to answer a short list of questions. My goal wasn't to get answers but relevant perspectives on the game within the game.

Here is Nahuel Beau:

What is your first memory of football?

My first memory in football is go to the Estadio Centenario with my dad to support Peñarol. I was 3 or 4 years old and I enjoyed that days a lot.

What attracted you to data and scouting? What’s more intriguing now, refining your processes and acumen or 'discovering' players?

I always found it interesting. I love football, I'm studying journalism and I like it, but over time I became to focus more and more on the game from different areas. I think that it is very important to understand the game, and it will help you to be a better professional. I love to discover new players, but now I'm working in refining my processes to be more efficient in my searches.

What is the biggest misconception/cliche regarding recruitment you’ve found in this space?

Well, It could be that a lot of people thinks scouting is only available for youth players, but in fact it is necessary for all players regardless of age.

If you could start over what skill would you build on first?

I think it is very important to be organized. If you see a lot of matches but you don't have a data base with the information you collected, all of that will probably be of little use. For that, I think I would build on that first.

What is more important domain knowledge or curiosity?

I think both are important. Curiosity is a must, it is necessary to begin in this world. Then, obviously knowledge and intuition are necessary to find the players you need, but I'm convinced that it can be improved with time and experience.

What is more useful in scouting- breadth of skills or depth of talent? Why?

Personally, I will always prefer talent over versatility. However, it is true that it is an increasingly valued virtue in football. If a football player can do many things well, he is better than one who only knows how to do one excellent thing but he is regular in the others ones.

What three (3) football icons would you want to have a meal with? Why?

Pep Guardiola, Jose Mourinho and Carlos Bilardo. They are three iconic people with different ways of understanding football, and It could be a dream for me.

What advice would you give to someone wanting to get into this space?

I would say that the key to success is work hard. It's a difficult world to have opportunities, but with hard work, constancy and above all passion for the sport, there will always be reward.

What is your favorite quote or saying?

"The possible is already done. We are doing the impossible". - Marcelo Bielsa.

9 Questions with Matthias Kullowatz

The pursuit of wisdom in any walk of life quickly reveals that what you think you know is not nearly enough to get you to where you want to go. As I'm starting out in my football journey I challenged myself to reach out to those already working in various roles in football to answer a short list of questions. My goal wasn't to get answers but relevant perspectives on the game within the game.

Here is Matthias Kullowatz:

What is your first memory of football?

I'm going to cheat and share an early memory of football. I grew up in Oregon, USA, where, in the 90s, "soccer" was growing, but it still was not very popular at the competitive level. Every kid played when they were 6, but by the time I was 12 or 13 there were only a handful of us left playing on competitive teams in my town. You couldn't just go to the park and find a pickup game to join...that is, unless it was basketball you were looking for. 

When I was 9 we lived in Ankara, the capital of Turkey. We lived across the street from a public school, where just about every night kids of all ages would go to play pick up games. I had never seen kids so competitive about soccer. Even the kids who drew the short straw to play keeper would go out there and dive to make saves. And we were playing on rough asphalt. The goals were marked by trash cans, and the ball was rarely pumped up. 

It didn't matter. This is what Turkish kids lived for: to make it through the school day so they could go play soccer at the school at night. I returned to the US the next year a considerably better soccer player, and ended up playing competitively through high school. There's a good chance I never would have played that long, or been as interested in soccer as I am now, if not for that year spent in Turkey.

What attracted you to data and scouting? What’s more intriguing now, refining your processes and acumen or 'discovering' players?

Definitely the thing that got me into data was baseball. There have always been so much data available from baseball, that it's the perfect training ground to learn statistical and data analytics skills. I read Moneyball (Michael Lewis) in undergrad, and decided to get a master's degree in statistics purely so I could better analyze baseball and become a GM. That didn't fully work out for me...yet. 

I would have to say I'm pretty equally intrigued by learning better tools to study sports data, and by developing methodologies to discover players. You could say that our recent creation of Goals Added (g+) combined both. I used xGBoost, a machine learning algorithm I've recently started using more, and we developed something that could very well help identify some of the next great players.

What is the biggest misconception/cliche regarding recruitment you’ve found in this space?

I mean, one of the most obvious ones is using goals and assists to evaluate players. There are so many lurking variables related to team strength and finishing noise that make those metrics vastly overrated. But more generally, I think there is still this rift between the analysts--nerds, if you will--and the front office. 

Many believe that you can't measure football with stats, and most of the rest believe that people who try to use their eyes to measure football are idiots. I think the less popular truth is that these things need to be combined. At ASA we have a wide range of bright minds. Some have watched a lot of football and a lot of players, and they have trained their eyes to catch important things, and others couldn't name half of Barcelona's current starting lineup (maybe that's just me?), but can code and build analytics tools. 

Most are somewhere in between, with a blend of those skills. When we come together and discuss a project like g+, there is so much synergy. We go through so much productive iteration, asking questions, checking the data, checking our intuition, and doing it all over again. Goals Added would not be as good a model if just I had created it myself. From measuring pass receiving value to using a multiple-possession time horizon to evaluate actions, the model would have come up woefully short of expectations without a mix of technical analytics skills and well trained football eyes.

If you could start over what skill would you build on first?

For me, I'm not sure I would do it much differently. My strengths are data analysis and model building. If I were restarting today, in 2020, I would immediately try to get more comfortable with cloud computing. At the very least, using cloud resources to tune models quickly or clean large datasets. I am getting old and I missed these things the first time around--maybe because they weren't there, or because they weren't very popular.

What is more important domain knowledge or curiosity?

Between my day job and working with the ASA team, I can definitely say both are important. But to me, curiosity is more important. Domain knowledge can be picked up, especially by curious people. And being curious leads you through explorations that develop not only more domain knowledge, but greater skills in data analysis and problem solving.

What is more useful in analytics - breadth of skills or depth of talent? Why?

I think this really depends on your team. If you are a lone wolf, you need a breadth of skills, and even when you have a team, a breadth of skills still helps late at night when you live on the west coast your team is asleep. But the most efficient work gets done with a diverse team of people that have expertise in different areas. It becomes an impediment to progress when you're putting the full burden on yourself to learn everything. 

At ASA, I don't necessarily have to be an expert in football tactics. As someone who played competitively in the distant past, I can still understand when someone tells me how a team is playing and where they're attacking, but I'm no expert. 

I can use the expertise of any one of our ASA tactics experts--John Muller, Kieran Doyle, Cheuk Hei Ho, Eliot McKinley, the Twitter personalities known only as JMooreQuakes and TiotalFootball, to name a few--who suggest where to look in the data for meaningful signal, and then I can code it up into something meaningful. I don't have to be able to set up a database and link it up to our R Shiny application. Because Tyler Richardett. 

You might start asking, what does Matthias even do? And that's a good question. A diverse team has the potential to be so efficient and do so much, but that doesn't necessarily require each individual to be diverse.

What three (3) football icons would you want to have a meal with? Why?

Mia Hamm, for one. She was, and maybe still is, the most recognizable face in American soccer. Not only is she one of the greatest football/soccer players of all time, I remember hearing about when she hit a few long field goals (American football) with her right foot, then hopped over to the left side and hit a few more. Field goals are hard! She's a boss.

I'm not sure about the other two. I'd probably go back home and visit some of my coaches growing up. It would be fun to catch up.

What advice would you give to someone wanting to get into this space?

There are some obvious ones, like learn to code, or learn to use video software really well. Basically learn to do something technical that many people can't do. Then to build on one of my other answers, make some friends in the community. There's a football analytics community out there with a lot of nice, helpful people. Eventually you might be able to slot your unique skills alongside theirs, and then you have 1+1 = 3.

What is your favorite quote or saying?

I have always been partial to: "Stop worrying about the world ending today. It's already tomorrow in Australia." Charles Shulz reminded us to relax every once in a while.

9 Questions with Iñaki María Avial

The pursuit of wisdom in any walk of life quickly reveals that what you think you know is not nearly enough to get you to where you want to go. As I'm starting out in my football journey I challenged myself to reach out to those already working in various roles in football to answer a short list of questions. My goal wasn't to get answers but relevant perspectives on the game within the game.

Here is Iñaki María Avial:

What is your first memory of football?

The first clear one was the final of the 2005 Champions League, Liverpool's legendary comeback against AC Milan. My father went to water the plants at the break because he thought that the final was already over and soccer ended up showing me that it is much more than 22 men or women kicking a ball.

What attracted you to media? 

Curiously, I had never considered it. I think especially his ability to connect people who share an interest in an issue. And in the soccer field, although they do not take too much advantage, they should also be an intermediary so that the soccer players could talk about the concerns of the fans and vice versa.

What is the biggest misconception/cliche regarding journalism in football you’ve found?

This is very clear to me. The need of most of the media to be the first to tell something. Many times it does not matter to tell the background or even the truth, what matters to many journalists is to hang the exclusive medal, without contrasting enough. And in the background, something that seems very serious to me is also the fact that the economic survival of the media depends on visits, because in the end this encourages clickbait.

If you could start over what skill would you build on first?

 Professionally, rather than build something, what I would do would be to build it sooner. In this profession I do not think that you need to assimilate certain concepts before an age, it is never too late to learn and, in fact, something very important is be in constant learning. But I do consider that my late jump to social networks made me discover the "new journalism" after many colleagues and that slowed me down, it took longer than it should to burn stages.

How do you see data/analytics growing in the La Liga going forward?

The data is called to be a very useful tool for studying certain behaviors in football, they are a great support for the analyst and should continue to be so. But as with technology, it should not replace human knowledge. 

And not because it takes away the work, but because the data without an understanding of the game and its subsequent interpretation, are nothing more than empty numbers. Getafe is a team that statistics do not do justice to at all, through the data it is impossible to detect how well worked that team is.

How do you see Spanish football growing in general over the next decade? Why?

It is difficult to predict. The great years of Spanish football created a diffuse context, we lost the north and we got used to the fact that winning was normal. Currently there is still a problem that is slowly disappearing. 

It is inevitable to refer to the figure of Pep, Luis Aragonés or Del Bosque to understand the golden generation of Spanish football. They did him a lot of good. But they also created a trend in which any team that did not play following those ideals was frowned upon. Mourinho's Real Madrid was exceptional, for me it is the best Madrid of the 21st century, but he had the defensive conception when in fact he set a goal record. This team was not defensive, it was pragmatic. 

And little by little, thanks to coaches like Simeone or Bordalás, Spain understands the need to adapt to the new reality, which is to optimize your resources to compete better. Trying to play prettier can make you play worse. If many teams and the national team realize this, national football will improve.

What three (3) football icons would you want to have a meal with? Why?

Not to mention topics, I would say that with Marten de Roon for his sense of humor and to chat about Atalanta and the Holland of the present / future, with Juanma Lillo for the variety that his career has had and for being the 2nd of two technicians to the ones I admire enormously like Guardiola and Sampaoli, and lastly, Chris Wilder to tell me how he founded the peculiar system of Sheffield United.

What advice would you give to someone wanting to get into this space?

This profession is very beautiful but also very sacrificed. Recording radio shows in which you feel you have mastered the topics covered is a great feeling. For me that is not work, it is pleasure. The most complicated part is doing all the documentation work. 

My advice is to only board those who have the willpower and are able to give up a lot of leisure time to dedicate to work. Behind the cameras or the microphones there is a huge job that is not seen, and that is necessary because, in a job market where there is so much more journalistic supply than media demand, you need to work very hard to dedicate yourself professionally to this. It is necessary to live many years where your effort seems to have no reward, so that it ends up having it. 

And the most important thing is that your trusted people support you and understand that on a Saturday afternoon you will have to work more than half the hours a day has. Everything comes, but you have to be constant and have patience, the quality will end up imposing. And finally, I would say that nowadays the focus is more important than the topic, it is essential to know how to tell something and use the graphic tools as well as possible to be self-sufficient.

What is your favorite quote or saying?

As a journalist specialized in international soccer, I am left with "the one who covers a lot, little pressures". You have to know how to detect where and when you should be in each place, doing according to what things.