Expected goals (xG) measures the quality of a shot attempt in soccer based on several variables. They are among the most used and best understood advanced metric in the world of football, but training an accurate xG model is not as simple as it may seem.
The VAEP framework is a novel data-driven framework for assessing the impact of the individual actions performed by soccer players during a game, which is a crucial aspect of the player recruitment process. Here we group a number of blogposts on the methodology and applications of VAEP.
A player’s style of play is a reoccurring concept when discussing soccer as each player approaches the game in a different way. Unfortunately, playing style is inherently a subjective and nebulous concept, which makes it difficult to capture it in a data-driven manner. This post gives an intuitive explanation of our recent ECMLPKDD 2019 paper on this topic, provides illustrative use cases and introduces a small interactive demo.