高価なデータセットでもあり、これまでクラブ内のみで使用されていたものを、これだけ大胆に公開するとはまさに英断。マンチェスター・シティの公式サイトで次のようにアナウンスされているように、ベースボールの『マネーボール』のようなデータ分析を、サッカーでも推進そして一層加速させていくために、一般ユーザーへのデータ無料公開に踏み切ったとのことだ。
以前にも書いたが、フットボールの統計学では、同じプレミアリーグのリバプールの取り組みが先行していた。そこにカウンターを仕掛けたのが今回のマンチェスター・シティだ。Billy Beane が『マネーボール』で一躍成功を収めたように、サッカーの試合の "winning formula" を見つけるのは、今回の無料データというアシストを受けた経済学者・統計学者そしてそのタマゴたちかも知れないし、熱狂的サッカーファンの経営コンサルタントやただのブロガーかも知れない。オープンデータを活用した、そういうエキサイティングな競争が、今キックオフしたのではないだろうか。
Over the last three years it has become increasingly apparent that the field of performance analytics in football has been held back for one simple reason - the lack of publically accessible data. Analytics across U.S sports has flourished over the past two decades with myriad high profile success stories, the most notable of which saw the story of the Oakland A’s baseball team dramatised in the film Moneyball.
Yet their story is the tip of the iceberg and many more similar successes from within the NBA, NFL, MLB and NHL have yet to be told. Analytics and objective analysis is in the very fabric of those sports. There also lies within them a culture of analytics amongst the franchises themselves as well as the fans, the media, bloggers and students alike.
As far back as the 1970’s Bill James (one of the early pioneers of data analytics in baseball) was using open data to develop new ways of analysing player performance and also objectify the very makeup of the sport, by analysing the data and challenging long held assumptions.
Much of the excellent work now done in U.S sports has stemmed from the pioneering approach of the people who work outside of the training ground walls. The reason was and still is that making the data publically available drove forward the US sports as a collective.
Let’s not overlook the excellent work that has been taking place within English football (and indeed other national leagues) within the clubs themselves over the past decade. There has been a very successful culture of performance analysis and use of data within the club structure, but the speed of growth for the discipline of performance analytics is essentially in the clubs’ hands - it is they who have bought the data at significant cost and the rest of the analytics community simply do not have access to the data at the same level.
The development of performance analytics is a passion of ours and one the primary focuses of the Performance Analysis department at Manchester City Football Club. We see it as the responsibility of those in such a fortunate position to support the analytics community and share what tools, resources and insights that we can in order to accelerate this growth.
There are many people in the analytics community right now who have the skills, desire and vision to make a difference in the performance analytics space, people who can add significant value such as Bill James did in baseball.
But those people have no significant data to work with and, with the support of OPTA, we hope to change this. OPTA have been our data provider for a number of years and have one of the most extensive data sets and detailed coding templates available.
We are launching MCFC Analytics for this very reason, to share the data that we have within the analytics world and, further to that, engage directly with the resulting community to see where this collaboration can takes us all.
2012/08/20(月) | Economics | トラックバック(0) | コメント(0)
