The following is a post that I have preserved in its original form. It was the 2nd of 6 posts that I created for a computer science class at Northwestern.
Casual passerbys trying to watch a soccer game struggle to find themselves engaged. More often than not this happens because of how rarely it seems that any action actually occurs in a match. People want to see goals. Score one or more goals than your opponent, and your team wins the game.
However, oftentimes teams will play for a full 90 minutes without scoring a goal at all. This is why teams spend so much money to bring in the right players to help score more goals. In order to figure out if they received a strong return on investment, teams need to be able to measure a player’s performance. Squawka’s 2016/17 Goals Scored table is a great example of how soccer data can be kept and organized.
The site organizes allows the user to sort statistics in a few different ways. We can dissect the LATCH method in order to understand the data. Squawka allows the user to sort by Category – Games Played, Minutes Played, Right Footed Goals, Left Footed Goals, Headed Goals, Other Goals, Goals Inside the Area, Goals Outside the Area and Total Goals. It also allows us to sort Alphabetically – by player name. While the examples are not in this data set, some benefit could be found in sorting soccer data by Location (stadium or national region), Time (chronology of goals in a game) and Hierarchy (professional league performance vs minor league performance.
I hope to dive into those more specific methods in the coming weeks.