The following is a post that I have preserved in its original form. It was the 1st of 6 posts that I created for a computer science class at Northwestern.
I was originally born England. My family lived there for six years before we moved to Chicago in the summer of 2000. While I didn’t live in England long enough to hold onto an accent, much less an understanding of how to play cricket, I did hold onto a love for the game of soccer.
The English Premier League is probably the sport’s most famous league. It produced superstars like David Beckham and Cristiano Ronaldo, and is home to teams like Manchester United and Liverpool. Even for people who are relatively unfamiliar with the sport, those names are generally recognizable. The Premier League is the epicenter of soccer.
For this class I will be studying and dissecting information that is publicly accessible on Squawka, a “web-app that delivers you real-time data on the football match you are watching on TV”. While there is no evident “master” dataset, the service provides multiple smaller ones. I plan to use each of these in class.
To get the ball rolling (pun not intended), in my next post I will discuss an easy-to-understand dataset that makes sense to those with only basic soccer knowledge.