My latest blog post "From Data to Wisdom: Playing Football’s Information Game at the Right Level" explores how football clubs can move from simply collecting data to making better, evidence-based decisions. janvanhaaren.be/posts/from-d...

I've always wondered (and feared) what might happen if everyone started taking set pieces seriously. The first eight weeks of the Premier League season might be giving us a glimpse into the future, where soccer no longer features much, well, soccer: www.espn.com/soccer/story...

Congratulations to DTAI PhD student Laurens Devos for successfully defending his PhD thesis on "Verification and reasoning for decision tree ensembles": tinyurl.com/47efmbj5 🎓👏🥂🍾 @wannesm.bsky.social @jessejdavis.bsky.social

We’re excited to launch the 𝐒𝐤𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐂𝐨𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐫 𝐗 𝐏𝐲𝐒𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐀𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐲𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬 𝐂𝐮𝐩 - a hackathon-style challenge that will bring together the community to collaborate, compete, and innovate using open-source SkillCorner data. 👉 Sign up pysport.org/analytics-cup

Before an app launches, it undergoes usability testing. Why shouldn't an advanced sports metric? In our latest blog, we propose 4 criteria: 1️⃣ Trustworthy 2️⃣ Novel 3️⃣ Intuitive 4️⃣ Useful Then, we put VAEP to the test... \w @jessejdavis.bsky.social & Maaike Van Roy dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/sports/blog/...

We can use xG to compute post-hoc win-draw-loss probabilities. Our new blogpost shows MCMC's estimates of these probabilities are unstable, computing them exactly is faster than approximating them, and MCMC's runtime strongly depends on its implementation. dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/sports/blog/...

Burger time! With a very fitting flipper thanks to @janvanhaaren.be and Giels

🚨🚨You can now pre-order my book, THE LONG GAME, on the United States men's national soccer team and its messy rise from total international irrelevance to, well, TBD!🚨🚨 I spoke to ~150 players/coaches/etc. and got fresh stories and unprecedented access! www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/722130...

At OHL for women’s champions league qualifiers with the whole family

Excited to announce a new paper together with @sigridolthof.bsky.social entitled "Perspectives on data analytics for gaining a competitive advantage in football: computational approaches to tactics". This is a synthesis article that has 3 key objectives www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.... 1 / 4

🔷 𝐏𝐲𝐒𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐗 𝐏𝐲𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐄𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐡𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐧 𝐂𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐚𝐥𝐬! 🔶 On December 9th @PyData Eindhoven and @pysport.org will organize 𝐏𝐲𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐄𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐡𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐧 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟓! 𝐌𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐟𝐨: lnkd.in/eBGWKs3V

If you loved Sarri's Napoli or De Zerbi's Brighton, you should be watching Mikey Varas's San Diego. I wrote for the Guardian about the risky press-baiting style that makes MLS's newest team its most tactically interesting, statistically extreme and just plain fun.

EurIPS is coming! 📣 Mark your calendar for Dec. 2-7, 2025 in Copenhagen 📅 EurIPS is a community-organized conference where you can present accepted NeurIPS 2025 papers, endorsed by @neuripsconf.bsky.social and @nordicair.bsky.social and is co-developed by @ellis.eu eurips.cc

Minnesota United became the most aggressive set-piece team on the planet with old-fashioned tactics backed by new analytics — and now they can’t stop scoring from it. My first for The Guardian:

I took my 8-year-old son to his first professional soccer game... at the Club World Cup. It was too much of everything. But we found a moment of humanity in amid the artifice and the avarice. Column @theguardian.com www.theguardian.com/football/202...

Column on last night's spirited #USMNT penalty-shootout win over Costa Rica in the Gold Cup quarterfinals, and what this tournament really represents to the Americans. @theguardian.com www.theguardian.com/football/202...

Our Women's Euro 2025 predictions are out! 🔮 Spain 🇪🇸 is our model's favorite to win the title, with Germany 🇩🇪 close behind. Meanwhile, Belgium 🇧🇪 will most likely be eliminated in the group stage. w\ @jessejdavis.bsky.social dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/sports/blog/...

I think we should be building systems that complement people; systems that do well the things that people do poorly; systems that make individuals and organizations more effective and more humane. 3/

If you missed it yesterday, I spoke to fans, economists and players unions and wrote long about the overlapping ways in which the Club World Cup represents a collision of all the untenable forces in modern soccer.

I strongly believe biomechanical analysis will be the next big leap in sports analytics—and not just for the pros. I got a glimpse by testing the @runeasi.bsky.social sensor (a @dtai-kuleuven.bsky.social spin-off) and wrote about how it helped during my marathon training → runeasi.ai/my-marathon-...

🌀 𝐎𝐩𝐞𝐧-𝐒𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐜𝐞 𝐅𝐨𝐨𝐭𝐛𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐀𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐲𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬 @ 𝐏𝐲𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐋𝐨𝐧𝐝𝐨𝐧 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟓 On Saturday I presented a Graph Neural Network Expected Possession Value model at @pydatalondon.bsky.social 2025. This 𝐆𝐫𝐚𝐩𝐡𝐄𝐏𝐕 model is an ML approach that predicts scoring probability for any moment in the game 🔗 tinyurl.com/pydata-ldn25

This is one meal that makes both kids very happy

To give an example that funding research can have positive benefits beyond what was intended: we were able to apply some ideas from our sports research to play a small role in a study on Parkinson’s disease www.biorxiv.org/content/bior...

I’m honored by @leanderalphabet.bsky.social excellent write up of our soccer research! Lots of credit to my wonderful collaborators @janvanhaaren.be @wannesm.bsky.social @probberechts.bsky.social Maaike Lotte Tom @lorenzocascioli.bsky.social @hugoriosneto.bsky.social Max Arne Tim & so many others

Over the next few weeks we'll be publishing articles to help you get to know how futi's stats work. First up: meet our possession value model that turns every touch of the ball into goal probabilities.

Spain - Belgium #FlameTime with a very happy daughter

It's the hope that kills you

We’ve submitted a paper to arxiv that’s been on hold for 3 months. This seems abnormally long. Has anyone else had this issue? Any suggestions?

🚨The third and final blog post in our series on possession value models design decisions🔍: Can the features chosen to represent the game state inadvertently bias player ratings? w/ @probberechts.bsky.social @jessejdavis.bsky.social Lode Van Tente dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/sports/blog/...

📣 Excited to share that the Workshop on Machine Learning and Data Mining for Sports Analytics (MLSA) will be held again this September as part of @ecmlpkdd.org! w/ @hugoriosneto.bsky.social, @azimmerdm.bsky.social and Maaike Van Roy dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/events/MLSA25

The proceedings of the latest edition of our (@jessejdavis.bsky.social, @janvanhaaren.be, Ulf Brefeld) workshop are finally out: link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-86692-0 And the organization for this year's edition's already underway: dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/events/MLSA25/

We are looking for a Data Analyst to support performance functions of Tottenham Hotspur. Lots of interesting projects ahead, a lot to learn about football and lots of space to develop tech skills (I'll help here). More details on LinkedIn. www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/41...

Congratulations to our DTAI researchers for presenting their work at #AAAI2025 #AAAI25 Lennert De Smet, Dimos Tsouros, Liesbeth Allein, Jaron Maene, David Depot, Ignace Bleukx.

This is a great initiative by @PySport! A common theme in the discussion was how many started their projects to learn. For me, contributing to open-source and collaborating with others has been instrumental in becoming a better programmer. Excited to see what’s next! 🚀

We all know backpropagation can calculate gradients, but it can do much more than that! Come to my #AAAI2025 oral tomorrow (11:45, Room 119B) to learn more.

I wrote about Christian Pulisic, his "Pulisic" docuseries, and what it says about a United States men's national team generation that lacks the promotional zeal of its predecessors. @us.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com/football/202...

🌀 𝐮𝐧𝐫𝐚𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐬𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐬==𝟎.𝟑.𝟎 I'm very excited to announce the release of 𝑢𝑛𝑟𝑎𝑣𝑒𝑙𝑠𝑝𝑜𝑟𝑡𝑠 version 0.3.0. 📺 If you follow the Jupyter Notebook tutorial you'll be able to generate a Pressing Intensity video step-by-step using any of the Kloppy supported tracking providers. 🔗 tinyurl.com/unravel-pres...

We’ve restructured our 2022 Men's World Cup dataset. To streamline analysis and improve usability, we split event data by game and organized metadata and rosters into separate subfolders, each corresponding to a single game. Download for free ⬇️ www.blog.fc.pff.com/blog/enhance...

We are hiring for PhD positions! I’m looking for people interested in exploring the intersection of learning and reasoning with applications to anomaly detection and sports. @dtai-kuleuven.bsky.social @wannesm.bsky.social www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo...

It was a pleasure to collaborate with Maaike over the course of her PhD!! I'm thrilled that she'll stay a bit longer! She did amazing work. The thread below details some research that did not even make the thesis, which can you read here: lirias.kuleuven.be/retrieve/790...

I wanted to know why so many young men are betting on sports. What I learned genuinely shocked me. My story @us.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com/sport/2025/j...

🔹 𝐏𝐲𝐒𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭 - 𝐎𝐩𝐞𝐧-𝐒𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐜𝐞 𝐒𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐬 𝐀𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐲𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬 𝐒𝐮𝐫𝐯𝐞𝐲 - 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟓 🔹 At PySport we would like to learn more about the use of open-source tools within the sports analytics community. Please help us by filling out the 𝑃𝑦𝑆𝑝𝑜𝑟𝑡 𝑂𝑝𝑒𝑛-𝑆𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑐𝑒 𝑆𝑝𝑜𝑟𝑡𝑠 𝐴𝑛𝑎𝑙𝑦𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑠 𝑆𝑢𝑟𝑣𝑒𝑦. 👉 forms.gle/GCGtwek9eEtN...

It's been a while but I've written a new article for my blog looking at how to calculate Expected Threat (xT) in football / soccer analytics using linear algebra. pena.lt/y/2025/01/08... #python #DataScience #SoccerAnalytics

Continuing the tradition, I have compiled an end-of-year overview of the soccer analytics content that I liked the most in the past year. The 2024 edition includes pointers to over 160 resources, including research papers, blog posts, articles, podcasts, and books. janvanhaaren.be/posts/soccer...

Big Chances. Gone too soon?

So true. We have been working on possession value models since 2016 and we are still discovering new things about them