Yesterday, Ellyse Perry became the oldest player to take a wicket in a women's T20I for Australia (35y 140d). Remarkably, Perry now holds the record for being both Australia's oldest and youngest wicket-taker in the format, having taken 4-20 aged 17y 90d on debut against England in 2008.

This year at Plot the Ball, I’ve already covered 48 different nations across 19 different sports. The latest edition of my weekly newsletter recapping the latest in international sport has just been published. You can read and subscribe here: www.plottheball.com/p/the-week-i...

there is a precise form of takery that likes to pretend "the ascent of Premier League financial and football power" implies that there are literally no great teams with great players on the continent and the success of Real Madrid, Barcelona and PSG invalidates analysis of financial stratification

Japan proved their mettle as favourites in an impressive 4-1 win over South Korea to set up a blockbuster final showdown with Australia. My latest Asian Cup report from Australia for The Cutback: www.thecutback.com/p/womens-asi...

Some of the most enjoyable sport I’ve watched so far this year has been at the World Baseball Classic. I wrote briefly about the ongoing tournament in this week’s edition of Plot the Ball — as well as some 3x3 basketball, men’s rugby union and more. www.plottheball.com/p/the-week-i...

With a bunch of new followers, I wanted to re-introduce myself 👋🏻. Every Saturday, I publish a newsletter called Plot the Ball 📊🏐 — where I use data to tell better stories about sport. To get this week’s edition in your inbox, subscribe here: www.plottheball.com

The latest edition of Plot the Ball went out on Monday. This week, I recapped the Men's T20 World Cup, looked at some data on where top women's soccer players come from and picked out a moment I enjoyed from Lucy Hamilton's test debut for Australia: plottheball.substack.com/p/the-week-i...

The two Liverpool-Wolves games — same teams, same locations, three days apart — were a nice little experiment to show just how volatile soccer is from a game to game basis, even when nothing fundamental changes at all.

The latest edition of Plot the Ball is here! This week, I enjoyed learning more about how good the Netherlands are at field hockey — particularly on the women’s side. Subscribe if you want to keep up to date with what’s happening across international sport: www.plottheball.com/p/the-week-i...

Finally wrote about ice hockey in my football blog. www.getgoalsideanalytics.com/football-2-0...

Found an excuse to make some flashy dataviz to display how different the points distribution in the 2025/26 Premier League is compared to recent seasons.

Today at Plot the Ball, I used my ‘Rank the Nations’ database to take a look at the recent ice hockey tournaments at the Winter Olympics. You can read the latest edition of the newsletter here: www.plottheball.com/p/the-week-i...

This week’s edition of Plot the Ball introduces one of the major questions I’ll be asking as part of the ‘Rank the Nations’ project. How do countries’ performance levels differ across different versions of the same sport? www.plottheball.com/p/the-week-i...

A fairytale World Cup run for Northern Ireland, powered by Dan Ballard set-piece goals?

The Big Five era had a good run

The latest edition of The Week in International Sport has gone out to subscribers. Featuring today: handball in Egypt 🇪🇬 and Denmark 🇩🇰, futsal in Brazil 🇧🇷 and rugby union in Wales 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿. You can read it here: www.plottheball.com/p/the-week-i...

After their loss last night, Real Madrid have dropped outside of the top 10 in the Opta Power Rankings for the first time in over 5 years. theanalyst.com/articles/who...

in the latest Expecting Goals newsletter (free to read!) I broke down the numbers on the Premier League set piece revolution and why I think it marks a major new tactical trend in the Premier League that will be unusually difficult to dislodge www.expectinggoals.com/p/the-set-pi...

In Plot the Ball this week: a look at the state of men’s water polo, the trajectory of Fiji in rugby sevens and a few other interesting things I learned about international sport 🌍. You can read — and subscribe to get the newsletter directly every Monday — here: www.plottheball.com/p/the-week-i...

the most telling part of the Deloitte Money League this year wasn't the top 20 it was the rankings of teams 21-30 it's a new world www.deloitte.com/uk/en/servic...

Wrote about the state of play for football, getting data, and getting insight, in the aftermath of the FBref news www.getgoalsideanalytics.com/square-one/

This week’s edition of the newsletter has just gone out to subscribers. You can read it here — and subscribe to get it directly to your inbox every Monday: www.plottheball.com/p/the-week-i...

Well this is unfortunate www.sports-reference.com/blog/2026/01...

Good time for someone to write about City's issues... Oh wait #BGMCI #Footy-Live

Indiana football compiled a .384 winning percentage in the 25 seasons before this one. No national champion performed worse during the stretch preceding its title, according to a Washington Post analysis.

11 german managers in the bundesliga. a combined zero caps for the german national team between them.

Plot the Ball is back! 📊🏐✉️ Today, I launched a really exciting new project. Over the last few months, I’ve been working on finding a better way to understand the landscape of international team sport. You can read more about it here: www.plottheball.com/p/what-to-ex...

Plot the Ball is back! 📊🏐✉️ Today, I launched a really exciting new project. Over the last few months, I’ve been working on finding a better way to understand the landscape of international team sport. You can read more about it here: www.plottheball.com/p/what-to-ex...

How good is the Olympic ice? Let's ask someone who played on it this weekend Chatted with Florian Wieser about it today and then got some perspective Moritz Seider and Lucas Raymond their Olympics thoughts. My latest at Shap Shots www.shapshotshockey.com/p/how-good-i...

Interview time on the @IrishTimesSport rugby podcast Rory Best, an ex-Ireland captain under Joe Schmidt, is now general manager at Ulster What does a GM actually do, and how have Ulster become Irish rugby's good news story? Listen ⬇️ www.irishtimes.com/podcasts/the...

Carcassone fly-half Gabin Michet receives his club player of December award from a local butcher #ProD2, never change, never change

I wrote this two weeks ago. Seems like it might be relevant today: www.espn.com/soccer/story...

Check out @sportico.bsky.social's best data viz of the year 📈📉📊🏀🏈⚾️⚽️💵💰 www.sportico.com/business/spo...

If you'd like to read every story I've written in 2025 before the end of 2025, the last one just went up: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

One viz "rule" that I follow almost always is that scatters with the same units on both axes should be square and scatters with different units should be non-square. Squareness here produces whitespace at the bottom which tells you that no team is as bad defensively as CAR/COL are good offensively.

Continuing the tradition, I have compiled an end-of-year overview of the soccer analytics content that I liked the most in 2025. This edition includes pointers to about 200 resources, including research papers, blog posts, news articles, podcasts, and webinars. janvanhaaren.be/posts/soccer...

Excited for another round of “Is Morgan Roger’s finishing 5 times as efficiently as Lione Messi going to continue indefinitely?” today.

City have been much more reliant on counter-attacks to create chances this season. Their xG from counters per game and share of non-penalty xG have both more than doubled compared to a relatively steady baseline. For the first time, Pep's team rank at or near the top of the PL by these metrics.

Primary Assist heatmaps for 2024-2025 season as well as current, based on strength. Pretty cool stuff happening on the powerplay and one of the reasons why xG models (publicly) are so much less accurate for that strength

imagining a future where it's normal to ask soccer players interesting questions and for them to answer them

Used Liverpool’s tendency to “win” games on xG as a topical Trojan horse to debunk the concept of winning on xG, and why xPoints tables often produce league standings that are clearly nonsense www.nytimes.com/athletic/688...

I linked to this yesterday, but it's worth bringing up again. When I first started doing analytics, it was the base assumption that players are, on average, the same. Now I am more interested in what *changes* them. This highlights one cause. www.espn.com/nba/story/_/...

It took half a season but Real Madrid have discovered the secret tactical formula of Trent kick ball far + Kylian dribble fast

Some interesting data trends on Manchester City's season (🧵, some metric explainers at the end) 1/ As of today, this would be the first season where City don't top the PL for possession % and field tilt since 2017/18, and the first where they drop below 60% and 70%, respectively

Here is the updated #NWSL point spirals after the 2025 season. It really shows how quickly Kansas City took the lead without any other team coming close. Remaining teams were pretty tight on points

EXCLUSIVE LukeKnox , Creative Director at ESPN, speaks with TK Sajeev Kumar,Editorial Director of NewspaperDesign, about how his team redefines digital sports storytelling through sharp design, smart data, and mobile-first creativity. newspaperdesign.org/2025/11/27/d...

Outstanding scrum analysis from James Tracy on today's pod. James breaks down how things unravelled for Ireland in detail. Also chat about Nienaber at Leinster, card decisions, and listeners who think we got referee views wrong on Monday. the42.ie/subscribe to sign up!

In the latest edition of Plot the Ball, I've written about Sidney Crosby’s longevity at the top of the NHL — and his deserved place on Canada’s Olympic team at age 38. Also featuring this week: Jorja Miller, Caoimhe Bray, Victor Wembanyama and Drake Maye. www.plottheball.com/p/already-a-...

In the latest edition of Plot the Ball, I've written about Sidney Crosby’s longevity at the top of the NHL — and his deserved place on Canada’s Olympic team at age 38. Also featuring this week: Jorja Miller, Caoimhe Bray, Victor Wembanyama and Drake Maye. www.plottheball.com/p/already-a-...

Still had this data open from the other day so I made you a chart