Football Data Analyst

The Football Data Analyst course comes from the idea of training future data scientists of our football while promoting greater integration and use of a data-driven approach by football organizations, and more generally by all the realities that operate in the field of scouting and evaluation of players’ performance.
 
The aim is to lay the foundations for the creation and training of a new professional figure, the Football Data Analyst, able to extract value and insights from data, “transforming big data into smart data”, useful for the team’s strategy and highlighting the opportunities that can emerge thanks to scouts and match analysts, enhancing them in the best way within their technical area. 

During the third edition of the course, we had the opportunity to launch a survey aiming to map the Data Analysis landscape in Italian football. 

State of the Game, the first research on Football Data Analysts in Italy, a Wylab project in collaboration with a research group from the University of Edinburgh (UK), is inspired by “State of the Stats“, the initiative created in the United Kingdom by Thom Lawrence, CTO of StatsBombs, from 2015 to 2017.

State of the Game is accompanied by Wylab’s desire to create a student register of the course participants, and from there extend the mapping to all those working in this field in Italy.

The analysis responds to a number of important objectives: 

• to map the market to understand the numbers, background, skills, interests and characteristics of football data analysts active in our country;

• to learn the most frequently used tools, the most important difficulties and challenges of the work of football data analysts;

• to identify gaps and improve training in the field of football data analysis.