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Does anyone do any statistical analysis of your players? I’d love to be able to do some actual analysis of passing, possession, shots, etc. I think every coach thinks they know what is going on during the flow of the game, but sometimes the actual statistics show us something different. I used to do scorekeeping for my older son’s baseball team and was surprised at some of the stats that you didn’t notice while watching (certain kids who weren’t considered very good players had very good on base percentages, etc.).
If you do track your teams stats, do you have someone on the team do it by hand, using an app, or what? It seems like it might be easier to track while watching video replay of the game, but curious if anyone does it live.
Soccermeter.com
I have that app and have used it, but I was thinking of more something like what FourFourTwo does. Their passing charts and heat maps are very illuminating.
My full-time gig is as an economist/statistician so I’ve put a lot of thought into how to do this without spending 20+ hours a week on just that project and I’m failing to come up with a solution. The type of stats that you can easily get are pretty worthless or so rudimentary that the eyeball test is a measure of equal or better value.
I’ve found that the easiest way to do stats is to film the game first and go back and take stats afterwards. If you pause when a ball goes out of play the typical 90 minute game will have about an hour of action to go through. Depending on what you are looking to measure you can often fast forward through the tape too, so it does not have to be a lengthy process. Arbitrary stats can be misleading so I think it’s better to start with a thesis to prove, such as “Jimmy makes too many bad passes in the final third” as opposed to just compiling some stats and trying to interpret them after the fact.
We did try to keep track of basic passing stats this year, simply to get a general picture of how we are doing in terms of playing a possession game, but we task this to somealliums and senior players.
Ive found that simply studying the video is usually more productive than tallying stats. In fact it’s amazing and a little scary how different a game looks when you view it away from the heat of battle and the sidelines. Recently one of our teams won a game and we thought they played great… Until we watched the tape and it immediately became clear that they started well but steadily got caught up in the other team’s jungle ball game.
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