Soccer Data with Sean Forman

and welcome to the double pivot. The world's most agreeable soccer analyst podcast. I am Michael Kaylee and we're now list podcast. We do soccer data, tell stories with data, baby.

And one of the things that has changed in soccer data over the last decade is that it has just become much, much more available. And that is broadly what we're here to talk about. I guess to talk about it, who has been a integral player in that story. So I'm joined by Mike Goodman and he is going to introduce our guest.

Let me get heard on the way in his way. I was pleased now that I was as happy as podguesses, Patreon.com slash double pivot. Come and hang out in the discord. In fact, our guest today is a member of the discord.

I believe he will hold the first distinction of being the first guest on the podcast, who was previously a member of the discord. Everybody welcome the president of the sports reference sites, Sean Foreman. Hello, it's great to be here. I you guys are actually my number one listening to podcast this year according to podcast.

So that's great to be here. Oh, wow, that's I am flattered. Mutual admiration society. Here we go.

Well, not for a long time, Sean is like you guys know him from FB ref, but if you don't know him, if you only know him from FB ref, I think like FB ref is a site that brings up to par with other sports statistics sites that Sean runs soccer data, right? Like baseball reference has been, I don't know. How long have you looked at baseball reference? Of course, of your life.

Yeah, I just shot and I used to blog about the red socks together. My God, like, yeah. So, so why don't you just like, why we start with why? I feel like why did you get into like, why did you move into the soccer statistics part of sports statistics?

Right. So before I was launching like 2000, then we launched basketball in 2003 or four or four or 2000 hockey, 2008 and some college sites. And so we were kind of thinking like West next. And we always find that obviously there have been no soccer is the biggest important in the world and has worldwide coverage and interest.

But the other thing that really drives traffic for us on other sites is transactions. And of course, transfers are so massive in soccer. And so it just felt like a huge opportunity for the company. And there was a gap and it was a really hard problem because nobody had done it before.

I mean, there's transfer market, which is a great site. But in the in depth kind of statway that we do at the reference sites. And so I started making plans in like 2010 that we're going to do up your route. You'll notice it didn't launch so like 2018.

So there's a big gap there. But, you know, it's just something it's about like the next thing that we that we should be doing as a company. And now you're taking that even to the next next step, right? You want to give a little plug for what's going on back here?

So this past week, we can have go we launched we have a some crypto features called a stat head which kind of is sort of a it's a way to interact with our database directly is what I'd say. And so you know, you're on site and our sites are mostly static. You don't have a lot of interaction interaction interactivity in them necessarily. And so this is a tool that we launched earlier this month for allowing you to interact with our database.

So you can query on the maps level, query on the season level. And pretty much other than national team pretty much anything we have on the site is now directly queryable through this tool. Now that's that stat head.com. You'll see a link there to the up your app version of that pre-file.

So we're hoping people give it a try now through the end of January. Very cool. Very cool. So we're setting up I was asking you saying we want to set up a play index that believes what you call this on this record like over a decade ago.

So it's branded now. It's called stat head. Glad that correct. And yeah, so I think one day I want to say data in soccer is just totally different as a business space that is in American sports.

I was wondering sort of what your experience was with sort of figuring that world out. Right. So it's yeah, that's that's been one of the bigger challenges for us, I think, is trying to figure out like where. So in the North American sports, obviously, I'm generally a single entity that has kind of managed the single league over the years.

So baseball is more complicated than that. And so you just have to cover three teams and never change. It's the same teams. The players are more or less the same every year and each league.

And so it's a much more straightforward way to handle and also have a lot of companies in the US that have been dedicated to collecting these stats, going back to the sporty use baseball guys or the reach guys or the falling guys early in the early 1900s. People have been transcribing this and putting it in a databases for a very long time now. You got baseball encyclopedia in 1969 that was published. And so all the North American sports generally have been covered in this way.

And we've had pretty good grasp on up until the league really stats. I had a pretty good grasp on who all the players were and what the stats were. When we get into soccer, of course, you've got hundreds of leagues. You've got, you know, you've got promotion, relegation, you know, and so, you know, they're also not the culture of accumulating statistical records in the same way that the North American sports happen.

So, you know, we started this process probably like 2015 or so. We found a gentleman Aaron Nielsen who had been doing statistical work and he compiled a very rough data set for us that we had to add IDs to and identify all the teams and the leagues and all this kind of stuff, which a lot of them we still haven't put out on the website for like the 90s and 80s and that. So, so there's that and then over that, you know, we've wanted to kind of merge multiple data sets to get the analytics as part of this as well. So it's we actually have like three or four different data providers that were kind of merging into the product that we have now.

And so, you know, that's been a huge change. You know, we've been fortunate to work with people like Samfbaum and now Opta to have access to this data that we can present to our users. Yeah. And the other thing right.

And I guess when you get into Staffsbaum, Opta, this is this is part of it is that the legal like who owns stats is different in America and Europe. Like it's like a completely different legal setup. Whereas we're like in the US, the leagues own at least the basic set of stats until you get into doing things with them. Like like the counting sets, there's a I believe the NBA like sued.

They actually lost that lawsuit. So, so yeah, I'm not lawyers. So don't nobody started business based on this, what I'm saying here, but you know, basically back to not copyright of only United States. And so the fact that very bonds hit, you know, 73 old runs, you know, a season or something like that is not a copyrightable fact.

We can anybody can publish that, which is good for us in some ways and bad for us in some ways and that, you know, we don't have any protections for any of the stuff we do either. So the leagues do have official providers that they work with, but there are also all these some mom and pop, some other competitors of these larger companies that are also paying people to watch the games and just, you know, translate the data into databases and things like that. So overseas, obviously the regulatory system is different and there is a little bit of, you know, debate or who owns the stats and, you know, things like the maybe premillion that. Yeah, it's a little more of a gray area.

And I think that's probably changed how far the fields have gone in different countries. That makes a ton of sense. So as you then get into building out FB ref, I think, you know, obviously we've got an audience that is incredibly familiar with their website, incredibly familiar with the field of looking at soccer through statistics. I'm curious if there's anything that says that to you as like interesting or important decision points along the way of sort of constructing what we all are sort of not used to seeing FB ref like, is there anything that you were like, Oh, I expected this to sort of follow fairly uniformly in the footsteps of the other sports and it didn't or something that like ended up actually being like sort of similar that you didn't expect.

So I think the biggest, I don't think we've quite gotten as much traction as I expected to get to the audience. I think you're audience obviously is our sweet spot. I think we've been a little more, I think, you know, across, you know, we get millions of people on our sites, you know, each week. Yeah.

And so, you know, it's still kind of finding its living, I think, in that regard. I think, you know, what's, what's been different is we were not seeing as many of the like, just kind of general fans on our sites, you know, whether that's because we're not, you know, it's not quite as good penetration in Google or whatnot. But we've seen significant, you know, like in baseball, some people may be familiar with fan graphs, which probably is more comfortable with what FB ref is doing in soccer than what baseball refons does in baseball. And so, I think we've kind of pitched a little more at the analytics and numbers crowd than we have the others, the other sports.

And so that's, you know, it's still an infinite audience. It's like still doing well, but it's not, it's, it's, it's, the degree that it hasn't kind of filtered down into a broader audience, I think is an interesting one to me. The other thing that's been significantly different in soccer is the degree which people are like repackaging what we're doing and like putting visualizations on Twitter or doing, you know, blog posts and things like that. The soccer audience is much more interested, I think, in creating scatter plots than any other sport that we've seen, you know, even from both anywhere else, it's probably like five to one or something like that in terms of other scatter plots, I've seen over the last three to five years.

So that's kind of interesting dynamic that I think quite exciting. That is interesting. That makes a lot of sense to me that both because of the volume of data that is being presented is so much larger than the volume of data that you get on any other soccer website that like sort of it looks more like a fan dress, even if it's not so distant about the volume data that you have in other sports and on top of that, because this not only like, it wasn't just the soccer needed a some, a good website for reference, it needed anything. And so then this still, then this becomes also a key source in a different kind of way.

That's really interesting. It makes a lot of sense. Well, just to sort of follow up on my question, I think one of the interesting questions to us is like the website is full tapes and the tables have a certain set of data in them. And when you click on the tables, you go to a page for a player or for a team or for a team season.

And like, that is a intentional structure. And that was, I was wondering sort of the process of putting that structure together. Was there anything that was unexpected to you? Obviously, you want to get this, you want to have kind of a standardized processes, right?

Where you get some efficiencies and things like that, soccer can't do all that up. And so it's actually gone the other way in an interesting way. We had it because of, you know, cup play and international cups and national team play and all that kind of stuff. It's, you know, it, we really had to create kind of a whole new generalized structure website that we didn't have before.

And so we've actually are now in the process of like backfilling all of our other sites to match up with what soccer has rather than kind of going the other way, which is useful because, you know, now we can do like NBA launches in terms of it, which looks a lot like, you know, the champions league sort of the end or the epic. You know, we want to have Japanese baseball in, you know, or Korean baseball in our Saturday at a tool at some point as well. It's kind of actually a case where that's written some innovation on our side in order to kind of expand what we can do on the other sports as well. It's now extremely tedious to like rewrite everything to like kind of hit this in paradigm and we're not quite there yet.

I think we're hoping that will pay off significantly for us going forward. It's part of the reason to be honest with you. Like when I started in 2010, we started, I really started like 2010 is kind of made when we made the decision to do this. So I really did not even watch like a league match until like 2011.

I like, oh, you know, I'll spend three months, I'll spend two months watching soccer and I'll be able to create a soccer match. I mean, that'll be it. And then so I think, I think, Sergio, I think Sergio, I think Sergio, I think Sergio, I was debut match against Swansea in 2011 was like the first league match I'd ever watched. And so I quickly realized that like, I didn't know anything and it was going to take a long time.

And so I started playing football manager the next year and like lost your life to football manager and I did win three champions league. So it wasn't completely waste of time. But I, you know, it took me a lot of time to figure that out. I'm going to just be accumulating all the data and deciding what we're going to do with it many years after that.

So so it's been a long process to get to where we're at. And we're at it for long haul. We're, you know, we've been around for 20 plus years. So we're hoping, you know, we've kind of set a goal of having the site kind of, it'll never be finished but having a significantly advanced in time for the 26 World Cup.

Everybody in America who does this in any capacity professionals, we'll get a timeline at the 26 World Cup. So you started, you mentioned this to these ones easier. First, like club soccer match, you said that I watched, did you settle on a team? And if so, how?

So I watch a lot of matches that year. And of course, you won the title of that year. So I actually, I'm something of a city fan. So I realized that makes me a world pro runner and probably a world person, maybe a person, a family, a world person.

I don't know. But so I am a city man. I've never been to Manchester, but I'm hoping to go in February. My son has something black, cool in February.

So I'm going to be there for that. But yeah, I got hooked on city. I'm a huge man's national news, US friends, national team fan. And I suffer with my American team.

So I figure I can be a farm runner on my soccer team. That's right. I ended up with Everton completely in the opposite direction. Never suffered for your local team.

So that's exactly what happened. I was like, OK, I've had the Yankee fandom experience. Let me pick a team that will give me a different fandom experience. And boy, it was the questionable decision.

You've certainly had a different experience. This is true. Kind of denied it. OK, so you know, you say that you sort of envision 26 as this goal.

What does that look like for the second? Like where is it going? Where are the areas that you feel like you need to sort of improve it or evolve it? Or like what is that roadmap for you?

I think a lot of it is just continuing to evolve the usability of the site. I think we've got like, you said, we've got so much data there. I think whether that's through like teacher education or things like that. I think we also, you know, we're translated into six languages as well.

But English is still the whole world overwhelming use case. So trying to do more to sell pay use in South America or in Africa and non English speaking, English speaking countries around the world. So that's the main part of that. We also like we've got a lot of historical optodata that we haven't launched yet that we're hoping to add.

And some type, yeah, I've got a big there on that one. So we are hoping to add that at some point relatively soon, you know, continue to expand our women's coverage. You know, we have optodata for NWSL, League of them Nina, probably blue league, you know, women's super league, you know, making people aware of that and hopefully growing, you know, that women's analytics community is women's soccer analytics community as well. So, you know, and then just expand features that we've got a lot of things on our reference sites that we have.

Yeah, I poured it over to FBRF that we'd love to add managers, you know, things along those lines, you know, shot charts perhaps at some point, you know, they have a lot of data that we're not fully utilizing. You know, we got a very long list. And so, you know, starting to will down that list is kind of the make up. That's really interesting.

I wanted to sort of interested in that with like the different pieces of data that you think you can, that you can get in because I think that there's a couple of different like, it's just full of holes. And I've been working on these soccer studies to try to fill in holes in kind of different ways. I've just been like thinking about these in a bunch of different capacities. Like there are, there is the, there is the historical question.

There is the fact that soccer has been being played for this incredibly long period of time. And, you know, as you go back in even less and less fully organized ways with obviously less and less organized record keeping. And then there is the more recent data that has been collected at a higher level of granularity. And there are sort of in between things as you're saying, like managers and things like that.

And as you think about like the stories that you want to tell with this website, what do you think are sort of the most important ones? I see a spreading out for the whole of that. I'm talking from you that prioritize one over the other. I think the obviously our existing site is having the complete historical record is a significant benefit to our users.

Obviously we're never going to have a complete historical record of, you know, of law legal or something like that. But I do think having more historical data would be helpful, you know, to context, you know, putting players in context and things like that, even just having, you know, even just making a back of the footy more fun to play would be, you know, would be a benefit of that as well. So, you know, so I think that's a big one. I think I think it's definitely having more things on like the play level, like, you know, shots that I mentioned, things like that, you know, presenting it away where we're not getting sideways, neighbor, data providers and stuff like that.

But we're still providing, you know, useful context to our users and, you know, allowing them to really, you know, understand the game in a better way. It's funny that you bring up a Macullet which I very much enjoy. But it does seem to me that the challenge of a Macullet footy becomes quite different from the challenge of playing baseball or basketball. And like it sort of gets at the ways in which the sets of data really are very different.

Yeah, so, you know, we only have, so we have the full from yearly history. So we have, you know, England back to the 90s, but we have very little, we don't have anywhere near as much in Germany, France, you know, in Italy and Spain. And so it's, you know, when you're playing for people, we don't, you know, it's a quiz game where you're, you know, you kind of the standard interaction is I'm picking a player from in a line and he's also played for Manchester United, you know, and maybe there are a dozen, you know, 18 players who match that category. We only have data for a certain number of years.

And so we're missing everybody from like, if there are any people players in the 70s, 80s, you know, 90s, awesome in the 90s who would match up to that. Now, of course, my band on that's not really a problem because I don't know who those players were anyway. But what I did there is at the flip side is that like England, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, that's 90s, 60s. Whereas, like, baseball, it's like, you know, it's like, roughly 30 days, so you know, all the other sports that you want to do it.

So it's like, you know, it's a different set of great challenges for a back and forth. Which like, I think right against it, like, all the stuff we've been talking about, where it is really a different kind of funnel to take the data that exists in the world and make it presentable in sort of instinctive and usable ways for soccer versus other sports. And like, you know, I think the entire analytics industry, as they come into soccer from other sports, like deals with this challenge, like leaking out in various ways. I mean, I'm sure you guys know this but like, even, you know, there are like 14 players named Emerson in our database or something.

I mean, like, you know, you're trying to match up players across datasets and it becomes an extraordinarily important part thing to do. So I recall correctly, your first Immaculate Footy had Micon as a very popular answer. And there were like 35 different Micons. Yes.

Yes. I think we have a headshot on there now. I'm not a good reporter. I was a quick operator because, yes, we were going to handle a lot of issues.

Can we, you know, we can't even really, you know, and then in baseball, you think, oh, I can just put the years in there because it's, you know, he played from 1982 to 1993. Well, soccer players are playing from age 15 to age 40, you know, but they're in different leagues than who knows. And so it's, yeah, it's a probably different, you know, problem that you're dealing with. So it's, I mean, in some ways it's been a lot of fun because, you know, new problems are interacting and stuff you have to work through.

So I think we've really enjoyed that and, and, and have a little training program for developers to teach them about soccer so they can understand all of this difference because a lot of them don't come to our company with a lot of soccer experience or interest. So it's, you know, it's been a good problem to have. Our, our head of product is a huge driven fan. So we, you know, not lucky in that regard, you know, you know, and have people on staff who do a little bit.

So. Cool. So yeah, so I have been playing around a bit with, with staff head. Anyway, I wanted to sort of let you talk for a minute about the, you said that it's offering the query that is that and you know, just sort of, I have a broad sense of what that means.

And I'm interested in sort of your description of what are the things that this adds and what are the things that like, what would that mean? Right. So, so we have four tools. We have a, a match finders and season call binders.

So match finders and season binders. And then we have a player, a player and team level level that's those four things. And really it's, it's, it's, some users may come in and be like, oh, I love all these options. I've got to click things and try.

So we're going to be overwhelmed by it. I encourage you just to like try it. It's, you know, like I said, it's free through through the end of January. And so, but, but the basic idea is you can filter on different facts about the player.

So, you know, you pick, I want to order the players by goals plus assist per 90 or something like that. And then you can filter them based on what competitions you're looking at. You could filter them by age, right? So players who are under 20 playing in a big five league, you can filter them by birthdays, the nationalities.

So we try to maintain the national team membership pretty well. And so you're looking for, you know, the next Italian striker who's, you know, under 20 and playing in a big five league, you can look at that sort of player. And then it's also really good for things like last time, like if somebody starts a sentence, but the last time this happened or the most, this is the most sentence or the pure sentence, that's the type of thing that you can search on or site. So, for example, you know, I was looking at, you know, after the hasn't built a city match, you know, when, as this was shot set, Pep has had an match playing for, when you're coaching Man City and you know, you enter, you know, I want to sort my shots ascending city matches in the league since the first year of Pep was there.

And yes, it's the, you know, two is the pure shots of a bad match, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you'll eat match since Pep started there, or you can do things like show me all players with two or more shots taken for 90. And then who has the longest shot distance and every shot distance across all those players. So I think it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, uh, summer, uh, seven year from a my peeler is like 20, 60 yards, 20, 60 yards, or something like that. So, I love that.

He pops the lowest XG per shot and he pops the progressive pass. He just loves taking the ball a long way. Exactly. Exactly.

So, you know, you go off those here and there, right? So, you know, and then on the other side, you have a special layer who's, you know, 10 and a half, 10 and a half yards, I have a shot distance, you know, and so you can find stuff like that. And so it's kind of a scouting tool a little bit, but also kind of looking out facts like, you know, last the time something happened or, you know, you can do it at the player level or you can do it at the team level as well. So it's, it's, you know, it's really, we try to get really flexible.

You can do per 90s, you can do opponents at, you know, which, you know, which team has allowed those crosses in the league this year, you know, stuff like that, that, you know, that really, kind of allow you to answer those questions. And, you know, we welcome all feedback. So, you know, again, people tell us, I got to have this, you know, one of the things we probably need to add here is the ability to add like, start being an end date to your query. So you can, you know, do last one, eight days or the last, you know, 90 days in season or something like that.

So there are always things that we're trying to add to it and improve it as we use feedback. Very cool. And you touched on this a little bit when you talked about how F.E.R.F. is sort of leaning more into analytically inclined fans as opposed to perhaps being a broader reference site for like a wider base of things.

And it does seem to me that like, there's a lot of this in sort of soccer coverage, especially when you when you are directed by the Google machine to an American audience, which I also speak with some degree of experience from here, that like Americans bring a set of expectations to watching and experiencing sports that I think this caters to you in a way that just like it doesn't occur to European fans a lot to like look up basic, you know, like basic stuff. So it just seems to be that like moving into this place where you guys is like just like a pretty simple fit for like, what is probably a wide base of American fans, but that still translates in the space of soccer to a relatively small niche. Yeah, I really agree with that. I think, you know, I think the question for us is whether that that's going to be down to a broader audience worldwide.

You know, are there going to be fluency fans who want to know, you know, we have, we have a series of results down for opt up for the last four or five years. Are we going to start seeing fans of those leagues start to look more and actually start to look more at, you know, there's the best we're on the team, things like that. Or is that still going to be mostly kind of an American, you know, American type lens to look through the game. I suspect it will start to filter down a little bit more.

And I didn't argue that he was a room baseball. So I, I, I was a soccer as well, probably part of the course. But, you know, I find it interesting. I enjoy seeing that context.

I do enjoy watching, you know, watching a lot of matches as well. So it's, you know, I watch you do your show. Well, let me tell you, well, you might have been individually accused of ruining baseball. If you ruin soccer, it's just for us in formals, but the true American, like, that's sort of like up there.

That's true. Yeah. I mean, come on. We don't watch matches on this podcast.

We get the spreadsheets. We tell people it's in the spreadsheets like I mean, come on. We send them to the website that has the spreadsheets. Seriously.

It's amazing. We get 30 minutes of content every week. Man, 30 minutes, I got to program a whole website every day without watching matches. It's very modern.

Seriously. But this is the thing you have to live your trip. You have to be authentic. And for us, it's not watching the games.

I was like, because Sean and I actually went to a game together. We got to watch Leo Messi live. One of the worst matches of his career, I would say. I mean, the chili was kicking the snot out of every.

I can't imagine how many times it was out of that match, but that was a great time. And it was like the very peak of Argentina as our plan is that Messi will progress the ball up to Messi who will score. And, you know, that was a matter of he liked this. The penalty kick and then quit the national team.

Yeah. That's the very low point of the Messi national team arc and we got to experience in person. All right. I mean, I am out of questions.

I mean, I could sit around and talk a little bit about the website for a while. I can say, like personally, that we link out to it from CBS a lot. And we do that even though we have our own internal access to lots of stats, there is just some stuff. It is easier to use your websites to find and contextualize.

And, you know, like we all find it quite invaluable. Really. Yeah. It's a total game changer like for just the basic experience of like, I want to say something in a chat room about soccer.

I want to like someone said something and I want to know what is true. Or, you know, I am just bored. I want to see who has the most dribbles in league and that I want to claim that my team should sign them. Like that just simply did not just it used to be that like I was one of a small number of people who could find that data.

But of course, like I have that data in a bunch of CSV files on my computer that I don't make a very good database out of. So it was significantly harder and like the ability to go and have that and find that is has really changed soccer fandom in a really significant way. So it's fantastic. Yeah.

Thank you. I, yeah. I, we're very proud of that. I mean, we're also proud that we've been very intentional trying to also do the same for both.

So as well, for women's soccer, you know, way, you know, we as a company, data democratization is one of our core values. And so that's a crossboat making data available, but also, you know, expanding universe of people who are covered by the data sense as well. And we've done that for WNBA and hopefully we'll be able to keep doing that for women's soccer as well. So I, I'm really, I think any improvements you guys would like to see on the site that make your lives easier while you, you know, while I'm on the call here.

I'm going to hand so I can write it down if there is any way to IP block people that tweet to the game on xg. See, it means nothing. Because I would like that to stop happening. I get the other who I am.

This is authenticity is a theme is podcast. Yeah, I think that if there was a, if you could break down some of the passing numbers, including like breaking out crosses from passes. And you know, all of those all of those aggregates, especially for percentages and for other egrets breaking out non breaking out set play and non set play for different things, even the team level breaking out set play and non set play. But I think that like having a bunch of those passing numbers broken out and even just like a really simple way, having past percentage, just simply exclude crosses and throw ins.

Because some of it is like me saying, I wish you put like 10 more tables on your website and I understand by that is not a not not not like an actual solution to a problem. But I do think that breaking out that pulling out crosses and actions, whether they're free kicks or throw ins would would improve the pass display. Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, the future as you described it is we now have like four passing tables instead of one passing table and how many people that might Michael Galy are benefiting from that change.

But I mean, I do I certainly understand the reason I find it at least. So that is I have found that always ends up being an issue. And you know, I've said in plenty of meetings where you're evaluating data providers and backends and stuff. And it's just really makes different decisions throwing down those lines.

And one of the things that I find fascinating is how much the tool you have access to influences the kind of analysis you do. And like, because I can see it as we switch from one product to another, like what my writers can work on, how they can like break down a game. She's and there's no right answer. But like, you know, it's just like, I don't have any good suggestions for you other than to say that like, yeah, like you got to pick things and include things.

There's no good, all the cops are going to do it. Well, yeah, that's not true in the North American sports, right? I mean, the basic facts were calculating the North American sports are much, much better defined. I mean, I guess that there were sounds really basketball.

It's kind of allowed me that we have like passing in soccer, but we don't have passing in basketball or, you know, yeah, we're just because there's so many more shots. So that's the best. Yeah. So I mean, really, that's a good point.

So there's how many bounces there are because everybody's shooting every possession. So, yeah, that's, you know, the fact that you don't have pressures anymore is a good example of how that changes, you know, the discourse and things like that, not different things. So, yeah, I'm working on with my, you know, the studies that I'm trying to write, I sort of realized that one of the ways that I am one of the things I think I want to like build toward over the course of this like year to your project, but I've exactly turned into is that while and sort of thing back on what we had in baseball in the 2000s and 2010s, that I think a lot of people have been focused on trying to create an overstep for soccer. Let's get value, player value on ball value.

I think I don't mean to say negative things about any of that work. I think that people working on things is great. But one thing that I realized is an in between thing in a certain way that is missing is and that is much, much more doable and much less theoretically difficult is to say, what is this players passing percentage next year likely to be. You think of like, dancing, or see, zips projections and Nate Silver's, all of these, and then the cascading cascading, happened in two years.

And while it is very, very hard to say, having to bring that added this much value with his passing, being able to say, Kevin De Bruyne the next season for city is projected to do have these passing statistics and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and if Kevin De Bruyne went to Bayern Munich, you'd be projected to do this and this and this and this and this and this and this and that is a very difficult problem. But I think it's one that would help us understand a lot better what these stats actually are and what are the ones that we want to see. Like, what is a player's passing percentage? Well, it's made up most likely of these different things.

And I think that in the move to try to have a value set, we move past the, wait, what actually are these stats that we have? And we have this incredible, as you're saying, this incredible proliferation of stats. It's very different from even from baseball, from basketball, because we're tracking all of these actions that like being to understand them on a deeper level is I think something that, you know, your website, you know, you're going to see a lot of things. So I really push this forward as I want to study in more detail.

So, yeah, the value of ball progression, all that kind of stuff, right? I mean, that would be, you know, would be along those lines as well, the value of now that you talk about going to that. So, yeah, I definitely see that as a website creator and maintainer, I do think having the Uruv metric would be valuable to us. And so I think that actually, you know, the discourse is definitely good for us in terms of, you know, especially if you've got your own thing.

So, you see how much transfer markets, you know, transfer value gets cited in various places and stuff. So certainly I understand it may not be the most useful. I think that it's certainly one of the more interesting things that people want to talk about. So, I mean, it's interesting to me, because we're now, we're talking about the proliferation of stats.

When I started writing years ago, when I was at Grantland, I specifically wrote a piece where I sort of said, actually, what's happening in soccer is very different than what's happening in baseball, because in soccer, it was being presented as stats versus no stats, which was the same conversation that was happening in baseball. And I was like, well, actually, no. Baseball has always had tons of stats. What is happening in baseball is, are these new stats better than the old stats?

And, you know, why are the new stats better than the old stats? And what's going on in soccer is a lot of people who are like, scarred from those wars being like, don't invent all the old stats if you don't know that they're important. And what I would say, my article is kind of disagreeing with that. Or is just sort of like, well, look, we need the information to figure out what information is good.

And it is amazing to me that like, several years later, I don't like to think about exactly how many. We are sitting here now, like, oh, we have all these stats and now we can use them to figure out what can make it smarter about the game. Right. Yeah.

Well, that's more of a comment than a question, really. We might reach the loopy part of the podcast. We might have hit it 10, 15 minutes ago, but I've been having a good time. So yeah, Sean, you know, we've I think we've.

Anyway, just wanted to say thank you for the podcast and is there anything you want to mention website, you know, URLs or whatever that. I mean, thanks again. I enjoyed it immensely. I I'll continue to listen.

So even if you don't have me on in the future, so you know, they thank you for that. But yeah, you're up to calm and then the new feature where we just launched is stat.com. And if you go there, you'll see a link to the app. You're outside.

If you're a basketball fan, they spoke to anybody by the other stuff interesting as well. But pre-trial through the through the end of January, no credit card needed. Just sign up, give free access and give it oral. And you know, let me know.

I'm Sean underscore, former on Twitter. So very happy to talk with people about how to do things or, you know, take ideas from people. So, you know, I'm opening all the back that that that you'll just might have. And you know, he's reachable on the discord too.

Otherwise, thanks so much, Sean. This was a lot of fun. Yeah, you did. Great.

All right. And we will be back there this week with more soccer podcasts. Cheers, y'all. Cheers.