Blog Posts

  • Brighton & Hove Albion

    Everton travel to Brighton this weekend. Let’s have a look at The Seagull’s set up: Brighton are a compact side Keeper, Mat Ryan will play out from the back when he can The centre halves prefer to shuffle it wide to full backs The full backs are not overly aggressive in getting forward. They will…

  • Everton v Burnley – Micro Preview

    On the face of it, Burnley’s deep set defence should cause chance creation crocks Everton problems this afternoon. But I’m starting with a positive: Burnley’s keepers Tom Heaton and Nick Pope have been massively overperforming so far this season. Burnley generally get bombarded by shots each week but their two shot stoppers have stood pretty…

  • Jordan Pickin’ ’em out?

    So we’ve all seen one or two of these and appreciated them on social media: But you’ve not seen my passing model outputs which suggest Pickford’s kicking has been absolutely terrible overall this season. Like nearly worst in the league terrible. I’ll wait for the collective gasp to die down… Exhibit One Pickford’s distribution map…

  • The Data Scout – Sandro Ramirez

    Everton’s pursuit of 21 year-old forward Sandro Ramirez is complete. Apparently, the lad’s a goalscorer. Sandro himself: “My key strength is goalscoring. It’s always good to bring goals to a team and that’s what I’m hoping to do.” Koeman: “He will bring a lot of good qualities and he’s a really good goalscorer, too. There…

  • The Data Scout – Gylfi Sigurdsson v Ross Barkley (Extended Version)

    All the data below is taken from the last two seasons of Premier League football. Do they even play the same position? My favourite way to test this using data is by seeing where players receive the ball on the pitch. I’ve split the pitch into twelve positional zones and used a machine learning method…