Odd Lots · Thursday, July 16, 2026
The podcast explores the increasing application of data analytics in soccer, challenging the notion that the sport is too fluid for "Moneyball"-style analysis. Experts discuss how advancements in AI, tracking data, and computational power are enabling deeper insights into player performance and game strategy, akin to modeling discrete events.
“A lot of people were saying that soccer. You could never use data analytics in the same way for soccer, Like it's too chaotic, it's too fluid, there's too many variables, there's not enough goals.”
“And now we have the ability to do make highly complicated artificial intelligent neural nets with this positional tracking data where at ten trains per second or twenty five points per second, we know where all the players are, and we know where the ball is.”
“So you can discrictize this so you can discertise it into let's say, very minor events where we use the on ball event data, and if we align that with the positional tracking data, we might know every single moment where a player makes you pass, and then you might know the next moment where a player makes a reception.”