Odd Lots · Thursday, July 16, 2026
The podcast touches on the potential for open-source models and data to democratize soccer analytics, helping smaller clubs level the playing field against wealthier ones. However, the complexity of knowledge distillation and questions surrounding data ownership remain significant challenges.
“I hope by doing that it will help the smaller clubs, help data providers I guess provide better insights to level the playing fields. But I'm not sure. I'm not sure that it is working out necessarily because getting the knowledge, like we talked about before, actually I'm distilling the knowledge from the data. I still I think.”
“It depends, okay, and I think some of it is a gray area. There are a lot of data providers, some have licenses, some don't. Yeah, it's a big question market in some instances.”
“So it was very skunk works, but Dmitri was able to find a way for me to get access to all of the on ball data across the world at the time to start building my models.”