I spend a lot of time working on new models and metrics, watching games and generally mucking about with football stuff, but very little of it sees the light of day. Sometimes I fall out of love with an idea, sometimes it just doesn’t pan out, sometimes I hit the limit of what my brain (or for that matter my free time) can handle and give up.

Today, I’m going to take you on a tour of my drafts folder in WordPress, and as a weird form of primal scream therapy, I’ll give you a sample of some of the ideas I’ve had over the last few months and stalled on. I’ve no idea if this will be in any way useful or inspiring for people, but I hope at the very least that you’ll read it and think, “hey, that guy’s ideas are stupid, I could do this!”

As a festive but belated Easter bonus, I’ve also added a ‘probability of resurrection’ to each idea, so you can see which ones are victims of mere procrastination instead of actual shame.

The Path of Least Resistance

This idea is sort of the intersection of all the shot chart and PATCH stuff I’ve done – can you calculate and plot the areas where a team (or indeed a particular lineup) are weakest? Is it possible to visualise the path of least resistance, along which you’ll find it easiest to progress towards your opponent’s goal?

This isn’t supposed to sound grandiose, or like some universal metric that just tells you how to beat teams, but I genuinely think it would be great to have a visualisation that combined the shot and PATCH charts, to be able to get a feel – at a glance – for where your own team is weak, or where prospective opponents might be weak.

There are a few ways to do this, the first quick attempt I tried was purely visual, plotting big fat lines on a pitch wherever you conceded ball progression, overlaying them, and changing the colour of the overlaps as they get more and more used. This looked almost comically vomitous, so I paused to work on both a better model and visualisation.

Review: promising, until we got to the word ‘vomitous’.
Probability of resurrection: 6/10

Dangerous Dispossessions & Forward Retention

I spent a long time cobbling together stats for an extremely snarky piece about Everton’s ‘Fab Four’ of Barkley, Stones, Deulofeu and Lukaku. The general idea being, each player had bad habits, and we could judge Martinez by the degree to which those habits were being trained out. To be quite honest, three of those players have been fine and/or excellent this season so I cooled on the idea, plus I could never find the exact right metric to test against.

A couple of things I came up with were quite fun though. The first was ‘dangerous dispossessions’. Ross Barkley has spent large swathes of his career dribbling into trouble and losing the ball, and I started watching games with a eye for one thing: how many shots from counter-attacks did Everton conceded when Barkley was dispossessed? The idea being, some players really shouldn’t be dribbling, because they give up more equity than they ever gain. For a second I thought I had him with this, he and Alexis Sanchez featured highly, but after I’d per ninetified everything and used xG instead of raw shots, Barkley stopped sticking out so much.

The second metric I looked at was ‘forward retention’, where you don’t just look at pass completion, you also look at the success of the player you’re passing to, the idea being that some players might play their team-mates into trouble. And then you’ll want to look at whether players are playing passes that are too safe and build a model to allow you to look at the risk vs reward of individual passes etc etc.

Review: better if all this was subsumed into a more general model that looked at events on the pitch and their actual vs likely outcomes.
Probability of resurrection: 3/10

Peak xG

I was thinking about this partly as a way of measuring striker positioning, but also in light of Damien Comolli’s mention of judging defenders by interceptions on the Analytics FC podcast (about 30:52 in). Basically, you can sample along the line of an attempted cross or throughball or whatever, and calculate what could have been the maximum xG for a resulting shot. You can then hope to judge a striker’s positioning by whether they met the ball at its point of peak xG (or if they indeed exceeded it by taking a touch or whatever). You can also hope to judge defenders by measuring how dangerous a shot they prevented through an interception.

Review: probably very simplistic in a world with positioning data, but might be interesting to see a few numbers.
Probability of resurrection: 5/10

Pinball Charts

This was an alternative I imagined to the (rather busy looking, these days) PATCH charts, and part of my frustrated obsession with making charts as animated gifs. The idea was to plot the lines of an opponent’s attacking possession as it moved over the pitch, ‘activating’ defending players’ territories as the lines entered. Territory polygons would start faded out almost completely but become more visible when entered, a bit like a bumper lighting up when hit on a pinball table. If the possession ended in a territory, we’d make it more green (yay, you stopped an attack), if it passed through and out the other side, we’d make it more red (boo, you failed).

I didn’t get very far with this, if only because the graphics library I’ve been using for everything is a little hateful. But I think it would solve a lot of problems with charts that get very busy, and I’m eager to at least see people experiment with whether any useful information can be communicated with animation of this sort of data.

Review: this would probably annoy enough people on Twitter to be worthwhile.
Probability of resurrection: 9/10

Expected Yellows

Clubs are looking for any edge they can get in games, and I would love to build some referee models. The easiest to do with the data that’s out there is expected yellows: given a foul, what is the likelihood of a player being booked for it? Can we find more/less lenient refs, unfairly maligned players versus those immune to punishment, areas of the pitch where it’s safer to put in a professional foul? Could all be interesting, but there’s only about 1000-2000 cards a season depending on the league, and those for a variety of offences, so it’s quite difficult to pin down any patterns with confidence, and that’s before taking into account that the data doesn’t contain how dangerous a particular tackle was.

Expected offsides would be another wonderful model to have if you were intent on destroying the beautiful game at all costs.

Review: not enough data to do a decent job at this stage.
Probability of resurrection: 4/10

Passing Variety

This is one of those weird ones where I’m sure someone already did this, but I may just be misremembering Marek Kwiatowski’s article on Statsbomb about classifying central midfielders. Anyway, what I wanted to do was look at similar metrics to Marek, the pass direction and length, but see which teams had built midfields with a variety of passing styles, as opposed to just the same profiles across the board. Then of course you’d have to look at which approach actually worked better, or whether different lineups enabled teams to handle different opposition better etc. If this sounds familiar to anyone and they know the article I’m talking about, please get in touch so I know I’m not dreaming it.

Review: would be interested to read even if it already exists.
Probability of resurrection: 9/10

Corner Positions

I don’t remember ever making this, but it’s the only one of these that has code which worked first time, so I can actually give you some pictures. what you’re seeing here is players’ aerial performance from corners (straight from corners, whoever wrote this code never bothered to include headers after the first). Size is volume, colour is the ratio won and the centre of each players’ circle is their average position for aerial challenges. Left side of pitch is for corners from the left, right is for right, so picture them coming from the bottom of the screen.

Both Merseyside teams covering themselves with glory here.

Review: a bit sparse, probably interesting to someone though.
Probability of resurrection: 6/10

CROTCH

This wasn’t actual work per se, but after dropping the Possession Adjusted bit from PATCH, and talking about it on the Analytics FC podcast, it occurred to me that CROTCH would be a magnificent acronym. Control Retained Over Territory something… something. Didn’t pan out, probably for the best.

Review: no.
Probability of resurrection: 0/10

Conclusion

I’d genuinely forgotten a couple of these until I went through old SQL stored in databases, so it’s been a useful process. By all means take any of the ideas above and run with it (or tell me if you’d desperately like to see it completed). In general I’m happy if you want to replicate anything on the blog as long as you credit me with a little inspiration.

In the meantime, I’ve still got plenty of things sitting in my drafts that I’m actively working on, so I haven’t included those, in the hope that they don’t fall into disrepair also. In fact, I ought to publish this before I forget about it.