Episode 07: Dustin Ward

In Episode 07 of the Analytics FC Podcast Sam and Tom are joined by Dustin Ward aka Saturdays on Couch.

Before Dustin joins us we talk about the Women’s World Cup. Sam cries into his Canada scarf while we discuss the game, looking forward to the quarter finals and reminisce about a penalty shoot-out way back in 2007.

When Dustin joins we discuss his background, recent work on Statsbomb and his influences behind his very popular and thought provoking piece about getting granular with analytics in football.

We also talk more generally about Dustin’s work around bucketing teams together depending on their playing styles according to some preset metrics.

Finally we also discuss the teams Dustin is looking forward to watching in the 15/16 season (yes, we are slowly previewing the new season!) and round off with Tom absolutely butchering the pronunciation of “Spielverlagerung”.

A really fun discussion with some salient points about the buy in of analytics, the importance of visuals in the implementation of it and how tactical awareness is vital to introducing this sort of match-day analysis too.

The book we discussed quite a lot in this podcast is called Pep:Confidential by Martí Perarnau. You can buy the Kindle edition on Amazon for just £2.99 - a steal and very highly recommended! http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pep-Confidential-Inside-Guardiolas-Season/dp/1909715255

Please take the time to give us a rating on iTunes here: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/analytics-fc-podcast/id991610009?mt=2. It really helps us grow the audience for this podcast and get new people involved. Once again, at least 2 stars!
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You can find Dustin’s blog at http://saturdaysonthecouch.wordpress.com/

Dustin Ward is @ SaturdaysOnCouch
Tom Worville is @ Worville

Sam Gregory is @ GregorydSam

[email protected] for any comments and questions!
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Intro music is MMHHMM by LiamLRY
Logo created by Erik Wagner from the Noun Project.