KNOWING ME, KNOWING LU(TON), A-HA(NALYTICS)
KNOWING ME, KNOWING LU(TON), A-HA(NALYTICS)
Here we… here we… here we fucking go.
I’ll start with how and why I ended up writing this piece under the pen name of a football ‘analytics’ Twitter account @LutonAnalytics (which quite ironically, up until this point, hasn’t really ‘done what it said on the tin’ - think more Retweets and opinions than analysis).
Until April of last year (2019) I was almost entirely unaware of the incredible football analytics community on Twitter (which for someone who works at Twitter and loves football is quite frankly pretty shonky) - that was until I scrolled upon this Tweet from one of/if not the best in the business - @Blades_analytic
You never really know what things are going to change your life and in what way but it turned out what changed mine was a scatter plot charting the attacking creativity of EFL Full Backs under the age of 25.
This seemingly innocuous scatter graph confirmed two things, both of which I’d known for some time:
We had the best set of attacking fullbacks in League One by a country mile and there were numbers to prove it. And…
As with anything that demonstrates how brilliant my club is - I would cherish it and show it to anyone I thought would be even remotely interested. It had grabbed my attention - not least because of the fact that in the Twitter timeline Jack Stacey isn’t even visible unless you click in to the image to reveal just how much he stands apart from the rest (he was, at first glance, quite literally off the charts).
Inspired by this I decided to start following a fair chunk of the analytics accounts on Twitter on the off chance that any of them might Tweet any Luton related data. In January of this year, along with my brother, I decided it was time to set up @LutonAnalytics in the hope that at the very least I could be a place for amalgamating all the Luton data and analysis that was making its way to Twitter.
Please understand all these posts are written as fan analysis pieces. Also bear in mind that I’ve never studied data science, I got the lowest mark in my whole university year for statistics and until recently I didn’t know my PPDArse from my eXpected Assists elbow. This is very much a fake it till you make it approach - with all constructive feedback welcomed.
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