Click for bigger. I’ll try to add updates on Hilltop as well as tweeting these, so they’re easier to find.

This post is late. Really late. I’d intended to write up my 2016 Opta Forum presentation back in February when the conference happened, but somehow never got around to it. Now that applications are open for 2017, it’s definitely time to get this piece out. For anyone unfamiliar with Opta’s Analytics Forum, it’s a chance […]

Throughout Euro 2016, I ran a Python script capturing every tweet that mentioned the tournament hashtag “#Euro2016”, or any team hashflag such as “#ENG” or “#ISL”. The script captured over 13 million tweets, which I’m making available to the data visualisation and analytics communities to play with. If you want to try messing about with a […]

It’s been a while since my player snapshots last had an outing, but they’re up and running again – with a few small improvements – and in this post we’ll use them to take a look at England’s striking options for the rest of Euro 2016. If you haven’t seen the snapshots before, they’re designed to be a fast […]

This is part two of the user guide to Hilltop’s chalkboard app. If you haven’t used the app before, then it’s probably a good idea to start with part one. Hopefully, you’re already comfortable drawing players and events on the chalkboard. In this guide, we’re going to learn how to add players in bulk, move them about […]

You might already have seen Hilltop’s new Chalkboard app. I launched version one during the final game of the 2015/16 season, using the tool to describe Rooney’s opening goal. Too impatient for instructions? It’s not really complicated. Go here. The chalkboard app is a quick way to describe moves and to illustrate tactics. A few possibilities are… Describe a goal in […]

I’ve wanted to build a match summary dashboard for quite a while. Partly due to dissatisfaction with what I can find out on the web, and partly (along the lines of my player summaries) because I really like the challenge of trying to boil a dashboard down so that it fits onto just one page. My […]

When you think about it, the standard categories into which we group football players aren’t very satisfactory. Midfielder, defender, striker. Those say little about a player, beyond where he stands as the game kicks off. So we add some more detail. Full back, wing back, defensive midfielder, “number 10”, “false 9”. And things quickly get […]