Course Overview

Welcome to “Data Science Applied to Football”, an innovative course uniquely designed to provide a comprehensive understanding of how data science techniques can be applied to the world of football.

DSAF was first offered in the first semester of 2023 for students majoring in Computer Science, Information Systems and Computational Mathematics. However, there were students from Engineering majors that took the course as an elective. The course was structured by professors Wagner Meira Jr., Adriano César Pereira and Master’s student Hugo Rios-Neto, who served as a teaching assistant. The course syllabus is available, in Portuguese, here. Also, Master’s student Luíza Campos played a crucial part in the course running well, preparing almost the entirety of the slides. The plan is for DSAF to be offered once per year, during the first semester.

The course draws lots of inspiration from the Soccermatics course, but it follows a distinct structure, delving into each of the data types in football in each module. They were: scoresheet data, aggregated statistics, event data, and tracking data. Previous to that, there was an introduction module that briefly touched on some of the basics in data science and an overview of the football analytics content that would be covered.

Over the span of the course, students had the opportunity to engage with six different practical exercises. These exercises were carefully crafted to offer hands-on experience with the different data types. Each exercise was worth 10 points. However, to encourage learning and progress, the lowest score among the six was discarded. Unfortunately, due to the timing of the course, tracking data was left out of the practical exercises as students were concentrating on their final projects by this point. This part of the course, nonetheless, accounted for 50 points.

The final project was a significant part of this course, carrying the same weight as the practical exercises with 50 points. It wasn’t merely about turning in a report. Students were expected to come up with a proposal and make an initial pitch to Rodrigo Picchioni and Pedro Picchioni. This was followed by an intermediate presentation, where students showcased the progress made. In the culmination of the course, students delivered a final presentation and a concluding pitch to Rodrigo Picchioni and Pedro Picchioni once again.

The structure of this course, focusing on the practical application of data science to football, offered students an exciting opportunity to understand and analyze football from a new, data-driven perspective. With its roots in Soccermatics and its unique structure from data types in football, “Data Science Applied to Football” represents a compelling blend of football knowledge and data science principles.