This past weekend, soccer analysts, media members, students, and data/statistics professors got together in the Anderson-Clarke Center inside the Rice University campus to literally crunch the numbers. 

The inaugural American Soccer Insights Summit fostered an open and friendly environment where college (and high school) students alongside professionals in their fields were able to listen to lectures from PhD candidates and other peers. The highlights of the event were the keynote speakers Pat Onstad and Ethan Creagar from Houston Dynamo FC and Zayne M. Thomajan from Chicago Fire FC who gave the attendees of the event a glimpse of the inner workings of MLS and NWSL clubs, considered to be the cream of the crop in North American soccer. 

The majority of the event was spent listening to presentations from students who were given Skillcorner tracking and event data from the 2024 NWSL and 2023-2024 WSL seasons. Then, they used that data to try and draw some conclusions. Other presentations were delivered by people who worked in football, specifically in the analytics space.

My personal favorite of the student presentations was Rob Oakley’s (Temple University) which was titled, “1v1 Defending Beyond Tackles and Interceptions.” Too often, we can only quantify tackles and interceptions when it comes to defending performance, but in his presentation, Oakley came up with a way to try and quantify a defender’s performance without touching the ball with something called EPVp (Expected Possession Value Prevented), a descendant of EPV. 

Other presentations in this event centered around LLMs (learning language models) in sports analytics (Weining Shen), the trials and tribulations of starting an analytics department for an expansion team from scratch (Arielle Dror), the importance of data being presented in an informative way (John Muller), and much more. 

Despite the sheer amount of quality in these presentations, the most valuable part of this event was perhaps the networking that took place. It’s not often that you see industry experts chatting with college students seeking inspiration and guidance. In a field as inherently secretive as football analytics, a recurring theme during this conference was an exchanging of ideas in order to advance the collective knowledge of everyone in attendance.

“I learned a lot about the sports analytics space as a whole, I learned about the type of people in it, and I learned that even in a city like Houston, there's a large amount of people that really do care about the sport and the nuances and the deeper parts of it,” Leenser Thomas, a sophomore computer science student at Texas A&M, said near the end of the summit. “Some people have been in this field for 30, 40 years, (and) some people like me are just starting out, and I think it's a great opportunity for me to learn more about (soccer as a whole).”

This summit was an incredible experience, and the entire event was filled with insights in the world of football/soccer that anyone could enjoy, no matter your level of expertise in statistics or data science. Hopefully, this event will begin to thrive even further in the years to come.