Raison d’être
While coverage of top flight, continental and international football competitions is becoming awash with statistics, fans of lower league football subsist on a relative paucity of freely-available information. The scant data we do receive is blandly or patchily presented and analysed, with nobody seeming willing to invest in squeezing insight from it.
This imbalance doesn’t sit well with me: while I’m not obsessed with numbers, I enjoy the added insights and depth that they bring. I’ve long harboured a fondness for data analytics and visualisations which I crowbar into my ‘day job’ whenever possible, and I reasoned that this blog would serve as a suitable outlet for combining this with my love of football.
In a perfect world, I’d be able to devote a significant proportion of my waking hours to furnishing fans of clubs outside the top division with as many data-driven insights as my brain could conceive. Unfortunately I’ve yet to find anyone willing to pay me for such an endeavour, so I’m having to divert some creativity towards finding a way to fit this blog around a fairly demanding job at the moment.
What this is
This blog represents another step change in the intensity of my attempts to realise my recently-acquired dream of analysing football for a living. First came the Torquay-specific Twitter account, then the accompanying blog, followed by the diversification of the blog to cover the whole of League 2. The current aim is to be covering all three divisions of the Football League on a regular basis, drawing on whatever data I can lay my hands on. This will be interspersed with more detailed regular and ad hoc analyses at league, divisional and team level throughout the season.
While I will continue to tweet and blog on all matters Torquay from the extant accounts I mentioned previously, it seemed fairer on my existing followers to segregate those activities from what I’m attempting here. This film, heavily skewed towards the @GreenwichGull aspect of my online presence, will hopefully explain things further:
What this isn’t
This isn’t the place to come for professionally rigorous standards of statistical analysis – I simply don’t have the time or the data to match the admirably scientific level of detail that some of those I follow are capable of (see my recommended links page for a shortlist of these). Nor is this is intended as a betting guide or a source of news or match reports – more established entities than I already have that angle very much sewn up.
Have I seen your stuff somewhere else?
You may well have – I’ve written quite a few pieces on Torquay United for various publications as @GreenwichGull (see the list here). Under this latest guise the list is more diverse, and includes:
- Several leading club blogs, including Seat Pitch, No Nay Never and The Exiled Robin. Many others have taken my data and analysed or adapted it themselves.
- I’ve also appeared on the We Are Going Up podcast, which I can strongly recommend as it covers all 72 Football League clubs with an informed passion.
