CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

SOCCER JOINS THE ANALYTICS REVOLUTION

In 2020, the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference featured a panel entitled, “Soccer Analytics: The Beautiful Game Meets the Analytics Edge.” While the broader sporting public was acknowledging that soccer analytics had finally hit the mainstream, it had been evolving for decades. Starting with the work of Charles Reep, who is largely credited as being the first person to capture soccer match data en masse then analyze it, soccer analytics truly accelerated in the 2000s.

A combination of American influence co-mingled with application globally pushed the practice forward. Thanks to the “Moneyball” phenomenon, conferences like Sloan, enterprising data scientists and opportunistic entrepreneurs, soccer analytics began to forge an influential path with English clubs like Arsenal and Liverpool

Lucy Rushton broke into the soccer world in that environment. After working for her hometown club, Reading FC and then later Watford FC, Rushton moved to the US to take on a lead analytics role for Atlanta United in Major League Soccer. She was later hired as the General Manager of DC United and then also of Bay FC in the National Women’s Soccer League. Rushton joined the show to talk about her journey and the evolution of soccer analytics over the last few decades.