Meet FIFA’s data science and performance analysis teams

1:47>> Juan, Aaron, thank you so much uh for joining us today. I'm super excited about the opportunity to get to have the chance to talk to both of you. Um, for those who are fans of the pod, we covered many aspects of the World Cup over the last couple of weeks. And we ended up putting out a short explainer on the match momentum visualization, which was many people found very fascinating, but also raised a lot of questions about how you could actually make something like that happen. So, we are very blessed today to have two members of the data science team over at FIFA to help us walk through and better understand how the match momentum visualization works and how that

2:28integrates with the rest of the graphics and broadcast team. So before we dive in, gentlemen, um I just wanted you guys to see if you could tell us a little bit about your role within FIFA and how it sort of works inside the larger ecosystem where there's a lot of moving parts again, graphics, broadcast, live, it's global, it's not just the World Cup and maybe we can start uh uh with with you and go to Aaron. >> Cool. Thank you for having us. It's a great chance to also share with the rest of the world what we do. I mean other than the world cup I think that it's nice to have a chance to explain a bit further the details of the or the inner workings of of our job. Um so yeah I'm

3:10data scientist at FIFA and my job mostly basically relates to trying to convert the principles of football into some statistical and mathematical component or algorithm that allows us to extract objective insights from the match. And for that we have different data sources and we have a whole development process that we discuss with professionals in different aspects of football in order to come up with the most suitable and trying to bring the let's say most helpful insights to the teams, the fans and the rest of the audience that we

3:51have. >> So >> thanks Juan. Um, so yeah, so my role is slightly different. So I look after the performance analysis team here at FIFA. And I probably would say in terms of analysis, whether that be data or video, we're probably the closest to the grass and the coaches and the technical staff that we have. So on a tournament by tournament basis, we always bring a group of football experts in um to work alongside us. So in the World Cup, we have Jurgen Klinsman for example. Um, we have Michael O'Neal from Northern Ireland. We have Tobin Heath with us who are working, living and breathing this this every day with us to learn as much as we possibly can. But one of the most

4:32fascinating things for us is and biggest challenges as you've already experienced, Lester, is is how we translate into that into information that can be understood on the most basic level. Right? So that's where we then work with uh infotainment or uh stadium entertainment we we call it or or TV broadcasting for example and every year every few months we go through the process of identifying potentially new metrics potentially new new stories to tell within the game right and then the challenge becomes okay how do we graphically represent that so I work extremely closely with with Juan for example we work in the same team um

5:14ultimately And we then come together to go okay what do we have within the data? We have a a huge amount of data that both tracking event scal um as you can imagine for for all of our competitions. And then it's about okay well we know we use the data for this and we can tell stories uh around the data in this way that may be understood by a data scientist or maybe understood by a coach but how do we bring those two together to really tell a story to the audience and that's where I guess momentum has come in and played quite a big kind of TV role over the last six weeks during the World Cup.