In 2018, StatsBomb announced the release of free data on women’s football (link). The announcement included this observation:
Not only do we believe that analysis of the Women’s game deserves equal attention as the Men’s game, we know that by doing this better, we will improve the overall understanding of the game. We also want to encourage more Women to enter into Analytics, Technology and R&D …
The announcement included a reference to the StatsBomb Resource Centre (link). In 2019, StatsBomb provided open data from the Women’s World Cup (link) and indicated the importance of the use of R in deciphering these data (link).
StatsBomb noted:
We’d like this to be as approachable as possible for as many people as possible. We want you to feel comfortable jumping in and having a play around. With that in mind, we’ve put together a little primer for working with our data in the R programming language.
StatsBomb has created the StatsBombR package (link) and is shared as a repository on GitHub. The package requires a User Agreement (link) that notes “StatsBomb have made this data freely available and accessible to encourage and facilitate research and the shared analytical understanding of the game of Football. This is aimed to be a research tool, and is intended to be used as such”.
Information about the StatsBombR package can be found on GitHub (link). An example of the use of these data can be found in the FCrSTATS Github repository (link) including some getting started guidelines (link). Ryo Nakagawara has been using ggplots with some of these data (link) and shared them with #TidyTuesday visualisations (link).
Photo Credit
Officiating (FIFA’s Women’s World Cup)
