The #OptaForum was held in London on 5 February 2020 (link). The proposed presentations for the Forum were judged in November. The judges scored each proposals based on three criteria: innovation, relevance and application. “By the end of the process, six projects had been chosen for presentation, with a further two submitters invited to exhibit their proposals as posters”. In December 2019, the successful proposals were announced (link).
The six main presentations were:
- Karun Singh: Learning to watch football: Self-supervised representations for tracking data.
- David Quartey: How do attacking and defending strategies affect goalscoring opportunities from throw-ins?
- David Perdomo Meza, Daniel Girela and Mark Thompson: Tactical insight through team personas.
- Santhosh Narayanan: Modelling event sequences in football using multivariate point processes.
- Dan Barnett: I’m in a wide open space: creating opportunities at set pieces.
- Vignesh Jayanth: Identifying and evaluating strategies to break down a low-block defence.
The two poster presentations selected were:
- Pieter Robberechts: Contextualized performance projections for soccer players.
- Javier Buldú: Using network science to quantify the identifiability of football teams.
Each year, since 2014, the Forum has given a feel for “innovation, relevance and application” and indicates the issues we might need to monitor as analysts. The Opta web site has a link to previous years’ papers (link).
Photo Credit
Opta Forum (Opta Website) (link)
