Club football seasons across most of Europe have ended. The lack of serious football (apart from the Euro 2012 in a few weeks) means the off-field stuff like transfer rumors and player agents take the center stage. Recent news items like the deal of Bebe to Manchester United highlight the inefficiencies and the lack of transparency in the transfer market.

If you are not from the blue half of Manchester, any discussion that involves Manchester City quickly boils down to buying titles.

A few weeks ago when City played Arsenal at the Emirates, there was this banner:

With the Manchester Derby looming on Monday, there are a slew of articles centered on arguments like buying titles and class.

The astute reader will recognize the title of this post as a play on Edward Tufte's book of a similar name. While Tufte's work focuses on turning quantitative data into an easily consumable format that has a clear message, it's also important to do so with qualitative data. Qualitative data can often be the "how" or "why" to go along with the "what" provided by quantitative data.

I'm pleased to announce that I've joined StatDNA as Vice President of Analytics and Software Development. This is a super exciting opportunity for me as I'll be combining my loves of software development, data analysis and soccer. What could be better? I'll hopefully have some blog posts up for StatDNA over at their blog soon using their best in breed data.

There was an interesting article this morning on Soccernet about Robin Van Persie being in the "injury red zone". Hyperbole aside, it raises the point that Arsenal have had the luxury of playing Van Persie in every league match so far (starting 12 of 13) but will have to manage his workload a little more conservatively or risk a decrease in performance or potential injury.

I'm always on the lookout for new ways to visualize data in the hopes that it might lead to a better understanding of the data. In the first leg of the tie between Real Salt Lake and Seattle Sounders FC, the Sounders midfield was completely MIA for large portions of the game while RSL enjoyed large periods of maintaining possession.

There has been lots of talk about the goal glut that is happening in the Premier League right now. Are pricey strikers to blame or is it the death of quality defense? Decision Technology's Ian Graham has already taken a look at debunking the Guardian's piece on the "goal glut". I thought I'd add my two cents.

It was rough being a Sounder's fan last night. Amidst discussions of a CONCACAF Champions League curse, playing at altitude and missing one of their best players of the season in Mauro Rosales, the Sounders had a tough playoff matchup against Real Salt Lake. While most fans would have been surprised if the Sounders had come away with a first leg lead, going down 3-0 was a bit of a shock.

During tonight's MLS Playoff match between the New York Red Bulls and FC Dallas, the "Curse of CONCACAF Champions League" was brought up. FC Dallas has had to play more matches than NYRB this season and came into the match looking a bit fatigued. Since the CONCACAF version isn't as lucrative as the European version, it is getting the reputation as being a drain on teams.

Previously I've written about examining conversion rates and shots as a way of examining which areas an offense or defense excels at or is struggling with. Shots can be a crude estimation for opportunities and conversion rate and estimation of how well a team executes on those opportunities. I had looked at offense and defense separately in the past, but decided to combine the two to see if any interesting patterns emerged.

As I've previously posted, I had the chance to speak at the New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports. They've now posted the videos and slides from all the presentations. I've posted my video below as well as the slides and original blog post so that all the content is in one place. Originally I wanted to title my talk "Cool Shit You Can Do With Markov Chains in Soccer" but toned it down a bit to "A framework for tactical analysis and individual offensive production assessment in soccer using Markov chains".

This weekend I had the privilege of speaking at the New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports. It is a much more technical conference than the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference so I felt a bit like a duck out of water given my background in computer science and not hardcore statistical methods (and these guys were hardcore!

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of sitting down with Ravi and Elisa from Forza Futbol to record a podcast about Sports Analytics. We discuss a whole host of topics including some of the work I haven't had a chance to publish yet involving looking at the quality of cantera products (using the Castrol Index).

I am thrilled to announce that I will be speaking at this year's New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports (NESSIS) on September 24th. Earlier this year, StatDNA announced a Soccer Analytics research competition and my paper was selected as the winning entry. I'll be giving a talk titled "A framework for tactical analysis and individual offensive production assessment in soccer using Markov chains".

Map of birthplaces for players currently in La Liga (excluding Spain)

This is our second post in our series on the origins of players previously we looked at the Premier League. La Liga is little different from the Premier League, both in terms of infrastructure ("B" squads can compete in lower divisions) and culturally (Athletic Bilbao has a policy to only sign players from the Basque region).