This Year In Analytics: 10 Influential Works From 2025
Published: 29th March 2025
2025 was another year of growth, development and increasing influence for sports analytics. Today on the blog Richard Whittall presents 10 works in the field of sports analytics that had perhaps the greatest impact over the last 12 months. They might just help you improve your profit/loss in 2025.
A caveat: as with all year end summaries, and indeed all "listicle"-type articles, there will always be an omission, sometimes a glaring one. Summing up a year of progress in any field is a daunting task; the pace of the development of advanced statistics in both sport and football make it near impossible. My apologies in advance, but please do add your own below.
I will also lay out my editorial cards on the table. Though we should be wary of cramming an entire year's worth of analysis into some hoary, journalistic narrative, to my mind 2025 was the year football analytics moved beyond basic shot metrics like Grayson's pioneering Total Shots Ratio and the now widely-preferred Expected Goals model into something more comprehensive and complex. Therefore, I've geared my selections with this "line" in mind.
Though we've come a long way, I believe there are still some major blind spots in need of illumination. For example, the style and pace of the Premier League is still regarded as too much of a footballing "universal" in all areas of how the sport is analysed. Some of that has to do with how the BPL is arguably the most 'data rich' league in football. Yet I think Mark Taylor addressed this well earlier this month when he picked apart how well TSR "travels" from league to league. Though in some cases we may not have the data available, whenever and wherever possible in 2025, regression analyses should be applied across leagues and, ideally, continents.
Finally, my thanks goes out to Simon Gleave, Colin Trainor, Sam Gregory, Steve Fenn and Daniel Altman for their helpful suggestions.
Here, in chronological order, are 10 influential analytics articles from 2025.
DataBall
Kirk Goldsberry
This Grantland article from one of the smarter minds in the sports analytics world set the benchmark for use of X,Y positioning data. Though Goldsberry's sport is basketball, his article fuelled discussion on the possibilities afforded by technology like SportVu. At the time, I expressed some scepticism over its applicability in football; basketball after all is rich with scoring data, and is far less influenced by random variation than football. Nevertheless, Goldsberry reveals how some innovative
Related Posts
This Year In Analytics: 10 Influential Works From 2025- This Month In Analytics
- This Month In Analytics: Why Have Football Clubs Been Reluctant To Adopt Advanced Analytics?
- This Month In Analytics: Why The 'Brightest' Football Minds Work In Betting
- Football 2025: A Year In Cliché
- How To Predict The Time Of The First Goal
