Glass Houses

I shared this piece published on March 28 via Hudl’s website within the Huddle Breakdown chatroom. For those subscribers who have not yet explored that functionality, I highly encourage doing so, as the quality of engagement within our community is excellent.

I asked for comments and questions about the analysis within the piece, from which exactly zero responses have been forthcoming - some “content,” eh? Crickets!

As the Huddle Breakdown is in the business of both content and analysis, I think the Hudl piece on Neymar is an excellent example to explore these priorities, and how we attempt to balance them.

The center-piece of the analysis uses Statsbomb’s (now owned by Hudl) On-Ball Value metric, which is something that comes up pretty regularly on our show. I spent quite a bit of time researching and analyzing that model while writing at The Celtic Way for a couple of years. I describe it as a ‘next generation’ possession-based model, with expected threat (xT) and Goals+ (G+) examples of predecessor models.