What I learned about Big Data and Machine Learning from trying to predict football matches.

Two years ago I asked myself if it in any way would be possible to use Machine Learning techniques to predict the outcome of football matches. To describe the process briefly I started by collecting as much data as I could get hold of. I mined data about old games from every different source and API I could find. Some of the more important ones were Football-data, Everysport and Betfair. I then took all the data for from the old matches, with its corresponding results, quantified it and put it in a database.